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

[User]
Do fish need to drink water?

Not only live, but like to not stay dehydrated or something?

[Assistant]
Yes, they do. Especially fish living in saltwater. The fish live in a hypertonic environment, i.e. the water they are swimming in is "saltier" than the water inside their cells. However, their skins are semi permeable, meaning water can diffuse easily through them, ions such as Na^+ Cl^- can barely do so.

Due to osmosis (e.g. diffusion through a semi permeable membrane) the fish lose water. If you are not familiar with diffusion/osmosis: Basically, the water inside the wish wants to "dilute" the saltwater, so everything has the same level of saltiness / Na^+ Cl^- .

So, if the fish would not consume any water, they'd basically dehydrate inside it. They drink a lot and have special chloride cells inside their gills helping them to desalt the water, to make up for the water they lose through their skin.

*Funfact: Fish living in fresh water pee incredible amounts of water to keep themselves from "drowning". Simply apply the principle from above to a hypotonic environment (more Na^+ Cl^- inside the fish than outside).*


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

[User] Is there any legitimate reason to have an upper limit on password length?

[Assistant]
If your protocol involves submitting the password to a server instead of locally computing a response to a challenge, you probably want a limit to prevent against unbounded allocation/computation on the server side; otherwise an attacker could send a two-terabyte password and watch your server swap itself to death. But that limit can be pretty generous; a limit in the thousands of bytes won't affect anyone reasonable and won't affect most unreasonable people, either.

If the literal text of the password is synchronized to legacy systems (instead of being immediately hashed and then forgotten), and one of those systems puts a limit on effective password length, it's better to limit the password length up front instead of silently making some characters irrelevant. For instance, old-style UNIX crypt passwords only use the first eight bytes of a password, so if you have the misfortune of setting up a system that pushes passwords to those systems, you should probably not let people think that a longer-than-eight-character password will be useful.


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

[User]
First time on the job market... advice welcome

I am a media studies PhD candidate graduating in June 2015 and have been sending out job applications since July of this year. A few weeks ago I received an email from a small liberal arts college in the Midatlantic region to schedule a Skype interview; I was asked to come for a campus visit just two days afterward.

The school is a small liberal arts college with a minimal research focus, and it sounds as though I could have tenure in as little as four years. However, my advisor (I go to a R1 school in the Pacific Northwest) is extremely research-oriented, and she fears that my research output would be stymied by this job and that I would essentially prevent myself from moving to another school in the future if I take the job (should I receive an offer, that is). She also believes that it's a "red flag" that I was asked to interview in person so quickly.

Frankly, I believe I'm a far better teacher than I am a researcher, and I think a liberal arts college would be a good fit for me. Plus, nothing is going to stop me from conducting research; in fact, the faculty was discussing the possibility of creating a brand new standing research pool of undergrads specifically for experiments and studies. When thinking about this whole situation, what should I really take to heart, and what should I take with a grain of salt? Advice is welcome.

[Assistant] A job like that can work out just fine. But you need to make sure you understand job expectations prior to accepting an offer. There are many situations where you would have the course and service load of a teaching position but with added research obligations due to pressures on the department from the administration. Be very careful if that comes up. Being encouraged to do research is one thing, being expected to do it without being given time and resources is another.


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

[User] ELI5: Why digital colors are expressed in Red Green Blue (RGB) and not in Red Yellow Blue, the primary colors?

[Assistant]
Because primary colors aren't, really.

The human eye has three different types of cone cells that can each "see" a different color of light. These are roughly red, green, and blue. So, right there, you should be able to understand why colors on a screen are represented by red, green and blue; they're just tuning in to what our eyes can see. By mixing these colors of light, we can create all the other colors our eyes can see.

So why are the so-called primary colors red, blue and yellow?

Because we people started thinking about colors, they had no idea about how light worked, or how our eyes worked, but we did know something else: paint. by mixing colors of paint, you can get a different color. By trying a lot of combinations, people found out that with red, blue and yellow, you can make (almost) any other color, so the called those the primary colors.

But mixing colors works a little different from mixing light. Paint has a certain color, because it absorbs all the other colors. So if you add different colors of paint together, the mixture gets darker. But if you mix different colors of light together, the mixture gets lighter (because more light!).

Now that we know how light and our eyes work, we have learned that what we first called primary colors are slightly off. To be able to make all different colors using paint, you actually need

* yellow (that one was right)
* cyan (a sort of light blue)
* magenta (a sort of pink)

These colors are what you get when you mix red and green, green and blue, and blue and red light, respectively.


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

[User] How does fabric softener work?

[Assistant]
So fabric has lots of little fibers of which it consists.  If you look at your clothes, you'll see little short tiny fibers sticking out in all kinds of directions.  Fabric softeners cause all those little fibers to more prominently 'stick up', as opposed to being more 'pressed against' the fabric.  As more of those fibers stick up, the fabric feels softer as those fibers provide some bounce and rebound when we touch it.

On a related note, silk feels extremely smooth because the fibers that make up the fabric tend to bind very well to the fabric - there aren't a lot of bits of fibers pointing off in random directions.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why aren't schools focusing on more life skills (first aid, nutrition, your countries laws etc)

Say something like a new subject on these sorts of things?

Edit: Wow thanks for the gold kind stranger!

[Assistant] Long story short: In the US at least, the No Child Left Behind Act and ensuing movement was the spark to a new and now controversial shift towards 'teaching to the test' and meeting state and national standards. These standards, unfortunately, did not include basic life skills, and focused instead on knowledge and skills perceived as being the stepping stones towards college. It also signified a shift away from things like trade schools and a focus on pushing all students towards college regardless of whether they are well suited for it.


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

[User] ELI5: It's more like etymology question. In Polish language cardinal directions are named after parts of day (pnoc, poudnie, wschd, zachd - midnight, midday, sunrise, sunset - north, south, east, west). What is the etymology of English directions as they don't seem to mean much at first glance?

[Assistant]
So, the word "north" is related to Old High German 'nord,' and both descend from the proto-indo-european word unit *ner-,* here indicating 'left,' as the direction north is to your left as you face the rising sun.

"West" may possibly descend from PIE *wes-*, the reduced form of *wes-pero,* meaning 'evening' or 'night.'

"East," from PIE *aus-*, 'to shine.'

"South" is less clear in its lineage, unfortunately.


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

[User] Why shouldn't you extinguish a beach bonfire by burying the fire with sand?

[Assistant] In terms of intrinsic properties, sand has a decently high heat capacity and a rather low thermal conductivity. The former property means that sand can absorb a large amount of thermal energy and the latter means that hot buried sand can retain this energy for a prolonged period. In practical terms, this means that even an extended time after a fire is covered there will be hot sand hidden beneath the surface such that if someone unwittingly steps into it he may sustain serious burns.


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

[User]
[The Culture]I am a member of a species capable of interstellar travel... for like three hundred years. Can I immigrate as an individual to join the Culture?

My civilization is pretty proud of the fact that we went from our first launches to our moon to exploring the local corner of our galaxy in three hundred years!  We even started our first colonies on planets in nearby systems fifty years ago!  We are a peaceful species but far, far, far less advanced than pretty much every other species in our neighborhood.  Our cultural values focus heavily on respect for the self determination of others, cooperation and non-violent solutions to our problems.

We recently learned about the Culture from one of our neighbors and WOW!

From what I understand, our civilization is seen as far too primitive to join the Culture.  My species has not discovered biological immortality and we have not extended our lifespans dramatically compared to how long we lived before we discovered space flight.  I won't live long enough for my civilization to ever join the Culture.  If me and my close family can make it to a Culture ship or habitat in our own, would they allow us to immigrate?  If anyone else has done this, what is the process like?  How do we make a good impression?  We are a bipedal mammalian-like species, so we even sort of look like them!  Kind of!  Except we are er... twelve feet tall.  Our homeworld has lower gravity than many other typical humanoid species.

[Assistant]
We have a couple of examples of people from cultures about that advanced becoming Culture citizens, insofar as such a concept exists.

But they aren't exactly *recruiting*; you'd probably need to ...find one of their habitats or ships, hang out there for a while, mix with the people. They're pretty informal about these things, if you end up with a few Culture friends (even if it's just the ship's AI avatar) you should be fine.


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

[User]
ELI5: If your body needs ~2000 calories a day to sustain itself, why do you get hungry during the day after eating 2000 calories worth of food in one sitting?

This is probably a dumb question, but why do you need a certain amount of food to satisfy your hunger if your body doesn't actually need the calories? Why does your body tell you that its hungry if you already have your nutritional needs met?

[Assistant]
The stomach isn't aware of how many calories it's consumed. It's not like there's a little meter in your intestines that flags the stomach to stop feeling hungry when the daily caloric requirement has been reached.

The stomach simply makes you feel hungry when it's got nothing much to process. It wants to be continually doing *something*. So if you've got an abundance of low-to-moderate calorie foods, you just keep it partially full 24/7 and it hopefully averages out to around 2000 calories each day. Sometimes more (which causes your body to store the extra as fat), sometimes less (which causes your body to burn its fat stores to make energy).

If you swallow a single pill that contains 2000 calories, then your daily caloric requirements are met, but your stomach is still saying "Hey dude, you've only given me one measly pill to work on all day, we're dying down here" and asks for more.

This has become a big problem lately with the easy access to foods that pack a big caloric punch in a small physical package.


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

[User]
Ok... so what kind of processing power do we not have that it would have to take, to attribute all our known physics into a computer simulator? Consequently for running anything and everything 'real life' inside of a video game?

I guess since it takes our universe to hold all the laws of physics that it does, then it might be very unrealistic to imagine some computer program that implements it all as well? Are the numbers real though and calculable for what it would take? Is there a chance you could really make a video game that looks normal, but really, any action is based on every atom and molecule and force it consists of, and would literally mimic real life? I.E., a real/true simulator?

edit: thanks for all the awesome replies, everyone! I had a great time reading!

[Assistant]
Something to give you an idea:

Suppose you have a mole of nitrogen gas at standard temperature and pressure.  That's 6.02 x 10^23 molecules.

Each one of those molecules will have 1.3 x 10^9 collisions per second, on average.

That's 8 x 10^32 collisions per second.  And that just describes the behavior of whole molecules.  You still have to deal with the electrons, etc.

A computer is pretty fast if it can do a petaflop (10^15 floating point operations per second).

To model just the kinetics of a mole of nitrogen gas, you would need 8 x 10^17 of those computers.  To put this into perspective, the oceans contain approximately 1 x 10^19 gallons of water.


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

[User] [The Purge/DC] What would the Joker do during the Purge ?

[Assistant]
Unless there's something specific going on that Purge Night, he probably just chills at home. Too many tourists and amateurs out on the street to get anything good done. More sane/calculating Jokers do the math and know there's just too many unknowable variables and trigger happy idiots to make a viable plan. "Style over substance" Jokers just think it's tacky as hell to get a permission slip from the government to be a crook.

Edge case? Crimes that are *specifically banned* from the Purge like deploying overpowered weapons or targeting critical facilities/personnel might lure him off the couch and onto the streets, if only to show the open mic night crowd what a pro can do.


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

[User]
[MCU] What is actually happening when the Ancient One flings Strange through all those dimensions while monologing at him?

Is she just projecting that shit into his mind to give him a taste, or is Strange's spirit and/or body actually being flung through a dozen exotic dimensions that could kill him in an instant if something goes wrong. At one point his body starts transforming and at another point he even glimpses Dormammu before passing along, and finally his body falls out of the ceiling and crashes to the floor. Did any of that really happen or was it just an illusion?

[Assistant] I believe his astral form (basically spirit) is being transported through numerous dimensions cherry-picked by the Ancient One to fully denounce any skepticism Strange still had about magic. The Ancient One was fully in control of where and what Strange was shown, with the most surreal and potentially dangerous dimensions being necessary to reinforce her point. Dormammu's appearance was likely tied to the Ancient One's own use of the Dark Dimension energy, allowing Strange to catch a glimpse of Dormammu before continuing his psychedelic experience.


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

[User]
Empathy is the solution to every (social) conflict. CMV

I think empathy would make society a lot better. People would understand people and wouldn't judge them too hard. They would try to help finding a solution instead of just blaming them and not showing how they could make better. If they felt being understood, they'd probably more open for criticism. People aren't just black and white and I think they can change, it's only the way how we get them there.

Now change my view. I know it's unrealistic and probably not elaborated / it can't be that easy but why?

Edit: Thank you very much for your responses! I don't know what to say, just give me some time to think about.

[Assistant]
Empathy only works if applied reasonably.

A fundamentalist Muslim might believe that Allah wants women to be submissive. When his wife wants to be treated like a person rather than a piece of property, he will beat her to force her into submission, so she won't be damned to hell.

A person against gays' rights believes that allowing gay marriage will somehow cause an increase in child molestation, so that person is protests against gays because of her empathy for children.

The solution to social conflicts requires more than empathy. It takes reason.


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

[User]
ELI5: The universe is "Expanding"

I've heard people say that the universe is not as much expanding as it is growing; The distance between everything is increasing.

Right? So does this mean that there sort of is a limit to the size of the universe? we just can never get there? Imagine that I could move infinitely quickly through space, would I ever catch the expansion of the universe? Could I fall off the edge or does it loop around?

Fuck, I'm wrecking my head thinking about this, I enjoy being mind fucked though. Help me understand what it means for the universe to be expanding.

EDIT: oh, also, I'm not sure I understand he names of things, is there only 1 universe? and "Universe" is just the name for 'absolutely everything'? or are there lots of universes floating around? what's at the end?

[Assistant]
Imagine you have a ruler that is shrinking... so today you use it to measure the distance from your house to that big tree in the back yard. 50 ft... wonderful... BUT TOMORROW... (since your ruler is shrinking) you measure it to be 55 ft... is your yard expanding? No, not really, all that is changing is the "ruler".

In physics this is called the "scale factor", it turns out that (based on all our observations and best current theories) that the "scale factor" is not constant, it changes with time, and in fact it is not just changing, but right now it is shrinking at an accelerated rate... that makes it seem to us that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate... but nothing is really expanding, only the measured distance *between points far apart is changing*. (far apart here means REALLY FAR APART, like the distance between two super clusters of galaxies, there is no expansion say between the Milky Way and Andromeda as we are part of the same neighborhood of galaxies)


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

[User] ELI5:The structure of songs - verse, chorus, bridge, breakdown etc.

[Assistant]
This is an interesting question, let me give it a shot.

**Verse:** This a part of the song where the lyrics are unique generally take the place of the melody, but not necessarily. The other instruments usually play the theme or something generally simpler so that the lyrics can more easily be heard.

**Chorus:** This is part of the song that is repeated at least once. It can be lyrical or in an instrumental, it could be the theme or the main riff of the song that appears a lot, this definition is used primarily in Blues and Jazz.

**Bridge:** This is a lead into another part, and can either be instrumental, lyrical, or both. Often goes in between the verse and the chorus, or a solo and the chorus/verse.

**Breakdown:** This is a part of the song where everything is a lot simpler. The guitars/bass usually play a driving riff on one or two notes, and the drums play a simple driving rhythm.

Most songs have a verse-chorus structure, which is more or less intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus-outro. Bridges can be introduced before the chorus, and are often called pre-choruses if they have lyrics, or after the solo or the intro. Many bands also add solos in between choruses and verses or may do verse-verse-chorus or something. But that's the general structure.


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

[User]
[WH40K] How much compassion remains in a Space Marine after augmentation?

The Space Marines are loyal soldiers of the Imperium, walking to their deaths with a smile on their face, as was programmed into them. However, how far does this programming go? With some chapters like the Salamanders, they contain enough compassion to go out of their way to defend civilians, even at great risk to themselves. This would seem to contradict the "Remorseless killing machine" personality they are know for. Likewise, the Marines have basically been programmed to kill anyone for a hint of Heresy, but the Space Wolves where willing to wage war on the Inquisition to protect those the Inquisition saw as Heretical.

So, to what extent is a Space Marines personality altered by augments?

[Assistant]
First things first: there's not really a standard "Space Marine culture" beyond some broad tenants (loyalty to the Imperium and Emperor, martial honor, etc.) Each Chapter has a unique culture stemming from its history, homeworld, and general temperament of its Marines - which includes views on ordinary men and the ethics of civilian casualties. Chapters that care about civilian casualties tend to be more involved with the general population of their homeworld (like the Salamanders, Ultramarines, Space Wolves). And even within Chapters, individual Marines often disagree and can vehemently argue amongst themselves.

What this is getting at is that while Space Marines are well indoctrinated into their Chapter's tactical, ethical, moral and spiritual tenants, the idea of a Space Marine as a remorseless or unfeeling killing machine is not true. For all their strength of mind and body, they're ultimately still men; they from friendships, have disagreements, and form their own opinions. From the number of Astartes who have told their Battle-Brothers, commanding officers, and the frigging Inquisition itself to fuck right off, they're not really "programmed" so much as "indoctrinated."


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

[User]
CMV: I think the letter C should not exist in the English language

Context: I am native English speaker, with dyslexia. The spelling of the English language has always be a struggle for me, as it is not phonetic. I genuinely think besides CH (Che/cha), the letter C can be replaced phonetically with an S or a K for any word. Please show me a word you cannot replace a C with an S or a K, phonetically speaking. For further explanation, I think CH could be a single character, like they do in other languages, but for all other words every word should have the C replaced with and S or a K. Thanks yall in advance for this!

[Assistant]
An old joke:

"Directors at Daimler Benz and Chrysler have announced an agreement to adopt English as the preferred language for communications, rather than German, which was another possibility.

As part of the negotiations, directors at Chrysler conceded that English spelling has some room for improvement and have accepted a five-year phase-in plan. In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Also, the hard "c" will be replased with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but komputers have one less letter.

There will be growing kompany enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replased by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 persent shorter.

In the third year, DaimlerKhrysler akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible.

DaimlerKhrysler will enkourage the removal of double letters, whish have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"'s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps sush as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" by "v".

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be droped from vords kontaining "o", and similar shanges vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis, and employes vil find it ezi to kommunikat viz eash ozer.

Ov kors al supliers vil be expekted to us zis for all busines komunikation via DaimlerKhrysler.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru."


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

[User]
ELI5: How can a piece of vinyl be carved in a way that perfectly mimics the sound of an individual person's voice?

I can sort of understand records mimicing the sound of instruments, but voices are so unique, how did we ever figure out the exact carving of a piece of vinyl that when you drag a needle across it, you'll get the same sound as x or y person's voice exactly?

[Assistant]
The sound is what carves the vinyl.

When recording, in the original technology, the sound vibrates a needle, which is dragged along the spinning disc to carve the grooves. When the record is put on a player, it spins and the needle is dragged across it. The needle is pushed along the ridges of the record, causing it to vibrate in exactly the same way as the one that carved it. That vibration goes up the needle as a sound, gets amplified, and there's your recorded sound.

Sure, in theory, one could map exactly how a particular sound would cause the needle to move, and thus what exact shape of ridges would create that sound when it's played, but it's so complex to do something like that, it'd be easier to literally invent digital sound design and make the sound ypu want happen that way. Simpler to just tryst physics to take care of it for you. It's just a matter of running the same physical process in reverse.

Side fact: it's actually kind of a big deal in physics that most of the laws of physics run exactly the same backwards as they do forwards. There are a few specific things that don't go like that, and that makes them really important in thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why bacteria visibly grows on a glass plate and not on everything we touch?

Why in labs bacteria grows in different colors and we can see it but we cant see it when we touch our phones, tables etc?

[Assistant]
The bacterial colonies on an agar plate have millions of bacteria growing on top of one another. The agar contains lots of food, so the bacteria multiply very enthusiastically.

The different colours are often caused by special genes that are put inside the bacteria. For example, there's a gene that makes a blue colour, which they use to see which bacteria *don't* have the gene the researchers want.

In the environment, there's much less food, so the bacteria don't multiply as fast. It only takes one bacterium to form a colony though, so if you culture an environmental sample, then they'll also make those obvious blobs.


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

[User]
What is a curled up dimension?

I know this is a stupid question but its been bugging me.

One explanation of the extra dimensions needed for string theory is that they are curled up. I cant make any sense of that. In my mind no matter how small or curled up a dimension is its still length or height, just .00000whatever of the same dimension.

Thanks in advance.

[Assistant] Imagine a squirrel walking on a telephone wire. To them it seems one dimensional. They only go forwards and backwards. But the wire is actually a cylinder, so something small enough, like an ant, could actually walk in two dimensions around the wire.  The second dimension is curled so small that the squirrel doesnt know its there.


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

[User]
Human love in spring...

Ok, so, i asume we all know that spring is normally when all species start to reproduce, but i've never heard about humans...

My doubt came out because, thinking of this, i noticed a notorious and impresive increase in flirting and relationships in my school in the last months, so i was wondering.

Do humans also enter a reproductive cycle in spring?
How are we different from other species?

[Assistant]
I would assume it has something to do with the fact that both genders are walking around wearing less clothing, generally.

Girls start to wear shorts and show off cleavage, guys start to wear just t-shirts rather than covering themselves in a jacket, and start wearing shorts as well. This makes each gender more attractive to the opposite.

Also, the warmer weather makes socializing quite a bit easier and more prolific. It's a lot more fun to go out to parties/bars/social events when you're not freezing your balls off just by going outside.


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

[User] [Star Trek] how much inertia is dampened by the inertial dampeners percentage-wise?

[Assistant] Except for extremely rare circumstances the dampeners can compensate for 100% of inertia changes.  There is however a problem with response times.  For a planned acceleration (navigation or approach to a large stellar mass) this delay is compensated for, providing a perfect response.  In unexpected situations (under fire, rapidly fluctuating turbulence, collisions) this delay leads to an initial change in inertia, that is quickly compensated for.


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

[User]
[General Fantasy] If elves are so overpowered why are they basically an endangered species in almost every setting?

In Black Clover elves possess near godlike strength but are almost completely wiped out. In Eragon two cornered elves are a match for dozens of human soldiers but their numbers are low and are kept to pretty much to one exclusive forest. The elves in Warhammer FB can cut through steel armor like warm butter but constantly seem to be losing ground.

What gives? It's like this race is generally given every advantage you could ask for but can never seem to hold onto their position in the world. Don't tell me they can't breed. They have genitals and presumably know how to use them. Surely they can get over "ew sex" when there's only like a couple hundred of them left.

[Assistant]
In some circumstances, they're on the tail end of their time of prominence, and have been fading away for a long time. On Middle-Earth, for instance, the days of whole empires populated with Elves are thousands of years in the past, and the remaining ones are the ones who haven't *quite* gotten sick of the world and struggle and so on and so forth, *yet*. They're all just a few more headaches away from getting on a ship and going to literal Heaven, which is a thing they get to do. Heck, a bunch of them have been there already, came back, and know precisely how nice it is.

Similarly, in the WH40k universe, they spent so much time being the absolute king-shits of the galaxy that they got tired of being diligent, got very, very, very, very, very decadent, and essentially partied themselves to destruction.

In others, in many many others, it's not that they *don't* breed, it's that they breed *slowly*, compared to everything else. It doesn't matter how desperate a human might be to increase numbers, you're still not going to get more than a kid or two out every few years. For elves, in most cases, no matter how desperate the situation, it's still going to take years to produce each kid, and even then, you still might not get families much larger than a comparable human family. Depending on the setting, the fertile time for elves might also be limited. Consider that Elrond was around for at least 6.000 years, and only had, what, 3 kids?

Similarly, their wacky relationship with age can cause issues. An individual adult elf is powerful and skilled and can overcome great odds, and might be at the top of his game for centuries, or even millennia, but it takes that elf a couple of hundred years to get to that point. It takes humans, in comparison, a couple of decades to reach full strength, and there are always more of the sweaty monkeys coming up right behind them.

Elves represent quality, sure, but without *quantity*. Humans (or whatever) will out-breed them most of them time.

(that being said, there are places where Elves are dominant, even over the long term. Both Arianus and Pryan in *The Death Gate Cycle* have elves being powerful nations that completely dominate their human neighbors.)


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

[User]
Whitebread. Where did those nutrients go?

refined foods always are said to be less nutritious. Where did they go? what is involved in the refinement process of foods that removes the good part.

[Assistant]
One class of nutrients that are particularly sensitive to processing are the ones we would consider anti-oxidants.  That includes Vitamins A, C, D, E, and K, as well as other micronutrients.  Using your example,during processing of wheat into Wonderbread flour, it undergoes processes of dehulling, grinding, bleaching, and drying.

Each of these processes has a way of destroying some of the nutrients contained within.  A lot of the fat soluble vitamins in wheat are contained in the bran, a slightly oily coating on the wheat berry.  Dehulling and polishing removes this layer.  What vitamins remain are in the "white" part of the wheat, which is then ground up and bleached, so that nobody is mislead that they might be eating whole wheat bread.  These two processes expose the inner parts of the wheat to air, which can oxidize the nutrients inside.  Depending on what bleaching process is used, even more can be destroyed (sunlight+air decimates vitamin C, peroxides can do the same to just about everything).  Washing and drying (if necessary) completes the process.  If the flour is washed with water at some point before use, it can leech out the water-soluble vitamins like Vitamin C, the B-group Vitamins.

To counteract all this, manufacturers usually add the missing vitamins back at the end, but they can only add in what is known to be missing.  If it's some lesser-known nutrient that went away, it'll stay gone.


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

[User]
[MCU] Could Ant Man use a blue disc (the one that makes things bigger) on the Hulk and/or other Avengers, making them gigantic and near invincible?

**Potential Civil War spoilers are allowed and encouraged**

Imagine a super sized hulk, a super sized Thor-hammer... A super sized Captain's shield? It seems like this would be an effective strategy for the team now that Ant Man has joined their ranks, no? imagine what spidey could do with some super sized web materials... I haven't seem Civil War yet, so maybe this has already been acknowledged: I don't care about spoilers at all so please enlighten me.

[Assistant] Complex living organisms don't do well with sudden growth like that - without the suit to administer a careful dose, most endoskeletal creatures rip themselves apart. So you can do it with insects but not humans.


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

[User]
ELI5: Is there actually any link between being funny and being at increased likelihood to be depressed.

People always tell me the funny ones are the ones who are usually depressed. Is there any link between the two? People have already mentioned it to me in the short time Robin Williams has been dead, whose passing is a complete tragedy.

[Assistant]
A typical reaction for a child growing up in a dysfunctional home is to try to make everyone happy. They learn very young that if they can make people laugh it relieves the tension of home life. Providing humor becomes their family role and being funny becomes a critical life skill.  It's not surprising that someone growing up in these conditions would suffer from depression.

Jim Carrey was once asked in an interview - what is the secret to being a great comedian? He replied "alcoholic grandparents".


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

[User] [MCU] How does Doctor Strange use the time stone in the dark dimension if it is a place without any concept of time?

[Assistant]
No concept of time, not no time at all.

Dormammu is an extradimensional being in a plane very unlike our own.  For all we know, nothing changes in the dark dimension; what is is what was, and what was is what always will be.  Hes clearly familiar with the concept of mortality, but for someone that has spent eons in his home dimension, death is something for those lesser creatures.  Something they bring from their dimension.


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

[User]
ELI5:Why has it taken 9 months for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (one of the Boston bombers) to go to trial even though he was identified and captured just 4 days after the bombings?

Edit: 1 year 9 mo...first date screw up of the year.

It seems inefficient and somewhat unfair for taxpayers to be financially responsible for this duration of pretrial detention even though there exist solid video evidence against him.

[Assistant]
Because this is a high profile trial. If the prosecution chooses the wrong charges, or charges which are easily beaten, then people will be very angry "they let Tsarnaev go."

It's one thing to decide to make an arrest, and another to build a case and prove a charge. There's all kinds of procedural things that need to be done.

Look at what happens when they over-reach. In Florida there was that woman whose baby disappeared and was later found dead, and she didn't seem to care too much - they charged her with first degree murder which required them to prove she PLANNED and EXECUTED A PLAN to kill the child, which they couldn't. Merely her indifference at the kid being gone and the kid turning up dead doesn't prove the charge they went for.

TL:DR selecting the right charge and making sure they can prove all the elements.


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

[User]
ELI5: How can they unscrew the fuse from a WW2 bomb that was rotting under the ground or in water for 80 years, when you may have to use brutal force, heat, etc to remove bolts from a 10-year-old car (and the bolt will snap anyway)?

I would expect that you wouldnt be able to loosen anything on an old, rusty bomb, especially that it is so unstable and can go off anytime.

[Assistant]
They don't, they detonate them.

Most disposal teams will evacuate the area, pack it with explosives and sand bags, then detonate the bomb from a safe distance.

Some might be moved to a safer location to be detonated.


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

[User]
Is this argument Sound?

All Christians believe in God.
Atheists dont believe in God.
Therefore Atheists are not Christians.

[Assistant]
It's a valid argument:

All X are Z, all Y are not Z, therefore all Y are not X.

Whether it's also sound depends on whether the premises are true. An interesting case might be if someone claims to be a Christian atheist, because they don't believe in God but they believe in Christian morality and so on, and perhaps believe other Christian things metaphorically. In this case, one might debate whether premise 1 is true: Do all Christians believe in God? And that's something that cannot be deductively proven (unless you start with a presupposed definition of 'Christian').


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

[User]
To what extent is it immoral to appreciate a great artist's work after they've been exposed for atrocities in their personal life? (e.g. Louie CK, Spacey, and others to come)

I'm conflicted. Take Louie CK for example - outstanding comedian, regarded as one of the all time greats by other comedians such as Bill Burr, and Louie is now admitting to sexual harassment/assault. Is it immoral, as a fan of comedy, to watch his work and appreciate it? Could the same could be said for other cases: to watch OJ Simpson highlights as a football fan, Jon Jones for a UFC fan, etc?

One could argue the art to the public is separate from who they are as a person, but I disagree because art is an expression of very deep personal things. Is this valid?

How does viewing this person's art, with the atrocities in mind, change it? In some cases, now knowledgeable of the person's atrocities, does this somehow enhance the art in hindsight (e.g. how some people say Hitler paintings are more interesting after knowing he was so evil)?

I don't have a lot of conviction in any beliefs I may have expressed, I'm just curious to see what others think about this topic as more and more celebrities get outed for atrocities. Thanks

EDIT: A user below brilliantly raises what I think is the central point to this entire situation: *Is the art the artist?* To what extent is the artist connected to the art? How does this vary by the art form, the personal wrongdoing/atrocity of the artist, or any other factors?

[Assistant] Do you mean on a financial level, like buying a ticket to a Woody Allen movie lines his pocket? Or do you mean on the level that you fear appreciating greatness in a field because of the character of the human that brought that greatness into being?


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

[User] [DC] Why does batman leave his mouth exposed and why does no one target it?

[Assistant]
It's a risk, but he leaves his mouth exposed in case he needs to assure someone (usually a kid) that he's just a guy in a costume and not a giant bat like some urban legends say.

Also makes it easier to breathe, speak, and chow down on bat-energy-bars.


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

[User]
[Halo] Did the UNSC start using any Covenant star ships after the conclusion of the war?

In general, post-war UNSC technology was slightly better than the Covenant's, but it had still suffered massive depletion of its military forces, and would likely not have been able to build and modernize its entire navy in a reasonable period of time. Covenant star ships were still very powerful, and likely still superior than the vast majority of ships the UNSC had at the time.

The remnants of the Covenant were in disarray, the Engineers were now serving the UNSC, and the current Human government was hosting many former Covenant defectors for asylum. Would it have been that difficult to acquire Covenant technology? Why didn't they?

[Assistant]
The UNSC used both covenant and forerunner technology in their post-war ship designs. For example, the Anlace-class frigate was the first UNSC ship to have energy weapons as it's primary armament and the Strident-class heavy frigate had energy shields; both ships were post-war designs that utilised technologies that had been the reverse-engineered from the covenant. The UNSC infinity, the new flag ship of the UNSC, made use of both covenant and forerunner technology.

However, as far as we know the UNSC did not use ex-covenant ships after the war. In fact ,the retrofit of remaining UNSC vessels with covenant and forerunner technology, in addition to the introduction of new vessels such as the USNC infinity, actually gave the UNSC technologically superiority over the remaining covenant factions. There was simply no need to use covenant designs.

Another point to consider is that practically all UNSC ships are essential giant space guns; the bulk of UNSC vessels is built around a central MAC gun. Covenant vessels did not follow this design philosophy and thus may have simply been strategically incompatible with UNSC battle doctrine; it was simply more feasible for useful technologies to be stripped from captured convenant vessels and used to upgrade UNSC ships.


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

[User] ELI5:What are Tesla's "Battery Farms" and how do they work?

[Assistant]
Australia has a problem.  The ways that they generate electricity are fairly constant from moment to moment, but the demand for electricity is not.

While they have lots of resources and abilities to generate electricity, demands are far too spiky.  Meaning, during the hottest times of the day everyone is turning on their AC.  That uses up LOTS of electricity.  Most of South Austrians generation is done through wind power and that's a fairly constant generation, even overnight.

So while on average demand is meeting supply, there's a problem of timing. Basically, there's lots of electricity at night time, when no one wants it and not enough at noon when everyone needs it.  This causes blackouts, and that's bad.

The solution here is to store the electricity for use later.  Generate it all day and store it in batteries so that they can draw down during the hot times. That is a battery farm.

It's really just a very large amount of batteries all in one place. Tesla recently has been building the world's largest battery factory (called the Gigafactory).  Batteries, funny enough, are one of the things in this world that we basically can't make enough of.  Batteries are in VERY high demand for everything from laptops, and cell phones, to electric cars.

So using them for something like this battery factory was previously kind of a nonoption.  It simply took so many that it would be too expensive.  So electric utilities would look at other solutions like importing electricity from other districts or turning to non-renewable sources that can be easily turned on and off (like a coal plant).

Tesla's very large factory has recently started pumping out batteries and that is what's allowing Tesla to do things like sell battery storage products to the home consumer market (the Tesla power wall), sell inexpensive electric cars (like the Model 3) and do battery farm projects like this.


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

[User] If I'm standing 10ft from a mirror, is it the same as my eyes looking 20ft away or just the 10?

[Assistant] Assuming the mirror is flat, your reflection will appear to you like a mirror-image copy of yourself staring back at you from 20 ft away (double the distance to the mirror).  This is because light rays from your body have to travel to the mirror and back before they enter your eye.


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

[User]
(DC) Why don't batmans superpowered friends help with Gotham?

Gotham is routinely described as a hell hole, running rampant with insane meta humans, organised crime and corrupt cops; batman seems to be the only one keeping any semblance of order in the place. So my question is this- why do none of The Bats superhero friends come into help? Surely superman, Wonder Woman or the Martian man hunter could swoop in and clean up the city in the better part of a day?

[Assistant]
Baghdad was a hell hole, surely the overwhelming military presence of the United States would restore peace and calm, right?

Nope. Corruption is a disease worse than cancer. At least with cancer you can cut one bit out and hopefully save the body. With corruption that's what the body needs just to survive. In our world Marion Barry, the mayor of D.C., was caught on camera *smoking crack*, severed jail time and still managed to be re-elected.

So let's say Supes, Wonder Woman, et. al. sweep in and, against their principles, kill everyone in power up to and including the Joker, Mayor Hady. etc. All they leave is a power vacuum that gets filled by the next-in-lines. So now you have Harley Quinn, Hady's Lt. Gov. and so forth.

Gotham is a cesspool. The people who live there are fish and this is the water in which they swim.


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

[User]
Why do electron holes move 2x slower than electrons?

Electron holes are just places in the lattice where electrons aren't present, so why is the carrier mobility around 2-3x less for electron holes compared to electrons? I never quite understood why.

It obviously has massive effects in electronic design like VLSI gates and power electronics.

[Assistant] This is only the case for silicon.  There are many materials where holes have a lower effective mass than electrons.  The relative speed of each depends on the relative curvature in Energy vs. Momentum of the possible states in the conduction band vs the valence band.  In other words, it depends on the landscape of valid quantum states for the two different objects.


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

[User]
[DC] Is poison Ivy vegan?

Does she only eat plants? Because if she does in a way she would be hurting those plants no?

[Assistant]
Many plants deliberately grow parts that are intended to be eaten - if an animal eats an apple, for example, the seeds get dropped a distance away from the tree. Eating apples doesn't harm the plants, it actually helps them.

Hilariously, Poison Ivy should eat a lot of avocado - because the animal that used to eat them is extinct. Giant Sloths used to eat avocados and poop the giant seed out unharmed. The only reason avocados survived the extinction of giant sloths is because by that point humans had discovered agriculture and planted avocado trees.


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

[User]
How can a tiny, low-power cell phone send a text through a signal that can be heard from miles to a tower that can send it to the recipient who could be almost anywhere in a matter of seconds?

Please use as excruciating of detail as possible. I really want the nitty-gritty.

[Assistant]
I imagine this is still higher level than you want, but here it is!

> tiny, low-power cell phone send a text that can be heard from miles to a tower

Higher frequency signals -- in the Megahertz range -- travel further than lower frequency ones, due to a variety of properties including higher reflection off environmental surfaces.  However, higher frequencies cost more energy to generate -- but, as Schimmelreiter already explained, this energy cost can be mitigated by lowering the amplitude.
Thus a phone will transmit a high frequency, low amplitude signal, by pushing energy up and down a short antennae hidden in the phone case.

This signal is a wave at a fixed frequency, and thus it has one property that can be subtly modulated to encode information: the amplitude.  Imagine a sine wave with a slight wiggle in the signal -- that wiggle can be treated as morse code, or binary code, or far more complicated codes, and within that wiggle your text message can be transmitted from your phone to the tower.

>a tower than can send it to the recipient who could be almost anywhere

The tower you are sending a message to is just connected to a big network, much like your laptop is connected to a router sitting somewhere in your house. The destination phone, the friend you are sending a text message to, is also connected to some tower somewhere else, which is also communicating with the same network.  You could imagine that when the tower recieves your text message with desintation "Friend's phone", it asks the network if anyone knows where "Friend" is -- and the tower nearest your friend answers.  These two towers exchange information, and then the tower nearest your friend sends them the text message in the same way that your phone sent a message to the tower.  Then, they have the message!

>in a matter of seconds

Cell signals are electromagnetic waves.  These propogate at practically the speed of light -- practically instantaneous.  Thus, the few miles between you and your nearest cell tower are covered by the signal in microseconds.  After hitting the tower, various methods of communication are used between your tower and your friend's tower -- but they're all, again, practically instanteous since they are all electrically based.  Thus, the only limiting factors in this travel time are really just the time it takes to process the signals and for the towers to communicate and find each other.


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

[User]
[Dune] Long story short our guild navigator is dead. How bad of an idea is it to make a blind jump? Can we do some rough math to improve our chances? What exactly are our chances of living through a blind jump?

New crew member hooked up the Guild Navigator to the waste pipes and a lot of sewage made it into the fish tank he was in.

Guess he didnt see that coming...

[Assistant]
Fortunately, Guild heighliners never really "leave" habitable solar systems. They just jump between them as needed. So unless you've committed the greatest robbery in human history (serously, heighliners are massive and transport gigantic amounts of people and stuff) and took it out to deep space for some reason, you just need to wait for the Guild to send a replacement. And possibly a firing squad for you/your friends.

Any essential passengers and cargo can be easily offloaded back to the planet and/or other ships waiting nearby so they can get to where they need to go in relatively short order.


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

[User]
[Adamantium] How to destroy it.

How can Adamantium be destroyed? What happens if it comes into contact with antimatter?

[Assistant]
Reality warping is always a good way to get rid of it, and matter manipulation should do the trick, too, depending on the strength of the matter manipulator.

If adamantium were to come into direct contact with antimatter, it should be annihilated just like anything else - antimatter would straight-out cancel the matter that made it up, which isn't really something that can be stopped by physical toughness. If it was just caught in the blast of an antimatter explosion, though, it should be fine.


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

[User]
[General] Why is there highly advanced firepower for small arms in various universes but no equally advanced targeting/guidance system?

I get shooting is a strong discipline; it is useful no doubt about it. I just don't get why from a design point of view there are sophisticated weapons that shoot lasers, plasma, and every other manner of projectile, but they rely purely on a human being to aim it? I'm not saying full on self guided weapons, I just mean more target assisted weapon.

Feel free to use whatever subject you feel comfortable elaborating with.

[Assistant]
Because there will always exist the technology to hijack those guidance systems and turn them on the users or civilians.  Not only that, but the threat of sabotage makes something targetable all the more dangerous.  But, most important, the more complex the technology, the easier it is to simply just not fucking work or be countered.

Think about it: how many times have we seen in our collections of cross-universe historical programs a robot that turns sentient?  How about a weapon that fizzles out because of sabotage?  What about weapons that backfire?  Or technology that's hacked and nobody finds out about it until the last second?

Better yet, just take a look at 2014 Earth Prime.  Our washers from 1950 are going strong while washers from 2010 are failing every day.  We got to the moon in 1969 but the Chinese can't even get a successful moon operation going entirely in 2014.  As we try to cram more and more complexity into every-day technologies, we invite issues.  Older aeroplanes are immune to EMPs, but newer ones will fall out of the sky with a single easy pulse.  Older cell phones were bricks that worked fine, newer cell phones break at the drop of a hat and a software malfunction in a single app can make the whole phone lock up.

But let's take a look at the Enterprise, NCC-1701.  While the Federation had the technology available for more state of the art luxuries aboard the ship, the Romulan War made them paranoid enough to intentionally dumb down some of the ship's work stations.  While they still did all of the intended functionality, the bells and whistles we associated with the alternate NCC-1701 were not present.

When your gun jams, you can have a crew fix it or pull out another or have someone take over while you get your shit fixed.  If you only have one gun and something inside just breaks or gets disabled by an enemy, and every other soldier you are partnered with is fucked too, there's no alternative.

Besides, if you think there's no target-assist on many weapons you must not be referring to targeting systems.


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

[User]
ELI5 : How do dogs know humans are not food?

Specially new born babies!

[Assistant] Humans will definitely become food to a dog if it is a matter of survival.  A dog isn't going to eat a baby if there is other food around but if that dog is trapped with that baby long enough with no other food around, it's dog food.


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

[User] Is the infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 2 more than the infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1?

[Assistant]
No, it's the same size of infinity. The way to handle it is to consider a mapping between the two sets.

For every number between zero and two, you can divide it by two to find a partner in the set between zero and one. Every number is mapped so the infinities are the same size.


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

[User] ELI5: vitamin letters and numbers like B6 B12.

[Assistant]
The B vitamins are a set of vitamins that were originally all thought to be a single vitamin (in early attempts to separate the vitamins, they tended to separate under the same conditions) and were then later discovered to be chemically distinct molecules.

The vitamins were initially numbered in the order in which they were characterized. A number of those compounds were ultimately determined not be vitamins at all -- for example vitamin B4 was determined to be the nucleotide adenine and thus there is no vitamin B4.

Vitamins got their letters by being sorted into groups based on their chemical activity. The A vitamins, for example, are characteristically unsaturated hydrocarbons; the B vitamins are enzyme co-factors, etc.


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

[User]
ELI5: What is an abstract data type (ADT)?

Is a ADT just: int x = 5;

and why is a Linked List not a ADT?

[Assistant]
An abstract datatype is like a machine that has a control panel.  The user(programmer) can put an item in, take items out, ask questions about the number of items, things like that.  But the user(programmer) has no idea, and shouldn't know, how the machine is keeping track of the items.

For a real example there is a list type in c#.  It doesn't matter if it is stores items as a linked list, an array, or whatever.  All you(the programmer) care about is that it is a list.

An ADT is just like an interface but non-language specific.  So no matter what language you're working in if you are writing a List datatype it should have the same handles/methods and they should work the same.  But the inner workings of HOW they do this can be different.


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

[User]
I believe holding bartenders legally liable for drunk drivers is bullshit. CMV

Imagine this very common scenario: A man walks into a crowded bar, where the bartender can't possibly be expected to keep a careful eye on every single patron. He pays cash for his drinks all night, preventing the bartender from seeing a concise list of how drunk the guy might be. The entire time, as he's an experienced drunk, he's speaking clearly enough and walking cleanly enough that you believe him to be far less drunk than he is.

But he leaves the bar and drives home. He gets pulled over, or hits a tree, or any number of other terrible things, and it's discovered he's over the legal limit. All of a sudden, depending on the state (or even country,) the bartender may be sued in civil court or may face criminal charges for allowing the guy to leave and go drive drunk.

Now this is just one scenario, but the number of different scenarios that would prevent a bartender from accurately identifying someone who must be kept from driving *far outweigh* the number of scenarios where the bartender may stop the drunk without putting himself or others in danger.

You have to be a grown adult to purchase and consume alcohol in a bar, and you are thus responsible for your own actions. I believe that civilly or criminally holding someone else responsible for your poor decisions is utter bullshit, and the practice should be stopped. CMV.

[Assistant] It's a negligence standard, not absolute liability - the bartender isn't *automatically* liable because the drunk guy did damage. The bartender only becomes liable (and then only partially) if the negligence standard is met - did the bartender behave like a reasonably competent bartender and if not did that failure actually cause any damage?


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

[User] ELI5: Why putting a spin on things makes them travel straighter (e.g. rifling with bullets)

[Assistant]
Most bullets will not be perfectly symmetrical sure to flaws in the manufacturing process. These flaws will cause a bullet to naturally veer during flight. Think of a plane with the tail kinked slightly to one side, it will not fly sight without constant adjustment from the pilot. Since bullets cannot be stress once shot, one way to deal with this natural tendency to veer off is to spin the bullet to balance out the veering. If a bullet would normally veer slightly to the left, then spinning it causes it to spend half that time upside down as it were and it veers back to the right.

Think about an American football thrown in a spiral. The football is not a perfect ovular shape, because it has stiches on one a side that create increased drag. Spinning the ball causes those stiches to spend the same amount of time create drag in every direction rather than throwing it without a spiral where the stitches always stay on the same side.


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

[User]
How to write an ONE page literature review on 8 references?

I am writing literature review for the proposal and i have about 8-10 references , but my faculty says that he wants ONE page on lit review, so do I write like a highly compressed summary for all references that I have picked or do I write only for those which do make a big impact on my research paper ?

[Assistant] The answer to your question is probably somewhere in between your two extremes. Discuss what's necessary to set the stage for your proposal. Spend more words on things that are more relevant. Remember that the purpose of a lit review for a proposal is to make the case that what you're proposing makes sense in the context of what we currently know, not to write a book report that demonstrates that you read everything.


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

[User] Eli5: Why are orcas, lions or tigers abled to be trained as performance animals at aquariums and zoos but others like a cheetah or shark are not?

[Assistant]
You could probably train a cheetah if you really wanted to.

Animals with zero social behavior like a shark are very difficult to train because theres no social instinct to build upon.  Theyre not good parents or good friends, everything is food or foe.

Lions and Orcas are highly social animals and the trainer becomes part of their social group to work with them.  Tigers are less social, and harder to work with.


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

[User] Why don't animals like Seals suffer from decompression sickness?

[Assistant]
When you scuba dive you are breathing in compressed air. The high air pressure while at depth forces more gas into your blood/allows your blood to dissolve more gas than it can hold at one atmosphere pressure. When you come back up too fast the gas comes out of solution too fast and turns into bubbles in your blood, which is bad for you.

When you or a marine animal without gills dives on a single breath there isnt additional gas in their lungs to force into the blood, so you dont get the bends if you come up too fast.

A flip side of this is that while at depth there is nothing in the lungs that can balance the immense water pressure acting on you, which requires either immense strength or specialized lungs in order to resist/cope with.


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

[User] ELI5: How is the breakthrough of the IBM 7nm chip is going to change technology and why it is important.

[Assistant]
Computers calculate by turning a series of switches on and off in various patterns.

If a computer has more switches, it can perform more calculations.

But the bigger the switches are, the more power it takes to turn these switches off and on.

The more power it takes, the hotter it becomes, the more complicated the way these switches cooling has to be, etc.

So people make the switches smaller to put more switches on a computer on the same space to make a computer faster. That is why computers today are so much faster than in our fathers time, while they have become smaller.

The 7 nm process can be used puts the double number of switches that your computer today has in the same space. So it will take so much less energy to run so much more faster.


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

[User]
[Alien] The Weyland-Yutani Corporation finally captured a queen. Now what?

How do they go from "uncontrollable, perfect killer" to "reliable weapon"?

[Assistant]
They might be better off trying to isolate certain aspects of the xenomorph's unique biology, rather than using the xenomorphs themselves as weapons.

Their blood is an unaccountably powerful acid, which itself is contained within their bodies somehow, so their bodies must have some amazing ability to resist acids. Their reproductive cycle allows them to play with completely unrelated species' DNA like Legos. They can survive in a wide range of profoundly hostile environments. Their metabolisms are somehow configured such that a creature the size of a kitten can grow to over six feet tall in a matter of hours apparently without feeding. They are possibly psychic.

Even if one assumes that the xenomorphs themselves are unsuitable as weapons (which is a huge "if" in the face of WT's suicidal incompetence), any one of those particular qualities would make the xenomorph a gold mine of research for a wide number of applications. Securing a queen would be the foundation of such research.


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

[User]
[Warhammer 40k] All of the Fast-Food from today is transported to Terra far in the future of the 40th Millennium...

All the fast food restaurants doting the earth right now is transported to the future. All the employees are rendered to ash but all the food are preserved. They suddenly take the place of any building that had taken their space in the future. In case of the restaurants is in the Holy Palace, they are just placed on top  as in they are sitting on the roof. All shops are accessible but that does not necessarily mean they are easy to access.

How many shops are to be destroyed from the inevitable looting and some extreme inquisitors?

Will some of the meat and other food stuff be replicated by the Biologis?

Will we see these fast food restaurants preserved?

Will the Adeptus Mechanus loved the toasters brought along with the sudden temporal displacement.

This is assuming that none of the shops are contaminated by Chaos.

[Assistant]
>How many shops are to be destroyed from the inevitable looting and some extreme inquisitors?

the vast majority of them. Those in the slums get looted near-immediately, those in the more civilised parts get cordoned by Guards and secured/destroyed by the Inquisition

>Will some of the meat and other food stuff be replicated by the Biologis?

Possibly yes, but very likely unoficially and under the table, since such a sudden food-teleportation reeks of Chaos.

>Will we see these fast food restaurants preserved?

Some would, if they ended up on some merchant's or nobleman's property, and he had enough political clout to preserve it.

>Will the Adeptus Mechanus loved the toasters brought along with the sudden temporal displacement.

Definitely yes, but rather as a curiosity/souvenir from a previous age. The only tech they would freak-out about would be the computers and smartphones bound to be there.

>This is assuming that none of the shops are contaminated by Chaos.

This is a problem. Everybody would immediately assume this is a Chaos plot, most likely by Slaanesh or Tzeentch. And even if not, forces of Chaos would be immediately be all over this like flies, since this is a novel and interesting tool for them.


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

[User]
[Minecraft] what state is humanity in within Minecraft?

I've been playing Minecraft quite often and I am beginning to wonder what could be the reason why the player is so physically different from the villagers. Continuing with the villagers, did they build the jungle temples and pyramids? Do they know anything about the other dimensions?

[Assistant] I've always like the "The real world is The End" theory. Humanity progressed too far, and the Enderdragon is the manifestation of their corruption. They've destroyed so much that all that's left is The End. So the Endermen dreamed a world like the one they used to have, and Steve is part of the dream. Except the dream became real when he escaped.


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

[User]
Why is existentialism frowned upon?

Would it be considered a philosophy? If so its the only sect of philosophy I see people make fun of. I find it interesting personally.

[Assistant]
Within the Continental tradition, existentialism has not faired well since the rise of structuralism and its heirs. Part of this is due to the anti-humanism that came with structuralism.

Existentialism is a humanism, in Sartre's phrase. It concerns human actors who are more-or-less transparent to themselves: they evaluate their situations, they make choices, they bear responsibility for those choices. The anti-humanist tendencies of structuralism is best summed in Levi-Strauss' criticism of existentialism as a "shopgirl metaphysics" (from *Tristes Tropiques*). What he meant (by that quaintly sexist dismissal) is that he distrusted any philosophy that elevated personal experience to the level of a philosophy. His emphasis on structures entailed that actors where never in control of their own choices--they were driven by structural forces beyond their control and cognizance, whether those be macrostructures (like kinship systems) or microstructures (like the unconscious). As time went by, this tendency to divorce people from their motivations got stronger as Foucault showed that the subject is an effect of power, Lacan showed that the unconscious is structured like a language, Derrida showed that any identity is founded upon the denial of its opposites, thereby requiring those opposites, etc. Methodologically, these thinkers share what Paul Ricoeur had called the "hermeneutics of suspicion." That is, a way of studying objects that took it for granted that what was on the surface was not the essential aspect of the object; something deeper needed to be ferreted out.

Basically, to structuralists and post-structuralists, existentialism seemed naive because it thought it could describe experience; rather, because it thought that described experience *mattered*. A similar critique was leveled against other phenomenologists, too. Sartre was the particular target of all of these criticisms. Derrida went so far as to say Sartre had basically no influence on his thought, which is a hard pill to swallow considering the enormous influence Sartre exercised on French philosophy for several decades. Other factors colluded in Sartre's falling out of favor: his politics were troublesome to many, he said some things about female genitalia that are bizarre and sexist in *Being and Nothingness*, he was probably a victim of his own enormous fame, etc.

All of this said, it does seem like there is something of a revival of existentialism happening now. People are starting to remember that Beauvoir was, in fact, an existentialist and a feminist and that the two are intimately linked. The anti-humanism of structuralism and post-structuralism is starting to look worn out, and an interest in choosing and willing is coming back (we can see this most clearly in Badiou's rise to prominence after the death of Derrida).


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

[User] [ELI5] Why does rice taste entirely bland to us, when it is quite calorific? Isn't it the general rule that more nutrients = better taste?

[Assistant]
Firstly, it is a "general" rule.

Secondly, eating raw wild rice *isn't* very caloric for us because we can't digest it. That is why we cook it and otherwise process it.

In addition, even though rice has been a staple food for a huge portion of humankind's existence, it is still relatively recent, evolutionarily speaking.

The high caloric value of sugars and fats have been much more accessible over the course of history and prehistory, so there has been lots of time for species to adapt for preferences for such foods.


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

[User]
Do you give feedback to students about their soft skills?

I teach undergrads at a small community college. We get to know our students pretty well. There is a senior who is very talented, but has a difficult personality. She made a really negative impression on a fellow student who was in a position to influence hiring decisions. As a result, she didn't even get an interview while two other students were hired. She told me her application "must have gotten lost" and asked if I knew why she didn't even get an interview. I played dumb, even though I was specifically told no one at that company wanted to work with her. I felt that it's their responsibility to communicate, not mine. Would you have a heart to heart with her or let her figure it out on her own?

[Assistant]
If in a close enough relationship with them, and think they might be receptive, I'd probably gently bring up the idea and see how they respond to it. Lord knows pretty much only very close family/friends/advisors will ever bring personality issues and social skills as something to work on, and it's possible that the student doesn't even know that they should be more aware of their behavior in this respect.

The company may have let you know about this, specifically so that you could bring it up with your student if you wanted to.


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

[User]
What causes the pain in your torso when you're very sad, emotionally hurt, and/or heartbroken?

I've been wondering this since I was little, but only now thought to ask someone that might be qualified to give a real answer.

For me, when something is overwhelmingly sad or upsetting, there's a sort of internal pain in the general area of my chest.  My (utterly uneducated) theory is that this is the basis for the somewhat nonsensical link people make between the heart - which, as far as I know, is purely a muscular, mechanical organ - and emotions - which obviously originate in the brain.

[Assistant]
A contraction of your muscles, which is normally involuntary. Assuming you mean the tightness in the upper chest and lower throat yes?

I am not a doctor, biologist or anything remotely close, but at a guess, your brain is overwhelmed by the emtion you are feeling which causes a release of some chemical into your blood to prepare certain muscles for a reaction. Somewhat similar to a fight or flight responce with adrenaline?


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

[User]
[Star Wars] How did Obi Wan survive so long despite keeping the name Kenobi?

Even changing his first name to Ben shouldnt have worked, because we know from the Rako Hardeen Arc in TCW that Ben had been his undercover name for quite some time, and Anakin probably knew this from him going on undercover missions. So how did news of a Ben Kenobi never reach Darth Vaders burnt ears?

[Assistant]
>So how did news of a Ben Kenobi never reach Darth Vaders burnt ears?

The Star Wars universe has an estimated population of over **100 quadrillion** sentients creatures. Hunting down and investing every Kenobi would literally impossible.


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

[User] ELI5: Why have my dreams become more vivid/realistic since I quit smoking marijuana?

[Assistant]
Yes, smoking marijuana does affect your quality of sleep, namely it hinders your bodys ability to produce REM sleep (the stage where intense dreams usually occur). Smoking before sleep will alter your sleeping patterns, thus altering your dreams.

In 1975, Feinberg, et al. did a study on the effects of THC on REM sleep patterns in human subjects. They had this to report:

Electroencephalographic readings and eye movement were recorded in experienced marijuana users under placebo and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Four subjects were studied for 3 baseline nights, 3 nights under initial dosage of 70 mg/day, the last 3 nights of a 2-wk period of 210 mg/day, and the first 3 nights of withdrawal. Three other subjects were studied only during the latter 2 conditions. Administration of THC significantly reduced eye movement activity during sleep with rapid eye movements (REM) and, to a lesser extent, the duration of REM itself. Withdrawal led to increases above baseline in both measures but the rebound effect was greater for eye movement. Stage 4 sleep tended to increase on drug, but this effect was not statistically significant. On withdrawal, stage 4 sleep decreased significantly; this change was marked only on the first withdrawal night. The functional or biological significance of these changes is unclear. Nevertheless, these are the most marked effects of THC on brain electrical activity demonstrated thus far.

Smoking marijuana may alter short-term memory. Short-term memory is integral to recalling your dreams as your wake up.


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

[User] [Black Panther] If there are two challengers for the throne during Challenge Day, does the heir have to fight one after the other, or is it a free for all?

[Assistant] Presumably the heir has to fight all challengers (you wouldn't want them to fight just the weaker challenger who they know they have a decent chance of winning against after all) but they'll be given a chance to rest and recover from the first fight rather than giving the second challenger a potential advantage.


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

[User]
How much air would have to be injected through a syringe to kill a person?

In movies there are often scenes of people inject a needle with air into a IV drip. The person ends up dying as a result of it. Is there any truth to this hollywood depiction? If so, how much air must by inject to actually kill a person?

[Assistant]
We don't know. But a few bubbles don't kill (most) people. What matters is not only the amount, but also the speed at which the air is injected/entrained.

Small amounts of air injected into the peripheral venous system eventually end up in the capillaries of the lung, from where they are usually absorbed. Even if they don't, a small part of the lung infarcts. Not a major problem.

Large amounts of air form froth in the right ventricle and its outlet, the pulmonary artery, producing an air lock. The victim dies because no blood is being ejected into the lungs by the right ventricle.

The usual scenarios where air embolism occurs are surgery on the skull, accidental opening of one of the intracranial venous sinuses, laparoscopic surgery and surgery on the spine, open heart surgery, liver surgery.

Exception to the large amounts of air: During fetal life there is a communication between the right and left atria called the foramen ovale, which closes at birth. In about 20% of adults this persists in a form called probe-patent foramen ovale (PPFO). When this is particularly large even a small bubble can cross over to the left side of the heart, from where it can embolise into the systemic circulation. If it then goes into one of the coronary arteries or into a cerebral artery, it can cause a heart attack or a stroke. Pretty rare though.

Go to pubmed.gov and search for "venous air embolism" and "paradoxical air embolism".


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

[User]
ELI5: How does leakage current work and is it always there?

Please explain it to me in simple terms.

My stepfather always gets pissed at me cuz I don't to pull every plug from the wall and every battery out of tools whenever they are not used.

Just because some idiot told him a year ago that apparently there is "leakage current" running through everything at all times.

It just stresses me out, im very certain that this dude is wrong but maybe so am I, I need to understand how this actually works to reasonably judge. Thanks guys.

[Assistant]
Oh yeah most stuff uses a miniscule amount of power when idling. However it amounts to so little that you lose more money on wear and tear on the plugs from all the yanking.

Oh and batteries self discharge just by existing so good luck on that front.


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

[User] ELI5: What's the science behind white noise?

[Assistant]
White noise is just a sound (or signal) that has an equal intensity of all frequencies.

Because the brain tends to ignore things that don't change (the feeling of a wool sweater once you're used to it, the friction of your skin on on object, a sound, staring at one thing for too long, etc...) white noise can become soothing.

How? If silence is the absence of frequencies, then white noise is easily "converted" to silence in your brain since it doesn't change and includes an equal spread of frequencies. So you get noise without the noise.

This un-noise blocks out actual noise (crickets, someone snoring in the next room, creaking house, tinnitus) without being annoying itself.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do conservatives classify healthcare, education and infrastructure as "big government" but not the police and military?

Giving the state authority to shoot people and deprive them of their liberty on an arbitrary basis isn't an overreach of their authority but providing essential services isn't? I'm a little lost here in this line of thought.

[Assistant] It has to do with what you see as the role of government. Some people believe that the government should take an active role in people's lives, providing services on a day-to-day basis and enforcing rules and restrictions on various facets of society. Others believe that the government should instead be a safeguard against violence both internal and external and otherwise should let people live their lives unhindered by government interference. A belief in a strong police and military nicely aligns with the second view because both are necessary to prevent violence committed against each other and from an outside aggressor.


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

[User]
ELI5: If humans are warm-blooded, why can we sit comfortably in hot tubs, but cold-blooded lizards, snakes, turtles, and alligators can't?

From what I understand, cold blooded animals like warm environments because it heats them internally.

So then, why can warm blooded humans sit comfortably in a hot tub, whereas cold blooded lizards, snakes, alligators, and turtles cant without overheating?

[Assistant]
"Warm-blooded" means "able to control their own body temperature".  You can sit in a hot tub because you can control your own body temperature and help make sure you don't overheat.

"Cold-blooded" means "can't control their own body temperature".  A cold-blooded animal in a hot tub would just continue to get warmer and warmer until their body temperature was the same as the hot tub temperature, which may very well be fatal.


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

[User] ELI5: Why can't single-use plastics just be mixed together, melted down, and used to make any other plastic products?

[Assistant]
Polymer Chemist here. Plastics which are single use plastics are normally commodity polymers such as Polyethylene, Polypropylene, PET, Polystyrene, PVC etc. Problem is that these different types of plastics cannot be mixed together because they tend to melt at different temperatures and also if you try to melt them together they all degrade and you are left with nothing but mess that is useless.

Therefore, unless these plastics must be segregated based on their recycling class (the small triangle at the bottom of all recycling bottles for examples) and then melted together only with plastics which match same class you get useful recycling out of them.


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

[User]
ELI5 why do mead and beer tools and containers need to be very well sanitized during the brewing process if both were created before people knew about bacteria?

I'm not so much questioning rather it's a good idea to stay clean or not but most guides I read or watch seem to indicate it will drastically alter, in a negative way, the results if you don't sanitize everything thoroughly.

This seems strange as I would assume that monks back in the day would not have known to sanitize anything.

[Assistant]
You can still make them without sanitizing, but the results can be terrible.

Before people knew about bacteria, they still learned (through trial and error) that some things come out much better if you wash your containers with boiling water before starting.


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

[User] [Marvel] If all of the governments of the world agreed to let Doctor Doom rule the world, what would his approval ratings be after 10 years?

[Assistant]
It would be 100%, and anyone who disagreed ... well, it would soon be 100% again.

But seriously, the more recent portrayals shows Doom as a competent leader and ruler, beloved by his people. And this isn't just a personality cult like North Korea ... Doom not only makes the trains run on time, he makes the crops grow, the factories productive, the demonic hoards emerging from that funny rift that opened above Castle Doom flee back to the netherhells from which they spawned ...

Latveria has the greatest science and magic in the world, all because of Doom's research. The nation is a modern utopia, save one thing: if you get in Doom's way, you're dead. If you can put up with that, you live in paradise.


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

[User]
I strongly dislike all new music. CMV

With the exception of older bands that make new music, I strongly dislike pretty much anything played on the radio unless it's purely a rock station, since they normally play classic rock.

The only exception I have found has been Deadmau5.

Instrumentals are pretty important to me and I'm pretty sure this is why I don't like much new music, it sounds too manufactured and has too much concentration on lyrics and voice.

Edit: Should have put 'most' in the title, sorry guys!

[Assistant]
Whatever you hear on the radio is an incredibly small portion of what is actually and currently being produced. You're hearing lowest-common-denominator music on the radio, for the most part. It's okay, most of it doesn't appeal to me either. The point is, you cannot say you dislike all new music, because you aren't hearing all new music.

Now at this point, we can't really recommend anything untill we know what else you like to listen to. You've said you like Deadmau5, is there any other artist or band you really enjoy?


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

[User]
ELI5:If I put a giant fan on my sailboat, would I be able to sail as though there were wind, even in the absence of wind?

I have always wondered this. Maybe it's simple.  Imagine the fan was big enough to fill the sail, but was attached to my boat.

[Assistant] While common sense says "No", newton's third law and all that, Mythbusters have actually proven that it DOES work due to some clever physics. Its similar to how old ships used to sail against the wind and all that.


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

[User]
ELI5: How is gravity both the "strongest and weakest force in the universe"?

I've heard this saying before and don't really understand it.

[Assistant]
Gravity is a very weak force, in comparison to the electrical or magnetic forces, on a unit by unit basis.  That's why if you set a rock on the sidewalk, gravity tries to pull it to the center of the Earth, but the electrons on the outside of the sidewalk have no problems repelling the electrons on the outside of the weight to prevent this sinking.  That's the electrons in a one atom thick layer overpowering all the mass in the entire weight.

The "strongest force in the universe" statement is more poetic than physics.  Gravity shapes galaxies and star systems, giving them their attractive shapes.


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

[User] [ASOIAF]What lies beyond the Sunset Sea?

[Assistant]
Probably a continent equivalent to the Americas. There are four confirmed continents in the ASOIAF world: Westeros, Essos, Sothoros and Ulthos. Westeros is obviously equivalent to Europe and Essos to Asia. From in-universe sources, Sothoros is a savage and wild land filled with jungles and plagues; both this and its geographical position are reminiscent of Africa. Ulthos is a small continent/big island far, far to the east, close to Asshai; that's Australia. So the four known continents cover four continents of our own world, leaving only the Americas to continue the analogy.

Additionally, it's rumoured that there's a golden paradise beyond the Sunset Sea. House Farwynd of the Lonely Light (an ironborn house) believes they can lead the ironborns to this land, and Brandon the Shipwright of House Stark once sailed to the west in search of this paradise, never to return.


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

[User]
[SW] Is Stormtrooper armor effective ?

Doesn't seem to stop boasters at all, but is it bulletproof? Or is it simply for show.

[Assistant]
white parts shrug off slugthrowers, barring oversized, armour piercing projectiles. The black body suit doesn't, though.
It offers descent protection against weaker, civillian blasters, too.

Armour that are able to stop high-powered, millitary blaster, would be too thick and unwieldy to wear. It is simply not practical. What the suit does, though, is save the soldiers life.  Instead of killing the trooper outright, he will most likely survive to get medical aid, letting him live to fight another day.

Stormtrooper armour is also pretty protective against explosions and shrapnel.

Another advantage is that the suit is sealed, and offers good CBRN defense.
Nuclear , biological or chemical spills? Searing hot planet? Deadly spores? Stormtrooper armor keeps the guy safe.

------------------------------------
Intimidation is a factor too, of course. The Stormtroopers are exactly that, elite stormtroopers who capure heavily fortified positions, or very important positions. They are the faceless fist of the Empire, and comes smashing down on any threats to galactic peace.


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

[User] ELI5:What has happened with the whole ukraine and russia thing?

[Assistant] It has essentially stagnated. Crimea is Russian, and parts of Ukraine are trying to separate and join Russia, which is causing a bit of a civil war in the Eastern parts of the country. So not much has changed since Russia withdrew its troops from the border a few weeks ago.


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

[User]
[Physics] why do teabags inflate when you pour hot water on them?

I've noticed that when I pour hot water into a tea cup with a tea bag at the bottom, the tea bag inflates. Why is this?

[Assistant]
The hot water makes the air in the teabag hot, which makes it expand, which is the effect you're seeing. The teabag is tight knit enough to not easily release all the air (like the spiders that trap bubbles with webs, you don't need to be air tight to trap the bubbles), but the leak rate is still pretty high, so they usually deflate pretty quickly.

As far as floating after you squeeze the air out with a spoon, that's just because dry tea is buoyant and it takes a while for it to fully soak and sink.


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

[User]
[Marvel] How does Magneto's helmet block telepathy?

What sort of properties does Magneto's helmet have that blocks out telepathy? Does it have something have something to do with the material, the exact construction, both, or something else?

[Assistant] Human brain works by producing very small currents. That is what EEG detects when used to monitor brain activity. With most telepaths the current is strong enough that it can reach someone and effect them from a distance. Also their brain is able to detect the signal generated by people from some distance. faraday's cage can block em waves so Magneto's helmet works the same by blocking the signal produced by telepaths and keeps his brain signal from reaching telepaths. That is how juggernaut's helmet works too (don't know why the same thing doesn't happen with wolverine, he should be immune too) and that is the reason behind the conspiracy theoriest putting on a tin foil hat to avoid government's brain control and reading.


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

[User] [Marvel Comics] Where would be the best countries for Mutants to live comfortably without being ridiculed by Flatscans (Non-Mutants)?

[Assistant] Latveria most likely. Any mutants would bolster the strength of the country, which Doom would take an obvious liking too. It is pretty safe to assume that any people liked by Doom in his own country will have a fairly high social standing.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are airplane tickets are so expensive in America compared to Europe?

[Assistant] America is a large country, so flights may be longer distances, on average. In addition, Europe has a very competitive train industry, meaning that the airlines have to compete with it. America's trains are much more limited and expensive, so they aren't much of a competitor to airline travel.


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

[User]
ELI5: how do divers clear their masks when water leaks in? especially in the case of the 13 thai boys rescued from the caves

I have just been watching Thirteen lives - the film about the cave rescue of the 13 young boys in Thailand who were totally sedated before being taken hours under water.
It got me thinking that when I go snorkelling i always get a bit of water leak into my mask and have to come up and clear it out so i dont breath water in.
Is this something that happens to scuba divers, if so how do they deal with it, and in the case of the boys how would the divers accompanying them have cleared the boys masks ?
i would also like to say what an incredible job done by all those involved.

[Assistant] Well, for one, remember that scuba divers are breathing through their mouths, so a small amount of water in a mask isn't actually a problem when it comes to breathing. But to clear a mask underwater is actually pretty simple: you inhale air from your regulator, then tilt your head back slightly, lift the bottom of the mask a bit off the face, and exhale the air through your nose. The air bubbles fill the mask and force the water out of it.


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

[User] ELI5: why does my body tell me to scratch, when it basically worsens absolutely everything? (Scabs, rashes, bug bites, pox, poison ivy)

[Assistant]
Typically it is due to a natural response by your immune system to foreign material. Say you had a tick or leech attached to your skin, scratching would make sense. However, your body doesn't immediately recognize the difference between a tick vs a mosquito, so in either case you get this immediate immune response that is very general referred to as **inflammation**.

Inflammation involves an early stereotypical response, one of which includes the release of histamines which causes itching, particularly when released in the skin. Depending on the actual foreign material, it can take the body some time to realize exactly what is going on and for the correct immunological response to take over. In some case this the immune system never specializes enough to stop the itching and the foreign material must be completely removed first. In a worst case scenario, the immune system responds without stimuli and the itching never goes away.