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

[User]
How long after the Big Bang did the first supernovas happen?

Was it shortly after stars formed? Or was it millions of years later?

[Assistant]
Don't forget, in astronomical terms, millions of years later *is* "shortly" :) The first stars are thought to have formed roughly 100 millon years after the Big Bang. These would most likely have been incredibly massive, a few hundred times or even a thousand times more massive than the Sun. Stars this massive can't form today, because the clouds that form stars are filled with heavy elements that quickly cool the gas as it collapses. But these heavy elements were created by stars, so the first stars had no such impediment.

The more massive a star is, the shorter its lifespan - a dim red star, less massive than the Sun, will have a lifetime longer than the present age of the Universe, lifespans of tens of billions of years or longer, while these extremely massive first stars would have only been able to survive for a few million years. So the answer to both of your questions is yes - the first supernovae happened very shortly after the first stars formed, only a few million years later :)


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

[User] ELI5:Why is a single cherry on every traditional sundae?

[Assistant]
The ice cream sundae was invented by Chester Platt who owned the Platt & Colt's drugstore in 1893. Platt prepared a dish of vanilla ice cream for the Reverend John Scott on a Sunday. Chester Platt spiced up the ice cream with cherry syrup and a candied cherry. Reverend Scott named the dish after the day. An advertisement for "Cherry Sunday" served at the Platt & Colt's drugstore has helped document this claim.

The birth of the sundae goes to Ithaca, New York, which as what is the earliest known documentation via an ad placed by Chester Platt in the Ithaca Daily Journal on April 6, 1892 for the Cherry Sunday served at Platt & Colts soda fountain.


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

[User]
[LOTR] What are Galadriel's powers?

Does Galadriel have some kind of magical powers, or are those caused by her wearing one of the three elven rings?

I'm mainly talking about the stuff she did at Dol Guldur when fighting Sauron and in Lothlrien when talking to Frodo about the ring.

[Assistant] Magic doesn't really work in Middle Earth the same way it works in other universes. Most of her power is keeping Lothorien from fading and her people from declining faster. She can will nature in a way, but nothing like casting fireballs from her hands.


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

[User] ELI5: Movies and film from past decades still look fairly decent. Why do live sports from the same eras look so bad? Even highlights from just 10 years ago look greatly inferior to nowadays.

[Assistant]
The type of recording media being used.

Film looked (and still looks) awesome, but it's really expensive and time consuming to work with. It also takes extra steps to take something shot on film and broadcast it on TV. So for sports, it just wasn't an option.

Recording to magnetic tape systems was much less expensive, and the signal that comes out of that kind of camera can pretty much go straight to broadcast, making live TV possible. But they didn't look as good, and duplicating a tape (which often had to happen for archival purposes) or amplifying the analog signal (necessary if you're broadcasting a national game to local affiliates) hurts the quality even further.

Modern broadcast systems are digital, and the reason for that is that digital format things do not degrade in quality when duplicated. Ten years ago the switchover process was still happening, analog TV was still a thing until 2009.


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

[User]
ELI5:What is it I'm actually smelling as a thunderstorm approaches?

Just today I walked outside to overcast skies, and I could smell the storm coming. What did I smell?

[Assistant] An electrical chargefrom lightning or a man-made source such as an electrical generatorsplits atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen molecules into separate atoms. Some of these recombine into nitric oxide, and this in turn reacts with other atmospheric chemicals, occasionally producing a molecule made up of three oxygen atomsozone, or O3. (Most atmospheric oxygen is made up of two atomsO2.) The scent of ozone heralds stormy weather because a thunderstorm's downdrafts carry O3 from higher altitudes to nose level.


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

[User]
ELI5: Does the US have a plan for it's debt? What is the endgame?

I know the debt is more complicated than it seems but it is a gigantic number that just keeps rising. What will eventually happen? Can it get too big?

[Assistant]
National debt isn't like personal debt.  We don't need to pay it off.  As long as we can keep making the required payments on it, people will gladly keep loaning money to the US government.

The debt is only really a problem if it starts growing faster than the economy & we *can't* make payments on it.


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

[User]
[Mr Roboto - Styx] Who is Kilroy and why was he turned into a cyborg?

We know that Mr Roboto isn't what he seems, the man behind the mask is someone named Kilroy, but that is all we really know. Who was he and why was he turned into a robot, and just what is he planning to do?

[Assistant]
So Mr. Roboto is a disguise Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK) used to escape imprisonment by Dr. Righteous the leader of the MMM (Majority for Musical Morality).  The whole album is a rock opera.

Edit: also thanks for the earworm...


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

[User]
[Zelda] Lore-wise, dont you find any non-monster skeletons anywhere in the ruins of Breath of the Wild?

I get that the most likely answer is its a family friendly game but after I00 years there would still be skeletons in these ruins (especially near the Castle) unless someone or something removed them. Did people brave the danger to retrieve the bodies over the years? If so, where are the cemeteries? LoZ is no stranger to cemeteries after OoT so it seems the bodies just completely disappeared after the Great Calamity.

*Lore-wise, why dont you find any

[Assistant] A couple of possibilities. The survivors may have recovered them in order to give them a proper burial, or the monsters may have eaten the bodies and/or used their bones to make things. The monsters use a lot of bone-themed imagery, so it may be a part of their culture or ritualism.


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

[User]
[MCU] In the 1st Avengers film they use Lokis staff to access the Tesseract and close the portal, saying you cant protect against yourself. But the staff had the Mind stone, the tesseract was the Space Stone.

so what happened?  Could the Time Stone have also penetrated the energy barrier and close the portal?

[Assistant]
Erik Selvig says "Loki's sceptre. The energy. The Tesseract can't fight, but you can't protect against yourself." Since Black Widow replies "It's not your fault. You didn't know what you were doing," Selvig seems to be speaking in the context of being mind-controlled.

Selvig had rigged the Tesseract-operated portal device to respond to the sceptre - possibly its energy signature - in order to shut it down. He couldn't have known about the stones, because the sceptre was only revealed to have something in it after substantial analysis - that, and Ultron removing it from inside, and all of that wouldn't take place for another few years.


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

[User]
It might be time for a change

I'm currently a math instructor with a PhD in Statistics at a decent university in the Midwest, and most days, I enjoy it. The problem is it is starting to get boring. I have been here seven years, and I have to teach the same gen ed courses over and over because the tenured or tenure track professors get first choices of courses. It is also the same school I received my degrees from. I have thought about moving into institutional research, but I like student interaction. Have any of you made a change out of teaching into a staff position?

[Assistant] You're not tenure line and you've been teaching seven years? Definitely time to explore non-teaching careers. And you'll absolutely able to find ways to interact with students in non-instructional roles, btw.


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

[User] Eli5: Why does it take so long to change a channel on modern TVs?

[Assistant]
Old TVs were analog. The signal was encoded in a simple way than needed just basic electronics to decode and display. This was fast, so old TVs changed channels quickly. However, such a method of transmission was inefficient: just one TV channel per frequency. It also did not allow for a high quality of image. The only edge of analog signal is that it is robust: it can be displayed no matter what the interference, it will get blurry, snowy or lose color, but it still will be decipherable.

Modern TV is digital, it uses complex computerized encoding that allows to pack ten or twenty channels in one frequency with much more quality. However, deciphering this signal is harder and needs a mini-computer that is built in every modern TV set. That's why the slow down: it's the wait while the minicomputer processes things.


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

[User]
Is the atom considered stateless?

I understand the interaction between between atoms (distance, composition) determines whether a mixture or compound is a solid liquid or gas. does this mean the individual atoms themselves don't fall into these categories?

[Assistant]
In terms of gas, liquid, solid, etc. states.  Yes a single particle doesn't really have a definite state.

If you have thousands of molecules that fly about not really caring about each other, you have a gas.

If you have thousands of molecules that can move, but are really close to each other, you have a liquid.

If you have thousands of molecules that are pretty much frozen in place in a compact space, you have a solid.

There is of course other states with variable definitions, but those three are the most common of course.


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

[User]
[Superman]where does the cape go when he's in his Clark Kent getup.

This is one that has always bugged me, but now that my 3 year old is starting to learn more about superheroes, I feel like its going to come up. That cape is pretty billowy - in many depictions it goes all the way down to his calf, if not the floor. How does he fit it under a dress shirt and suit jacket?

[Assistant]
That super-suit is made of Kryptonian fabrics, salvaged by his adopted parents (the Kents) from Kal-El's spaceship.  The material has some very advanced properties, such as being nearly indestructible, and appears to have some sort of adaptability function as well.  The billowy cape and boots, while obviously being thick and substantive when Superman is in hero costume, are able to fold and compress away into unnoticeable thicknesses when Superman is hiding them under his civilian persona's usual business attire.

Note that Superman, since he has super-speed as one of his abilities, isn't significantly hampered by those instances when he has to wear t-shirts, gym shorts, bathing trunks or other apparel that wouldn't conceal his super-suit - he can simply conceal the suit "nearby" (i.e., somewhere within a few miles of his current location) and move so fast he's unseen to retrieve it and change into costume.


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

[User]
The principle of charity

How seriously is this principle taken within academic philosophy? One thing that's very easy to see within more popular/non\-academic forms of communication is an almost wilful determination to think the worst of people who disagree with you, or think you're wrong, to the point where they aren't just wrong, but also morally disgusting, repugnant, and vile. Even when doing my PhD in Psychology, it was not uncommon to see very uncharitable interpretations of statistics, theories, hypotheses etc., within academic journals.

On the rare occasion when you see a philosopher comment on something in more popular media \(I'm thinking of Dennet's response to Sam Harris' book on free will, as one example\) it's astounding how well\-mannered the complete disagreement can be. Is this style of discourse the norm, or the majority? Is it common \(for instance\) to dismiss an objection simply because it violates this idea to some degree?

[Assistant]
>How seriously is this principle taken within academic philosophy?

Very.

>Is this style of discourse the norm, or the majority?

Yes.

>Is it common (for instance) to dismiss an objection simply because it violates this idea to some degree?

Yes.


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

[User]
[28 days Later] What do the infected eat?

As far as I'm aware, the Rage Virus effectively turns people into ravenous, rabid animals. That said, they don't tend to eat people, more just kill them in a fit of rage. The Major talks of how Private Mailer will teach him how long it takes the infected to die of hunger, yet since they aren't technically 'zombies', I didn't think they would eat flesh.

[Assistant]
The urge to kill overrides all other desires. Any eating that the Infected do is more accidental than intentional. This is why the Infected in Britain were all dead after 28 weeks. This was when the last wave of "fresh" Infected died of starvation.

Maintain the Quarantine.


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

[User]
ELI5:why do (some) digital clocks run behind/ahead after a while

I noticed my digital clock (which i use to wake up in the morning) started running ahead of the real time. I'm now trying to keep a log of how much it runs ahead, to see if it's significant. Last year it didn't have a significant difference between displayed time and actual time. (The clock was plugged out for a month or two)

So I wanna know why they can run ahead or behind in time.

[Assistant]
Digital clocks work thanks to Quartz crystal oscillation.

Basically, if you take a quartz crystal and pass an electronic current through it, it will oscillate at a specific frequency.

Most work at about 32,768hz, which is 2^15 cycles per second. Basically, a computer chip counts the oscillations. Every 32,768 oscillations, the clock moves forward one second.

This is very accurate and reliable, generally speaking. The issue is, pressure and temperature affect how fast the crystal oscillates. A 10C difference can cause about 2min/year to be lost, a 20C difference can be a difference of 10min/year. If your unit gets hot, or sits in a hotter than normal area (like over a heater, on a sunny window sill), it can have a noticeable difference.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do you have to download Java and Flash to run things in Java and Flash, but don't have to download C/C++ libraries to run programs that are coded in C/C++?

[Assistant]
C/C++/Etc... are compiled languages.  That means that the code has been converted into a form that your processor can execute directly, with relatively little interaction from the operating system.  But, because they are converted down to that level, a program compiled for one type of computer, like your PC, won't work on another type of computer, like your phone.

Java and flash on the other hand are at least partially interpreted languages.  That means that they are delivered in a form that is processor independent (The same code will run on lots of different hardware types).  But, to understand that more general code there is a program interpreting the general code and converting it into hardware specific machine language on the fly as you use the software.

What you are downloading is the specific program needed to convert from the "generic" java code to your hardware's specific "machine language".

Edit (to elaborate):  The converter is always compiled, and is always hardware specific.  Therefore, the copy of Java on your phone is different than the copy of Java on your PC, but they will both run the same java programs.


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

[User] ELI5: Why does medicine such like anaesthetic and painkillers make you constipated? What are the chemicals doing to your body to stop the poopin'?

[Assistant]
Opiates (like morphine) basically act on the gut to reduce the movement of the gut that moves your poops along, reduces the secretions that the gut makes, and absorbs more fluid from the poop.

So it dries them out, and keeps them in a long time.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do ~2 hour movies take 2-3 years to make, while an 6+ hour TV season can be made in 1 year?

[Assistant]
\*Some\* movies take 2-3 years to make. The "blockbusters" with lots of CG, locations, etc.

Other movies that are just people talking in ordinary places with no pirate ships, monsters, or giant fights can be made in less than a year.


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

[User]
eli5 Why do devices still briefly have power when unplugged?

Say you unplug your tv, the standby light will remain on a few seconds before going off?

[Assistant] Electronics use components called capacitors to regulate voltage. These capacitors act like little, short-life batteries - which still hold a charge when the power source is disconnected. The stored power then drains out and keeps other components powered for a short period of time.


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

[User] ELI5: Old Cathode TVs would sometimes display an image that would roll up the screen and come back up on the bottom. What was happening that would cause that? And furthermore why did slapping the TV on the side sometimes fix it?

[Assistant]
In old broadcasts, pictures were generated one line at a time, roughly 500 lines per frame, with a blank interval between each picture. Both the transmitter and the receiver had to be synchronized with the start of each frame.

When you saw the screen roll it was because the TV became unsynchronized with the broadcast and it was trying to find the frame. Most, if not all early TVs had a knob that allowed this to be tuned, while later TVs had better circuits to handle this.

Modern broadcasts don't require it.


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

[User]
[Zelda] Why does Zelda have a legend written about her?

I know basically nothing about the franchise except that Link is the player character. So why is the legend about Zelda instead of Link?

[Assistant] Canonically, Zelda is an incarnation of the deity Hylia who, along with Link and Ganon, is locked in an eternal cycle of struggle due to the dying curse of the Demon King Demise. While Link is the playable character, Zelda is generally just as central, if not more so, to the plot of the games.


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

[User]
Why do we call elements above uranium man-made?

This is a trope I've heard repeated over and over since grade school, that elements higher than uranium don't exist in nature and are only man-made.  Doesn't that seem a bit arrogant considering the awesome forces in supernovas and black holes?

[Assistant] We call them man made, because with the exception of trace amount of neptunium and plutonium, they don't exist on earth unless manufactured.  They most certainly did exist in supernovae, but since we are 4 billion year removed from the last one, they have decayed away and aren't available to us anymore, unless we make them.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Why is Palpatine so powerful?

I could go a long way with describing his many feats.

Darth Maul and Savage Opress who Obi Wan and Anakin had a hard time beating were completely at his mercy. He forced chocked Dooku light years away. Took 3 Jedi Masters in a few seconds. He went up against Yoda who was the strongest Jedi at the time and overpowered him. He did lost to Mace Windu but only due to him using Vaapad.

Why is one Sith Lord stronger than the entire Jedi order? I understand the Sith seeks control of the Force through the faster, easier path of letting strong, powerful emotions dominate you. But due to being chancellor and a politician most of his life wouldn't he have needed to set aside training in lightsaber and force use?

[Assistant] Palpatine is the end result of the Rule of Two, which causes each successive Sith lord to be slightly more powerful than the one before him.  After a thousand years of this cycle, we arrive at the end of history.  A single Sith who is powerful enough to overcome the entire Jedi order.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do modern graphing calculators have such a terrible resolution?

[Assistant]
Some of the graphing calculator models have basically remained unchanged for decades. This has two benefits:

1) it's all standardized so regardless of how old the calculator is, all the calculators of that model number will have the same features and functions and same sort of style/interface which makes it a lot easier to share calculators and teach groups of students how to use a graphing calculator.

2) Each calculator model is intentionally limited in its functionality. Even though the capability exists to make very powerful graphing calculators with amazing high-resolution 3D graphics and powerful mathematical functions without a significant increase in price, schools want students to be purposefully limited to certain functions found on specific calculator models. The primary reason for this is that it makes sure everyone is on the same page and that no student has an unfair advantage or the ability to use the calculator to 'cheat' and perform advanced functions/calculations that the school wants students to learn how to do manually.

Edit: by the way, there are other more advanced graphing calculators out there that have color displays and higher resolution displays, it's just that the most popular models (the ones that schools usually require students to use) contain only the basic functionality and low-resolution monochrome display that has been around for ages.


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

[User] ELI5:Why is Microsoft Word so delicate and finicky with its formatting sometimes?

[Assistant] I don't know if anyone can explain MS Word's logic, but you can at least reveal their method by pressing Shift-F1... it'll open a "Reveal Formatting" pane. Wherever you put your cursor, it'll tell you both the current formatting and how to change it.


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

[User]
CMV: voting should not be mandatory. choosing not to vote is a perfectly valid form of participating in a democracy

voting is mandatory in my little european nation. well, showing up is, anyway. you can hand in a blank ballot or write some anarchist message on the paper with your pathetic little red crayon, but you're legally required to show up.

imo in a true democracy everyone should be able to choose whether they want to vote or not. not showing up to the polling station at all is also a form of participation, because you're still *choosing* not to vote for anyone. making voting mandatory encourages people who have not done any research and don't care about politics in any way to just check one of the boxes to get it over with.

---

edit: a third of these comments appear to only be relevant to the US and have very little to do with the point I'm making.

I'm not sure why you lot seem to think I'm talking about american politics when I specifically mentioned in the post that I live in europe. I'm talking about democracies as a whole.

---

edit 2: I'm not here to have you talk me into voting. if voting weren't mandatory, I would still vote. that's not the point of this post.

[Assistant]
>imo in a true democracy everyone should be able to choose whether they want to vote or not

You can choose whether you want to vote or not. As you have said, you can do whatever you want on the ballot. Leave it blank, paint a dog, your options are limited only by the tiny red crayon.

More importantly, non-mandatory voting means that politicians can win elections not just by convincing voters, but also by frustrating voters into not voting.

It invites corruption into the voting process. America is a great example here. Predominantly black area tend to vote democrat. Closing voting stations in those areas causes long queues, thus causing people to not bother. As a result, you can sway the election.


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

[User] [DC] if superman gets shot in the head and "killed" when next to kryptonite, but his body gets moved away from the kryptonite, will he die?

[Assistant] Kryptonian physiology is pretty weird under normal circumstances.  Add in solar radiation from a yellow sun and it just gets weirder.  Popping a vulnerable superman in the brains isn't even guaranteed to kill him but may put him into a near death state. While in this state his body will gradually heal itself until he's whole but may come with a slight case of amnesia.  Depending on which multiverse version of Superman we're talking about could take days or even years to fully recover from the original wound and some versions of him aren't able to regenerate at all.


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

[User]
CMV: There is no justifiable reason for organizations to offer internships that are unpaid

Unpaid internships are labor theft. There is no reason a person contributing to an organization should not be compensated for their work (and no, experience does not count as compensation). The idea of an unpaid internship is elitist and discounts tons of qualified individuals who may not have the means resources to work for free. I feel this further contributes to the diversity problems of many organizations and industrires as it sets those who can afford to go months without pay ahead of those who cannot. Organizations that cannot afford or refuse to pay interns should not offer internships.

[Assistant]
>There is no reason a person contributing to an organization should not be compensated for their work

For an unpaid internship to be legal, the intern needs to be the "primary beneficiary" of the arrangement.  There is a 7-point test to determine this:

>1.The extent to which the intern and the employer clearly understand that there is no expectation of compensation. Any promise of compensation, express or implied, suggests that the intern is an employeeand vice versa.
>
>2. The extent to which the internship provides training that would be similar to that which would be given in an educational environment, including the clinical and other hands-on training provided by educational institutions.
>
>3. The extent to which the internship is tied to the interns formal education program by integrated coursework or the receipt of academic credit.
>
>4. The extent to which the internship accommodates the interns academic commitments by corresponding to the academic calendar.
>
>5. The extent to which the internships duration is limited to the period in which the internship provides the intern with beneficial learning.
>
>6. The extent to which the interns work complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees while providing significant educational benefits to the intern.
>
>7. The extent to which the intern and the employer understand that the internship is conducted without entitlement to a paid job at the conclusion of the internship.


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

[User] [Rebels] If Kanan was properly trained, would he have the potential to become a top Jedi? His feats seem at least good for someone who never completed his training?

[Assistant] Kanan got on the job training. What the pre-purge Jedi did was when you don't have to fight for your life on a weekly basis, and aren't pushing back the dark side in your mind as you resist taking vengeance. He became a superb knight, just not Chosen One levels.


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

[User] When objects give off an aroma/odor, does the object lose mass?

[Assistant] Yes-the sensation of smell is from molecules of the object you're smelling entering your nostrils and interacting with nerve receptors from your olfactory nerve. So, while the mass loss may be pretty much negligible, the object is still losing some mass.


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

[User] ELI5:If most citizens of a nation don't really understand economics, geopolitics, or even most of history, why does Democracy give the masses the ability to decide the future of the nation when most them don't really know how things work?

[Assistant]
Most "democracies", especially the US, are actually Republics, which elect representatives that then decide on policy for economics or politics.

In a true democracy, every single individual would vote on every issue, which as you get even a modest sized society becomes unfeasible. Just look at how poor voter turnout is for Presidential elections, then imagine needing to get more people than that for each policy change.


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

[User] ELI5: Does my dog understand that I'm putting cream on her foot to help it heal, or does she just think I'm am asshole for rubbing weird stuff on her open wound?

[Assistant]
Your dog understands you are the pack leader, you are in charge, and you typically act in her best interests and she trusts you.

She does not understand specifically that putting cream on a wound is helping her, and might be confused why you are doing something that hurts her.


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

[User]
Eli5: how do those water dispensers heat and cool water so quickly?

Like those water dispensers that have the hot and cold water. How does the hot one produce near boiling water and the cold one  really cold water directly after one another?

[Assistant] There is a small holding reservoir for each side, that is heated or chilled. It is not an infinite supply, and you will eventually run out after filling multiple water bottles, and would eventually get room temperature water.


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

[User] [Star Wars] We are storm troopers assigned to guard duty on the death star, but we woke up with our uniforms missing and in the cargo hold of a smuggling ship. How do I explain this to my superior with out alerting Vader about the fiasco?

[Assistant]
Well good news for you. Vader not only knew of your capture and replacement he planned on it. Bad news is he assigned the most replaceable and useless inspection team possible to the task in the event Leias rescue party was feeling murderous. So not to worry you won't be punished any worse than knowing with proof now that you are cannon fodder for the imperial war machine even on a place as secure and important as the death star.

Now report to your stations for battle against the rebel scum on yavin 4. Today will be remembered as the day the rebellion died at the hands of grand moff tarkin and you played a vital if insulting role in that.


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

[User]
[Dragon Ball Z] How is the original timeline SUPPOSED to end?

We know things happened the way they did because of time travel shenanigans, but lets ix-nay all the time travel.

The Androids kill Gohan and Trunks leaving them able to roam free until that timelines Cell wakes up, absorbs them, obtains his perfect form, and probably destroys the planet afterwards which means that Buu is probably never awakened unless his little stasis thing survives the explosion. So where do things go from here?

[Assistant]
Realistically if Cell becomes too much of a problem the Gods will deal with him, hes a universe level threat.

But... more likely what happens is some young scrapper either human or an alien trains his McGuffin to challenge cell, whole arc takes a season or two, lots of yelling and montages of things lost etc before our new hero taps into super ultra mega god ki-chi and summons the souls of Earths mightiest heroes into a final attack that just barely works.


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

[User]
[DC] Are there any known planets that give humans superpowers, like how Superman gets powers on Earth?

Some alien races get powers on different planets, like Kryptonians on Earth, and I think there are others, but do humans get juiced up on any alien worlds?

[Assistant] I don't know of any in the main multiverse but in Batman Brave and the Bold cartoon there is a planet called Zur-En-Arrh that has an atmosphere that gives humans Kryptonian like powers, and a weakness to an element called Rodon.  Oh and the powers are permanent (unless counteracted with a different special spray) so they don't have to stay on that planet.


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

[User]
What would happen if every mosquito on earth dropped dead right now?

This includes every mosquito egg, larva, etc from every mosquito species.

[Assistant]
Depends on the region you are considering. In the arctic, which has very low species richness, you would have removed one of the key links in the very short food chain. Migratory song birds which feed of the adults would go hungry and probably fail to breed. Char and lake trout who feed off the larvae and nymphs would loose their main food source. These effects would then work up and down the food chain.

INB4 "blackflies will take up that niche": Blackfly larvae could not substitute for mosquito as they live in biofilms on rocks in springs with strong current. Mosquito larvae colonize small stagnant pools and lakes and ponds with low currents. very different conditions.


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

[User]
[Matrix] If you get a gender reassignment surgery in the Matrix, does anything happen to your real body?

Assuming you're still plugged in. Do the machines perform surgery on you? Do they artificially change the hormone levels in your body? Does your brain "make it real?" If everyone in the Matrix got a sex change at once, could that strain the caretaker systems?

[Assistant]
This is a very interesting question (actually it is).

There is no canonical evidence to support the sexual reassignment of a person's body outside of the matrix. At least not in the terms you mean.

However, the character Switch may meet some of your criteria for gender selection or gender reassignment. This character changed genders upon entering the matrix. But there is no physical change to the body outside the matrix.

As an aside, author Robert A. Heinlein tackled some aspects of gender identification in his story *I Will Fear No Evil*.


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

[User]
[LOTR] Would the Ring have been destroyed if Gollum didn't charge Frodo and fell off?

Was Frodo just about to keep the Ring to himself? Would have Sam been able to stop him?

[Assistant]
I believe Tolkein himself said that Frodo could not destroy the ring by choice, no one could.

If Gollum had not attacked him, the Nazgul would have shown up and gotten him to come out so they could snatch him.


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

[User]
[Twilight] Why don't vampires rule the world?

In most vampire fiction, vampires have weaknesses. At the very least, they're vulnerable to armies and suchlike. Hence why they skulk in the darkness.

Not so the twilight vampires.

They're capable of full on comic-book level superhuman feats, are basically immune to human weapons, can regenerate from being pulled apart and have various random but powerful magical abilities. They're also immune to all normal vampire weaknesses. Sunlight just makes them fabulous, they're very difficult to set on fire, and everything else- garlic, running water, dropped seeds, stakes, crosses, whatever- does nothing.

It's explicitly canon that it's only recently that humanity's weapons reached the point they had any chance- against a WW1 soldier, never mind a medieval man at arms, they'd be unstoppable. So, why didn't they take over the world before then?

They're easily powerful enough to sweep through a medieval army and have a good incentive to keep humans as cattle rather then letting them technologically develop. And it's only the cullens who have any ethical concern about human well-being, and even them not very much.  Why are they skulking in the shadows? At any point prior to the modern day they could have just shown up to humanity and started dictating terms.

So why did they just sit around wandering the woods until we invented the hellfire missile? Why not just take over?

[Assistant]
If the vampires take over and turn humanity into cattle, being a vampire becomes mundane. As a vampire you wouldn't be anything special anymore. You wouldn't prowl the night (sparkle the day?) hunting for your victims - instead you'd feed on cattle like shooting fish in a barrel.

The vampire rule would also necessitate a mountain of bureaucracy and a large scale blood farming industry that would take away most of the appeals of being a vampire. You'd still have immortality but you'd lose the freedom that comes with effectively being an outlaw.

The Volturi leaders, for example, are *already* bored out of their mind from ruling just their tiny coven and enforcing just a couple of laws to maintain the status quo. They'd go insane if they had to oversee a world government.

And what if human cattle doesn't work out? You could run into Matrix-esque problems of humans simply not flourishing as blood bags. What about overpopulation of vampires? Wars over blood supply?


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

[User]
Why is the UK so economically dominated by London?

I get the impression that the UK's economic activity is particularly skewed towards London, with the rest of the UK lagging behind a lot. Other countries often have strong centres of economic activity outside their capital city.

This seems to cause a lot of problems (high house prices and overcrowding in London, a feeling of left-behindness elsewhere) so I would be interested in knowing why it's happening.

[Assistant]
I can answer this as somone who has studeied the UK's history and lives here.

The UK's north south divide started to become apparent in the interwar period. This is for several reasons. The north had iron/steel works, ship building and other heavy industry like coal mines. However, these industries went a long painful death that saw the economies of that area go down and down. The Great Depression exacerbated this. Northern Towns suffered higher rates of unemployment and economic deprivation. Jarrow, a ship building town, saw roughly 80% unemployment.

In Comparison, London was the financial capital of the world. Britain's trade decifit was only pallatable due to the export of financial services to the rest of the World. Britain has only increased this divide as globalisation has brought in new markets for its financial services alongside deindustrialistion and the fact that the coal mine and industry of the north has lost either its market or profitbility.


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

[User]
Why was nuclear power originally researched?

What was the original purpose for studying nuclear energy or nuclear fission? Was it to help man-kind originally, or was researched to create a new weapon? I am just trying to understand the historical purpose of nuclear energy and what the scientists had in mind when originally researching it.

[Assistant]
The first experiments were pure scientific research into the nature of the atom and its nucleus. But after that, the applications for power and bombs were thought up pretty much simultaneously. The same team of French scientists, on the same day in 1939, filed patents for nuclear reactors and for nuclear bombs. The first working reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built in 1942 as part of the Manhattan project.

The investment of money and effort was heavily towards building an atomic bomb, because of the historical coincidence that the relevant science was discovered just before the Second World War.


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

[User]
[Harry Potter] Does Mad Eye Moody know what boggarts really look like?

I remember in the third book that Lupin says no one knows what a biggart really looks like as they always change shape. But in the fifth book Moody looks into a cabinent with his weird eye and says its a boggart. So does that mean hes the only wizars to know what a boggart really looks like?

[Assistant] Could have been a few things.  Either his magical eye lets him see things on the magical spectrum and he recognizes the boggart's particular waves.  Could also be he looked into a cabinet, saw his fear which is something unlikely to be in a cabinet at the Order of the Phoenix headquarters, and then deduced it was a better chance of being a boggart than whatever it was.


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

[User] [General] Do superheroes have a holiday dedicated to them the same way we have Veterans Day for people who served in the military?

[Assistant] Generally, you have localized celebrations for your town's heroes. New York has Avengers Day for instance, where there's a parade. National holidays for superheroes never quite caught on, mainly because superheroes tend to be such a localized phenomena. You get them in big cities and nowhere else.


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

[User]
[Powerpuff Girls] Why are the Girls complete and utter jerks to Rainbow the Clown?

Happy and cheerful clown gets into a freak accident involving bleach and turns into the evil Mr. Mime, who wishes to fade all the colors of the world. The Girls use the power of music and love to restore all the colors and save Rainbow the Clown.

They immediately proceed to brutally punch Rainbow and throw him in jail.

Why in the hell? It wasn't his fault. He got turned into Mr. Mime accidentally. I will concede that the Girls didn't know who he was, so they didn't have any reason to assume Mr. Mime was good but got corrupted by bleach. But immediately after restoring him, he is all apologetic, thanking them deeply for saving him, and shows no signs of being an enemy. They still assault him. They don't even just restrain him for the police to arrest him, they actually punch him over and over again, until he's completely beaten up. The fuck?

[Allow me a quick out-of-universe comment that's not relevant to the question. The original ending had the Girls forgive Rainbow the Clown and everyone was happy. The network interfered because they wanted a more "usual" ending which required *someone* to be arrested, because obviously it's no true happy ending if someone doesn't end up in jail. Think for a moment how fucked up this is.]

[Assistant]
The PPG universe is kind of fucked up. Most superhero settings are already messed up in that super-powered vigilantes exist, but in Townsville the super-vigilantes are *five years old*. Life-and-death moral choices are being made by girls who haven't even left kindergarten.

So of course Rainbow the Clown got a beatin'. To a five-year-old, all clowns are evil.


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

[User] [Spider-man/Marvel] What's Norman Osbourne's deal? Is he crazy? Is he just a prick? What is he?

[Assistant] He's some combination of crazy, evil, and the victim of his own scientific experiments. The thing that varies in different incarnations is if he started evil, experimented on himself, and drove himself crazy, or if he started crazy and evil and then experimented on himself.


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

[User] Eli5 Why do we not taste the sodium in sugar free soft drinks?

[Assistant]
You do. If you took it out it would taste worse.

At very small quantities we dont perceive salt as  salty, we perceive it as enhancing other things (notably sweetness in this case). This is why almost everything has at least a small pinch of salt.


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

[User] ELI5: How does the "one country, two systems" method of goverance work between Hong Kong and China? Are citizens of Hong Kong also technically citizens of China?

[Assistant] People from Hong Kong are not just "technically" citizens of China--Hong Kong is now considered an integral part of the territory of China. However, the Chinese government has committed to granting Hong Kong autonomy for at least fifty years, meaning that the local government has more power than other local governments and Hong Kong does not have to follow the strict economic laws the other parts of the country do.


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

[User] ELI5: Why does pain (i.e. migraines, hard hits to the head) cause the body to vomit?

[Assistant]
Nausea is pretty much the bodys go-to solution when feeling bad. Extreme pain? Puke. Concussion? Puke. Nervous about your final exam? Puke. Its essentially a safe guard against poisoning, where your monkey-brain tells your stomach to empty its contents in case youve eaten something you shouldnt have.

In some cases of more severe concussions, it can also be a direct result of swelling in the brain, where the bruise you got when you hit your head causes a swell in your not-too-spacious cranial vault. This might result in pressure on the part of your brain that causes vomiting, known as the vagus nerve.


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

[User] ELI5: How does paracetomol work?

[Assistant] The mechanism of action for Paracetamol/acetomenophen is not entirely understood. It *probably* inhibits COX, which is an enzyme that is part of the chemical pathway for chemical pain signals in the body. Inhibit the enzyme, the body makes less pain-signalling chemicals.


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

[User]
[T2] Is there a reason why T-1000 killed some people and let others live?

I get why it kills the cop, it needed a disguise and the poor guy was just convenient. It kills the stepfather, later it kills the security guard but leaves the doctor and other staff alive, during the Cyberdyne company it lets the police helicopter pilot live, then later kills the truck driver. I may be missing some.

Is there is a reason why it let some live and others die?

[Assistant]
Convenience, mostly. It's not there to kill humans, it is there to kill John Conner. Any humans that are directly in the way or at risk of making that goal even slightly more complicated are expendable, sure, but the goal is getting Conner, not Kill All Humans.

The major question would be the helicopter pilot. Why tell him to "Get. Out." instead of just killing him? Because killing him would have made it slightly more difficult to pilot the helicopter effectively in the pursuit of John Conner. Telling him to Get. Out. removes the pilot from the situation, removes the pilot's body from the helicopter, and all with virtually no effort needing to be expended by the T-1000.

The truck driver, similarly. Killing him was the fastest way to remove him from the situation.

And the foster-father was posing a minuscule-but-real annoyance to the plan of enticing Conner to return to the foster-home.


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

[User]
CMV: If the police displace you from your home in the process of doing their job, the government should pay for any and all accommodations, food etc. Until the police resolve their conduct.

Recently, there has been a standoff down the street from me. An adult who lives with his parents had a warrant put out for his arrest on the basis of sexual assault. He took his parents hostage in the attic with a handgun.

I know one of the neighbors to this standoff, and they were not allowed to enter or leave their home until its resolution. The standoff began at 4PM and did not conclude until 10PM the following day. While displaced from their home, they were on the hook for room and board and food despite the fact that they had both readily available to them but were not allowed to utilize it under threat of force/arrest.

I am all for being safe, but even more than that I value bodily autonomy. If someone wants to take the risk and barricade up for the night in the comfort of their home they should be allowed to do so. However, IF the precedent for keeping people (I.E. The Police)  safe outweighs that, then it should be the government that pays for the upheaval to people's lives when an arm of the government acts as such.

[Assistant]
Do you think that the government's role in this circumstance differs substantially from an evacuation order due to a natural disaster such as a wildfire or hurricane?

The government did not cause the hostage situation. They're not responsible for damages caused by it. Their job is to limit the damage and loss of life caused by it. That's what there's doing in your scenario.

Secondarily, having people around can make it more difficult to do their job. Similar to how a building fire is much easier to manage if there's no one inside.


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

[User] ELI5: Can animals be mentally ill?

[Assistant]
Yes.

Harry Harlow have used a apparatus called the "pit of despair" to create depressed and antisocial monkeys. Basically, he would lock a newly born monkey inside a cage completely devoid of contact from other monkeys. That monkey would eventually become extremely mentally disturbed, unable to cope when reintroduced into a population of healthy monkeys and would simply just sit rocking back and fourth in a corner.

As we can't actually talk to animals, we can only judge if an animal have a mental illness based on visible symptoms, and we have many cases of animals exhibiting pica (eating and craving non-food items like dirt or rocks), or OCD (where neglected/understimulated animals will start to groom themselves nonstop, until they start bleeding).

Furthermore, to facilitate the research of psychiatric drugs, various strains of mentally ill mice and rats have been created (e.g. rats with schizophrenia, depression, OCD). It's not known if these animals are *actually* experiencing what humans with these diseases would experience (after all, we can't interview a rat to see if it's depressed), but these animals all act abnormally in one way or an other compared to normal animals (they are less socially adept, have trouble finding mates, have trouble dealing with new situations, have trouble learning, etc).


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

[User]
ELI5: How do movie 'flops' ever get released?

Movies all seem to take a good few years to go from initial detail to actual release in the cinema, how could it go so wrong, with nobody intervening along the way? (e.g. Jack the Giant Slayer)

[Assistant]
Imagine if you put 30 hours into an assignment and read it and you realize that it's shit, but you either fail to turn it in and the teacher gives you a big fat zero and writes you up or you turn in your shitty assignment, maybe get a bit of bad rep in the teacher's eyes, and at least get any grade at all (maybe you flunk narrowly or get a bad but passing grade).

You can always do a better assignment later on to make your teacher change his or her opinion of you, but if you don't turn it in, you'll have wasted 30 hours, gotten a zero and been written up t the principle, all at the same time.

Even simpler, $20,000,000 spent on the movie + $5,000,000 made on the movie from stupid weekend moviegoers who didn't have anything else to watch is a $15,000,000 loss, whereas $20,000,000 spent + $0 due to a no-release means a $20,000,000 straight up loss + you get a reputation for being a guy who can't deliver a finished product.


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

[User]
Is academia broken? And if so, how can we fix it?

Throughout my academic career up to this point (approaching the end of my first postdoc in biology) I've been inundated with the problems of academia but never any talk about solutions:

From the overproduction of PhDs, to the travails of the current publishing and funding systems, to the problems of scientific reproducibility and sheer amount of data\papers out there, to ineffective teaching practices, and so on.

Here, I'd like to initiate a discussion on how serious these problems really are? How do they translate to the social sciences and arts? And most importantly, have any of you great minds out there (or between us all) got any ideas for how to fix it?

[Assistant]
The concept of postdoc positions as "training" positions needs to end. Either the PhD programmes are preparing people for a career in research, or they're not. Current postdocs need instead to be recast as junior faculty -- similar to they way an Assistant Professor used to be. If the person isn't up to scratch after 7-10 years of training, they're not likely to ever be so.

PIs who need extra technical assistance should be given grants to hire technicians instead of postdocs.


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

[User] ELI5 Why is being sedentary so bad for your body?

[Assistant] Your body is sort of like a machine.  Regular use keeps the machine in good working order.  Your bones and muscles stay strong, your tendons and ligaments stay flexible.  So if you dont exercise or have regular physical activity then you become weak.  Your body also more fuel in the form of calories the more it works.  So if youre sedentary you run the risk of storing excess calories in the form of fat.  That fat and weight gain can cause significant health problems.  So its best to stay physically active.


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

[User] If hand sanitizer kills 99.99% of germs, then won't the surviving 0.01% make hand sanitizer resistant strains?

[Assistant] Most hand sanitizers use alcohol, which kills indiscriminately.  It would kill us if we didn't have livers to filter it, and in high enough doses will kill anyway.  Some germs survive due to randomly being out of contact, in nooks and crannies and such, not due to any mechanism that might be selected for.


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

[User] ELI5: Why is it impossible to swallow rapidly over and over with nothing in your mouth, but chugging water is easy?

[Assistant]
Swallowing solids and liquids works slightly differently.

Swallow with an empty mouth and pay attention to what you're doing: The tip of your tongue presses against the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth, then 'rolls' along the roof of your mouth backwards towards your throat.

Basically, it's two actions: You open your throat and your tongue forces your food towards it.

When you chug water, you don't do that. There's no need to force the liquid to the back of your mouth, because your head's tipped back and gravity takes care of that for you...basically all you're doing it rhythmically opening and closing your throat.

So, swallowing with an empty mouth is a complex action, and because you're not swallowing anything but saliva and air, you have to manually 'reset' your tongue between swallows.


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

[User] Why do we humans call our hairs...hair? But call animals's hair fur? What's the difference?

[Assistant]
There is no definitive difference, it's mostly semantics.  Basically, usually humans are described as having hair, animals have fur.

A less human centric difference between them is that fur usually grows of a year or less before stopping and falling out.  Like most dogs, cats, and other animals who shed every year.

Hair grows for many years before stopping, so isn't shed every year.  Human head hair usually grows for 5-7 years.  This is like Human head and beard hair, sheep wool, poodle hair etc.

This isn't perfect because human body hair grows for up to around 3 months.  That means humans have hair on our head, but fur on our bodies.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are so many jazz groups named simply after one man/woman instead of having a band name (ex. Metallica has 4 members, Duke Ellington had many more)

[Assistant] Because  most of those bands have a leader and an often changing. Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, all of them had rotating cast playing different stuff. If metallica replaced half its members and stopped playing the same songs, they wouldn't be metallica. This is what happens in jazz.


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

[User]
ELI5 is power only generated by spinning turbines? (besides solar)

Nuclear power appears to be a powerful way to make steam that spins a turbine. Same with geothermal, wind, & hydro. Maybe not solar? Isn't energy lost in the multiple energy conversions (heat, water state, kinetic)? Is it theoretically possible to have a power source that more directly moves electrons through a circuit? If solar is the only one that can, it's limited in efficiency and where it can be used. What about power generation undersea or on Ganymede or something?

[Assistant]
Electricity is generated by the movement of electrons through a circuit. You seem to understand that part. That motion of electrons can be cause by several different methods. Solar uses photons of light to push electrons across a semiconductor and generate a voltage. Fuel cells use hydrogen and a catalytic material to strip an electron off and generate a voltage. Spinning rotors use mechanical motion to cause changing magnetic fields to generate voltage. Thermocouples use heat differentials across different materials to generate voltage.

Thing is, all of these methods include losses. Transferring one type of energy to another always will. It just so happens that spinning rotors have some of the best efficiencies, so theyre used most often.


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

[User]
[Infinity War] WHEN did The Snap occur?

We know from *Avengers: Infinity War* that The Snap takes place when the sun is out in Wakanda, Africa; let's say mid-afternoon for an initial estimate. We also can assume that its effects occurred pretty much simultaneously across the universe.

Yet, from the opening scene in *Avengers: Endgame,* we see Hawkeye and his family having lunch when The Snap occurs. We also know from the stingers in *Infinity War* and *Ant Man 2* that The Snap takes effect in San Francisco in the daytime (probably in the afternoon if we assume Hank Pym didn't want to get up early for his experiment).

So, WHEN (clock-wise) does The Snap happen? What is the UTC moment that allows for daylight in Wakanda, San Francisco, and wherever the Bartons are (presumably North America) simultaneously?

[Assistant]
If it occurred right about at 1pm EST it would be around 6pm in West Africa, which is before the sun sets in the spring there (accounting for daylights saving and stuff too). Thatd be around 10AM in San Francisco and Noon in Missouri (where Clints home is).

So that seems like a pretty reasonable bet that fits with all the events we saw happening.

The Clints were just having a noon lunch, Pym was doing his experiment earlier in the morning, and it was late afternoon and a little while before sunset in Wakanda.


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

[User]
CMV: Extended payment terms should be abolished. They are a powerful force in the economy right now and nobody is talking about them.

Ill explain quickly how they work then offer a quick syllogism arguing why you should care about this issue.

First, Im not an economist or an accountant, Im a business leader working in a large corporation who has drawn some conclusions watching what happens in my corner of the world and has done a little research.

A large corporation that has lots of leverage over its vendors simultaneously negotiates the shortest possible payment terms (when one party actually has to pay another) for all of its receivables and the longest possible payment terms for its payables. Doing so adds to free cash flow, a key metric Wall Street looks at to determine the health of a business- it is how much money the business has to spend on stuff at any moment. If you are a small business with the capital to float all of your expenses (or the ability to borrow to cover them) while you wait four months to get paid for the service or good you provided your customer (the large corporation), then you can play ball. Almost invariably you will include your cost of borrowing in your bid- and theres the rub, as the large corporation you actually pay more in the long run because the cost of borrowing for the little guy (almost certainly more than the big guy) gets added into the cost of the contract. On the other hand, if youre a small business who cant wait four months to get paid you are excluded from the potential work.

So,

Extended payment terms hurt small businesses.

Numerous taxpayer funded programs and tax credits exist to prop up small businesses.

Small businesses could be made healthier as a result of dialogue/legislation around this issue and consequently less reliant on this taxpayer funded backstop.

You are a taxpayer and/or you benefit from taxpayer funded stuff.

Therefore you should care about this issue.

Edit: To rearrange first sentence.

[Assistant]
I follow the argument.

I wonder though, are payment terms the root problem here?

It seems like the real problem is an imbalance of power in certain markets. A concentrated buying group holds all the power, and can dictate terms. If sellers have more options, they can choose to sell to folks with better terms.

It feels like killing off payment terms would just lead to new tactics. Amazon and Walmart have largely moved to fulfillment models, which is really just a nice way of saying "you own all of your inventory and the costs associated with it until it sells".

Perhaps more should be done to promote competition and break apart large monopoly powers?


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

[User] How did we know xenon-124 was radioactive, if its decays are such a rare event needing a massive facility (XENON1T) to even see it?

[Assistant]
Its straightforward to calculate how much energy *would* be released in some hypothetical decay mode, you just need the masses of all the involved particles.

If that number is positive, then the decay is theoretically possible (at least its not forbidden by energy conservation).

Then the question is just how likely is it to occur. If its never been measured or observed before, its probably rare. From theoretical calculations, you can try to get bounds on the half-life. And then given the expected half-life range, you can design an experiment that has a chance of seeing it.


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

[User]
ELI5: Is the apple I am currently eating biologically dead or alive? If it is dead, when did it die?

Thanks for all the responses! I've definitely learned something new today.

[Assistant]
so "dead" isn't a binary state. it's a process. So when you pluck an apple, the process of "death" is triggered (not exactly but eli5).

Now, an apple has two parts. the seeds and the edible apple part. the seed is a possibility to life (like a fertilized chicken egg). the edible part is the food (the eggyolk).

If you eat the apple (cook the egg) life never happens, if you lave it, it decays - and if t decays in a good spot and so forth and so on. you might get a tree. (or a chicken)


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

[User]
[Star Trek] The effect of falling through a warp bubble

So the easiest analogy for the question is what would happen if someone were to jump off the Starship Enterprise while it was traveling at warp speed.

I would assume that within the warp field, bubble, whatever, would be essentially the same as in normal space but as the unfortunate soul passed through the edge of the field his atoms would essentially spread behind the ship like a comet tail. Sort of akin to falling into a black hole.

But then I wonder, if space is frictionless, would the person then simply continue to travel along with the ship at warp free floating within the warp field?

[Assistant]
If you were in a space suit on the outside of the ship while it's at warp, you'd be fine as long as you didn't exit the warp bubble. Ships are tractor-beamed-towed through warp all the time using the same principle.

But yeah, falling through the warp bubble probably isn't a good idea. With the right equipment it IS survivable though. Photon torpedos have "warp sustainers" built into them so that they can continue at warp-speed for a few minutes after being launched from warp, making warp-to-warp combat possible. The saucer section also has warp sustainers, to allow it an ability to escape if separated during warp.

Warp sustainers cannot _create_ a warp field, but they can keep a pre-existing one going for a few minutes.


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

[User] Are the seemingly chaotic curves of the small intestine the same in almost everybody, like the shape of the hand, or do they follow different paths in different people?

[Assistant]
They move around in real-time.

The small intestine  is like a long hose but all along its length it is tethered on one side by the mesentery. Closest way to imagine it would be something like paper fan with the intestine along the expanded edge while the pinched ends is attached to the back.

the small intestine under normal conditions will slither around while maintaining that arrangement and folding in general.

So if you can take picture of them, they wont look the same in the same person moment to moment.


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

[User]
eli5: If good habits are rewarding and healthy, why is it easier to keep falling into bad habits?

Ive been trying to sleep earlier lately because i genuinely feel great in the morning, and have a productive day. But I keep falling into the habit of staying up too late and feeling tired in the morning. This feels like a trend across the board.

Why the self sabotage? Anyone got an explanation?

[Assistant]
The example you're talking about is a type of procrastination; staying up late pays off \*now\* while the negative effects don't show up until later. Going to bed early "hurts" us \*now\* but doesn't pay off until later. We're wired up pretty strongly to prioritize near-term benefits over longer-term ones because of the heavy evolutionary survival pressure for a sure thing now against a more risky thing later. Successfully fighting this tendency is one of the major differences between children and adults, but it's always there.

Good habits that pay off now area easy and don't backslide. It's the ones that you have to invest some "pain" for now in return for a (presumably) more worthwhile gain later that have problems. This is why exercising is so hard for so many people.


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

[User]
[Star wars] What would have happened if luke had gone to the imperial academy...

instead of staying on the moisture farm?

[Assistant] During Luke's intake medical exam they would take a blood sample. 5 min after that Luke would be called into the commandant's office and told to wait. 10 min after that he would be told that he is going to be transferred to a special facility as his test scores showed something of interest to the higher ups that the commandant isn't cleared for. 20 min after that he would be loaded on a shuttle on it's way to Vader's palace. 5 years after that Vader and Luke are disposing of the emperors body and ruling the galaxy as father and son.


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

[User]
ELI5 Why is a long screwdriver "stronger" than a short screwdriver?

I was trying to remove several wood screws that I could hardly turn at all when using a 5 long screwdriver (and a lot of physical effort).

Switched to an 8" long screwdriver and I could easily turn the screws with a lot less effort.

My father, who was a craftsman, told me when I was younger that longer screwdrivers are stronger than shorter ones. What physics principle explains this?

[Assistant]
Theres no mechanical advantage gained from simply using a longer shaft without also a larger handle. The advantages are mostly ergonomic. A large part of the impression just comes from longer screwdrivers also having longer and wider handles in general. But assuming the handles are identical:

A longer shaft gives you room to get a good palm grip on it with your hand fully around it, hold the screwdriver closer to your body to be able to apply more torque, and let you elbow move downward, and helps with maintaining alignment with a longer shaft meaning less angle change from the same horizontal displacement.

Also the shaft being longer is more springy, which gives you a softer/better feel for how much force you are applying.


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

[User] ELI5: Why is diplomatic immunity a thing and how did it come about?

[Assistant]
Diplomats are people who travel to other countries and act as representatives of those countries interests. This was very important before the days of telephone or the internet where communication over great distances took a very long time. Messages were slow to exchange and relationships hard to build. Instead of trying to do it from afar a special professional was chosen to build that relationship and look after foreign interests under the direction of their home country.

In order for that to happen there needs to be an agreement that the diplomat won't be legally hassled by the host country. Tossing the diplomat into prison or torturing them until they agree with whatever you want isn't acceptable to the country they represent. This means that minor transgressions are generally overlooked in the interest of diplomacy; if the diplomat parks in the wrong place and would otherwise get a ticket it is just ignored.

Basically the diplomat is "immune" to the normal course of legal process. If the diplomat does something the host country finds unacceptable then the host country will simply kick them out of the country, and potentially the relationship with the country they represent could be damaged. Or the immunity can be revoked with the agreement of the diplomat's home country and the diplomat prosecuted as normal. Broadly though it is a protection against trumped up charges being used as a tool of diplomatic leverage.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Why didn't Vader try to kill Palpatine when he found out he had a son?

Clearly Palpatine had lied to him.

[Assistant]
Vader confirmed that Luke was his son while he was speaking to the Emperor just after Hoth. They both used the force to confirm that he was the Son of Skywalker. And in that moment, he begged his master to let him be turned rather than killed. That was the first moment in decades he felt a pang of humanity beneath the darkness, and he did everything he could (which wasn't much) to preserve that tenuous connection to Padme.

After that, he literally began a campaign to kill the Emperor. His entire objective for capturing Luke at Cloud City was the convert him to the dark side, and together they would destroy Palpatine. After failing to do this, we can assume that the Emperor utilized his proven abuse techniques (we're seeing a lot of these in the comics) and harsh punishments to put Vader in his place. That was why he was so cowed at Endor, at least until Luke's life was in immediate danger.


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

[User]
Why can baby horses, cows and other animals walk within a short period after birth, yet for human babies it seems to take an age?

I have always been curious about this, why does it take a human + 6-12 months to simply learn how to walk, when I watched a video the other day of a calf learning to walk on all fours within hours of being born. Why and how?

[Assistant]
Baby heads.  If they were any larger at birth neither mother nor child would survive.  Simultaneously, because of the relative size of the head to the body (and the weakness of key muscle groups) it would be physiologically impossible for newborns to walk even if they had the coordination.

Also, as demonstrated by the fact that babies crawl on all fours before walking on two legs, bipedalism is just more difficult.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are silent letters a thing?

[Assistant]
Different silent letters are there for different reasons.

Some are there because they didn't used to be silent. The K in knife and knight used to be pronounced, and the gh in knight used to be pronounced like the ch in loch or the h in Ahmed.

In other cases, a silent letter was deliberately added to be more like the Latin word it evolved from. The word debt comes from the French *dette*, and used to be spelled dette in English too, but we started spelling it debt because in Latin it was *debitum*.


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

[User]
[Star Trek] Why do consoles explode?

This has been bothering me for awhile...

I've noticed that like 90% of deaths on Star Trek happen because people's consoles explode. I feel like at one time or another, they mentioned it's because of rupturing plasma lines.

So, with all this futuristic technology, why can't they find a way to run the plasma lines further back, or shield them better, and make the workstations simple "dumb terminals" or something?

[Assistant]
See, in Trek, they don't use what we would consider "electricity".

They use high-energy electro-plasma, routed through conduits to the device that will use it.

In the case of consoles and displays, when damage or an overload occurs that breaches through to atmosphere, the electro-plasma is flashed *into* electricity.

Since this process occurs inadvertently, there's no way to break the circuit intentionally at the flash point.

Secondary systems will generally reroute power away from the damaged portion within moments, but sometimes it's not fast enough to avoid a small explosion. Sometimes a person will even be close enough to get blown back. Sometimes it's even *severe enough to cause plasma burns.


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

[User] ELI5: How come you don't get HIV or AIDS from mosquito/bug bites?

[Assistant]
Diseases like yellow fever and malaria are spread by mosquitos through their saliva, not because you got a little bit of the infected person's fluids. Yellow Fever and malaria are just two examples; but virus's/infections that are spread by mosquitos have evolved a way to avoid being digested with the blood that carried them. Instead of being digested, they make their way into the mosquitos saliva system and infect more people.

Aids and HIV don't have this survival mechanism. When a mosquito sucks the blood out of a person with aids or hiv, the whole virus gets digested before it can become spreadable.

There are 2 more factors that also limit this. One is that a person with HIV or aids doesn't have enough of the virus floating around for the mosquito to take enough to infect with.

The other factor is this. Most people think of mosquitos as essentially flying needles. The mosquito's "needle" actually has 2 canals, one that handles drawing blood in, and one that handles saliva. Even though mosquitos do vomit on you a little bit when biting (how you get yellow fever and malaria, from infected saliva), the saliva canal isn't connected to its stomach, so theres no way for aids infected blood to get there.

short version:
aids and HIV are digested too fast to be spread
there isn't enough aids or hiv to be spread
theres no way for aids/hiv infected blood to get back out of the mosquito once its in there.


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

[User]
What does the pOH tell you about a solution where there is no hydroxide?

Okay, it was hard to make a title for this one, but I'll try to clarify here!

If we have the following reaction:
HCl + H2O  H3O^+ + Cl^-

                                          Strong acid, no equilibrium.

Let's say the pH for this solution is 1.7.

Using Kw(10^(-14) molars^2 ) = [OH^- ] * [H3O^+ ]

log([H3O^+ ] * [OH^- ]) = log[10^-14 ]

log[H3O^+ ] + log[OH^- ] = log[10^-14 ]

-log[H3O^+ ] - log[OH^- ] = - log[10^-14 ]

pH + pOH = 14

I would imagine that pH + pOH = 14 is valid for the reaction above. But is this where I am wrong? If not, I continue.

Since the pH is 1.7 we could calculate that the pOH is 12.3. Using this we could calculate the concentration of hydroxide in the water (10^(-12.3)). But this makes no sense since there is no known concentration of hydroxide in this solution. Where am I thinking wrong?

[Assistant]
As long as you are working with an aqueous solution, the Kw expression is valid.  In another solvent, that wouldn't be true.

However, in the expression above, your determination of the concentration of hydroxide is correct.  Even if there is a lot of H^+ around, that doesn't mean there can't also be OH^- around.  Pure[ish] water has a concentration of 55 M H2O.  There's plenty of room for both H^+ and OH^- at any attainable concentration of either of those ions in solution.


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

[User] ELI5: How can online games like first person shooters be so in sync across all users without hardly any delay?

[Assistant]
Fast internet and faster servers.

Human reaction times are on the order of 100ms or so. Ping time, which is round-trip packet flight time is often on the order of half that or so.  Round trip is therefore on the order of human reaction if you give the server a little time to do stuff.

Also, the server only sends back just enough to run the game.  For example it may just send back Headshot and some points, and your client has to take care of the headshot animation, credit, sound and then tell the server when it's done because it's not really sync-critical.


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

[User]
ELI5:Graham's number + 1

If I take Graham's number and just add one have I just with very little effort come up with a larger number.

[Assistant]
Yes you have. Which is why nobody claims that Graham's Number is the largest possible number. What they do state, however, is that Graham's Number is the largest known number which is used in a specific mathematical calculation.

If you can come up with a formula which legitimately requires you to use (Graham's Number + 1) as part of it, then you could claim that you have "discovered" a larger number.


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

[User]
In the United States, I think that the religious based marriage should be removed and replaced with secular based civil unions. CMV.

I believe that in the United States, marriage should be removed as it follows religious rules and doctrine in most parts of the US.  I believe that this is absolutely in the jurisdiction of the church and should remain there, allowing churches to marry people as they deem appropriate. I believe this because of our separation of church and state.

Civil Unions that are based in secular principles should replace the marriage institution.  Any adult able to consent to a contract would be able to form a union with another individual. (Or other individual**s**, but that is a different discussion.)  This would grant the same benefits marriage currently has.

It may seem like just a name change, but its a fundamental shift in philosophy.  Change my view?

[Assistant] Marriage in the legal sense is already independent from matrimony within the Christian faith and similar ceremonies in other religions. It's already possible for two individuals of opposite genders (or the same gender, in some areas) to get a marriage license - and become subject to all the legal statuses marriage entails - independent of sexual involvement, religion-based marital status, and similar factors.


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

[User] Eli5: Why do we feel muscle spasms sometimes when we stay in the same position for an extended period of time but not when we're sleeping?

[Assistant]
You don't stay in the same position when you sleep. It may seem that way, but your body constantly shifts its weight off of pressure points throughout the night. This is why people who are found down from strokes or opioid overdoses often have massive pressure ulcers after several hours, but you've never developed a pressure ulcer from sleeping -- even if you're sleeping on a hard surface.

As for muscle spasms, those can be the result of odd positioning (strange tension on a muscle group) or any number of electrolyte abnormalities. Usually it's low potassium, but even dehydration can bring about spasms. You experience these in your sleep as well, but since you're asleep you don't notice. The one major exception to this is the so-called charlie horse in your calves, which tends to DEFINITELY wake people up.


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

[User] When classifying a moon, is it based around the relative size to the planet? Or do all moons have to be a certain size or larger?

[Assistant]
The word moon clearly describes an object that orbits something other than the main star in a system. Moons are not classified by their mass, size or composition.  *Ganymede for example is the biggest one*  with a diameter of 5,262 kilometers and we have just found that there are some with only a diameter of 1 kilometers orbiting Jupiter.

Moons are classified by their motion around the object they orbit. That motion could be in same direction or contrary.


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

[User]
[Terminator] If skin is required for something to survive time travel, would wrapping objects in skin or putting them in your body allow you to take them back in time with you?

Edit: Im asking more about humans time traveling than about terminators.

[Assistant]
Very likely, yes. This is how the Terminators are able to come back at all, and why the TX and other advanced models were able to bring back built-in future weaponry.

Reese describes it as a "field around a living thing," so as long as the flesh was alive, it should be fine.

A pacemaker implanted in a human should come back, but a simple lump of skin, with nothing to provide it nutrients, would probably not have the "living" quality necessary.

This is one of the things that makes the 800 series so remarkable; the flesh is actually alive, and the Terminator has systems capable of sustaining all of its biological functions.


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

[User] Can someone be infected with different strains of the same virus at the same time? How would these strains interact?

[Assistant] Yes, absolutely! In many cases, the viruses can reassort or trade genes with each other to form different variants. This is especially true in the case of segmented viruses like Influenza or Rotavirus.  For example, you get infected with ABCD and EFGH, then someone catches AFCH from you.  With non-segmented viruses, the reassortment is more rare, and oftentimes one strain will simply outcompete the other(s).  If the strains cause the same symptoms, the presence of two or more strains instead of one does not typically make the symptoms any worse. Two different viruses that cause the same symptoms can sometimes worsen the symptoms, though.


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

[User]
[Star Wars: A New Hope] Why doesn't C-3PO recognize Princess Leia on R2-D2's recording?

When the *Tantive IV* is attacked by the Empire, 3PO remarks that "there will be no escape for the princess this time", and as Captain Antilles's personal droid, surely he has encountered her before.

However, when Luke stumbles upon R2's recording of her message to Obi-Wan and asks who she is, 3PO responds with "I'm afraid I'm not quite sure, sir". Unlike R2, 3PO has no reason to lie to Luke, so what's with his sudden memory loss?

[Assistant]
The real, canon answer:

In the Star Wars Radio Drama, which is basically ANH before the editors got to it, there is a lot more background information from well before the Tantive IV was captured. One of those scenes involves 3PO and R2 being instructed by Captain Antilles not to disclose the identity of Princess Leia to anyone.


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

[User]
[TLA] Can airbenders bend the air around another element and "bend" it that way?

Can they shift the air around, say, a pice of stone and bend it almost as if an Earthbender would?

[Assistant]
It's been done in the first season. Aang air bended a rock to make Katara look like she earth bending.

It wouldn't be as effective. Aang could lift the rock but out requires more effort and it's not as effective as the native Bender.


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

[User] ELI5: What are dissolvable stitches made of and why aren't they used in every medical procedure?

[Assistant]
What are they made of? One of the most common are "catgut" stitches (more correctly called sutures) which are made from processed products that come from the intestines of sheep/cows (despite the having "cat" in the name). Others are synthetic (made using chemical processes) polymers (plastics are examples of polymers) that, unlike many familiar plastics, slowly disintegrate when exposed to the body.

Why not use them in every procedure? As these sutures dissolve they progressively lose their strength. In some situations the doctor (and patient!) really does *not* want the stitches to fail. E.g. someone having surgery on their intestines might have a large cut down the middle of their abdomen. It is obviously undesirable for a patient's gut to burst open and spill their intestines onto the floor when they squat down or try to pick up a heavy object. Better to just remove the sutures manually when certain that the wound has healed enough to hold on its own. Other examples are heart surgery where again it is very undesirable for the sutures to give way so maximum security is preferred.


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

[User]
ELI5: When earthquake / tsunami hits a region, how are inmates / patients handled in prisons / mental institutions?

I read the news that 300 female inmates escaped during the earthquake in Chile. That made me wonder how are such situations handled in such institutions where people are being held? Do they go "Form a line and evacuate in orderly fashion" when everything is shaking around them or just open the cell gates and "everyone run for your life" within prison ground?

[Assistant]
Involuntary commitment facilities should have disaster preparedness plans already in place, so it's not like they'll just be winging it.

There are two kinds of natural disasters, relative to your question: sudden and unpredictable ones, and ones you can see coming.

If it's something you can see coming (like a hurricane), someone with the relevant authority (like the warden) will make a risk assessment, and if necessary, conduct an orderly evacuation of the facility according to the disaster plan, until such time as the inmates can be moved back in.

If it's not something you can see coming (earthquake, tsunami), there will still be a plan in a three-ring binder on somebody's shelf, but it will go roughly like this:

* Ahh! What's going on! Freak out!
* As soon as the immediate event has passed (the ground stops shaking), the facility staff will respond.
* If the facility has survived relatively intact or with only minor damage, they'll probably just cope as is, leaving the detainees where they are.
* If the facility is damaged enough to be unsafe, to pose an escape risk, et cetera, but the staff are still able to do their jobs, they will first work to assert control and then, again, conduct an orderly evacuation.
* If the facility is heavily damaged, staff are injured or dead, et cetera, then whoever's able to is most likely going to report the situation to higher authority (state/regional/national government), do whatever they can to protect and secure the detainees, and wait for help to arrive.

It's basically common sense stuff, based on priorities of safety and continued performance of the facility's primary function.


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

[User]
What's more effective at reflecting heat, a sheet of aluminum that is polished or a sheet of aluminum painted white?

I've been wondering if something that was polished to a mirror finish was better at not absorbing heat through light than something painted with pure white paint. Any responses are appreciated!

[Assistant]
It very likely depends on the details of your paint and of the light that you want to reflect. Something you see as "white" is going to be broadly reflective of all visible wavelengths, but it may absorb some of the IR or UV spectrum. If the incoming light has significant intensities of those non-visible wavelengths in it (like sunlight does), you may still absorb a lot of energy. Some white paints will likely do a better job at reflecting those than others, and you probably can't see the difference. The mirror finish will probably have similar limitations, as it won't reflect all wavelengths equally. Different methods of polishing might give different results for different wavelengths.

If this is for a practical use, not just a thought experiment, you probably also need to think about other factors, like how the finish holds up to wear. If the brightest, most-reflective finish only lasts for a short time in your target environment before needing to be touched up, it may not be as good for your purpose as a less reflective option that is more durable.