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

[User]
Does having a violent felony prevent me from getting into graduate school or being hired by an academic institution?

So I'm currently an undergrad at my local community college and I've been accepted in all my universities of choice but, I'm worried that my criminal record (a violent felony), will prevent me from getting into grad school. Perhaps I'm being a bit facetious I believe it shouldn't be an issue (or could be? Correct me if I'm wrong),  but rather I'm worried that I will find it exceedingly difficult to be taken on as a TA or RA, and from there post-doc et. Also it should be noted that the schools I've applied to are state schools. Will I be looking at any serious roadblocks due to my record?

Edit: Thanks for all the input peeps, I am in fact reading these haha.

[Assistant] Hate to be the bearer of bad news: A family friend was in a similar situation. He had a violent felony, got out of jail, got a BA from a great school. He applied to, went on recruitment visits, got accepted, and got funded to attend 4 fantastic grad schools. Only then, did the Grad Colleges run the background checks and decline admission. His recruiting professors were as shocked as he was. He's trying again next year applying only to private schools. Might be the only way to make it work.


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

[User]
Where does the energy go when particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously appear and annihilate?

Still trying to wrap my head around Hawking Radiation, but I was wondering about those particle-antiparticle pairs that are spontaneously appearing.

If they appear and annihilate (elsewhere in space, not related to black holes), wouldn't that release energy? I thought energy could not be created, but wouldn't the annihilation of those particle pairs release energy into the surrounding space, increasing the total energy of the universe? Where does the energy go?

[Assistant]
The energy doesn't go anywhere, because there was zero energy to begin with and zero energy after.

The particle-antiparticle pairs you're referring to are called *virtual particles*. They aren't real particles, and they don't actually exist. They're mathematical tools that are used in calculations, but they fail to have many of the properties of real particles. In particular, *real* particles have a relationship between their mass, energy, and momentum: E^2 = p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4. In particular, their (mass+kinetic) energy is always positive. That relationship is not true for virtual particles, and one of the pair of virtual particles just has negative energy (so the pair has total energy zero).

But--just to reiterate because this causes so much confusion--virtual particles aren't real. They're just a mathematical tool.


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

[User] [Witcher 3] Does Geralt's horse always stalk him in the shadows? Or does it just magically teleport close to his location when he whistles?

[Assistant]
About a decade ago Wizards where selling a briddle that would make a horse seek out it's owner when magically activated, also the Highest Chapter and Conclave of Wizardry was working on making the teleport spell accessible to the common people.

Stands to reason that years later they actually managed to combine both technologies allowing for a teleporting briddle that transport the horse near its owner when activated.


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

[User]
ELI5: If someone needs dialysis, why can't they live the rest of their lives on dialysis if it filters the blood?

I feel like it would clear the waste and everything else so why do people still die even if the dialysis is taking over the function of the kidneys or anything else?

[Assistant]
I am a dialysis nurse. They can. There are variations on the duration of rest of. Ive seen months to decades. Dialysis only takes care of certain things- acid/base balance, electrolytes correction, and removing fluid that would have been urine in a working kidney person.

Kidney failure typically comes from high BP, diabetes, and the remaining causes are prevalent, but a much smaller amt. Usually these people have MANY other problems: mineral disorders, vitamin D dysregulation, high BP continues. A person has to restrict their fluid intake ALL OF THE TIME along with a restricted diet. It is a difficult life not to mention 3 days a week having to spend 3-4 hrs of dialysis that kinda wrecks the rest of the day with fatigue. Dialysis pulls off fluid quickly and corrects waste products quickly, which puts strain on the body. Kidneys are doing that 24 hrs a day so theres no spikes or drops.

Overall, those on dialysis will have a shorter life, all other things held equal, somewhere around 5 years, aggregate. A transplant is far superior. Dialysis is a stop-gap to prevent dying - it works yet it is a brutal life, invading all aspects of what one does. Often, they cant work because of the schedule and other problems.

The kidneys do a lot - synthesis of active vitamin D, major BP regulation, waste excretion, water balance, electrolyte balance, and not having these affect other systems in the body, significantly. Again, they can stay on dialysis for the rest of their lives, but it really takes it toll on them.


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

[User] ELI5: What was happening in North America during the bible?

[Assistant]
Natives. Literally.

If we look at the bible as a semi-historical text, it goes back a few thousand years.

People started migrating over the Land Bridge into North America from Asia before that. Meaning that while David fought Goliath, Geronima was chasing the buffalo. While Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, Sacagawea was helping prepare food. While Jesus was sitting at the last supper, Squanto was deciding whether or not to travel to the winter camp.

The Natives have little written history, and even that which does exist, in drawings and oral history has been destroyed. We can't tell what exactly was happening, but we have a decent idea that the Native Americans were just living their lives. Like the Picts were living their lives, the Japanese were living their's, and the Australians, and Indians, etc.

Edited for political correctness, because apparently English versions of Native Names are racist.


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

[User]
ELI5: What is a "right to work" state?

i checked the wikipedia page and it just confused me.

[Assistant]
In non right-to-work states, a union at a company or in an industry can be so strong that the require every single employee to be a member as a condition of employment.

So a right-to-work state doesn't let the Unions have that much power, meaning, you have a "right to work" regardless of your affiliation with any workers unions.


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

[User] Does our sun have any unique features compared to any other star?

[Assistant]
It's the only star humans have ever discovered that sustains life on one of its satellite planets :)

But seriously though, our sun is incredibly typical when it comes to stars.  It's mass is a little bigger than average, but there are tons and tons of other stars that are very similar to ours.


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

[User] [Marvel] Which is stronger: adamantium or vibranium?

[Assistant]
Without getting into the hundred variants between universes, your short answer is:

**Vibranium:** sourced from a HUGE, like HUGE meteorite that in some ancient era crashed into what today is the heart of Wakanda. In the most basic depictions, vibranium is a ludicrous (virtually magical in physics we can grasp) superconductor of primarily kinetic energy. The more you put into it the more it takes nearly, and then can harmlessly dissipate it like it was nothing, or redirect it in controlled conditions. Fun fact: the vibranium meteorite could have done a dinosaur level wipe out, being so huge, and because it was likely coming into Earth as fast. But, the moment it hit atmosphere, what's hitting the meteorite? Energy, which slows its descent incrementally more moment by moment. It still would hit the ground with a huge amount of energy, but again: kinetic energy. So that's how you get a buried mountain-scale huge chunk of solid vibranium spearing itself into Earth without wiping out ancient prehistoric humans or earlier ancestors.

Wear a midevil suit of straight vibranium and someone smacks you with a mace and you'll barely feel it if at all. Apply enough (a LOT) of force/energy and you can break or overwhelm vibranium, but in practical terms no one who's not a major level comics power person of some sort is beating the armor this way. Can be reforged, smelted with right tools.

**Adamantium:** alloy of vibranium and sometimes steel, sometimes other stuff. Once it's set from liquid form and hardens nothing short of God Level or crazy ass cosmic conditions will break it. A suit of armor of adamantium will outlast the planet Earth, *full stop*. The sun could go supernova, blap us, and the suit may warp a bit but will survive otherwise.

If you get smacked with the mace in that suit, it'll hurt a LOT less than a steel suit but the energy won't do magic stuff. It's just simply the hardest, toughest most indestructible metal in perhaps the galaxy that mortals can forge. Good luck smelting it again if your name isn't like "Odin".


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

[User]
To what extent do most cultures recognize the same specific emotions?

Some cultures only have words for red, white, and black, while other cultures have words for red, orange, yellow, etc.does the same hold for emotions?

Put another way: in primary schools, there are posters with cartoon faces caricaturing important emotions, but would an analogous poster on the other side of the world be likely to have the same categorization?

[Assistant]
There are a certain set of base emotions that are pretty much universal in healthy humans.

Brain scans and neurological studies have indicated that the amygdala plays an important part in the expression of emotion, fear in particular.

There are also physiological reactions associated to emotions.  The Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, also known as the Thalamic theory of emotion, is a physiological explanation of emotion developed by Walter Cannon and Philip Bard. Cannon-Bard theory states that we feel emotions and experience physiological reactions such as sweating, trembling, and muscle tension simultaneously.

According to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, we react to a stimulus and experience the associated emotion at the same time. The physical reactions are not dependent upon the emotional reaction, or vice versa.

Psychologically, the expression of emotion and our interpretation of it seems to be universal in healthy individuals.   Interpretation of emotional sign is tied to cognition and emotional intelligence, and these expressions play a major part in our overall body language.

Research suggests that many expressions are universal, such as a smile to indicate happiness or a frown to indicate sadness. Sociocultural norms also play a role in how we express and interpret emotions.

In 1972, psychologist Paul Eckman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout human cultures: fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness.

This was later added to Robert Plutchik in the 1980s when he introduced another emotion classification system known as the "wheel of emotions." This model demonstrated how different emotions can be combined.

In 1999, Eckman expanded his list to include a number of other basic emotions, including embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, and amusement.

There has been considerable study into the nature and expression of emotion.


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

[User] ELI5:Can a police officer use narcotics if he is undercover? And if so, how does that work?

[Assistant] They absolutely can.  Undercover cops have a lot of leeway to stay undercover and protect themselves.  How does it work?  They do the drug.  That's about it.  They might do less of it so they're not so high they blow their cover.  They go through training to hide the drugs, do less of them and make it look like they're doing more, and to control their actions under the influence.


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

[User]
Our manuscript got rejected but they offered to transfer it to other journals?

My supervisors and I submitted a manuscript to a journal. Our manuscript fit the scope but judging from their recently published papers it was clear that they favour another method and only every now and then publish papers with the method we used. We wanted to try anyway (they have a good impact factor) and got a rejection today with the offer to transfer the manuscript directly to a variety of other journals.

What I am wondering now is: does it make any difference whether this journal directly transfers the manuscript or whether we take the manuscript and submit it to a journal by ourselves? Which of the two is the better option?

[Assistant]
The main advantage with these trickle-through systems is that it saves you having to jump through formatting hoops.

So, the only reason to trickle down is if the paper they are sending it on to is if it is  the next on your taget list. If your next target journal isn't in their publishing house, or the next on the trickle-down list, then go elsewhere.


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

[User]
ELI5 What's with the Golden Dawn group in Greece? Who are they? What do they want? Why are they so violent?

Thank you to everyone who answered!

[Assistant]
The Golden Dawn is not a group, they are a political party with seats in the Greek Parliament. In the last elections they gathered 7% of the votes, which gives them 18 seats.

They are a far right political party, campaigning on a platform of anti-immigration and a complete rejection of the demands made to the country to pay for their crippling debt.

If in power, their plan is to simply default, leave the EU and the Euro, expel any immigrant living in the country, and adopt a policy of self-reliance with a great investment in the military to recover lost Greek lands (Cyprus for instance).

They are mainly known for their associations with neo-nazi movements, known hooligans, as well as many members of the greek police force. They are openly homo and xenophobic and frequently protest and harass in full view of the police.

This is because Greece has a serious immigration problem. They are the only gateway into the EU for people from that region. With an unemployment rate of 25%, some people are willing to blame it on foreigners and Golden Dawn uses that for political purposes.


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

[User]
What happens to air that escapes the ISS?

Generally, what happens to air that escapes the ISS? Does it eventually get reabsorbed into Earth's atmosphere? Or is it stuck up in orbit or escape our planet?

[Assistant] The ISS is in orbit, but it's closer to Earth than you probably think. There's still a tiny bit of air resistance from the upper atmosphere at that altitude, so anything without rockets (which the ISS has) will gradually slow down and fall back down to Earth. So any air that escapes the ISS will simply "fall" back down again. It will take a while, but eventually it'll just mix with the rest of the atmosphere.


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

[User] ELI5: What is that wierd jarring feeling when you take a step on the stairs and don't realize it's the last one? Isn't it just like every other step?

[Assistant]
You mean when you get to the top of the stairs and try to take another step because you don't realise you're at the top? Your body was prepared to put your weight on top of the next step, but there isn't one, so you lose your balance and fall forwards until your foot touches the *actual* floor. It's basically the same as if you were walking blindfolded on the flat ground, and you stepped in a pothole which you didn't know was there.

Walking is actually really complicated even though our brains make it seem easy. (That's why most robots use wheels instead. Wheels are much easier.)


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

[User]
Got invited to PhD Open House and got Zoom invites for 1-1 meetings with 3 faculty. So they announce decisions AFTER this?

Context: These are 3 faculty members who I'd mentioned in my statement of purpose. This next round is after an initial round of interviews I did last week with the same School. So, what does this mean? There's also an "exit interview" scheduled. Can someone decode?

[Assistant] You are on a shortlist of students they are considering admitting. The interviews are both to help them decide which of the prospective students they prefer, and also to help you decide whether you like this school.


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

[User]
How does bad weather obscure radar?

In my history textbook, it says that bad weather helped the Japanese fighter planes slip past radar on their way to Pearl Harbor. How does bad weather obscure radar?

[Assistant]
First, you have to realize that the radar of the day was extraordinarily weak and primitive by today's standards. Second, the screen that the operator was looking at required both training and intuition to interpret. The screens of the time looked like a oscilloscope screen, with just a horizontal line across the screen. A radar return would look like a spike, or multiple semi-merged spikes, in this line. That's it. That's why long hours of training were needed to try and interpret what you were seeing, but also experience and intuition were required to really understand it.

So the radar has low power, low resolution, and an output that requires an extreme amount of interpretation.

Storms offer interference to the radar in the forms of the physical water in the air helping to scatter the weak radar returns, and in the case of electrical storms the lightning would also cause bursts of interference. So those little planes that really didn't have a whole lot of metal weight or a very big cross-section, could slip in behind the storms.


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

[User] ELI5:Why is the smell of rain pleasing?

[Assistant] The smell of rain is called petrichor, and it is caused by rain or other water falling on the dry ground. Some scientists theorize that because our ancestors so heavily relied and cherished rain, this smell is pleasing to us.


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

[User]
Throughout philosophy's history, which topics had the greatest change in perceived level of significance? (Whether from trivial (or not-even-considered) to utterly fundamental or vice-versa)

Not only branches! But topics and questions and problems and paradigms and theories too.

[Assistant]
The philosophy of language has a rollercoaster of a history. In the Medieval period, language was absolutely key, then became sidelined with Modern philosophy, and in the 20th century saw a huge revival. Philosophy of Religion went out of favour a bit in the mid-20th century and now is quite lively, though the questions that it considers are not thought by those outside the discipline to have the central importance they had for the Early Moderns and Medievals.

The areas of race, gender, sexuality are probably experiencing their greatest flourishing right now - more and more people seem to work in these fields than before. Prior to the second half of the 20th century, philosophy of race, gender, sexuality, and related phenomena didn't get much attention.

The idea that history can be treated philosophically or that history raises important philosophical questions is an innovation of the early 19th century, with Hegel being the primary representative of that move. He wasn't the first, exactly, but he is the most famous.

These are the areas that come to mind right now.


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

[User]
Why doesnt electric resonance imaging/ nuclear electric resonance exist/work?

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are both powerful medical and biochemical tools. From what I understand both rely on the magnetic spin properties of particles, can a similar principle work with the electric charge inherent in particles? Why/why not?

[Assistant]
>can a similar principle work with the electric charge inherent in particles?

In principle you could do something similar with particles with *electric dipole moments*, but those are strongly suppressed by time-reversal symmetry.

Magnetic dipole moments don't violate time-reversal, so they're very common in atoms and molecules, while electric dipole moments are somewhere between extremely small and zero.


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

[User] ELI5: Why does eating spicy food help unblock a congested nose?

[Assistant] so your nose has mucous membranes in it that make mucous, the watery stuff in your nose. then theres spicy food, which has chemicals in it that upset the membranes when you eat it. when upset, the membranes produce more mucous to try to get rid of the chemicals. this causes your nose to be runny, clearing both the chemicals and snot in your nose.


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

[User]
ELI5: How serious of a problem is wasting water through flushing toilets?

I've heard flushing toilets wastes water, but how, and how serious of a problem is it? And if its serious, why are we still using normal toilets when there seems to already be a lot of prototypes attempting to solve it?

[Assistant]
"Low flush" toilets have been available for many years now (at least in Europe); it is also possible to collect "grey" water from other sources (like rain water) that may be not perfectly clean but is fine for toilets. What is available and what makes sense depends on the region you live.

I live in north germany where there is plenty of clean water available (lots of raaaaain); people are still into saving water big time - and the waste management people are actually complaining that the efforts to save water are too effective: Sewage is now not diluted enough (I guess you can imagine), which causes problems in the sewage pipes.

Water usually goes in circles; what you flush goes into the river (via, hopefully, sewage treatment facilities), evaporates, rains, is collected again etc, so in this context the idea of "wasting" water becomes a relative one. However, there are very arid areas where water that evaporates is effectively "gone" (it will condense elsewhere eventually but is removed locally). In such areas, you will want to make every effort to save water.


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

[User]
Is there any truth to the idea that Scandinavian economic policies wouldn't work in America because of its size?

It seems to be a recurring topic here on reddit. A lot of people seem to paint economic policies in countries like Sweden and Norway as very ideal. But the comments are riddled with people who claim that they could not be applied to America due to her size. Is this true?

Edit: Answered! Thanks for all the insight guys. This is all very helpful.

[Assistant] It's not about sheer size, but about centralization of power: In the USA, political power is decentralized among federal, state and municipal spheres. Think about these spheres as barriers to the implementation of new policies.


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

[User]
[LOTR] How did the elves sail to the undying lands?

From my understanding that the undying lands were once a place technically anyone could sail to be after  Ar-Pharazn tried to attack them Ilvatar literally just took them out of the earth but still allowed the elves and on rare occasions other members of middle earth to travel there, but how did they get there? was it just a portal?

Bonus question: When Gandalf went there, did he still keep his appearance of an old man, or did he go back to look more like a spirit before he went to Middle earth?

[Assistant] Those with special dispensation from Eru can take the straight path, meaning they can take the route that used to exist. They can essentially sail off the planet, watching the oceans drop away below them, through the sky, and possibly through space. The closest approximation is probably the rainbow bridge, although there isnt a rainbow below the ship.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do video buffer times lie?

It seems like with just about every video player there is online, the load bar will claim that a certain amount of it is buffered, and yet the video will stop to buffer more when there is still at least half an inch or more of supposedly loaded time on the bar. What gives?

[Assistant]
They're estimates based on a simple calculation that assumes a constant download/streaming rate from the server, with a video file encoded at a constant bitrate with equal size frames.

However, IRL the data is delivered to your computer at a rate that fluctuates unpredictably, and videos are often encoded at variable bitrates and use encoding techniques that produce a file where not every frame of the video is the same amount of data.

So while the player can know or be told it needs X number of frames of video before it can start playback, it can't accurately predict how large those frames will be or exactly how long they'll take to grab from the server until after they've been downloaded.

A little more info: Video encoding compresses data in a number of ways, but one with a large effect is when frames in a video refer back to frames that have already been rendered.

For example, if you have 30 frames of a ball sitting on a beach, the first frame will include all of the data to render the entire scene, but the next 29 frames will save data by referring back to the first frame. Maybe the waves in the background move but the ball doesn't, so frames 2-30 would have data for how the waves need to be displayed, but could just refer back to frame 1 for the data about the ball.

It can get even more difficult to predict the size of future frames when you consider that the scene of a ball on a beach requires a lot more data than a scene with a single, flat color, like when a frame is only black. And there's really no way for a video player to know in advance if a director chose to fade from the beach to black for frames it hasn't yet downloaded.

This means that frames in a video can vary drastically in size in ways that cannot be predicted, which makes it almost impossible to accurately calculate how long a video will take to buffer.


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

[User]
[Jumanji] What is the origin story of the board?

Currently watching the movie and it doesn't really explain where it came from and it got me to thinking about it. I googled it but didn't come up with anything solid.

[Assistant] If the animated series is anything to go by, the board contains an entire artificial universe designed to prey on players. Whenever a creator was seemingly found, they were revealed to be just another creation of the game.


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

[User]
[Marvel] Dr. Octopus: Why doesnt anyone just shoot him?

This is something thats always confused me.  Let me preface by saying that I understand he's a super genius, so he can always super science himself into a threat that requires heroes to deal with him.  I also recognize that right before superior spiderman started he was using a protective suit.  However, this body armor was a recent addition to his standard load out.

My problem is that Doc Ock ends up brawling in the streets pretty often.  I've read my fair share of comics and I've read his wiki. Super strong and fast metallic arms might be good for fighting spiderman, but he himself is not super powered.  Why don't the police or someone else just shoot him? He might be able to block some of the bullets (although that could depend on how fast his arms are. They seem on par with spidey, but his spider sense gives him a hand when it comes to dodging bullets) but he himself is still a big unathletic target. He can't jump around or contort himself to dodge bullets. Even if he uses his arms to throw himself out of the way, he wouldnt have the ability to track the incoming bullets ( or really anything considering he would be tossing his normal human self around at super speeds) or the reaction time to deal with multiple bullets at once or sequentially.

Except for possibly ultimate Doc Ock due to his weird magneto rip off powers (havent read ultimate spiderman in a while so I dont remember exactly how his powers worked) how can Dr. Octopus deal with guns without changing his modus operandi? As far as I can tell his standard suit isn't even bullet proof!

TL;DR--> how come someone hasn't shot Dr. Octopus any of the times he's rampaged through the city without protection?

Bonus: Are there any other super villains (acting in character) that would be more easily dealt with conventionally rather than by supers?

[Assistant]
> Bonus: Are there any other super villains (acting in character) that would be more easily dealt with conventionally rather than by supers?

The Joker. Even if he can't be legally executed because of reasons, you'd think someone would have shot him in self-defence by now.


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

[User]
[Halo] Why do Prometheans in the game seem relatively weak?

During Forerunner-Flood war era a single unit was capable of taking down a flood infected battleship.

But in the games it seems that Master Chief (who have much inferior armor even compared to regular Forerunner foot soldier) can take down hundreds of them and even Covenant and UNSC infantry soldiers can hold them off with sufficient firepower.

Also I don't think their weapon in the games aren't significantly powerful over Covenant and UNSC weapons and I wonder why they still use relatively primitive mechanism such as manual reload.

[Assistant] The prometheans encountered by UNSC forces on Requiem were not the same Prometheans that you mention first.  The original Prometheans were the elite troops of the Forerunner Warrior class,  born and bred for battle, and equipped with top quality combat skins.  The prometheans on Requiem are what remains of a group of de-evolved ancient humans that were captured and "composed" by the Ur-Didact as effectively cannon fodder.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do male athletes in sports like baseball, hockey, or football rarely debut before about age 20 and typically peak around age 25-27, but female tennis players can reach the top rungs of their sport at age 14/15 (Austin, Capriati, Hingis)?

You never see a 14-year-old male competing in competitive sports. Yes there was a 15-year-old baseball pitcher once, but he did very poorly. Typically superstars in these sports don't have even decent seasons until age 18 at the absolute earliest.

However, women in tennis sometimes burst onto the scene as 14 or 15-year olds.

Why? Is it their being female? Is it tennis?

[Assistant]
Male athletic performance depends on muscular strength and power, which for most guys doesn't fully develop until their early 20s or even later.

Female athletic performance isn't juiced by testosterone like male performance, and so those extra 5 years of the body maturing doesn't bring increased performance like it does for men.  In fact, in some sports the widening of the hips and ongoing breast development may make it harder for 20 something women to compete, in general.


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

[User]
ELI5: How can we have heart-lung bypass and kidney dialysis but not liver dialysis? What makes creating liver dialysis so difficult?

Is it the functional complexity of the organ?

[Assistant] ELI5 version: The kidney is a filter. The liver is a factory. We can build pretty good filters, and add stuff back in if we need to. Replicating every single synthetic and metabolic function of the liver would take a machine that can perform thousands of different reactions at controlled rates.


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

[User] ELI5: What is physically happening when your ear suddenly starts ringing?

[Assistant]
The first thing to understand is how we perceive sound:  We have outer and inner ear hair cells, and they both detect vibrations and pressure changes of the basilar membrane.  The reason we have two types of hair cells is because, while vibrations travel very efficiently in the fluid of the inner ear, they require a lot of energy (think about trying to run on land vs. trying to run in a pool).

Outer ear cells, then, are designed as amplifiers.  When they detect low energy vibrations, they vibrate in time with them, amplifying the signal and sending it to the inner ear.  Most of the time, this system works perfectly, but - like any biological system - it can get buggy.  Sometimes the outer ear cells will freak out and vibrate on their own, and that's when you get the sudden onset tinnitus.  There's also a control system that will tell the outer ear hair cells to knock it off, but it takes about 30-45 seconds to kick in.


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

[User]
[DC Comics] Why did the Waynes walk through a dark alley instead of having Alfred pick them up in their car? Also, why didnt they have at least one bodyguard walking around with them?

Gotham wasnt exactly safe, even back then.

[Assistant]
There's a lots of different minor variations, but the oldest one is that they didn't really walk through an alley. It was a street, and Chill intercepted them (sometimes coming out of an alley intersecting it).

Also crime in Gotham was getting worse, but in a frog in boiling water kind of way, that most people didn't really realize until the Waynes got murdered, which was one of the things that made their deaths a big deal to the city in a 'loss of innocence' kinda way.

Other factors to the story that have been added and subtracted over different iterations:

* Alfred simply wasn't around back then
* The Waynes were familiar with the neighborhood and felt safe
* The Waynes wanted to go out as a 'regular' family in Gotham
* They were planning to meet Alfred a short distance away
* Bruce naively wanted to cut down the alley/street and they were following/chasing after him
* They were walking to Leslie Thompkin's clinic a short distance away
* They were leaving the show early so exited through the back door to avoid disturbing people
* The Waynes simply never felt the need for a bodyguard
* Thomas Wayne was dumb and the thought it was a good shortcut
* The Monarch theater was privately rented out by Bruce's parents for the movie and they though the entire area was empty.
* Chill was a hitman hired to kill them so he was following them the entire time and they couldn't have avoided him without knowing it no matter which path they took.


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

[User] ELI5: why does wasabi heat affect our noses while chili pepper heat affect our tongues?

[Assistant]
It comes back to different chemicals that are present in these different foods.  The pungent chemical present in chili peppers, capsaicin, excites our tongue and triggers similar reactions that a high temperature would cause, so we associate it very directly with "heat."  Other chemicals like piperine (found in many peppercorns) have similar effects, though most people find piperine to be more biting and less hot.

With wasabi, as well as horseradish, mustard, and a few others, the chemical that gives it its pungency is allyl isothiocyanate, which our body reacts to a little differently and which has a stronger effect on our sinuses - as anyone who's taken too big a bite of horseradish or wasabi can tell you, they can cause a pretty major reaction.  It can actually be great if you need to clear your sinuses too!

Both chemicals ultimately have the same goal - the plants want to avoid certain animals eating them as much as possible - they just work in slightly different, convergent ways.  The effect of these chemicals repels most mammals and insects, while birds, who aren't as affected, will happily eat chili peppers and spread their seeds.  Humans, being the crazy things that we are, have decided that we enjoy these sensations in moderation, and we've found ways to incorporate them deliciously into food.  And there are others as well - the piquancy of ginger and garlic, the numbing heat of szeschuan peppers, these are all different chemicals that make our food flavorful and interesting in different ways.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do the days go by faster the older that you get?

[Assistant] Imagine you have been alive for 10 minutes. 10% of your life and everything you've experienced is summed up in 1 minute. Now imagine you've been alive for 100 minutes. 1 of those minutes is now 1% of everything you know life to be. You perceive time to be flying by as you get older because you have a larger sample of experiences and memories.


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

[User] ELI5: Why is the belt the symbol of victory in the fighting world? Why no trophies or medals?

[Assistant]
>It is believed that the first championship belt was awarded in 1809 to Tom Cribb after his defeat of Jem Belcher.

Basically, someone did it first, and it just caught on.  As someone said, not all combat tournaments use belts.  But lots do just based on a tradition started (I guess you could say) somewhat randomly.


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

[User]
Why is something beyond an EF5 Tornado considered unlikely to occur on Earth?

Edit: Sorry for the inaccuracy on my part. I had read somewhere in the past that wind speeds beyond 318 mph were considered unlikely to occur on Earth, and assumed that Wind speed, and not magnitude of damage, determined where on the EF scale a tornado measured. My question was inspired because I am an Oklahoman, and was informed that the 1999 OKC tornado had the highest wind speeds recorded. I was curious as to why higher speeds were considered unlikely, and mistook unlikely for impossible. Thank you for your responses.

[Assistant] Well, based on the current definitions, an EF6 or greater tornado is impossible because any tornado with wind speeds above a certain level is just defined as and EF5.  So by definition it's impossible, but why don't we have a higher class? In short, EF5s are rare as it is, only a couple a year on average, and at that point a stronger tornado realistically wouldn't cause much more damage because EF5s already wipe out basically everything there is to destroy.


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

[User]
CMV: College is a better setting than high school for television shows.

I'm in my late 20s and I've graduated high school and college and I would say that both were pivotal to me being the person I am currently.  However, when I look at pop culture aimed at younger people, it's 90% set in high school, with shows like *Riverdale*, *Euphoria*, *Vampire Diaries*, etc.  I think that college is a superior setting for these kinds of shows compared to high school and I'm very confused that Hollywood (movies or television) don't think to showcase this.  I'm probably missing something about college vs high school settings, so CMV!

**1) A higher level of competition.** A large part of high school stories revolve around a person finding what they're good at, their "thing", and using that to succeed in high school, but what happens when they go to college, especially a Big State U, and realize that they're middle of the pack in their thing? And that's whether it's athletics, cooking, musicianship, artistry, academics, or a hobby that you have.  It can be very disconcerting at first to think that youre relatively unique for being an All-State student athlete, only to get to college and realize that theres 20 in your cross-country team alone, and that youre in the bottom half.  But it can also be wondrous to realize that you can be part of a passionate community in a way that you didnt have in high school and use that higher level of competition to improve yourself and your work ethic.

**2) Who are you when no one is looking (or cares).** The biggest difference between college and high school is the lack of daily accountability enforced by parents or teachers.  Assuming the student is living on-campus while the parents are still at home, theres no one to tell them that it's time to study or stop watching TV, and the professors more or less don't give a shit if one random person attends their class or not.  Some kids can't cope with the lack of structure and flunk out of school, when they were the top students at their high schools.  This is also the time where a lot of kids will for the first time have nearly unfettered access to drinking, drugs, and non-stop partying if they choose.  More than high school, college is where kids really experiment with the highs and pitfalls of drinking, drugs, hook-up culture, and partying.  What happens when a religious person gets to college, and gradually realizes that they dont *really* believe in God, or at least not the God they were taught in their home?  How do they work through a loss in belief?

**3) Greater self-expression and more diverse interactions.**  This kind of intertwines with point #2, but I would argue that people are more likely to be weirder in college than high school because the greater anonymity of college allows them to try a different style of dress and personality without fear of damaging their reputation.  And if they do, its very easy to just find a new group of people to hang out with.  For a lot of kids, that might mean coming out as gay or trans, people exploring their sexuality, and getting into niche hobbies that simply werent available at their high school like boating or hiking.  Theres also the diversity of interactions that will occur.  Even a non-prestigious Big State U will have students from all over the world, and certainly all over the state its located in.  Youll have people from all different experiences, socioeconomic backgrounds, rural, urban, suburban, and exurban communities all sharing classes and dorms together and exchanging worldviews.  Imo, the sheer diversity of people in college is far greater than youll find in a typical high school, no matter what you consider to be diverse.

**4) Meta Reasons.**  Basically, most of the actors playing high school teenagers, so commonly 14  18, are in their 20s and they look it.  They dont look old, but they certainly look older than most teenagers and it can at times create a falseness to the narrative when I see a girl whos clearly 20+ worried about passing algebra.  However, if you take the same group of actors and make them college students, then that age problem disappears.  Instead of a 20 year old worried about passing algebra, theyre worried about passing Organic Chemistry.  Additionally, the narrative feels much more authentic.  See *Skins UK* for better examples of how shooting a teen drama with actual teenagers makes everything more visceral.  Another aspect of high school dramas that gets addressed is the lack of parents.  Pretty much every teen shows fandom will joke about how the parents will disappear for episodes at a time before reappearing for a scene or two before disappearing again.  If the shows set in college, parental absence makes total narrative sense because its more likely that the students are living 40+ minutes away from their home.

**TLDR** These are the largest ways that I think college offers unique and superior story points to that of high school.  The combination of more adult-like freedom and apathy towards your behavior, a higher level of competition in all aspects, greater opportunities for self-expression and diverse interactions, all combined with the inexperience of youth.  As an added bonus, the actors are actually playing character their age, leading to more realism in these shows.

[Assistant] Shows set in high school can follow multiple age groups. That includes the high school aged protagonists, their parents, the younger siblings who provide comic relief, etc. It's more relatable to a wider age group. College follows 18-22 year olds and no one else.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do companies care how their stocks are performing since they already got the money in IPO?

I know that good performing stocks means that the company can interest other investors easily. And that some of the upper management have stocks themselves, hence it is in their best interest to see that stocks prices keep rising.

But what are other reasons for the company to care? They already have got all the money in IPO. And when stocks markets crash, why do we say that company lost money? Aren't investors the ones who lost money. Company already have all the money they acquired during the IPO. How exactly is the company losing money?

[Assistant]
The stockholders elect the board of directors. The board hires the CEO. The CEO hires the president and he hires everyone else.

If the company performs poorly, the board will replace the CEO or, in extreme cases, the stockholders elect a new board.


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

[User]
[Marvel] How would the Marvel universe differ if Tony Stark's and Bruce Banner's roles had been reversed?

Say the Marvel universe was the same up until that point where Tony Stark was struck by a gamma bomb and Bruce Banner was kidnapped by terrorists. What's the outcome?

[Assistant]
Tony Stark, while working on a military project, is wounded by a gamma-radiation land mine and rushed back to the States. He finds his intelligence vastly increased, Leader-style, but the StarkTech weapon was a little *too* well-designed. He is fatally and irreversibly irradiated.

Desperate, he builds a suit to support his failing body and contain the radiation. But the prototype is faulty and his secretary Pepper and driver Happy are given lethal doses of radiation. They die, despite all of Tony's efforts. In a rage, he permanently seals himself inside a massively oversized suit, the **Iron Hulk**. He is now a chaotic force for good.

Bruce Banner is kidnapped by terrorists and forced to build a gamma bomb. But Bruce is not a weapons designer and sabotages his own work. It explodes prematurely, embedding shrapnel in his heart and brain. The radiation enhances his intelligence. It also enhances his strength She-Hulk style, but not to grotesque proportions.

Banner is trapped in this new form. He can't ever grow too big, or the shrapnel will kill him. Same deal if he turns back to normal. He must maintain a calm and rational emotional state in order to stay alive. He trains with Doctor Strange, who teaches him the way of inner peace. When he comes down from the mountain he takes a new name, **Professor Incredible**. Scientist, adventurer, and unstoppable lady's man.


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

[User]
ELI5: What year did people thousands of years ago think they were in? What year did they think it was in 100 BC? 1000 BC?

EDIT: As people have brought up, it depends on the people and place, so for clarity, if possible please include the part of the world/people you are talking about that thought this way.

[Assistant]
> Did they count down the years at the time, like BC

They couldn't have. They'd have no idea what to count down to.

> did they count up, like AD

Usually they did, however when they count up from varied.

For example the Mayans (of 2012 fame) had a calendar based on counting the days since 'creation', which happens to be August 11, 3114 BC on our modern calendars. So for example August 31, 3114 BC to a Mayan would be day 20 and  December 21, 2012 is day 1,872,000.

Other cultures based their years on the reign of their current monarch. So a date may be recorded as March 15, in the 3rd year of King Derp; or something similar. It's this system which was used in our current calendar, using the birth of Christ instead of the rise of a monarch.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do we "catch" colds/flu/etc. in cold weather? Why are we more susceptible to getting sick in colder weather.

I was talking to a friend about this and we all know the situation, not supposed to go out in shorts, no shoes,  wet hair, blah blah in the cold. Why exactly does this make us susceptible to getting sick?

[Assistant]
There is some evidence that cold makes your nose (nasal passage) a little more vulnerable to infection, but the primary reason is social.

When it's cold, we spend a lot of time indoors. This means we spend a lot more time in smaller spaces with more people. This just makes it easier for diseases to spread around to lots of people.


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

[User]
Does a person's body still become rested if only laying down instead of completely asleep?

Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep and I tell myself (so there isn't that much pressure to fall asleep) that if I just lay down and relax in bed with my eyes closed, my body will still obtain rest. Or does this not matter?

I will be happy to provide further insight on my situation.

[Assistant] The effects of sleep are primarily related to brain function, and that recuperation does not happen from just laying down all night. If you actually needed a physical break then that would help (but chances are you probably didn't).


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

[User]
If gravity is one of the weakest natural forces, then why is it the dominate force in space?

Orbits act and react because of gravity. Stars collapse, some into black holes, because of it. Galaxies and galaxy clusters are bound by it. How is this so if it is the, or one of the, weakest natural force?

EDIT: Okay, I think I get why gravity is the dominating force for long distances. Now I'm trying to understand how the strong and weak forces are bound by mass. ELI5 would be great.

[Assistant]
Because there are only two infinite-range forces, EM and gravity.

Moreover, in EM opposite charges are strongly attracted to form neutral states where the positive and negative charges cancel. So large systems will almost always be electrically neutral.

Gravity is essentially all that's left above a certain scale.


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

[User] Why is the cryptocurrency community out of touch with monetary theories and policies?

[Assistant]
Most people already have a pretty low level of understanding of these things.

On top of that, there are a lot of people in the crypto world who want to convince you for some reason that the current system is bad in some way, because it's unstable, because of inflation, because they want to control you, whatever.

At the end of the day these sorts of people are either actually crazy, or they want to sell you something, usually a book or a seminar or their own cryptocurrency or something.

Point being, such people often actively perpetuate bad economics.


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

[User] [Star Wars] Why are Imperial Storm troopers always "Armored" in bright white? even in forest or desert worlds? Isnt that terrible camouflage for starters?

[Assistant]
They used to have camouflage options. They got rid of those options after the Clone Wars, because they felt it was more intimidating to have the all-white uniform under all circumstances.

They reinstated the use of camouflage uniforms after being beaten by a bunch of teddy bears on a forest world.


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

[User] [general] what would be the effect if dragon exist in our modern world, since in many story like LOTR they are seen as town destroying, walking disaster?

[Assistant]
Dragons horde. Dragons horde gold. Dragons horde oil. Dragons horde tobacco. Dragons horde stocks. Dragons horde bonds. Dragons horde mutual funds. Dragons horde contracts. Dragons horde advertisers. Dragons horde property investments. Dragons horde bitcoins. Dragons horde diamonds.

So life would go on as usual, but instead of shapeshifting reptilian aliens controlling things behind the scenes, we'd know them as kobolds, servants to our might corporate dragon overlords.


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

[User] eli5: why isnt it possible to cook e.g. cookies at twice the temperature for half the time? obviously i know it isnt possible, but *why*? whats the physics behind it?

[Assistant]
When you put something in the oven, the outside heats first, and then the inside slowly absorbs heat from the outside.

If you raise the temperature, the outside heats way faster but the inside still lags behind.

In the most extreme scenario, the outside is burnt while the inside isn't even warm.


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

[User]
If honeybees pollinated some marijuana plants, would the honey they produce have similar psychoactive effects to the smoked buds themselves?

I just wanna know if THC/CBD would be present in the honey and if it would be enough to have an effect if ingested. This was just a shower thought,  but I really wanted to possibly find an answer.

[Assistant]
As stated before, just eating the honey would probably not have any affect since the THCA needs to be decarboxylated.
However, there are bees which produce intoxicating honey from a rhododendron species containing grayanotoxin. It's called "mad honey" and used as a recreational drug in Nepal.


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

[User] Eli5: What determines if a metal produces an oxide layer?

[Assistant]
Firstly how reactive it is to oxygen. A metal like gold is practically inert and so wont readily oxidise in air. Where as something like sodium or aluminium will oxidise very quickly.

Secondly the physical properties of the oxide. Aluminium oxide isnt water soluble and is fairly hard so sticks to the metal very well, on the other hand rust on iron is very weak and will be quickly eroded, revealing more iron to oxidise and losing much of the material.


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

[User] [Lord of the Rings] How did Gimli catch up to Legolas' kill count so quickly to them being about tied in the battle of Helm's deep?

[Assistant]
Once things got chaotic with the wall being breached, archery wasn't the main line of combat any more.  The archers (Legolas included) ran out of arrows and had to switch to close-range combat, and enemies were swarming through the breach and all through the keep, making it much harder to use a bow safely.

In close quarters, Gimli had the advantage of a sturdy axe and years of practice hewing orcs.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do front wheel cars handle better on ice and snow than rear wheel?

[Assistant]
Put a pen flat on a table.

First, drag it along by its tip. Then, push it in the game direction from the back.

Which of the above resulted in a more stable path? Obviously the first.

Same thing with a car. With FWD, the front wheels are dragging the rest of the vehicle behind it, resulting in a more stable trajectory. With RWD, the rear wheels are pushing the rest of the vehicle in front of it, which isn't stable in limited traction scenarios.


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

[User]
I'm scared of the possibility of 3D printed guns becoming something big. CMV.

I'm not someone who wants to have a gun, this doesn't mean I think people shouldn't be able to have firearms. However, with the rise of 3D printing, which will most likely be widely available to most people in a matter of years, and people printing gun parts with this technology, I suddenly become scared of what the future could become if 3D printed firearms become "a thing".

Again, I'm not against people owning guns, but I'm against the trivialization of guns, I think that the rules and procedures to acquire a gun should be decently strict, at least enough so that people aren't able to create freaking guns in their homes!

The main problems I see are:

* Making guns available to kids, teenagers, crazy people, basically anyone who has access to the technology.
* Making it virtually impossible to monitor the number of existing guns and their respective owners. (which even today is very hard to do in many places)
* Maybe, in a worst case scenario, the 3D printing technology being abandoned or made very difficult to make use of because of the rise of crap like this.
* Creating a new way for criminals to get weaponry. Even today it must be quite easy for them to get this kind of equipment, 3D printing would make it even easier.

The whole scheme of production of guns is, in my opinion, already pretty good AND pretty flawed. People who do need guns for certain, like the army, navy, etc. are nowhere near a shortage of equipment.

People who shouldn't have access to guns, like criminals, teenagers, etc. already find a way to get guns anyway.

I'm simply a teenager really concerned about the what the future he is going to live in might become, and it would be great if someone could convince me that the thing I just talked about is not possibly an issue we might run into in the near future.

Thanks for the attention and sorry for the (possibly) bad English. (not my native language)

Edit: I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear, but I need to point out that what bothers me is what this would mean in the future where we will possibly (and in my opinion probably) have high-quality 3D printing widely available. I'm aware that with today's commercially available printers it isn't possible to do much.

Edit2: I'm from Brazil and was quite impressed when I found out it was so easy to get guns (mainly ammo actually) in the US. I think the problem I'm talking about means even more in places where getting a gun is hard (such as the place I live in)

[Assistant]
i can refute all your points very succinctly.

1. the commercialy available printers print in plastic which breaks after a few shots.

2.  i can make a faster, better, longer lasting gun out of some pipes, nails and duct tape from the hardware store.

guns at their base are extremely simple tools that anyone can make with a couple bucks.  bullets are the hard part.  you can't 3d print bullets and making them from a hardware store would require massive amounts of time, skill and intelligence.  so as long as bullets are restricted 3d printed guns are useless and even if they have bullets making them from pipe is better.

in short:  people already have what you fear.  easy access to the materials to make guns.  but you don't even notice it.  being able to use plastic won't change a thing.


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

[User]
ELI5; How do we know atoms exist?

Like obviously they exist. We can measure them, split them and manipulate them. But like, how?

[Assistant] In fact, technology is now advanced enough that there are photographs of atoms. You can google "image of atoms" to find the pictures. But early investigation of atoms involved things like bombarding them with subatomic particles and measuring the scattering and reflecting patterns.


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

[User]
[A Series of Unfortunate Events] Whats with all these mansion fires?

Ive been doing some research, and I noticed that the homes of wealthy families appear to catch fire much more often than other buildings, despite not being inherently more flammable. What is the explanation for all these Very Frightening Disasters?

[Assistant] Well, you see, wealthy families tend to own *larger* homes, and in a much larger home, it is much more likely that a fire might start in a part of the building that no one is in, and in fact that no one has been in for many years. This of course means that a fire, unhindered by such useful human reactions as "screaming and stamping it out while it is the size of one's shoe" or "calling the fire department with reasonable alacrity," has the opportunity to spread to a much larger and more dangerous size before it is noticed.


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

[User]
[God of War] Did Kratos merely move from Greece to Norway or did he move to another dimension entirely?

Follow up question. If he did dimension hop, is there another version of Greece in the same dimension with no pantheon?

[Assistant] Kind of both. Physically, he just moved north, across western Europe. But each major region of the world has its own cosmology and structure that intersects with different magical realities and divinities.


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

[User] Would you see the same constellations on the Moon or Mars as you do on Earth?

[Assistant] Yes. The stars are so far away that moving such a short distance will not change their apparent positions in relation to each other. Even moving as far as the nearest stars will not change them much, other than adding our Sun into the mix.


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

[User]
ELI5 - How is it that Ticketmaster seems to have a total monopoly over all things tickets, or, why does it cost $18 to mail me tickets?

Fees that double the stated price of the ticket, huge prices for them to actually mail you the ticket - isn't capitalism supposed to work to avoid these sorts of situations?  How has this happened and, secondly, how can I avoid using Ticketmaster?

[Assistant]
It seems like they have a near-total monopoly over the North American ticket industry because that's exactly what's happened.

Ticketmaster has exclusive deals with hundreds of major venues and most of the major concert promoters in North America (including Live Nation, the world's largest promoter, with whom they merged last year).

The short answer is, if you don't want to use Ticketmaster, you've got to boycott their shows and let the promoter and the venue know why. If they get one angry letter, they'll write it off. If they get ten thousand, they'll start to pay attention.


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

[User]
[DC / Marvel] Why dont cosmic entities or other supervillians that want to destroy Earth or just make it their own just slighly fuck with the Sun or any other planet in our solar system instead of straigh up attacking Earth?

Like, you could go so much stuff that would be stealthy and quite possibly make Earth inhabitable without confrontation with the big guys.

[Assistant]
They're tried all of that at various time and been caught.

That's kind of the point of superpowered people an assorted what not. The spread of their powers is enough to cover almost every conceivable reality and someone somewhere will have a premonition, read tea leaves, pick up on the psychic signature or whatever and go "GREAT SCOTT! SOMEONE IS TRYING TO SLIGHTLY FUCK WITH THE SUN! TO ARMS MEN!"

and then go and wreck them.

Also, the Sun is massive. Anything you could do to even alter it slightly would be massive overkill to do the same thing on Earth. So why not go straight for the target you want?


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

[User]
[MCU] Why didnt Thanos invade New York himself in the movie Avengers?

If he wanted the stones so badly, why didnt he take his overwhelming forces and force the planet to submit like all others?

[Assistant] While he was willing to act through seemingly unconnected agents for individual Stones, Thanos waited to personally act until he knew where he could find all six Stones.  He's already notorious, but he knows that if he starts going after Infinity Stones directly then the rest of the universe is going to go into panic mode and rally to stop him.  Hitting all six in succession minimizes the chances of them successfully coming up with a counterplan.


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

[User]
ELI5: If you took a newborn baby from today and one from 4000 years ago and raised them together would there be any difference in intelligence or abilities?

Omitting natural variance between two unrelated people obviously. Are today's people smarter/healthier/better?

[Assistant] You could probably do the same with a baby from 50,000 years ago and cognitively they would be the same.  Our brains have not evolved much if at all since modern humans appeared; we just have better toys (technology) now and the sum of previous knowledge to build upon.


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

[User] [Santa Warhammer 40k]Since Santa Claus is an immortal being he could still he alive. Does he still secretly deliver presents to Good Child on Holy Tera? Did the Emperor kill him during the Unification wars while stomping out religion? If not, how does he hide from the Inquisition?

[Assistant]
>He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake

As you state yourself, Santa is an immortal.

Have children on Terra received gifts in the past 10k years?  Hasn't Santa since his prominence caused Christmas to become less about Christianity and more about gift giving more about concepts compatible with secular humanism?

Son, Santa *is* the Emperor.

He cared about the Webway so much because it would let him spread Christmas cheer throughout the galaxy.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why and/or how is our legislature allowed to rush bills through Congress without them being able to be fully read and comprehended?

I'll admit I'm not incredibly versed on how exactly our (the United States') government works in the way of how bills are voted on. However, I frequently hear of bills that are rushed through and voted on before anyone actually has a chance to read them in their entirety. How is this allowed to happen? Is there a specific reason that this is allowed? Is it a case of one member deciding when the voting will begin, and the representatives can either vote uninformed or not be counted at all? It just seems like it should be common sense that no one should be forced to vote on a subject they haven't had time to fully understand. However, I can also see how it could be a way to prevent potential situations where some try to bog down the process to prevent bills from passing. Could someone be so kind as to clarify this for me?

[Assistant]
If there is no law prohibiting an action, it can be typically done freely, so long as it doesn't violate some other law.

There's no law requiring Congress to read anything that's signed, nor does it create a standard of understanding, so it happens a lot. The reason it happens *a lot* is that there's a very large number of laws that are presented to Congress. Typically, the only ones that understand even a good portion of the implications are the ones who proposed it or reviewed it in a committee.


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

[User]
[General Sci-Fi] Is there really any benefit to plasma weaponry?

I don't see how plasma weaponry is better than your typical bullet. Lasers maybe, but not plasma.

[Assistant]
As seen in the Human-Covenant war, plasma weapons are insanely deadly. Handheld plasma weapons used by the Covenant melted through infantry armour. The sheer heat caused severe third degree burns... On a near-miss.

As well, to prevent technology from falling into enemy hands, some plasma weapons (such as the Energy Sword) had a built-in fail-safe that caused the plasma in the weapon to become unleashed and destroy the weapon.

On top of that, the weapons could potentially be refilled with energy instead of bullets. Note, humanity hadn't figured out how to charge Covenant weapons. The fact that (potentially) one universal charger design could work for all your troopers is much better than needing to send out and organize multiple different kinds of bullets.

Plasma weapons just have so many perks that you couldn't easily get with normal ballistics. Significantly higher damage, self-destruct, and versatility. If you can effectively use plasma, there's no need for bullets.


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

[User]
[Marvel] So what is the ultimate nullifier?

Aside from sounding like the laziest McGuffin I've event heard, what is this nullifier and what does it do? How does it nullity people? What does nullifying mean?

[Assistant]
It's pretty much what it says on the tin: It is the ultimate weapon for nullifying something from existence.

Once you pull the lever, whatever it is aimed at is removed from all levels of existence. It simply ceases to be. If the wielder is powerful or knowledgeable enough, they can make as if the victim never existed in any and all timelines and universes, as if they never were.

How does it work? Well, apparently the wielder envisions their enemy as completely as they can, in every aspect they can conceive of, and pulls the lever. At that moment, the nullification begins. If the wielder impression of the target is thorough enough for the nullifier to know what it's erasing, it does its job. If the wielder fails to have full knowledge of the thing it's attacking and sufficient focus to see the process through, and only the nullifier knows if this is the case, the wielder can be damaged as well, up to and including mutual nullification- the wielder nullifies themselves as well.

Now the exact mechanism of it's function is unknown. Not even Galactus has ever specified by what means or by whose will the item works, only that it does, even on him, and that is an aspect of his very existence.


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

[User]
ELI5: How much if at all does the amount of physical activity early in life affect potential physical limits of an adult?

Would a 25 year old male who commited his life to weightlifting and eventually reached his peak results would have different peak results if he trained as a child? How would the answer be different depending where the muscle is or if instead of muscle strength we look at flexibility, lung capacity, etc.

[Assistant]
Basically the younger you start the better you get. In optimal conditions.

However optimal conditions only apply in lab experiments. If you trained too hard and broke something early on, you could get a lifelong detriment (injury etc. ) that will always hinder your performance.

A lot of people who were forced to train at a young age, cant train that sport in later stages of life coz they have trained too hard and are now broken in multiple places.

Idk if this made any sense, but in the end of the day, you do you. And dont train too hard. Life is a marathon not a hurdle.


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

[User] ELI5 What is the sound in your ears when you are in a very quiet room and there is no other noise? It's sort of like a ringin in the ears, but it's not the same...

[Assistant] Sounds like tinnitus. Most people experience mild tinnitus from time to time, others (myself included) have it permanently. It's not an actual sounds, just nerves misfiring, sometimes caused by damaged hairs on the ear drum.


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

[User]
ELI5: How is my 4K TV somewhat doubling the frame rate when the shows and games in question output to 1080p?

Basically, I've been noticing that some shows, including the iMPACT Wrestling channel(yes, they have their own TV channel) air their older stuff at 60FPS. I honestly thought that it was meant to be like that, but not only did I notice 60FPS with some stuff in games like WWE 2K22, but just earlier I noticed that Doom Eternal, a game on Switch capped at 30FPS, looked at times more fluid and at 60FPS. Occasionally, but still enough for me to notice.

So uh....how does this work?

Edit: Sorry, failed to mention it's a Smart TV.

[Assistant] Do you have motion smoothing or motion interpolation turned on for your tv? A lot of modern TVs will, be default, convert lower frame rate material to a higher frame rate by trying to add missing frames. If you can find it in the menus, try turning that off and seeing if that affects how everything looks.


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

[User]
[Toy Story] Why did Buzz go limp before he knew he was a toy, assuming (bssed on Woody's scare scene with Sid) it's a choice?

If their nature is to never let kids know they're alive, then Woody shouldn't have been able to talk to Sid. But, if it's a choice, why would Buzz do that if he didn't know he's a toy?

[Assistant]
It's not a choice in the conventional sense. It's closer to pulling your hand out of a fire.

You *can* hold it there if you really try, but it's a very deep instinct that it's very hard to overcome. If you're not making very serious efforts to overcome the reflect you'll just move your hand off automatically, and this will happen even if you're under the delusion that you're immune to heat or some such thing.

Buzz doesn't have a reason to force himself to overcome the instinct, so he doesn't/


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

[User]
I do not believe that "Free Will" is a coherent concept. CMV

I have never heard a precise definition of free will. It seems to be a very important philosophical concept, but I can not think of a way to distinguish a world in which people have free will from a world in which they do not. Because of this, I think that every debate ever held on this issue was a result of semantic confusion, and not legitimate difference of opinion.

Please do not try to convince me that free will exists, until someone can convince me that free will has a consistent and coherent definition. Thanks!

[Assistant]
Determinism is the concept that everything in the universe is determined by variables that are already in existence. In other words, we can look at the state of the universe right this moment and determine everything that will ever happen by calculating influences between those variables and the laws of nature. Cause-and-effect governs the entire universe, so if we could examine the whole universe for causes, we can determine all effects, and what effects would follow from those, and so on.

Fatalism is similar, but it holds that everything is already "set;" the future is just as immutable as the past or present, and whatever actions we take have been preordained and cannot be altered.

Free will is the concept that decisions we make can be unbound from both of these ideas. That it's an exception to the deterministic/fatalistic nature of the universe because human choice is something we can control, and can make transcend predictability.

For example, say for instance we had the technology to examine the universe and determine a future with certainty. Free will would enable us to simply change the conditions of the universe (by being in a different place, changing the state of the causes involved, etc.) to result in a different future. It's the ability to do that, essentially acting independently from the laws of nature.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do dreams feel much longer than they actually are?

[Assistant]
Studies have shown that our perception of how much time has elapsed is significantly influenced by how memorable the experiences during that time were. If you drive to work the same way everyday, you'll probably have the experience of getting to work and not really even remembering the drive, like you were "driving on automatic." They have suggested that this is why the years seem to go by so much faster when we're older. When we're young, everything is a new experience. After we've experienced so many things repeatedly, out brains don't need to store so much information about them.

With that as context, I'd guess dreams that focus a lot of our thoughts could seem very long.


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

[User]
ELI5 : why are the quality of voice/videocalls so low, when we can stream 1080p++ movies on demand?

Is there real reason why calls are so low in quality (relative to the hardware's maximum capability), or am i just using sh*t platforms?

(I've tried using google duo, google meet, zoom, line,whatsapp etc and their quality doesnt differ much)

.

Additional question : is there a platform that focus on super high quality calls?

[Assistant]
Your movies are streamed trough protocols built upon transmitting high def video, and if you force high quality, your.movie will stop and buffer until enough data is downloaded to continue.

A video/voice call uses a very different protocol, built so that communication happens in real time. On top of that, your same call service has to work for those poor kids in rural africa, to make an extreme example, so it uses adaptive audio and video quality for that purpose.


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

[User]
[Halo] Why does the UNSC have such a disproportional amount of frigates?

They are very common.

[Assistant] Most of their capital ships were destroyed early in the war before the beginning of games like Reach. Also we don't see many space battles in the games where the capital ships would be used. For the ground operations that the chief does a simple frigate is more than enough to transport and give fire support.


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

[User]
If one were to take a seasonal tree from the Northern hemisphere (that has lost all its leaves), and replant it in the Southern hemisphere, what would happen?

If one were to take a tree from one hemisphere, and replant it in the opposite hemisphere (where the seasons are opposite), what would happen? Would that tree simply readjust to that hemisphere's season?

[Assistant]
Plants use more cues than just temperature to determine when to go into dormancy. Things such as resource availability and length of daylight also have an impact in what temporal stage plants are in, depending on the specific species. If a deciduous tree that had lost its leave was replanted in a region that was in the growing season, the local conditions would trigger physiological changes and the tree would again sprout leaves and take advantage of the available resources.

Dormancy is an evolutionary adaptation to deal with the stress of cold temperatures, low light, low resources, etc. Assuming the tree had the capabilities to do so, and could overcome the stress of being replanted, it would adjust and begin growing again.

TL;DR- The local conditions would trigger leafy growth again and the tree would adapt to the local conditions.

Source: Me, a wildlife and rangeland ecologist. (this info specifically from a university course in Plant Ecology with Dr. Gary Clambey, Plant Ecologist)


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

[User] eli5: Why do most of the heavy machines use diesel instead of petrol?

[Assistant]
Diesel engines are more efficient because of their higher compression (it's true that diesel has slightly higher energy density too but that's not why diesels are more efficient), they produce much more torque at low speed, they are far more efficient at part throttle, they're electrically simpler, diesel is a safer fuel, and they're generally more durable.

The things diesels are bad at (low weight, fast acceleration, high RPM) generally don't matter for heavy machinery so it's an application where all diesels' advantages help and the disadvantages don't really hurt.


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

[User] [Aladdin] Why is genie still wearing his cuffs after he is freed?

[Assistant] The Genie explains this himself during the series: He's not enslaved to the lamp anymore, but he *is* still a slave to *fashion*.  He doesn't *have* to wear the cuffs now that he's freed from the lamp, but he keeps doing so because he thinks they're stylish (and he probably feels almost *naked* without them, having been forced to wear them for as long as he's been bound to the lamp).


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

[User]
[DC Comics] why did Kryptonians evolve to have superpowers under a yellow sun

Somehow Kryptonians evolved to have superpowers under suns that were different from their own. If they evolved under these conditions thats counterintuitive. Evolution doesnt design a species that would do far better in an alien environment. I know that before suns become red theyre yellow  but I dont think that Kryptonians evolved under a yellow sun due to Doomsdays origin. Sooooo why did all Kryptonians and I guess Daxamites evolve to achieve superpowers under a yellow sun?

[Assistant]
IIRC they evolved as solar batteries to be able to receive nutrients from a red sun, which puts out less energy than a yellow one.

So when under a yellow sun they get a sort of power overload which manifests as super powers.


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

[User]
are black holes hot?

From my, extremely low level, understanding black holes suck in anything close enough at an alarming speed tearing everything to shreds.

With that being said, would the amount of stuff being pulled in, and the rate at which it's pulled in, make the black hole hot? Or because it's in space it stays cold.

Also I don't know the right flair for this so sorry in advance if that's an issue.

[Assistant]
The normal concept of temperature doesn't really apply to the black hole itself, as an object, since heat can never flow out of one by the usual mechanisms.  They do emit radiation, but the mechanism that produces it is completely different from normal thermal radiation.

It's common to describe black holes as having an "effective temperature" based on the amount of radiation they emit, comparing it to how hot a normal object would have to be to emit the same amount.  It turns out that this effective temperature is determined by the black hole's mass, with more massive ones being colder.  All of the black holes known to exist are massive enough that their effective temperatures would be near absolute zero.

The accretion disks and jets of matter that surround black holes do have a temperature though, and they do get hotter because of friction and compression.  The matter in an accretion disk can reach temperatures in the millions of degrees.


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

[User]
What cause labour shortage when employers can actually raise wage to atteact labour?

Does labour shortage in general really mean that the wage is set below the equalibrium?
Then why the employers don't simply rasie the wage?

[Assistant] Yes, a labor shortage does mean the price of labor is too low. The answer to your question is that employers do raise wages, they just do so hesitantly and slowly. In a perfect classical economy, employers would also lower wages when labor becomes more abundant, but there is a  strong culture against cutting wages and salaries, at least in America. That's why companies usually lay people off in a downturn instead of cutting wages. Because they know they can't cut wages, employers are pretty hesitant to raise wages by a lot. The solution a lot of companies have come up with is a signing bonus, which is a way to pay people more now without promising to pay them more later (when, presumably, more people will have joined the labor market).


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

[User]
[Invincible] Omni-Man's durability *spoilers*

How is he durable enough to withstand all sorts of human weaponry, even a laser thats basically a tactical nuke, but he got nearly beaten to death by the Guardians, those zombie robot things, and the Cthulhu thing?

Maybe you could argue he threw the fight with the Guardians, though that seems unlikely as he'd have to very specifically get beat up enough to go in the hospital, but not actually die or lose the fight. That would require a very precise amount of throwing the fight. But regardless, he definitely wasn't throwing the fight against zombie robots or dollar store Cthulhu, and without Mark he would've died, so what gives?

Can discount Wonder Woman and zombie robots simply punch harder than the laser nuke?

[Assistant]
Unfortunately, the power levels in Invincible are all over the place.

Mark almost dies from a hit from Battle Beast's mace, that didn't even break the floor below him, but took a punch from Omni-man that sent him flying into the city, through several buildings and causing wide scale destruction and was more or less okay.

Edit: To those that say that Mark gets stronger by being beat up, sure you can say that, but that means that the Zomborgs are as strong as a Mark that almost died to Battle Beast (and grew stronger) as that episode came after. The same Zomborgs that Omniman casually tore in two, but Mark is mostly fine after city block leveling punch.

The scaling still sucks.


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

[User]
How come nitrate is common but tetra-oxygen isn't?

Nitrate is NO3, a nitrogen and 3 oxygens with an overall negative charge of -1. I always like to think of ions as the next element over when drawing lewis structures, makes it easier than thinking of them as an element + or - electrons. So I look at nitrogen and see that a nitrogen anion is pretty much the same as oxygen, electron-wise. So why is nitrate a super common compound, but tetra-oxygen is pretty much non-existent?

EDIT: Thanks for the answers, now I'm going to wikipedia all the concepts y'all mentioned.

[Assistant]
Short version: You'd either have to have a quadruply bonded oxygen with a 2+ formal charge, or a oxygen with only six electrons on the periphery. None of these are good things. This would be a stupid reactive species.

O4 could be transiently formed by reacting ozone (O3) with atomic oxygen, but I'd expect it to either be linear or equilibrate rapidly between a linear and square structure.

tl;dr Draw Lewis structures. Flinch in horror.


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

[User]
Bitcoin is an nonviable currency. CMV

It's just a massive bubble right now, facilitated by people with a shared delusion that Bitcoin is the "currency of the future", as if it would somehow replace fiat currencies as the international medium of exchange.

It may well already be the preferred currency by transnational organized crime groups to launder and transfer money. However, it always will derive it's buying power from the ability to exchange it for traditional currency.

There is simply no justifiable reason to buy/mine bitcoin beyond crime, or perhaps as a very-high risk investment.

[Assistant]
There is going to be a cryptocurrency sooner or later. Cryptography and currency were made for each other, as the value of currency always boils down to scarcity and security, which is what cryptosystems are all about.

Modern Fiat currencies rely on a state (a government) controlling the scarcity. There are some upsides to this, because it means they can fiddle with the scarcity in both economic booms and busts to do what they think will improve the situation. For this reason, Fiat currencies will last for a while.

Before Fiat, there was gold and silver, which were naturally scarce, but had the problem of failing to deal with periodic trade imbalances. Nixon took the US off the gold standard because the country was shipping too much physical metal offshore in a period when other countries (particularly Japan's manufactured goods and the Middle East's oil reserves) were enjoying a few decades of superior exports.

Cryptocurrencies, however, don't come from the ground or from cheap labor. Any country can build chip fabs and "mine" for BitCoin gold, and that makes it fundamentally attached to a higher level of abstract wealth. The ultimate level of abstraction, of course, is human intelligence. A smart engineer can build a better ASIC, and it doesn't matter what's in the soil of the country he lives in.

Paper currency is like a kind of proto-BitCoin. Rather than using the difficulty of doing big math to guard the value of a currency token, it uses the difficulty of manufacturing things like the paper (cotton and linen based), the ink, the printers (intaglio, which press the paper into channels of ink rather than surfaces), holograms, plastic strips, watermarks made from fibers coaxed into special matrices, etc. These are all physical "hard problems", which--as it turns out--are not a problem for competing governments that have the resources to solve them.

This was the case with the "superdollar" problem in Iran back in the 80s, for example. When the US was trying to prop-up the Shah's government in the 70s, they shipped him intaglio printers and plates for American $20 bills. When the Ayatollas took over in the revolution, they got up to a lot of mischief with that equipment and made Jeffersons that were indistinguishable from the real thing. Main reason for the redesigns of the last few decades.

You can't do that with a cryptocurrency. Math is hard, and you can't go shopping.

Today's incarnation of BitCoin may have some flaws that will render it worthless, but there's a good chance that we'll either patch those flaws, or eradicate them at a fundamental level with BitCoin 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever. Cryptocurrencies are inevitable, they're cat-out-of-the-bag. They're going to replace both gold and Fiat currencies in the next decade or two because they solve all of the logistical problems currently damaging the Dollar, Euro, Pound, and so-on.

Yes, it's popular with crime. So was (and still is) the Dollar. Yet the security and e-commerce systems you use to buy things from Amazon today were also pioneered by disreputable industries, particularly pornography.

Most mediums of exchange, and all modern "respectable" currencies and commerce systems, come from dubious backgrounds. Ironically, that muddy history has helped, because it meant they were geared for the kind of security and privacy that people want.


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

[User]
[The Dark Knight] What if Alfred gave Bruce the letter from Rachel? How would it change the story?

When Alfred brings Bruce breakfast the night after Rachel died, he removed the letter. What if he told Bruce to read it?

[Assistant] This has bothered me a little bit as all it did was create a wedge between him and Alfred. Hed have been extremely depressed about it all, but its hard to believe he would have reacted any differently to the subsequent events (just as the events in TDKR didnt change when he found out). He still believed in what Harvey stood for, and wouldve made the same decisions regarding how to handle Harveys legacy.


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

[User]
Why is logic irrefutable?

It occurs to me that logic and truth are somehow related, but I don't know why or how.
Is it that logic is somehow an inherent property of our universe or the human mind? Did we just make up logic, and due to many years of conditioning, we are now unable to separate a valid logical argument from truth itself?
Heads up: I am not an academic, nor very knowledgeable with general concepts in philosophy. In fact, I'm actually a mathematician.

[Assistant]
Most philosophers would say that 'logic' is a set of languages we've made up, but they are languages that describe underlying properties of the world.

Logic has a *syntactic* and a *semantic* side. (You're a mathematician, so the following will probably sound familiar.) The syntactic side refers to how the symbols can be used with other symbols. It tells us, for example, that if you have such-and-such a string of symbols, then you can derive such-and-such other string of symbols. It also tells us which strings of symbols count as 'well-formed,' analogous to real words in a natural language. The semantic side refers to what the strings of symbols mean in the real world. For example, the symbol '&' might mean 'and.' (We could have made it mean 'or,' but we didn't. And we could have chosen a different symbol for 'and.' Some languages do.)

We say that a language of logic is 'complete' if every (semantically) true-in-the-world sentence can be derived (syntactically) in the language. We say that a language of logic is 'sound' if every (syntactically) derivable sentence in the language is also (semantically) true in the real world. Standard languages of logic--those you learn in intro-courses--will be sound and complete. If logic were *just* something we made up, then there would be no answer to the question of whether it's sound. But we do ask that. So we do think of logic "trying" to mirror or match real-world relations between real-world truths. If '*p* & *q*' narrowly logically entails '*p*,' then that matches up to the fact that in the real world, 'the dog is a black and the dog is a mutt' metaphysically necessitates 'the dog is black.'

In sum, according to many or most philosophers, there seem to be metaphysically necessary relations between facts, truths, or states of affairs in the real world, and we create languages of logic to try to model or match or describe or help us understand the relations between those necessary relations.


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

[User]
ELI5: How come states have issues getting the drug cocktails to commit executions but everyday vets put down animals humanely?

I guess I am confused why it is difficult to put down a person but easy for animals, different drugs used?

(This is not a political question regarding capital punishment, I am only confused by the paradox)

[Assistant]
Executing criminals is done in a stupid and over complicated way because people are upset with the idea that a criminal could somehow enjoy being killed if any opioids are used but also the constitution won't let them actually actively torture the criminals so there is a weird and multi step process to make sure they die in a way that is not painful but also not at all comforting.

Animals we just overdose with barbiturates which is a death of feeling good and falling asleep and not waking up ever.


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

[User] Why does a firefly light up? Is it a defense mechanism?

[Assistant] Its a chemical reaction in their gut where an enzyme reacts with some chemical, atp and oxygen to produce light. They do this for defensive reasons and for sexual reasons. The more frequently a male firefly emits light the more attractive he is.


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

[User]
What does the pineal gland do?

I have been reading some pretty amazing stuff about this small gland in the center of the brain. I have read that it can release serotonin, DMT and some other pretty serious chemicals. I have also read that it can process light, almost like an eye in the center of the brain. I am trying to sort out fact from fiction.

[Assistant]
The main role that we know of for the pineal gland is to regulate circadian rhythms. . The pineal gland mainly releases melatonin, which is derived from serotonin but also releases other chemicals involved in your sleep-wake cycle.
Evolutionarily, the pineal gland is a quite ancient structure and  in many animals, the pineal gland is connected to a third eye and has photoreceptive cells. As you can imagine, a gland that regulates sleep and waking would find it very useful to know when it's light or dark outside. While human pineal glands also have photoreceptive cells, their position in the middle of our skulls renders them more a vestigial artifact than functional.

In human beings, the pineal gland is believed to be involved in regulation of sleep-wake cycles, but we also have several other parts of the brain that are involved in that so the pineal gland has somewhat fallen to the wayside in terms of functionality here.


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

[User]
[Spider-man] Why didn't supervillains use the excess radioactive spiders to make themselves into evil spider-man?

Or why didn't Peter talk with the Avengers and create an army of spidermen given his success?

[Assistant] It's not just any radioactive spider, it was a certain type of radiation of a certain dosage on a certain breed of spider, plus maybe a bunch of other unknown factors that created Spider-Man. If you nuke a bunch of spiders randomly, you just get loads of dead spiders.