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

[User]
What happens to a non-diabetic when given a shot of insulin?

I get asked this question regularly so I was wondering if anyone can point to an answer.  I would think they would be able to decrease the amount of insulin produced by their own body but this is just a guess.

[Assistant]
It would depend how much was given and under what circumstances. Insulin is produced in response to detection of elevated blood glucose, there is no feedback based on the level of insulin itself.
A few units of short acting insulin given to someone who just ate a meal with carbohydrates would have no problems. The injected insulin will lower the blood glucose and the pancreas will make more if needed or none if the glucose level is too low.

What if you gave a few units of short acting to someone who hasn't eaten all day? In that case you might drive the blood glucose low enough to cause brain damage or kill them. The brain is one of the most glucose sensitive organs, and damage occurs quickly if it gets too low. Low glucose in starvation is different in that there is some ability of the body and brain to switch to tolerate lower glucose by partially using other metabolic pathways. Switching take time though, so fast drops in blood glucose are dangerous.

Long acting insulin could do the same thing as giving short acting insulin to a person with low blood glucose. Eventually the food they ate is digested, but the long acting insulin sticks around and blood glucose will continue to decrease until they get into trouble.

The low glucose (hypoglycemia) causing brain damage and coma is one of the reasons killers sometimes use insulin to kill people. Usually diabetics that they switch the dosing on so it looks like an accident.

Too high a glucose level is actually short term pretty safe. That's one of the reasons why unconscious people get intravenous glucose with electrolytes. Too low is much worse than too high, and the lost time to check can make a difference in recovery.


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

[User]
ELI5: How did the U.S. rise to a global superpower in only 250 years but counties that have been around for 1000s of years are still under-developed?

The U.S. was a developing country for *maybe* only 100-150 years. After that, the U.S. became arguably the largest economic, military, academic, manufacturing powerhouse the world has ever seen.

Yet, countries that have been around since ancient times are still struggling to even feed or house their population.

How is that possible?

[Assistant]
Progress over time isn't guaranteed. A devastating war, plague or simply bad leadership can set a country back decades, and these things can happen over and over again.

The US has incredible potential for building a superpower - the geography is nothing short of amazing. It has lots of natural harbors in both the Pacific and the Atlantic, enough arable land to feed itself many times over, vast resources of all kinds - oil, minerals, gas, you name it. It was too remote to be in any real danger of the other great powers of the time, and its only two real neighbors are weaker states that pose no threat.

It had all the resources and living space it needed to grow into a superpower and all it really needed was good leadership, good institutions and enough time to grow, and that's what it did, with relatively few setbacks while other countries have been perpetually ravaged by wars, famines, disease and tyrants.


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

[User] I've read several times that particles and their corresponding antiparticles are constantly being created and annihilated. Why doesn't that violate the conservation of matter?

[Assistant]
By the relation E=mc^2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared).

For instance, you may hear of a positron annhilating an electron.  What actually happens is that when a positron and an electron meet, they give off two gamma rays (which are photons, and as such have no mass), and a lot of energy.  If you take the energy generated and divide it by the speed of light squared, you will get the missing amount of mass.

In everyday calculations, it's convenient to say that mass is conserved, since very few things in our everyday experience give off enough energy to change mass significantly.  However, it is really energy, and not mass, that is being conserved.

Edited for Science!


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

[User]
[ATLA] Could a firebender use lightning to restart a heartbeat, or the ability to manipulate the heat of an object to create ice?

Jeong Jeong claims that firebending is an element that can only destroy; however, could a firebender use controlled bursts of lightning to restart a heart like a defibrillator? I feel like that would actually be a pretty helpful use of the power.

Additionally, could a firebender create ice through their ability to control heat. We see early on firebenders can make stuff hotter, but also in the scene where Roku and Sozin fight a volcano we see Sozin extract the heat from a volcano until its magma turns back to stone. Could you do something similar to that on water, to remove the heat until it became ice? or even just cool an area until condensation and ice formed?

[Assistant]
The elements are all connected, so it's a blurry line. We've seen waterbenders remove the life and water from plants, animals and other humans, and since water and fire can learn from each other it's not out of the question. The only thing stopping someone is probably their talent. You'd likely need someone on an Avatar level to really and truly cause that degree of a change.

Also, there's nothing really stopping the lightning thing except medical science. You probably couldn't start a heart with lightning but an expert bender able to redirect their own charge could stabilize one.


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

[User]
Is there any correlation between the frequency of left-handedness in a population and the population's writing system being read right-to-left?

I've always assumed most of the languages I encounter are read left-to-right and top-to-bottom due to the majority of the population being right-handed, therefore avoiding smudging when writing. However, when I take into account the fact that many languages are read right-to-left, this connection becomes more tenuous.

Are writing systems entirely a function of culture, or is there evidence for biological/behavioural causes?

[Assistant] Are there even any instances of abnormal amounts of left-handed populations in history? Probably not many (if any), and definitely not enough to be instrumental in developing writing systems. Remember writing didnt start on paper, so throw out the whole notion of writing being easier one direction or another because of hand dragging and ink smudging.


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

[User]
ELI5:Why do some people look "good" fat, and others look "bad" fat?

Kind of a strange question, but I feel like some people get fat and look okay, whereas other people get fat and look terrible.

Does it have to do with the allocation of where the fat is stored? Does it have to do with the person's natural looks?

I'm asking because I'm a decent looking person, but I feel like when I gain a little weight I look terrible. Then when I see people who are visibly fatter than me they don't look too bad. Is this all in my head?

Thanks in advance.

[Assistant]
Confidence goes a long way in this respect. If you feel less confident when you gain weight, you'll feel like you look less attractive. As for others, the ones that look good to you are likely not only confident but also dress for their body in a way that is flattering. Personal grooming goes a long way, too.

Different people have different body shapes, too, and society has deemed some more attractive than others. For example, there's the classic female hour glass that is largely considered the sexiest of female shapes because bigger hips are a sign of fertility. For men, even if they have a heavier midsection, having muscular arms and shoulders tend to make them more attractive because it is a sign of strength. That attraction is partly influenced human nature (the desire to survive and reproduce) and partly by traditional gender roles, but still very present today in determining what society deems attrative.

In the end, it's all about working with what you've got.


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

[User] Why do we forget dreams so easily?

[Assistant] The hippocampus is a part of the brain used to transfer information from short term memory to long term memory.  During dreaming, the hippocampus is suppressed so that you will not form long term memories of your dreams.


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

[User] ELI5: How did Germany survive through 2 World War losses with billions in owed reparations?

[Assistant]
Well... they kinda didn't, which is why we had World War II.  Reparations from WWI devastated Germany, all but guaranteeing it would spend it's future crushed under the debt of reparations and preventing any economic growth - it created a lot of resentment among the German population and gave rise to angry populist movements... namely the Nazi party.  The Nazi's didn't rise to power on a 'We hate Jews' platform, it gained popularity because it tapped into a sense of national pride that was (in their eyes) being attacked and degraded by an organized world-wide effort to keep Germany down.

There were ~~no~~ (edit) minimal reparations from World War II.  Instead, there was the opposite. The Marshall Plan was visionary for its time that instead of penalizing the losing side, it instead poured billions of dollars into re-stabilizing the defeated countries, creating an economic incentive for playing nice with the rest of the world instead of fighting it.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do striped clothes go crazy on cameras?

[Assistant] It's called the moir effect. It's a bit difficult to explain but it happens when the stripes on the clothing is as fine as the pixels on the cameras sensor. The stripes of the clothing doesn't hit the sensors pixel dead on but it's a bit of. So the camera can't make a right stripe of it. And so when the person or the camera moves the lines seems like they are moving because sometimes the sensor sees them the way they are and the next picture it's just off again.


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

[User]
ELI5: the duggars scandal

What's going on that is getting them canceled?

[Assistant]
One of the family, Josh Duggar, was found to be molesting his younger sisters while they slept; it began when he was 15 and continued for several years, while the victims were as young as 4. Jim Bob, the family's father and leader, knew about it, but declined to do anything at first. A year later, he found out that Josh was still doing it, not only to family members but to unspecified other girls in the neighbourhood; he took Josh to church, where he and church leaders decided to punish him with 3 months of working construction on a friend's home. He then had his friend, a state trooper, give him a talking to about what would happen if he continued.

As a state trooper, this friend was what's called a mandated reporter: he had a legal responsibility to notify the police about child abuse he knew of. But he didn't do this; he was later caught himself for possessing child pornography, was convicted, paroled, and then re-convicted again for possessing even more.

4 years after Jim Bob first found out what his son had done, the family were due to appear on Oprah, but an anonymous source called the police and Oprah herself to say that Josh Duggar had raped or abused her. Police looked into it, but Josh only confessed to the incidents in 2002; under Arkansas law, you have 3 years to prosecute child rape or abuse after a law enforcement figure is alerted. Because Jim Bob's friend in the state troopers had been told years earlier, this time limit had expired, and nothing could be done.

Pieces of testimony and allegations have circulated since 2006, but no one had evidence until this week, when the police report and other details came out and Josh publicly confessed. The incidents took place when he was 14 to 18 and involved him fingering and licking girls aged 4 to 11 while they slept.

TLC don't want to run a show starring Josh, nor his father who has come under criticism for not reporting events, exploiting statute of limitations laws, and for keeping a known child molester in his home with a dozen other children, where they continued to be abused for years. Additional condemnation has come from the fact that Josh Duggar is a representative of the Family Research Council, who has gone on the record stating that gay people should not have the right to adopt because they are sexual perverts who will likely molest children.


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

[User]
[Bioshock] How Andrew Ryan found enough money to build Rapture?

The creation of an underwater city seems very expensive, even by the standards of Ryan, who is stated to be a wealth businessman after WW2. Also, he built the city secretly, without the government's knowledge or funding, opposed to Columbia which got a massive money budget by the Congress. So, how did Ryan found enough money to create an underwater city(and sustain it for 10+ years)?

[Assistant]
He pooled his money together with other like-minded individuals to achieve a free thinking Utopia. Andrew Ryan was already very wealthy, and an active member of the scientific community, so he was able to create such a place when using the funding of similarly wealthy scientists.

The entire location was made to be self-sustaining from the onset, and had a very small, fixed population, so making sure that Rapture could survive on its own was at the heart of the original construction.


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

[User]
Why don't the Na'vi follow the same body plan as the rest of the Pandoran animals?

Most of the animals visible on Pandora have a hexapodal layout. The horse-analogues, the wolf-analogues, and the jaguar-analogues we've all seen in the reference files the company provided us all have six limbs. And then even as far as those dragon things I've seen videos of, they have breathing vents at approximately their collarbone.

The Na'vi don't though. They look so much like us, while the rest of their environment does not.

I mean I'm all for convergent evolution, it's clearly easy to be on top of your planet's food chain if you're bipedal with two arms for manipulation like both the Na'vi and humans, but at least we appear to have animals with the same descendants as us.

Apes for example, we both have four limbs, our organs are more or less in the same places, we even have the same muscle groups. Other animals like mice still have a nose for breathing, and a quadripedal layout.

Can any bio-techs answer this for me?

[Assistant] At this point it seems to be a genetic anomaly.  Current theories are suggesting that this life form may not be a native species at all, but may have been genetically engineered and introduced to Pandora.  By whom and for what reason is obviously unknown.............................Look, basically, the guys upstairs don't give a fuck, so us lab boys are given next to no funding to study this stuff.  Since the uprising we've been getting our asses handed to us, we don't have time to worry about why they're different.  Besides, the all that genetic information is locked up tight behind their patents and copyrights.  We don't have the clearance to see the whole sequence, just the parts we're hired to work on.


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

[User] ELI5: Is whiskey dick an actual thing and if so, what causes this to biologically happen?

[Assistant] An erection is caused by restricting blood flow out of the penis by muscle action. Alcohol is a nervous system suppressant and so would tend to reduce the ability of the body to direct such actions, which usually result from the parasympathetic nervous system.


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

[User]
What is aftertaste?

Some foods and drinks have an aftertaste (a taste that's different after you've swallowed it). What's going on chemically that makes a particular taste more prevalent after it's left your mouth vs while it's in your mouth?

[Assistant]
Aftertaste can be different for two reasons:

Smell- The sense of smell has a lot to do with the perception of taste. Once the original food is gone you no longer have that intensity telling you what it is you're eating.

Digestion- Some things actually wouldn't taste the same if they weren't being digested in your mouth. Saliva contains amylase and lipase which break down starch and fat respectively. With the food you just chewed up chemically changing, different tastes and odors will be present.


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

[User]
What happens if you repeatedly melt glass?

If you have glass and you melt it, then allow it to cool and harden, then melt it again and repeat a few times, will the glass become brittle? What change will happen to the glass?

[Assistant]
Glass is already tremendously brittle.

But to respond to the substance of your question: glass doesn't have a memory. It doesn't remember that it's been melted 50 times before in the last 24 hours instead of 1 time. So the parameters that affect the properties of glass are simply those of the most recent melt/solidification cycle.


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

[User] ELI5: I believe it is impossible quickly "de-radioactivate" something that's (highly or otherwise) radioactive. If that's true, what makes that so?

[Assistant]
It depends on the thing.

If you're talking about a lump of uranium or another material that decays then no because it's nuclear decay is a part of its natural existance.

If you're talking about an object that's been sitting in the fallout area of a nuclear weapon or disaster, then thoroughly cleaning the item will remove most of the nuclear radiation.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are the new army uniforms pixelated? What's the logic behind that?

[Assistant] It's not pixelated. It's a type of camouflage called "disruptive pattern." Basically the sharp angles and contrasting colors make it very difficult to discern outlines, making the wearer difficult to see.


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

[User]
[Marvel] Venom's powers are influenced by Spider-Man, but what if another superhuman had been the 1st host?

The Venom symbiote & its decendants (Carnage, Toxin, Scream, etc.) All display variations of Spider-Man's powers such as webbing, wall crawling, Spider sense as well as enhanced strength, speed & agility)

If Venom's first host had been a different superhuman would it have different powers? Would Carnage & Toxin be different as well? Would its personality be affected?

[Assistant]
The personality would always be somewhat similar. Obsessive need to re-connect with the host, with maybe a bit of the host's personality, ie, Venom's haphazard vigilantism and lethal protector schtick that tore up the East Side throughout 2008. The powers, on the other hand, would be different. Let's say, by chance, it hooks up to Captain Marvel at first when she's out fighting in space as she's well to do.

Maybe instead of webs, it gains the ability to absorb energy like she does? It's still addicted to the thrill of her flying, it's still aggressive like she is (to the degree she's aggressive, Carol likes to punch things.)

But what of Captain America? Would it have that same sense of morality that Captain America has? Would it have no real special abilities beyond augmenting strength and endurance? Who can say.

We just know the Venom suit is like a jilted lover towards Spider-Man after he abandoned it about ten years ago. It *really* wanted to re-connect with him at any cost.


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

[User]
Does the 1.9 mile Klystron Gallery have to account for the curvature of the earth during construction?

Aside from walls (e.g. the Great Wall of China), the Klystron Gallery is listed as the longest man-made structure. Given its length, are there special engineering considerations that needed to be taken to deal with the curvature of the earth, or is the curvature not a significant factor at 1.9 miles?

[Assistant] The main accelerator is a linear beam projector buried 30ft under ground which is straight as a laser beam. The building above it is probably a series of connected, traditionally built facilities which conform to the ground. If they didn't take into account the curvature the buildings at the ends would have an inclined floor.


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

[User] [Marvel] How many time machines can you find in New York City and who owns them?

[Assistant]
The Fantastic Four definitely have one, if not more.

Pretty sure the Avengers have one, either Stark tech or more likely captured from a villain like Doom or Kang.

There *might* be one hiding inside the Latverian consulate.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do we put ress at the end of some words, like actress, mayoress and murderess, but not for others like doctress, accountantress, or teacheress?

[Assistant] Your question has mostly been answered, but interestingly, words ending in -tor like doctor used to get -trix (yes doctrix) for the feminine form. It has mostly fallen out of use but you still see it in words like dominatrix and executrix (when drawing up a will).


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

[User] [The Office] I own a business and am looking for a paper supplier. I know Dunder Mifflin provides more personal service than the big box stores, but how does that concretely benefit me? And why do I have to pay for your downtown NYC headquarters, too?

[Assistant]
The main difference is that, assuming you're in Scranton, if you have an issue at any time, someone from their office will be there in person that afternoon to find out what went wrong and how they can make it up to you.  With the big suppliers, you'll be lucky to get anything even after several hours on the phone with customer service.  They're also more responsive if you need to change your order or if you need to make a special order.

That said, it is just paper.  If your business depends on having a wide variety of types and weights on hand at all times, go with Dunder-Mifflin, but otherwise you probably won't care about the difference.


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

[User]
Why do rivers like the Nile and Amazon not form large canyons like the Colorado river did with the Grand Canyon?

Are they just newer than the Colorado river? Or is the ground underneath the rivers not as conducive to erosion?

[Assistant] Deep canyons tend to form where the land is in a state of slow, steady uplift where a river runs through it.  So it's not so much that the water drills down into the earth, rather the earth is rising up around an existing river.


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

[User] Since wifi has trouble going through walls, does it have as much trouble going through a wall of glass than a wall made of bricks? and what would the best material for wifi to travel through is the best?

[Assistant]
Clay bricks are no problem for wifi, and neither are glass bricks.

Concrete is a huge problem, as the water and steel absorbs/blocks the radio waves.

From memory the ideal material for radio transparency is zirconium. So zirconium bricks would be the way to go.


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

[User]
[Rick & Morty] A question about Cop Morty

Is he aware of the irony of his anti-Morty sentiment?

He talks about how Mortys are "raised to be sidekicks", and calls the Mortys in Mortytown "poor Rickless bastards". But he doesn't have a Rick, and when the other Mortys suggest that he's a sidekick to his Rick partner, he goes ballistic.

Is he self-hating, or does he consider himself somehow unique?

[Assistant]
He's pretty much the Uncle Tom of Mortys. He is self-hating and idolizes the ideal of Rick; that Ricks are superior and Mortys are morons. He's bitter because he's barely smarter than the average Morty; he knows what a Morty will do all the time. He's a Morty, after all; an insufferable idiot who thinks he's sort of okay when in reality, a housefly will beat him in a game of chess. But a Rick will know so much more, so much more than what Cop Morty can even think of dreaming about.

He also has an inferiority complex; he lashes out against stereotypical Morty behavior, hates his own guts, has low-self esteem (like all Mortys), and thinks like a Morty (which he hates and uses to his advantage in his line of work). He hates being a Morty; he hates that he's pretty much a slave to a self-loathing sociopath, hates the undeniable truth of the circumstances of his existence. There's no way out of being a Morty; only death will solve that. But he can do something to prove to Ricks that he's on their side. That he's more Rick than Morty; that his knowledge of being a Morty will make him a worthy agent for the ultimate Rick agenda, whatever that may be (since he probably won't figure out what that is anyway).

But that just makes him all the more of a subservient and proudly stupid Morty; he knows it and he *hates* it.


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

[User] ELI5: What's the difference between a sports jacket and a suit jacket?

[Assistant]
A suit jacket is part of an entire suit, meaning it has pants made of the same material and color. It's a matched wardrobe.

A sport coat or blazer is a stand alone garment that is meant to be paired with any pants that can match, whether or not they are the same color or material.

Generally, the suit is more dressy and the sport coat is more casual or business casual.


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

[User]
[All Fields] We (non-scientists) like to think of science as, well as an exact science. What is something that is contested in your field, and where do you stand on it?

I guess pretty much what the headline implies: In your field of study, are there any points (even better if they're widely accepted, but still fiercely debated) that there still isn't a solid general consensus on? I don't so much mean "Evolution vs Intelligent Design", but more just "We're really not sure how $THING works, but this is what I think based on $EVIDENCE"

[Assistant] Tissue Engineering. Not really any debates there, but many people both inside and outside the field call it a "voodoo science". There aren't too many underlying principles, and its really just a bunch of labs trying to throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We take the principles of cell biology, and try to make an organ or a tissue out of it. Sometimes we get lucky, most of the times, we don't. Sometimes we discover something new that relates to actual cell biology along the way. Fun stuff all the same.


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

[User]
Why are the motions of spiral galaxies so regular and predictable, as opposed to chaotic billion-body problems?

I know that systems of bodies linked by gravity are chaotic in the majority of cases for n>=3. Why is it that galaxies (in particular spiral galaxies) appear to have regular patterns in their stellar movement? Shouldn't it all be a jumbled mess of billions of bodies interacting chaotically?

[Assistant]
For the same reason that the air acts fairly predictably, even though a litre of air contains *many* more molecules than a galaxy has stars. A galaxy is sort of a (pressureless) "gas" of stars. Although the individual paths of stars might be hard to predict (although easier than predicting the paths of molecules, because stars don't often have close encounters), the general picture is not too difficult. You have a big ball of millions of stars, with such and such a distribution of velocities, then you can predict if it'll collapse or expand or whatever.

*However* things can be a bit chaotic. We can predict for instance that a galaxy will form a bar or a spiral, but we can't predict exactly when it'll appear and what angle it'll be at etc. This is because the random motion of every single star actually matters here, and that's impossible to measure accurately.

Edit: Ooh also, for disc galaxies, they form from gas which can't have extremely large scale chaotic motions, because gas bumps into gas and changes its momentum until that stops happening, so the gas has to have a nice circular orbit to not hit anything, and so when it collapses into stars the stars end up with a fairly circular orbit too.


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

[User] Why do people love to hate popular things?

[Assistant]
people love popular things, that's what makes them popular.

SOME people want to differentiate themselves from that which is popular for any of a great number of reasons, some BECAUSE the thing is popular, others for practical reasons.

QUERTY is a pretty bad system for keys on your keyboard, DVORAK is much better but much less popular, some people like DVORAK because it's an objectively better system.

justin beiber is super popular, but i don't like any of his music, i prefer lhasa de sela who is much less popular but has a much more expressive voice and doesn't use auto tune.

some other people might dislike beiber because he represents pop music and they want to be known for their love of small independent bands.


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

[User]
[MCU] How much of Captain Americas life would actually be in Rogers: The Musical?

I assume most of *The Winter Soldier* and *Civil War* is classified information, so how would that be represented in the musical?

[Assistant] Winter Soldier is 100% public since Natasha dumped the files and then testified to the Senate. The musical probably covers his creation and WWII adventure as Act I, Act II is probably him being unfrozen and forming the Avengers and finding Bucky. It probably ends with Civil War. Act III is probably the fight against Thanos, reforming the Avengers, and then a dramatic death scene since the public doesnt know what happened to him.


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

[User]
[40K] In his final confrontation with Horus, the Emperor of Mankind executes Horus without allowing him a duel and emerges unscathed. Is mankind any better off?

Everything occurs as it does in canon, except after seeing the corpse of Sanguinius at the feet of Horus, the Emperor makes his judgement: there can be no redemption for Horus. Rather than engaging in the duel that left him so horribly wounded, the Emperor of Mankind immediately unleashes his wrath upon Horus and obliterates him.

Is mankind any better off? True, he would still have to return to the golden throne to hold the breech in the webway closed, but he would still be able to at least communicate, and would not be slowly dying from his wounds, allowing for some possibility of rectifying the golden throne situation.

[Assistant]
Of course.

With the Heresy defeated, an unscathed Master of Mankind would likely would have been able to figure out a solution to the Webway breach in the Imperial Palace. The Emperor has held the breach shut for 10,000 years despite being a few cells from becoming a complete corpse. If He hadn't suffered the terrible, terrible wounds at the hands of the Archtraitor, He not only would have likely been able to reseal the Webway (given enough time), but would be fully conscious and able to direct the course of the Imperium throughout the ages.

A sealed Webway and a healthy Emperor? There wouldn't be anything left to stop the Emperor from reconquering what was lost and ushering in a Golden Age for humanity as He originally intended.


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

[User]
[SCP Foundation] What is life like for those in the employ of the foundation?

 Whether voluntary (security, MTF, agents, scientist, support staff) or involuntary (class D or others like them). What's life like on base for those that live there, and what's life outside of work for those that just have a 9-5? Do they get paid reasonably Well? Turnover rate? Mortality rate? Getting sucked up into a cloud made of spiders rate?

[Assistant]
For most, horrible. Boredom, bureaucracy, rumors, and dread, punctuated by moments of extreme stress or fear. The constant need to lie because of your job, and the knowledge that your superiors are also lying to you because of *their* job. Either you die horribly or live long enough to see your friends die horribly. Having to work with people who have had memories erased, and always avoiding *that* subject. Wondering if your own memory got erased, and your friends are avoiding *that* subject with you.

But for a select few, wonderful. Certain people get to tell another human being, "Go touch that weird thing and see what happens," and no matter what happens, you are never held accountable! Certain people get to torture, experiment, vivisect, test to destruction, throw people into the cage of a monster as they plead for mercy. And you get away with everything! And they *pay* you! For those few, twisted individuals, it's the best job you could ever possibly have. Those people also die horribly, but it's so worth it.


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

[User]
[General] I'm a fat guy who recently started working out. I've lost about 20 pounds and was hoping to lose another 80 or so. Last night I was turned into a vampire. Am I stuck this way forever?

I've done a lot of reading but I don't see any fat guys in vampire lore. What are the macros for blood? Is it even worth it to keep working out? What are my options? Help, the clothing sizes in this leather fetish catalog only go up to XXL.

[Assistant]
Depends on the vampire.

Strigoi, traditional Slavic Vampires, always become thin and almost skeletal.

Strain Vampires become the same.

Blade vampires seem to have normal metabolic functions, and can get fat if they consume too much or are too sedentary. This indicates they can also lose weight.

Anne Rice vampires remain as they are when turned, so you'd be screwed.

Dracula is unclear. It seems that a Vampires health and vigor changes as they feed, so you may be able to lose weight if you abstain from eating... But vampires also manifest unearthly beautiful appearances when well fed, so you may automatically get leaner and more muscular.

Warhammer Vampires... Well... There's a horrible, predatory bat-monster living under your skin. Fat is the least of your worries..


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

[User]
[Marvel] Don't the heroes have any problem with how SHIELD works?

SHIELD is an overbearing militaristic organization without any oversight. Its jurisdiction reaches the whole world, its competence is limitless. Given the right circumstances, SHIELD's director can take complete command over the three branches of power in a country, essentially becoming a non-elected dictator. They have detained and brainwashed people, their operatives consistently torture their prisoners.

**Sovereignty, Will of the People, Due Process of Law, Fundamental Human Rights, Checks and Balances.** SHIELD takes a huge dump over all those concepts. How none of the heroes have a problem with that? How can Captain America work with (and often for) such an organization when that organization has powers that go completely against his own beliefs?

[Assistant] They have a very big problem when S.H.I.E.L.D. violates due process and sovereignty. This was pretty much the theme of the Secret War and Civil War storylines. In Secret War, Captain America straight-up punches Nick Fury in the face and in Civil War he leads a superhuman resistance against the superhuman registration act.


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

[User]
[DC] If Batman intentionally acted like he couldn't solve a riddle and allowed Riddler to believe he was smarter, would Nygma go away?

I know Batman has to save people, but some of his riddles are just simple riddles and I'm curious if it would be better for Batman to just humor him. I mean proving his superiority is basically Edward's reason to exist.

[Assistant]
Not really.

Riddler has a very explicit compulsion to prove that he's not just smarter than Batman, but pretty much everyone else in the world. Batman just happens to be the person perpetually in front of that line to Edward.

If he thought Batman was actually beneath him (which he actually perpetually does because of his ego, regardless of his constant failures) to the point of not being worthy of his attention anymore, he'd just look for someone else to compete against.

And unfortunately for everyone, Riddler's idea of matching wits involves engineering crimes which put other people, and not just his primary targets, in mortal danger.


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

[User] [Avatar] Does Toph have any way to defend against a flying jump-kick?

[Assistant]
Probably, she would detect them jumping off the ground, and as long as they can't change directions mid-air, she could just throw up some rocks in their face. Which is why she had so much trouble with Aang-he could change directions mid-air without touching the ground, so she had no idea where he would be going. She's also got a pretty great sense of hearing, so it's not like she wouldn't hear them jump up in the air at her.

The only time she's really struggled are:

-Against Aang, who was an airbender and she couldn't sense his location (Also almost nobody has any idea how to fight airbenders)

-With metal before she developed metalbending

-Unusual surfaces (she can't see as well when walking on sand, and she had a hard time crossing the ice bridge since she's walking blind as well).

-Underwater or in the sky, since she's not near earth and can't see much.

Otherwise, she's almost unstoppable without resorting to trickery or overwhelming numbers.


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

[User] ELI5: How did "s" become the letter that pluralises nouns ("one apple, ten apples") in so many languages?

[Assistant]
Around the time of the late Roman Empire, c. 400 a.d., the western Roman Empire was breaking apart. Latin broke apart with it. North and west of the Italian peninsula, we think, people started to speak their latin in a different way than people to the east and south of the Italian peninsula. In the west, they started generalising the rule for plurals in the latin accusative case (adding -s) for just, all nouns in all cases. In the east, they used the nominative case instead, leading them to make their plurals by changing the final vowel. The western latin evolved into French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese, while the eastern Latin evolved into Italian and Romanian. (So this is how we get Spanish hombre/hombres but Italian uomo/uomini). Sardinian, right on the dividing line, is more similar to Latin and Italian but has -s for plurals.

In a later, totally weird coincidence, Anglo-Saxons in Britain at some point started forming lots of plurals with an -as ending, which eventually became -es and then just -s. -as (or -az) was already a normal plural pattern for nominative case words with certain endings in proto-germanic; in English it was just generalised to lots of other words over time. Why this happened in English but not in Dutch (which forms some, but not all plurals with -s) or German (which dropped the -as plural completely) is not entirely clear. Possibly it could be because of contact with Latin and Old French? But English preserved a lot of 'irregular' plurals from its Anglo-Saxon roots anyway.


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

[User] Why is there ringing in your ears in complete silence?

[Assistant]
there are little tiny "hairs" in your ear that are actually very sensitive cells that detect vibrations in the air that you brain interprets, thus, you  can hear things.

Sometimes, these little "hairs" get flattened out, by a very loud sound or by a natural quirk in your body. The ringing you hear is the the cells straightening themselves back out slowly. Imagine them like carpet that was under some furniture that you just moved. Your brain is wired to interpret any movement from them as sound, so you get that phantom sound at a low level as they stand back up.

Edit: Children of Men was an AWESOME movie, but the whole swan's song theory (that when you have ringing in your ears you will never hear that pitch again) is a common misconception.


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

[User]
[Mass Effect]How did The Illusive Man earn all his money, before Cerberus?

Im not asking about how Cerberus earns its money, thats well established, but how did TIM get Cerberus going in the first place/how did he make his bank before it?

[Assistant] What we know is that he was a regular civilian before becoming the Illusive man and his first action to gain notice by general media was an email calling for humans to dominate and rule every other species. Basically he started out as an internet troll who gained some clout for getting on the news. He was able to get lucky when contacting like-minded people and his little group eventually gained support from powerful people. After he had sufficient funds, that's how he was able to get the ball rolling.


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

[User]
How is behaviour innate? How can animals replicate behaviour that they have never observed?

So, I know that some behaviour in animals is innate, I also understand why, but I don't understand how (except reflexes). Like, how do animals know mating rituals, or what to do when they see another animal, or how to hunt, or howl, etc.. And I know that there are instincts, but where do they come from? As in, what part of the brain, is it all subconscious? I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it well. I can't seem to find an answer on Google.

[Assistant] Those types of behaviors are similar to reflexes, they are hard wired and are initiated by an environmental cue. Often it is a series of behaviors that are initiated...an environmental cue initiated one behavior, and that behavior initiates a second behavior, and so on. Essentially, they are behavior patterns that do not need to be learned. Some texts that give a quick overview are Pierce and Cheney Behavior analysis and learning and Powell et al Learning and behavior.


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

[User] ELI5: How were people like Galileo and Newton able to make such accurate theories about space and the solar system using such simple telescopes?

[Assistant]
The solar system bodies Galileo was theorizing about were visible to the naked eye, without telescopes. Most of the data their theories explained (ie. movement of the planets, the sun and the moon  across the sky) were recorded in great detail by his predecessors. They also already had multiple models(including the Ptolemy's and Copernicus' models)  all of which provided reasonably accurate predictions for the position and movement of planets.

Galileo's telescopes added crucial data(Venus' Phases, Jupiter's moons) that could be explained by the heliocentric model and not other models that were proposed at that time. But the accuracy of the predictions had less to do with the telescope data and more reliant on the planet movement data and the geometric calculations done to show that the models and the data matched.


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

[User] ELI5: What does polarized mean in the terms of sunglasses.

[Assistant]
Imagine light is a bunch of little frisbees.

It's not, but bear with me. It's not waves or photons either.

Polarized glasses are like a set of vertical bars. The only frisbees that can get through are the ones tilted on their sides to pass between them.

Most light is randomly oriented, so while a bunch of the frisbees will hit the bars, a lot will also get through. You can see stuff, it's just dimmer.

The trick is when you consider reflections off of things like water. The vertical frisbees will sink into the water instead of bouncing, so the ones that bounce off towards you tend to be about horizontal. These are the ones your glasses mostly block!

So the end result is that polarized glasses tend to make reflections and glares much dimmer.


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

[User] ELI5: why is necessary to keep water running when running disposal?

[Assistant] To cool and lubricate the grinder, and to wash off the screen inside. A garbage disposal basically grinds stuff up until it can pass through a sieve so anything that hinders that process will wear the system.


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

[User] [Terminator] Back in the Cameron films, how did Skynet actually build the first Terminators and war machines? At the start of the war it seemed like it was just software on a bunch of servers.

[Assistant] Skynet hacked into various Pentagon, military contractor, and robotics computers, then downloaded all of their blueprints and software and designs.  It then ran simulations to determine the optimal combat configurations needed for its war with humanity, then hijacked various automated factories and foundrys and started mass production.  As the war waged on, Skynet then used iterative changes and additional simulations to update its arsenal against the human threat, until it got to a point where the weapons and robots and crafts seen in the movies bore little resemblance to their original, human-developed designs.


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

[User]
If an astronaut in the vacuum of space released a bag of flour, would the powder stick onto him/her?

You know...due to gravitational pull, since the human body (and the space suit) would proportionally weight a lot more than a speck of flour.  This is also assuming there are no nearby objects with a greater gravitational pull.

Edit: Wow, thanks for the detailed answers.

Edit 2:  I was thinking more along the lines of if static, initial velocity from opening a bag of flour and so on were not a factor.  Simply a heavy object weighing 200ish pounds (human body with suit) and a flour specks with no initial momentum or velocity.  It is good to know gravity is a very weak force though.  Thank you all. :)

[Assistant] Intermolecular forces like electrostatic attraction and Van der Waals forces would be much much more significant than gravity for these small particles. In fact, the first dust bunnies that started coalescing when the solar system formed and would eventually become planets were first attracted by these weak forces, not gravity.


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

[User] ELI5: how does corn pop into popcorn, and are there other seeds with this ability?

[Assistant]
The water content of kernel expands as it is heated, turning to steam. When the internal pressure gets high enough the kernel explodes and the steam is released, leaving the starches crispy and perfect for crunching.

As to other seeds, it depends on hull thickness/toughness, water content, and potentially oil content. While there are other seeds you could get to "pop" they wouldn't have the same texture as popcorn.


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

[User] When we fall asleep what's to keep us from staying asleep? How does our body know when to wake up?

[Assistant] When we sleep, we are in an altered state of consciousness. We aren't consciously perceiving the things around us, but we still maintain a level of unconscious awareness, albeit the threshold for stimulus recognition is a bit higher while sleeping. So, that brings us to a couple of ways our body wakes up. We can either be awoken by external stimuli which alert our nervous system to become conscious (e.g. an alarm clock), or when no stimuli are present, our body will wake up in accordance with our circadian rhythm, which is essentially a periodic pattern of brainwaves which follow our sleep-wake routine. Our circadian rhythm is sensitive to a few factors, such as exposure to light throughout the day, how much sleep we had during our last rest, etc..


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

[User] ELI5: How does a pressure cooker work? How does it cook the food faster and why the whistle?

[Assistant] When you bake cookies in an oven, a recipe specifies a certain temperature. But when you boil pasta, recipes only specify lengths of time, and those change depending on elevation. This is because substances undergoing phase transitions (with boiling, water is changing from a liquid to a gas) are restricted to one temperature. No matter how high or low you turn your stove, boiling water will remain at the boiling point. The boiling temperature, however,  changes with the pressure. At higher pressure, water molecules are pushed together more and they can't "escape" their mutual attractions to become a gas as easily, so the boiling point is pushed to a higher temperature. Inside a pressure cooker, the water is able to reach a higher temperature. This cooks the food faster. The whistle is a pressure valve to keep the pressure inside the pressure cooker from reaching an unsafe level and turning it into a bomb.


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

[User]
How does LHC detect the subatomic particlesit discovers?

Or better. How will it detect unknown particles or anything alike if we dont know them or about them already? How can we detect something we ignore its existance?

[Assistant]
The LHC has several detectors that work in different ways. This could be by particles impacting the sensor, disrupting a magnetic field or seeing tiny amounts of light given off.

The sensors detect something and the scientists can work out what set them off by the information they get - the mass of the particle hitting the sensor, the path of the particles through the magnetic field, the amount and wavelength of light given off and so on.

They can detect things they've never seen before because they still set off the sensors but give different information from other particles.

Think of your own body's sensors - New things can hit then but you can still detect them even though the information is different from anything you've experienced before n hence you can register new sights, sounds, smells, tastes...


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

[User] What's the difference between carbonite and carbon dioxide? They both have the same formula . . .

[Assistant] Carbon dioxide is a neutral species. On the other hand, carbonite is a double charged ion, which can be written as [CO2]^(2-). In other words, if you find a way to remove the two excess electrons from carbonite you can get carbon dioxide.


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

[User] [DC] Is there truth to the rumour that, if Flash went fast enough, he'd accelerate his ageing process?

[Assistant]
No. He's gone faster than the speed of light, broken the barrier of speed itself, and run past the end of the universe. He still looks mid-twenties.

He'd age if there were some outside influences, but not from running alone. Besides, IIRC, one of the reasons Jay is still alive and active is because the Speed Force helps slow his aging.


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

[User]
[Fallout] Whats Mr. Houses goal?

Setting up a lovely casino in the middle of the desert seems a rad underwhelming considering the resources he has at hand. Why is he merely interested in restarting Las Vegas as leaving the rest of the Mojave to itself? For one of the most powerful figures around, it seems rather underwhelming.

[Assistant]
He wants to rebuild civilization under his guidance. He's doing that by temporarily making deals with other major powers to avoid conflict while accumulating wealth and influence (hence rebuilding the Strip to bring in money). Meanwhile he's looking into ways of gathering enough military strength (Platinum chip to upgrade the Securitrons) to drive out the NCR and Legion and establish his own rule. He eventually plans to begin expanding, using his technology to secure areas and then rebuild them as he has done the Strip. Honestly, it's arguably a better fate for the Wasteland than either the Legion or the NCR offers, because he can provide the safety the Legion promises without all of the rape and murder.

Why did he choose Vegas? Well, it's not politically or militarily significant and didn't have a huge population, so it wouldn't be targeted by as many nukes as say, California or the eastern seaboard. He also believed it had a unique spirit that he wanted to preserve and take into the new world.


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

[User]
Why can I sometimes see low-lit objects better with my peripheral vision as opposed to when I directly look at said object?

I'm thinking of looking at objects like stars at night - sometimes I feel like some stars are brighter in my peripheral than they are when I directly look at them.

[Assistant]
Your eyes consist of two types of receptors called rods and cones.
Cones are good for high detailed and colour visual perception while rods are good better to detect movement especially in low light.
There's usually more rod receptors in your peripherals.


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

[User] ELI5: why are our voices deeper in the morning and more prone to cracking when trying to talk in a higher pitch?

[Assistant] I always thought it because our vocal cords relaxed while we slept, in effect making them longer and therefore producing deeper sounds. Like if you pluck a longer string you get a deeper sound than if you pluck a shorter one.


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

[User]
ELI5: What exactly do the UK porn filters do?

I can still browse porn like I could before... So... Why is everyone so mad?

[Assistant]
They only exist in the bigger ISPs, and only apply to new installations.

They work by compiling categories of websites, and refusing access to sites which match those. Based on the blocks in place, Claire Perry MP and others in support feel that children suffering from gender identity/sexuality issues, or wanting information on drugs, or eating disorders should be denied this information. Because that always helps resolve problems.


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

[User] ELI5 If we know what chemicals make us happy and how, why cant we create a food or something that keeps us in a good mood permenantly without ruining our dopamine receptors?

[Assistant]
We are only just scratching the surface in our understanding of how the brain works. We have seen that activating the dopamine and serotonin receptors tends to make people happy. But, there is an ocean-sized gap between that basic understanding and making a drug that will always make people happy with no side effects.

It's entirely possible that the human brain simply isn't capable of maintaining a permanently happy mood without long-term damage. It might be like trying to run a car at top-speed all the time and not expect the engine to break down.


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

[User]
[LotR] What evidence of the first, second and third ages remains extant to present day?

Say I'm a billionaire with a passion for archeology and the Red Book of Westmarch. If I wanted to find evidence of the world the book posits actually existing, where should I look? Further, what should I be looking for both on Earth and off of it.

[Assistant]
The most obvious should be Venus. The Star of Erendil is supposed to be just that. That's both a relic of the Year of the Trees as well as the First Age since the Silmarils predate the First Age.

The other place I'd go looking for relics would be the ocean. Both Numenor and Beleriand got sunk and there should be some remnants of them in the oceans still. Nargothrond, Menegroth and Gondolin could be home to some pretty dope coral reefs.


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

[User]
CMV: Instead of an effort to keep immagrints out from Mexico, we should just fix Mexico.

This is something I've never heard anyone suggest so there may be something im not seeing that would render this idea obsolete.

But atm it makes sense to me to just fix the issues that make people want to leave Mexico in the first place like the corrupt government and Drug Cartels.

An argument i made to myself against this is idea that people would complain about not helping other countries and why we should only help Mexico. They are our neighbors and our country is almost as Mexican as it is American, especially in the south, i live in Texas and Mexican culture is so dominant here.

Now, I also can think of reasons why some wouldn't want to help, and thats for their own profit. Fixing Mexico would cease a lot of dirty money pipes and black market operations that make a lot of people rich. Also racism and fear.

[Assistant] If we really wanted to fix Mexico wed have to do more than give them money etc. By doing so we could be infringing upon Mexicos sovereignty unless the Mexican government asks us to do so and even then its iffy. Global politics is just messy and you never know what could lead to conflict.


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

[User]
Steps to becoming a professor?

Hi Academia! I'm currently getting my MS in Biology (Evolution and Ecology) and am trying to put together a plan for my future. I have 1 year left and then to defend my thesis. I will most likely go on to my PhD after, though I'm newly married so we have to figure out plans for a baby maybe in the next year or so and everything else as well. I enjoy research and recently discovered I really enjoy teaching people about biology. I answer a lot of questions here on Reddit, have done the same on other forums and mostly seriously love science. I think it's incredibly important and I like to pass that knowledge on! I'd love to become a professor and was wondering if anyone had any pointers? A few questions I can think of right now:

* I am not currently a TA or GA for my school, but will try for it for my PhD. I applied but didn't get it for my MS. Is it absolutely necessary though for future teaching?

* Do I need to take education courses or does it not matter if you have enough research from the PhD and Post Doc?

* What are the hardest parts about getting a position?

* Anything else I should know that I'm not even thinking of?

I know I've got a ways to go, but if I can start preparing now it'd be great. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

EDIT - I know there is a difference between teaching a classroom and just enjoying teaching in general. I'd like to split my time between teaching and research.

[Assistant]
>What are the hardest parts about getting a position?

There are very, *very* few of them, and you'll be in competition with people who are more established than you.  People with a solid grant history and a list of publications as long as your arm.


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

[User]
ELI5: How do copper wires and fiber optics (light) transmit data?

 Hi,

I  am currently studying computer networks and I have been reading about  how data is transmitted via copper wires and fiber optics.

I understand the very basics of computers, data, logic gates and binary code.

However,  currently I am struggling to wrap my head around how data can be  transmitted by copper/light? It just does not make sense to me!

Can someone shed light on this?

[Assistant]
Consider that you and a friend are on two hills far enough that your voices cannot carry but within sight of each other. You both have flashlights and know morse code. So by flashing the lights at each other you can send messages (ie data).

Instead of flashlights, assume you have a wire between the hills and one side has a switch and the other a lamp operated by that switch. You can now send the same data by flicking the switches on and off according to morse code.

Now replace the wire by a long internally reflective tube. By flashing a light on one end, the flash appears on the other, so you can send messages again.

This is how copper wire and fibre optics work - just an agreed upon method to interpret the on-off signals. As long as both parties agree what certain sequences mean, then you can send information.


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

[User] can we perceive without interpreting?

[Assistant] Jacob Bronowsky discusses this a bit in *The Origins of Knowledge and Interpretation*. The illustration he gives is the way that the eye converts light into the electrical signals that transmit it to the brain where it's reconstructed as images. The general implication of all this is that perception is, itself, an act of interpretation. Take away that interpretation of light into synaptic signals, and we're no more perceptive than a stone.


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

[User]
CMV: Despite the court ruling, public officials blocking social media users is NOT a violation of the First Amendment

I today read about a lawsuit filed against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for blocking twitter users. I then backtracked to New York court rulings on Trump blocking twitter users, deeming it unconstitutional, in violation of the first amendment. So its a court decision thats going to be a problem for elected officials of both parties. I just dont see how using a feature on a privately owned website violates the First Amendment. No journalists are censored because Trump blocked them. An individual is not being censored because another chooses not to interact with them on social media. Even if you are a public figure, social media isnt some state-sanctioned political forum. I dont see how its any different from a public figure blocking a phone number. Also, blocking a user from a page does not prevent access to that page. I would say it could count as censorship if say, someone like Trump or AOC could use the block feature to prevent a target IP from accessing a site, but you can still get on to someones twitter or Facebook if only your account is blocked.

I think this court decision was made more to take a stab at Trump than anything else, but is long term going to be an inconvenient rule that will just be an annoyance for tons of people from any side of the political spectrum. Furthermore, I feel this will be heavily exploited by people who use the first amendment specifically to agitate with legal protection. Trolling and brigading are just a common thing on social media, and preventing political officials from making the choice to block people for any reason just gives agitators more righteous authority, and doesnt really protect any of our freedoms. On what grounds is this unconstitutional?

[Assistant]
This is one of those situations where it is very important to read the actual decision, rather than what the talking heads are saying about it.

There is a very important, but rarely mentioned, aspect of First Amendment law regarding _public forums_.  The gist is that when the government establishes a public forum for discussion of ideas, policy or action, the government does not have the ability to stop people from contributing to that public forum simply because they dislike the viewpoints being presented.  This was held in _Manhattan Comm. Access Corp. et al v. Hallek et al_ (among other cases) which said:

>When the government provides a forum for speech (known as a public forum), the government may be constrained by the First Amendment, meaning that the government ordinarily may not exclude speech or speakers from the forum on the basis of viewpoint...

This lays it out pretty clearly - if you _as a government actor_ have a public forum, it has to be a _public_ forum and you lose the right to kick people out simply for disagreeing with you.

The court, in this case, determined that the nature of the @realDonaldTrump account was a public forum - the POTUS uses it to announce official decisions and _openly allows_ discussion of those decisions in the comments section.  Moreover, it is used by people _other_ than Trump himself to announce official business from the White House or official positions of the POTUS _acting in their official White House capacity_.  Regardless of when the account was created or for what original purpose, its _current_ usage is that of a public forum to announce and discuss Presidential actions.

Since it was determined to be a public forum, the existing restrictions around public forums apply - you can't stop people from voicing their opinion in that forum simply because you disagree with what they have to say.  That would limit their ability to redress the government, and that violated the First Amendment.  Yes, maybe they can use work arounds to deal with this, but the point is they shouldn't have to do that, no matter how light the burden of doing so may be.  If the government provides a platform for people to discuss its actions (and the @realDonaldTrump account is clearly such a platform) then it can't add difficulty to people using that platform simply because it doesn't like what those people have to say.  People cannot converse with each other (or with the POTUS) using their established identities (accounts) and that is an undue burden that the government cannot impose.

This was a very logical decision based on existing case law.


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

[User] ELI5: How come when you film a computer or TV screen it appears to have black bars running through it that you never normally see?

[Assistant]
Simplest explanation is because of the way old monitors/TVs display their image at a slow frame rate and how the camera is recording at a different frame rate. During playback theyre out of sync so you start to see partial scans on the display.

Kinda like how a fast spinning wheel can look like its spinning backwards.


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

[User] ELI5:Why was Greenwich Mean Time changed to Coordinated Universal Time?

[Assistant]
It wasn't. GMT was changed to UT1.

GMT and UTC are actually completely different: GMT is time based on the *sun*. "Mean" in GMT refers to the fact that it is based on *mean* (i.e. average) solar time. On the other hand, UTC is *atomic* time, based on vibrations of radiation given off by atoms. At the precision of milliseconds, the Solar day is variable in length, Earth's rotation is slowing, and a solar day is no longer exactly equal to 86,400 seconds. These clocks therefore tick at different rates.

But it makes sense that atomic time should roughly agree (i.e., be "coordinated") with solar time for practical purposes. That is why, every once in a while, a leap second is added to UTC: to keep it within 1 second of GMT (or really, GMT's successor, UT1).

TL;DR: GMT (or really, UT1 now) is solar time, whose rate of flow is slower now than in the past, and varies at the level of milliseconds because of changes in the Earth's rotation rate. UTC is atomic time, with an absolutely constant rate of flow that must be periodically adjusted ("coordinated") to stay within 1 second of UT1.


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

[User]
If kids in Fallout and Skyrim are invincible, why don't we make armor made of children?

.

[Assistant]
Have you not noticed? You are special, you can kill a whole bandit camp no problem and heal the bullet to the face with a bottle of water. While most people are down and out with an arrow to the knee you take one to the balls, pull it out, spit on it, and shove it down your enemies throat. Facing 5 Super Mutants with Laser repeaters, no problem, you slow time down and somehow can carry every weapon for every occasion. Ever find it strange that a flying, spell breathing dragon always happens to land next to you for a fight?

Yes you are blessed, but with these blessings comes curses, like never being able to kill kids. Those little motherfuckers could chase you across the ends of Skyrim, or the Barren Wastes, and there would be nothing you could do but run.

So that is why you can't make armor out of the kids, they are no different than normal humans, but for some reason, as a cruel joke, or maybe as a way to mock your unmitigated  blood lust, the gods have cursed you with the inability to kill children.


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

[User]
Is it okay to create and name my own principles in my philosophy paper?

I was assigned a philosophy essay with a very traditional prompt. It's pretty open ended and has to be less than 2000 words. I kind of got carried away, becoming passionate about the question and I wrote what I think is a stellar paper. It's still less than 2k words, ready to be submitted, but I just feel like I was too pompous in a particular area. That's because I became proud of a main argument in my paper, so much so that I gave it a name like this: "Principle of *\[blank\]*". I even made an abbreviation for it so could reference it multiple times in my paper. I just feel like as an undergraduate student and someone who isn't even a philosophy major, I do not really have a place in putting that kind of material in the paper. Does anyone agree/disagree with this?

Part of the reason I have all this doubt is because it seems rather similar to what Peter Singer wrote in one of his books. He revolutionized the "Principle of Equal Consideration" of equal interests (PEC) and referenced it all throughout *Practical Ethics*. I can see that Singer absolutely has the privileges of doing this in his great book, but not me with this measly 5-page paper.

[Assistant]
This strikes me as a pretty tiny concern. Is the principle meaningfully defined?  Does it avoid being unnecessarily duplicative of something in a source you were supposed to use?  Is your use of it justified in the paper?  Does it help you answer the assignment?  Worry about the terms of the assignment, not some little technical move.

Instructor sensibilities differ, but this would not phase me at all.


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

[User]
CMV: We shouldn't group people into generations, because all it does it pit people against eachother.

The generation groups that are currently alive right now are the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millenials, and Generation Z

My view is that people should not be grouped into these kind of generations, because all that it does is turns people against eachother, and doesn't provide any benefit for any of the listed "generations"

The "generations" seem to love to criticize the generations older or younger than them and place stereotypes on them.

Some examples of generalization that I've heard (thru real life conversations and the internet):

"Generation Z is obsessed with social media and are always on their phones, have a short attention span, and are attention seekers"

"Millenials are self-centered, entitled, want everything handed to them, and are easily offended"

"Generation X is cynical, don't work well in teams, and have a negative attitude towards everything"

"Boomers ruined the economy, are spoiled, out of touch, stuck in their ways, and will never learn to use technology well"

"The Silent Generation places too much value on authority, are stuck in their ways, and are overly loyal to brands, and have out-dated opinions"

Obviously, these are just stereotypes and are not true for the majority of people of those "generations". Those sterotypes could also apply to anyone of any generation (for example, ANYONE can be cynical - not just generation X).

If there is any truth to these sterotypes, they may have more to do with human nature or age. For example;

Boomers and the Silent Generation are labeled as "out of touch, have difficulty with technology, and are stuck in their ways". But one day when Millenials and Generation Z are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond, we too will be "stuck in our ways" because as people get older, it becomes harder and harder to change your ways that you've known for decades. And there will be new technology by then that we too will have difficulty learning how to use.

Generation Z and Millenials are labeled as entitled, self-centered, with a short attention span. However I think that's more to do with being young. As we get older we will become less "self-absorbed". Bommers and the Silent Generation were also likely self-absorbed and entitled in their youth too.

All this negative labeling of the generation is just causing people to turn against eachother. How often do you hear the phrase "OK Boomer" on the internet followed by an article or meme criticizing a middle aged person's views or behavior. And how often do you hear the term "The young people of today ..." followed by a rant about how easy the young generations have it or criticizing their views or behaviour.

If society stopped group people into generations based on the years you were born, society as a whole would be kinder to people outside of their age group, because these dumb negative sterotypes would not exist. We could get along better at work and be more productive, and finally we would not get into useless arguments about young generations vs. Old generations.

[Assistant] But it's useful for tracking cultural changes.  For instance, the television technology and norms of boomers (not many networks, lots of shared experience), GenX (reruns, cable explosion, widely diverse experiences), and millennials (prestige TV, streaming, marathoning) is incredibly useful for studying how the medium changed and affected people in turn.


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

[User] ELI5:How did id Software's Quake engine lose ground in the '90s to where the Unreal engine became the game engine of choice?

[Assistant]
Unreal's Engine was, quite simply, available.

Id was massively successful at licensing the Quake engine.  The Q3 engine powered both the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Call of Duty, for example.

The problem was the next major release to come from the studio was Doom 3.  As Doom 3 suffered long delays, so did the release of the next id Engine.

Studios were faced with the choice of buying UE2, which was available to them immediately, or waiting who knows how long for the Doom engine to be finished and released.  As a result a lot of studios went with Unreal.

When it finally did release it had rigid hardware requirements that prevented older graphics cards from working with it, that competing engines didn't have.  It was also optimized for dark, spooky interiors (*a la* Doom 3) and had difficulty handling large, expansive outdoor environments, which meant it had narrow appeal.  This was the last version of the engine to be offered to external proprietary licensees.


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

[User] Why do matter and antimatter annihilate when they come into contact with each other?

[Assistant] Because each can turn into a particle with less mass in the process. That then increases the entropy of the system since there's more available ways of arranging the kinetic energy between the resulting particles.


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

[User]
eli5 Why were Blue LEDs so hard to make that the team that did it won a nobel prize in physics for it.

Why was it so difficult to make blue LEDs. It ook 30 years longer apparently to make them than red and green ones, and they won the nobel prize in physics for it.

[Assistant]
The actual invention of the blue LED was not that complicated and was not what won a Nobel prize. We figured out that adding magnesium to GaN would make a blue LED pretty early on.

The Nobel prize was won because the people figured out how to mass produce them.

The material behind the blue LED, Gallium Nitride (known as GaN) turns out to be a pain to make. Its a crystal that has to be grown right, and also really does not like impurities being added to it and will shatter if done wrong. Impurities are important in semiconductor physics, which works much due to doping, a process where other elements like magnesium are added to a crystal like GaN or silicon to change their conductive properties.

The Nobel prize was awarded for figuring out how to add the magnesium and other stuff into GaN without shattering it.

Interestingly, GaN has some very good properties otherwise and is currently being researched as a replacement for silicon in our computer chips, which will hopefully make them more power efficient and faster. Silicon is a decent semiconductor that is mostly used because it is easy to manufacture, GaN would likely have been used if it were easier to handle, which it now is thanks to the work of those researchers.


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

[User]
[The Devil Went Down to Georgia] How was the winner of the fiddle contest definitively decided?

The pieces both the Devil and Johnny play are so strikingly different to the point that you could argue your preference for either one. With no judges present, how did both agree that Johnny had bested the Devil?

Since he's infamous for, you know , being the Devil and more or less the centre of all evil why didn't he just declare himself the winner on account of personal taste?

[Assistant]
The Devil conceded. He's clearly an honourable gentleman who didn't anticipate actually losing.

Or arguably the Devil considered losing to be the better play. Isn't it pretty much implied that Johnny is still going to hell simply for making a deal with the Devil?


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

[User] ELI5: Why is customer service waiting music on the phone so low quality?

[Assistant]
Phones don't send audio at very high quality, just enough to allow you to understand what the other person is saying. In particular, a very common standard for phone call audio is 8 kbps, meaning you only get sound frequencies from 0 to 4000 Hz.

Now, 4000 Hz may seem pretty high (you can look it up), but all kinds of instruments and voices emit "harmonics", which means superposition of different frequencies. So even lower "pitches" can contain frequencies above 4000 Hz.

When you transmit audio over a phone, frequencies above 4000 Hz are cut, which not only cuts very high frequencies, but also "removes harmonics", making music sound "weird".


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

[User]
ELI5: Meth. Why is it so horrible and what does it do to people?

I have no experience with meth but I see it referenced often. Shows I watch portray meth in vastly different ways.

What's the true nature of meth ?

I'm never going to try it, just curious.

[Assistant]
It's so horrible because suddenly nothing else is of value anymore. You choose it over everything. It's always on your mind.

It does a variety of things to people. Being a stimulant it keep a you awake and suppresses appetite for around 24hrs. People often binge it so that this happens for days on end. They hallucinate and become paranoid, anxious because of sleep deprivation. They become incredibly thin and frail. Your cardiovascular system is under stress for a very long time, you overheat, you dehydrate, you forget general hygiene, your mouth begins to go red and sore.

Psychologically, it plays on your reward system, dopamine. This is where the addiction sets, as dopamine is released when we do basic survival stuff, eating, sex, etc. Soon enough the brain associates meth with this same survival reflex.


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

[User]
Why can't bots read Captchas?

I've just always wondered.

[Assistant]
In short: Captchas are designed to be unreadable for machines, hence bots shouldn't be able to read theb (but they are gettin better at it).

Programs that transform images into text face the problem that they get is in essence a big grid of color values. It says "well, pixel (x,y) is pretty black, pixel (x+1,y) is kindof grey ..." and so on. It isn't possible for the computer to look at the whole image as a human does. Instead it traces pixels that border on other pixels which have a large difference in color. This way it detects edges.

These edges give you some shape you can work with, for example, you might get four lines, one is a long vertical one, the other three are horizontal and shorter. Two of these intersect the vertical one, while one doesn't connect. Using some kind of pattern recognition your program could recognize this as an 'E'. However you have to account for small errors that occur during edge detection. This works well enough (but not perfectly) if you give the program a nice scan of a black and white, printed document.

You run into problems pretty quickly when you encounter low resolution scans, skewed lines or worse, handwriting. The latter is especially difficult to recognize, since letters aren't uniform. Some methods that work are programs that simulate neural networks, that can learn how to read a specific handwriting with some training.

Captchas try to distort text in such a way that computers cannot recognize it, by advertently introducing the problems I've mentioned above. For example, if you take a text like "Foo" and run a horizontal black line below the text and a vertical white line through one of the 'o's, the program will probably be trown off course and read something like "Eeo". Most of the time humans can read it, but somtimes even we fail. That shows us how good these captcha-bots have  become.

Because bots are getting better at reading texts, captchas are moving away from text to things that are much harder to do on a computer. For example challenges such as "find the animal that is not a cat" while presenting you eight dogs and one cat. Easy for a human but very difficult for a machine.


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

[User]
ELI5 why do we have to install a specific Android OS for a specific phone when we can install Windows or Linux on any machine(x86) and expect it to work without too much problems?

Like, If want to install a custom rom(LineageOS) for my Galaxy s9, I have to use a build specifically built for the s9.

But when I go to install Windows10 or a Linux distro on my laptop, I can use one version of to install on any x86 machine.

Why do we need to make specific versions of android operating systems per android phone?

[Assistant]
In comparison to phones, computers are very standardized in terms of their software architecture. Computers also enjoy an advantage in that an OS manufacturer (like Microsoft) can include a whole host of drivers to work with any combination of hardware, even if you don't use them all.

Phones don't have that advantage. Consumers want their phones to be fast, lightweight, and streamlined- and the hardware on them is fixed. That means trimming all the excess fat off an OS so it fits exactly to a specific phone and its hardware, not to mention adding carrier-specific tweaks and features as selling points.

The trade off is that by doing that you lose a lot of compatability as each manufacturer's flavor of Android ventures farther and farther from the original software.

It's an interesting example of real world evolution. Phone software too far removed from the original OS isn't compatible with it, while animal species with common ancestors too far removed from each other can't interbreed.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why exactly will the sun expand?

I'm trying to learn more about astrophysics, and one thing I can't wrap around is how the sun and other stars will expand near the end of their lifetime. The reason people give is that when the hydrogen in the core depletes, a star fuses heavier elements together and therefore the inner pressure "wins" against gravity.

What I don't really understand is how fusion of heavier atoms would increase the pressure. Wouldn't that mean that fusing them together creates more energy than the fusion of hydrogen? Which isn't true if I understood fusion correctly.

[Assistant]
You have it backwards. The higher pressure *causes* the fusion of heavier nuclei (not atoms - electrons don't stick to nuclei at the temperatures found in stars).

More precisely, the chain of events looks like this:

* Before a star is born, a hydrogen cloud slowly collapses under its own gravity. Initially, this raises pressure and temperature at the center.
* Once the pressure and temperature at the center get high enough, hydrogen fusion ignites. That fusion produces a lot of energy, which makes the core very hot. And as you probably learned in high school chemistry, heating a gas increases the pressure it exerts. (Okay, technically the material here is a plasma, but the same laws more-or-less apply.)
* Because higher pressure increases fusion rate (and thus energy output) and lower pressure decreases it, the inward pressure of gravity and outward thermal pressure reach a stable equilibrium.
* This stable equilibrium lasts throughout the star's time on the main sequence. As fusion products (mostly helium nuclei) build up in the core, the fusion gets less efficient, which means gravity wins out just a little, increasing the star's core temperature until the outward pressure rises enough to counterbalance it again. From the outside, this manifests as stars getting slightly hotter (and thus slightly larger, since the higher temperature puffs up their outer layers) as they age.
* Near the end of the star's life, so much helium has built up in the core that hydrogen fusion slows down enough that the core collapses to a very high density, much higher than in previous stages.

What happens then depends on the star's size:

If the star is quite large (about twice the size of the sun or more), this is enough to raise the pressure and temperature enough to ignite helium fusion, which raises the star's energy output and re-establishes the equilibrium that had persisted throughout its time on the main sequence.

But for smaller stars, we need a little more physics.

Up until this point, the thermal pressure from the extremely high temperatures from the energy released by fusion has been the dominant force holding a low-mass star up. But as the pressure rises higher and higher, the nuclei in the core begin to physically run out of space.

It's a general rule of particle physics that two particles (more properly, fermions) can't be in the same place at the same time *at the same energy level*. So when the space runs out, the nuclei in the core have to jump up to higher energy levels - they can no longer stick around in their ground state. (Imagine, say, a stadium that fills up so people have to start sitting on each others' laps.) Pushing particles up to those higher energy states, and keeping them there, "consumes" some of the pressure that would normally be compressing the matter further - or, as we usually think of it, results in an extra outward pressure on top of the thermal pressure that has been involved so far. This extra outward pressure is called *degeneracy pressure*, and it quickly comes to be the *main* force stopping further collapse (outstripping the thermal pressure pushing outward).

This continues until the pressure and temperature get so high that that helium fusion ignites. But *unlike* the earlier ignitions, this ignition *doesn't* immediately establish an equilibrium, because thermal pressure is no longer doing much. If you have 1000 units of degeneracy pressure and 1 unit of thermal pressure, then even heating the core by a factor of 100 doesn't change things much - you go from 1001 units of total pressure to 1100. So once fusion ignites, there's a temporary runaway reaction that isn't stopped by a new equilibrium for a relatively long time in particle physics terms (a couple of minutes). This is called a *helium flash*, and for those couple of minutes, the star produces energy at a rate comparable to whole large galaxies.

Eventually the flash makes the core so hot that thermal pressure once again becomes the main force, reestablishing the equilibrium.

In either case:

* Now that helium fusion is lit, the outward pressure from fusion (possibly assisted by degeneracy pressure depending on the star) re-establishes the equilibrium from earlier - but the output of the now-very-compressed core is much, much higher. That causes its outer layers to puff out, since there's more outward push from the energy flowing from the core. (This actually makes the star's *surface* cooler, because it's spreading an increased energy output over a drastically increased area.) The star is now a red giant.


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

[User] [Halo Universe] If there wasn't a massive Covenant war happening, do most of the humans have pretty good quality-of-life? Do they live in a post-scarcity economy?

[Assistant]
Outer territories sent the majority of their resources to core worlds like Reach and Earth, and this had been going on for long enough that they had entered a state of more or less open rebellion. The Spartans' first deployments were against human targets.

While the insurrection never officially ended, these outer worlds were the first to be wiped out by the Covenant, so their priorities shifted.


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

[User]
[MCU] How much do the MK50/MK85 suits Weigh?

The armors are stored as nanobot dust inside of Tony's chestpiece. Even if the nanobots were stored with perfect efficiency at the density of Osmium the suit could at most only weigh a couple kilograms.

[Assistant]
Its mass isn't fixed.

I imagine it runs on the same weird physics that allows the Hulk to grow from normal human size to weighing several tonnes.

The Law of Conservation of Mass is more like a mild suggestion in this universe.


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

[User]
ELI5: How does the cooking method impact so much on the actual taste of the food?

Obviously I'm not talking about what you add during the different preparations, but just about the way you cook something.

Like boiling VS roasting broccoli. Boiled broccoli smells and tastes like death and despair, but the second you roast them they're absolutely delicious.

Or eggs, hard boiled eggs taste completely different from when they are cooked in a pan.

Or again meat, roasted meat is completely different from boiled meat even if you add little to no other ingredients during the cooking process.

[Assistant] There's something called a Maillard reaction involving browning food, browning happens when you roast in the oven or sear in a pan on the stove, that intensifies the flavor of food. You can't get that when you oil or steam something.


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

[User] ELI5: How air conditioners take hot and humid air, and make it drier and cold.

[Assistant]
Kinda hard to eli5

But basically 3 parts and a refrigerant.

A refrigerant is basically  a substance that can change it's temperature based on pressure so when you drop pressure it makes cold.

An air conditioner is a evaporator condenser and compressor.

The refrigerant gets compressed so it's at a high pressure. It then goes then goes to the evaporator, which usually has a small limiting valve at it's entrance. This takes the high pressure refrigerant and only lets some through.

The refrigerant is now lower pressure. It then literally sucks the heat out of the room as it moves through the coils. A fan usually blows over the coils to help spread the cold around.

The refrigerant heats up and eventually dumps it's heat at the condenser. This is the hot side of your air conditioner. Usually it faces or is completely outside of the area.

The refrigerant is compressed again. And it keeps going around.

This process is extremely efficient and can even be reversed. That's what a heat pump is.


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

[User]
[Back to the Future] Would Marty's family be more or less strangers to him in the "good end" timeline?

(Excuse if I flub something here, but I haven't seen these movies in a while.) But I know that Marty's post-first-movie family is better off and quite different from the movie's starting timeline, right? Would he have to tread lightly to not mention possible discrepancies from his timeline around them, or is there some timey wimey handwave for this whole situation? Would he even be comfortable here?

[Assistant]
There would be a lot of changes in his family, his actions completely changed how his parents see the world and themselves. However it seems that instead of little changes in the past completely altering every thing in the future, while details may be different, the broad strokes seem to remain. For instance, the McFly's still have the same children of the exact same age, they live in the same house, etc.... Perhaps the flux capacitor works to limit the amount of paradoxes that is possible by keeping things broadly the same.

So in the end, while there will be differences in what Marty remembers and what his "new" family experienced, they are still his family and he will fit in perfectly fine.


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

[User] [Ender's Game/WH40K]Ender Wiggin is given tactical command of an Imperial Warfleet. Given his success against the Formics, how does he fare against a Tyranid Hive Fleet?

[Assistant]
Ender beat the Formics because of his incredible ability to empathize with his event, to love them. And when he knows them so well that he loves them he utterly destroys them. Ender could never empathize with the single-minded all consuming hunger that is the Tyrannid hive. All he would feel from them is an overwhelming desire TO EAT.

That said he is also an extremely capable tactician, and could doubtless become a very high ranking Admiral. He couldn't end the war of course, but he could definitely cause considerable trouble for the Nids.


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

[User]
[Jurassic Park] What ever happened to that sick triceratops?

During the ill-fated tour run, Dr. Sattler is talking to someone from the park, trying to figure out why the trikes get sick every 6-8 weeks. She thinks it's pharmacological, related to some nearby poisonous berries. She looks through the dino...dino-d-droppings? but can't find any evidence that the trikes have been eating them. It remains a mystery as they get back to the tour, and it's never really resolved due to the ensuing catastrophe.

So why were the trikes getting sick? Was this covered in the book? I haven't read it in years and I don't have a copy anymore.

[Assistant] Yes, this was covered in the book (though in the book it's the Stegosaurs that are getting sick.) The dinosaurs weren't eating them, they were accidentally consuming them when they swallowed gizzard stones and being poisoned that way. Many animals, apparently including Stegosaurs/Triceratops (depending on the version) regurgitate gizzard stones after they become smooth rather than excreting them-- if Dr. Sattler had investigated dinosaur puke rather than droppings, she would have solved the puzzle.


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

[User] ELI5: What causes trucks to get stuck on railroad crossings?

[Assistant] Often it's the grading (sideways tilt) of the railroad track which is at odds with the layout of the road, creating what's effectively a large bump in the road. Grading is needed to keep the trains stable in turns. Vehicles long enough that two sets of wheels can sit on either side of the bump, can get the bump jammed up their undercarriage. Shorter vehicles are lifted by the bump and roll right over.


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

[User]
[Transformers] Why are the new bots decepticons?

In "Revenge of the Fallen" Sam gets ahold of a piece of the Allspark, and when he accidentally creates new Transformers, they all appear to be evil and Decepticons.

 If the Fallen is the first Decepticon, that means Primes and perhaps Autobots too were older and the "standard setting". Is the Decepticon "mode" the standard setting these days?

[Assistant] The all spark creates new transformer life, "Decepticon" is a faction created by Megatron. They're the equivalent of wild monkeys flinging poo when they're brought to life by the allspark, only their poo is live ammunition. They work together because they must recognize each other inherently, and their instinct to assert dominance over any different life form, which is why they attack Sam.