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

[User]
ELI5: What exactly is a Super Solid?

Now, I know that Super Liquids, in a nutshell, cannot be contained after cooled pasted a certain point, meaning they will drip out of the container holding it, and will on occasion climb the walls of the container as well.

Upon looking for information about Super Solids, it looks like they share the same properties as a Super Liquid. If that's true, how does the Super Solid retain it's shape? If it's not true, what are they?

*Edit:* Is there a video showing properties of Super Solids in an actual experiment like there are for Super Liquids?

[Assistant] While physics predicts that supersolids exist - solid helium-4 being one example - the problem is that we actually don't have conclusive proof that supersolids exist. Helium-4 forms crystals at very low temperatures (that's the "solid" part), but for all other practical purposes it does behave like a superliquid.


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

[User]
ELI5: How the grass is still alive after being covered by snow for months?

Since it can't get any sunlight, how does it all not just die off?

[Assistant]
There is a rule in chemistry, for every 10oC you raise the temp of a reaction, you double the reaction rate.  The reverse is true, the colder, the slower the reaction.

Since it is so cold in winter, the metabolic reactions (the plant cells eating) are so slow, that a small amount of food is enough to hold the plant for the whole winter.


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

[User]
[Pokemon Games] What stops someone from buying 100 rare candies and beating the Champion and rule the world?

I'm basically asking what is stopping someone from carefully selecting a team and leveling it? Are the game mechanics and items just there for the players convenience or you really can teach Pokemon from CDs? And while we are at it why are Gyms usually specializing in type rather than stuff like speed and defense?

[Assistant]
Rare candy's increase the level,  but do not increase the bond with your Pokmon, nor does it give them the time and real experience to use their skills to their fullest, nor the trainer the same experience.

Gyms running by type is more a community aspect than a function. They gather people of like mind, and temperament that understand the abilities and care of the type of Pokmon and truly love them. If they were based on speed, or defense then people would focus on only the "best" or "most powerful" Pokmon instead of the companions they love.


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

[User]
I don't see the necessity for art and music education in schools. CMV.

In today's age of computers, technology, and a broadening of languages spoken America, we should be teaching our kids code and different languages as opposed to how to play "Do Rae Mi" on the recorder or the color wheel. In my opinion, art and music are hobbies. If a child wants to learn them on their own time, great. I just think precious school resources (especially public schools) are wasted on "the arts."

[Assistant]
> we should be teaching our kids code and different languages as
> opposed to how to play "Do Rae Mi" on the recorder or the color wheel

The purpose of school isn't only to prepare children to work. Learning a skill that will be useful in business, like coding, is important, but there is more to life than work. Music and the arts teach children about expression, feeling, and what it means to be alive.


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

[User]
ELI5: How does fast charging work?

And how is it different from normal charging/ different fast charging? (qualcomm quick charge 2.0/3.0)

[Assistant]
The limit on charging is down to how much power can be transferred into a phone.

USB standard is 5 volts, at 0.5 amps. Multiply those together and it gives you 2.5 watts.

Wall chargers tend to be higher amps, 1 amp, or even 2 amps, which would give you 5 or 10 watts. So two or four-times faster than charging with a computer.

The problem is you can't keep increasing the amps, because eventually it would start warming the cable up and you'd get limitations like that.

So 'fast chargers' became a thing. The phone has to be compatible, because what they do is abandon the 5V standard, and increase it to 9V at almost 1.7 amps. Multiply those together, and you get just over 15W, so it's six times faster than you'd get from charging with a computer.


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

[User]
[Borderlands universe] how do some enemies become badass enemies?

Is it like a position That you apply for or are you just born A badass?

[Assistant] By naturally rising to the top of the midget-eats-midget hierarchy in the bandit wasteland. By fighting rivals and threatening monsters, ordinary bandits "level up" the same way you do. Also, living on a planet mined for mutagenic ore helps too.


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

[User] ELI5: Why we don't see full black in night/close eyes but see random noise moving around?

[Assistant]
I suppose it could be visual snow, but more likely what you're seeing is called eigengrau.

To explain, the way your eyes see in dim light is for particles of light to enter the eye and strike the rods of the eye, specifically activating a protein called rhodopsin. This protein is extremely sensitive to light, which enables us to see in very dim light, but is also so sensitive that it can be activated by the heat of your body. Since, even in pitch black, some of this rhodopsin would be activated by the heat of your body, you see a dark grey when you close your eyes instead of pure black. When your eyes are open this dark grey is actually the darkest color you can see, your brain just  compares it to the other lighter objects around it and you interpret the object as a pure black.

True ELI5, your eyes can never see pure black because the chemical in your eyes that let you see in dim light is so sensitive they can activate from the heat of your body, making your brain interpret a dark grey instead of a pure black.


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

[User]
[Star Trek] Why are many of the species in the Galactic quadrant humanoid and sexually compatible?

Despite evolving in completely different systems, how is it that these different species are able to reproduce without great issue?

[Assistant] Humanoid species largely descend from the "ancient humanoids," as found by Professor Galen on Vilmor II. The aforementioned "ancients" seeded a number of worlds with their genetic material. Thus, Humans, Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, and even Cardassians are remote cousins.


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

[User] Why is 273.15 Celsius Absolute Zero? What's stopping you from going any colder?

[Assistant]
To overly simplify, lets say that a measurement of temperature is, more or less, a measure of how much the atoms in an object are jiggling about. The more they jiggle, the more they hit the things around them and make them jiggle, and the more some of the atoms get jiggled off and go on their own adventures.

Now, temperature can be measured on different scales. Fahrenheit is one, celcius is another... And kelvin is a third. "Absolute zero" is called that in reference to the Kelvin scale, where the lowest temperature is 0 Kelvin. (This is exactly the same as -273.15c, it's just a different way of showing it.) This temperature is where there is no energy in the object, which is to say, no jiggling of the atoms, completely still. So you can't go lower than that temperature for the same reason a stopped car can't slow down: there is no speed to reduce, no energy to lose, no temperature to drop.


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

[User]
[Jurassic Park 3] What killed the sailors on the boat at the start of the movie?

At the start of the movie the boat goes through fog and the two sailors are killed but what got them is never mentioned.

[Assistant]
I believe it is specifically alluded to be the pteranodons that we meet later in the film. That cage is pretty broken, and we see that the pteranodons prefer a foggy environment.

The group left a door open, but there are several individuals away from the island at the end of the film. It seems very very unlikely that the pteranodons would be intelligent enough to land outside of the door, walk through the little gate, and then open the door in order to escape. If they were that intelligent, they would have just slipped under the cage through the water like the gourp does.

It is far more likely that there are other ways to escape the cage already, and they keep their nests there to protect their young from the larger predators.


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

[User]
[Marvel] Could Wolverine's adamantium skeleton be recoated with vibranium to stop adamantium poisoning?

I was thinking, if Wolverine is suffering from adamantium poisoning, could recoating his adamantium skeleton with a different metal, say vibranium, stop the poisoning?

[Assistant]
Not a good idea. The one detail you rarely hear about Vibranium is that it is also highly mutagenic. It could spawn a potentially spawn a positive mutation in him, but it has been shown to have negative mutative effects like transforming people into monsters. Basically whenever Logan is exposed to any mutative materials (ie radiation, chemicals) his healing factor tries to fight it off, which taxes his body's healing factor  to the point the Vibranium toxicity could actually kill him. Also, the reason his body holds the Adamantium because his healing factor is always holding it at bay. He is essentially constantly dying of metal poisoning but that is offset by his healing factor. The only reason his body maintains and does not expel the Adamantium is because it is nigh indestructible. Vibranium is not (despite Captain America's shield being Vibranium and nigh indestructible, its actually a uniquely developed Vibranium alloy that ended up indestructible, they could never replicate it, and the based Adamantium off it) and his body could potentially expel it, causing lethal damage if it again taxes his healing factor.

Recently the X-Men subgroup The Five developed a cloning procedure to resurrect dead mutants, basically make a clone and telepathically reconnect your spirit to it. Wolverine had it done once already as he died in space in a massive explosion. Forge keeps a tub of liquid Adamantium to re-infuse him when needed, but technically they could skip this step and Wolverine would be Adamantium free.


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

[User] [Superman Returns] Why was Superman able to lift an entire island of Kryptonite?

[Assistant] Superman is as powerful as he needs to be, and out of sheer will alone he can push his body to limits even his anatomy can't take. He also went into a coma due to the exposure as well, so it's not like he came out unharmed.


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

[User]
ELI5: What is Berkshire Hathaway and how did it get so big?

I just dont understand how?

[Assistant]
It's an investment company, a company that buys other companies (or at least parts of them). It got big by making very very smart investments over a long period of time. Unlike day-traders (buy and sell quickly), or private equity (buy most of a poor performing company and fix it then sell it), Berkshire-Hathaway tends to place very long (years or decades) bets on companies that are already sound but undervalued and they believe will grow long term.

If you do this correctly, over and over for decades, you end up with a giant pile of money.


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

[User] ELI5: why do I need to take breaks between drinks of water, longer than it takes to take a breath?

[Assistant]
Gag reflex, the epiglottis (muscle that controls whether we breathe or swallow) takes a while to switch from covering your wind pipe to your stomach pipe within the oesophagus.

I could be reading your question wrong though...


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

[User]
Is there a relationship between Atmospheric Pressure at sea level and the Air-Fuel Ratio of a stoichiometric reaction in an internal combustion engine?

My automotive class at my trade school is currently covering Fuel systems and my instructor says that it's just a coincidence that the Stoichiometric air-fuel ratio (by mass) for an ICE is 14.7::1 and the atmospheric pressure at sea level is \~14.7 psi. I feel like there is more than just coincidence here.

[Assistant]
It's a coincidence, as air-fuel ratio is dimensionless, and the pressure at sea level can be expressed in other units (and it usually is, outside the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar).

If air-fuel ratio had a dimension, and it was multiple of psi, and converting it to another measurement system also resulted in the pressure at sea level in that measurement system, then you could find some relation between them.


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

[User]
ELI5: What happens to excess electricity?

When power plants make electricity I assume the always make above what is needed. What the hell happens to the excess that they make? Or if maybe we have a slow day and nobody is using their electricity.

I'm thinking about just every type of powerplant (hydro, nuclear, fossil fuel and steam)

[Assistant]
Nuclear reactor operator here.

When there is a little more power on the grid than is required, the grid frequency increases, and all devices on the grid use slightly more power to balance this.

As you have more and more excess power, grid frequency increases and the grid begins to go too fast. Power generators have a "droop" function which starts to reduce the power output of their generators to try and prevent a grid failure. If it gets bad enough then power plants start tripping offline and failing.

So For small periods of time with small amounts excess power, all the equipment on the grid is forced to accept a little more to balance it, usually this means more heat is dissipated in electronics.


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

[User] ELI5: What is Visa/Mastercard and why do all the banks use their cards?

[Assistant] Both Visa and MasterCard started off as a form of cooperative owned by banks and other financial institutions. Both have now floated as independent companies.  They built worldwide networks to support payment processing from just about every retailer. That's something that would have been absolutely insanely expensive for each bank to do on their own. Also imagine how crazy the tills would be if each bank had a terminal to process payments at the till!


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

[User]
When I accidentally step on my dog's foot does it know it was an accident?

So does my dog, or any other animal know what an accident is or do they see everything as intentional?

[Assistant] As social animals, dogs (as well as cats) have ways to defuse accidental conflict situations just like humans. You can see this deescalation behavior when, for instance, two individuals are play-fighting and one of them plays a bit too rough. Similarly, well-socialized pets learn to understand human apologetic gestures after an accidental misstep.


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

[User]
How Do You Guys Do It?

I Have Tried To Read Multiple books about philosophy  But I cant just conprehend anything  and i want to ask-How Do You Guys Deal With The Confusion The Feeling of not being able to understand....

[Assistant]
The same way people deal with the feeling of not being able to lift a given weight at the gym, only in the case of philosophy the issue is less of physical frailty and more of emotional frailty -- although there's some significant emotional frailty that comes up in the gym as well.

That is, one continues to train oneself by engaging in the work at hand, and in this process learns the lessons that such training provides, including the lesson concerned with the emotional improvements needed to be less bothered by this feeling.


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

[User]
During a woman's period, why is blood used as the medium to flush the system out rather than using a different fluid?

It seems strange that the system would use the most precious fluid in the body to flush out the system during a menstruation cycle. Wouldn't the production of a mucus be better?

[Assistant]
It's not actually blood.

The women sheds the wall of the uterus which has been thickening for the previous 15-20ish days. It just so happens that the uteren wall has to be full of blood vessels in the case that a fertalized egg attaches to it.

Lots of blood vessels means it will have a lot of blood in it, which gives it the characteristic red colour.


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

[User]
Interview at R1 university but research credentials are not extravagant

Background:  I am currently tenure track at a teaching university with ungodly course / service loads.  My goal is to do research and I have gotten an interview at a nearby university, which is highly focused on research.  However, my publications and funding are very nill.  I only published one paper in my PhD (a "current state of the art" review paper), and most of my other publications were internal reports at the company I worked for, not peer reviewed, and very dry, non-academic quality.  However, I have technical skills and super powers which is what probably got me the interview. I was wondering if anyone could give me tips that might help me out, or has been on a search committee at an R1 or similar.  My plan for the presentation is as follows:

 ~~Background on myself~~

~~Teaching, classes developed, course loads / pedagogy~~

~~Past technical projects (non published :( , but I have physical show and tell)~~

~~Current research focus and plan, and what I am working on~~

~~Current grants submitted~~

~~Future grants I am planning on submitting~~

Big question is whether to talk about my Ph.D. (nothing really came of it but it was neat), and what I need to be successful at the R1 (students, lab, start up funds, faculty interested in xyz ).

Anything else I should include or mention?

**Edit:**  Ok obviously glad I posted this.  FYI im in Electrical Eng.  So my PhD didnt really go anywhere (finished 2 years ago), so I guess I will present what I am working on now.  Unfortunately I dont have a lot of results yet. It is an idea in progress.  It would mostly be a technical talk about the idea, and how I am going to accomplish it. How about this

* Background on Tech  (5 min)

* Proposal ( 15 minutes )

* Strategy to accomplish it w/current work done ( 15 minute )

* Funding sources identified ( 1 - 2 slides )

* Broader impacts (plus: undergrad research, incorporate Ph.D. work, etc.)

* Research spin off ideas ( other things I can work on once this work is done )

* Beg for mercy and to be pulled out of my current hell hole ( 1 - 2 slides )

* Advanced Groveling Techniques ( 1 - 2 Slides )

Ok maybe not the last two.

**Edit 2**  Per your advice, I emailed the search committee.  The contact said include: "your research philosophy, your teaching philosophy, and show that you are going to write research proposals and state the research potential agencies"

[Assistant] One of the most important things we consider is the future research of a candidate. What intellectual contribution you will make during your CAREER? What are the funding agencies and specific programs you will target? What are the broader impacts of your research? How will you integrate our students into your research plan? Will you collaborate with other faculty in the department? These are some of the important questions that should be answered during your talk.


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

[User]
[Dragonball Z] (possible spoilers) could Goku have been allies with Broly?

I was watching and reading up on the movie when it occurred to me that Broly only hated Goku because of that crying moment when they were babies. Could they have been allies if that didn't happen?

[Assistant] Highly unlikely. Yes, he hated Goku because of the crying, but he was highly destructive due to his growing power and kept under control with the head piece. If you watched the flash backs before it was put on his head. He was a maniac that would just kill for the sake of killing. This clashes with Gokus belief system.


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

[User]
ELI5: Where does weight actually go when one is losing it? How can I go to sleep weighing 202 and wake up weighing 199?

So yeah... Always wondered this. During the process of losing weight, how does it actually leave your body? Does exercise convert it to waste and then you just get rid of it that way? If so, when losing weight, does one have to go to the bathroom a LOT more? How does it just magically disappear? It's always perplexed me.

[Assistant]
>how does it actually leave your body?

Primarily through your breath.  You breath in (some) O2, and breathe out (some) CO2.  The extra carbon in there comes from your body "burning" sugars, converting sugar + O2 into H2O and CO2, which you breathe/sweat/urinate out, as appropriate.

Fun fact, plants use a similar process in reverse.  That is, the solid bulk of trees is made up (mostly) from carbon in the air.  Thus trees grow from material in the air, not material in the ground as many people seem to think.


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

[User] Why do I feel more tired after 11-12 hours sleep than after 7-8 hours sleep?

[Assistant] Here's the real answer: your body goes through many sleep cycles, each lasting about 90 minutes. If you sleep for 7.5 hours (5 cycles) you will feel a lot better than if you sleep for 8 hours (in the middle of your sixth sleep cycle) even though you are technically getting more sleep. When you sleep later, you tend to be woken up (by light, sound, etc) in the middle of a sleep cycle, which causes you to feel tired. You should set your alarm so that you wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, accounting for how long it takes for you to fall asleep (around 14-30 minutes on average.) There are websites that will calculate when you should set your alarm so that you'll wake up at the end of a cycle.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why is Disney allowed to merge with all of these other big companies, most recently 21st Century, and not suffer from monopoly laws?

Just off the top of my head, they own Marvel, Lucasfilm, 21 Century, ESPN, ABC. How is this not considered monopolization in the eyes of the law?

[Assistant]
Monopolization is, generally speaking, when you control all (or a substantial portion) of a _market_ or _industry_.  Standard Oil was a monopoly because they controlled almost all of the oil industry; Microsoft was thought to be a monopoly because they controled 90% of the PC OS market.

Disney, even as big as they may be, controls only a tiny fraction of the entertainment industry.  There are many, many other companies producing entertainment, so they are not where near the level of market share you'd need to think of them as a monopoly.


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

[User]
Does the nutritional value of fruit or vegetables change as it ages/ripens?

For example, a banana... what nutritional changes occur in the carbs or other nutritional aspects as it goes from green to yellow to brown?

[Assistant]
The most unstable nutrient in bananas is vitamin C (aka ascorbic acid.)

Bananas are also a good source of vitamin B-6 (pyridoxine), dietary fiber, complex carbohydrates, starches and potassium. These don't tend to degrade over time. (unless the banana goes rotten.)

As the banana ripens, it converts some of the complex carbohydrates and starches into simple sugars, causing it to taste sweeter and also have  a softer texture.  Furthermore  the banana breaks down tannins and other compounds that cause the bitter, astringent "sandy" taste of green bananas.

Plants can synthesize new vitamin C from simpler compounds, but humans cannot. Which is why we require a steady intake of it.

Therefore as long as the banana stays fresh it generally retains it's vitamin c content.  Freezing or drying the banana kills the plants cells in the fruit and destroys most cellular activity.  So V.C. production stops and the level of V.C. drops over time.

For example, after several months of storage dried banana chips contain almost no V.C. that fresh bananas do.


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

[User] ELI5: How does Googles new AI work?

[Assistant]
It is called machine learning and is quite complex.

What it boils down to is that you break a problem into discreet parts, or steps.

You show the machine all the different steps it can do. Then you tell the machine what the desired "win" condition is.

It goes and compares all the different steps and series of steps to figure out the best way of getting to the win condition.

As these models get better and more generic, we can let the win condition be more vague and it has more freedom to learn how to get there.

It is entirely dependent upon structures called neural networks, which have an input layer, a hidden layer, and an output layer. The hidden layer is trained to give outputs to certain inputs.

For a board game training data might be all the moves of a bunch of games, and which player won. We don't actually know what the algorithm inside came up with, because we didn't tell it what to do.

It learned how to get to the "win" state by analyzing a bunch of data and coming up with its own pattern recognition to apply to new games.


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

[User] What causes ice to form on the De Lorean(Back to the Future) when it's used?

[Assistant]
It is the displaced gas at the target.  The Brown/McFly Causality Violation Generator, or CVG for short, does not have any means of removing material from the target location before arrival.  Thus, the air at the target location is suddenly, and massively compressed for a brief moment.  This compression causes a portion of the air to condense on the surface of the CVG.  As equilibrium is reestablished, the condensed gas evaporates/sublimates, drawing a quantity of heat from the CVG, rendering it cold.  Imagine if the CVG had been doused with Liquid Nitrogen just as it arrives.

This compression, and release is also the source of the thunder-like bang and bright flash of light that accompanies arrival.


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

[User]
CMV: Body Positivity doesn't mean you can walk around being morbidly obese.

Hi there people! So I was browsing through memes and saw people talking about being "shamed about being anti-fat". I don't understand that. You can't change the fact that you may not look exactly how you like, but you can easily become less fat. Being fat isn't good for your health, and you shouldn't be positive about it. It's okay to be a bit chubby, as long as you're healthy and can perform daily tasks + do moderate exercise/maintain a somewhat healthy body, but I find that being fat is bad. To clarify, I don't support people laughing at fat people at a gym, since they're trying to change and improve, but I don't think that people think it's OK to be morbidly obese and not care about changing themselves, and to have people trying to help be scorned for "fat shaming".

[Assistant]
>I dont support laughing at fat people at a gym

But the second they step out of the gym, its okay?

You have no idea whether or not any given person is working to improve themselves, or to adjust their behavior. They should not have to prove that they are before theyre safe from your scorn. Its just none of your business.


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

[User] It's said that some lobotomies, such as Rosemary Kennedy's, were performed on awake patients under local anaesthetic. What would a person have sensed or felt as a metal instrument was sweeping through their head?

[Assistant] While the brain is obviously at the heart of nocioception, it does not itself contain what would be called pain receptors. Almost all modern brain surgeries are done with the patient awake. So in a sense the brain feels no pain, yet feels all the pain.


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

[User] ELI5: What is cellphone unlocking? Why is this issue all of a sudden so pertinent?

[Assistant]
When you buy a cheap cell phone ( with a 1 or 2 year contract ) you're only paying a fraction of the phone's cost in advance. The rest of the cost is included in your monthly payments.
The carrier who sponsors your phone wants to keep you as a customer so they 'lock' the phone so it won't take a SIM card from another carrier.
So when the term of your contract runs out you'll be forced to stay with your current carrier or you will have to get a new phone.

It's been legal to remove this lock from your phone for quite some time. But recent legislation in the united states has made it illegal to remove these locks. Which is kind of strange. Because once your contract is up you've paid for you phone in full and it should be yours to do with as you please.


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

[User]
ELI5: How do bonsai trees survive hundreds of years in such proportionately small pots?

Every time i see a bonsai tree i'm left wondering how it survives hundreds of years, period, but more-so how the plant takes decades to get 'root bound' as in there's not enough room for the roots and the soil becomes hard, which happens more often for usual houseplants.

How do people get around that issue that is prevalent with all other houseplants?

[Assistant]
Bonsai trees basically require two things.

1. Stunting the tree's growth by cutting roots and such. Trees are resilient in that if they can survive, a lack of nutrients will just result in a really small tree
2. A lot of care to keep the tree in the sweet spot where it's undernourished but healthy. That includes frequently refreshing the soil to keep it from becoming hard.


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

[User] ELI5: How does Spotify pay artists?

[Assistant]
I worked for a now-dead streaming service.  We would keep track of what we played, and give money to the labels based on whatever payment schedule we had with them.  It was then up to the labels to pay the artist.

The same rate was paid whether it was a popular or an obscure artist.  Some labels it was by plays, some it was by seconds streamed, and others had a combination.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are Greying or White Beard Hairs Longer and More Wiry than Regular Hairs?

[Assistant] It's because the whole reason those hairs have gone white in the first place is because the root has become damaged, most likely from age. This results in a porous transparent hair with no pigment in it, and that makes it stiffer and less flexible than the undamaged hair.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do headlines and titles avoid words like "Are" or "The"

English is not my first language so this is pretty confusing for me. Headlines and titles always seem so excessively brief to me. For example, they would say

"Boy rescues children from fire"
Instead of the more correct sounding
"A boy rescues several children from a raging fire"

[Assistant]
Headline Brevity "Efficient"

Officials: Short Headlines Use Less Space

Print News: Headline Space at Premium

Editors: Articles, Prepositions "Implied By Context"

Here's some extra text just so this sub doesn't auto-mod me for using too few words.


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

[User] [Batman] With the batcave being full of literal bats, isnt Bruce at all worried about rabies? Is he just constantly getting shots?

[Assistant]
The part of the cave that holds the bat population is different from the one Batman uses. Those that wander into Batman's lair are usually lost, or otherwise got separated from the group, and aren't a health risk. Alfred has sometimes gently shooed them away, otherwise they wander off on their own.

For the most part, the bats are kept separate by the cave's natural geography. Batman keeps his operations in an area that doesn't have a convenient way to fly outside and catch bugs at night, so the bats are content to live in areas where it's easier to do so. The caverns beneath Wayne manor are quite extensive.

In addition, the cave has been separated with different artificial barriers to ensure the bats don't mass migrate deeper into batman's base. Metal plates or faux-rock formations usually keep the aforementioned lost bats from even getting into the batcave in the first place. Sometimes there are even sonic emitters in the batcave that constantly produce a noise that humans can't detect, but repel bats quite effectively.


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

[User] What is more corrosive, something with pH 1 or 14?

[Assistant]
pH is the measure of hydrogen ions in solution. Whether or not this is corrosive is dependent upon the material in question. Additionally, the scale can easily exceed 14 or 1. Concentratrated sulfuric acid has a pH of 0.1, ~~and anything with a lower pH is called a "super acid".~~ but stronger acids do exist, called "super acids".

Consider HF, hydrofluoric acid. It is considered a weak acid. With a 0.1M concentration, it is expected to have pH around 2. Compare this to 0.1M HCl which should have a pH of around 1--or ten times more hydrogen ions in solution.

However, 0.1M HF is considered much more dangerous than 0.1M HCl. While the HCl is more acidic, the F^- ion of the HF is much more dangerous than the Cl^- ion. HF can easily penetrate the skin and cause burns which aren't visible until the next day. HF can also be absorbed into deeper tissue and cause cardiac arrest.

Also of interest, passivation of acids. Fuming nitric acid reacts with less volatility than normal lab nitric acid with copper, despite the fuming acid being more concentrated.

In short, pH is a measure of something, like how meter is a measure of length. What's better to hit someone with? A 30cm stick of hardened wood, or a 2m long foam pool noodle?

Edit: slight mistake regarding definition of super acid. Also fixed a typo.


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

[User] ELI5: How do Geodes form and why are they hollow?

[Assistant]
When rocks get really, really, *really* hot, they turn into a liquid... but it isn't always a runny liquid like water. Most of the time, in fact, it's much thicker; almost like pudding. (You wouldn't want to eat it, though!)

Now, deep beneath the Earth's surface, there's *a lot* of liquified rock sloshing around, and sometimes, it gets forced up to where we can see it. It quickly cools and solidifies at that point, but before it does, it often traps bubbles of air within it.

If these pockets of air are in the right place, are the right shape, and are left alone for long enough, rain and other weather will very slowly fill them with water. That water will drain away just as gradually, and it will leave behind tiny deposits of minerals. Some of these minerals are called "silicates" (the same stuff that sand is made out of), and as they build up, they form into crystals. Calcium carbonate is another mineral that can seep in and grow into crystals, but the popular purple geodes  what we call "amethyst geodes"  are silicates.

That purple color is actually irradiated iron. (Don't worry, though: Iron is the most-stable element that we know of, so even the irradiated sort is usually less radioactive than even carbon.) Just like the silicates, the iron is brought into the air pockets by water... and after many, many years, the substances bind together to create the purple crystals that we all know and love.

That takes a very long time, of course, and *usually*, there's some empty space left over in what used to be the pocket of air. That's why geodes are hollow!


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

[User]
ELI5: Best way to maintain control while hydroplaning

When driving home in a God awful rain storm a few hours ago I realized my reaction time to hydroplaning is piss poor. I over correct by jerking the wheel to get out of the water while simultaneously letting my foot off the gas to slow down. Call me a grass pokemon attacking fire cause it's not very effective.

 What is the best way to maintain control while hydroplaning?

[Assistant]
Whatever you just did... stop doing it. This applies for skids, hydroplaning, whatever. Hit your brakes and it happened? Let off the brakes. Started turning and it happened? Straighten the wheel.

in your case, don't jerk the wheel, but do let off the gas. And don't hit the brakes. The water will slow you down once you let off the acceleration, your tires will drop back to control surface, and then you can slowly drive through it under control.


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

[User] What is the purpose of the fuzz on a peach?

[Assistant] Fuzz on a peach helps to be protected from infection, which is called brown rot. It is the cause of putrefaction of fruits in those places where the skin is damaged. Therefore, if peach more shaggy, it is stored longer!


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

[User]
If Gravity Is Not a Force, but the Curvature of 4D Spacetime, Why Do We Want to Unify It with the Other Fundamental Forces?

Gravity always seemed to be the hardest force to tie into the bunch of the 4 fundamental ones, but gravity is also the only force for which we go out of the way to claim that it's just a result of curvature in 4D spacetime and that it isn't really a force.

So, if it actually isn't a force, why are we so keen on unifying it with the three leftover forces in the pursuit of a "Theory of Everything"?

[Assistant]
Because this curvature is still describing a classical phenomenon.

Think of this.  Maxwell's equations describe electromagnetic interactions as interactions with fields and charges.  That's the classical view.  But quantum electrodynamics (QED) describes it as charged particles exchanging photons (quanta of the electromagnetic field).  How do we know QED is better? Experiments see discrepancies from the classical interpretation.

The curvature of space-time is related to the gravitational field, again a classical field.  We expect this to be an exchange of gravitons between masses(quantum gravity), but we haven't noticed any discrepancies between reality and Einstein's equations yet because these things would occur in very strong gravitational fields which we don't have access to.


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

[User] Why is it when people are completely paralysed, the only things they can move is their eyes? What makes the eye muscles different to any other muscles?

[Assistant]
If its paralysis due to a spinal cord injury the eyes and the associated muscles are above the break in the spinal cord causing the injury and are thus unaffected.

If its sleep paralysis, while you sleep you enter different phases of sleep,and in some of those phases your eyes rapidly move so when you sleep your eyes are never paralyzed, whereas in order to prevent you from injuring yourself while sleeping your muscles tend to be frozen by your brain thus when you wake up you can move your eyes but not your body.


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

[User] ELI5: Why does the vacuum of space have a temperature at all? What is it that has the temperature?

[Assistant] Its the temperature that a perfect black body will heat up to if you left it in that spot. It has a temperature because light can heat up objects, but objects also emit light as they heat up. An area of space in our solar system will be receiving a certain amount of light from the sun, which will cause an object to heat up until it is hot enough that its own radiation balances with that its receiving from the sun. That temperature can be thought of as the temperature of that area of space.


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

[User]
Eli5: Why do some sounds, like dragging your nails on a black board, make us queasy?

I personally can't stand hearing the noise of a felt tipped marker pressed hard on paper while writing or drawing something down, as my body feels really cold all of a sudden and I feel queasy. What is the reason behind this? Does it have an evolutinary explanation that can be explaimed like I am five?

[Assistant]
This is actually a **fascinating** question with an equally interesting answer.

So you know how most primates live in groups, right? Well, most have a scream that pretty much means "get the fuck out, something bad is going down" to signal about predators or other serious danger. Obviously early humans killed most of our closest species, but our closest relative alive today has a scream that hits frequencies very similar to the chalkboard sound (and they also someone's don't like the chalkboard sound).

Also, it's been shown that people have different levels of reaction to the chalkboard sound, and that it seems to be at least partly inherited (i.e. if one person in your family isn't bothered by it, you probably aren't either).

The hypothesis is that humans used to have an instinctive "get the fuck out" scream too, but that it's no longer important and we've more or less completely lost the ability to do it. However, the instinctive reaction to go on alert (uncomfortable, hair standing up, suddenly feeling anxious) when hearing the scream is still there in some/most of us. The chalkboard screech and similar sounds just happen to be close enough to our ancestors' panic scream that they can trigger it.

Does that make sense?


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

[User]
CMV: there should be no politicians that are in the last 10-15% of their conceivable lifespan.

What this means is that, if the average age of death in the United States is 78-80, than no one above the age of 70 (to give a round number) should be allowed to make decisions on a wide scale.

I know many divisive, politically-minded individuals will disagree with me on this (especially in the climate we find ourselves in currently in the US) but realize this would disqualify BOTH Trump AND Biden from office.

The reasons are as follows:

Psychological Readiness and Energy

\-the older you are, the slower you get.  No one is going to argue that someone in the 70's or 80's is as sharp as someone in the 50's; it's just a foregone conclusion.  Taking out those of that are of this advanced age would stop both sides from wanting "cognitive tests" and whatnot for either side, claiming that neither is fit for office.  (I'm obviously citing Biden and Trump here as examples).

Personal Lifelong Preferences, Beliefs, and Attitudes

\-generally, as we become older, most people become "set in their ways".  There's a reason this is a saying; it's because it's true.  Quite often this means your viewpoints, attitudes, and choices all become psychologically embedded, being unable to break into a newer way of thinking and feeling because you're just "set in your ways".  This can be EXTREMELY damaging when it comes to making decisions for people on a large scale because your beliefs may not be the most helpful and because you wield so much power, you could be damaging to progress even when you're not intending to be.  You have an inability to open your eyes to new ways of thinking, fresher ideas, and ultimately are stifling younger generations from getting what they want and deserve.

"Clogging Up the Line"

\-everyone is going to die someday.  The longer that people wait to retire and move on, the more it's backing up every movement forward for us in society.  Politicians don't seem to have a retirement age; they're like someone that's very much into the retirement space, but they also get to dictate policy and make grand decisions.  Younger people aren't going to want to move into politics on a regular basis until the oldest folks simply go away.  Right now, you have the "Silent" and "Boomer" generations of people just... hanging around FAR longer than their predecessors did.  It's nice that people are living into their 90's+, but SERIOUSLY, "Boomers" came into politics in their 40's back in the 80's and have just NOT MOVED ON.  They've had power so long that Generation X has been nearly completely overlooked and now Millenials are being looked to as the next ones to takes up the mantle.  But... Boomers keep wanting power, keep wanting to stay, NOT retiring.  (I'm looking at you, Mitch McConnel).

Now, I know people are going to argue "well, WISDOM comes with age, and you can't manifest that; you have to have gone through it", and to this I say... BULLSHIT.  That's not true.  There are many, MANY examples of older people simply making stuff up as they go along, lying, getting lucky in the outcome of something, and purporting that "hey, with age comes wisdom; that's how I knew things would turn out this way".  You don't have to be old in order to make good decisions, you just need to be logical and unbiased, which is asking quite a lot from an older individual.

By simple having a MAXIMUM AGE someone can be involved in policy making (70, which is OLD mind you), the more we would have FRESH, YOUNG, BOLDER and, (most importantly), APPLICABLE viewpoints to work with when it comes to the US being representative of the future and NOT the past.  The average age of those in Congress shouldn't be 65+; it, at MOST, should be 50.  Boomers didn't have to wait... and wait... and wait for those before them to simply retire so that things could MOVE FORWARD; when they were in their 30's and 40's, they would've been dealing with people only 15-20 years older than them AT MOST; not people nearly DOUBLE their age!  This divide is unprecedented in terms of the youngest citizens being forcibly effected by the oldest politicians beliefs, attitudes, and choices, and it's time to move on.  At this rate, Millenials are going to be in the 50's before they get any REAL, SUBSTANTIAL say in the way things go in this country, which is NOT what previous generations had to deal with.

Am I an ageist?  Honestly, I don't think 70 is asking too much from politicians to simple step aside and allow younger people to have their turn making decisions.  That's 5-7 YEARS past regular retirement age.  If you're drawing Social Security, you shouldn't ALSO be allowed to make decisions that could affect younger generations for decades to come (especially when you'll likely never feel the effects of those decisions long-term).  I feel like younger generations are being forced into being ageist because they're not able to get anywhere THEY want to go with older generations STILL controlling the narrative.

The line is clogged; unplug the line and retire, old politicians, regardless of your political affiliation.  You're being unfair to your children, grand children and sometimes your GREAT grandchildren by taking this long to stop pushing your old fashioned beliefs on all of us.  You weren't subjected to this divide for nearly this long, so why should we?  (I'm speaking as a 37 y/o btw.)

[Assistant] These arguments always strike me as decidedly anti-democratic. Voters keep choosing candidate you don't like, and rather than accepting that the electorate wants candidates with different qualities than you want from a candidate, you want to change the rules to disqualify the candidate you don't like. If people were doing this with qualities you value in candidates, you'd see it for what it is.


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

[User] ELI5: When a cheetah chases a gazelle, does the gazelle know that the cheetah wants to eat it or does it just perceive the cheetah as a generic threat that it needs to escape from?

[Assistant] There is no playing around in the animal kingdom - if something is chasing you, it isn't doing so to bust your balls or give you a purple nurple. It's coming to kill you, and usually not in a fast and clean fashion - the gazelle has lived its life watching its companions being eaten alive for failing to run fast enough to outrun the cheetah. Seems a pretty straightforward knowledge.


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

[User]
Is there a reason Beta Minus decay emits an antineutrino but Beta Plus emits a neutrino?

I am asking because I think it is curious that when an electron, matter, is released in the decay an antineutrino, antimatter, is released, but it goes the opposite way for a positron.

[Assistant]
Yup, conservation of lepton number.

Most people are aware of laws of physics such as the conservation of energy, momentum, and electric charge, but other things are conserved as well, such as various types of "quantum numbers". This includes things like "lepton number", "baryon number", iso-spin, etc. Conservation of lepton number means you need to have a balance in the "lepton" types in any reaction. You can't just create a solitary neutrino from an energy source, for example, you'd have to create a neutrino/anti-neutrino pair. Similarly, you can't just create an electron (ignoring the issue of charge conservation), you need to create balance the lepton number by creating an electron and an anti-electron.

These sorts of things are a big reason why stable particles are stable. A proton can't decay into anything lighter because it can't just get rid of its charge or its baryon number, and an electron can't decay because it can't get rid of its charge or its lepton number.

For every charged lepton (electron, positron, muon, anti-muon, etc.) there's a corresponding neutrino *with the same lepton number* (electron neutrino, anti-electron neutrino, muon neutrino, etc.) And this is what enables beta decay. If you have an excess of energy as well as an excess of negative electric charge you can create an electron along with an anti-electron neutrino (meaning you have +1 "electron" plus -1 "electron" in terms of "lepton number"). Charge is balanced. And lepton number is balanced.

This is precisely why muons *aren't* stable. Because they can just dump all their "stats" into lighter particles. They can dump their "muon-ness" (lepton number) into a muon-neutrino, they can dump their charge into an electron, but in order to create an electron it's necessary to create an anti-electron neutrino, together those three particles have all the same quantum numbers as a lone muon, but much much less rest mass, so it's an incredibly "downhill" reaction. This is why muons have a lifetime of only 2 micro-seconds.

This is also why anti-matter "annihilates" because the difference between a particle and an anti-particle is that they have opposite quantum numbers (opposite charges, opposite lepton number, opposite baryon number, as relevant, etc.) That means when you have a particle and anti-particle together you come to the table with a balanced budget, all the quantum numbers balance out to 0, and you're left with the total energy (mass) of the particles that can be used for any balanced particle reaction (e.g. creation of photons, etc.)


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

[User] ELI5 : Why do Lightning Strikes come down as a Zig Zag line but not a straight line?

[Assistant]
Lightning follows the path of least resistance. There are typically air pockets, which are regions of higher or lower density than the surrounding area due to various factors - basically turbulence. This changes the resistance of the air that the lightning has to travel through in order to reach the relatively positively charged ground, or in some cases, another cloud.

Lightning doesnt know where to go, hence why it may sometimes appear to branch out. At the end of the day, its just the flow of electricity from a higher electron density region to one that is lower.


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

[User]
Why do knives cut better when you slide the blade across the thing you're cutting?

You can't really push a knife through something. Most often it cuts a heck of a lot better if you SLIDE the knife (almost like sawing, but only in one direction.)

For example, cutting raw chicken. If you try to just press your knife down against it, it doesn't really work, but if pull the knife back as you're cutting, it cuts great.

Another example... You can press your finger against the sharp edge of a blade without hurting yourself, but as SOON as you slide your finger across the blade, you get a cut. Why?

Of course, this is all related to how sharp the knife is, but the question still stands.

[Assistant] Because a good knife really is a microscopic saw, all these tiny serrations hook the plant fibers. This is why the best knife is always carbon steel, while stainless has difficulty cutting for example a tomato. Carbon steel has a crystalline structure with all these microscopic serrations that hook like a chainsaw. Stainless is relatively smooth and may just slide on a tomato.


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

[User]
[Harry Potter] Is plastic used in the Wizarding World? Do magical people even know what it is and what it can do?

Plastic has always struck me as a muggle material -- either because magical folk don't know how to synthesise it and/or they don't want to use it. However, does it exist in the Wizarding World? Do magical folk have an alternative to plastic?

[Assistant]
Hardly seems like a necessary invention when they can mold metal and wood (and rat) into any shape or mechanical part they need.

Wizards would probably have come across it in their dealings with muggles (however brief.), and would be able to recreate it if the need ever came up.

Maybe shoe lace aglets. The rat ones are generally too loud when stepped on.


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

[User]
What does it mean for a philosopher to develop a "complete philosophical system"?

Like I read recently, for example, that Hegel is considered one of the last great "systems philosophers", having developed his own complete philosophical system. What does that involve? Does the philosopher have to touch on every branch of philosophy and come up with theories for all of them? Or do they have a broad theory that ties multiple branches of philosophy together?

[Assistant]
I'd say both of your conditions need to be met:

> the philosopher have to touch on every branch of philosophy and come up with theories for all of them

More specifically, we could say that the philosopher has addressed every/most major branch of philosophy and..

> or do they have a broad theory that ties multiple branches of philosophy together?

...explained how their commentary on each of these branches of philosophy ties back to their overall system. Some philosophers, for example, don't do this; they may comment on a variety of philosophical topics, but they don't link it back to a central system.

Kant is perhaps the best known "systematizer", while Nietzsche comments on nearly every branch of philosophy but does so in a very distinct, non-systematic way (hence the ease of finding passages that contradict each other.)


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

[User] ELI5: What is the universe like outside of the boundaries of galaxies? Is it just empty space?

[Assistant]
Intergalactic space (the space between galaxies) is pretty much empty, yes. In any case a lot more empty than interplanetary space. It is not strictly "emtpy" as such, and not going to discuss if something like "nothing" even exists, but short of the occasional rogue star that got kicked out of its galaxy, particly density is very very low there. Galaxies string up a bit like soap foam: they accumulate along a bubble edge while the bubbles itself basically consist of emptiness inside.

EXCEPT, and this is a big except, there are huge amounts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy out there, much more than, "normal" matter, which play a vital role in galaxy, cluster and supercluster formation (i.e. galaxy clusters and clusters of galaxy clusters). Unfortunately we have no real clue what either of them are, except that we can't detect them (hence "dark") and that they must be quite different from the stuff that e.g. you and me are made of (i.e. baryonic matter).

Oh yeah, and besides "cold", it's also a heck of a lot darker out there than e.g. your typical starry night sky is. The stars you see at night when you look up are mostly in our more or less immediate neighbourhood from a few dozen to within a few thousand lightyears at best. Our own galactic center tends to be barely visible, our own neighbouring galaxies are so faint to us at their distance that most people have probably never noticed them. Now imagine you'd be situated in an intergalactic bubble where there is nothing but emptiness around you and the next visible galaxies are millions of lightyears away. Not much to see there except for some oddly faint smudges.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why can I have an international phone call with no lag, but news anchors and correspondents still have an awkward delay when communicating live internationally?

Anchor asks question...5 second awkward pause...correspondent answers question.

[Assistant] The telephone systems are connected by giant cables going across the ocean, spanning the continents. News and such have a lag because they use satellites, which has to send the signal into space and then back down. This takes (relatively) a lot longer.


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

[User]
[DC] How much does Superman "hold back" as Clark Kent?

He can carry cars with ease, fly, and do almost anything your world- class weightlifters can do hundreds and thousands of time more.

So I'm guessing when he's faking it as Clark Kent, he has to be holding back a lot? I'd assume he has to treat everything as being very fragile? How does it work? Does he still operate like a "normal" human when not displaying his powers? Or is he forcing himself to not output all his strength?

Basically, does he need any effort in restraining himself from using his full power when he's playing his Clark Kent persona?

[Assistant]
Without actually quantifying his strength, we can't quantify how much he holds back.

The last time a Superman was given a strength test, he was holding up the equivalent of the weight of the Earth for five days straight before he started to sweat. But that was the Post-Flashpoint Superman, who wasn't the same character as the Post-Crisis Superman (or the merged character that exists now).

We also don't know when/how his strength kicks in - is it always on, thus he has to limit himself to a fraction of a percent of his actual strength, or does he have to consciously use his strength, gauging it depending on the response of his foes? Most material seems to point to the former.


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

[User] [Harry Potter] What would happen if Lord Voldemort were to be the subjet of a Dementors Kiss?

[Assistant]
The parts of his soul actually in his body would be devoured, and his body would lie there, alive, as an empty husk.

As we saw in both the locket and the diary, the horcruxes can and do attempt to grow into beings of their own by leaching off of others, and without a central consciousness holding them back, they will continue to do so. Eventually, one of them will grow into a full body and take up the mantle of Voldemort.

Presumably, they will *also* be immortal, because the other horcruxes are still parts of the same soul.

It's possible that taking a horcrux to the body would allow a sort of soul-transfer, letting the chunk of soul from the horcrux hop into the body and take over where the now-eaten soul left off.


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

[User]
How do the communicators on Star Trek work?

This has bugged me for a while, but let's say Picard needs to contact Riker, he taps his communicator says "Bridge to Number One" or "Picard to Riker" or whatever, and he's now on a one way call with Riker. But how does the communicator know to go to Riker before Picard says "to Riker"?

I may be answering my own question with this, but my hypothesis is that the communicators are hooked up to the computer system. The voice command "to Riker" prompts the computer to send a recording of the last thing said to Riker, which then opens a live two way communication with Picard.

Am I close, way off, or what? How does that work?

[Assistant]
> the communicators are hooked up to the computer system.

That's pretty much it.  The computer is smart enough that when you're on the ship, you don't even have to tap your commIt can just tell by your tone.


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

[User] Can birds feel things they touch with their beak, if so how does this work?

[Assistant] Hold a pencil and then scrape it over various surfaces. Do you notice how you easily extend your 'feeling' outside of your body to the tip of the pencil? (I don't know anything about birds though, just wanted to share that...)


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

[User]
I believe Political Correctness keeps us from making significant social progress. CMV

From calling black people "african americans," to being called sexist if you point out there are fundamental differences between men and women. Beyond just physical.

Basically, everyone is always pussy footing around because they don't want to offend someone. If you never offend someone, how will you know what's truly "bad" vs "good?"

Personally, I'm offended by being called african american from time to time. Never offended by being called black.

**edit: clearly I'm not the best at expressing intelligence. or just not that well endowed with it. That said, thanks to you guys that had a debate with me. I think part of it is me grouping too much into a category, and part of it is me using the wrong terms. Having said that, there are definitely some points in here that are making me lean away from my original beliefs.**   *lean, not leave* ;)

[Assistant]
Without it, more people would hold bigoted beliefs and would not be questioned

If someone uses a racist slur and isn't criticized, they won't be pressed into examining their own bigotry, slowing 'social progress'.


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

[User] ELI5: Why old film clips, like ones of WW2 almost always seems sped up faster than 1x?

[Assistant]
As you probably know, the speed at which motion picture film runs through the camera determines its frame rate, given in frames per second (fps). When run through a projector (which you can think of as a backwards camera) at the same speed, the movement looks natural to us. If turned more slowly or quickly, however, it plays out in fast or slow motion, respectively (the terms "undercranking" and "overcranking" are still used for these techniques, derived from the literal cranking mechanism used to run early cameras and projectors).

Obviously this enthralled audiences, and early camera operators took advantage of this at times, but the cliche of its ubiquity happened more by accident. In the early days of the medium, both cameras and projectors were usually operated at a lower speed than the 24fps that later became the industry standard (particularly with the advent of synchronized sound in the late 1920s). I've shown silent films while working as a projectionist, and they're often distributed with instructions to be run at 18fps so that movement shows up normally. If shown at 24fpswhich has often been done, either because of insufficient equipment or human erroryou would be seeing everything at 1.5x the speed of the actual motion, hence the cliche of old films running in fast motion.


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

[User] ELI5: Why are anal muscles involved whenever one sneezes ?

[Assistant] Hahahaha there's no delicate way to put this. It's to prevent you from forcefully shitting yourself. Humans evolved over time with certain traits that are suited for social groups. Groups that just pooped where they ate and lived died off. Somewhere along the line we developed a trait to clench up when we sneeze, that provided an advantage, that group bred more successful offspring, and eventually the trait became prominent in the species.


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

[User] ELI5: If programs are lines of codes, how do we see images? Especially in gaming where there are so much interactive objects on screen.

[Assistant]
Are you thinking that if you looked really closely at your screen, like with a microscope, you would see the code, and that somehow it makes up the image? Code is just what tells your screen how to make an image.

Think of it like this. Your screen has thousands of little empty dishes we call "pixels". We can put any kind of colored ball into one of these dishes. Code tells your computer which colored ball goes in which dish. After your computer reads the code and puts the correct colored balls in the correct places, then when you back out and look at everything at once, you see an image.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why is milk chocolate made in North America so vastly different from milk chocolate made in Europe?

I have eaten milk chocolate from Hershey and milk chocolate from some strange Swiss chocolatier and they were so different. I cannot even describe how much so. The Swiss chocolate was not even a 'name brand' there like Hershey is here in the states so I did not even get high quality chocolate. Their low quality chocolate tasted better than our average/mid quality.

I went onto Wikipedia's entry for chocolate and it turns out that the US and Canada and Europe consider milk chocolate to mean different things in regards to how much milk fat, 'milk solids,' and chocolate 'liquor' are present.

Can anyone explain in simple terms what this means? And why do these areas have such different standards?

[Assistant] Money, and regulations. European chocolate, by and large has much stricter rules about what passes for chocolate, while American chocolate has had the cost of ingredients driven down by commercial interests.


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

[User] ELI5: What happens to broken glass after it's thrown out? Does it just turn into fine grains again? Decomposed?

[Assistant]
If it's recycled, it's sent to a plant where it's melted down and turned into new glass.

If it's thrown into a garbage dump, it will sit there for however long it takes to be exposed to the elements again, (possibly 1000s of years or more) at which point it will start to break into smaller and smaller bits and gradually turn into sand/dirt over a long period of time.

Glass is basically just sand that's been purified and melted into a single shape.


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

[User]
ELI5: Why is it bad for a car's transmission to shift into neutral while the rpm is still high?

Its something I always hear from friends, for example, having the car in neutral at a stop light and forgetting then revving the engine is bad. Also to just randomly throw it into neutral while driving.

edit: I should also mention that in my case the car is an automatic and has a carbureted engine. I don't know if that makes a difference.

[Assistant]
All car engines are reciprocating engines^1: they involve moving pistons back and forth very quickly. For a four-stroke engine spinning at 3000 RPM, for example, each piston is reversing direction 6,000 times per minute. That's 100 times per second; if you try to move your finger^2 back and forth at that pace, you will fail. But that's well inside the normal operating range of most engines. The accelerations involved for vehicle engine pistons are very large! This is why every engine has a redline: a speed beyond which it is not certified. It may work for a while, but the materials at that speed are experiencing stress greater than they are designed for.

Operating the engine for long faster than its redline speed will eventually cause the engine to fail catastrophically. If you ever hear of a car throwing a rod, or a piston, or see a disabled race car with one or more neat little holes exploding out from the hood, it's experienced a failure of this nature. The mechanical parts guiding the piston failed, so instead of experiencing the huge acceleration it was supposed to, it got thrown physically out of the car entirely^3.

Revving the engine in neutral at a stoplight isn't necessarily all that bad, though it could annoy the people around you^4. As long as you keep the tachometer below the redline, you should be fine.

Randomly throwing the car into neutral while you're driving isn't different in principle, but in practice there are additional factors to consider. When you're going, the engine is developing power. That power is being directed through the transmission to the wheels, moving the vehicle. Suddenly popping into neutral disconnects the wheels, leaving all that power with nowhere to go, so the engine speeds up very rapidly. It can be very difficult to avoid exceeding the redline in this case, particularly if the RPM was already high.

Will exceeding the redline briefly on occasion ruin the engine? Probably not right away. All it does is raise the risk of a catastrophic failure because of the increased stress the components have experienced. This risk is cumulative over the life of the engine, it never goes down. It's a better idea to avoid exceeding the redline to the maximum extent possible.

~~---------~~

1: ask me about turbine engines later if you want to hear about non-reciprocating engines.

2: or any part of your body

3: this ruins the engine, but usually isn't too bad for the driver. It is extremely dangerous for anyone around the car^5 at that time, though, as you've now got what amounts to a huge bullet flying out in some random direction.

4: Revving the engine at stops is also illegal in certain places, such as Germany. Don't try it when there are Polizei around!

5: it usually means very bad news for motorcycle riders, though.


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

[User] ELI5: Would a right handed person with a bionic right hand still feel more comfortable with that hand?

[Assistant]
Handedness is more about the way your brain is wired, than about the qualities of your limbs themselves.  So a right handed person would most likely still feel more comfortable using their right hand.

A common theory is that handedness is related to where your brain does most of its fine motor control. For most people, the left hemisphere does controls speech which requires fine control. The left hemisphere also looks after your right limbs, and therefore for most people, the right limbs are more comfortable to control.

tl;dr its all in your head - your left hemisphere is usually better at fine motor controls.


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

[User] ELI5: Why do all dumpsters smell the same?

[Assistant] You're not smelling the trash, you are smelling the waste product of micro organisms that are eating the trash. Since all microorganisms have more-or-less the same goal (get energy from food source) they are going to generate similar waste products in doing so. This is especially true for microorganisms feeding on similar materials, in this case trash. Your body doesn't want to eat food with microorganisms that might make you sick, so humans evolved an aversion to the smell of microorganism waste. Since there is no benefit to being able to distinguish between the waste of one microorganism from that of another, it kinda all smells the same to us.


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

[User]
Why is it that the Copenhagen Interpretation is the "standard" understanding of quantum mechanics?

My understanding (which could be completely wrong) is that many if not all of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics are valid understandings of the data.  What is it about the Copenhagen Interpretation that makes it a more attractive interpretation?

[Assistant] It's just historical. Quantum mechanics was first developed and formalized in the 1920's. Dirac published his famous textbook on Quantum Mechanics in 1930. For most practical purposes, this was the final word on the matter. It wasn't until the 1950's that other now-famous "interpretations" started to pop up, the work of Bohm, Everett, Bell, and so on. In the 1930's there was some famous grumblings from Einstein and Popper and others about the Copenhagen interpretation, but at the time they weren't able to come up with a serious alternative, and Bohr, the much celebrated fatherly figure of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation, held court. By the 1950's when the good alternatives started to crop up, all the good textbooks were solidly Copenhagen, everyone learned Copenhagen, and an entire generation of physicists had been brought up on Copenhagen. By that time, even though the new interpretations were brilliant and insightful, it had become virtually impossible to just unseat Copenhagen in a popular textbook without seeming kookily ideological, since after all, though all interpretations have their problems, and some are arguably better than others, it is somewhat a philosophical question, no one is a "slam dunk" to unseat Copenhagen, and after all, Copenhagen "works" and is easy to teach and apply.


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

[User] [WH40k] Could Orks hack a computer if they thought they were good hackers?

[Assistant]
The Ork believe thing isn't a solve all solution. The psychic field doesn't do anything really meaningful unless there's large numbers of orks.

All orks believe in loud guns, fast machines, protective charms and tattoos and the color red.

A single Ork believing in something doesn't do much. Besides all the other stuff works because orks understand what it's supposed to do.

Orks don't get computers, data, network security and what it's all for. What are they even supposed to believe in to make it happen?


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

[User]
Economic theory says that undercutting your competitors is bad for everyone as total revenue of all market participants reduces. How did amazon survive and what makes investors believe in its potential when it undercuts hot sellers on its platform (amazonbasics)?

The question might be dumb but Im new to economics and cant comprehend this.

[Assistant] Its fine for the undercutter if they successfully deter entry or force rivals to exit, especially in industries with large economies of scale, where their volume will lower their costs quickly. Amazon has seemed to pursue this strategysacrifice short-term profits for volume and economies of scale.


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

[User]
What's in the way of creating a natural-sounding voice that doesn't rely on pre-recorded words?

In other words, when I get directions from a navigation device or the announcer on public transport there's usually either a pre-recorded message (e.g. "examplestreet") or a combination of an established set of words, such as "head" "right" "next" "turn", resulting in a rather jarred sentence.

I realized there's a lot to a voice and humans are great at noticing even the slightest mistakes, but considering how incredibly great we got at rendering facial expressions and the astonishing sound design in various media I couldn't yet figure out what's keeping us from creating such thing.

I also have no clue wether this is the correct flair, sorry.

[Assistant]
This is an interesting combination of linguistics and computer science.

One of the biggest issues in synthesizing natural text-to-speech voices is intonation and pitch on specific segments of words. Given a single word, the pattern of sounds' pitches in that word will change depending on the surrounding words and the semantic properties of the sentence. For example, when asking a question: the last word in the sentence will often have a higher pitch than the rest of the sentence.

One would think that these types of things are easily encoded, but you can't just statically encode pitch values for each individual word in the sentence or phrase. It has to be computed dynamically, which leads to a host of other issues. One of the foremost issues there is how computationally expensive it is to determine what part of speech a word is. Others are determining whether something is a statement, question, or exclamation and  how the word-final and word-initial phonemes at the edges of words act in concert.

An example of the difficulty in doing that can be found in the phrase, "Hello, it's nice to meet you." Very often, in "meet" (/mit/) and "you" (/ju/), the /t/ and /j/ segments will "merge" into something like a "ch" (/t/). It's not too easy to actually consolidate all of these problems yet, and it's an active field of development, primarily in industry.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] What made Admiral Ozzel think he could get away with condescending to Darth Vader?

"My lord, there are so many uncharted 		settlements..."

Ozzel sounds straight up *patronizing* to Vader when he says this, as if Vader were some foppish visiting dignitary, and not the Emperor's personal cybernetic murder gargoyle. How could he possibly thought it was a good idea to talk down to Vader?

[Assistant] The Empire works on strength.  You get ahead by showing no fear and intimidating people (also getting shit done which was Ozzel's mistake).  Being frank and questioning superiors has worked so far and gotten him in the Admiralty.  Ozzel has seen guys like Tarkin or Thrawn directly challenge Vader and get away with it so he figures if he wants a Grand Admiralship he should do the same and prove himself not afraid of Vader.  The thing is Guys like Tarkin and Thrawn have earned Vader's respect so he lets them talk to him as an equal.  Ozzel being disrespectful just pisses Vader off.  Ozzel is trying to play the game and sucks at it because he didn't realise the guys that are winning the game aren't playing a game they are just hyper competent.


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

[User] ELI5: Do commanders actually give speeches before a battle (like in LOTR) and can people in the back even hear whats going on?

[Assistant]
Modern warfare does utilize motivational speeches to generate morale among the troops. The content of these speeches are likely to include nationalist sentiments, self-professed martial superiority, focus on broadly shared values(ex:importance of protecting family.)

Antequated warfare did as well. Alexander Suvorov is a prime example that comes to mind. He used to carefully plan out battles ahead of time by accounting  for geographical features, possible reinforcements, etc. and then claim it was the work of god that led them to victory. On a  sidenote, he is one of the few undefeated generals in history.


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

[User]
[Star Wars] Does morality play a big role for Jedi?

After spending some time on this sub it seems like I have a very different idea of Jedi from many of the other people here.

For me, Jedi were not really obsessed with morality and "doing good". The whole point of them was to not give in to feelings, to fulfill the will of the force and generally be objective. A Jedi is not like a super hero, a Jedi would not go out of his way to avoid killing and generally doesn't make moral judgements.

Am I wrong about this? For me the Jedi always were more like Buddhist warrior monks in the position of UN troops than saints or moral authorities.

[Assistant] In a cannon comic, Darth Vader uses a Jedi's sense of morality to defeat him. Vader destroys a dam which threatens the lives of the people below. The jedi are all about self sacrifice so this jedi master stops his fight to save the people. This allows Vader to force choke him and kill him (ultimately for his lightsaber).


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

[User]
ELI5: Why do you get so hungry when you are high?

I was thinking, what makes you so hungry when you are high?

[Assistant]
In your body you have an Endocannabinoid system which has a role in appetite, pain-sensation, mood, and memory.

It's suggested that THC the psycoactive compound in cannabis activates a receptor called CB1 which directly increases appetite when fired.


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

[User]
[Tangled] How would an army that has replaced a sizable number of its swords with frying pans fare against an invasion?

Rumor has it the kingdom next door got the idea to replace all their swords with frying pans after their princess "miraculously" returned (like I'm buying that).

How easily would a more traditionally armed force be able to invade them now? Hypothetically. Wait, let me get a notebook. OK, go on.

[Assistant]
Tangled takes place in the late 18th century at the earliest (Mozart is already famous), and more likely the 19th century (Rapunzel and Flynn are at Elsa's coronation in *Frozen*) so swords are largely irrelevant as a tool of warfare. This is why the adoption of the frying pan as the Royal Guard's weapon of choice is not tactical suicide-- it's largely a ceremonial weapon used for guard duties and things like that while the gun and bayonet rule the battlefield.

Edit: Wrong movie.


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

[User]
CMV: it doesn't make sense to value potential life

UPDATE: holy macaroni I finally got through them all. All 328 comments. I need a break from Reddit for a while because I've been hyperfocused on this all day. I'll reply to any further comments tomorrow

This is in relation to the abortion debate. A point where I often get stuck with pro-lifers is the value of potential life - potential consciousness might be a better term, but for the sake of brevity and keeping to widely used terms I'll say potential life.

UPDATE: the term potential life is confusing people so I'll be using the term potential consciousness from now on

So here's how the debate usually goes.

Me: why is there anything immoral about aborting an embryo that hasn't developed a brain yet? It isn't conscious, it has no feelings, it's like killing a plant.

Pro-lifer: but it could have feelings one day, you're denying it its potential consciousness!

Me: but why is potential consciousness important?

Things have never gone beyond that point. I either get no reply, or weird circular logic, or my opponent in the debate resorts to rambling about me being a baby killer.

I have two issues with potential consciousness. The first is, I don't see any reason for it to be important or valued. If that potential consciousness doesn't come to be, no one has suffered. A conscious being has not died. To never be born is not the same as to die.

The other issue is that if we follow the logic of valuing potential consciousness, then why do we stop at the embryo? An embryo is a potential consciousness, but so is a sperm. A sperm could fuse with an egg and grow to create a person. Why is it ok to waste *that* potential consciousness? As far as I know most pro-lifers aren't desperately trying to have as many children as possible. Why are abortions wrong but not condoms, or periods (an egg being wasted), or masturbation, or being single, or abstinence?

UPDATE: This is getting a lot of traction and I'm finding myself repeating certain points over and over so here's a list of commonly made points and my rebuttals.

A: Would you invest, or garden, or plan for the future?
Yes. I never said potential value doesn't exist, I just don't see the value in potential consciousness specifically

B: But don't you value LIFE?

A plant is alive.

C: But don't you value HUMAN life?

A tumour is human and alive. I also don't see why humans should be regarded as more important than other intelligent species such as dolphins and elephants. And finally, humanity is awful and is destroying the world, so the less humans the better.

D: But an embryo has unique diploid human DNA

My response here would be similar to point C, but also this implies that an identical twin is less of a person than most people

E: but coma patients aren't conscious!

A coma patient was conscious in the past and had a personality, identity, rights, and things they wanted to do. Their life is valuable because they attained consciousness. Would have been is not the same as was

F: but expecting parents value their baby's potential life!

This is subjective value, and no one would assign any subjective value to my embryo if I became pregnant. I wouldn't, my partner wouldn't, my doctor ought to remain objective, and no one else would know. To convince me that early term abortion is bad you'd have to either convince me that I myself subjectively value my nonexistent children (good luck), or that an embryo's potential consciousness has OBJECTIVE value.

[Assistant]
A person in a coma doesn't have significant brain activity, and a person in a persistent vegetative state has zero higher brain activity, yet people in both situations have legal protections, despite having less brain activity than many fetuses.

Assigning personhood to developmental stages also creates weird situations where a baby born prematurely is more of a person than a fetus set to be delivered on time despite the fetus being more developed than the premature baby.

> An embryo is a potential life,

Not a potential life. An embryo is **a** life. One that many people, yourself included, are okay with terminating. Pro-life people are not.

> The other issue is that if we follow the logic of valuing potential life, then why do we stop at the embryo?

An embryo is a unique diploid human. A sperm is not.


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

[User]
ELI5:Will we ever be able to tell if the reality we perceive is actually real ?

Is it possible that the visions we discard as dreams are actually a self reflection and that what we wake up to is actually another dream and we all are part of something bigger or maybe some future advanced civilization's science project  ? maybe we are not meant to be here but were forced to be here ?

[Assistant] Like many interesting hypotheses, the idea that we are in a constructed/simulated universe might be proven under some circumstances, but can never be definitively disproven -- we may remain in doubt forever.


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

[User]
ELI5: How exactly are wages for jobs decided and why can the wages for similar jobs differ so much across different companies?

Is there a law that states a basic amount for every type of profession or is it entirely up to the employer? While looking for jobs I noticed that in many cases the same or similar jobs would have different wages depending on which company I chose to work for. ie, one place that needed a truck driver was offering $17/hr while another that also needed a truck driver offered $19/hr.

Why not just have a standard for every type of job? All doctors make so and so, all teachers make a certain amount, all laborers make so and so, etc. Before raises of course depending on how long you worked.

[Assistant]
Honestly, a standard pay for different types of jobs would be really hard to implement. There is just so much variety even within the same group.

Take teachers for example. Can you really compare a high school and an elementary school teacher in terms of salary? Should the salary of a teacher who teaches a regular class of kids be the same as the salary for someone who teaches an advanced class or even a class of kids with learning difficulties / disabilities? Should a teacher in New York make the same amount of money as a teacher in Idaho, even though their expenses will be very different?

Generally wages are decided by supply and demand. The more people there are willing to take the job, the lower the wages are. The less people there are, the higher. This is further influenced by the exact nature of the job (okay, it is driving a truck, but what type of truck? what distance? during which hours? how long away from home are you?) and the area people live in (people like, you know, actually being able to afford stuff so the standard of living will influence what pay people are willing to take). Other benefits might also influence the wages people are willing to take. for example, someone might accept a lower paying job if that job offers better hours or more training on the job. And, we cannot forget that frequently, wages are something to be negotiated. Not in all fields / job types, but if you have a unique skill employers want, you can make your own wishes known, which can result in higher wages if that is what you want. It can also result in a lower wage but certain time off arrangements.


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

[User] Why does my external speaker have louder ground-hum when the computer it is plugged into displays brighter colors?

[Assistant] Your monitor uses a scheme called "dynamic contrast" to improve it's contrast ratio. When brighter colors are displayed, the backlight intensity increases, which requires more current from it's power supply. The audio amplifier's power supply is, obviously, not as well isolated from from the power line noise as it could be and is reacting to the increased load with increased noise.


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

[User]
ELI5: what exactly happens to your brain when you feel mentally exhausted?

Is there any effective way to replenish your mental energies other than sleeping?

[Assistant] Your brain cells (neurons), just like any other cells in your body, excrete metabolic wastes. During the day (or night) when you are active and awake, the brain is slightly swollen relative to when you are sleeping and this shrinks the amount of space between the gyri and sulci (mountains and valleys) of the brain. The less space, the less efficiently the cerebrospinal fluid is circulated and cleaned. With this stagnating CSF, the metabolites being released by brain cells just hang around the cells in the brain and this affects the metabolic functions of said cells. All of this occurs until we go to sleep, where the brain shrinks and more room is made for the CSF to be circulated and the metabolites to be cleared.


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

[User]
How is hydrogen stored in the sun?

Basically what im asking is how un-fused hydrogen is kept in the sun without it just being fused immediately. Is there a max amount of hydrogen that can be fused at a time?

[Assistant]
A better way of looking at this topic is asking why wouldn't the hydrogen on earth fuse to helium but instead form the chemical compound water together with oxygen? And why wouldn't water exist on the sun, although oxygen is the third most abundant element on the sun?

The both intuitive and correct answer is, that the conditions aren't right. Earth is to cold to allow fusion, but cool enough to allow water; the sun is too hot to allow water, everything is in the plasma state and basically no chemical bounds can exist there.

The logical conclusion is then, that the conditions for fusion aren't met everywhere in the sun, because otherwise the hydrogen would fuse the star away in an instant. Fusion depends on temperature, density and time. If you increase each factor, the fusion rate will increase as well.

That means fusion can in fact occur everywhere, even in extremely cold and thin gas. Though, the timescales involved here are unimaginable. If you want to create a lot of energy, such as needed to maintain a star stable, you would have to increase both temperature and density, because you obviously can't increase time for that matter.

The right conditions are only met in the very core of the star. The vast majority of the star's matter does nothing but contributing mass, to increase the pressure and thus density to the core. Almost all energy of the sun is produced within 1/4 of its radius, the rest is just heated up to enormous temperatures from a human standpoint, but not enough for any significant fusion reaction.

The fusion rate increases squared  with density and exponentially with the temperature. Since increasing mass eventually leads to higher densities and temperatures, this causes the interesting effect that higher mass star fuse faster than small stars. Although being more massive, larger stars have a shorter lifetime than smaller ones.

Small stars with 0.1 M^solar can have lifetimes up to trillions of years, because of their low reaction rate and other effects like convection. They can fuse almost 100% of their hydrogen in that lifetime. Large stars with 100 M^solar live only some million years. In that time they fuse only about 3% of their hydrogen. Small stars are are more efficient, while large ones are more effective.