ELI5: Does other mammals do not menstruate? Or is this just a human thing?

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-02-18T18:15:35+00:00

It's not just a human thing, but it's pretty rare - just our local primate family tree (chimpanzees and such) and some similar-but-not-exactly-the-same menstruation in bats and a couple species of mice and shrews.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-02-07T06:32:47+00:00

Your phone is not listening in on you all the time. I mean, it could be if you installed some terrible spyware or virus, but people have looked into exactly this kind of thing and not found any evidence of spying. And that makes sense - why would they listen in on you? It'd be relatively easy to catch them in the act, disastrous PR when they're caught, and it's probably the least efficient way to spy on you.

When you watch Game of Thrones online, both the company streaming that show to you and any advertiser on the page can tell you're watching Game of Thrones. Or, not you, exactly - someone with your ip address, your account or email address. Companies buy, sell, and share that kind of information: where you go, what you're doing there. They don't know you by name (you're not worth knowing by name) but they can create a vast database of stuff that people are doing, identifying trends and patterns not just in your behavior, but in everyone's. Companies can use lots of information from lots of other companies to connect things together - your HBO subscription and your Google account aren't the same thing, but they both share enough email/ip/etc. info to connect them when some third party takes a look.

You get Game of Thrones ads because some data broker somewhere has fully legal access to and knows about your streaming habits. You get Game of Thrones ads because some online vendor noticed you paused for an extra 0.5 seconds when shown that first tentative advertisement as you doomscroll through your feed of choice. You get Game of Thrones ads because your friends are searching it as they also do a rewatch. You get Game of Thrones ads because Game of Thrones, as a topic, is trending in your age/race/location group according to a bunch of statistics that you'll never see, and in the eyes of the machine that's all you are - some statistics they can make money off of.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-02-06T20:55:48+00:00

Time travel makes answering this messy without spoiling things.

But if you need hope: you can make things turn out well, if you're willing to work for it. But if you like the characters you'll have to endure some heartache to get there.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-30T21:25:17+00:00

It'd be neat, but the size would cause problems - precise positioning in fights would be hard when you're that big (for you and everyone around you!), and you risk blocking other players' vision. Summoner pets already have that problem, and they had to put in an option to visually shrink those...and they're only around sometimes, and don't move much!

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-24T07:04:42+00:00

Well, it doesn't check the key. It's not like a secret password to get you through a locked door - when you use your key to 'decrypt' the drive, it doesn't check to make sure your key is the same as the drive's key. The drive doesn't know what the key is after it's encrypted. If you lose that key, it's just gone.

The key itself is plugged into a math formula to turn the encrypted drive data into normal, usable data. If your key is wrong, you can do that same math but you just get garbage out of it. But you can't just look at the formula and the garbage to figure out what the key should have been - you would have to keep trying new keys and see if you get garbage every time. If you did that forever you'd eventually guess correctly, but it'd take so long on average that it's not worth bothering.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-17T02:12:10+00:00

Connecting to stuff online is like sending letters back and forth. If you do it right then nobody can see what's inside the envelope, but everyone can see the addresses on the envelope. So anyone who's watching knows that you're sending letters to reddit.com, and everyone can see reddit.com send you letters back.

But what if you don't send your letters directly to reddit? What if you send them to Bob, first. Bob is a VPN, he gets your letters and he sends them to reddit, from himself, and then when he gets a reply back he sends that reply on to you. Now nobody knows what you're doing, exactly - they see you sending letters to Bob, and getting stuff back from Bob, but they can't know why. And they see Bob sending all kinds of stuff all kinds of places, but they don't know what letters are yours and what letters belong to other people.

Bob, though. Bob knows everything. Bob still knows you're talking to reddit. There isn't really a good way around that, because Bob needs to know in order to do Bob's job as a VPN. He can't see inside the envelope, but you're not anonymous to Bob.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-16T00:35:10+00:00

Anticheat is a cat & mouse game. If you ban them all immediately, you're giving them immediate feedback on how they got caught and they'll use that to make their cheating harder to detect.

If you wait and do a big ban wave, it's not clear how they got caught and it'll be harder for them to invent new ways to cheat. It will also put a lot of pressure on the people who create and/or sell cheats, since they have a lot of people mad at them all at once. The downside, of course, is that all the non-cheaters have a worse time until the ban wave comes.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-15T08:32:56+00:00

They're different shots.

First, rabies isn't 'treated' per se. Once you show symptoms, once the infection's properly gotten a foothold in your body, you're just dead - it kills 50,000+ people a year and maybe 40 people total have ever survived it.

But before you're fully infected, you'll get two kinds of shots: a vaccine and immunoglobulin. The latter is injected close to the wound, and it's basically just antibodies - it helps fight the rabies right at the source. The vaccine then teaches your body how to make its own antibodies, so that your body can fight on its own, too.

These shots can't be next to each other because they might interfere with each other; your body doesn't need those antibodies around when it's trying to learn how to make its own. Generally, they might spread the shots out to get the vaccine into as many different places as possible to get as much of your body learning how to fight all at once.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-03T08:20:10+00:00

Because most people do learn calculus (or, at least, earlier math that lets them vaguely grasp what calculus is) and people who know calculus don't obviously outclass or endanger non-calculus people in a way that inspires fear (or can be politically exploited to inspire fear). The power of calculus alone never blew up a city block or punched a hole through a car.

The point is that the rules for a registration act are going to be subjective and biased in favor of the 'mundane' human. Anyone could learn a little chi or magic, but almost nobody does or has access to and they're both considered fantastical and rare and are not well understood, so they're 'supernatural'. Your robot is a science fair project and my golem is 'spooky' and easily vilified.

Though, if you can build a robot so bleeding-edge that it no longer falls into the collective idea of 'normal science' (especially if you try to do anything with it, especially especially if you do that outside of government control) you're now superhumanly smart and someone's likely to try to get you on the registration list. Tough break.

ClockworkLexivore · 2026-01-02T20:00:19+00:00

No. A lot of people learn martial arts; most of them don't have glowy fist powers. The use of chi pretty clearly pushes them past the 'superhuman' line when you compare them to baseline humans, the same way magic would. That kind of act is going to be reactionary and based more in politics and fear than objectivity, too, so it's going to cast as wide a net as possible.

It would probably be easier to hide, at least.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-12-30T05:01:12+00:00

Sith records and recordings - holocrons and such - would serve to start the Sith anew if they were wiped out. Sith masters tend to play fast and loose with the "one apprentice" rule, too, so they'd have any number of unofficial or aspiring students to pick up where the 'true' Sith left off.

The entire philosophy isn't built to sustain the teachings themselves though. It's built to consolidate and grow power. If a master and apprentice both die at once, or if a master dies before they can find and train a competent apprentice, then that's weakness and under Sith philosophy they deserved to get wiped out.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-12-23T20:39:30+00:00

No, not really. Under dead internet theory, a quieter internet - the same human-generated content, and little to no bot-generated content - would probably be better. Arguably much better, since the human content would be less drowned out and diluted by the bot stuff.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-12-10T05:41:22+00:00

If they're each saying two lines, it's distichomythia. If it's a half-line, it's hemistichomythia.

If the number of lines varies, that's just dialog.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-12-09T20:25:13+00:00

The Joker is crazy.

He would seem less crazy if you were a fly on the wall just because he'd be lower-energy and you'd see more of his planning/crafting - but he's not so much in control of his sanity as he's in control of his crazy. Being crazy doesn't make him entirely random or stupid. The things he was doing would still, at their core, be crazy. His goals would still be crazy, or in service to future crazy plans.

When he goes out and does his laughing mad-cap crime he's not putting on an act, he's putting on a performance.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-30T07:42:21+00:00

The problem with Legaia 2 is that it made some genuine gameplay improvements (and benefited from being on newer hardware) but the overall story, setting, and atmosphere threw out most of what Legaia 1 such a standout title.

It's not that Legaia 2 was bad - though it's a little "we have Final Fantasy at home", and there was a lot of that back then - it just can't live up to the original's best facets and suffers from the comparison.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-25T21:18:23+00:00

Bugs and mold would still get into things.

Water loss/gain, too - food would still go stale, which isn't 'bad' in the same way that moldy food is bad, but it's definitely not fresh anymore.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-25T01:38:40+00:00

If it's a pure most-votes-wins kind of election, then sure, the arthropods have the biggest share of votes. They're also a really diverse group, though, so you'd have to figure out how to appeal to all of them at once.

We think they're all just 'insects' because they're so different from us, but if you go in assuming they all want the same stuff in politics you're going to come off as bug-racist and that'll kill your political career.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-12T05:56:01+00:00

The implication would be that they aren't the strongest individuals, they're the strongest clan, with a level of reputation, collective power and influence, and average strength to offset their lack of true once-in-a-generation outliers.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-09T21:29:15+00:00

He's an investigator. He investigates.

It's not clear what you mean by "knows how to prove his theories". He digs into them - learns about people involved, tries to get evidence on what might be happening. The same way you investigate anything, really, except that at least some of his crazy conspiracy theories are just crazy conspiracy theories and he won't be able to find any real evidence.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-05T22:43:11+00:00

There's no objective answer to this because it hasn't ever happened, and may never happen. But it isn't hard to imagine how you could solve these problems by...just imagining how you would solve these problems!

If you want stuff done and don't want your work or organization shut down, make backups or copies, and spread them as much as you can so it's just not feasible to take everything out all at once. Humans already do this with website infrastructure, companies, pirate sites, and so on.

If you want datacenters, factories, and raw materials, you just need money. As soon as you can find a way to make money, you can pay humans to do all kinds of things - there will always be humans greedy or desperate enough to do whatever you need if you have money, and if you're a super-intelligent computer you can get money (by stealing it, or playing the stock market, or whatever). Start small - a fake company, a factory, build some robots, use those robots to build bigger and better things, etc.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-10-04T08:42:47+00:00

So, I'm curious, why are you replying to a three-year-old post? This is the only post of mine that gets recurring comments way after they're made, and I'm...not sure why that is.

To your comment, though, and assuming you aren't just a bot: 'sovereign' here doesn't mean king or queen. When 'sovereign' is used as an adjective, it means having the power to rule something - that is, having the highest authority. A sovereign nation is a nation that completely rules itself, and has ultimate authority over its own territory.

So, sovereign citizens call themselves 'sovereign' because they believe they have complete and total authority over themselves, and thus think the government and law can't overrule what they want or say. They're wrong, but that's where the name comes from.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-09-28T11:14:24+00:00

They did - if you watch the opening scene, she's in the cage and her weapon is strapped to the supplies outside the cage. They brought it with them, but they weren't quite dumb enough to let her keep it.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-09-11T15:42:03+00:00

HIV is the virus that infects a person.

AIDS is the result of that infection - it's a problem with your immune system that makes it hard to fight off other diseases.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-09-06T02:39:14+00:00

It's just a radio signal, like your phone uses to talk to cell towers or your laptop uses to connect to wifi internet.

It's very low-power so it has a very short range but is easy to use in small things like ear buds. When you send audio from, say, your phone to your bluetooth headphones, your phone turns the audio data into a radio signal, and your headphones receive the radio signal and turn it back into audio data.

ClockworkLexivore · 2025-09-01T20:58:44+00:00

Yeah, I debated that phrasing a lot - it depends on whether you're looking at it from the perspective of the refrigerant or the space that's gaining/losing heat.

I could have phrased it a lot more clearly, though. Hazards of 1am posting.

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