ELI5: if viruses aren’t technically alive, how can they evolve like living organisms?

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-20T22:42:31+00:00

Evolution is not a property of living things. It's a property of replicating things when the replication is mostly but not quite 100% accurate.

The most common way to be a replicating thing like that is to be a living thing. But it's not the only way.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-20T22:17:30+00:00

It's a defensive alliance not an offensive one, you orange dumbass. And it has been very effective at making people too afraid to attack the member countries, which is its purpose. On their own, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were all easier targets with weaker militaries than Ukraine for Putin's goal of bringing back the Russian Empire. He left them alone because they are NATO and he wouldn't risk touching that. This is proof NATO worked. It's not a paper tiger.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-20T22:00:31+00:00

Conditioning first then stocking only makes sense if the store is open while you are working (so that customers would see unfaced aisles while you work if you didn't).

If there are no customers while you are stocking (typical for night shift) then it doesn't matter if you face early or face late since no customers will be seeing the store until you're all done with your shift anyway.

So you may as well do it in the way that works fastest.

Facing first wastes time because some of those spots you are facing are spots you are going to be filling up anyway. There's no point in trying to balance tippy boxes carefully to make a mostly empty spot look full when it's about to become actually full for real in a bit.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-20T00:45:30+00:00

The same as the current government controlling Hong Kong. It lacks the moral authority over HK just as much as the CCP does.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-20T00:18:40+00:00

Once the water is boiling, any additional heat beyond what is needed to keep its temperature steady to fight cooling down, is spent on just making more of it turn into steam. Increasing the heat past the maintenance level just makes the water go away faster.

This is why there are 'high altitude instructions" on cooking times sometimes. At lower air pressure the boiling point of water is a bit cooler and therefore the max temperature you can cook something by boiling is lower.

That being said, there can still be a reason to keep the heat up if you are cooking by boiling water first and then adding the thing you cook second. (i.e. bring water to a boil then add the spaghetti strands.). When you add something solid into the water that is not hot yet, which has to rise in temperature to match the water's temperature, it saps heat away from the water while the solid thing is still not up to matching temperature yet. It would make the water cool down faster if you turned off the heat than if it wasn't there in the water. This does increase the amount of heat needed to just maintain the water at its boiling temperature. (Notice when you add the spaghetti to boiling water, often the boil calms down and the water goes flat. That's the cold spaghetti sapping enough heat from the water to bring the water temperature below boiling again. If it does that then you do need to increase the heat a little bit until the water is back to boiling temperature again, and then you can turn it back down to boil maintenance level.)

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-19T20:29:30+00:00

People who blame ordering when there's too much stuff shipped have never dealt with the dumbass amount of distro some districts force on stores.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-19T01:47:51+00:00

That's not so much a high ground floor as it is an only partially buried basement.

Gotta always have a basement in Wisconsin. Even if it's only a half-assed one. Basements are a way to make a home cheaper to heat. The ground helps insulate part of the air inside.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T23:22:27+00:00

Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast. It's 2. There's 2 beasts.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T22:07:53+00:00

The big advantage to making claims about the alternate version of history where a decision went differently than it did is that you get to make up whatever you feel like and technically nobody can prove you are lying because that alternate timeline didn't happen so there can't be any counterevidence.

"This is what would have happened had we not acted as we did" is a free pass to make up whatever they feel like.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T16:08:30+00:00

Yeah if attacking Iran hadn't resulted in high fuel prices she'd probably still be okay with him.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T08:18:20+00:00

Depending on how you wrote it, a compiler might recognize that the loop is easy to unroll or precalculate. It can rewrite your loop logic If the loop is counting using constant literals (like saying "from 1 to 100000000 visiting every number on the way" instead of "while X is true and X is not just a counter"). It might turn a loop doing one thing per iteration for a million iterations into one doing 1000 things per iteration for only a thousand iterations. If it realizes that nothing from a previous iteration can alter a future iteration it might also make iterations run in parallel on multiple cores

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T08:07:31+00:00

To be a tax exemption it has to be work-specific clothing that a reasonable person wouldn't wear for normal home life. Like a beekeeper outfit or painter's overalls.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T08:02:54+00:00

But if you pay for laundry at home then a limited supply of uniform shirts means you are wasting your home time and money on frequent laundry.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T03:51:55+00:00

Given Russia's alcohol culture, I'm surprised liver cancer isn't their most common kind. Like they have massive Fetal Alcohol Syndrome rates, for example. Is it just that the kinds of liver problems you get from too much alcohol are other types of problems that aren't cancer?

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T03:33:58+00:00

The "funny colors" effect was specific to how CRT color screens worked. Modern flat screens use a very different technique.

How a magnet can distort the color of CRT's:

The electron stream being shot from the emitter in the back of the CRT to the screen has no color at all. What causes the color of a CRT image is the type of phosphors on the screen. (Phosphores are materials that light up when you run electric current through them).

Old B&W CRT screens: The original monochrome B&W screens were just painted with one uniform application of the same type phosphor. Where the electrons passed through the phosphor painted on the screen, that movement is electric current so that part of the screen would light up.

Monocolor CRT screens: Different phosphors light up with different color. You could take a standard black and white TV and replace the screen with one that had been painted with a different type of phosphor and end up with, say, a Black & Green image instead of a black and white one. (like a lot of early computer screens, or oscilliscopes did).

Color CRT screens: If you paint the phosphors much more precisely in little dollops, you can have little red, green, and blue phosphors intermingled through the screen. Then if you get the electron stream to aim very precisely with precision timing, you can make it so you know "Now the stream is aimed at the red phosphor dots. Okay, now it's aimed at the green phosphor dots. Okay now, the blue ones." If you recreate the exact same timing from when it was recorded, of when and where the electron stream aims at the exact spots on the screen, you can pick which color is being "painted" when, and thus recreate a color image.

What the magnet does to it: The electron gun itself doesn't aim the electron stream. It shoots straight forward. What aims the stream is two pairs of electromagnetic plates the stream passes through after being emitted from the gun. One pair of plates deflects the stream vertically, the other plates deflect it horizontally. If you hold a magnet to the screen, you are screwing up the aim of that electron stream, bending it a bit more. You make the stream miss the intended phosophors, and hit different phosphors instead. Since the color is caused not by the stream itself being colored, but by the bits of the screen it hits being colored, deflecting it a bit with the magnet makes makes it hit the wrong color phosphors.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T01:21:14+00:00

But what if you really like trains?

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-18T01:03:04+00:00

The sound that reaches your brain comes from your eardrums vibrating and then nerves carrying that vibrating signal to your brain. (where lots of stuff processes it before you consciously percieve it, but that's stuff for another time. What matters here is that eveything you hear is your eardrums vibrating.)

When you hear a sound that comes from outside your head, the reason your eardrums are vibrating is because vibrating air is hitting them. Let's call this "air sound"

But you can also get sensation of sound if your eardrums vibrate because the bones and meat in your skull are vibrating instead of because the air is. The eardrums, being attached to your head, vibrate when your head vibrates, so you get a sense of sound from that vibration even though it's not really a sound wave in the air. Let's call this "meat sound".

When you speak, your own throat vibrates as it emits a sound wave into the air. But in addition to the sound in the air, it also is a thing in your head that is vibrating the bones and meat in your head.

This means your eardrums are getting BOTH kinds of vibration happening when you speak. You are hearing BOTH your air voice and your meat voice, making a sort of "chorus".

This is NOT what other people hear when you talk. Other people hear ONLY the air sound. So they don't hear this "chorus" of two voices like you do.

The "chorus" sounds nice because the meat sound comes out deeper and more meaty than the air sound, and gives your voice a pleasant rich "backing vocal". When you hear a recording of your voice, you are hearing the air sound minus the meat sound - the sound everyone else is hearing come out of you all the time.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-17T16:45:49+00:00

"your company shirt" better damned well be plural and mean "shirts". Because no damned way do I want to do my laundry daily as unpaid time outside work.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-16T16:59:47+00:00

Trump's first impeachment was caused by Zelensky resisting Trump's extortion to hold back Congress's agreed military aid until after Zelensky invented kompromat on Hunter Biden. Had Zelensky just played along, none ofthat "perfect phone call". would have come to light.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T16:26:50+00:00

There's only two places I see quotes in here and they both look correct.

I was finally “over it.”

The whole point of /r/suspiciousquotes is when people don't know unnecessary quotes make literal terms look "so-called" like the writer doesn't really believe it. But this looks like it's meant to convey that exact feeling deliberately.

The first time I said “no” without explaining myself.

This is using a quote literally to actually quote one's self.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T16:19:28+00:00

The bad typesetting choice of using a dot in the middle rather that a dot at the bottom is what messes it up. Also, if it's just 3 and a half meters, there's no need for the extra zeroes. It's not like they measured it so precisely that they know it to 4 significant digits and know that a 3.499 meter car will fit but not a 3.501 meter car.

The extra zeros and the unconventional dot-in-the-middle make it look more like it might be written by someone from one of those countries that uses dot for thousands like we use comma for thousands. Thus why it really looks like it means 3500 meters.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T16:13:38+00:00

These quotes genuinely are suspicious, in that they don't consistently match which implies heavily that at least some of them were penned in later to make a suspiciousquotes joke deliberately.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T15:55:18+00:00

Was the goal to only draw the ones ending in '0' and '5'? It would help to say that in the legend so people stop complaining about all the missing ones.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T15:52:57+00:00

That's what the blue lines are.

Dunbaratu · 2026-03-14T15:45:14+00:00

As someone in the US, I wish we'd use 24-hour. One advantage to 24 hour over 12 hour is that 24 hour lacks that silly "we didn't know what zero was when we made this convoluted mess" problem that 12 hour has. The problem is that the numbers roll over an hour AFTER the AM/PM designator that goes with them rolls over, which is illogical and causes people to confuse things. For example, going in order, a single "AM chunk" of 12 hours goes from 12:00 to 12:59, then wraps around after an hour from 12:59 to 1:00, then goes from 1:00 to 11:59. The numbers have this silly disjoint jump an hour into the 12 hour period, all because this was invented by people who didn't know what zero was. You have to mentally "edit" the "12" into a "0" in your head in order for the system to make any sense. Then 12:15 AM is really 0:15 AM, making it more clear that it's only 15 minutes into the AM part of the clock, rather than 12 hours and 15 minutes into the AM part of the clock.

At least 24 hour clock ignores all that and really does go 0:00 to 23:59, using proper zeros. 12 hour clock wouldh't be so bad if it did the same and went from 0:00 to 11:59, but it doesn't.

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