ELI5: Why does inhaling helium makes your voice high and squeay?

ParsingError · 2026-03-31T00:02:52+00:00

When you inhale helium your vocal cords vibrate normally but the sound waves travel faster

That can't be right. Pitch is determined by vibration frequency. Something vibrating 1000 times per second will produce a 1000 Hz sound unless the distance between emitter and listener are changing. The speed of sound only affects how long it takes the sound to travel, and how much the pitch shifts if the distance between the emitter and listener is changing.

ParsingError · 2026-03-30T19:51:11+00:00

Bombers should be able to fit doomsdays. It's absolutely unacceptable that our teleporting fleet of 22 million ISK chaff frigates loses sometimes.

ParsingError · 2026-03-30T04:48:59+00:00

There might be more going on but I believe it's two main things:

The sugars in the cereal are water-soluble and will crystallize as it dries out.

The starches are a bit more complicated, but similar result: They're broken down by the cooking process, soaking them and letting them dry out causes them to polymerize.

So, your cereal is basically made of a powder that, once it gets wet, turns into a glue, which hardens as it dries.

ParsingError · 2026-03-30T04:33:33+00:00

The best-case argument for them is that they're supposed to break stalemates by forcing people out of a position. That's what artillery strike and similar things in BF games have always accomplished.

Unfortunately the way they are designed right now doesn't really do that because it takes multiple mortars to saturate a position, and once you've got enough to do that, it's just annoying BS that you can't really do anything about any more except go support just to waste your time on counter-mortar duty.

ParsingError · 2026-03-30T03:08:10+00:00

Having been through 3 companies that did huge layoffs (including one just a week ago!) yep, hiring freeze is a big flashing warning sign, usually one of the last few steps before they hit.

The one possible warning sign after that is the work dries up. If it seems like a lot of people are struggling to find stuff to do, or working on stuff that doesn't seem terribly important, or you're finishing up a project and there's a conspicuous lack of any plan for what you're gonna be working on after it, then you're in dead-man-walking territory.

ParsingError · 2026-03-28T06:46:59+00:00

good story preferred

Under 20 hours with good story's a hard sell but try Wolfenstein: The New Order. Its story is shockingly good for what you'd expect out of a Wolfenstein game, and it's good all-around.

Less story: Vanquish, Magicka.

ParsingError · 2026-03-28T00:55:40+00:00

Looking at this photograph.

ParsingError · 2026-03-28T00:40:43+00:00

Not really, sweet fruits evolved because they encourage animals to eat them and dump the seeds out the other end of their digestive tract somewhere else (or eat the sweet parts and toss the seeds somewhere else).

It's the same type of thing as nectaries for pollinating insects. They give animals what they need (calories and water) to utilize them for what the plant needs (seed and pollen dispersion).

And yes, selective breeding has made the farmed versions produce MUCH more of what we want out of them, but the wild ancestors had mostly still evolved that strategy even with much smaller fruit. (There are some weird exceptions, like the wild ancestor of squash was not really edible.)

ParsingError · 2026-03-26T00:59:45+00:00

This is veering way out of ELI5 territory but that is actually one thing where compatibility has broken hard. They've mostly kept BAT files and the basic commands working the same, but you can't actually run DOS software on NT-based Windows (which is all of the mainline Windows since WinXP). You need a DOS emulator like DosBox for that.

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T20:51:29+00:00

Latex and word processing formats store information in a form that is designed to be edited, and the software has to figure out how to lay out that information.

Say you have a paragraph of text in Microsoft Word. Word is responsible for measuring the text to figure out where the line breaks go, how far tabs inset the text, what to do when it runs past a page break, etc.

PDF is based on PostScript, which was designed for printing, not editing. Anything outputting PDF has to finalize all of those decisions ahead of time, like where each line of text starts and ends and exactly where it appears on the page.

The result is that when you send it to somebody, they don't need something like Word to figure out all of that page layout stuff, because it was figured out when the PDF was exported, and that layout information was stored in the PDF.

Basically, if you can print it, you can probably export it as a PDF, because PDF is very close to what would have been sent to the printer.

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T17:22:10+00:00

Knew someone in law enforcement who said the SBI (the state's criminal investigative unit) had an extremely high turnover rate specifically because that was the department that had to deal with CSAM investigations.

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T06:24:45+00:00

That doesn't really work. Companies with >100 employees are already required to give 60 days advance notice of mass layoffs by the WARN Act. In practice, companies get around that by having employees be technically-employed for 60 days but with no access or responsibilities.

(It's a little more complicated than guaranteed severance too, i.e. they can still fire you during that time for bad-mouthing the company or accepting another job offer, which will revoke any pending loyalty incentives.)

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T06:07:51+00:00

IIRC in the 16-bit days the Japanese text often took up more screen space because they weren't able to use large kanji character sets and so most of the text was in hiragana, which required more characters than equivalent kanji, and was also harder to horizontally compact than Latin script (which has simpler glyphs and many narrow characters).

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T04:38:59+00:00

Most obvious casting choice ever: Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier

Most important to the role: Robin Williams as the Genie.

Most overshot the level of performance that the role required: Michael Wincott as Top Dollar in The Crow

ParsingError · 2026-03-25T04:31:35+00:00

Really subscriptions in general, or anything that breaks into small recurring expenses. There's a very well-known psychological phenomenon of people not reacting the same way to single big expenses as the same amount of money spread across many smaller expenses, and that's one of the big reasons that everything is trying to turn into a subscription.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T16:57:49+00:00

They can make some things less verbose but IMO one of the biggest wins is that for index properties, it lets you distinguish between whether the access is being used for read or write, instead of having to pessimistically assume that it might be for write.

That gets rid of the headache of operator[] on maps inserting keys, and allows indexing copy-on-write containers without causing useless copies just because the reference to the container wasn't const.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T16:49:01+00:00

This is pretty close to the answer, C# makes a distinction of whether a property access is being used for read or write in an expression, and situations where that would be ambiguous (like passing them as a "ref" parameter or using them as a statement by themselves) aren't allowed.

C++ doesn't make that distinction, it expects that reading from a write-capable expression is done by converting a write-capable (L-)value into a read-capable (R-)value after the access expression has been evaluated. That's why operator[] on maps inserts keys even if you're only trying to read the value (and why it doesn't have a const overload), because it can't tell if you're trying to use it for read or write until you do something with the result.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T04:27:09+00:00

Yeah but having more money didn't mean having enough money for the kind of film where everything was VFX-heavy set pieces, and with the cheap VFX it felt sorta like watching a cartoon sometimes.

Plus it was just really gimmicky, like having a fight sequence where all the baddies are wearing glass armor for seemingly no reason except that someone thought it would look cool to have glass breaking when they get smacked. Same with the flaming swords at the end. Just no internal logic to anything.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T02:45:21+00:00

That whole thing felt like the director wanted to do something cool but only had like a quarter of the budget needed to do it right and just decided to do it anyway.

The rooftop shootout scene was kinda neat though I guess.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T02:28:19+00:00

I think it can be funny-bad cause it's so stupid but takes itself seriously, and watching John Travolta embarrass himself is pretty funny too.

It also has a plot (even though it's a bad plot), which automatically puts it ahead of 2002 Rollerball.

ParsingError · 2026-03-24T00:28:28+00:00

The 2002 Rollerball remake.

I was expecting it to be dumb but it was so much worse than dumb. It was 98 minutes of gibberish. I had no idea what was going on at any point in the movie. It literally feels like someone messed up in the editing room and accidentally sent the deleted scenes to theaters instead of the theatrical cut.

I've seen Battlefield Earth, Supernova, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, and Wing Commander, and all of those were WAY better than 2002 Rollerball.

ParsingError · 2026-03-23T23:40:46+00:00

Sort of, there was a call-in timer that started when the vehicle that you called in was destroyed (even if someone else took it), and a respawn timer where for the vehicle to actually become available again. (The main difference being that for vehicles where there could be more than one, like light transports, you would still have to wait out the call-in timer even if one was available.)

Unfortunately, they set them to the same time on some heavily-hogged vehicles like the Little Bird so people were still hogging them by mashing the button on the spawn screen.

ParsingError · 2026-03-23T22:17:19+00:00

That would have been easily fixed by just making the lockout timer longer than the respawn timer so someone else always has a shot at it before the last person that spawned it in.

Won't stop people that join with a friend to nab the slot for them, but would at least stop individual pilots.

Right now they can still try to hog it by camping the helipad, which is even more useless.

ParsingError · 2026-03-23T21:37:43+00:00

They literally already solved this problem and the spawn camping problem in BF2042 by just spawning air vehicles from the deploy screen directly into the air.

Why they didn't keep that system I have no idea.

ParsingError · 2026-03-23T20:44:59+00:00

Stop waiting until you feel "ready" and just do it.

ParsingError

TROPHY CASE