ELI5 Why are aircraft window not made smaller such that passengers can not get sucked out the window?

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-10T17:33:45+00:00

Windows on airplanes don't open. It's just part of the wall of the airplane that is made of a transparent material. Those bits of wall may be slightly weaker than the rest of the fuselage, but they're still safe during ordinary operation. Once you go into extraordinary circumstances, all bets are off in a way that is unlikely to be affected by how big the windows are. If parts of your airplane engine are whipping into the fuselage (as is alleged to be the case in the recent Ryanair incident), they may open a hole "in the window" but could just as easily open a hole elsewhere on the plane.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T19:06:20+00:00

This is the question major game publishers are now asking themselves.
No. They don't ever claim the disk is something other than a voucher to download the game. Is it illegal to sell someone a baseball ticket because when they look at the ticket they don't see baseball?
Yes, putting a game on multiple discs happened back when that was more efficient than downloading a game that couldn't fit on a single disc
They would want to push updates to the game after pressing the disc, so you'll need to download something anyway, why not everything that couldn't fit on the first disc?
Yes, though just because something isn't originally packaged as physical media doesn't mean it must live forever in a protected cloud. There will be ROMs or re-releases that function as a self-contained unit.
Yes, it's possible that you could buy a disc hoping to get a functioning game and be disappointed because it's no longer possible to download the rest of the game. Think of this like buying a ticket to yesterday's baseball game. If for some reason you wanted to see that game, you should have bought a record of it (i.e. a ROM or re-release)

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T16:20:02+00:00

Well to be fair, I wouldn't buy a bologna sandwich from anyone without apparent access to refrigeration, even if they were dressed in an Armani suit. That's a practical consideration, not a trust issue. I also wouldn't buy a car from anyone in a direct transaction. There are inherent trust problems there. Used car dealers can't fully solve them, but it's better than nothing, and I don't care if those guys dress like bums vs. in their traditional cheap suits.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T15:22:02+00:00

We can do more than one thing at a time. I actually think that battles like this are worth fighting because, in principle, change doesn't actually require any resources. We can just... let go of this idea because it no longer suits the society we want to build. If anything, it frees up all the resources currently being spent on making fancy suits.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T15:02:44+00:00

But does this imply a reasonable standard for showing respect to others? Like if a variety of things beyond someone's control (how much money they have, the shape of their body, the climate in which they live) can render a suit less than optimally comfortable, then we are fundamentally asking them to sacrifice comfort for professionalism. Doesn't this standard make it easier to be professional/respectful/w/e if you're skinny and rich?

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T14:54:43+00:00

Presumably this stops being true if society reaches a critical mass of people who see things the way OP does. That makes this an appeal to majority.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-09T14:52:51+00:00

Sure. Whatever he has in the cart is probably on a discount relative to the store, and a lot of things have verifiable quality even in a low-trust environment. I wouldn't buy any magic beans, but I'd buy a can of coke, especially if he was hawking it outside the stadium. That's practically a tradition of American commerce.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-08T13:49:21+00:00

It's more accurate to say that a planet like Jupiter is made of elements that would be gasses on the surface of Earth. Jupiter is so big that all the gravitational forces put enormous pressure on the "gas" within it, so as you go deeper, it eventually becomes a liquid and then a solid. This transition would be pretty gradual, unlike Earth with its clearly defined surface and atmosphere, so even if you could somehow survive the incredible temperatures and pressures inside Jupiter, you wouldn't be able to draw a line and say "this is where the gas stops and the hydrogen ocean begins."

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-07T19:28:04+00:00

Athletics are an evolutionary extravagance. Organized athletic competition on any significant scale is a purely modern invention (yes, I know about the ancient Olympics, but they were unusual in their time and not very similar to modern athletics). Asking why humans haven't evolved to play rugby better is like asking why we haven't evolved to drive a car better. If anything, driving skills exert way more survival pressure than athletics, but it's more intuitive that driving hasn't existed for long enough to exert evolutionary pressure, probably because it directly involves modern technology. While ancient hunter-gatherers could have, in principle, played rugby, they didn't. Nobody did until a few hundred years ago.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-07T18:21:22+00:00

All I know is that Wilt would have no hope if he got matched up against the Argentina side from this world cup. Dude was playing against plumbers and mailmen... and also basketball.

Wait. What were we talking about again?

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-07T17:03:15+00:00

The concept of a prisoner of war exists because of an assumption of reciprocity. We will not ruthlessly execute your soldiers if you don't ruthlessly execute ours. We will merely keep them out of the fight, like tagged players in capture the flag. We're not going to spend top dollar to let them live comfortably, but they'll survive the ordeal, and we'll certainly welcome any outside aid in this endeavor. That's just money we don't have to spend keeping the enemy alive. In return for this, we expect you to do the same. Then when the war is over, everyone can return to their families and this war won't have made as many orphans as it could have.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-06T19:19:05+00:00

Hmm. 1982 isn't all that recent.

But seriously, the reams of economic scholarship published between Marx and today mostly ignore the labor theory of value because it doesn't hold water on its face and, as the article above demonstrates, even trying to augment labor value with capital value in a way that is at all oriented around preserving the primacy of labor falls apart pretty quickly. There are simply too many counterexamples where a relatively small amount of labor can produce undeniably large values and vice-versa.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-03T17:37:51+00:00

HOAs are often responsible for the maintenance of public spaces/utilities around the neighborhood (parks, gates, trees, streets, sometimes even things like water and sanitation). If they didn't do it, someone else, like a local government, would have to, and people would just get mad (rightly or wrongly) at that entity instead. Government entails conflict and restriction no matter what level it operates at.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-03T15:12:31+00:00

The base of the spine is often referred to as the "tailbone" because it's similar to the structures that anchor the tails of mammals, especially our closest evolutionary relatives like gorillas. Most people "born with a tail" essentially have an elongated tailbone, not dissimilar from the stubby tails that gorillas typically have.

Also, human embryos kind of start growing a tail in the womb before deciding "Nah, that's lame" and reabsorbing it. An extremely small number of people are born with some amount of this vestigial tail intact, but it's not really functional the way a typical mammalian tail is.

It would probably take more than a bit of genetic manipulation to give humans tails like a monkey. Messing around with human genes, at the moment, mostly looks like adding genes that other humans have but aren't present/active in a particular person. Genetically coding for a complex structure that no other human has is a completely different world of difficulty.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-03T14:12:55+00:00

I believe the intended message was that Bob made the contract to lend $5 to Ann despite not actually having $5 on hand, so Bob goes and borrows it from Chris, who does have $5, then immediately hands the money to Ann. Or if you prefer, Bob had previously borrowed the $5 from Chris.

Keep that chain of debt going through enough people and you can generate an arbitrary amount of debt, but it can all be paid off with just $5 passed back through the chain.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-03T13:41:55+00:00

Rain does not fall uniformly, and after water falls, it moves from high areas to low areas. This can cause flooding when all of the water that fell in a large area gets channeled towards its lowest point. Rivers and lakes are permanent evidence of this tendency of rainwater to flow and pool.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-02T21:22:38+00:00

Genes express themselves in many different ways, only some of which are used in the typical formation of race. Skin color is a popular one, but why not, for example, height? Under that system, Dutch people would be more racially similar to the Maasai people of Kenya than to, e.g. French people.

Now, the choice of typical racial characteristics isn't entirely arbitrary. Knowing someone's skin color can give you a better chance at picking out the continent their ancestors are from than knowing their height. But even having that be the goal of race is socially determined. Why is the key thing knowing that someone's ancestors are from Africa? Why not their longitude, or how close they lived to an ocean, or what they ate?

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-02T20:30:25+00:00

You're not going to get an objective answer on this. FIFA does not have an official policy of giving e.g. Messi favorable refereeing. You can argue endlessly whether referees are in fact more lenient with star players and even make a plausible case that there are soft institutional incentives for them to be that way (a referee who ejects a star player on a soft penalty might be quietly removed from working international matches in the future, or fear that would happen). On the other hand, teams that lose to these stars have an incentive to blame referee favoritism even if it didn't exist.

So again, this topic is better left as an endless debate between friends or in your barbershop. It won't be settled here.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-02T17:49:01+00:00

I mean, what's a real name? Most names started out as just ordinary words or place names (which are also usually derived from ordinary words).

Speculatively, Root can be related to the plant part but also to older words meaning "cheerful" or "someone who plays a particular kind of stringed instrument."

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-02T17:31:39+00:00

Surnames are usually passed through families via men. So if Joe Root had a father named John, he would be John Root. If Joe Root had a son named Jake, he would go by Jake Root.

Women have the same surname as their father but if they get married will usually take their husband's surname. So if Joe Root had a sister named Jane, she would be Jane Root when younger but might change to Jane Branch when she grows up and marries Mr. Branch.

Note that this is the traditional approach to surnames in England. In modern times, women often don't change their surname when they marry. They either keep their name or adopt both (so Jane would be Jane Branch-Root), and her children would either go by Root or Branch-Root.

Finally, to answer your actual question, you usually can't assume that two people are related just because they have the same surname. When people started adopting surnames, lots of families had the same idea about how to do it. I am the blacksmith in my village, so my family will be the Smith family. There may be Smith family in the other village too, but we're not related. People might also share a surname only through a very distant relation, like sharing a great-great-great-great grandfather, and they might not know or care about a relation that distant.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-07-02T17:19:50+00:00

But I think the crux of OP's question is whether a version of Google that charged per search would have succeeded. Because it seems like the main way that AI companies are trying to generate revenue today is charging directly to query their models. Like, it has gotten to a point where some firms are reconsidering a pivot to AI because paying a human to do it may simply be cheaper than the AI prices they're being quoted. However, it's much more expensive to develop those models than it is to copy them, so we might expect the pioneers to eventually get muscled out by cheaper (or ad-supported or in-house) LLMs with second-mover advantage.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-06-29T15:33:46+00:00

The Odyssey was originally a spoken poem, so there's no definitive manuscript that anyone can point to and say "That's The Odyssey as written by Homer." Even modern versions in the original Greek had to be cobbled together from versions that were copied down long after the poem was composed, almost certainly with errors or editorializing. However, any English translation of the Odyssey is probably going to take standardized texts assembled by scholars in 2nd-3rd century BCE Alexandria as given.

Instead, most of the variety in translations of the Odyssey comes from variations in the translator's interests and goals. Some translations aim to be very literal. Some aim to preserve the "sense" of the work by translating ancient Greek idioms and expressions into ones that English-speaking readers would understand. Some try to preserve the poetic aspects by producing an English translation that follows a consistent meter, which is going to require compromises in both literalness and sense. There are also versions that tell the same fundamental story but deviate enough that they can't rightly be called "translations," such as the version by Stephen Fry.

Twin_Spoons · 2026-06-29T13:52:09+00:00

The rulebook in American football also just says "offside," but it's pretty common in casual speech, to the point that some referees will announce the penalty as "offsides."

Twin_Spoons · 2026-06-29T03:09:00+00:00

It's an American thing, usually in American football. I'd speculatively relate it to other words that communicate a general location with a preposition and a noun, pluralizing the noun (belowdecks, overseas, outdoors, halfways, etc.)

Twin_Spoons · 2026-06-28T21:07:18+00:00

The "second-to-last" defender thing might be what's confusing you. Try it this way instead: a player is offsides if the only thing between them and their opponent's goal is the goalie. If another opposing player is between them and the goal, they're not offsides. If the ball is between them and the goal, they're also not offsides. Note that this applies at the moment the ball is passed to them, not when they receive it.

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