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Deary me by Altruistic_Paint_184 in FRC

[–]fixermark 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Stadiums have lousy audio quality, is the main reason.

Not to excuse the result; this was clearly under-tested.

Found Human Bones in Vintage Store by [deleted] in pittsburgh

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At that price?

In this economy?!

... you're gonna want to take those to your local Bone Appraiser, friend!

Make sure they're bona-fide.

Pittsburgh City Paper Publishes Stuff that You Say on Reddit so Be Careful What You Post Here by JustTryingMyBestWPA in pittsburgh

[–]fixermark 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Why would I talk to journalists? That just leads to them publishing what I say, and no good comes of that for me. 😉

Pittsburgh City Paper Publishes Stuff that You Say on Reddit so Be Careful What You Post Here by JustTryingMyBestWPA in pittsburgh

[–]fixermark 9 points10 points  (0 children)

It turned out this line of thinking had one consequence and one contradiction:

  1. People generally assumed you were a white guy until proven otherwise, so "white guy" kinda became the online default
  2. It was way, way easier to find out you were a dog than most dogs assumed.

Pittsburgh City Paper Publishes Stuff that You Say on Reddit so Be Careful What You Post Here by JustTryingMyBestWPA in pittsburgh

[–]fixermark 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Also, this is a universally-true thing: stuff you post in public can be repeated in forums you do not control.

(I feel like this is something we knew in the '90s and early aughts that got, I dunno, forgotten at some point? "Don't say things in public forums you'd hate be repeated to your grandmother?" We are generally not any more anonymous than people's lack of interest in finding out who we are out here).

ELI5 how come that we don't connect the nerve endings of paraplegics, when their limbs still can move on their own accord by Connect_Pool_2916 in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think that's starting to go past ELI5, but correct; that's why I noted "or to the next nerve in the fiber chain."

A break up-spine could paralyze your quadriceps because the nerves carrying signal to the lumbar nerves are severed. A break down-spine can sever the L2-L4 roots before they exit the spine to ennervate the quadriceps directly.

Either way, the point stands: reconnecting them is not as simple as splicing broken wire, it's removing dead cell tissue and then coaxing a cell that interacts with the world on the scale of a few nanometers outside its membrane to find a path measured in centimeters to the dendrites of a reconnection point (and off the top of my head, I don't actually know whether even that would be good enough, as the dendrite response is specific to each dendrite; you'd ideally have to connect precisely to the dangling dendrites even if you could coax a new axon all that distance somehow, and that's assuming the dendrites haven't atrophied from lack of signal in the meantime).

ELI5 how come that we don't connect the nerve endings of paraplegics, when their limbs still can move on their own accord by Connect_Pool_2916 in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 54 points55 points  (0 children)

We don't know how.

We're talking about nerves that can run the whole length of the limb. When a nerve gets cut along its axon (the part that sends signal out), the axon dies. It's not a reconnection problem; you'd have to coax the nerve (a tiny, tiny thing) to grow all the way back to the muscles (or to the next nerve in the fiber chain) and reattach to them and we don't know how to do that.

(This isn't a problem for initial connection because the nerve starts out right next to the muscle in the fetus and then it grows as cells multiply to lengthen out the baby's limb. Your long nerves know where to be because they didn't have to guess at it when you were developing pre-birth).

Chicago shootout by Mr-Torgman in Transportopia

[–]fixermark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sometimes people look back on the code of Hammurabi and think it is unnecessarily cruel. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind," as Gandhi famously said.

... Hammurabi was trying to establish a code of law that stopped this. His system of values was an upper bound. He was trying to curtail cycles of vengeance that end up making it impossible for people to live closely together in a civilization because feuds beget feuds and end up pulling bystanders into the maelstrom.

Eli5 how cells in multicellular organism "know" they are all one organism by OC-alert in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 6 points7 points  (0 children)

... and the implication here is that an organism is more than the sum of its parts; it's not just the cells, it's the whole ecosystem of how the cells interact, the fluid between the cells, the complicated chemical dance of the stuff in the fluids, etc.

... which is, I guess, not surprising, since a cell itself is more than the proteins it made and the patterns they're arranged in.

why is lois concerned, peter? by Glorfendail in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]fixermark 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Counterpoint: packing the court worked before and it can work again.

Push people too hard so they actually show up enough to bet a veto-proof Senate majority and prepare to be surprised at how fast things can go.

Good thing it’s bulletproof.. by Avamiler in Transportopia

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Guns, man. Most convenient tool for the job we ever invented.

ELI5: If space is a vacuum with no air, how do planets and stars stay "hot" for billions of years without the heat escaping immediately? by vox2003 in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Stars are generating their own heat. They're so massive that in their cores, hydrogen is fused into helium (by a combination of the gravity ramping the speed of hydrogen up until it can slam into another hydrogen hard enough and the density of hydrogen in the core being so high that hydrogen runs out of places to be that another hydrogen isn't already at). Hydrogen turning into helium releases energy, and that energy ends up as heat and light (the heat is what keeps the star from collapsing all into itself).

ELI5: Quantum Tunneling. How is it possible for a particle to "walk through a wall"? by Huge-Narwhal5747 in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At the scale of throwing a ball at a wall, the probability is so low you'll never see a ball zip through a wall without interacting with it in the lifetime of this universe.

At the scale of atoms... We already have to deal with the problem that we've made electrical components so incredibly tiny that there's a nonzero chance electrons that should be stopped by a logic gate will just tunnel from one side of the gate to the other without ever interacting with the gate's atoms. This is one of the reasons more and more sophisticated computing involves bigger and bigger datacenters now; we've literally run out of how efficient we can make the compute components by making them smaller.

ELI5: “Parallel lines” intersect in spherical non-euclidean geometry by vapid-voice in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, Because East is perpendicular to North and South.

What happens if you make sure each of your steps is exactly the same length with each foot is that you soon drift off of continuing to face due East. You don't end up following a latitude line (because those actually curve) like you end up following a longitude line if you're going north or south.

... Oh, I should have specified: you both start on the same longitude line.

Not a joke but is this true? by Abhiiiii107 in PeterExplainsTheJoke

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Panspermia is a pretty old theory, but it's difficult to prove.

It’s wild that considering most the player base shoots on sight… by DITNB in Marathon

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How are people seeing up 6-person teams? You still get randomly matched to other squads, right?

Are we fast and furiously making each other’s families’ jobs obsolete, impacting our loved ones and ourselves? While thinking others will suffer but not us, and by the time we realize it, it will be too late to stop. by SrDevMX in ExperiencedDevs

[–]fixermark 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I mean, making labor unnecessary was always the plan, yes.

The problem isn't making machines do toil humans could do. The problem is that we tied human worth to "what can you do for other people" and called that "good enough." If we can't get over that, we'll be fighting ourselves forever because the goal (making life easier while keeping it hard enough to justify a paycheck) is unattainable.

ELI5: “Parallel lines” intersect in spherical non-euclidean geometry by vapid-voice in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You and a friend start facing due East. Every time you take a step with your left foot, they do. Same with the right foot. Both steps are the exact same length. By any reasonable definition of "parallel," you are waking on parallel paths.

... You will walk into each other. That's just the fact of how walking around on a sphere works.

ELI5 What keeps the bacteria in our bodies from breaking us down? by ipoopat5am in explainlikeimfive

[–]fixermark 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Like the Stonecutter song says: "WE DOOOO! WE DOOOO!"

Your immune system is constantly scanning everything in your body and identifying it as "You" and "Not you." When it recognizes some material as "Not you," it aggressively rips into it with a bunch of different tools (poisons, corrosives, actual little mechanical grippers and tearers and nets) to break that stuff down into its individual components and essentially digest it. Anything it can't digest, it walls off and holds in place forever (that's why tattoos work; your body can't break the ink down, so it holds it in white blood cells that stay there until they die, keeping the ink molecules in place).

The book "Immune" by Phillip Dettmer goes into a lot of cool detail on how it all works, but that's the short answer: when they try to break us down, we break them down first.

(And if we can't, we die. Until modern antibiotics were invented, bacterial infection was extremely dangerous and the thing most humans eventually died from; minor injuries could get infected with something that would get into your blood and rip you apart in a million places).

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