Muroid
Muroid t1_jegfxuj wrote
Reply to comment by awfullotofocelots in There really isn't any reason why north is always upward and south is always downward on maps. by GuinnessTheBestBoi
You’re the one who said there was a geographic reason for it.
There’s no geographic reason for poles to be oriented vertically.
You’ve essentially just said “There’s a reason that we orient our maps so that North is up. It’s because that’s where the North Pole is and we orient our maps vertically based on the poles.”
Ok great, except that that doesn’t actually answer the question, because if you then ask “why do we orient our maps based on the poles” which is kind of implicit in the initial question, the answer is “No particularly good reason except that that’s how we do it.”
Edit: Sure, there are always reasons why an arbitrary choice went one way or the other. But you didn’t actually give the reason in this case. You’ve just asserted that there was one.
Muroid t1_jegef9x wrote
Reply to comment by awfullotofocelots in There really isn't any reason why north is always upward and south is always downward on maps. by GuinnessTheBestBoi
Yeah, but the orientation is still arbitrary. There’s nothing natural about associating the poles with up and down or the precession of the sun through the sky as side to side motion.
It’s purely an arbitrary convention that could easily be reversed with no impact on how any of it is observed now or in the past.
Muroid t1_jefw3tl wrote
Reply to comment by awfullotofocelots in There really isn't any reason why north is always upward and south is always downward on maps. by GuinnessTheBestBoi
You’re already assuming an “axis = vertical” model in that justification.
There’s no particular reason to think that the sun moving East-West means that East-West has to be side to side.
Maybe the sun is falling from “up” to “down” and the poles are the sides of the Earth.
Muroid t1_je50suh wrote
Reply to comment by aitherion in eli5 why ancient historical buildings haven’t been kept up? Why are buildings like the Parthenon and the Colosseum in such disrepair? Greece and Rome/Italy have existed the entire time? by PickledSpace56
Also, the white stone looks gorgeous. The way things were painted in bright colors in antiquity was gaudy as hell.
A lot of the classic Greek and Roman architecture and statuary would look kind of stupid to modern eyes that are used to seeing it with the color stripped away.
Muroid t1_ja6mcbb wrote
Reply to comment by No-Owl9201 in TIL a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English sent their own Armada to Spain, leading to similar losses of ships and men, and an ignominious English defeat by malektewaus
History is written by the people who were writing history in the language that you speak.
Muroid t1_j930w34 wrote
Reply to comment by MicMustard in Will The Last of Us take the generational crown from Breaking Bad? by MoonSpawn12
Or it would have been canceled after one season.
Muroid t1_j8nf0zq wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in TIFU by accidentally revealing my love for anime during a job interview. by [deleted]
You went into an interview for a sales job and talked about how anime inspired you to become an animator?
Muroid t1_j7zxb6s wrote
>unfortunately, i live with my 80 year old
The line ended here and wrapped around to a new line to continue the sentence. Combined with the headline, I’ll admit my heart skipped a beat before my eyes caught up to the rest of what you wrote.
Muroid t1_j6xju18 wrote
Reply to comment by kagalibros in TIFU by getting the same thrifted cups as someone I know by transcendentdanae
There’s not a separate preschool budget. There’s just the budget for the school district.
Muroid t1_j6p19kb wrote
I’m looking forward to summer when work ends before sunset so my wife and I can go back to committing walks in broad daylight.
Muroid t1_j6ojls0 wrote
Reply to comment by Bawbawian in Man who lost testicle from supervisor's hit awarded $295,000 by wawaboy
Endowment effect: People overestimate the value of things they already own.
You say an arm or a hand isn’t worth a million dollars, but let me ask you this: if you had a million dollars and someone offered you a severed arm for a million dollars, would you take it? No? Then clearly a million dollars is worth more than an arm.
Muroid t1_j6k7xs6 wrote
Reply to comment by Kewkky in ELI5: Why do so many fruits have seedless varieties but the apple and cherry do not? by JanaCinnamon
A bit like chickens laying unfertilized eggs.
Muroid t1_j5w24kc wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why is the kinetic energy of an object proportional to the square of the velocity? I've read many explanations online but I still don't get it. by ThrowawayHomesch
You have correctly identified the fact that kinetic energy is frame dependent and not conserved between frames of reference.
You aren’t really missing anything other than that you should do all comparisons from within the same frame of reference, but what frame you choose can be arbitrary and the math will ultimately all work out.
Muroid t1_iy6yibk wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why has no one invented a humidifier that doesn’t grow mold or need to be cleaned? by wakanda_banana
Mold and bacteria thrive in moist, humid environments. It’s less that humidifiers have been engineered to need excessive cleaning and more that their intended function encourages this growth as a natural consequence.
Preventing it would require doing things to the water that you probably don’t want to do to something you’re intending to aerosolize and inhale, or else treating the device itself in ways that are likely to require cleaning and/or maintenance anyway.
So at that point it’s cheaper and safer just to tell people they need to clean their humidifiers because the thing that makes humidifiers good for you also makes it good for stuff you don’t want building up in the humidifier.
Muroid t1_iy2f19r wrote
Reply to comment by RedneckNerd23 in Somewhere, during the countdown to Y2K, someone's power went out and they probably thought the world was ending. by YourAverageTylerFan
They fixed the problem before it appeared so everyone else decided it was a big nothingburger and vowed never to let anyone get them worked up like that over nothing again.
Muroid t1_iwiu1iq wrote
Reply to comment by Abbot_of_Cucany in TIFU by telling Polish soldiers that I eat pussy with absolutely zero context by [deleted]
Oh that’s good. I like those kinds of puns.
Muroid t1_iu01r1h wrote
Reply to comment by OpenGiraffe in Every language travels at the speed of sound, except sign language that travels at the speed of light by _somename_
The speed of light almost always refers to c. It would technically be correct to refer to any speed that light travels at as “the speed of light” but given the common name of c, that is almost never what people mean or understand by the phrase “speed of light” unless it’s been very clearly specified.
The speed of light through air is very, very close to c. The speed of light through fiber optics isn’t. Still a high percentage of c so very fast, but not a value that you’d ever mistake for c. With air it’s practically a rounding error away.
Muroid t1_itzzmox wrote
Reply to comment by Memestrats4life in Every language travels at the speed of sound, except sign language that travels at the speed of light by _somename_
You can hypothetically measure the time it would take sound to travel through air a distance equivalent to the distance from the Earth to the moon even if it would not be possible for sound to actually travel from the real moon to the real Earth.
Muroid t1_itzzcye wrote
Reply to comment by NuclearCreations in Every language travels at the speed of sound, except sign language that travels at the speed of light by _somename_
Electricity travels through wires at a high percentage of the speed of light, but not at the speed of light.
Same applies to light in fiber optic cables, actually.
Muroid t1_itvf738 wrote
Reply to eli5 How does renewable energy work by Whitney_Is_Easy
“Renewables” aren’t really reusing energy so much as the source of the energy can or will be replenished rather than running out on human timescales.
For instance, we can burn oil and we can burn trees. There is currently a finite amount of oil on the Earth and a finite number of trees.
But we can grow more trees. We can’t make more oil. So trees are renewable. Oil is not.
The overwhelming majority of “renewable” energy sources that will not run out are actually just capturing energy put out by the sun.
If we want to be very technical, that energy is also finite and will run out, but the sun will expand and destroy the Earth long before that happens, so worrying about running out of that source of energy doesn’t seem particularly worthwhile.
Muroid t1_isggua6 wrote
Reply to comment by Ffdmatt in When it's said 99.9% of human DNA is the same in all humans, is this referring to only coding DNA or both coding and non-coding DNA combined? by PeanutSalsa
That’s really a better description of all DNA-utilizing life.
Humans are remarkably similar in their genetic code even by that baseline.
Muroid t1_iqrsyp5 wrote
Reply to How do ants find their way back "home"? by DanieleJava
In addition to the already mentioned pheromone trails, ants are also very good at exactly retracing their steps.
Experiments testing this exact question found that if they added stilts to ant legs on their return trip found that they overshot their nest by the corresponding amount that their stride was lengthened by the stilts, implying that they are effectively counting steps as they retrace their path.
If these normal methods fail and they get lost, they’ll then enter a spiral search pattern until they find the nest or a trail.
Muroid t1_jegky7a wrote
Reply to comment by A40 in TIL an amateur archaeologist discovered European cave paintings used a proto-writing system meant to convey the gestation period of the various animals they painted by using dots to indicate the lunar cycle. by AudibleNod
What they look like is kind of irrelevant. If they’re consistent, they’re consistent. If they’re not, they’re not.