Because they look bad.

That said, that's not really a mullet on Link. A mullet would be cropped much closer on the front (especially on the sides), thus "business in the front, party in the back."

One other wrench to throw into this thesis is that phase of matter is actually determined by a combination of temperature and pressure. The pressure of a single atom is also not a meaningful metric.

A chair requires a very specific environment to reproduce. Inside a carpentry shop with a human carpenter capable of measuring, cutting, and machining new parts to assemble, or otherwise a factory designed to create more chairs. /s

That article matches exactly what I said, and isn't comparable to CO poisoning at all. As you said, CO binds to your red blood cells preventing Oxygen uptake. Water does no such mechanism. You can prevent water intoxication by supplementing your water consumption with sufficient electrolytes. You cannot prevent CO poisoning with supplemental Oxygen.

Oxygen toxicity is also directly damaging. The high level of oxygen is actually damaging your lung (and other organ) tissue. With water intoxication, it's not the H2O that gets you. It's the electrolyte imbalance. Unless you want to squint and say that electrolytes are the antidote to water poisoning, I just don't think that framing paints the right picture.

OP was asking if too much water damages your kidneys or w/e. The implied question there is like, do your kidneys wear themselves out processing all that water, to which the answer is not really. Your body is perfectly fine handling as much water as you could possibly drink. It's more comparable to something like Nitrogen asphyxiation. The Nitrogen isn't killing you, the lack of oxygen is (and the lack of CO2 telling your body not to panic). Nitrogen, in any quantity, isn't really poisonous or toxic.

Someone please factually correct me, but I don't think the comments saying it's possible to drink "too much" water are correct. The key distinction is that there is no such thing as water poisoning, or anything like that. Your body will flush any excess water you drink.

The problem is, as others have explained, that when your body flushes the water it takes important vitamins and minerals with it. If you're able to replace those you should be fine. The first that you would probably notice is sodium/electrolytes. Beyond that, any water soluble vitamins and minerals could become a problem.

The best answer is still drink water when you're thirsty. If you're expending a lot of water due to heat, exercise, or illness you may need to supplement with electrolytes. 3-4 liters a day is pretty normal and should not cause any issues.

Edit: I said factually correct me... Y'all keep "correcting" me by agreeing with me. It's not too much water that kills you. It's low electrolytes.

Dreams aren't memories. Dreams and hallucinations are when your brain fires random neurons, and then it tries to interpret those random firings as sensible sensory inputs by filling in the gaps. The dream continues as the brain solidifies its interpretation and begins to self-propagate the meme.

A dog dreaming about chasing squirrel is something along the lines of random firings->that must a squirrel->I chase squirrels->squirrels run away when I chase->I continue chasing. It doesn't really require a memory of a squirrel any more than chasing a squirrel in real life requires a memory of previous squirrel. The dog just very instinctively chases small critters and knows that they usually run away.

If anything dreams are more driven by associative memory. Every input has an expected output, and you just keep chaining those together. Like spamming the suggested word on your phone's autocomplete.

We can only imagine a life form that doesn't metabolize but does everything else required of life. I don't think it's a requirement though. Still, it's pretty hard to grow and change, have functional activity, or reproduce without a metabolism. Information theory may even say that's impossible, but I don't think it's been applied to that problem before.

Different conceptions of life in different contexts. Individual cells are alive in the sense that they can die, not in the sense that they are generally self-sustaining and worthy of care and protection.

When I bleed, red blood cells are streaming out of my body and dieing. Nobody cares about the sanctity of those cell's lives.

An embryo or fetus is certainly alive in the same way as any other cell in your body is alive. It is arguably not yet a life, or a human life though. It just isn't developed enough to have the features we associate with living beings. It's arguably just another part of the body, worth no more consideration than a tumor.

FWIW, whether or not an embryo or fetus is alive is irrelevant to the pro-choice case. It just impacts how individual people think about their own pregnancies. Forcing someone to carry a pregnancy against their will is still a violation of their most basic human rights. If that fetus needs protection, it can do so outside of an unwilling person's body.

Life is anything with the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

While it's interesting to consider sterility as undermining the reproduction part, I think that's more an artifact of the taxonomy. It seems obvious that someone that happens to be born sterile is still alive, because this is more about describing a group than an individual. Humans are alive in a way that rocks are not. The sterile human is still a human, and as a group humans have the capacity for reproduction, even if an individual does not.

Now, all mules are sterile, but it is not a stretch to put the mule in the same taxonomy as its parents. That group clearly has the capacity to reproduce, they're the parents after all. The mule just has the misfortune of being born sterile.

One last semantic argument. The fact that we describe the mule as sterile actually reinforces the idea that it has the capacity for reproduction. It's just broken. If you take a bottle and drill holes in it, you could still talk about its capacity to hold water. It can't hold any water due to the holes, but that doesn't change its existence as a water vessel. You could print a whole batch of these, and they would still be water vessels, that happen to have their water holding be broken.

Cars are alive. In the very specific environment of an automotive factory, the machinery and humans present replicate them from a base blueprint. /s

Viruses are not alive. They are merely particular arrangements of molecules that are prone to being replicated by a compatible host if encountered. The memetic conception of life (where any repeating or replicating pattern is "alive") is too degenerate to be usefully applied.

>They use the host’s...

No they don't. That would imply that they did something. A host encounters a virus and makes copies of it. The virus does nothing. We do everyone a disservice every time we imply a virus has any agency.

They actually aren't doing any of that. They're literally just floating around. Entirely inert.

The generally accepted definition of life is: the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

Viruses don't do any of that. There is no reasonable definition of life that includes viruses that doesn't include a crystal lattice. They're just patterns found in nature that due to their environments are more likely to be replicated than most. They don't actually do anything though.