Quickie Questions

Your brain's really good at crunching the soft trigonometry of projectile physics?

For the same reason our ancestors were really good at judging how to jump from tree to tree. The human brain devotes a great deal of processing power to hand-eye coordination, and you train it as you grow up. Babies can't catch a ball bouncing from a wall, but every time you practice it in gym or in the backyard, you are learning.

That does explain why it was hard as a kid, but now it's nothing.

It's especially easy when you're the one throwing the ball at the wall, because you have a lot more specific understanding of its starting parameters than what you can judge from just seeing it in motion.

Is there any Finnish-speaking troper around here? I only need to identify a 20-seconds extract from a song of which there are no lyrics around.

I have two interrelated questions.

1. Is my understanding of the following terms' distinctions correct?
   • Metropolis: A large city or large collection of cities, towns and other urban areas, which acts as a significant culturo-politico-economic center and an important regional/international hub.
   • Metropolitan area: A metropolis and the less densely populated urban areas that surround and are interconnected with it in terms of industry, infrastructure, and housing.
   • Megacity: A city, typically a metropolitan area, with at a population of least 10 million and often with a relatively high population density.
   • Megalopolis (AKA megapolis, megaregion, supercity):
     • Sensu stricto: A clustered network of cities comprising at least two roughly adjacent metropolitan areas, which may remain somewhat distinct or effectively merge into a contiguous urban region where you can't tell where one ends and the other starts.
     • Sensu lato: A synonym for megacity.

2. By the definition of the terms, can a city-state be a megalopolis sensu stricto?

Probably a silly question, but how are featured tropes chosen?

Moderators choose them

Are there really courses that give out free credits to whatever colleges that you are enrolled in? Do you get free college credit from those courses even if you are temporarily "enrolled" in those other online colleges?

Edited by GAP on Mar 22nd 2020 at 9:04:05 AM

Question 1. Would a character going to the authorities really destroy the story plot?

Question 2. How long should a TV Show last, going by episodes and seasons?

Edited by asiacatdogblue on Mar 24th 2020 at 7:11:15 AM

Are you talking about transfer credits, or something else? Might be something to talk to Admissions or the school's registrar about.

Q1: Not necessarily. Depending on the point the story's trying to make, it could be ineffectual, actually make things worse (whether this is actually true or not), or fix certain things at the cost of others (see works about child abuse involving multiple children, where they don't tell anyone because they're afraid of retribution from their abusers or that they won't be believed, or of going into foster care and getting split up).

Q2: However long the story needs, and can maintain quality.

Edited by CrystalGlacia on Mar 24th 2020 at 10:40:10 AM

I was talking about something else like how you can do a project at another college or job for college credit.

Edit: Like free courses from online classes like Coursera for example.

Edited by GAP on Mar 25th 2020 at 6:43:45 AM

Okay, those two sentences refer to totally different things.

With regards to projects at other schools or your workplace, you'd have to talk to both the transfers department at the school that's receiving the credits, in order to determine what sort of proof you'd need in order for the stuff to count, and the school/workplace where you did the projects, in order to obtain the aforementioned proof. And remember that just because a place says something can qualify for college credit doesn't mean that all schools are required to accept it. It might also just allow you the opportunity to test out of a course and get the credit that way, but again, that's up to the school.

Free online courses are even less likely to be accepted for college credit; you almost always need to take a paid course for that. You could check the course's website and see if their courses could count as college credit, and if they offer proof of completion that you could submit to a transfers department to see if they'll accept it, but as I said about the projects, no school is under obligation to accept the course for college credit. The worst thing that'll happen is they'll decline the course for credit, and you'll have an easier time taking the actual college course the online one was supposed to replace.

How do you remove your profile picture or avatar on Facebook?

https://www.facebook.com/help/221688294510299?helpref=uf_permalink should answer your question

What is preventing companies from striking down all of the various pirate media stites there are? It seems some are taken down at random while others are allowed to exist.

Time and money

There's so much pirated media out there that I don't think companies could ever get rid of all of it.

Edited by Bluethorn on May 10th 2020 at 8:20:50 AM

It's the boy with his finger in a dike. Plug one leak, another starts.

More broadly speaking, piracy is a kind of black market dealing in intellectual property. Black markets form when regular markets are distorted such that there are artificial constraints on the supply of a product despite greater demand than can be satisfied by that supply. See for example: luxury goods under state communism, or cigarettes under vice taxes.

What makes media unique in this regard is that there is no physical good being sold. The supply of any given song, film, TV show, video game, etc. is effectively infinite — constrained only by download and storage speeds, not by the need to make and sell a disc, put seats in theaters, nor even by limited room in a channel lineup. Once it exists in a digital format, the manufacturing and distribution cost is effectively zero.

Therefore, charging for the privilege of consuming media is a supply distortion: creating artificial scarcity. In such a situation, black markets (i.e. piracy) are inevitable. Creators expend time and other resources in the act of creation, and thus expect to be compensated for that. So we have an impasse: on the one hand, creators want to get paid for their work; on the other hand, distribution of their product has a marginal cost of zero.

I don't know that there is a reasonable solution that reconciles these problems. Certainly, draconian enforcement of IP rights isn't going to work.

Edited by Fighteer on May 10th 2020 at 11:22:20 AM

Personally I have to agree with Gabe and say that ultimately the best way to combat piracy is with convenience.

I buy games on Steam all the time when I could go pirate each and every one of them.

For a fair number it's because I like the developers and want to give them money but it's simply just so much easier to buy them legitimately.

You're seeing this somewhat with all the different streaming services start to pop up. When everything was either Netflix or Hulu you just paid your subscription and didn't mind much but now that so many shows and movies are exclusive to different streaming services, all of which require their own subscription, people turn to piracy more and more.

The answer may be that paying for things has to have a convenience factor that exceeds the difficulty and risk of piracy for most people.

The Four Currencies: Money, Time, Integrity, and Pain In The Ass.

If you want to get people's money, you need to minimize the hassle or they won't feel as bad about stealing it.

To the original question, stolen content, especially popular stolen content (I've been coming up with some that's not popular enough lately) gets shared and reshared so much it's impossible to take it all down. You find and shut down one sharer, and three other people who already got their copy say "oh, it got taken down. I guess I'll put it back up". The Pirate Bay has gotten shut down by multiple jurisdictions, but the people running it believe in what they're doing strongly enough to keep moving their host servers somewhere else every time the law reaches out and pulls the plug.

But content owners that don't at least make the attempt risk losing their legal ownership.

Edited by TParadox on May 10th 2020 at 11:53:55 AM

Is it possible for a twin pregnancy to arise through a combination of IVF and regular intercourse? I know that IVF often leads to twins or multiplets but here I am thinking one baby from the IVF and the other through the normal fertilization.

Relatedly, is 5.5 and 11 months a normal time for babies to speak their first words and 9 months for walking?

Edited by SeptimusHeap on May 26th 2020 at 2:31:01 PM

Natural fraternal twins happen when two eggs are present to get fertilized at the same time, and while IVF is usually employed when giving up on natural conception, but I know there are cases where a natural conception was thought impossible and then happened, so I would say that it is very very very unlikely that an IVF pregnancy and a natural pregnancy could happen concurrently on the same womb, but not impossible.

I think IVF is also used in surrogate pregnancy, so it might be slightly more likely that the surrogate accidentally conceives within a few days of implanting the IVF. What do you call two babies with no parents in common that shared a womb?

I don't think that scenario happens commonly enough to have a name.

What about the developmental milestones? That was '' Relatedly, is 5.5 and 11 months a normal time for babies to speak their first words and 9 for walking?''