Someone told me their partner is a freemason and belong to a lodge. Looking it up, it sounds very similar to a fraternity but got confused after reading about strange rituals, terminology and titles, and got an overall very secretive and elitist vibe. What is a freemason and why would someone want to be one?

So basically the title, I live in Belgium and its a foreign concept to me, but I keep getting confronted with these terms when I consume American media. As a kid when I thought of Sherrif I thought about Cowboys. As Im older I know that not how that works.

i work in marketing and im writing landing page content for a product that has an api and mcp, so i want to understand the basics without the jargon

i searched here before posting and read a post about a similar question. i get roughly what an api is, but the explanations of mcp in the comments were too technical for me. could someone explain what mcp does and how its different from an api, in plain terms? also, where do tools like n8n and make fit in

As an example, a cockroach might lay an egg somewhere that hatches hundreds of cockroaches which are all siblings, but then dozens of those siblings will mate with each other, and then their children will mate with each other, and some with their aunts/uncles potentially, and this will just go on and on with seemingly no issues. How is this possible?

Why does it feel like airlines have a really difficult time being consistently profitable. With JetBlues financial issues and it feels like almost every other major airline has either filed chapter 11 or merged etc at some point. With all of the analytics, constant ticket prices changes I feel like they should be better at making a profit.

What are phantom kicks after pregnancy caused by? For me, it’s been years since I was pregnant and I still get phantom kicks. I can sometimes see them and feel them from the outside too?? It’s been happening consistently since delivery so I’m really curious.

Hopefully this is properly flaired. People have been talking about ETH and AI lately and I don't understand what ETH really is.

Bonus for ELI5: How did AI supposedly disprove ETH—But I'm mostly interested in knowing what ETH is on its own.

I’m relatively new to playing rugby and learning a lot. One thing I have not wrapped my head around yet at all is playing advantage. Whether it’s called in one of my club matches or watching the pros play, I am not grasping the concept yet. What does it mean? When is it granted? When is it deemed over?

TIA!

For example the Variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease

Footage from a 1929 game between the Packers and Giants.

If doctors say a surgery has a 1% chance of causing death, does that literally mean that if 100 people undergo the same surgery, 1 person would be expected to die and the other 99 would survive?

Does that percentage apply to every specific person, if that's the case wouldn't that mean, theoretically, every healthy person should survive out of the 100 people since every person has a 99% chance of not dying?

I've been seeing people talk about these things called "liminal spaces" lately mostly on posts with weird looking pictures of empty places. I don't really know much about them but I'm kinda curious. What exactly makes a place liminal?

Studying osmosis stuff for an exam, I thought water was able to slip through gaps in cell membranes, but a quiz question my professor posted said to cross the cell membrane water must pass through aquaporins.

Hello everyone. Why do we not have exercise machines which ‘force’ our bodies to exercise and therefore lose weight? For example, an exercise bicycle where the pedals are electronically turned moving the legs for you. Surely we are burning ATP and associated stores by the muscles moving? Thanks!