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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

My 4 year old daughter literally has been asking about this and while I’ve seen a number of posts, it’s been hard to find a truly appropriate explanation for a young child. How would you actually explain it to a 5 year old?

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.

I understand how hardware determines limits on what software can run, but how can it also affect software security?

What determines how much control users can have over their recommendations? Are there technical limitations to how customizable these algorithms can be?

For example, on YouTube, I’ll sometimes go down a rabbit hole and suddenly get flooded with videos on that topic. That makes sense and then using “Not interested” helps, but my overall recommendations eventually start feeling stale and repetitive. Then I’ll switch to an older account and find all kinds of interesting videos about things I’d forgotten I was interested in.

It makes me wonder how much more control users could technically have beyond simply asking for more or less of something. Could we adjust things like variety, randomness, older interests or how much recent activity influences recommendations?

Or is the underlying technology too complex for that level of customization?

I don't really understand what they call bots

Are they robots or are they people?

And how do you notice that they are bots?

I've never really understood how daylight saving works. I know that in some countries, people move their clocks forward or backward by an hour at certain times of the year, but I don't understand what that actually achieves.

Like, I get that it changes what time the clock shows, but how does that help people make better use of daylight? The sun still rises and sets when it does, right? So what exactly changes, and why do countries do this instead of just keeping the same time throughout the year?

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!