I fully acknowledge that smoking, dipping, vaping, and other forms of tobacco, or nicotine consumption carry significant health risks. However, I'm curious whether it's the inherent properties of the substance (nicotine) itself that is harmful, or if it's the methods of consumption- such as inhalation, combustion, or absorption- that primarily contribute to the dangers.

Here's the mean center of US Population.

Here's the population by time zone showing about half the population lives in the eastern time zone.

https://imgur.com/a/BZs4Exk

I noticed that most social media /tech companies are going towards the same direction recently which is "throw more ads at people's faces to generate income"

For context on why I'm asking, I was watching a 20+ min youtube video while walking to work and I kid you not, only halfway through the video I encountered 3 batches of 2 unskippable ads.

I don't know if its just me, but I cannot remember the latest 100 ads that internet in general shoved into my face. Pretty bad effectivity if you ask me. How is this model thriving? Are most people retaining all these ad information? Am I just a dumb, low memory exception?

I (18m) almost got scammed recently by one of those people who post job adverts and then they tell you that they will send you a cashier's check for a really high amount of money. In my case it was for $2,250. But they had told me to take $500 as my pay and use the remaining $1,750 to purchase a couple of things for them as part of my first assignment. It wasn't until they started telling me about Apple and Walmart Gift Cards that i started getting second thoughts. When asking about what the cards would be used for he told me that they resell them to other clients and so on. I called bullshit but that's besides the point.

I told this scammer that my account at my small local credit union is brand new. Only opened it a few days earlier. I have had absolutely no deposits or transactions in my account and he wanted me to do a mobile deposit and I mentioned that wasn't sure if the funds would be held given it's a new bank account, no transactions, and a cashier's check for $2,250 from some bank I've never heard of. He was completely convinced that check would be cleared in 2 days.

Luckily, i didn't deposit the check and ran with my gut. So I saved myself a lot of trouble.

With all that being said, why was he confident that the money would be available to me in 2 days? Upon research, aren't check deposits subject to extended holds especially on new accounts which are less than 30 days old AND are done via mobile deposit?

I apologize for the long post but i just needed some clarification especially for people my age who may not know much information about checks either. I'm not sure if i asked the question the right way, but hopefully this helps understand my question better. Thanks :)

I’m talking about the noise any ICE car makes for the first second or two when first turning the key/pressing the “Ignition” button

I watch a youtube sailing channel. Their boat is currently disabled in part because of current leakage corroding various metal components. is the source of current leakage the batteries and other electrical components such as the engine, alternators, etc.? How do you detect and measure it? What is the fix? Thanks in advance

Is bathroom air dirty? Every time I go to public toilets, I make sure I don’t physically touch dirty surfaces especially wet ones. But then this makes me wonder, does this make my stuff dirty as well coming into contact with bathroom air due to dirty air particles?

A valley is a low area between mountains or hills (usually high hills), typically with a river running through it. I should know this because I wrote the lead sentence of the Wikipedia article lol.

But what's a river valley, and how is it distinct from other types of valleys? Google isn't explaining it in ways my 5-year-old mind can understand. It's not just a valley with a river through it, because that would then apply to the vast majority of valleys, right? Why is the Nile river valley a valley when it's not between any uplands (as far as I'm aware, correct me if not)?

Thanks.

Jazz musicians can seemingly effortlessly produce in real time what sounds like composed music. How do they do it?

Specifically, there are a lot of complex things to keep track of and there are so many possibilities of what you could play for each note. I don’t see how someone could figure out which note to play next, then do it for a whole song or at least a whole solo.

Some time has passed since that awful period, so I hope it's ok to ask now but it's been bugging me for over 2 years now.

But in the US alone over 1.2 million people died from covid (and those are just the confirmed covid cases, but housing prices didn't seem to remotely budge, not even for a few months despite this unusual extra shift. The deaths were also of the type of population who more likely would had freed a house since they were mostly older people.

I understand housing market is also very influenced by unethical players like Vanguard which are buying up houses to gouge the prices, but idk I'm still having problems understanding the logic behind the current events.

Also, I'm Italian and a very similar situation happened (housing market in a specular spot, high prices in most cities and private corps buying up stuff), where other than the 200k extra deaths, the regular deaths that would have occurred anyway (old age mostly) and the aging, dying population I was really expecting a noticeable generational shift, at least in the housing market

I’ve been playing around with LEDs and a Raspberry Pi. Tutorials say to use a resistor to limit current draw from the GPIO pins to protect both the pi and the LED.

My intuitive understanding is that the resistor limits the current by converting it to heat - protecting the LED but drawing the same current from the power source as if it weren’t there.

But that doesn’t square with the fact that the resistor is limiting the current being drawn from the gpio pin itself.

Thanks!

I recently moved from an extremely dry climate (highs of 106F in summer and lows of -3F in winter). Now I live in a much more humid climate, but the highs are about 95F and the lows are 30F.

I am so much hotter/colder now than I was the previous place I lived. The heat also makes me more thirsty. Why does that happen when the air is literally full of liquid?

If Hydrogen is Hydrogen because is has 1 proton and Helium is Helium because it has 2 Protons, could you somehow take Hydrogen and shove a second proton into it and force it to become Helium? How does that work?

With apologies, I know the core concept has been explained many times. But there's something major missing. I think I understand the basic idea:

Neural network tries random 'noise', compares it to desired outcome, repeats, feedback loop that mathematically narrows it down to the outcome with best results.

So, that appears to be what's happening if you repeatedly tap the middle option on predictive text. Each word statistically likely most likely to follow the preceding word(s). I understand that, but it's nonsense.

But what are the extra parameters being used on say, chatgpt, which aim for context, an overall sentiment, etc? How do neural networks determine what to look for?

This gets more complicated in images!

Do programmers have to add in specific paramaters for the NN to calculate? Like, checking human facial expressions, body language... how does a mathematical model decide what these paramaters even are to look for?

EDIT: Thank you! Honestly, I was thinking of diffusion and mostly images. Predictive text vs gpt seemed like it was easier to illustrate my question, without knowing it was a different method :)

Harder to explain but for an image I would expect diffusion to result in a muddled blur of pixels or shapes that each statistically represent an average of the images it was trained on.

Can we trick our brains into releasing them?

Humans are actually quite efficient at running, which makes it less effective for weight loss. Running for ten minutes typically burns only about 100 calories. Despite this, running can be really tiring. Most adults can only run for 10-30 minutes before getting fatigued.

What I’m curious about is why running feels so exhausting, even though it doesn’t use up that much energy.

It has to do with adrenaline pumping through our bodies stressing us out too much but are we really tired out that quickly?

All I really know is that throughout history individuals could only sustain battle for a few minutes at a time before tiring out too much

I’ve never fully grasped the concept of over pressure in a tank. How does it work? What happens exactly?

When an event has multiple camera men, how is it decided what camera is to be played on the live feed?

Suddenly years after highscool a thought came again to my mind. In chemistry I was told that the octet rule was the reason atoms form bondings and this become more stable when it comes to energy levels. If entropy dictatates that everything in universe tends to disorder, then isn't that contradictory With the octet rule? I'm missing something or mixing things?

I’ve sorta wrapped my head around space and time but can’t understand why we see things at say a black hole slow down. If light was constantly emitting from something or between, why do we not see things happen near a black hole happen at the constant speed they were at?

I know both are mainly medical terms and more or less mean the same thing but I still wanted to know the underlying difference. Like, is one typically worse than the other?

Don't understand.

why can free falling blood only travel at 25 ft/s