It seems that many flavor and food preferences can be explained in the context of regulating feeding behavior. Generally, organisms tend to enjoy those foods which are optimal for them to feed on and provide the best nutrition. There are well-known exceptions to this, such as:   Artificial chemicals (eg. the supposedly sweet-tasting but deadly polyethylene glycol) which are very rare in nature, thus there was no opportunity for an appropriate taste perception to evolve Nutrients which are desirable in moderation but dangerous in excess (eg. sugar), but have only become readily available recently thanks to technology (thus once again moderated consumption has not had opportunity to evolve)   But humans in particular also seem to enjoy consuming a large variety of foods that one would expect to be unpalatable or mildly harmful. For instance various peppers, spices, hot sauces, wasabi, mustard and so forth, don't appear to provide much of a nutritional benefit. Indeed their chief property of interest, the spicy flavor, is a defense mechanism: The plant attempts to make itself unpalatable or toxic to deter predation. Why is it then that this very defense mechanism has ironically become prized as a food ingredient by humans, to such an extent that wars have been fought over access to spices? And why is it that humans do not consider (for instance) pure, fresh, raw meat to be more delicious than meat with seasoning or condiments?    There has been a similar question (see comments) on here but that has also not attracted a good answer. I think this exemplifies the enduring interest in the subject and as such I'd like to keep this question open to stimulate a better response from more recent visitors.
Peppers evolved chemicals like capsaicin to discourage animals from eating them, and that chemical itself can cause internal damage if consumed in large quantities, though this is usually only a concern for the hottest of peppers (which people do eat).   Still, why is it that humans seem to be the only animal that often "like" spicy food?
How many arrangement of the letters in MISSISSIPPI have at least 2 adjacent S's?  I was thinking that I can glue two of the S's together, so there will be 9 letters plus the special letter SS, and the number of arrangements will be $10!/(2!2!4!)$, this is not the correct answer, but what is wrong with my reasoning.  (the correct answer is $11!/(4!4!2!)-7!/(4!2!)\binom{8}{4}$, I understand the solution) Using NPN transistor as switch Admin privileges requiring for installing a package build though Packages Using osx 10.9 and packages for making package installer.  While installing a package made using Packages in /Applications location on a osx 10.9 machine, installer is asking for Admin password. Even though I had unchecked 'Require admin password for installation' while package making.  So, how to avoid this i.e a non-admin user should install this package. Package should install in /Applications location, so that non-admin user can use the app.  I check  and I get this error when trying to use apt-get:  E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable) E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/) is another process using it?     How can I fix this? How to solve the "io.netty.channel.AbstractChannel$AnnotatedConnectException: Connection refused: no further information" error on Minecraft? I am getting the following error when I try to connect to a Minecraft server:  This is all servers, not just one. The error says:  io.netty.channel.AbstractChannel$AnnotatedConnectException: Connection refused: no further information: Version 1.12  I've tried:  Restarting Minecraft Restarting Computer Uninstalling and Reinstalling Mincraft Uninstalling and Reinstalling Java Altering Firewall Restarting Internet I've messed with my port, made a second windows account, reset netsh winsock Checked hosts Made a new WINDOWS account  The overlay in the bottom right is Geforce's Overlay for game capturing. I don't have any mods installed. A Mojang support ticket wouldn't help. Im desperate. Invariance of a maximally entangled state under unitary operation $U \otimes U^\dagger$ Data Not Backed Up, Partition Type: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF I was trying to install Linux on my MacBook for class when I bricked my computer, which now in an unbootable state.   I made my partition too small, so I was going to delete and create a larger one. However, Disk Utility did not allow me to delete the small partition. I followed the instructions from   However, not only was I still unable to delete it, but upon restarting I realized my primary partition (located on the same disk) changed into FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFFFFFFF, and I had no options to boot.  (I am sure I performed the command on the correct disk and partition)  I saw some similar threads, but my main bootable drive is the one that got corrupt.   I don't want to lose any data. I'm not the most terminal savvy, so ANY help is appreciated, and I will kindly provide any additional information!  (Disk 0, partition 2 is my main partition, and that only one I care about)  Below are the results of  $ diskutil list and $ gpt -r show disk0.        UPDATE: :  I have followed @klanomath 's instructions. At the last step I received the following error:  Checking prerequisites Checking the partition list Checking for an EFI system partition Checking the EFI system partition's size Checking the EFI system partition's file system Problems were found with the partition map which might prevent booting Error: -69766: The partition map needs to be repaired because there's a problem with the EFI system partition's file system Underlying error: 8: POSIX reports: Exec format error    FINAL UPDATE: SUCCESS!  I just wanted thank @klanomath for helping me through this entire process. He spent 11 hours TeamViewing with me until not only my files were accessible, but until I could access my computer as could before this whole debacle (and this was after 5 hours of email correspondence).   To any future reader with this problem: PLEASE don't give up, it can be fixed! How to prevent any game from running on a PC I am looking for an unbreachable way to disable the games running on my PC. Even games which require quite a low amount of graphics say 256MB should not work. It is to put restriction on gaming on my PC. I have a graphics card of 1GB and  2GB RAM and a processor of 2.7GHz with Windows 7.  Can we prevent a process from running if it takes a certain amount of graphics memory greater than a value set by user? I mean can we put restriction on games on the basis of the amount of graphics memory they use. Also the method should be applicable to all games (ignoring the chess and other small games like that. Even if it gets blocked, then also no problem.  This is to prevent myself from playing games. But I need other software (non game) to run properly. If electrons were positive and protons were negative, would life be different? This was a question on a worksheet during my first week in a class on Electromagnetism. The answer is essentially:     No. Life would be no different if electrons were positively charged and protons were negatively charged. Opposite charges would still attract, and like charges would still repel. The designation of charges as positive and negative is merely a definition.   But how would we have negative charges within the nucleus? Taking a look at the , it seems that down quarks are required in this new "negative proton" to help with creating the pion to "transmit a residual part of the strong force even between colorless hadrons".  I tried to set out and try to find a particle with (-1) charge with a down quark (by going through this ) but all the particles are not stable with the exception of two unknown:   Bottom Xi Baryon Double Bottom Xi Baryon   Assuming one of the above are stable, could the strong force act between one of them and a neutron, implying its alright to have a negatively charged nucleus?  Edit: If it wasn't clear, my question concerned whether or not there existed stable baryons of $-1$ charge with down quarks that could "replace" the proton. What should I be teaching my two year old? My two year old daughter has never been to a daycare, so everything she knows is something that me, my husband, or her grandparents have taught her. She sees very little interaction with other kids her age, well, except for her 8 month old sister.   I am wondering what people, or even day care centers, teach two year olds. What do they do all day long? Presently, our daughter draws a lot - she has bathtub crayons, wax crayons for paper, and chalk for the driveway/sidewalk. She attempts to draw circles and lines. We try to teach her shapes and colors, and she has a rough idea of what they are. She plays with sand in the sandbox a lot, dumping sand all over her and her sister's head. She goes to her playhouse and uses the slide and the swing.   We sing songs together - the alphabet song or the numbers song. She is able to say the correct word when I say the phonic (i.e. if I say B, she'll say ball; if I say H, she'll say hat). She tries counting, but is still learning (she goes 1, 2, 6, 7, 8...). She enjoys building and destroying towers. We read books and I sing some nursery rhymes. She plays a toy piano and dances around to it. She plays with playdough, but most of the time it just ends up in crumbs everywhere.  She also watches TV - something I know most parents object to. She enjoys watching Dora, Finding Nemo, and Cinderella. She will sometimes watch LeapFrog phonics videos for alphabet and numbers.   I am not trying to give a resume for my daughter, but merely wondering is there something more that kids her age do? Is there something else that I should be teaching her? What do kids her age do at a daycare?   Thanks AMD-V is not enabled in VirtualBox on AMD APU I am running on a dual core AMD E450 CPU. When I tried to run a 64-bit OS that requires hardware virtualization using VirtualBox, it showed me an error message that "AMD-V is not enabled".    My AMD processor is supposed provide AMD-V support, but I can find no option for enabling AMD-V in BIOS.    How can I solve this problem? How can I enable AMD-V for my CPU?  Thanks in advance  lscpu :-  Architecture:          x86_64 CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order:            Little Endian CPU(s):                2 On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1 Thread(s) per core:    1 Core(s) per socket:    2 Socket(s):             1 NUMA node(s):          1 Vendor ID:             AuthenticAMD CPU family:            20 Model:                 2 Stepping:              0 CPU MHz:               1650.000 BogoMIPS:              3291.72 Virtualization:        AMD-V L1d cache:             32K L1i cache:             32K L2 cache:              512K NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0,1   EDITED:-  Error message from VirtualBox:-  Failed to open a session for the virtual machine XXX.  AMD-V is disabled in the BIOS. (VERR_SVM_DISABLED).  Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) Component: Console Interface: IConsole {1968b7d3-e3bf-4ceb-99e0-cb7c913317bb} How to connect an LED indicator to a circuit? I would like to know how can i add a safety switch with an LED indicator to a circuit , so that if the safety switch is on then the LED lights , and when i want to use the device , all what i have to do is to press the normally-open switch.   I have attached this schematic and im not sure if it will work correctly  ,as i am a very beginner in electronics   Thanks sed delete option change of delimiter Proving $\frac{\sin x}{x} =\left(1-\frac{x^2}{\pi^2}\right)\left(1-\frac{x^2}{2^2\pi^2}\right) \left(1-\frac{x^2}{3^2\pi^2}\right)\cdots$ Get the row and column name of the minimum element of a matrix nginx httpMapModule regex variables The  states that:     Since 1.0.4, case insensitive regular expressions can be used by prefixing the pattern with ~*.   And gives the example:  map $uri $myvalue {     /aa                   /mapped_aa;     ~^/aa/(?&lt;suffix&gt;.*)$  $suffix; }   I updated to nginx/1.2.7 to make use of this, and naive regexes work okay, but variables don't. When I try the above syntax I get the error:  nginx: [emerg] pcre_compile() failed: unrecognized character after (?&lt; in "^/aa/(?&lt;suffix&gt;.*)$" at "suffix&gt;.*)$"   I also tried the following syntaxes, but none of them worked:  ~^(.*)$  $1; ~^(.*)$  \1;   but neither of them worked either.  Does anyone know how to get variables to work in regular expressions in HttpMapModule? I have a bunch of magnets (one of those game-board thingies) given to me when I was a school-going lad over 20 years ago, and the magnets feel just as strong as it was the day it was given.   As a corollary to this question , is there a way to determine how long a permanent magnet will remain a magnet?   Addendum: Would two magnets remain a magnet for a shorter duration if they were glued in close proximity with like poles facing each other? queries with db_select don't respect integers When I check "SHOW PROCESSLIST" in phpMyAdmin I can see lots of queries where argument-integers are being inserted as strings (with single quotation marks).  I'm wondering if this is due to the way phpmyadmin reports the queries (if it puts every argument between quotation marks) of if it is db_select that puts every argument between quotation marks.  An example of my code where integers are being used as arguments:  $select-&gt;join('taxonomy_index', 't_'.$key, 't_'.$key.'.nid = n.nid AND t_'.$key.'.tid = :tid_' . $key, array(':tid_'.$key =&gt; (int)$tid)); $select-&gt;condition('t_'.$key.'.tid', (int)$tid);   As you can see I explicitly write (int)$tid but in my query log I can see the following:  ... WHERE (t_0.tid = '10') ...   The big question is: How can I be sure that integers are being treated as integers in my queries? I don't want MySQL having to transform strings to integers. Should I not answer my own questions? Breitbart today:   What is the source for the term nothing-burger?