Not necessarily. The hydrogen and oxygen in water get separated and recombined all the time. It happens during photosynthesis, at high temperatures, when water is exposed to certain kinds of radiation, and all kinds of other natural processes.

Modern SSDs with Multi-Level Cells (MLCs) actually do use multiple voltage levels to store multiple bits of data in a single memory cell. Triple-Level Cells can store 3 bits per cell. QLC's can store 4 bits. They end up just converting that back to binary for transmission though.

https://www.purestorage.com/knowledge/what-is-mlc.html

You would have decided how much gets withheld (to an extent) using withholding allowances when you got hired and filled out your W4.

Right? The last thing most people need is even more bubbly corn syrup water.

My wife and I just discovered a really well done YouTube channel called Astrum. Their video on black holes is fascinating and covers this stuff in a clear and straightforward way. Highly recommended!

Imagine a wave traveling through water. Each water molecule doesn’t really go anywhere. It just gets bumped and jostled by its neighbors and it ends up moving in a circle as the wave passes through.

Light is a wave too. It’s a wave passing through the electromagnetic and mass fields in the same way that a wave passes through water. Light is a vibration that propagates through those fields. So, empty space is an area whose fields aren’t vibrating. The fields are still there just like water is still there when there isn’t a wave passing through it.

According to one theory, during a time called Inflation, space expanded really fast. The volume of space expanded 10^78 times larger in 10^-32 seconds. That was way faster than the speed of light. This super rapid expansion explains why the cosmic background radiation is so nearly perfectly even - because at that time in the early universe, it was all in one point. If there is a limit, it would have to be faster than that.

The speed at which you can stretch a balloon’s surface and the speed at which an ant walks across the balloon’s surface are distinct and separate things that aren’t related.

The same is true of the speed at which light (or gravitational waves or information in general) propagates through space and the space it’s propagating through. They’re not related.

Keep in mind that space expanding happens ‘faster’ on bigger scales. If 10 cm of balloon distance expands to 11 cm over the course of a minute, then the points that were 10 cm apart are moving away from each other at 1 cm/minute, even though neither point is moving across the balloon in its own frame of reference. If the balloon were enormous with two points 10 light years apart and it expands at the same rate, they’d be moving apart at 1 light year per minute - much faster than the speed of light.

I mean… I appreciate the long-winded explanation of how light moves through space, but none of it covers how space itself expands and how that can make distant objects move away from us at faster than light.

Again, the galaxies are not moving through space faster than light, but the distance between us and them is growing faster than light-speed because of the expansion of space.

They are effectively moving away faster than light. If you magically took off toward one today at light speed, you’d never reach it.

The common analogy is an ant crawling across the surface of an inflating balloon toward a specific spot. The spot is stationary on the balloon’s surface and the ant is moving toward the spot, but the distance between them is growing because the size of the balloon is growing.

Compare the expanding 2d surface of the balloon to space itself, and that’s why distant galaxies are moving away. Like the spot, they’re maybe not moving, but the distance between us and them is still growing.

Right, but all of those rules only apply to objects moving through space. Space itself is also expanding, and taken with the movement of the galaxies through space, distant galaxies are moving away faster than light.

That is, if you fired a laser at one of those galaxies today (and assuming the universe continues to expand forever) the light from the laser would never get there. The distance between the ray of light and the galaxy would continue to grow even though the galaxy isn’t moving through space faster than light.

In addition to allowing calls from anyone in your contacts list, the feature will also allow calls from numbers that you’ve called recently. That way you don’t need to add a contact for your auto mechanic to get their return call, for example.