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3pvclc
|
why aren't people who overdose on illegal substances arrested?
|
With Lamar Odom in the news and all, I was wondering why he isn't under arrest. Once they know for sure that the cause of his sickness was cocaine and heroin, will he go to jail? I've never heard of somebody overdosing on something illegal and then going to jail after they get out of the hospital. Why not?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pvclc/eli5_why_arent_people_who_overdose_on_illegal/
|
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"Because if you think going to the hospital is going to get you arrested, then you might decide that you're not going to go to the hospital.",
"* drug possession is a very low priority for law enforcement, especially when the suspect is in a coma\n* many jurisdictions have policies to not arrest people who see medical treatment for drug reactions, so encourage them to seek treatment\n* in some jurisdictions, using drugs is not technically illegal, only possession them is...being intoxicated is not enough to prove possession\n* some overdose victims are arrested"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
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|
4h9fj6
|
where did the idea of a self-destruct system come from?
|
They seem to appear in ships and bases in films. Are there any in real life?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4h9fj6/eli5_where_did_the_idea_of_a_selfdestruct_system/
|
{
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"text": [
"Some sensitive military equipment may have it to prevent the enemy from stealing data or reverse-engineering the machinery.\n\nAlso useful in rocketry, because if something comes loose you have a big can of rocket fuel stuck to an engine with zero control.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-destruct#Uses"
]
] |
|
6eda6d
|
why is abstract art considered good? what is it about random splashes of paint and lines that makes it more appealing than a more realistic painting to some? how does the randomness actually represent anything?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6eda6d/eli5_why_is_abstract_art_considered_good_what_is/
|
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"I think it is the inventiveness that appeals. Artists coming up with new ways to express themselves.\n\nPersonally I think 98% of Modern Art is shite.",
"They aren't \"random splashes\". Jackson Pollock's paintings evolved over time to have an underlying [fractal nature](_URL_0_). \n\nEven people who don't like them can spot a [real Mondrian](_URL_1_) from a fake.",
"I once read that Hemingway's brusque writing style--which today is commonplace--was a radical departure from the flowery tradition that came before him. And while Hemingway's work certainly has aesthetic appeal to many people, despite it's simplicity, the reason modern writers celebrate his work is for his role in broadening the field.\n\nI look upon modern art the same way. Whether or not I personally enjoy an abstract painting, the reason artists celebrate modern art is that it was such a free and expressive departure from the portraits and still lifes that dominated the Romantic era before. For better and worse, the inclusiveness of modern art has allowed a wider variety of styles which depart from traditional beauty.",
"Yay an ELI5 I can help answer. You know how certain psychologist's will hold up black drawings and as you what you see or more likely ask you the first word that comes to mind when associated with that image? Well the idea is for your interpretation of that image to reveal something about you to the psychologist. Just like how your interpretation of a dream you had is way more important than the dream itself, how you see it is actually useful information. \n\nIn the same way, abstract art does not put a limit on your imagination and thus enables you to interpret something in a way that could reveal something interesting about yourself or the world around you. Now if you choose not to engage your imagination in this process then abstract art would most likely not appear beautiful to you but if you do there is a possibility that some pieces of abstract art will speak to you while others will not. In that case you are able to segregate \"appealing\" abstract art from not appealing abstract art. There are two sides to this and abstract art upholds the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder while many argue that things are inherently beautiful. \n",
"Anyone can make something that looks like something. It's a skill we've been teaching children since the renaissance, photography was one nail in the coffin and computers sealed it shut; mere representation by itself doesn't impress anyone any more.\n\nSo, what does? \n\nIn broad terms: semiotic puns.\n\nConsider book covers, and the painstaking design that girlies into them. In a second or two as you glance at them in a bookshop, they need to communicate the genre of the book, the tone and feel, the demographic they're aiming for and a whole bunch more, *before you've even read the title*, let alone the blurb on the back. \n\nThey achieve this through the typography, the colour scheme, the art style, the theme of the cover image (or lack of one); all the elements of cultural baggage that you've come to associate with the various aspects of the work that they're trying to show off. \n\nOr look at a TV show. Is it Serious News? Then expect somber greys, almost-military music, people in glasses, severe clothes and serious haircuts speaking in a tone laced with just a little disdain. And certain fonts and typographic styles, certain kinds of graphic design, etc - because all those things fairly scream Serious And Authoritative. \n\nContrast and compare opinionated, charisma-driven news-lite shoes: the entire look and feel will be different.\n\nSame goes for restaurants, ads, logos, interior design, product branding... the web of cultural associations tied into the *presentation* of content can oftentimes speak louder than the content itself. \n\nThe study of what those things speak is called semiotics. \n\nAnd the greater part of Art with a capital A is making 'jokes' in that language. The result of 'getting' the joke isn't humor and doesn't make you laugh... but it's kind of analogous to it. \n\nAs a kindergarten-level example, I saw a sculpture once that was a big rusty industrial-as-fuck metal cube on these little thin, curly spidery tendril-like legs. \n\nIt barely rated a heh, but that's the basic outline of the game. The top part was everything we associate with solid and massive and strong and heavy, supported by everything we associate with frail and weak and shifting and unreliable. \n\nThe contrast between the two is the 'punchline' if you will; just as with jokes, too obvious a setup spoils the effect. \n\nIt's when some buried part of your brain 'gets it' on some level, but you can *almost* work out how.. that's when Art hits you, that's the buzz.\n\nThe gimmick with abstract pieces is communicating all that cultural baggage *without* explicitly representing anything, giving you pure look-and-feel elements without anything to pin them on, hiding the connections a few layers deeper in your subconscious.\n\nIf a work strikes you as the equivalent of funny, then great. If it doesn't, that's fine too. Just like jokes, it doesn't (necessarily) reflect on you if they fall flat. If you don't have the particular associations that the artist was going for hidden in your brain, then it's just never going to do anything for you, and that's okay. \n\nFor gods sake never read the little plaques 'explaining' the works; no joke ever survived being explained. It's much kinder to politely heh and walk away. Also, the levels of pretentious wankery on the things can kill cows at 40 paces. \n\nHave a peer at modern art from that perspective; if you get an idea of what they're going for, it might do something for you. Or not; it's not for everyone.",
"[/u/windwolfone explains it as being due to the progression of art throughout history](_URL_5_)\n\nHistory of Art in too many paragraphs, aka Why does this painting of nothing exist?\nA long time ago: People paint things on cave walls. Walls continue to get painted until someone decides to paint on smaller boxes. All this time it is usually pictures of people, places and things. When the subject is imaginary, it still is generally assembled from existing things (like an Minotaur, half bull, half human). Most art is generally deeply related to the political and religious cultures of its era. In wealthier societies, the subjects are more diverse: rich people like paintings of themselves. And paintings of other people, preferably naked: _URL_1_\nWhen you go to museum and see art from 5000 years - 150 years ago, it almost always is going to be of a person, place or thing. Unsurprisingly, lots of naked people.\nFollow the Renaissance and the rise of capitalism and science to around 1800-1900, and that entire time period's subsequent huge changes. Art is now taught in schools and the best artists are sought after by the richest people. Unfortunately these people for the first few centuries are heavily religious and there are a fewer paintings of naked people (though they cheat with pics of Angels and God's Mom)...and there seem to be a lot of cows: _URL_2_\nArt goes through a great period of refinement. New knowledge & ideas are everywhere, science has begun to pry out the secrets of color and light. The understanding of the human mind and how it is influenced by external stimuli is being refined. All this, combined with advances in paints, art uses to increase the emotional capacity of paintings. Artists are continually rebelling against previous generations while also reflecting their times. The 19th Century is a very radical time for humans in Europe and art begins moving into a more abstract realm on the canvas, where the color and light within the painting is less realistic but deeply evocative in color and design so as to still generate a response in the viewer: _URL_6_\nAnd: _URL_0_\nTurner's title rain, steam and speed is itself an abstraction. There is an energy to this painting that reflects the energy that the railway brought to his time. Step further away from the painting, forget the subject... and the title still works. Again it would have taken a person in the mid 1800 hundreds in order to appreciate and understand this painting, and people from a hundred or two hundred years earlier would struggle with it. When life moved by cart and horse, cows were an interesting subject. By 1850 there are beasts of steel eating coal, spewing a faster future via fire and steam. The future is no longer a fixed certainly, unlike the era of cows and still fruit a few hundred years prior.\nThe new art is beginning to be influenced partly by what will become psychology, along with the competing social/political ideas of the era. In the cities, new ideas are flowing, social patterns are broken, technology is changing life rapidly. And more naked people get painted: _URL_3_\nWith a bright new century of plenty and wonder ahead, the early 1900's develop a new generation of artists steeped in ideas of revolution and freedom. The old world is being transformed dramatically and permanently and will require a transformed group of artists to react to it.\nBut where will they seek inspiration? The old world was...lots of cows. It is the era of Colonialism, remote lands are being explored and the objects of their peoples collected. Soon museums are opening, showing exotic exhibits from across the oceans. The art designs are often bizarrely abstract: _URL_4_\nwith accompany cultural stories of a fantastic, superstitious nature shocking to a Christian society. But not shocking to the younger artists who emerge with the new century. _URL_8_\nThe stuff from primitive cultures shocked and amazed its viewers... folks whose cultures had spent the last couple of centuries slowly unshackling the stratified dogma of religious-political monarchies and its accompanying literal, formal arts.\nSo artists like Picasso are blown away by the new patterns, but more importantly freed from formality by the abstraction they are seeing in these beautiful objects. Of course abstract design already existed, but it would be a pattern like plaid and used for decoration on existing objects like pottery or clothing.\nNow it's the early 20th century and politics, psychology & science have moved even further along. Freed into abstraction, artists are starting to think about color purely on its own. It's pretty clear that the human mind reacts with this world without the need for a subject. On a rainy day we are more likely to feel sad; in fact we even use a color, blue, to describe it. So now art has been freed to explore color purely as an abstraction.\nArtists start to paint colors with no subject. And it is spectacular.\nMark Rothko is my favorite artist and you will have a different emotional reaction to this painting : _URL_9_\nthen you would to his painting here: _URL_10_\nRothko is ignoring subject and trying to master the basic elements of his world: canvas, paint, light and sight. He is seeking to elicit a response freed from history and knowledge, he is seeking the purity of color, an idea very much of its time.\nI find it fascinating that one of the initial inspirations for this is from cultures that existed outside of time and history. Tribal peoples whose lives revolve around imaginations, a world of ghosts, spirits and gods whose influence was as true as the trees they made their art objects from. The human imagination is a powerful, amazing thing.\nOf course these Rothko are on a screen- in person they are completely more alive. What artists in the 20th century were capable of creating with paint was as much a statement as it was about technique.\nSo my short summary of my entirely too long response is this: what you're looking at is a culmination of thousands of years of art, where the last several hundred years of great technological advances, social change, economic advancement, etc, have created a person with the economic leisure capable of buying a painting of pure color. Art evolved to the point where it's creation was freed from connection to concrete reality, inspired by people whose reality was abstract imagination.\nThis piece is no Rothko and they paid too much money for it...so of course you should switch to art!\nAnd thus you have a guy who's painted one color on a canvas. As to why it sold for so much: it's what rich people do and it's the single greatest way to take their money: siphon it thru an art dealer with the sales skills appropriate for rich people. (ok they're not that dumb- there's actually some tax purposes to buying expensive art).\nThis is of course a quick and dirty history and there is going to be exceptions to the idea of abstract art as a modern concept. Of course naked people are painted that way too: _URL_7_\n\n",
"Abstract art is in many ways art about art. The \"goal\" of art has changed over time. For the Renaissance artists, the \"goal\" was to create very realistic art. Several things happen in the 20th century that influence the development of abstract art.\n\n- Psychology and psychoanalysis: art becomes about the viewer's perception and inserting personal meaning into non-representational forms. Think like an inkblot test\n\n- Photography displaces art with its ability to capture realism. Art can't beat photography when it comes to looking \"real\", so art has to change to emphasis other qualities. Now art is about drawing attention to the fact that it is just paint on canvas. Art can do something that photography can't: be abstract.\n\n- In post-WW2 society, a lot of people were questioning their reality. How could something so devastating happen? People thought a war like WW2 was completely impossible, but it happened anyways. A lot of cities were destroyed and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. This led to people in all fields questioning what they take for granted and tradition. Abstract artists like Jackson Pollack were intentionally creating new rules for painting. Instead of using a brush to paint oil strokes on an upright canvas, he use wooden sticks to fling industrial-grade paint onto a canvas on the floor from all different angles.\n\nThere are many, many reasons why abstract art developed. But I hope you can understand that just because some art is abstract doesn't mean it is meaningless, and it doesn't have to represent anything directly to have meaning in its context.\n\nEDIT: The other answers are all really good, but in the end it's a combination of all these reasons and the ones other users have mentioned."
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[],
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"http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/featpollock",
"https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mondrian-original-is-simply-picture-perfect-131523.html"
],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain,_Steam_and_Speed_%E2%80%93_The_Great_Western_Railway#",
"http://www.jssgallery.org/Other_Artists/Roman/pompei3graces.jpg",
"http://p7.storage.canalblog.com/79/54/577050/48870460.jpg",
"http://www.naturistart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/francisco-goya.jpg",
"http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1978.412.425",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/3e9jq6/23_million_this_painting_sold_for_48_million/ctd4x9y/",
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Monet_Water_Lilies_1916.jpg",
"http://uploads1.wikiart.org/images/pablo-picasso/crouching-female-nude-1959.jpg",
"http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aima/hd_aima.htm",
"http://uploads4.wikiart.org/images/mark-rothko/blue-and-gray.jpg",
"http://www.markrothko.org/images/paintings/orange-and-yellow.jpg"
],
[]
] |
||
q1rdo
|
- inertia
|
seriously, it's like magnets and ICP to me. Plus we're going over it in physics
edit: At this point I might as well make a seperate post, but could some eli5 moment of inertia and why a wider object has a bigger moment of inertia than a smaller one thanks
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/q1rdo/eli5_inertia/
|
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"Imagine a car, in neutral, brakes off on a level road. It is heavy, but it's not moving.\n\nYou push hard for a few seconds and it starts to move. You keep pushing until it's moving at walking pace. It keeps moving by itself. Then you run around to the front, and you want to stop it. You have to apply the same force to stop it as you started it.\n\nInertia was that original resistance you had to push against to speed it up. Intertia kept it moving. Then you had to push just as hard to slow it down, fighting that inertia again.\n\nI'm ignoring friction.\n",
"\"Inertia\" means things keep doing what they were already doing. It's a fancy name for something you already know.\n\nThings sitting still keep sitting there unless something budges them.\n\nThings rolling along keep on rolling the same way unless something slows, stops, or turns them.\n\nOne surprise is that sometimes there is a push or pull that we didn't notice. Things thrown in the air don't keep going forever, because gravity is pulling them down, and because the air is pushing on them."
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ztf2v
|
the appeal of tim and eric.
|
Their stuff feels like the antithesis of comedy. Like, it's supposed to be funny precisely because it isn't.
Can someone tell me what's going on here?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ztf2v/eli5_the_appeal_of_tim_and_eric/
|
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"My husband and I love them, but I can't really explain it. We saw them live last year, and it was packed. I think it's just so weird you either love it or think it's fucking stupid. ",
"Here's some wikipedia articles you should read.\n\nIt's not ELI5, but 5-year olds wouldnt benefit from watching T & E anyway.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_",
"It specifically toys with all the tropes and idioms of pop culture and trashy TV. I think it's completely missing the point to refer to Tim and Eric as something you have to be high to appreciate; I don't do drugs but T & E is extremely funny to me. It's like post modernity taken to its utmost extreme. It's just so fucking amazingly poignantly horrific. It straddles the fine line between bad-bad awful and something you might see on late night public broadcast TV. Basically it's like bizarro television, something I find very interesting to watch.\n\nActual ELI5: You shouldn't be watching this. Turn off the TV and go to bed.",
"It's not drugs at all. It really helps if you have had any experience whatsoever in watching your local cable tv station (unskilled people attempting to do tv and failing) which is what they started lampooning. Then they started making a brand of comedy all their own, featuring an exaggeration of the absurd and the disgusting in order to highlight that which already exists in our daily lives. It takes some people a long time to sort of \"adjust\" to understanding their humor, but once you get it, you get it. I can't go into more detail now because I have to go to a meeting and I'm sure someone else on here can explain it better than I, but it is by no means a humor designed for solely idiots or people on drugs. In fact, I have a hard time understanding them when I'm not sober.",
"It's a show that mocks the stupidity and absurdity of modern television, by taking those traits to the extreme as a form of parody.",
"[It's Not Jackie Chan](_URL_0_)",
"To me it's a giant eff you to American TV culture and a critique of the way that we consume media (as pretentious as that sounds). Eric said in an interview that all they do is highlight all of the horrific things in the world around us that we can't really escape from.\n\nNotice that so many of their skits are just the absolute stupidest products that they try to sell you so hard on, but then the only thing worse than the product is all the horrible side effects/hazards (Now with 2nd degree burns! Call now!). They also revel in horribly awkward camera takes and strangely disturbing moments. \n\nThey've said that David Lynch is their ultimate comedic inspiration, which actually makes a ton of sense\n\nIt's massively satirical, so much so that it's hard to even figure out what it is that they're skewing sometimes. But even without that meta element, it can be just hilarious in its own right...Here are some gems that I think are funny regardless of whether or not you \"get\" the larger picture of the show..hope this helps!\n\n_URL_6_ - Into the Universe with Dr. Jimes Tooper\n\n_URL_1_ - The Cinco Phone!\n\n_URL_0_ - The Cinco Mouth Decorator\n\n_URL_4_ - Video Match 1\n\n_URL_2_ - Video Match 2\n\n_URL_3_ - Quilting with Will\n\n_URL_5_ - Brules Rules w/ John C Reilly\n\nThey also have a pretty strong Monty Python influence as far as I can tell..tons of humor derived from hilarious fake words, small hats and silly walking.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n",
"its some real highbrow shit, it may just be going over your head.",
"They're kind of like the modern day Andy Kaufman.",
"I absolutely love T & E - Of course there are some skits that I consider a miss, however, that's no different than any other show out there.\n\nThat said, I **completely** understand those that hate it. I can appreciate the fact that for some people the humor just isn't there. I think of shows with laugh tracks like *Friends* or *Two and a Half Men* and they bore me to death. I feel like I can write the upcoming episode line by line just watching the commercial bumper for the episode.\n\nT & E is a special kind of absurd and surreal humor that doesn't click with some people - and that doesn't mean they are wrong or dumb, they just don't understand the humor of something so horribly absurd. (This isn't an elitist thing)\n\nTo address the you have to be high, this is completely wrong. I've literally never taken so much as a single puff of weed and I think a lot of their stuff is brilliant. \n\nHere's a skit that seems to be a good barometer. If you like it, you will like T & E, if you hate it, you will hate T & E:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nLastly, I wanted to mention that humor changes over time. What we think of as funny today is different from 10,20,50 years ago. \"I just flew in, boy are my arms tired\" and physical comedy like a pie in the face are not likely to garner many laughs. Comedy for the youth of today (i'm in low 30's) is also notably changing from when I was a kid. Take a look at the *Regular Show* or *Adventure Time* and you will see that it is a different type of comedy than when I was younger (*Duck Tales, Tail Spin, Animaniacs*) - Certainly different than the *Jetsons* and *Flinstones* of my parents' generation.\n\nI remember when this kind of comedy started to just take hold about a decade ago and I remember characterizing it (personally) as \"Random Humor\" - In fact, I remember saying things along the lines of \"That's hilarious, it's so random\". It's so bizarre and off kilter that some people just crack up.\n\nSo, comedy changes, and it's not a good or bad thing, but the way we evolve as well as the entertainment medium itself. Don't like it? Don't feel bad, it's not for everyone and I understand completely."
]
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[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_%28literary_device%29",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_humour"
],
[],
[],
[],
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"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8u4CEBVq7s"
],
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhOc4qbpvk",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEW5b5ZtaV0",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6caDqpYKrgE",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33HdkLjw6Q",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=A21wxZKiao8&feature=endscreen",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeyqS9BDPds",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFKvgo7q6lw"
],
[],
[],
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"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWX4GUYGQXQ"
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|
9nmi6r
|
how come the leaves on trees that are facing towards the sun are the first leaves to die off?
|
I always though that, since those leaves are getting the most sunlight, they would die off last, but apparently not. I know I'm missing some huge, glaring detail... but I don't know what.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nmi6r/eli5_how_come_the_leaves_on_trees_that_are_facing/
|
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"It isn't the location of the sun but the distance from the centre of the tree. Basically all the useful resources need to be moved out of the leaves and it starts with those which have the longest journey.",
"Also leaves in sunlight have the most evaporation so the tree has to expend more resources keeping them alive. Since the photosynthesis process is shutting down anyway kill off the leaves that require more resources first. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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|
1n7kkr
|
how can stores refuse to accept some denominations of money (like not accepting $50 or $100 bills). why aren't they required to accept it if it's legal tender?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n7kkr/eli5_how_can_stores_refuse_to_accept_some/
|
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"Its legal tender for \"all _debts_ public and private.\" There is no law which requires retailers to accept any specific form of payment.",
"It's robbery prevention policy. To deter would be thieves many stores only keep a small allotment of money in their drawers (50-200) and drop all extra money in a time locked safe. Many registers are set up to MAKE you drop money if you want to proceed (or else the scanner won't work).\n\nAlso, many stores can't do cash back or lottery pay outs if all their small bills get wiped out with big bills. Taking big bills means extra trips to the bank and many banks DO charge for making more than 5 visits a week for smaller increments... \n\nI used to run a gas station. People used to get mad I wouldn't break 100 for a pack of gum. But if I only have 70 in my drawer I literally CANNOT. I would have no money for any other transaction. \n\nPeople shouldn't use 100's or 50's unless they are spending at least half that. Banks for large transaction denominations, stores are under no compulsion to do so because it risks their safety.",
"Legal tender must be accepted for debts. If you haven't actually purchased anything, no transaction is made and they don't have a debt to settle."
]
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[] |
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[],
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2fzxb6
|
why is it when you're about to fall, but catch yourself, you feel those pins and needles in your hands and feet?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fzxb6/eli5_why_is_it_when_youre_about_to_fall_but_catch/
|
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"ckeaods",
"ckeatxp",
"ckeb293"
],
"score": [
10,
2,
22
],
"text": [
"I don't think thats normal, dude. Or am I weird?",
"It could very well be an adrenalin release.",
"When your body perceives a threat (like falling), your body will initiate a [fight or flight response](_URL_0_). When this happens, adrenaline is released into your body, the blood vessels in your muscles dilate and blood vessels in other less important areas (eg in your skin, hands and feet) constrict. This lets more blood flow to your muscles, and less elsewhere. The decrease in blood flowing to your extremities will cause a decrease in oxygen reaching the nerve endings there, which can cause a [pins and needles](_URL_1_) feeling."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paresthesia"
]
] |
||
3v60lg
|
why are minors always blurred out on television but we can freely post pictures of them online?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v60lg/eli5_why_are_minors_always_blurred_out_on/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cxklkpr"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Contrary to popular belief, in most cases it *is* legal to film people (including minors) in a public place and include that footage in a television program without blurring their faces or having each person sign a release form.\n\nHowever, some jurisdictions recognize 'publicity rights' or 'personality rights' which allow people to, in certain circumstances, exercise control over how their visual likeness is used in commercial media (such as a TV show).\n\nWhat this basically means is that, if an individual featured in the TV program does not sign a release form or otherwise grant the shows producers explicit permission to be featured in the program at the time of filming, then the individual may be able to later say \"hey, I don't like the way I am portrayed in your TV show, I demand that you stop distributing it until you remove or blur me out.\"\n\nWith minors, it's a more tricky situation because even if the minor agrees to be featured in the TV program and signs a release form saying as much at the time of filming, that minor's parent or guardian may be able to effectively void or override their child's consent in these matters and exercise publicity/personality rights on the child's behalf.\n\nNow, technically the same sort of rules apply for posting images of other people (including minors) online... however recall that publicity/personality rights are usually limited to situations where the images or visual likeness are used for a *commercial* purpose, So it may not apply to people who post images for personal or non-commercial purposes.\n\nSome jurisdictions also recognize a right to privacy which means that if the TV show (or image posted online) violates a person's privacy in some way (typically in situations where that person had a reasonable expectation of privacy when the image/footage was taken), then that person can again exercise control over the distribution of their visual likeness and force the TV show producers to remove or anonymize their appearance."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2ty6fi
|
what is a credit card report, what is your credit score and what is the big deal about it?
|
Also, why are there so many companies out there that can give you your credit score but you can't look it up yourself?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ty6fi/eli5what_is_a_credit_card_report_what_is_your/
|
{
"a_id": [
"co3daqt"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Credit is basically your financial \"word\". It shows how you payback borrowings and how reliable you are at paying back your bills "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
25xmab
|
the american government
|
Can someone please explain the relationship between the president, senate and Congress and their roles in basic terms. And no I am not American.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25xmab/eli5_the_american_government/
|
{
"a_id": [
"chloq50",
"chlozhq",
"chlqfjl"
],
"score": [
3,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"House and senate combined make up congress. Senate is 100people 2 from each state and the write and vote on laws and spending. House of represenitive is made up 435people, states get reps based on Population and they too vote on laws/budget and spending. \n\n\nThe President is the enforcer of what congress tells him. If they say here is your budget and 150million for a new prison than his office contacts work to get it built. If congress issues a new tax it is the office of the President to go collect the tax. Now if congress voted to tell the president a new law requires all men named Steve to go to jail the President can veto the law, and congress can revote to veto the veto if 75% agree. \n\n\nIt gets more complicated about the duties of each office and we also have a supreme court throne in here to review the whole process.",
"There are 3 branches. They are all considered coequal under the US Constitution and each has specific powers and authority granted by the people through the constitution.\n\nThe executive branch includes the president, vice president, cabinets, federal agencies and their employees. That branch is tasked with enforcing the laws and carrying out the will of the legislative branch. Article 2 creates the executive branch\n\nThe legislative branch, aka congress includes the 435 members in the house of representatives and 100 members in the senate. The legislative branch is empowered to create and amend laws. This branch is created by article 1 of the US Constitution.\n\nThe judicial branch interprets the laws. Particularly in regards to making certain they don't run afoul of the US Constitution. This includes the US Supreme Court and lower level federal courts. This is found under article 3.\n\nAll that said while that is how it looks on paper that is not always how things work in practice. ",
"The following book is the goto book on the Presidency:\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0029227968?pc_redir=1400069350&robot_redir=1"
]
] |
|
3ehnwy
|
why do imported strawberries from california and mexico not go mouldy?
|
They just get dark and soft. The ones from the local growers will go mouldy in a few hours if you are not careful.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ehnwy/eli5_why_do_imported_strawberries_from_california/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ctf1afx",
"ctf1f65",
"ctf1lhi"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"They were picked slightly underripe so they can last a few days, but depending on the condition of your fridge they might get dehydrated instead of getting moldy. If they are stored in a more moist environment at a higher temperature they can still get moldy. ",
"The local ones go mouldy when left out on shelves and bacteria grows.The ones you get transported from elsewhere are picked and quickly refrigerated. When they're transported the trucks used will have refrigerated trailers in which the oxygen is reduced either through the use of dry ice(CO2) or Nitrogen.\n\nThe cold temp and lack of oxygen reduce bacteria growth so the fruit stays fresher for longer.",
"Irradiation treatment is a common way to keep foods fresh when importing them. Basically, the fruits are treated with gamma rays to kill harmful microorganisms that would eat them, leading to rotting and mould. This is done on many different imported foods, and is widely considered to be safe. It doesn't cause harmful byproducts, and kills the bad microorganisms. \n\nSo your strawberries are possibly radiation treated!\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation#United_States_clearances",
"http://www.sterigenics.com/services/food_safety/food_irradiation__questions_answers.pdf"
]
] |
|
4udmsr
|
why is it that diesel locomotives in north america seem to all have the same basic design, whereas here in the uk they come in a much bigger variety of shapes.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4udmsr/eli5_why_is_it_that_diesel_locomotives_in_north/
|
{
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"d5ow7sp",
"d5p00sw",
"d5p526p"
],
"score": [
4,
22,
2,
3
],
"text": [
"Search for USA diesel locomotives in an image search in google and you will find a greater variety. Track and other differences means that the USA and UK can't use the same types.",
"The US locomotive that you have a pic of is most common in freight trains and they are made by GE (General Electric). There are different ones made by GE, but they all have basically the same style. Freight trains from one of your Class I railroads are usually what you would see when you are stopped at a railroad crossing because they opperate in a wider variety of areas, but if you lived closer to a shortline railroad, passenger rail station, or even near industries close to a Class I rail yard; then you would notice one of the many other types of desiel locomotives that are out there.\nTLDR: Freight Trains are most common and all their locomotives are made by GE in the US.",
"Mmmhhh...that diesel Class 37 THRASH!!! They need to send some of them over to this side of the pond!",
"Just to add to what digahole said, Norfolk Southern and CSX are the biggest Class 1 RR's on the east coast of the US, and they're using mostly EMD's or GE's. (electro motive diesel if you're interested). For some of the longer haul routes, you'll see a huge fuel tank beneath the main body, between the trucks (or wheel sets/bogies). Big railroads will place a big order for better pricing, but also to make all the maintenance similar, spare parts, paint, training for engineers, so you see a lot of nearly identical ones. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
dvv719
|
why is rent in california said to be uncontrollably rising?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dvv719/eli5_why_is_rent_in_california_said_to_be/
|
{
"a_id": [
"f7evsk5",
"f7ewo0k"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"It's not complex. High immigration rate plus plenty of births means the population is growing. But very strict government policies on building are constraining the housing supply.",
"California is known to have extremely high land values, for a variety of reasons such as income, amenities, climate, and social policies. Land taxes are based on land valuation, so as land valuation increases as things tend to do overtime, the taxes increase and the landlords raise the rent to pay the taxes and so on. \n\n\nCalifornia is also considered an extremely good state to invest in property so foreign investors pay large sums over the market price to get access to the market. This drives up land value and loops into the cycle listed above."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
z9jyo
|
what itunes terms and conditions is actually telling me.
|
What is hidden in there?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z9jyo/eli5_what_itunes_terms_and_conditions_is_actually/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c62p8rx",
"c62poyx",
"c62pt9l"
],
"score": [
3,
6,
7
],
"text": [
"You can't use it to develop, design, manufacture or produce nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.\n\n > You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.",
"Don't expect to keep your first born.",
"i am guessing it could be this one :\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n > This license does not allow You to use the Licensed Application on any iPod touch or iPhone that You do not own or control, and You may not distribute or make the Licensed Application available over a network where it could be used by multiple devices at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Licensed Application. You may not copy (except as expressly permitted by this license and the Usage Rules), decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, attempt to derive the source code of, modify, or create derivative works of the Licensed Application, any updates, or any part thereof (except as and only to the extent any foregoing restriction is prohibited by applicable law or to the extent as may be permitted by the licensing terms governing use of any open sourced components included with the Licensed Application). Any attempt to do so is a violation of the rights of the Application Provider and its licensors. If You breach this restriction, You may be subject to prosecution and damages. The terms of the license will govern any upgrades provided by Application Provider that replace and/or supplement the original Product, unless such upgrade is accompanied by a separate license in which case the terms of that license will govern. \n\n- only apple can distribute it the application, or else sad people in suits will drag you to court.\n\n > Consent to Use of Data: You agree that Application Provider may collect and use technical data and related information, including but not limited to technical information about Your device, system and application software, and peripherals, that is gathered periodically to facilitate the provision of software updates, product support and other services to You (if any) related to the Licensed Application. Application Provider may use this information, as long as it is in a form that does not personally identify You, to improve its products or to provide services or technologies to You. \n\n- apple will collect your personal data, and there is nothing you can do about it.\n\n > The license is effective until terminated by You or Application Provider. Your rights under this license will terminate automatically without notice from the Application Provider if You fail to comply with any term(s) of this license. Upon termination of the license, You shall cease all use of the Licensed Application, and destroy all copies, full or partial, of the Licensed Application. \n\n- apple can cut you off without notice on any arbitrary reason (e.g. you don't have a mac)\n\n > The Licensed Application may enable access to Application Provider’s and third party services and web sites (collectively and individually, \"Services\"). Use of the Services may require Internet access and that You accept additional terms of service.\n\n > You understand that by using any of the Services, You may encounter content that may be deemed offensive, indecent, or objectionable, which content may or may not be identified as having explicit language, and that the results of any search or entering of a particular URL may automatically and unintentionally generate links or references to objectionable material. Nevertheless, You agree to use the Services at Your sole risk and that the Application Provider shall not have any liability to You for content that may be found to be offensive, indecent, or objectionable. \n\n- we can offer you things we don't want to be held responsible for. it's your own damn fault for your curiosity.\n\n > Certain Services may display, include or make available content, data, information, applications or materials from third parties (“Third Party Materials”) or provide links to certain third party web sites. By using the Services, You acknowledge and agree that the Application Provider is not responsible for examining or evaluating the content, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, validity, copyright compliance, legality, decency, quality or any other aspect of such Third Party Materials or web sites. The Application Provider does not warrant or endorse and does not assume and will not have any liability or responsibility to You or any other person for any third-party Services, Third Party Materials or web sites, or for any other materials, products, or services of third parties. Third Party Materials and links to other web sites are provided solely as a convenience to You. Financial information displayed by any Services is for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon as investment advice. Before executing any securities transaction based upon information obtained through the Services, You should consult with a financial professional. Location data provided by any Services is for basic navigational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon in situations where precise location information is needed or where erroneous, inaccurate or incomplete location data may lead to death, personal injury, property or environmental damage. Neither the Application Provider, nor any of its content providers, guarantees the availability, accuracy, completeness, reliability, or timeliness of stock information or location data displayed by any Services. \n\n- same as above.\n\n > You agree that any Services contain proprietary content, information and material that is protected by applicable intellectual property and other laws, including but not limited to copyright, and that You will not use such proprietary content, information or materials in any way whatsoever except for permitted use of the Services. **No portion of the Services may be reproduced in any form or by any means**. You agree not to modify, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute, or create derivative works based on the Services, in any manner, and You shall not exploit the Services in any unauthorized way whatsoever, including but not limited to, by trespass or burdening network capacity. You further agree not to use the Services in any manner to harass, abuse, stalk, threaten, defame or otherwise infringe or violate the rights of any other party, and that the Application Provider is not in any way responsible for any such use by You, nor for any harassing, threatening, defamatory, offensive or illegal messages or transmissions that You may receive as a result of using any of the Services. \n\n- don't attempt to copy our business concept, or sad men with suits will drag you to court. if somebody messes with you over our service, it's your own damn fault. \n\n > In addition, third party Services and Third Party Materials that may be accessed from, displayed on or linked to from the iPhone or iPod touch are not available in all languages or in all countries. The Application Provider makes no representation that such Services and Materials are appropriate or available for use in any particular location. To the extent You choose to access such Services or Materials, You do so at Your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with any applicable laws, including but not limited to applicable local laws. The Application Provider, and its licensors, reserve the right to change, suspend, remove, or disable access to any Services at any time without notice. In no event will the Application Provider be liable for the removal of or disabling of access to any such Services. The Application Provider may also impose limits on the use of or access to certain Services, in any case and without notice or liability. \n\nwhat do you mean, you are not from 'merica? is that like, Yurop?\n\nalso, we can restrict your service so that you can only listen to your music through a farting walkie-talkie between 0:00 and 0:05 am every second wednesday on a full moon without telling you. and there's nothing you can do about it.\n\n > [ points e. and f. ] \n\nwhatever you do, it's your own damn fault.\n\n > [ more legal threats ] \n\nself-explanatory"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.apple.com/legal/itunes/appstore/dev/stdeula/"
]
] |
|
2pv0nn
|
why do i have to pay a toll to get off of a tollway when i paid to get on it?
|
I am driving through Illinois and just didn't know.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pv0nn/eli5_why_do_i_have_to_pay_a_toll_to_get_off_of_a/
|
{
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"cn09tqw",
"cn0aprk",
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"score": [
3,
3,
3
],
"text": [
"Just a guess: So you pay based on the miles you drove on the tollway. Maybe they charge more if you get off further down, and more if you had gotten on earlier.",
"It's the only way to gauge how long you've been on the toll road. One charge at the entrance (knowing you should be on until at least the next checkpoint), another at the exit, and potentially some along the way.\n",
"I'm from Chicago, I remember before the city sent out letters saying the extra tolls are just to pay for the construction for highways and afterwards it would discontinue. That was about 5 years ago. Before you paid like $0.65 to get on, and then again if you left the state. Now it's like every few miles, $1.80, $1.80, $1.80, then you leave and it stops."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1wmc9i
|
what are some likely evolutions humans may adapt over the next few million years, if any?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wmc9i/eli5_what_are_some_likely_evolutions_humans_may/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cf3c8fo"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Because this is entirely speculative and subjective it's been removed. Try /r/futurewhatif instead, or /r/askreddit instead."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
39ynr3
|
how do smartphone gps antennae work?
|
My first-gen GPS device required a flip-up antenna and needed to be well-positioned on my windshield. Now it seems my smartphone will connect to GPS satellites even inside my pockets. How did this level of improvement occur considering the satellites weren't "upgraded"?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39ynr3/eli5_how_do_smartphone_gps_antennae_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cs7n5vr"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Better antennas, also, on my iPhone (and probably on other phones too), the edge of the phone are actually the antennas (GPS, cellular, Wi-Fi, etc.), because the antennas are not inside, in results in a better signal."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
10tjhy
|
why did ww2 allied soldiers not use shields?
|
It seems like shields would have been especially helpful in situations like the Normandy invasion, since they were pretty much walking right into gunfire, right? Even if the shields didn't protect the soldiers from all the bullets/etc, wouldn't they have helped enough to be worth using?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10tjhy/eli5_why_did_ww2_allied_soldiers_not_use_shields/
|
{
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"text": [
"Absolutely not. Steel thick enough to stop German rifle rounds would have made a shield weight far in excess of 100 lbs, and men were routinely drowning with under 30 lbs of gear on.",
"As 1mfa0 said, a sufficiently thick shield would be extremely heavy to carry. So you'd probably have to provide some sort of motor to move it. And since it's not economical to provide one for every soldier, so you'd be better off making bigger shields that multiple soldiers can use together. And since you've got a motor, you can move quite a bit faster than on foot, so you'll want to have a group of these shield-vehicles moving together. And since a motorized shield-vehicle can carry so much more weight, you could have the soldiers use guns that are far larger and heavier than their normal guns. It will be big and expensive, but impervious to normal bullets, relatively fast, and pack a lot of firepower. Maybe you'd call your new army an Armored Division, and your new mobile shields \"tanks\" ",
"There was no such thing as kevlar (or any equivalent) back then, for body armor or shields. It would have had to have been steel, and as mentioned below, way too heavy.",
"Soldiers had to contend with much more than just bullets. I believe that the most casualties inflicted were by artillery and mortars. ",
"Not enough hands.",
"a shield that could stop a barrage of .306 bullets would be far too heavy to carry quickly",
"You try holding an M1 Garand and a \"shield\" and see how accurate you are. ",
"Shields were tried in WW1 by both sides but they found that it was to heavy and cumbersome for use by general infantry but they were used by snipers and other specialists to good effect. However when the British started using elephant guns that big game hunters brought over from their personal hunting arsenal and they found that this rifle could penetrate the Shields so they became obsolete. By ww2 it was an entirely different battlefield that was more mobile and had more firepower so a mobile shield would never have been any effective and by that time people started experimenting with body armour instead and found it far superiour because it keeps the user mobile and protected unlike a shield that you have to carry around.\n\nAlso I think it was the British who during ww1 created an armoured tree that was hollow so a sniper could climb it from the inside and be protected from enemy fire and at the same time have a clear view of the opposing trenches but that is another story entirely.\n\nHere is a link:\n_URL_0_",
"Any medieval shield will be too thin to stop armor piercing rifle rounds. An M2 black tip AP round from WW2 out of a springfield rifle will penetrate a quarter inch of rolled steel. The Soviets experimented with steel body armor for engineering units in urban settings and even then they weighed 40lbs, severely restricted movement, and only stopped 9mm pistol rounds from beyond 100 meters away. The development of the gun was directly responsible for ending the use of metal armor in European combat- firearms almost always penetrated the armor unless the armor was extremely thick and too heavy to carry.",
"Barbed wire, trenches, and machine guns. Yeah, you could put a shield on a wheelbarrow and run that shit pretty quickly, but can you run that mofo through a trench, or across some barbed wire, or when you're getting belted with heavy machine gun fire? Barbed wire was invented to keep 1 ton of cow in check. Trenches broke up the battlefield in a maze of canyons. Did you see \"The Last Samurai?\" Machine guns fucked up a bunch of ninja-killers. Thanks for the wheelbarrow. Now what was that you wanted me to do with it? Break through a cow-stopper in a canyon with a crap-load (scientifically proven to be 10x as much as a shit-ton) of ninja-killers aimed up my ass? Naw, man. I've seen Wipeout. That shit ain't never end pretty, Drill Sergeant.",
"Wait, you're telling me that that Captain America movie wasn't historically accurate? Fuck.",
"Simple shields (such as steel) would not have stopped the bullets *or* the shrapnel from the weapons used; the full power rifles in use in ww2 were orders of magnitude *more* powerful than the ones in use today, although the submachine guns used then were generally below par for what would be used today. the engine block in a car would do little to stop the 7.92 mauser rounds, their .30-06 american counterparts, or the (still widely used) 7.62 Nagant (long) russian rounds, to say nothing of the 7mm Arisaka the Japanese used (in what is still one of the sturdiest bolt action rifles ever manufactured).\n\nSo simple armor can essentially be shit-canned unless it was hardened and over, say, 1/2\" thick and held at an angle to incoming fire (in order to deflect, rather than repel).\n\nThis leaves composite armors: at the time, this mostly didn't exist, either because the materials hadn't been invented (kevlar) or because their use was impractical for movement, or incapable of the multiple uses necessary to justify their general issue, and they were instead used as fortifications (composites of metal and ceramic)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.landships.freeservers.com/french_creep-tanks_walkaround.htm"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
2hs0df
|
what is happening when we learn to like something like coffee?
|
I'm aware that when we are little we don't like different things because our taste buds aren't developed. But there are things like coffee and beer that people don't like even as adults and learn to like over time. What is that all about?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hs0df/eli5_what_is_happening_when_we_learn_to_like/
|
{
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"text": [
"\nYou can re-wire your brain in many ways regarding a very large number of things. Consequently, you can re-wire your brain so that when it gets the taste buds signal that corresponds to cofee, it associates it with pleasure and 'hmmm das güd!'. \n\nThere are many ways to do that and if you'd like to experiment with rewiring your brain, the best way is your way. Use your imagination to find tips and exercices that work for you, do these things, and enjoy your new way of life o//",
"The answer to this actually applies to a lot of things in life.\n\nThe thing is by repeating something continuously it becomes part of our routine and we become accustomed to it. As so, it doesn't feel out of place anymore even if it isn't the most exciting thing.\n\nI also said that this applies to other things in life, and here something from mine. Last year I finished highschool and the university in which i started going is in another town. The bus ride was about forty minutes and as many people in my town we made that trip every day. It was really tedious to me at first and i remember complaining about it often. After a while it just stopped feeling weird and the busses were suddenly okay, the road was cool, the people weren't sweaty , etc... I guess my brain just started ignoring the little details that would bother me at first.\n\nThis also goes both ways. In the same breath, going to university was a great experience, and i couldn't stop talking about everything. All seemed so special. Then as times passed and all those awesome things became part of my routine it didn't seem that exciting anymore. Not that things got worse but it didn't feel like something else anymore, ot was part of the daily routine.",
"You grow to like it because of operant conditioning.\n\nFrom Wikipedia : Operant conditioning (or instrumental conditioning) is a type of learning in which an individual's behavior is modified by its antecedents and consequences.\n\nDrinking coffee provides you benefits (energy, social status, etc.) and negatives (not a great taste at first, etc.). If the benefits outweigh the costs, you'll continue to do the behavior. Over time you'll strongly associate coffee with positives and downplay or even forget the negatives. With flavor, something that was not so great at first become great because you associate it with all the positives of the coffee."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1n7gcj
|
if gravity causes items with mass to pull toward each other how do we end up with orbits?
|
I might be struggling because I compare magnetism and gravity and have no clue how a planet could pull a meteor down to it, but we don't get pulled into the sun or our moon doesn't get pulled into us.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n7gcj/eli5_if_gravity_causes_items_with_mass_to_pull/
|
{
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"ccg1pl7"
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"I like this explanation of orbit from Wikipedia:\n\n\"As the object moves sideways (tangentially), it falls toward the central body. However, it has enough tangential velocity to miss the orbited object, and will continue falling indefinitely...\"\n\nSo in other words, we *are* being pulled into the sun but we are moving so fast that we keep missing."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
paat3
|
why does the world (besides the united states) hate israel so much?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/paat3/eli5_why_does_the_world_besides_the_united_states/
|
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"The modern state of Israel was created after WW2 to create a home for the displaced Jews from Europe. President Truman strong-armed the rest of the Allies into supporting the plan. To create the state, Palestine was carved up, and Israel was handed a prime spot in the middle of Muslim country, including the city of Jerusalem, which is a holy city to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Pretty much the only strong supporters of the plan were the USA, everyone else thought it would be too much trouble.\n\nSo basically the USA carved up the holy land of several religions and inserted the Jews. Add to that the fact that the USA has gone out of it's way to support Israel in disputes against their neighbors and has meddled a lot in the politics of the region, and it's not hard to understand why the Arab states are not happy with the USA/Israel combo.",
"After WW2 no one wanted to take the European Jews so the allies set them up to move back \"home\" in Israel well they moved in and took over. The people who lived there with them didn't like it and the rest of the Arab countries back the Muslims who lived there (this also had something to do with seeing them as a western culture.) I suggest you check out the Wikipedia on it because it is a really interesting history with a lot of nuance that we can't get in these short posts.",
"There are a few Middle Eastern countries that just don't think Israel has a right to exist, and are angry because of that. Most countries don't mind that so much, but they *do* mind the fact that Israel (with the support of the United States) blatantly ignores UN resolutions telling them not to do things.",
"Imagine your parents adopt a new child named Issac. They give him your room and move you to a smaller one. Even though it's always been your room, it's now his even though you didn't get a say in the matter. Sure, you still have a room, but it's not the room that you've grown up in or the room that you want. This is what the Allies did to Palestine after WW2 ended.\n\nNow Issac has always been picked on and had a rough home life before, so he is a bit aggressive and defensive. When your older brother Egert got angry at him for taking your room and tried to pick a fight with him, Issac beat him up and stole some of his toys in retaliation. Whenever you want to play in his room (your old room), he always watches you and sometimes yells at you for not doing exactly what he wants you to do. None of your friends like Issac either, because he's not very nice to them and they know that he's mean to you. You also know Issac sometimes puts gross things in the food you and your older brother eat that makes you sick, but you can't prove it and you know he would never accept responsibility for it.\n\nBecause you're mad about Issac stealing your room, you and your friends often get together and plan ways to pull pranks, like putting thumbtacks for him to step on outside his door, on Egert since you know you can't fight him directly. This usually only makes him angrier and makes it easier to justify beating you up to your parents. Sometimes he even retaliates against your friends who don't participate because he groups them with you and your friends that do. He is always suspicious of your friends because they hang out with you and always suspects that you and them are planning something, and so he preemptively tries to show his strength around them and control you.\n\nYour parents know that he came from a difficult living situation and sort of coddle him for this reason, even though he is sometimes a bully. In his defense, it's not really his fault that your parents gave him your room, but he is not very good at sharing it with other people and he doesn't get along with his neighbors - you and your older brother - or your friends. So you are both mad at him often, but your parents always prevent you from really starting a fight with him and you know they would take his side if there was one. He's also gotten big enough and strong enough that he might win even if you and your brother both took him on, so you're not really sure you want to take that chance in fighting him. \n\nIn the same way, the US and our closest Allies feel the need to protect Israel because they helped create it as a safe haven for Jews, who have been mistreated throughout history, and it also gives us a strong ally in the Middle East - a region we need all the help we can get in. Other countries in the Middle East obviously aren't happy about this, but can't really do much about it because the US and all of it's allies are backing Israel, and Israel has an extremely effective military for being as small as it is.\n\nEDIT: Wow, I'm surprised this has received so much attention, glad I could give a helpful explanation! I am by no means an expert on the subject, and, as several people have pointed out, there is a lot more to it and many more factors that weren't really covered by this explanation. I also may have come off as a bit biased, since it's mostly from Palestine's point of view, but am fairly neutral on the matter and can see some valid arguments from both sides. It was mentioned that I should add in something about how the younger brother and his friends also constantly poked Issac with pins, which I think is a decent metaphor for the terrorist attacks and small-scale escalations that occur, so I've added that in above.\n",
"Somehow I feel like our relations with other Middle Eastern countries might be better if we didn't bend over backwards for Israel all the time.",
"In my opinion, there is no way to answer this question without bias. You can't solve this riddle without bringing in religion, because that's the whole key to why either side cares about this little sliver of land that is around the size of New Jersey.\n\nIf you discuss religion, for most people, there will be inherent bias. As a non-practicing Jew, I hate a lot of the things that Israel does, but I also hate a lot of the things that the Arab countries do.\n\nThere's a reason why Israel has mandatory military service at 18 - they have come to terms with the fact that there will never be peace in the region. It makes it a tough life for both sides, when you know any day you or your family could be slain. But both sides put up with it 'cause the religion sucks them into it.\n\nTo the guy asking about the Quarters in the Old City - there's an Armenian, Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Quarter.\n\nThe USA's angle is all about power, money and stability.",
"I disagree with the notion that Issac is the primary aggressor in the analogy. ",
"IDF soldier here(downvote as you like =]).\nfrom my perspective: basically the world hates Israel because the arabs are promoting hatred in all the world media and that's what the world sees and super over-exaggerating the situation till now from 1948 there are 70,000 Arabs killed and from that number 10K are Palestinians. on the contrast in Sudan there are **3 million** killed till now and the genocide continues. Still you won't see the world news going on and on about Sudan as they go for Israel whilst the israeli-arab conflict is **50 times** smaller then what happens in Sudan.\n\non another note, what happened in 1948 was Exchange of populations. whilst some of the Arabs fled as you guys mention, you forgot to mention that 800,000 Jews were exiled from their Arab countries in which they lived fleeing leaving all of their belongings there. \n\nWe are the only true democracy in the Middle east and that drives the arab world crazy. that's why they divert the world media against us.\n\nAnyone who thinks i'm wrong can prove me otherwise. but i won't reply for two weeks cause i'm going to my base now. have a great weekend.",
"Israel is sort of like Justin Bieber. People like to hate on them a lot more than they deserve. Sure they've done some bad things in the past (and still do), but they aren't the worst country in the world. They just get picked on because they're highly visible. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4tiif3
|
what does a music producer do? what does a dj do? what exactly is the difference?
|
As a layman, I often (and probably incorrectly) interchange the words DJ and producer. Can someone please explain what each one does?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4tiif3/eli5_what_does_a_music_producer_do_what_does_a_dj/
|
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"They mean a bunch of different things. \n\nA DJ usually refers to someone who plays music at parties, nightclubs, bars, etc. Or it can refer to the guy on the radio who plays music. It has nothing to do with *making music*. \n\nWith the popularity of electronic music, DJ can also refer to. An electronic artist. This is someone who writes, composes, and performs music using a computer. \n\nIt can also refer someone who plays samples in a band or rap group. \n\nMusic producer can refer to the actual record producer in charge of the business side of making records. \n\nMusic producer can refer to an audio engineer who runs the technical side of making music. \n\nMusic producer can also refer to an electronic musician. \n\nMusic producer can sort of refer to any artist who makes music. ",
"A DJ is the person at a party who is playing the music, and the producer is the one who made the music. That's about as simple as I can describe it. Hope it helps!",
"A producer does for music what a director does for a movie or film. They decide what gets recorded, how it gets recorded, what songs will go on a record and how to mix the instruments together in the final recording. Basically he directs the production of the recordings.\n\nTed Templeman, a very famous producer said that his job was to take the best a artist has to offer and get it recorded and ready for sale to the public. This requires someone with a good ear, a good business sense, and knowing what people will like of what a particular artist can do. Many times the way an artist sounds before and after being produced is drastically different because the artist can't be objective, whereas a producer can. Good producers make artists better."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1s4i6e
|
affordable care act preexisting condition (pc) coverage mandate.
|
Is this still taking effect on Jan. 1?
If my insurance has denied coverage for a PC before, will it have to be covered after Jan. 1?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s4i6e/eli5_affordable_care_act_preexisting_condition_pc/
|
{
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"cdtxea0"
],
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2
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"text": [
"Basically they can charge different rates only based on your age, gender, and smoking habits. \n\nPreexisting conditions are covered and they won't be doing medical underwriting anymore. \n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
5thg2s
|
how do they make gorilla glass stronger than regular glass?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5thg2s/eli5_how_do_they_make_gorilla_glass_stronger_than/
|
{
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"text": [
"I don't think there's really such a thing as \"regular glass\" as you might think of it.\n\nTake steel for example. Steel is what's called an \"alloy\" which in it's own case is Iron mixed with some ratio of other elements, usually carbon. There is no standard type of steel. You mix in different elements in different ratios to get the type of steel you need. Stainless steel for example has chromium mixed into it and this is what prevents it from rusting.\n\nGlass too (and other materials) can be made this way, although technically not called an alloy I think (alloy is always metal). Typically the main component of glass is silicon dioxide (quartz) and mixed with other elements in certain ratios to give it the properties desired, although not all glass uses silicon dioxide to my knowledge. Other things can be done to it as well.\n\nGorilla Glass has found some mixture of elements in this way that causes their glass to be extra strong compared to other glass mixtures.",
"They take regular glass and soak it in molten potassium salt. The sodium atoms in the glass come out, and the potassium atoms replace them. Potassium atoms are 30% bigger than sodium ones.\n\nSay you are playing Red Rover. A bunch of kids are lined up holding hands, and another kid tries to run between them. When the kid runs through, his goal isn't to split another kid in half. It's to run in between two kids and get them to let go of each others hands. If you replace 15 little kids with 10 big kids, then there are fewer places the running kid can split the line."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2gz9vk
|
how planet's rotation affects on day length? how is that related? and if i lived on 12-days-planet, then my age will be half?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gz9vk/eli5_how_planets_rotation_affects_on_day_length/
|
{
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"text": [
"One day is the time it takes for a planet (or moon) to make a complete revolution. On Earth, that time is 24 hours. On Mars, for instance, one day is about 40 minutes longer.\n\nYour age doesn't depend on the day length of the planet. We measure time by the rotation and revolution of the Earth because its easy to observe; being away from the Earth doesn't speed up or slow down time.",
"The **rotation** is the planet spinning on its axis, which produces the day/night cycle. The sun is high above your head at noon, but as the earth spins, the sun appears to be moving away from above you, towards the horizon, because the planet is spinning and blocking your view of the sun. But 24h later, the sun will be in the same zenith spot once more.\n\nThe **revolution** is the planet circling around the sun, and because of factors like the inclination of the earth which makes you get more sunlight in winter and less sunlight in summer, creates the seasons. One year is one circle around the sun.\n\nWe decided to count these revolutions around the sun as one year, and count years like that. If you lived on a planet that had a year measuring 730 days, then technically, on that planet, you'd be half as many years old as you would be on earth...however, your biology doesn't care about such facts, and you wouldn't experience time any faster or slower.",
"Measure your height in inches, and you'll get a larger number than measuring in feet. The larger number does not make you taller.\n\nMeasure your age in Saturn-days, and you'll get a larger number than measuring in Earth-days (because Saturn-days are smaller). The larger number does not make you older.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
35pufo
|
why do i sometimes see a fleeting dark shadow of sort in the corner of my eye?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35pufo/eli5_why_do_i_sometimes_see_a_fleeting_dark/
|
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"text": [
"If you mean a floater, because there are occasionally floaty bits of broken down material inside your eyeballs, which block light reaching your retina to some degree. These are normal in small amounts, and tend to increase with age.\n\nThey seem fleeting because, as they are in your eye, when you turn your eyes 'to look towards it' the substance moves with your eye, thus making them difficult to center in your vision, and easy to lose against the background unless it is bright and plain like the sky. ",
"Its an illusion of vision. Your peripheral vision is superior at picking up some forms of light. But when you go to look at it straight on, you don't see anything. So what you saw was some fleeting or minor change in light levels.\n\nYou can see this effect strongly in certain cases. Just as an example, we have this large flat wall adjacent to the road here. During heavy sports games nearby, a police car or two iwll often be out there with lights on, directing traffic.\n\nIf you look at the wall head on while this is going on, you won't see anyhting. But if you instead glance it through your peripheral vision, you'll see the red and blue flashing.",
"You should get your vision checked if you havent already. Could be signs of a detached retna if this has come on suddenly."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
a10d60
|
what is measurement theory and how it can it be applied to a real-world scenario?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a10d60/eli5_what_is_measurement_theory_and_how_it_can_it/
|
{
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"text": [
"Are you asking about [measurement theory](_URL_0_), which appears to be an informal term for tools that the sciences use for making and reasoning about measurements, or [measure theory](_URL_1_), the mathematical model that allows us to assign sizes to infinite sets of infinitely small points?\n\n\nI can't speak to the former, but if you are talking about the latter, that blurb of a description is the gist of it. Let's go through a brief example of why this is necessary.\n\nLet us look at the interval [0, 1]. How many points does this interval have? Clearly, infinitely many. And yet we would like to say that this interval has a size of 1.\n\nLet's now look at the interval [0, 2]. How many points does this have? It seems like it should have more. However, let's take the interval [0, 1] and stretch it out by a factor of 2. Do we miss any points? Any point X between 1 and 2 must be covered, because X/2 is between 0 and 1, and (X/2)*2 = X. Even though we stretched out the interval, it has no gaps - it's like we used the same number of points to cover twice the length. And yet, we would like to say that the interval [0, 2] is bigger than the interval [0, 1].\n\nMeasure theory gives us a rigorous way of doing so. It gives us the most general principles according to which we can assign sizes to sets, and results of measure theory can be applied to various subfields.\n\nSo, where can this be applied? The most notable example is probability theory. When talking about probabilities, we are assigning particular values to events, and manipulating these values in a rigorous way. These events are collections (sets) of outcomes, which makes measure theory perfect as a basis. This allows us to reason rigorously about complicated probability spaces that we see in nature, which have infinite collections of outcomes (like points in space or velocities), and allows us to do complex calculations on them, all the while knowing they will never lead us to a contradiction because they have been justified through a rigorous axiomatic process.\n\nAs a general rule, this is where measure theory is practically useful - reasoning about an abstract space (like a probability space) where sizes in that space should be well-defined. Any time you see a real-world situation being represented in a graph, it may be that measure theory can be used to analyze it (but perhaps with a lot of extra tools involved)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.britannica.com/technology/measurement",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_(mathematics)"
]
] |
||
2dw1uu
|
what keeps the atmosphere where it is? why doesn't gas/air/oxygen/whatever just go flying out of it all willy nilly?
|
I'm informed enough (I went to kindergarten) to understand that it works this way for the most part, but not enough to understand why. Obviously the atmosphere has an "edge" (of sorts) but why?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dw1uu/eli5_what_keeps_the_atmosphere_where_it_is_why/
|
{
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"text": [
"It doesn't have an 'edge'. It becomes steadily thinner until it becomes indistinguishable from the interplanetary space of the solar system.",
"Gravity. The atmosphere has mass, because of all those hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other atoms and molecules that comprise it. It is held in place by the planet's gravitational pull. \n\nBonus tidbit: The weight of the atmosphere in a given area is measured by barometers, and this information is included in weather reports as areas of high pressure or low pressure. The atmospheric pressure is greatest at sea level (because there's more atmosphere above it) and lower in mountain areas.",
"Helium is pretty rare, since it does escape into space.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://chemistry.about.com/b/2013/12/02/will-we-run-out-of-helium.htm"
]
] |
|
2j99q8
|
who is considered a jew? is a person with ethnic jewish ancestry considered one?
|
My pal has Ashkenazi ancestry (ethnicity) on his mother's side. His surname is yiddish, many relatives were killed in the Holocaust, doesn't look 100% European but he is not religious and neither are his parents. So I am wondering if he'd be accepted. I don't think his mother is 100% Jewish, his grandparents passed away so there is no way of knowing hence the term 'ancestry'.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j99q8/eli5_who_is_considered_a_jew_is_a_person_with/
|
{
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"text": [
"**Jewish as ancestry**\n\nThe Mischling Test is an oft cited, but completely irrelevant definition of who constitutes a Jew. Someone with at least two Jewish grandparents was Jewish in the eyes of the Nazis.\n\nAnyone with any Jewish ancestry is partly an ethnic Jew. Given the number of ancestors you've had in the past 6,000 years, it is quite likely that everyone reading this is part ethnic Jew.\n\n**Jewish as ethnicity**\n\nEthnicity of Jewish people is complex. Some identify as white, others identify as other races in their ancestry. Others insist that Jewish is itself an ethnicity and deserving of its own category. Regardless 90% of the people who identify as Jewish in the United States also identify as white.\n\n**Jewish as nationality**\n\nTypically people from Israel identify as \"Israeli\" as their nationality, not Jewish, however others may conflate the terms. There is substantial overlap, so while it is imprecise, it isn't inaccurate.\n\n**Jewish as religion**\n\nThis is also complex. There is a large swath of people who consider themselves Jewish by faith, but do not practice or practice their faith very rarely. These people are typically accepted as part of the greater Jewish community regardless of their ethnicity. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
g1o5il
|
wolfram physics project (the fundamental theory of physics)
|
Stephen wolfram just announced a project to find the fundemental theory of physics through computation.
_URL_1_
Physicists of Eli5 can you explain this visual summarization for us?
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g1o5il/eli5_wolfram_physics_project_the_fundamental/
|
{
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"text": [
"Give an initial condition, apply “updating” rule, which has an effect of _time_, iterate the process. Left side is about visual summary of how the rules work, and the right side is about “causal invariance”. He went through more detailed explanation about it in his article, which he claims it coincides with the idea of causality in the relativity.",
"Stephen Wolfram is one of those people who does some completely legitimate work, some work that's legitimate but overhyped as a revolutionary breakthrough when in reality it's a fairly modest discovery, and some crank work that's little better than pseudoscience. This new project is almost certainly an instance of the last of these three types."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.wolframphysics.org/visual-summary/dark/",
"https://twitter.com/stephen_wolfram/status/1250063808309198849?s=09"
] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
bkkzpz
|
why do podcast and music streaming apps warn you about downloading content over cellular data? isn't streaming the content using the same amount of data?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bkkzpz/eli5_why_do_podcast_and_music_streaming_apps_warn/
|
{
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"text": [
"You could accidentally burn through all your data quickly by downloading a bunch of episodes. But streaming them one by one means you're only downloading them as you consume them.",
" > Why do podcast and music streaming apps warn you about downloading content over cellular data?\n\nBecause streaming is on demand and download -- especially with podcasts -- frequently happens automatically as a background process. \n\nI.e. my podcast player of choice (Overcast) is set to download only over WiFi. Occasionally, I'll be out and about and not near WiFi and want to download an episode to queue up for later listening. I switch to \"Download over WiFi or Cellular Data\" then switch back once the download is complete. No biggie. But, once or twice, I've gotten distracted and forgotten to switch back to \"Download Only Over WiFi\" and (since I have a huge number of podcast subscriptions because of a ridiculous commute) over the next several days wound up accidentally downloading *gigabytes* of podcasts over cellular data unintentionally. \n\n > Isn't streaming the content using the same amount of data?\n\nNo, not necessarily. When you download, you are likely downloading an audio file compressed into the MP3 or AAC codecs. There are different codecs that can be used for streaming, so when you stream audio you may not be getting just MP3 or AAC files sent over the wire. Different compression codecs mean different amounts of data (and potentially different quality)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1t5u8f
|
why do people use a glass to listen through walls?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t5u8f/eli5_why_do_people_use_a_glass_to_listen_through/
|
{
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"ce4mkl5"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Acoustics. The sound reverberates off the walls of the glass and it amplifies it naturally, making it easier for the human ear to pick up the enunciation. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
29ks2e
|
how are there telescopes that can see so far into outerspace?
|
For example, how can we possibly see other galaxies with telescopes? Are we really seeing them?
EDIT: How can we "see" them in such detail? Please ELI5 in detail...
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29ks2e/eli5_how_are_there_telescopes_that_can_see_so_far/
|
{
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"text": [
"Telescopes don't \"see\" any distance. Seeing is by its very nature a local action; you only detect light that has arrived at your location. A telescope just collects faint, disperse light and concentrates it. Very distant galaxies emitted light long ago that just now is arriving in our vicinity.",
"The distant objects give off light. There is relatively little between us and those distant objects as space is largely empty, thus some portion of that light is able to travel relatively unimpeded across the vast distance to us. \n\nA telescope gathers and focuses that light into an image. ",
"We would be able to see them too, except for two things:\n1. We have comparatively smaller pixel resolution, meaning that we only have so many \"live\" dots that can register light over our whole 180 degree field of vision. Telescopes have many more dots and they're focused on a much tinier field of view, perhaps just one degree by one degree.\n2. We don't see anything below a certain intensity. That's because if the light photons only come every second or so onto one of our \"live dots\" on our retina, the signal dies between them, and we don't register it as light. But with telescopes, you can accumulate light from a much larger aperture and for a much longer time, and so telescopes see things that are very, very faint.",
"We have also sent telescopes into space, which reduces some atmospheric disturbance, but that's not really your question. Light is captured over a longer period of time and then recompiled and amplified. Learn a bit about [photographic exposures](_URL_0_) and that should help get some of the specifics down. Basically, your eye can only capture light as it enters the retina, whereas photographs or modern telescopes capture light over several hours, days, or years to view galaxies far, far away.",
"Extremely large, well-made optical surfaces with tiny tolerances.\n\n\nHubble's ~7 foot mirror curvature was originally off by 2 millimeters (something like .08%) and they had to design and install an entire second mirror to correct for the sharpness issues."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overexposed"
],
[]
] |
|
2wteb1
|
how to get to the moon?
|
What is the fuel needed? What calculations need to be made? How does the thrust work in space? How much time does it take on a regular ship?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wteb1/eli5_how_to_get_to_the_moon/
|
{
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"cotxip9",
"coty2q5"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"The Apollo project used a rocket called a Saturn to send a 3 person crew to the moon and back.\n\nThe Saturn had 3 main stages which sent the Command & Service module (the part with the crew) and the Lunar Module (the part that landed on the moon and returned to lunar orbit) to the moon and the Service Module's engine sent the crew home to earth. \n\nThe first stage of the Saturn rocket, the Saturn V, burned kerosene and liquid oxygen. The 2nd and 3rd stage burned liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.\n\nTo fly to the moon a series of orbits had to be calculated - the first an orbit around the earth, the second a partial earth orbit with apogee (furthest point) in the vicinity of the moon, the third a lunar orbit, and the final a partial lunar orbit with an apogee in the vicinity of the earth. (Plus orbits for the Lunar Module to descend and ascend to and from the surface of the moon and rendezvous with the command module). These are all complex curves that change based on the relative gravitational effect exerted on the spaceship by the Earth and the Moon which changes at every point in the trip.\n\nThe planners of the mission also needed to calculate how much food, air and water the crew would need, and how much additional fuel the spacecraft would need for minor course corrections and attitude adjustments. The planners needed to calculate how much electricity the ships would need and for how long. The planners needed to consider the temperature changes affecting the ship (hundreds of degrees when in the sunlight, close to absolute zero when in shade). They had to determine how much radiation the crew might be exposed to and how to minimize that exposure under various conditions and scenarios. They worried about what might happen if the ship were struck by a fast-moving meteorite. They also needed to figure out how the crew could determine with a very high precision where they were at any point of the trip so that their trajectory could be recalculated and adjusted if necessary. And they needed to figure out how the ship could re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and slow down enough so that it could land with parachutes in the ocean.\n\nRockets are an example of Newton's 3rd Law which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The action of expelling rocket exhaust which is made up of gasses which has a mass at a very high speed generates an equal and opposite force on the rocketship, causing it to accelerate in the direction directly opposite where the rocket exhaust is going.\n\nIt took the Apollo crews about 3 days to go from the Earth to the Moon, they spent about 3 days in Lunar orbit, and spent 3 days returning to the Earth.\n\nStarting in 1968 there were 9 Apollo flights to the moon. 6 missions landed on the moon. The last trip and last landing was in 1972.",
"As far as the fuel goes they use either solid rocket fuel or liquid hydrogen fuel. If they use liquid hydrogen then they have separate tanks for liquid oxygen so they can burn in space. \n\nThrust in space works basically like if you throw something backwards then you will be pushed forward because if conservation of momentum. Imagine shooting a machine gun in backwards and being shot forward by the recoil it is the same principal. I think that it took a little over a week for a round trip to the moon and back. Finally, to get to the moon first you have to get into orbit. The hard part of getting into orbit isn't the height but getting going sideways fast enough to miss the earth when you fall. Once you are in orbit you just burn fuel and expand your orbit until intercepts the moon. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
2lmpoq
|
why do tv shows and other forms of media require release forms to be signed by the 'average' person, but are able to broadcast and publish footage of other more 'famous' people without repercussions?
|
Clearly, somebody like the President is subject to public scrutiny, but what allows an actor or a musician or other entertainers to be pursued in their private lives by profit seeking enterprises?
Where exactly is the line drawn? I'd assume that someone in a local theater production or small time band would not be able to be filmed and have their face shown or harassed in the same ways that bigger celebrities are. Similar to this is the fact that a major CEO is fair game, but a local business owner, not so much.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lmpoq/eli5_why_do_tv_shows_and_other_forms_of_media/
|
{
"a_id": [
"clwbkdk"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Privacy laws allow coverage of events of public interest.\n\nWhere Joe Sixpack walks his dog is not of public interest, unless he is has an unusual dog or is doing it in an unusual place.\n\nSadly, where George Clooney walks his dog is considered of public interest, because he is a public figure."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
e3wc46
|
why did older musicians put out so much music?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e3wc46/eli5_why_did_older_musicians_put_out_so_much_music/
|
{
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"text": [
"A lot of bands/artists first albums were written over a number of years before they were signed. Then once they have a record deal, they’re almost rushed to release albums in a certain timescale, rather then allowing years to write 10 decent songs.",
"This (bad songs) is still an issue for every band or group. \n\nHowever, for older groups, an album had to have a certain amount of songs to be considered “complete.” Pre-internet/streaming, a CD with five songs wouldn’t be considered an album even though all the songs would be radio hits. Add another five filler (or B-Side) tracks and you’re up to ten songs, making the album complete. \n\nAnother point to consider is that just because you considered some songs bad music doesn’t mean that everyone else felt the same; some might consider them the better songs on an album, disliking the ones you liked.",
"Music is all subjective, so what you may think is trash another may think is the best thing ever.\n\nThough quite often if a band had a hit song then the record label would attempt to make money by having them write a bunch more songs to create an album to attempt to capitalise on the bands popularity, if a band wrote one catchy song it doesn't immediately mean all of their songs are going to be on the same level."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
9b336m
|
why is it so hard for college graduates, even for those that pick rising demands in their degree, to find employment?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b336m/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_for_college_graduates_even/
|
{
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2,
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"text": [
"I guess it depends on your field. I work in health care and we can't find enough Ots, PTs, Nurses or Social Workers for the workload we have. Everyone is hired right out of school.",
"It’s not hard for all of them, as another user mentioned healthcare is very in demand. We can’t find enough electrical or materials engineers. If you just think you’re in a high demand field and don’t research beforehand you’re bound to be disappointed.",
"Plenty of jobs for engineers too. I guess the “rising demand” predictions were a little off"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
41dytm
|
why is youtube's video platform so consistently reliable and high quality, but basically every other online video platform sucks?
|
When I go to watch a video on youtube it pretty much always loads relatively quickly (minus the ads), the videos are high quality, play smoothly and I can move forward or backwards easily. Even when YouTube videos are embedded on another site, the same is true.
The exact opposite is true of almost all other video that is embedded from a host other than YouTube. Particularly news websites with videos ALWAYS lag, the pages take forever to load, the video is often low quality or pixelated, and trying to move forward or back within the video nearly always messes it up. I basically always avoid clicking links with videos.
Why has YouTube managed to do video hosting so well, why other sites seem so helplessly behind?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41dytm/eli5_why_is_youtubes_video_platform_so/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cz1khyd",
"cz1uh9e"
],
"score": [
26,
5
],
"text": [
"You need a lot of servers and a huge Internet connection to send thousands/millions/billions of videos to thousands/millions of people simultaneously. Thankfully Google, who owns YouTube, has both.",
"have you ever used vimeo? the streaming quailty is roughly the same but the video quality is often better"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
6kn5t7
|
in the 1800's when the bison population was decimated, what were their hides used for and why haven't they survived?
|
We have plenty of cow hide leather from that era (old saddles, belts, and things), but with over 20 million bison butchered, surely there ought to be a huge amount of surviving items crafted from them.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kn5t7/eli5_in_the_1800s_when_the_bison_population_was/
|
{
"a_id": [
"djnfudh"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Some where used as rugs, some as coats, and some simply burnt. Museums house a few things from that time made of bison hide. \n\nThe bison were slaughtered because the \"settlers\" wanted to starve the natives. They were not killed to get meat or furs. They were killed to be wasted, killed so that natives could not get the meat.\n\ni did see a bison coat for sale at auction about 5 years ago, but I have no idea how old that coat is."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2z8gej
|
how can "eyewitnesses" routinely lie in a trial and not be punished?
|
For an example here is a moment from near the end of the Ferguson trial. "Eyewitness": "I saw the cop walk up to the poor innocent man pleading for his life and was executed". Judge: "Your statement does not agree with what the Autopsy has found, would you like to change it". "Eyewitness": "Then they did mot see what I saw". All political opinions aside there was obviously some B.S. thrown around. (Just for background they were from a different state, just taking a guess, probably not an actual eyewitnesses). All political opinions aside about that particular situation, why are people who do that not punished?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z8gej/eli5_how_can_eyewitnesses_routinely_lie_in_a/
|
{
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"cpgknbo",
"cpgkxzz",
"cpgnshk",
"cpgq1xf"
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4,
2,
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"text": [
"Eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable, but this is not necessarily because the witnesses are lying, per se. Humans just aren't as good at remembering details of specific events as they think they are. \n\nSo the witness testimony might not conform to the actual events, but the witness is still doing his best to recall the event as best he can. \n\nUnfortunately, the gaps left by memory failure are usually filled by prejudice and suggestion, which makes eyewitness testimony a dangerous thing in courts and all but useless in scientific investigation.",
"Ignoring the example you used.\n\nEyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. In order to punish someone for perjury, you have to prove that they're willingly lying as opposed to having a really bad memory. It's almost impossible to prove that's the case, so it's not worth it.\n\nAlso, if we started jailing witnesses for giving testimony that doesn't match the facts, who in their right mind is going to come forward as a witness? If your own bad memory could land you in jail, would you ever voluntarily testify?",
"IANAL but in UK that would be perjury (lying in court/under oath) or attempting to pervert the course of justice. Both of which are serious crimes. I would expect that would be the same in USA. \nThere complications, of course: to prosecute they would need to be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the person was deliberately trying to deceive the court. I don't know the details of this case but false memories and misinterpreted autopsies are possible. \nAlso, since this case is so political, there would end up being a shitstorm if they did prosecute. And it may be considered not to be in the public interest or not worth the bother.",
"To generally answer your question, tribunals at every level in the U.S. don't punish contempt/perjury like they should. There are probably a lot of social decay reasons which contribute to the cause. \n\nIn your example though, that isn't perjury. Memory plays tricks on us sometimes. Sometimes our confirmation bias is stronger than it should be. This means that people will have an idea in their head and misremember or misinterpret things to support their idea. Usually this is unintentional. Even though testimony is inconsistent or flawed, it doesn't mean the person intended to lie under oath. \n\nIf you ever sit in on courtroom testimony by police officers, you'll notice that many of them will read from a notebook. There isn't anything wrong with a witness refreshing their memory. This is actually encouraged, as notes taken at the time of the incident will make it more likely that the testimony (often months or years from the event) is accurate. However, regular-ass joes don't usually take notes after they witness something. This is one of the reasons why police testimony is sometimes given a tiny bit more weight in a proceeding. The cops are taking active measures to counter their memory flaws, whereas most witnesses are not.",
"Lawyer here. Witnesses don't get in trouble because it is incredibly difficult to prove that a person perjured themselves on the stand. You have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that witnesses knowingly lied on the stand. Obviously you're going to have a very difficult time establishing that the witness didn't just see things differently or not remember clearly.\n\nTelevision spreads the myth that eyewitnesses are highly reliable. But in fact that's not the case. The human brain is notoriously bad at keeping memories clear and accurate. While the mechanism for this is way too complicated to go into on a reddit comment, buzzfeed actually had an interesting [article](_URL_0_) semi-recently. \n\nAs far as your exact example I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. There wasn't a \"trial\" in the ferguson case (unless something's changed recently), there was a Grand Jury presentation, but those do not have judges present. Are you thinking the prosecutor? Either way it is highly inappropriate for a judge to encourage, in a adversarial proceeding, that a person modify their testimony. A prosecutor can \"cross-examine\" a witness on the stand, but that is pretty shady for a Grand Jury proceeding: during a Grand Jury the prosecutor is the only lawyer present, there is no judge, no defense attorney, and no defendant, so a prosecutor really shouldn't be crossing a witness, they should be presenting the evidence with *very* minimal input."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-memory"
]
] |
|
e8tjcl
|
what at its most basic level is “hot” and “cold” and how does it change/move?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e8tjcl/eli5_what_at_its_most_basic_level_is_hot_and_cold/
|
{
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"text": [
"First, \"cold\" doesn't exist. It's just \"less heat\".\n\nHeat is energy being transferred. This kind of energy can move in three ways; radiation (like the sun), conduction (like your stovetop), and convection (like boiling water).",
"At the most basic level, temperature is the kinetic energy (motion) of the molecule comprising what is being measured. Hot objects have molecules that are vibrating more than cold objects.\n\nIt changes by adding energy, or allowing energy to dissipate.",
"Heat, in physics, has to do with the amount of kinetic energy in a volume. The more energy packed into a small space the hotter it is. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion so it might seem strange to use it when talking about a stationary object. In fact the particles of an unmoving object can have a great deal of kineatic energy, but thr bonds that hold the material together pull back on the particles causing them to vibrate. \n\nWe say that a burning match is hot because the tip contains much more kinetic energy than most things that size. An ice cube is cold because it contains less energy than most things that size\n\nImportantly this is not the only useful way to think about hot and cold. The physical sensation of hot and cold doesn't work this way. Rather the sensation is based on the rate at which energy enters or leaves our skin, not the absolute amount of energy in the things we touch. This is why warm or cool water will feel mild if you stay in it for a while. Your skin gets closer to the temperature of the water and so energy ceases to move quickly from skin to water or from water to skin.\n\nReturning to the physics objects gain and lose heat in two ways, radiation and conduction. \n\nRadiation occurs when an object emits energy as photons, cooling itself down and heating up whatever those photons strike. Because all objects lose energy rhis way it is sometimes said that there is no such thing as cold in physics, only hot and less hot.\n\nConduction occurs when objects are touching and is generally much faster than radiation. The particles, which recall vibrate around, bump into each other. On average the particles in the hot object will hit harder than the particles in the cold object. As a result the cold object gains energy while the hot one loses it.\n\nYou may also hear about convection. This is simply when a hot material (like water or air) is able to flow. Convention causes a material to conduct energy away more quickly as new cold parts of it move constantly into place."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3hyw4g
|
why does usa have to protect israel? (heard in a lot of speeches especially presidential) hasn't israel got its own armed forces?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hyw4g/eli5_why_does_usa_have_to_protect_israel_heard_in/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cubtjr4"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"Don't forget the strength of the Israeli lobby and the fact that many U.S. politicians are Jewish."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2gp7cy
|
how there are traces of stars in humans
|
I don't know if it's true or baloney, but it passed in conversation the other day and I need to know the truth. Please, I need your help!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2gp7cy/eli5_how_there_are_traces_of_stars_in_humans/
|
{
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"ckl8dfx",
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2
],
"text": [
"After the big bang, the only matter that existed was hydrogen, with a small amount of helium and lithium. There were no other atoms. No carbon, no oxygen, no gold or silver or copper, no potassium or sodium, etc.\n\nWhen the hydrogen condensed into stars, it began fusing into heavier elements. And when those stars went supernova, even heavier elements were formed, and they were all scattered back out into the universe to later collapse back into more stars and planets.\n\nSo every atom in your body that isn't hydrogen was once part of a star, and was expelled in a supernova.",
"The universe is made primarily of hydrogen. Stars composed of hydrogen operate by fusing the hydrogen into the heavier elements, starting with helium. That works, as time goes by, up to about iron. At that point a star just doesn't have the force and heat necessary to convert elements any further. Stars of a certain size end up exploding in super novas. That explosion has the force and heat necessary to create elements heavier than iron.\n\nSo in actuality we are not made of stars since the star was dead by the time the higher elements were created. We are made of exploded star guts."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
afw4rj
|
how did old video games fit into such small spaces on cartridges?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afw4rj/eli5_how_did_old_video_games_fit_into_such_small/
|
{
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"text": [
"It's all about detail of the game and what's needed to be stored. Super Mario only had like 5 colors or something rediculous and Ocarina of time looks like garbage compared to modern games. The more detail you give a character and environment, the more it takes to process those details and storage to house them. Link in OOT was little more than a few very noticeable polygons as was the entire world. Super Mario was literally stacked pixels with no rounded corners. Those things are easy to store and render, hence the low storage requirements and small processors. ",
"Majority of the game's code were shared among all games (libraries etc...) which was directly in the console. The cartridge contained just a small piece of code for that very game",
"I recently found a cool video on YouTube that explained some tricks that they could use. Will post again if I can find it. But basically, in Super Mario for example, notice how the bushes and the clouds have the same form and differ only in color. So that's one sprite saved. Then, look at goombas. They're symmetrical. So you only need to store half of their sprite and then you can mirror the pixel to get a full Goomba. Similar techniques can be applied for all sorts of objects and characters. Even for whole levels. Imagine the super Mario levels are actually (invisibly) divided into blocks, you could make the level symmetrical and bam, you only need to store half the level. You can continue to divide further and reuse e.g. only a quarter of the level etc. People used a ton of tricks to save storage and reuse resources. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
64tj64
|
noticing the curvature of the earth
|
At what hight or distinct apart would 2 poles need to be for there to be a notucable difference in the distance from the 2 at the base and at the tip? Thanks for any help I thought about this question while driving and for the life of me could not even begin to know how to answer it.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64tj64/eli5_noticing_the_curvature_of_the_earth/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dg50vr3"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"If two poles of height _h_ are a distance _d_ apart at the base, they're distance (1+_h_/_r_)_d_ apart at the tips. _r_ is Earth's mean radius of 6371 km or 3959 miles. You wouldn't notice much of a difference with this method because even 1% extra distance requires 64 km poles."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
5vnyuf
|
why is it that we compare some new planets we discover as earth sized? is there a significance to earth's size?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vnyuf/eli5_why_is_it_that_we_compare_some_new_planets/
|
{
"a_id": [
"de3icrb",
"de3ie62"
],
"score": [
2,
5
],
"text": [
"Size is believed to be generally indicative of things like gravitational pull and potential to have a magnetic field. These factors into things like whether the planet will be geologically active, and whether it will have a thick or thin atmosphere, and how resistant it will be too radiation. All of these things are factors in the likelihood of having earth like life.\n\nMars, for instance, is much smaller then earth, and has a much thinner atmosphere as a result.",
"It's generally believed that for a planet to be conducive to life it would have to be roughly Earth-sized. If a planet is too small, it won't have enough mass to retain an atmosphere. Very large planets tend to be gas giants, which are not believed to be habitable.\n\nAlso mentioning that planets are Earth-sized makes a snappy headline because everyone knows how big the Earth is."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
49alls
|
why does it matter that the speaker in advertisements for attorneys/law firms is paid but not part of the firm?
|
They're saying what the firm wants regardless, so why does it matter?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49alls/eli5_why_does_it_matter_that_the_speaker_in/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d0qc3s3",
"d0qcovi"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text": [
"The speaker is typically either playing a lawyer and talking about their awesome services, or playing a client and talking about their awesome services. \n\nEither way, you're either pretending to be a lawyer, or pretending to be a satisfied customer. If anyone is an expert on not getting sued for false advertising, it would be a lawyer. ",
"In many jurisdictions it is problematic for lawyers to engage in advertising. It actually used to be prohibited and considered to be an ethical breach. While it is permissible today (though often still regulated in varying degrees of strictness), it is possible that actors are used in order to create more distance between the advertisement and the lawyer in order to protect them.\n\nAdditionally, they have to be up front about it because to not do so may be interpreted as dishonesty, which, aside from any advertising rules which usually come down hard on dishonesty of any sort, is ethically problematic (especially if the person isn't a lawyer and is just an actor)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
3jrbp6
|
why did old rc cars only either go straight forward, or drive circles in reverse?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jrbp6/eli5_why_did_old_rc_cars_only_either_go_straight/
|
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"you mean 80's RC? \n\nbecause cheap multichannel radio systems and servo's didn't exist. ",
"The remote had a single channel, on/off control. The car drove forward in a (relatively) straight line until you pressed the button on the remote which would cause the car motor to reverse. Underneath the car chassis was a wheel on a sort of cam which would rotate into place when the car was backing-up and cause it to go into a turn while in reverse. When the car was facing the direction desired the button on the remote was released. The car motor would return to forward motion which would rotate the wheel underneath back into place and the car would again proceed in a (relatively) straight forwad path. It was a cheap way to make an rc car you could kinda steer. Hope this helps."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2x4pf0
|
why can i barely hear a siren when i'm driving and it's right behind me but they always wake me up in the middle of the night from far away?
|
Pretty sure police and EMT's just like waking me up.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x4pf0/eli5why_can_i_barely_hear_a_siren_when_im_driving/
|
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"text": [
"Probably because in your car there's engine noise, road noise, and music, while at night it's quiet. Could that be it?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1quw6t
|
what makes the number e so special and why is it used as the base of the natural logarithm?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1quw6t/eli5_what_makes_the_number_e_so_special_and_why/
|
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"e is so special because the y coordinate of the function y=e^x at a certain point is also the slope at that point. So the slope at x=3 will be e^3. This property of e and the natural log are very useful when solving problems in calculus involving exponents and such.",
"The way I heard it, this logarithm base is \"natural\" because it appears in the derivatives of every exponential or logarithmic function. With an arbitrary base b it turns out that the derivative of b^x is b^x \\* log*_e_*(b), and the derivative of log*_b_*(x) is 1 / (x \\* log*_e_*(b)) Because the logarithm of the base is always 1, e is the unique choice of base that simplifies these derivatives to e^x and 1/x. ",
"In addition to other things already, it is the value of (1 + 1/n)^n as n approaches infinity, and has some really interesting properties. For example, if you look at the taylor expansion of e^ix, you'll see that this is actually equal to cos x + isinx. This also means that e^(i*pi) = -1. That always blew my mind.\n\nEDIT: Sorry I didn't explain taylor expansions (there are some good explanations below), but I felt like the limit was self explanatory. I guess I didn't really try and simplify because there were already some other answers about e, but none of them mentioned the limit that defines it. Also e^ipi + 1 was more like a fun fact.",
"Amateur mathematician speaking:\n\nI think the reason it's the natural base of logarithms is because if you take 1 and add, 1/x and then raise that to the xth power you get closer and closer approximations of e as x increases towards infinity.\nFor example:\n1.1^10 = 2.59\n1.01^100 = 2.704\n1.001^1000 = 2.7169\n1.0001^10000 = 2.71815\nand for fun to show it's not just a powers/inverses 10 thing....\n(1 + 1/8675309)^8675309 = 2.718281\nand so on.\n\nSo e can be thought of (1 + 1/∞)^∞. So it's the smallest possible number greater than one raised to the infinite power. \n\nAgain working from the formula (1 + 1/X), we'll choose X = 1000. So if you have the natural log of a number, for example ln(10) = 2.302585 and multiply it by your X (here 1000), you get 2302. What you find out is that 1.001^2302 is very nearly 10. If you chose 42, ln(42) = 3.737670, then 1.001^3737.60 is very nearly 42. Or generally, (1 + (1/x))^(ln(Y)*x) approaches Y as x increases towards infinity. In any case, the end result is that if you were to make a logarithm table by hand starting with a number like 1.0001 and continually exponentiating, what wind up with is essentially a inverse logorithm table of base e.\n\nEdit: formatting",
"I believe e was originally discovered through calculations of continually compounded interest.\n\nExample: if you have a bank account that yields 10% interest, compounded annually, then if you invest $1000, after one year you'll have $1100. After another you'll have $1210. Another: $1331.\n\nNow let's say it's compounded semi-annually (twice a year)\n\nWe have after one year: $1102.5. After two years: $1215.51. After three: $1340.10\n\nThe reason compounding it as 5% every 6 months earns more than 10% every 12 months is because the function a^n grows faster than the polynomial function n^a, for constant a and linearly increasing n.\n\nWe make even more money if we compound every 3 months instead of every 6. And even more if we compound monthly. Weekly, daily, hourly, minutely, secondly, etc.\n\nWhat if we take it to the ultimate limit of compounding *continuously* every infinity-th of time?\n\nThen we get e^kt, where k is the interest rate, and t is the elapsed time.\n\nAnother way of saying this is that e = the limit as n approaches infinity of (1+1/n)^n\n\nA consequence of this is that the derivative (slope) of the function e^x is, itself, e^x. This is cool.\n\nI could go on for several hours about e. I'll just leave you with this:\n\ne^(i*pi) + 1 = 0\n\n_URL_0_",
"You're asking the wrong question. It's not that we came up with some number 'e' to satisfy all the properties that it has today, and decided to use it as the base for natural logarithms and other things. It's the other way around, we discovered that a lot of really fancy things could be done if you happened to use some specific number, and we called that number 'e'.\n\nMath is discovered as much as it is created.",
"Exponential expressions are used in many situations, like compounding interest in banks or figuring out how populations increase.\n\nIt was discovered that as anything grows exponentially in a continuous manner, like a large population increasing, the rate it increases converges towards a specific number that will depend upon e. In other words, e is used to calculate continuous growth.\n\nFor example, if a population of 1000 is growing continuously at 6%, you can calculate the population at any later time, t, with the following: 1000*e^(.o6t)\n\nFurther, the growth rate determined by e also has the useful property that it is equal to its own change of growth rate (the derivative of e^x is itself). The speed the function increases is the same as the function.\n\ne is similar to pi in that it is an irrational number that was discovered because it has practical applications.",
"There's some exetremely not-ELI5 answers in this thread. I dunno if it's possible to really put it *simply*, but here is the explanation that gave me an intuitive grasp of the number e\n\n_URL_0_",
"This is two questions. The response is pretty long but the history is complicated, the definitions have changed and their intersection did not occur until later.\n\nLet's first talk about e itself. \n\nJacob Bernoulli discovered it after asking, essentially, how much money you would get if you continuously compounded 100% interest on $1.00 of principal. The answer is $2.71828.... How do we arrive at this number? First consider how one compounds interest. If you do it annually you multiply your principal by (1+1): the first 1 is to keep the principal and the second 1 = 100% interest--e.g. $1(1 + 1) = $2. If you do it twice in a year then at 6 months it is $1(1+0.5)=$1.50. At the end of the year you compound the $1.50 so you get $1.5 (1+0.5) = 2.25. Another way of writing this is $1(1+1/2)^2 where 2 = number of times you compound. Compounding monthly gives $1(1+1/12)^12 = 2.61. Compounding daily gives $1(1+1/365)^365. If you take the limit to infinity you get 2.718.... At this point e had nothing to do with exponential functions or logarithms.\n\nLogarithms were originally used as a way of turning a problem of multiplying/dividing large numbers into a problem of adding/subtracting numbers. Before this trig was used in a similar manner. The idea was that 2 Cos(A)Cos(B)=Cos(A+B) + Cos(A-B). So if you wanted to multiply large numbers x and y you would set x = Cos(A) and y = Cos(B). From here you would find the values for A and B in a table, add/subtract the two numbers, find their cosines and then you could get the product xy.\n\nThis seems like a nightmarish way of multiplying two numbers but you had tons of trigonometric tables and if you were doing astronomy or anything involving large numbers this seems like a reasonable approach versus multiplying things out by hand.\n\nBut this proves somewhat limited--e.g. it was good at multiplying numbers but not so much at taking roots, etc. So John Napier invented a system he called logarithms (from logos = ratio, arithmes = arithmetic). I'm not entirely sure of the rationale behind the name. Possibly it meant a way of doing division (ratio arithmetic?). His definition of logarithms is not the modern one and it is quite weird. A link is at the bottom. Suffice to say that it roughly follows the modern rules of log(ab) = log(a) + log(b) and n*log(a) = log(a^n). Napier spent roughly 20 years creating tables of his \"logarithms\" so it could gain acceptance.\n\nBut consider the benefits. Suppose you want to calculate the square root of a large number x. You could take the log of x and divide it by 2: e.g you get 1/2 log(x). If you look in the table for some y such that log(y) = 1/2 log(x) the you've found the square root. A similar logic works for multiplication. So it was quite handy.\n\nThe concept of the natural logarithm (base e) came before calculus. Nicholas Mercator discovered the series ln(1+x) = x - 1/2 x^2 + 1/3 x^3 - ..., which presumably simplified the creation of tables. I don't know how he discovered that without calculus or why he called it natural. But the \"naturalness\" of natural logs are best appreciated in calculus. It can be defined by a simple integral, the derivative is simpler than other logs, its Taylor series is simpler, etc.\n\nLogarithms have a complicated and unintuitive history, which is probably why the history isn't taught in school. In a real analysis class logarithms are defined simply as the inverse function of the exponential function. I like this definition but sheds no light on why logarithms were important in the first place.\n\ntl;dr: e originally came from a question on compound interest. Logarithms were a tool used to multiply/divide/take roots. Compared to other logs, natural logs behave well in calculus.\n\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_",
"When you think of special numbers, the two that often come to mind are 0 and 1. They are special because addition and multiplication are important to us. How are these ideas connected you ask? Because 0 = 0 + 0 and 1 = 1 * 1. That's pretty cool!\n\n(For math aficionados, 0 and 1 are fixed points of addition and multiplication on Z, respectively, when the operations are viewed as a group action.)\n\nSo what does e have to do with this? Well, e really isn't as important as the function e^x and the connection that this function has with another mathematical operation: the derivative. You see, the derivative of e^x is e^x, and this is the ONLY function (with a leading coefficient equal to 1) for which this is true!\n\n(Likewise, e^x is a fixed point of the operation of differentiation on C-infinity.)\n\nYou see, the function e^x is special for the same kind of reason that 0 and 1 are special."
]
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[] |
[] |
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[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to-exponential-functions-e/"
],
[
"http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NapierianLogarithm.html",
"http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/convergence/logarithms-the-early-history-of-a-familiar-function-introduction"
],
[]
] |
||
to5fm
|
what is so great about anal sex?
|
Edit: Thanks all you guys (and girls?) for the great explanations, I have truly learned a lot today!
Edit 2: Also, learned that I should never trust on porn being realistic! Thanks, you guys!!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/to5fm/what_is_so_great_about_anal_sex/
|
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"Remember the time you got to stay up way past your bedtime? And how much fun you had? It wasn't fun because you were doing anything differently than you would have done it earlier in the day, or because things are more interesting after 9pm. It was fun because you were doing something you weren't supposed to be doing. Your parents always tell you you need to be in bed by 9, so when you get to stay up till 10, or 11, it's fun because you're breaking the rules. You're doing something 'naughty', even though your mommy and daddy said you could.\n\nAnal sex is sort of the same. It's not something that people talk about, and it is seen as being 'naughty.' Some people think it's gross, like picking your nose and then eating your boogers. We call things like this 'taboo' (that's a funny sounding word, isn't it?). A taboo is something that people don't talk about or do in public. It is taboo to tell your teacher she's fat, even if she is, because it might hurt her feelings. It's taboo to put chocolate sauce all over your pasta at dinner, even if you think it might taste good, because others think it is gross. \n\nAnal sex is taboo because a lot of people think of it as being dirty, and morally wrong. Morals are really complicated, and even though they're very important to a lot of people they can sometimes be very silly - like how your grandmother doesn't think its ok to make fart jokes even though you've seen grandpa laughing when you make one.\n\nSo even though anal sex is taboo, and against some peoples morals, it can be a lot of fun! Sometimes things are seen as being 'bad' or 'wrong' even though they're not really, because some people aren't very fun. \n\n**Reading back over my answer, I have some serious heeby-jeebies about my ability to explain the joys of the love that dares not speak its name to a five year old. Excuse me while I go vomit.**\n",
"what about the obvious answer, it feels good. I've known many women who enjoy it",
"I think bsteeper has a point there, anal sex normally being a taboo-topic makes it more interesting to many people than it is. But I think it's not the only thing. Since you didn't ask, what was so great about sex, I assume you have somewhat an idea of sexual pleasure and orgasms. Some people reach an orgasm better that way, some another way, and so there are people, to whom it's easier to orgasm, stimulated by anal sex than by other kinds of sex.",
"I heard a friend (female) of mine describe it as \"when you take a really big shit and it feels kinda good.\" Not my thing though.",
"\n* There is a taboo, forbidden fruit thrill\n* It is a next step in the seduction process, another conquest to make\n* It feels different, often tighter, which increases sensation\n* There is a dense nerve cluster to stimulate in the anus\n* For men, anal penetration can directly stimulate the prostate ",
"Well, though I do agree with [bsteeper](_URL_0_), there are differences to anal sex that *some* people like. \n\nFrom the man's side (assuming hetero sex, man doing the pushing) the anal sphincter is usually much tighter than the outer vaginal muscle (no idea what the name is). That's *usually* and it's also the only major muscle involved, which is why I personally prefer to put it in the vag.\n\nFrom the woman's point of view you have a changed angle that can stimulate the large mass of the clitoris which is buried (the little button on the outside is just the tip of the iceberg). The unique arrangement of everyone's bodies means that some women love anal sex, some to the extent that they abandon vaginal sex. I'd say about a third of women I've had anal sex with prefer it to vaginal sex, though another third find it horrifyingly painful.\n\nAlso, anal sex gets no one pregnant and feels good, this can be a damned big bonus. If you're talking about man on man sex, stimulation of the prostate is supposed to be amazing. I haven't tried it, but I know hetero couples that buy a strapon for the woman just because the man likes it so much. Good luck with those five y/o nightmares imagining mommy pounding daddy's browneye with a glint in her eye.\n\nFinally, the socially taboo nature means that it's a submission move. If you're into that sort of thing, it's a great way to dominate someone (male or female).",
"Neither me nor my boyfriend have a vagina.",
"I don't think anyone's yet pointed out from a homosexual PoV..\nAnd I'm not sure if OP wants that view either, but we might as well keep things balanced!\n\nIn a male's anus, there is the prostate, a little walnut sized gland, that when pressed feels very good. There are also dozens of nerve endings, hundreds more times than the head of the penis, so is very sensitive. So you imagine anything going up there, and it's bound to feel okay!!",
"I think the saying goes \"butt sex is wild and it don't cause no child!\" From the giver side, condoms and pulling out are much less fun. My girlfriend got a pain/pleasure thing out of it and from my point it view it was like she was having an orgasm the entire time. Between squeezing the sheets, flexing muscles, and raising the volume I was much more turned on. ",
"It is just plain fun to do. Some people like it, some don't, and some others dont even want to try it because of whatever reason or prejudice they have. \n\nBut hey, so is drinking wine. ",
"The day my lady had an orgasm from anal was the single most happiest day of my life.",
"_URL_0_\nhere's your answer in the form of a nice song",
"Because then the girl can squeeze her butt cheeks on the sides of your wiener",
"I just want to add to the comments on the it-feels-great aspect.\n\nSome people (me!) (btw, i'm male) like it a lot and have the good fortune to meet other people (my former gf!) who also like it a lot and then it is *major* fun. The butthole has lots of nerves. When you put something in the butt of a person who likes having something in there, and they get all aroused and excited and happy, and it's a person you like, then it's a wonderful big sexy turn-on to see them so turned on.\n\nI like putting something in my partner's butt and I like when they put something in mine. Both ways it's zesty sexy fun. Whew, now I'm all hot and bothered. Your mileage, of course, may vary. And some people don't like it; if that's you or your partner, then of course don't do it. PS Use lots of lube!"
]
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1vlr31
|
if we lived in a world that loved and encouraged being heavier or fat; would bulimia and anorexia exist?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vlr31/eli5_if_we_lived_in_a_world_that_loved_and/
|
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"If you are living in the EU or the US, you are living in a world where eating far in excess of your dietary needs is encouraged by advertising. Far more people are obese than underweight or anorexic. So yes, buliminia and anorexia would exist.",
"I think it would be less of a problem because beauty standards would not encourage new people to aim to be skinny and become anorexic.\n\nWomen were encouraged to be large and voluptuous in the 17- and 1800s, and still 'curvy' in the 1950s, see _URL_0_\n\nAlthough to be fair that was less feasible when there was rationing after the war. The thinking used to be that if you were rich you could afford to be fat, and so it was attractive; also bigger women were thought to be 'good stock' for having kids. And I guess men may always have apprieciated bigger boobs!\n\nWhereas for men I think the ideal has always been to be in shape, again unless you're someone who doesnt have to work like a king or something in which case fatness = power.",
"With a lot of eating disorders, attractiveness isn't necessarily the goal - I've known A LOT of anorexics and bulimics and with all of those that I've known, it was more of an internal competition within themselves. That being said, I think you'd still see those same people drawn to eating disorders - the only difference is some (not all) of them would instead binge eat to gain as much weight as possible. But yes, you'd still see people starving themselves. After all, nobody thinks a several malnourished woman looks healthy or sexy, yet those people will starve themselves to death, all in the name of what they believe is perfection.",
"The answer is that they wouldn't exist to the extent that they exist today and they wouldn't exist for the purpose that they exist today. Modern-day bulimia and anorexia basically date to the 1970s.\n\n > Though anorexia nervosa was rare until the second half of the 20th century, it certainly existed beforehand. The first descriptions of anorexia nervosa in the Western world date from the 12th and 13th centuries, most famously Saint Catherine of Siena (1), who denied herself food as part of a spiritual denial of self. By the sixteenth century, ascetics were considered witches and burned at the stake. There are several other clinical descriptions of \"wasting disease\" in the 17th-19th century, and in the early 20th century, anorexia was considered an endocrine disorder and treated with pituitary hormones.\n\n > In 1973, Hilde Bruch published a book with a number of case studies, called Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, And The Person Within. As the disorder reached public awareness in the 1970s, cases increased, spreading beyond the upper class. \n\n > Bulimia (binging and then purging via exercise, vomiting, or laxatives) is first reliably described among some of the wealthy in the Middle Ages, who would vomit during meals so they could consume more (2). Apparently this behavior did not happen in ancient Rome despite a common conception otherwise (3). The first clinical paper on bulimia was published in 1979—Bulimia nervosa, an ominous variant of anorexia nervosa.\n\n > The cases cases of anorexia and bulimia escalated in the 1970s and 1980s, and though some will say they peaked in that time, the national survey data suggests that bulimia, especially, continues to escalate. While most scholars will point to cultural pressures for thinness, increasing depression and obsessive compulsive behavior, and increased dieting behaviors as precipitants for eating disorders, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the 1970s and 80s is when the rates of obesity in the United States began to increase at an unprecedented rate, and low fat eating began its popular progression through the mainstream.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Back when famine was common, being fat was \"sexy.\" Now that food is plentiful, being fat is easy, so it's less sexy."
]
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],
[],
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"http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201112/history-eating-disorders"
],
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] |
||
4ee566
|
why are dogs more alarmed by someone knocking on a door/ringing a doorbell than they are by other sudden loud noises?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ee566/eli5_why_are_dogs_more_alarmed_by_someone/
|
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"They might have been conditioned to over-react to the sound of the door because of their owners reaction to it. This can be made even worse if the owner inadvertently hypes the dog up when the door bell rings by reacting to the dog's reaction. Anticipating a bad reaction (jumping, barking, bolting, biting) can actually be worse than calmly observing the situation before hand, correcting bad behaviour, and then proceeding to the door. There are plenty of tips and tricks to get a better behaved pooch when it comes to the door...but in essence what we are dealing with is *classical conditioning*. The dog is being conditioned over time to react in a certain way to a certain stimulus, in this case the door. That conditioned reaction does not generally translate to other situations, however similar (e.g. bell timer for food going off in the kitchen) because dogs are capable of differentiating between different stimuli within different contexts (e.g. doorbell at front of house, vs. alarm bell for the back door)",
"I think it's because they know that the doorbell means people. They tend to get excited about new people."
]
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|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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||
31v1rr
|
why are there so many failed suicide attempts for each suicide death ?
|
There are [apparently](_URL_0_) 25 unsuccessful suicide attempts for every suicide death.
Why does this happen ?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31v1rr/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_failed_suicide/
|
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"Part of it is ineffective suicide, meaning the method used in the attempt was not sufficiently lethal to actually kill. The majority of failed suicides are persons who are reaching out for help, and either purposefully or subconsciously use a non-lethal method to signal to others that they need help. ",
"Resilience of the human body. It's a pretty sturdy vessel. \n\nLack of anatomical knowledge. Most people get their suicide knowledge from TV, and, here's the thing... TV isn't always right about the best ways of killing yourself. \n\nLastly is commitment. Suicide attempts count the people who take 8 Tylenol and call 911. These people are depressed, need professional help, but don't know how to ask. They don't want to die, but they don't know any other way to seek help, so they \"attempt suicide.\"",
"It's because many people survive suicide attempts, even things like [shotgun blasts to the face](_URL_0_) (NSFW/NSFL). Even more people survive attempted overdoses. You can vomit when you're unconscious and spew out whatever you took, or people can find you and get you medical attention before you expire.\n\n \nAlso, some suicide attempts are only half-hearted attempts where the person doesn't really want to die but they want their family and friends to know how bad they feel. It's a cry for help but technically a suicide attempt.",
"It is mostly because they dont actually want to kill themselves but it is rather a cry for help or need the attention.\n\nIf they really wanted to kill themselves there are 100% sure ways of doing it",
"I work in an emergency room and previously worked on ambulances and have seen a lot of successful and unsuccessful attempts. While I have not studied the subject in an academic sense I can relate some observations from my own experiences. I would say the top three reasons are that most attempts are pleas for help and are not earnest attempts to actually die and secondly people are bad at it in that they do not use effective methods and third modern medicine is at a place where we can save people from many heinous illnesses and injuries. \nAnecdotally I can say I have seen people \"attempt suicide\" by things such as drinking shampoo, taking a handful of Tylenol, cutting their wrists shallow and across the arteries, these are all things which will not kill you and so are a cry for help but are still considered attempts. Anticipating the replies I should say all of the three methods mentioned are potentially lethal but were not in the way they were done. Shampoo I suppose could be lethal if a sufficient quantity were ingested, a Tylenol overdose can certainly be fatal but taking 5 or 6 500 mg Tylenol will not kill you and wrist cutting is probably the most common method of attempt but when cut shallow and across the arteries the injuries will not result in enough bleeding to prove lethal.\nThe earnest unsuccessful attempts I have seen were unsuccessful due to intervention, ineffective execution or happenstance. I have seen a guy shoot himself in the head and survive because he didn't manage to do enough damage, this is usually because the person unintentionally flinches when firing and misses a lethal shot. I have seen people attempt suicide by leaving their car running in the garage and were discovered before the CO poisoning could be fatal. I have seen a guy cut his wrists deep enough to bleed to death but did so in a cold bath which slowed his circulation to a point that he was discovered before he could bleed to death. I have seen a guy try to hang him self and the neck tie he was trying to use broke. The most impressive was a woman who took a potentially lethal overdose of sleeping pills, cut her wrists and jumped from a third story window, the fall didn't kill her and the overdose and slit wrists probably would have killed her had she not jumped and attracted attention. There are more but these are a few examples.\nAgain much of this is anecdotal but I hope it provides some insight. \nTLDR: lots of attempts are not earnest and people are bad at dying.",
"1) Because people don't actually understand what will/won't kill them. The human body is surprisingly resilient and will take a hell of a punishment. A lot of people just mis-judge how many pills they need to take, where they need to cut, how fast the car needs to be going etc. How many times have you seen a story on the news and asked \"How the hell is he alive?\"\n\n2) Because it's surprisingly hard to kill yourself. The instinct to survive is very, very strong - some suicide attempts start as a genuine attempt, but the victim talks themselves out of it or holds back. eg people jumping in front of a train but then scrabbling back out of the way, or taking pills then making themselves throw up. Cutting but not cutting hard enough is another: it's very hard to fight physical pain, even if you're going through incredible emotional trauma. Simply put: people want to live, at least on some lower functioning level.\n\n3) Because not all attempts are genuine. I don't mean they aren't all problems or are \"fake\" - just that the person didn't really intend to die. A cry for help is the most usual reason for this\n\n4) A large proportion of suicide attempts are made while drunk or otherwise under the influence. This, as you'd expect, makes people think less clearly, affecting their ability to perform tasks: this applies to both regular everyday activities, but also to suicide attempts.",
"As someone who tried and failed twice, allow me to shed some light on my situation:\n\nI just wanted to disappear. No big spectacle, not even leaving notes behind. I didn't want to be a news story.\n\nI had given up, but I wasn't desperate to stop any particular pain. I didn't want to shame my friends and family by jumping in front of a bus or splattering the side of a wall with brain matter from a gunshot.\n\nBleeding out didn't work, so the next time I tried a handful of pills. I was sorely disappointed when I woke up two days later.\n\nI imagine that some other people must feel the same. There's a difference between being suicidal and feeling \"I just want to die\", and being desperate enough to decide \"This ends now, no second chances\".",
"I tried to kill myself, but since I am a pussy and did not dare to commit suicide by throwing myself of a building or in front of a train, I tried to overdose on prescription drugs. Changes are higher that people find you and 'save' you when you try to overdose, than when you jump to your death.\n\nSo that is one reason. Being scared of pain and trying to take 'the easy way out'.",
"Females are more likely than males to attempt suicide, but are more likely to attempt via non-lethal methods. Males are more likely to use violent methods and therefore more likely to complete a suicide. Women are more likely to be concerned about someone having to clean up after them.",
"To put it simply, it's not something people have had a lot of practice in."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/Suicide-DataSheet-a.pdf"
] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://i.imgur.com/o1J9i.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1srj7b
|
why do americans oppose publicly funded health care, but enjoy other services: police, fire, roads...
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1srj7b/eli5_why_do_americans_oppose_publicly_funded/
|
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"Because those things are by nature community programs. You can't buy a personal cop or firefighter, and it's generally agreed that roads are important, although there are those who advocate a use tax so that only drivers pay for them.\n\nHealth care is opposed because either because people feel that other people's health isn't their responsibility, they fear the system will break and they won't get the treatment they currently can, or that its not the federal governments responsibility to mandate such a thing/its unconstitutional. \n\nThere are valid arguments for all those things.",
"Americans don't like change. \n\nAlso, it's worth noting that only *some* of us oppose public health care. ",
"There are a number of existing vested interests (HMO's/insurers) which lobby against the introduction of universal healthcare.\n There are also elements which confuse universal healthcare with communism. The US has a lengthy anti communist perspective.Vested interests link communism with universal health care. \n\nInterestingly public schools, universities, the army, post-office and most other government operations are not perceived as socialism/communism. \nIn short, because change is difficult to implement and as such rich folks who stand to lose money from change are able to obfuscate attempts at introduction of universal healthcare, despite its superior health and economic outcomes.",
"Those are seen as necessary functions and responsibilities of government. Providing healthcare, while a nice thing to do, is not the function of government. It's an ideological divide on what the role of government should be. \n\nIt's also important to remember that for every policy people oppose there is usually a group that supports it. Various iedological groups win various different battles so that creates a disconnect and disparity between different ideological policies that are implemented. ",
"Other services like police, fire, etc. are local. Their cities, their towns, their streets. \n\nSometimes people think, \"why should I, living here on a little island north of Seattle and getting health insurance through my job, have *my* earnings taxed for healthcare for someone 3000 miles away in Miami?\"\n\nI'd love to see single-payer, universal healthcare in the United States. But many people oppose it for the same reason that someone in San Diego doesn't mind his taxes paying for his own fire department, but he wouldn't want to have his earnings taxed for a fire department thousands of miles away in Maine.",
"[No to obamacare and socialism](_URL_0_)",
"\"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'\" -Ronald Reagan\nThis quote still resonates strongly with a large portion of the country. That portion of US citizens fears the incompetent US government and don't want it to have its hands anywhere near their health care.\n",
"Health care is neither non-rivalrous or non-excludable. And a public good generally must be both to be considered such. Some American's prefer government only fund public goods.\n\nOther's believe it is fundamentally wrong to take from those who earn money and give it to those who didn't, even if they supposedly need it more. Some believe \"need\" is not a claim on property.",
"I'd like to remind everyone that obamacare is really mandated health insurance, not health care..",
"I'm not an american, but I do live in a socialist country, with \"universal healthcare\". It sucks on a scale you cannot imagine. People get sick and die in state run hospitals. It's gotten to a point that we have a saying here \"you go to the hospital with 1 disease and leave with 3\". All of our socialist healthcare is corrupt from top to bottom. The salaries given by government are low, which has lead to institutionalized corruption. Everyone knows, when you go the doctor, you have to pay him on the side, then the nurse and any other staff that has cared for you. These are not isolated incidents, this is the norm.\nLuckily there are private healthcare companies which are way better, no bribes, just monthly insurance. Here's the kick, the cost of private insurance is at least 2 times lower than of public healthcare. The problem? If you want to have a superior private option, you have to pay for BOTH! You may think this is abuse,by the government and you would be right. It's also illegal, but it's institutionalized, everyone pays.\nYou americans cannot imagine how bad it is to have the government control your healthcare. For the love of god don't let them take away your freedom to choose. It's all down hill from there.",
"Because we think that a private market could do it better, and that we are being coercedminto using a monopoly by an illetimate entity that only holds it's power at the barrel of a gun."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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[],
[],
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"http://i.imgur.com/Qb1lpwb.jpg"
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||
2mldab
|
how can people go to the er for non-emergency symptoms and not get stuck with a huge bill?
|
This question stems from an r/askreddit the other day asking ER workers what was the most ridiculous thing they've seen someone come into the ER for. Some of the answers were mind-boggling! How do people who go the ER with a ludicrous "illness or injury" not get stuck with a giant bill!?! There are always posts from people who are posting their gigantic ER bills for actual claims--so how do the other people not get stuck with those same ridiculous charges?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mldab/eli5_how_can_people_go_to_the_er_for_nonemergency/
|
{
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2
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"text": [
"The bill is in proportion to the treatment offered, with a sizeable overhead. Presumably, they do get the sizeable bill, but either: 1) pay it, 2) have insurance that pays for it, or 2) don't pay it. Medical bills are essentially unenforceable. Since the debt is unsecured, and courts don't like to dissuade people from seeking treatments (and it most likely wouldn't be cost effective for hospitals to sue), hospital bills are essentially unenforceable. They may effect your credit, but since they're largely unenforceable... Unpaid medical bills don't effect credit as much as non-medical bills."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
716h7r
|
why humans, and some animals, stretch their limbs when they are tired.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/716h7r/eli5_why_humans_and_some_animals_stretch_their/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dn8xidx"
],
"score": [
25
],
"text": [
"When you use your muscles they break down in a way. This process creates a product that tends to sit around your muscles. When you stretch you move your muscles in a way that promotes the byproduct of your muscles breaking down to move away from your muscles. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
6e6diy
|
why did n64 graphics look so good to me as a kid, but now they look terrible?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6e6diy/eli5_why_did_n64_graphics_look_so_good_to_me_as_a/
|
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"text": [
"because when you were a kid, its graphic was actually quite good, compared to... quite everything else.\n\nnow you are used to much more sophisticated graphic effects, and it seems like shit.\n\n\nit's normal",
"Because all you had to compare to was even crappier graphics on older consoles.\n\nNow that you've seen what newer consoles are capable of it makes the N64 graphics seem bad.",
"It's probably worth mentioning that when you're seeing 'state of the art' graphics, your imagination is still doing some of the leg work. \n\nMove forwards a few years, games (and console power) move on and developers can add more details, which you then become accustom to.\n\nGo back and those 'details' you might have assumed were there are all missing. Things like accurate shadows, high res textures, realistic water effects etc. Little details like that.\n\nHave a skip through the Call of Duty series - the engine 'feels' pretty much the same from start to the latest, but the increase in detail is incredible.\n\nAlso bear in mind that you'd have been playing Super Mario 64 on a smaller, lower res screen which masks the shortcomings of the consoles of the day. \n\nThink of the Impressionist painting movement - low res but still leaves the 'impression' of the chosen subject.\n\n(and they say games can't be 'art'!)\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
41gwh4
|
why do we say that the republicans shut down the government?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41gwh4/eli5_why_do_we_say_that_the_republicans_shut_down/
|
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"The Republicans in Congress refused to pass any budget that contained funding for Obamacare. This was after trying dozens of times to repeal the Affordable Care Act.\r\rThey knew they couldn't get what they wanted and had a tantrum. It's entirely on them.",
"If you take a bunch of hostages and say you won't give them up unless you're given a trillion dollars and made King of Pennsylvania, we don't blame the cops for not giving in. The hostage takers are to blame.",
"Every year, Congress is supposed to pass a law that sets aside a certain amount of money to run various parts of the government. This is called the budget. \n\nIn recent years, the partisanship and gridlock in Congress has become so tight that they couldn't agree on a budget. So the normal procedure is to pass a \"continuing resolution\" (or \"clean\" continuing resolution) that keeps funding at their current levels for a certain amount of time (and which does nothing else). \n\nIn 2013, The Republicans decided that they didn't want to pass clean continuing resolutions. Instead, they would pass resolutions that would continue current funding levels, but gets rid of something that Democrats like (In 2013, it was Obamacare. In 2014, it was planned parenthood)\n\nDemocrats block the law, or Obama vetoes it, the continuing resolution fails, and the government runs out of money and shuts down. \n\nThe Republicans taken the blame because they decided to take \"hostages\" "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
72ooj7
|
how do we know (or at least claim to know ) so much about planets in far distance, while we only are able to see them as „light blockers“ of their respective star?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/72ooj7/eli5_how_do_we_know_or_at_least_claim_to_know_so/
|
{
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"text": [
"Careful, clever observation.\n\nIf you know how much light is blocked from the star then you can figure out the diameter of the planet. If you know how long the orbit takes and the size of the star then you can figure out the mass of the planet. From that you can speculate what it is likely composed of.\n\nIf the planet passes in front of the star then some light must pass through the atmosphere. Different gasses absorb different frequencies of light, so by carefully examining the spectra of the star before and during a transit you can figure out what the atmosphere of the planet is composed of. Knowing the distance, size, and atmosphere of the planet you can calculate surface temperatures.\n\nThe list goes on, and you can be even more clever than I can describe here.",
"There are several different methods for detecting planets orbiting distant stars.\n\nOne of the methods is called the \"transit method\" of detecting planets. When we measure how bright a star is, most stars are very consistent. They produce the same amount of light no matter when we look at them. If a planet were to pass between the star and us, it would block some small percentage of the light, and we have sensors that are sensitive enough to detect that very small change.\n\nNow, there are lots of things that could cause a star to dim. But, if we see a star dim by the same amount every, say, 120 days, then the idea that this is caused by a planet explains the star dimming very well. \n\nIf we know how often the star dims, we know how long an orbit is. If we know how long an orbit is, and how massive the star is, we can tell what the radius of the orbit is. If we know how much light the planet blocks, we can tell how big the planet is. When a planet is in front of a star, a small part of the light shines through the atmosphere of the planet, which gives us information about its composition. From there we can tell if the planet is rocky or a gas giant, etc."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
3k4rd0
|
. why is shaun of the dead so highly regarded among horror film fans?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k4rd0/eli5_why_is_shaun_of_the_dead_so_highly_regarded/
|
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"text": [
"It's a self-referencing satirical comedy that pokes fun at the zombie sub-genre, and it was made by real horror fans -- hence, it's appreciated by horror fans as well, unlike spoofs like Scary Movie.\n\nPut it this way: parody films like Scary Movie and Epic Movie have little or no intellectual content, and weren't made by devoted fans of their respective genres. Spoofs like those movies simply took a genre and made it into a lowbrow comedy with pop culture references. They don't draw attention to the absurdity of their source material, rather they take the source material and fill them with irrelevant jokes and whatnot, in order to make something serious appear silly.",
"It's a RomZomCom, what's not to like? Personally, I think it's the way the film trashes horror movie clichés with a very English surrealism. Beating up an elderly zombie in a pub with, pool cues, to the sound of Queen's *Don't Stop Me Now*? ",
"It was a very genre savvy yet subtle parody that also played well as a movie on its own merits.\n\n*Scary Movie*, in contrast, was a more heavy handed, over the top parody that didn't really let it be a real movie. ",
"In addition to all the comments that will (rightly) point out SOTD's excellent and affectionate parodying of the zombie genre, I think the film stands out as a horror film for two other reasons:\n\n1. The convincing mundanity of design and costume enabled a far more disturbing juxtaposition between pre- and post-zombie London. Unlike 28 Days Later, the other major UK-based zombie film of recent times, the lengthy exposition of suburbia and its inhabitants, and the creeping and unpredictable transition into zombiedom (in the first half, we're never quite sure if the next character we will meet will be a zombie or not), not only sets up great gags, but makes the horrific encounters more jarring when they do occur.\n\n2. Edgar Wright's superb editorial and directorial style, already honed when parodying horror genre in Spaced, actually lends itself beautifully to scares. While I don't know the jargon for his techniques, the quick cuts and frenetic camerawork, I think, are a unique and novel way to twist the conventions of cinematography in horror that makes SOTD stand out.",
"Even though it's a comedy it's still a real stand-alone movie. You dont need to have seen all the films that Shaun references to enjoy the movie or get the jokes. Most other horror-comedies rely on B-Movie style (so bad its good like Sharknado or Leprechaun 3) or parody style (like Scary Movie) to make the audience laugh.\n\nShaun of the Dead relys on wit and timing and just perfect foreshadowing/writing to carry it as a movie. This makes Shaun one of the few movies that sucessfully can carry their own weight alone as a comedy and as a horror (Evil Dead is another good example although that one tilts over more to the horror side in my mind).\n",
"This scene. [Best scene in any zombie movie.](_URL_0_) If you can't see yourself doing this in an actual zombie apocalypse, then there is something wrong with you."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHAOY7C1go"
]
] |
||
fzdm1x
|
how can the human eye see both darkness and brightness simultaneously, while a camera has to expose for either shadows or highlights? (hdr notwithstanding)
|
With a camera, you have to decide what part of the image you want to expose for. If there are a lot of tonal differences, i.e., dark shadows and bright spots, a camera usually doesn't have enough dynamic range to capture it all.
In comparison, our eyes seem very good at perceiving tontal differences in a scene.
What are the major differences between a camera lens and a human eye that allow us to see much greater dynamic range?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fzdm1x/eli5_how_can_the_human_eye_see_both_darkness_and/
|
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"It's not your eyes, it's your brain. Vision has been evolving for millions of years and it's absolutely essential for survival. Your brain has evolved to adjust for light and color and the context around what you're seeing. As a result, what you actually see - what you are conscious of seeing - is not the most objectively accurate image of the world, it is the image that gives you the most information possible that is pertinent to your survival.\n\nA consequence of this is that your vision can be tricked. For example, in [this illusion](_URL_0_) the spheres are all the same neutral beige color, but they *appear* to be different colors because of the stripes, because your brain is trying to process information in a way that it isn't used to seeing.\n\nTo go back to your question about brightness and darkness, consider [this illusion](_URL_1_), in which A and B are the same shade of grey, but they *appear* to be different shades because your brain sees what looks like a shadow. Shades change when they are in shadow, and your brain automatically adjusts to compensate so your image of the world stays consistent\n\nWhen you have areas of both darkness and brightness in your field of vision your brain is *very* good at understanding which is dark and which is light, and how everything *should* look in one or the other. It also knows exactly how bright you *want* or need the overall image to be and automatically adjusts that image in your mind. And of course, your brain will totally make up data that it thinks should be there. If you've seen something normally before, and then you see it in deep shadow your brain can take the clues it *can* see to fill in the gaps for what you can't actually see so you see it anyway.\n\nBasically, the difference is that before you \"see\" the image coming from your eyes your visual cortex does a lot of photoshop work to it so that it looks good.\n\nCameras can't do that. They can't do that for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that most don't have that much processing power built into the device. Smart phones are changing that, and there are some smart phone programs that can adjust pictures on the fly based on what the programmers generally know that users will want. Which is the other reason cameras don't do it - they don't know what you want to see. Maybe you *want* your image super bright and washed out. Or maybe you want it super dark. The camera doesn't know. It only gets a perfectly objective image of the world and it's up to the photographer to edit and adjust the picture to compensate."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/another-brain-frying-optical-illusion-what-color-are-these-spheres",
"https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/OrjSe2kP8x8DrBpnAn2TLcI2acU=/1440x0/smart/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XMBW2GEGUY7DNNH5UWSY2UJP5E.jpg"
]
] |
|
d6wnwt
|
why does virtual data take up physical space, and what stops it from being unlimited?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d6wnwt/eli5_why_does_virtual_data_take_up_physical_space/
|
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"text": [
"Data is stored in physical media. There is no \"virtual\" storage, it's all electronic stuff happening in materials. \n\nYour hard drive is a magnetic disk with something like 8x10^12 individual domains, each of which can store a single bit of information by being magnetized to either a 1-state or a 0-state. \n\nSolid state drives work differently, using bistable semicondor elements instead of magnetic domains, but they are still arrangements of physical electronic components storing bits as 1s and 0s.",
"Digital information storage requires physical space in the same way that writing takes up space on paper.\n\nIt's not the information that takes up space so much as the physical media it's written too. The smaller you can make your writing the more information you can put on the page, it's just a question of if that information is still legible.\n\nInformation is written to hard disks magnetically. A small portion of the physical disk is magnetized to represent a 1 or 0. As technology improves the amount of space these clusters take up gets smaller and smaller allowing us to store more information on the disk. But eventually we will run into a problem where we can't make them any smaller as the clusters will start to overlap and effect each other.\n\nSSDs meanwhile are made up of millions of tiny circuit pathways that each store information. Again it's a question of how small we can make them before they start to overlap.\n\nEventually we will figure out how to store information on the molecular level like our DNA. Again the molecules take up space, it just happens that they are considerably smaller than current data storage media.",
"There's no such thing as virtual data. Information is always stored somewhere, be it in working memory, a magnetic disk, solid state media, whatever.\n\nWhenever you see the words \"in the cloud\", it's worth mentally substituting then by \"on someone else's computer\". It is entirely accurate."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2w20mp
|
the appeal of ben carson as a presidential candidate
|
Honestly, I'm just not really into politics but I've been hearing a lot about this guy lately. All I know is that he used to be a neurosurgeon.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w20mp/eli5the_appeal_of_ben_carson_as_a_presidential/
|
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],
"text": [
"He's black, which means conservatives can use him to spout talking points without sounding bigoted."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3tmhtj
|
why doesn't mass produced food taste as good as homemade food?
|
It seems like this is almost always the case, shouldn't the factories have got it down by now?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tmhtj/eli5why_doesnt_mass_produced_food_taste_as_good/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cx7ewvg",
"cx7ewwe",
"cx7faje",
"cx7fc4v"
],
"score": [
12,
2,
5,
2
],
"text": [
"It isn't fresh, has preservatives, extra salt, extra sugar, been stored in a container made of plastic and uses sub-par ingredients.",
"Mainly because home made food is fresh. TV dinners are loaded with salt and preservatives to make it last for years. Same can be said for fast food. Home made meals are usually, not always, but usually healthier and not made to last months",
"Industrially produced food has a few problems going against it.\n\nOne is that they have to have a higher standard of food safety due to all of the time and handling between factory and you finally eating it. This almost always means either overcooking it or chemically processing it so that the organisms are all dead. This tends to destroy texture and flavor in many foods, particularly meats and vegetables.\n\nAnother is that industrially produced food has to appeal to a large audience in order to get the scale necessary to make everything economical. This means that food tends to have less complex seasoning as a surprising number of people prefer bland food.\n\nMy final bit of explanation (there are plenty more, entire books have been written on this subject) is that industrial food tends to skimp on expensive ingredients which are often very flavorful in order to keep costs low and either lower the price of the food or increase profit margins. Industrial food can be much better than most people experience, but it would double the cost at the store, and the market for higher-priced industrial food just doesn't seem to be there in most cases.",
"Freshness has been mentioned but another one is cost. Stuff that is \"mass produced\" is probably not made up of the best ingredients as price is a real issue and squeezing a few extra cents of profit out of millions of meals adds up.\n\nIf I'm buying food at the store I am looking at each piece of meat and each veggie and if one looks weird I can grab another one."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
22h8bt
|
what is the difference between satire and trolling?
|
Is it merely the difference between crazy and eccentric (i.e. money/power/popularity) or is it something more?
The first explanation that comes up in Google is this.
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22h8bt/eli5what_is_the_difference_between_satire_and/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cgms8wu",
"cgmu87h"
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text": [
"**Satire:** Mocking or mimicking an idea or scenario with the intent of humorously pointing out its flaws. The cartoon, *South Park*, frequently satirizes pop culture and politics.\n\n**Trolling:** Internet pranking or bullbaiting, usually in textual conversation. Trolling is pissing off an internet stranger on purpose. Someone who posts controversial comments in Reddit threads with the intention of starting an argument is trolling.",
"Satire makes people think. \nTrolling makes people sad or angry. \n"
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2030264791"
] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
ache1y
|
if affected by caffeine differently, are there other ways to stay awake without caffeine?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ache1y/eli5_if_affected_by_caffeine_differently_are/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ed7xh66"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"If it isn't already in your (or the doctor's) plan - I highly recommend asking to have your thyroid hormone levels checked. Underactive thyroids can cause so many random symptoms to appear and be different from one person to the next. Caffeine is often recommended to be reduced or eliminated if the thyroid is abnormal. \n\nYou obviously have adverse reactions to caffeine, so definitely it's something that your body doesn't process well. Vitamin B and vitamin D supplements can be helpful, as well as a balanced diet: carbs + protein + moderate fats. \nAlso look into aromatherapy. Certain essential oils diffused nearby can help keep you alert but calm at the same time. Might ease the migraines too."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1ndflg
|
why do people use complicated #hashtags? doesn't it defeat the purpose?
|
A friend did #newhandmadeboots which strikes me as something that no one would ever write again. Isn't that how you trend and find things meaning that if it's only used once it's kind of done?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ndflg/eli5_why_do_people_use_complicated_hashtags/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cchj83j",
"cchjfad"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"A lot of hashtags are for the sake of reducing character usage and also to look cool. \n\nUnless your friend is a very popular and influential person, he won't really be starting any hashtag trends. And there are some trending #tags that are pretty complicated, but these are started by popular people like music artists, etc.",
"Not all hashtags are for the purpose of contributing to a searchable trending topic. Sometimes they're just used as a humorous or trying-to-be-cool label. #awesomeeli5answer"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
bm2fr6
|
how come airplane passengers don't have shoulder harnesses like pilots do?
|
If passengers are only protected against vertical movement (_URL_0_), shouldn't pilots seatbelts be the same?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bm2fr6/eli5_how_come_airplane_passengers_dont_have/
|
{
"a_id": [
"emt94h2",
"emtb8g4",
"emtebxw",
"emtselt",
"emunqfa"
],
"score": [
22,
5,
2,
4,
2
],
"text": [
"Turbulence can and has killed people on flights without their seat belts on, by throwing them into the ceiling when the plane suddenly descends or gets thrown around. Up and down motions are to be avoided. \n\nWhilst violent forward and back motions are also to be avoided, they are usually only caused by impacts either with the ground, an obstacle, or something on the runway/tarmac. If that happens, forward and backward motion is the least of your problems. \n\nAs for the pilots, they need to keep in control of the aircraft no matter what is happening. Whether it is turbulence or an unexpected nose dive, they must be glued to the seat, not the back of the cabin struggling to regain control if there is an unexpected event.\n\nEdit: a word",
"A five point harness is also heavier but more importantly, is more uncomfortable to wear. Therefore it is harder to convince passengers to keep wearing it when there is no apparent reason.",
"Passengers have soft seats in front of them or smooth walls that aren’t very solid. Pilots have control panels with lots of sharp, pointy dials and switches, windshield, etc that could harm them. Also, a little more serious if a pilot gets knocked out than a passenger in terms of landing plane safely.",
"Probably for the same reason cars don't use 5-point harnesses. People wouldn't use them. Studies irrefutably show that a 5-point harness absolutely provides better protection in a crash than lap belts alone or 3-point harnesses. That's why pilots have them, and it's why NASCAR drivers have them, and it's why infant car seats have them. But they limit your movement and they wrinkle your clothes and people never think they'll actually be in a crash.",
"The main reason why passengers only have lap belts is due to laziness (And a bit for comfort). The 'Fasten Seatbelt' sign will go off and on throughout the flight, mostly only during take off, landing and turbulence. If passengers have to struggle with complicated seatbelts, they will be less likely to put them on. This is especially important for bigger people who have to adjust the length of each strap to fit them better. The lesser reason is that while the seatbelt is not in use, a 3-point or 5-point belt will take up more room on the back of the seat and make it less comfortable to sit in. Lap belts can be easily slid to the side.\n\nPilots need better restraints because their jobs are crucial to the safety of the plane. If they have to maneuver the plane at sharp angles, they must not be having to fight to keep their bodies in the seat. Their hands and legs should be free to reach the controls instead of having to grab onto something to keep from falling out of the seat."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8no4if/eli5_how_come_airplanes_only_have_a_seatbelt/"
] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
7axiu4
|
how does a jet afterburner work?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7axiu4/eli5_how_does_a_jet_afterburner_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dpdjmwp",
"dpdjp2f",
"dpdju8n"
],
"score": [
5,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Raw fuel is dumped in to the exhaust pipe and is ignited to create the thrust.\n\n If you are interested in jet engines and How they work, here is a cool YouTube channel about jets, their working and maintenance of them\n_URL_0_\n ",
"It's actually neither of those. Afterburners simply inject fuel downstream of the turbine, where it burns, increasing the velocity of the exhaust, hence increasing the speed of the plane. This comes at the cost of being incredibly fuel inefficient.",
" Expanding exhaust gases still inside a convergent duct. Pressure increases as velocity decreases. More fuel is added and ignited forcing even more rapid expansion of the gases. A variable area nozzle at the exit aids in pressure/velocity ratio efficiency. \n Not sure on the actual math as I'm only an airplane mechanic not a thermodynamics expert."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"www.youtube.com/user/AgentJayZ"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
165a78
|
computer viruses and their effects
|
Why do people make them? What benefits do they get, if any? How do they work?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/165a78/eli5_computer_viruses_and_their_effects/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c7sul09",
"c7suuvt",
"c7swjd8"
],
"score": [
2,
2,
2
],
"text": [
" > Why do people make them? What benefits do they get, if any?\n\nFor fun, to show off, to earn notoriety, or to steal from people.\n\n > How do they work?\n\nThere are a lot of things that are causally referred to as \"Computer viruses\". In general though they are programs that get on your computer somehow without your knowledge or understanding. Once there they disrupt the normal functioning of your computer and/or possibly steal information that you or others put into the computer. They also tend to be able to spread themselves using your computer (like the common cold, a real virus).\n\nIf you'd like more specifics let me know.",
"One reason people write viruses is to assume control over a large number of computers at once. It's called a botnet. This army of computers can be used to take down websites, hack new computers or steal everyone-in-the-botnet's credit card info, or rob people of their online assets, like wow gold or email history. \n\nPeople used to make viruses just for kicks, but not so much anymore. Also only programs that copied themselves to new computers used to be called viruses, but now the term is used more loosely for any malicious software.",
"Many answers to each of these questions \n\nWhy do people make them? \n- fun \n- learn programing \n- profit\n- cause inconvenience \\ damage to the operating system\n- laughs \n- to be \"cool\"\n\nWhat benefits do they get, if any? \n- fun\n- profit (governments do develop virus's but more commonly they also have a trojan component)\n- programming skill\n- learn something new\n- feel cool\n- stolen passwords\n- stolen credit card numbers \\ personal data\n- there has also been virus's made that fix your computer \n\nHow do they work?\n- Most virus's today try and replicate as much as possible using any way they can to get from one computer to the next\n- infected JPEG\\exe files are common \n- a famous example:\n_URL_1_\nusing a file with the name of good looking people to click on it \n- they can either exploit a failure in software design that alows them to spread or trick users.\n- another good example is when people download a key generator for a popular piece of software, quite often a person will join a virus to the generator and re upload it to the internet for victim's to download. \n\n\n-----\nWhat Is a Virus?\n\nA computer virus attaches itself to a program or file enabling it to spread from one computer to another, leaving infections as it travels. Like a human virus, a computer virus can range in severity: some may cause only mildly annoying effects while others can damage your hardware, software or files. Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it actually cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program. It is important to note that a virus cannot be spread without a human action, (such as running an infected program) to keep it going. Because a virus is spread by human action people will unknowingly continue the spread of a computer virus by sharing infecting files or sending emails with viruses as attachments in the email.\nWhat Is a Worm?\nSponsored\nIs your network ready for the cloud? Find out : read “Five Reasons Classic Ethernet Switches Won't Support the Cloud” and learn how to examine your network’s strength and eliminate any weak points.\n\nA worm is similar to a virus by design and is considered to be a sub-class of a virus. Worms spread from computer to computer, but unlike a virus, it has the capability to travel without any human action. A worm takes advantage of file or information transport features on your system, which is what allows it to travel unaided.\n\nThe biggest danger with a worm is its capability to replicate itself on your system, so rather than your computer sending out a single worm, it could send out hundreds or thousands of copies of itself, creating a huge devastating effect. One example would be for a worm to send a copy of itself to everyone listed in your e-mail address book. Then, the worm replicates and sends itself out to everyone listed in each of the receiver's address book, and the manifest continues on down the line. \n\nDue to the copying nature of a worm and its capability to travel across networks the end result in most cases is that the worm consumes too much system memory (or network bandwidth), causing Web servers, network servers and individual computers to stop responding. In recent worm attacks such as the much-talked-about Blaster Worm, the worm has been designed to tunnel into your system and allow malicious users to control your computer remotely.\nWhat Is a Trojan horse?\n\nA Trojan Horse is full of as much trickery as the mythological Trojan Horse it was named after. The Trojan Horse, at first glance will appear to be useful software but will actually do damage once installed or run on your computer. Those on the receiving end of a Trojan Horse are usually tricked into opening them because they appear to be receiving legitimate software or files from a legitimate source. When a Trojan is activated on your computer, the results can vary. Some Trojans are designed to be more annoying than malicious (like changing your desktop, adding silly active desktop icons) or they can cause serious damage by deleting files and destroying information on your system. Trojans are also known to create a backdoor on your computer that gives malicious users access to your system, possibly allowing confidential or personal information to be compromised. Unlike viruses and worms, Trojans do not reproduce by infecting other files nor do they self-replicate.\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2004/virus.asp",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Kournikova_%28computer_virus%29"
]
] |
|
2rvy9l
|
if ozone is bad to breathe, why do they make devices to plug into walls to put ozone in your home.
|
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rvy9l/eli5if_ozone_is_bad_to_breathe_why_do_they_make/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnjrj49"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Pretty sure those just produce ozone to react with other sutff in the air. It's not like they raise the ambient ozone levels. Also theres always a little bit of ozone in the air, it's really only a problem above certain levels. It really depends on how much this thing it putting out."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Grade-Plug-In-Adjustable-Ionic-Purifier/dp/B005E1CW9W/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top"
] |
[
[]
] |
|
19j6p3
|
how soda pop tabs can help a charity like ronald mcdonald house
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19j6p3/eli5_how_soda_pop_tabs_can_help_a_charity_like/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c8oi889",
"c8otm0c"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Here's an interesting article on the issue:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nSoda pop tabs are made of aluminum. Recycling centers will actually buy aluminum to be melted down and resold to business to use in making new products. So the Ronald McDonald House sells the tabs they get to these recycling centers.\n\nHowever, the tabs are very small. According to the article, 1 million tabs can be sold for only $300. So it is not actually a very good source of funds.\n\nSo why do they do it? Well, the article doesn't elaborate, but I have my own theory. I think that the effort makes people think the same question you do. It's a unique form of fundraiser, which sets the charity apart from others. This makes its name stick in a person's mind and makes a person more likely to remember them. So by doing this fundraiser, it's more of an effort to advertise the charity in a memorable way.",
"It is an urban legend. Soda tabs are virtually worthless, and cost more to process than they are worth. Despite being linked to a number of charities, they do nothing to raise money for them.\n\nFor more info, [snopes is your friend](_URL_0_)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://thesop.org/story/crazyworld/2006/10/27/whats-up-with-collecting-soda-tabs.php"
],
[
"http://www.snopes.com/business/redeem/pulltabs.asp"
]
] |
||
1sw7pi
|
what is pantheism?
|
So, I've stumbled on "Pantheism", but I really can't get my head round it. Sites say that "God is everything" and that "God is equated with nature". What does that mean? Do pantheists worship nature? It seems more than just the idea that "God is everywhere". How can it fit with conventional religions?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sw7pi/eli5_what_is_pantheism/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ce1tt4h",
"ce1ulv1"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"From what I understand [a little], the Universe equals divinity. There is no personal God that is seperate from the Universe // nature // the material.\n\nSome other religions have God as some seperate being who created the Universe... and/or is personal and cares about *you*, as an individual.\n\nA starting point: _URL_0_",
"It's the belief that God is the universe rather than a distinct entity that simply rules the universe. All living things are divine/ holy because all living things are part of God. They do no worship nature, per se, but they believe that the Earth is sacred.\n_URL_0_\n_URL_1_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism"
],
[
"http://www.pantheist.net/key-ideas.html",
"http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pantheism"
]
] |
|
1kl75w
|
how does the network know where my mobile phone is?
|
Unlike landlines, which have a physical address, mobile phones are just that: mobile. How does the network know where to direct the call, even if I'm thousands of km away from my home?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kl75w/eli5_how_does_the_network_know_where_my_mobile/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cbq207b"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Your cell phone connects to the local tower and identifies itself uniquely. Calls directed to your number go through that tower to you."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3wz3hj
|
what happens when we achieve sustainable fusion? how will this affect energy companies, the economy, and infrastructure? what does it mean for scientific progress? i.e. what are the immediate and long-term effects of sustainable fusion?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wz3hj/eli5what_happens_when_we_achieve_sustainable/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cy037r2"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"It depends on a variety of factors beyond sustainability. \n\nFor example, how much does it cost to build a plant? If it's prohibitively expensive, you may not see many built.\n\nDoes a pseudoscience group that opposes fusion for no actual good reason get enough popular support to create political pressure to stop plants from being built? If so, politicians will cave in to the stupid.\n\nWhat resources do they require? This isn't just fuel for reactions. We're talking about resources for maintenance, number of workers, the technical education required of workers, etc. If they require a specialized knowledge that isn't found throughout the work force, there would be a cap on how many you could run, and, by extension, how many would get built.\n\nHow much do they cost to operate, and how much electricity is generated for that cost? Is it more cost-effective than other forms of power? If it isn't, there may be little incentive to build them.\n\nIn other words: we can't know the effects until we know all the specifics. Just being powered by fusion and being a sustainable practice doesn't really get us very far."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3v9uzf
|
why doesn't engine power grow exponentially with rising rpm?
|
For example some engines have the most HP/torque at maybe 6500 rpm even though the engine revs to 9000. Why?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v9uzf/eli5_why_doesnt_engine_power_grow_exponentially/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cxlneci",
"cxlo5xz",
"cxlqc13",
"cxlsz1d",
"cxmcrsh"
],
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2,
2,
2,
5,
2
],
"text": [
"Well long story short. Internal combustion engines create more torque the faster they rotate but by the same coin they use more fuel and that fuel is used less efficiently in your case the engine reaches the peak performance at 6300 rpm ",
"It's not easy getting the fuel/air mixture into the engine fast enough, which decreases efficiency at high RPM.",
"Air puts up a fight when you are trying to pump it into an engine, moreso when that engine is spinning quickly. That's why power gains aren't quite linear as RPM goes up.\n\nAs for why a particular engine has a peak power at a certain RPM, that is because the cam profile controls the RPM where the engine will make peak power. Most road vehicles have the cam profile set to allow steady idling and low RPM power, useful for stop and go traffic.",
"Mechanical engineer here. First, it's important to understand that power and torque are merely two different ways of measuring the same phenomenon. The relationship between torque, RPM, and power is like the relationship between volume, density, and mass: once you know two you automatically know the third. If torque were constant, power would increase linearly with RPM (not exponentially). \n\nBut torque isn't constant because it depends on many factors that all change with RPM or throttle position. (I'm speaking of a spark ignition engine here, but the same basic principle applies to any engine or motor.) Just to name a few factors: internal friction, internal aerodynamic drag, combustion efficiency (which is in turn affected by duration of the power stroke and combustion chamber turbulence, both of which are affected by RPM), valve float (at high RPM), and volumetric efficiency. \n\nVolumetric efficiency is usually the biggest factor. It's the volume of air-fuel mixture (measured at ambient pressure) that enters the cylinder on the intake stroke relative to the volume of an ideal incompressible fluid that would fill the cylinder. So volumetric efficiency can actually be greater than 100 percent under certain conditions, since the air-fuel mixture is compressible.\n\nSo the torque produced by any internal combustion engine is a curve that starts low, rises to a peak (at the engine's most efficient operating point) and then drops off. The power curve is simply this torque curve multiplied by RPM at each point.",
"Let's completely disregard \"torque\" and it's relationship to power, because it can get confusing.\n\nFundamentally, horsepower talks about *power output per second*. If you want to know power output per second, you figure out **how much power the engine makes each time it rotates** and multiply that by the speed it's rotating. \n\nSo, spinning faster is better, but if you *make less power each rotation while you're spinning faster*... Well, the result could go either way. \n\nEngines don't always produce the same amount of power at high speed that they do at mid-range speed *each time they turn over* because...\nNot enough air can get in.\nNot enough fuel can be supplied/mixed with the air.\nThe fuel is burned before it properly mixes with the air.\nExhaust gas can't be gotten rid of quickly enough and it backs up everything.\n\nOut of these, the lack of incoming air may be the most common and problematic. Turbochargers and superchargers are added to engines just to solve this issue, while the other issues are usually fixed by tweaking existing parts. \n\nSo now that you understand that an engine may struggle to do as well *each time it fires* at 9000 RPM compared to 6500 RPM, you can infer that power may be worse depending on how the math works out. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
5un7lk
|
what can explain the rise of the dow jones index since donald trump got elected.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5un7lk/eli5what_can_explain_the_rise_of_the_dow_jones/
|
{
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],
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36,
20,
4,
8,
2
],
"text": [
"The economy was improving before the election. And it's still improving. Presidents get credit for economic things that they didn't do. Presidents get blame for economic things that are not their fault. It's how the job works.\n\nEconomics depends on many things, and who's president is only a tiny factor.",
"Republican white house and congress tends to lead to unrestrained corporate interests. Unrestrained corporate interests tends to lead to market enthusiasm. Market Enthusiasm tends to lead to bubble inflation.\n\nSadly while these things work out well in the short term, medium term can be [catastrophic](_URL_0_).",
"If you look at the trend over the last 10 years you can see that the Dow Jones is rising at the same rate is has for the last 8 years. There was a period of stagnation/fluctuation between mid 2015 and the election last November (i.e. election season). Now that the election is over, the market is correcting back to where it should be. \n\nThis happened in 2012 also. The Dow took a big hit mid 2011 and then jumped up again after the election. It has nothing to do with Trump.",
"The stock market is largely driven by speculation, a huge rise doesn't necessarily mean the businesses are doing better, only that people expect them to. Trump's promises will technically help businesses so there's a lot of speculation driving the rise (even if his promises are yet to be enacted). So what are they?\n\nWell, getting rid of things like those pesky environmental regulations certainly will help industry drive down costs. Reducing corporate taxes definitely will help as well. The ACA, even though I'm a fan of it as a first step towards universal health care, is something businesses are looking forward to getting rid of as well. Trump's protectionist policies will help manufacturing, at least in the short-term. Long term I still think it's a bad idea but it will have a short-term boost.\n\nIt was interesting to note that the NASDAQ, which is more tech-stock orientated, and historically has often outpaced Dow Jones (more industry orientated), did not receive as strong a boost. Mainly because of Trump having some beef with Silicon Valley and perhaps the fact that tech industries benefit more from global trade than traditional industries.",
"Several reasons:\n\nThe big part is largely- presidents really don't have all that much effect on the economy. Most policies, even controversial ones, don't really affect businesses all that much. Businesses don't care about social issues -they care about taxes, regulations, and stuff like wars.\n\nThere was an uptick, based on the hope (which hasn't materialized so far, but it's been \"common wisdom\") that there will be a stimulus program in terms of infrastructure. It's hard to say whether this hope is unfounded, since there's been little to no detail of whether this infrastructure plan will actually happen.\n\nThere's also the hope that since Congress and the Presidency are both GOP controlled, stuff might actually get done, rather than the intentional obstruction (the GOP vowed to not give Obama any \"victories\", which led to a historical low in terms of things being done). This is amplified because the GOP is seen as business friendly, and likely to reduce regulations (which will increase profits, even if it has negative effects elsewhere)\n\nThe dow in particular is tricky, because it's an index which happens to be weighted heavily towards companies (particularly banks) like Goldman Sachs/JP Morgan, which got a disproportionate bump, based on the hopes that stuff like Dodd-Frank will be repealed. You'd be better off at looking at a broader index."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/1928-congress-last-time-republicans-had-a-majority-this-huge-112913"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
623mms
|
how do racing tires work?
|
Why are racing tires able to be smooth yet super grippy whereas road tires have to have tread on them otherwise they'd be slippery and dangerous?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/623mms/eli5_how_do_racing_tires_work/
|
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"text": [
"Friction.\n\nRacing tires are smooth so the entire wheel grips the surface of the track. This is a good thing, and it is in a controlled environment. You never see races in the rain.\n\nRegular cars on regular tar roads work just fine with smooth tires, as long as there is no rain, ice, snow, oil, etc. The treads are there to help push water and ice and other things out of the way, while keep as much friction between the tire and the road.\n\nTire treads are a big science, and it's basically a balancing act between best performance, which would be smooth, with safest, which would be snow tires/spikes.",
"A flat surface against a flat surface causes very much grip, like a racing slick tire and a clean, dry race track. We do not drive race cars. We drive passenger cars that are equipped and tunned for everyday, average driving. Which includes rain and/or snow often. A racing slick tire on a rainy day: that's very dangerous and the car will fly off the road. Our tires have cross cuts and forward direction cuts to essentially wick away water from rain or melting snow. Or can fill up with snow in some spots and still be grippy. \nLastly. Look up some \"racing\" road tires. Like Pirelli P0, or check a tire website and find sport tires/high end tires fir a corvette or Nissan GT-R, you'll get an idea about what these high performance tires look like. You'll see a middle ground between racing slicks and economy tires basically (in tread design) ",
"\"Slicks\", or racing tires, are superior in dry weather on the road. If the road is wet slicks will hydroplane because there are no grooves for the water to flow through. Slicks are not street legal because law enforcement doesn't want people to get caught in a rainstorm with slicks on and take all the other cars out.",
"to answer a parallel question, why do normal tires get slippery even in dry weather when they become bald?\n\nbecause consumer tires are not made of same material thru its entire depth. the outermost rubber is most sticky. so new tires are always super grippy. once rubber wears past its minimum recommended depth, it gets to be a really hard and not grippy rubber. additionally it's also rubber that's very noisy when driving. this is basically your fail-safe. common person (aka idiot) car owner drives around for 10 years on same tires then finally they get noisy and he takes it to the mechanic. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
366ean
|
what is sikhism, and how does it differ from other religions?
|
I read an article about a Sikh man who removed his turban to help a little boy who was git by a car. So i started reading up on Sikhism. And I'm kinda interested.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/366ean/eli5_what_is_sikhism_and_how_does_it_differ_from/
|
{
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"text": [
"Sikhism is a religion developed in the 16th century Punjab, part of what is now India. \"Sikh\" is a Sanskrit word meaning \"student\"; the Sikh community as a whole is called \"Khalsa\".\n\nIt is a monotheistic religion, and God is formless and genderless. It is believed that people get closer to God through good deeds rather than religious ceremonies (although Sikhism does have them).\n\nThe Sikh holy book is called the *Guru Granth Sahib*, and the Sikh place of worship is a *Gurdwara*. Men and women are initiated into the Khalsa by the *khanḍe-kī-pahul* ceremony.\n\nAll male Sikhs are required to use the surname \"Singh\" (Sanskrit for \"lion\"). Females use \"Kaur\" (\"Prince\").\n\nSikhs can be identified by the \"Five K's\": Kesh (uncut body hair and beards; males must cover their hair with a turban), Kangha (a wooden comb that they carry), Kara (a metal bracelet that they must wear), Kachera (a specific type of woolen undergarment that must be worn) and Kirpan (a curved sword or blade that must be carried at all times).\n\n[More information](_URL_0_).",
"I answered a similar question on /r/Sikh, which I think will serve nicely- basically sikh philosophy in a nutshell:\n\nTry a thought experiment:\n\nImagine you are in a room with absolutely nothing in it. And your task is to make something new, anything, while you are in that room. What could you make something out of?\n\nYou only have one option - make something out of yourself.\n\nThat is the Sikh perspective on God. If you go far enough back to the existence of only one being, then everything must come from that entity. So Sikhs believe everything is God.\n\nFrom that all ideas flow - if everything is god, then all beings are equal. Then there are no uniquely holy places. Then there is no need for superstitious rituals in order to connect to god, for it resides in you as well.\n\nTrying to realize God - that is sikh practice. To meditate and reflect on poetry about God in order to connect to the divine in everything, and within you. To listen to it, with your heart open and your mind active, allowing your intuition to recognize when it finds truth in that poetry.\n\nThe pinnacle of that process is liberation - when you can recognize God in all things, and within yourself. And see no enemies or stranger - just god reflected in all.\n\nAnd you don't have to retreat from this world in order to have this realization. If god is in all, then he/she exists in all the places one's life may take them, not just mountain tops, or yoga retreat centers.\n\nOnce that state is achieved, you hope others have the opportunity to realize this peace. And while we think our way is the clearest and has so many advantages, its a voluntary system. You have to do the work in Sikhi to achieve this realization. You must voluntarily self-convert to become a sikh.\n\nFurthermore, we recognize that the spirituality in many religions can take you to this same end point. So instead of arguing with others about religious labels, we'd rather encourage spirituality and logical consistency in their own beliefs if need be.\n\nBut spirituality and reflection is a luxury in many people's lives. Many don't have food or live in fear. Only when people are free of oppression can they find peace. Thats why a Sikh's job is to provide and protect others. Since we see all of humanity as a manifestation of God, and thus, spiritual brothers and sisters, its that much easier for us to do."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/sikhism/"
],
[]
] |
|
d5z217
|
- what in a material's particle structure effects how fast it lowers or increases it's temperature?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d5z217/eli5_what_in_a_materials_particle_structure/
|
{
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"text": [
"Temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy of a material, basically how strongly it vibrates.\n\nIf you have lots of material due to more protons, neutrons, and electrons, it takes more energy to get this large mass to move. Thus, the temperature changes slower for heavier molecules lower in the periodic table.\n\nThe transfer of energy is important too. On an elemental level, metals have free floating electrons which allow it to be conductive. These free floating electrons are also good at transferring energy. This is why conductive materials also transfer heat well.\n\nBeyond elements and molecules, the state also matters. Solids have more mass and are tightly packed. More mass means slower heat transfer but closely packed means heat flows more easily to their neghbors. Gases are lightly packed with less mass but also move much faster, aiding in heat transfer. \n\nHow heat transfers for these states will depend on the molecular properties. For example, an oven using air to heat solid food at 350 F takes longer than boiling the same food in water at 212 F because liquid water is denser than air, allowing it to hold and transfer heat faster."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
atabob
|
how does the relative "strength" of a currency affect trade and economies.
|
Back when China was purposefully devaluing their currency, economists were saying it helps Chinese trade and hurts American trade. Why is that? Like if a Yuan is worth less won't prices just go up to compensate? Are some industries more or less benefitted or hurt by changing exchange rates? I don't get how exchange rates work really affects the economy.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/atabob/eli5_how_does_the_relative_strength_of_a_currency/
|
{
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"egzr34p"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"your lego was worth 1 of my legos. Now you need 2 legos for 1 of my legos. I will give you more legos than I normally would so I can get more legos in total. You will sell more legos as a result so you will have more to do and we can play for awhile longer and hopefully playing makes you happy and you go get more legos eventually but you can't do it forever cause you'll run out of legos."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
7uo2qf
|
why does having both eyes open merge the images created from both, but having one eye closed doesn't merge the other with darkness?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uo2qf/eli5_why_does_having_both_eyes_open_merge_the/
|
{
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"dtltz9u"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Your brain does a huge amount of tweaking when it comes to your eyes and what you see. The important part is that your brain processes the inputs from both of your eyes into one image rather than two. When your eyes are closed, the amount of light that falls on your retinas is substantially less than if your eyes were open, so if one eye is closed and one is open, the image formed by your brain is dominated by the image seen by the open eye. You can still tell that your closed eye isn't seeing anything, but you just don't notice it as the 'signal' from that eye is insignificant compared to that of the open eye."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2a5xi1
|
why is every google search url so long and complicated? what's with all the different & x=y - formulated strings?
|
For example if I want to send someone a link of my generic search for images of bunny tongues, the link is as follows for me:
_URL_0_
Now I realize that ** & safe=off** means that my safe search is off, **q=bunny+tongue** is my search query, and some part of that string indicates that it's specifically for a google *image* search. But the rest I don't get. Are they tracking me and what search strings I'm looking at and sharing - and if so, is that what this is? Changing or deleting most of these strings doesn't alter the search at all.
What are these things?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a5xi1/eli5why_is_every_google_search_url_so_long_and/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cirshg9"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"This seems to explain most of them.\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.google.is/search?q=bunny+tongue&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=7jW8U-noGauY0AXxnoAw&sqi=2&ved=0CBkQsAQ&biw=1158&bih=754"
] |
[
[
"http://www.rankpanel.com/blog/google-search-parameters/"
]
] |
|
62mgll
|
why do we sometimes perceive familiar music as being slower or faster than we normally perceive it?
|
Some days when listening to a very familiar song, it will sound as if it is going faster or slower than usual even though it is the same recording. What causes this perception in the brain?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62mgll/eli5_why_do_we_sometimes_perceive_familiar_music/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dfnpya1"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"When we retrieve a memory, what we are actually doing is retrieving the last time we remembered it. So if you have thought of the same track 10 times since the last time you heard it, you have had 10 different opportunities to distort the song in your head. Then when you hear the original again and you compare it to what you remember, then you hear the differences."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
aoq2f3
|
can someone explain one of the provisions of the affordable case act for me?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aoq2f3/eli5_can_someone_explain_one_of_the_provisions_of/
|
{
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"eg2sw6f"
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"text": [
"Pharmacies that accept Medicare patients have a maximum amount that they can charge those patients for pharmaceuticals. For any given pharmaceutical, that maximum amount is equal to 175% of the average cost to manufacture the drug, as reported to Medicare by the drug's manufacturer.\n\nSo lets say Norco is manufactured by 3 companies. They report costs to produce the drug of 25 cents, 35 cents, and 50 cents per pill. The average of those costs is 37 cents. 175% of that average is 65 cents. A pharmacy is therefore allowed to charge a maximum of 65 cents per pill to people who are on Medicare. \n\nThe actual amount that Medicare pays for a drug uses a different formula, and is usually less than that maximum amount."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1rlzc3
|
how do humans acquire a taste for things such as wine, beer and coffee
|
For instance I absolutely hated beer when I was a young drinker but now absolutely love it. That may be because I am from Wisconsin but how does the brain hate a taste but then start to like it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rlzc3/eli5_how_do_humans_acquire_a_taste_for_things/
|
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"IIRC, it's more or less tolerance; your body becomes used to the taste and it stops minding. ",
"The palate changes with age. Bitter is a particularly bad flavor to young people. This is supposedly because poisonous plants are often bitter, so we evolved to dislike that flavor in our youth. \n\nAlso your enjoyment of the beverage is only partially tied to its taste. It's color, smell, intoxicating effects, and your memories of other times you've consumed it inform your opinion.\n\nFinally, it's an addictive substance. Even mild alcohol cravings can convince you that you not only tolerate the flavor, you prefer it.",
"The biggest thing is just that your body stops considering it a threat.\n\nBitterness is a sign that something is poisonous. But as you drink it more and more, your body starts to say \"hey this isn't killing me\" and ignores the bitterness. \n\nEdit: If someone could look up the word for this I would be so thankful. It was in a post ages ago on /r/beer about how IPA is terrible when you first drink it, but after a while a lot of other beer sucks in comparison.\n\nEdit2: Lupulin Threshold Shift is the name of it.",
"Neurons that fire together, wire together. So you develop more neuronal connections around a singular stimuli. Thus developing a taste for something.",
"There is an interesting theory about that, actually. Do you know the [Jesus illusion](_URL_1_)?\n\nOur mind usually tries to adapt to things. In the said illusion, our mind notices that there is a big black blob in our sight, that carries no information with it. It makes no sense. So it's best to ignore it. Our perception mechanisms start to create a \"counter-reaction\" - something that would even out the nonsensical blob, and make it one with the background. The longer the blob is there, not moving, the stronger this counter reaction be. After a couple of minutes, when you stop looking on the blob, and look on, say, a wall, you will see the counterreaction of your brain - an image that happens to look like the face of Jesus. It could be anything though. Your nose, for example, is removed from your sight in a similar way, only you never get to see the counter-reaction, because you always have a nose in its place, hopefully.\n\nNow, the same applies for all stimuli, but there is an interesting glitch in some of them. There was an interesting study about people who give blood. When you do it for the first time, it's scary, painful, and takes some time to get back to feeling 100% good after the deed, but your organism creates an anti-reaction - and when the pain wears off, you actually feel pretty good physically. The more you give blood, the less scared you are, the more used to the procedure you are, and in effect, the less pain you feel (also thanks to the feel-good counter-reaction).BUT! The major finding in this study is, that with time the counter-reaction does NOT fade, like the initial painful stimulus does. It stays on the same level, making giving blood pleasant, some even described is as addictive.\n\nIt is hypothesised that the same mechanism happens with other things, like cold showers, blue cheese, wine, and (finally to the point), beer. It's not tasty at first, but your brain creates a countermeasure to relieve you in your beer-drinking pain, an anti-taste, if you will. With time, you get used to the taste, but the magnitude of the positive antitaste stays the same, so you end up enjoying the whole thing.\n\n\n**tl;dr: it's thanks to a counter-reaction to negative stimuli that your brain creates.**\n\nI know this from a lecture on positive psychology, but I managed to find some online sources: _URL_0_ . It's not exactly what I meant (nothing about perception illusions in the abstract), but it proves at least a part of what I said.",
"The side effects (main effects?) of those beverages are pleasurable and addictive, and the brain starts to associate the flavor with the buzz.\n\nPavlov proved the associations between things like this exist. Ring a bell and I salivate.",
"Because of the behavior-reinforcing effect of the drugs these beverages contain (i.e., alcohol and caffeine), as well as, at least in the case of beer and wine, the calories they contain. In other words, pleasurable drugs and calorically-dense foods gradually cause the reward centers in the brain to create a positive association between particular flavors and drugs/calories. \n\n\n",
"Social environment is a factor.\nI drink beer when I'm out with friends.\nI've bought the beer I enjoyed in a bar to have at home, more than once.\n\nIt tastes like crap.\n\nI've decided I don't like beer, I just can't tell when the social environment is influencing me.\n\nThe first time I tried it at age 18 I hated it, but I kept drinking it because everyone else was.\n\nSocial.\nSocial influences are huge.",
"As we get older, we appreciate things that come with age. Things that only time and patience could make taste the way that they do. Old cheese, smoked sausage, aged wine, roasted coffee beans, beer brewed to perfection. The bitterness and sharpness of taste is real to us and not drown out by sugars. We crave life at it's core. Appreciation comes with age only because we have ourselves aged, and therefore understand.",
"habit and repitition. It isn't some strange cosmic coincedence that our generation likes Aphex Twin and our parents don't. Also Africans hate cinnimon. It just isn't in their culture and they didn't grow up with it so if you give them cinimon they spit it out like it is wasabe. \n\nAlcohol is a poison and you are not supposed to like it. When people tell me they like alcohol I like to joke that they are \"affected\". Basically they like getting drunk and the sensations are tied together. I wish I had a better understanding but all I know on the subject is that we are creatures of habit. You are constantly altering yoru brain and synapses are firing differently until you enjoy something. You ever hear about people enjoying pain? Women who hate the look of an uncircumcised penis? Men who hate the look of women who don't shave their armpits? If all these extremes are possible then it is easy to imagine humans enjoying the taste of rotten poison. ",
"Think of it like drinking soda. There are pleasant sensations associated with drinking Coke (sugar, cola) and there are undesirable sensations associated with drinking Coke (acidic burn)\n\nIt's not that you learn to like the acidic burn, and you certainly don't drink the Coke to feel that burn. You drink it for the sugar and carbonation and tasty cola notes. And overtime, the burn of the acid probably doesn't even register unless you have a cold or have just consumed spicy food. But to someone in a third world country who has never had Coke, soda is hard to choke down the first time because of the acid and the cloyingly sweet level of sugar.\n\nLike so, there are pleasant qualities associated with wine, beer, and coffee. And there are unpleasant qualities associated with wine, beer, and coffee.\n\nWhen you \"acquire a taste\" you are **not** learning to love an unpleasant flavor…that would be nonsensical. The truth is that the unpleasant flavors fade away over time, leaving you free to discover and enjoy the pleasant qualities unfettered.\n\n\n",
"There are experience, predisposition and mental barriers one needs to overcome. The experience part is that you need to taste a lot of different beverages to know common and uncommon things about them. Then you need to know what to taste for and what to look for which is product of learning a lot. But predisposition is also important factor. Which means biologically people are slightly different even the same ones depending on their condition and age that results in different taste of same food. And then there are mental barriers that come from various psychological phenomena including unfounded dislikes from childhood, traumas, prejudices and what you consider your permanent \"taste\" at some point.",
"Over time and with personal preference. Also your brain slowly starts to equate the taste with the pleasurable feeling delivered by the alcohol similar to Pavlov's dogs.",
"Positive reinforcement! First beer kinda doesn't taste too great, but that feeling afterwards is pretty good. You start drinking beer for the good feeling(your prize for putting up with the taste) and soon enough you'll get those good feelings(not physically/chemically mind altering but it will stimulate the pleasure part of your brain) just from that first sip of a nice cold beer. ",
"I think it's because you are stupid as shit when you are a kid. Beer and coffee is like a life survival kit.",
"These things all contain drugs.",
"It's like if every time you fell down, you got a hundred dollars. Pretty soon you would probably start to like it. Then you'd get bored with just falling down, and you'd start to do it in different ways and maybe with different people to see how they do it. Before you even notice, you've become an aficionado.",
"Jesus Christ, TIL reddit is populated by 12 year olds.",
"We force our brains to get used to like the taste of things we get addicted to. Ooooh that sweet pain of the needle prick right before the heroin sinks in. oooh that dry lump in my throat as I take my meds. You can get an acquired taste for anything that you develop an addiction to.",
"You get used to it. \n\nSource: I am an alcohol and it is destroying my family"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12609018",
"http://files.myopera.com/Dava/albums/170157/Jesus%20Illusion.png"
],
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|
chprja
|
how exactly do things like google home and alexa work?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/chprja/eli5_how_exactly_do_things_like_google_home_and/
|
{
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"text": [
"The machine constantly listens for the trigger word. Once it hears that, it records the next few seconds of sound and sends them over the Internet to a server, for analysis and response.",
"I actually know the guy who \"invented\" Alexa. \n\nThere is a dedicated chip on the device that listens and only rembers one or two words at a time. It forgets everything it's heard just after hearing it. If it hears the word \"Alexa\", it wakes up and starts recording everything that's said for a few second. \n\nIt can't understand any word other than \"Alexa\" and \"Stop\". So it takes all the raw audio and uploads it to a much bigger computer in \"the cloud\". The bigger cloud computer has a machine learning algorithm that gets trained by people to recognize certain sounds as text words. \n\nThese text words are then run through a seperate *intent recognition* machine learning algorithm. Which kicks off specific *functions* that exact can execute."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
3l0ju2
|
what is a public company and can anyone just buy it anytime?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3l0ju2/eli5_what_is_a_public_company_and_can_anyone_just/
|
{
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],
"text": [
"A public company is owned by those of the general population who have purchased \"shares\" in it. The other types of company are 'private' (owned by a specific individual or individuals) and government (such as crown corporations or state agencies). Most non-government companies start off private as their creator builds them up. If they want to go public, a private company does an IPO, or Initial Public Offering, of shares on the stock exchange. \n\nWhen you purchase one share, you own a small amount of that company now and can influence its major decisions by voting at shareholder meetings. In return for that loss of internal control, the company gets some of your money to do with what they please, such as expanding to new products or geographies, or paying off the current private owner(s). \n\nLater on, if the company wants to raise more money, they can offer more shares on the market for sale for people to buy. \n\nPeople also buy shares from each other, and that's why the price of stock goes up and down. Companies that are doing well, paying good dividends and so on have the price of their stock climb because more people want it. Companies with disappointing projections or failed product launches have their stock decline because more people want to sell it off and buy something else that's better, and nobody wants to buy it.\n\nNow buying it and ownership. Nobody owns a public company, but another person or company can try and buy enough stock to \"control\" it by making every board meeting vote go their way. So a big company wants to take over your company, they save a lot of money up and start buying every stock they can, hoping to get to 51% ownership (when they can win all the votes). Sometimes this means they reach out to all of the shareholders and say \"we'll buy your current stock for its current price plus three bucks\", and hope to get a lot that way. If they manage to control the 51% of stock, they can then force the board to vote on a takeover offer from themselves, and they basically boot the company's current management out and rebrand it as theirs.",
"When a company is public, or a private company goes public, they're traded on the stock market like the NYSE. And yes, you can go buy stocks; usually through a bank or broker (USAA does it, Charles Schwab, any others that offer investing/stock options)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
8y1yo1
|
why are boat anchors shaped the way they are? couldn't they literally just be chains attached to heavy metal balls?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8y1yo1/eli5_why_are_boat_anchors_shaped_the_way_they_are/
|
{
"a_id": [
"e27f36n",
"e27f4n5",
"e27f5fi",
"e27f621",
"e27fpis",
"e27hx52"
],
"score": [
6,
10,
39,
2,
3,
3
],
"text": [
"It has to grip onto the seafloor. The weight is to make sure it stays in place but it's the shape that stops the boat from drifting away. ",
"The wind on the surface of the water can be strong enough to drag even a heavy anchor. The distinctive shape of the anchor means that when the wind starts to drag the boat the anchor digs into the sea floor and does a better job of holding the boat in place. ",
"Yarr, ye don't want yer ship driftin', matey! Yon hook's designed to catch on rocks down deep, or to dig into the sand or muck below.",
"It was always explained to me that the hooks and other various shapes will allow the anchor to dig into the ground and catch on rocks. A heavy metal ball, however, as you suggested, would just roll and drag on the ground without catching and actually stopping the boat. ",
"The “hooks” sink/dig into the sea floor. This causes them to be buried/trapped by dirt, rocks, etc instead of relying on their own weight to hold it down.\n\nThis requires a lot of pulling force to pull them back up, but remember that’s the *point* of an anchor. If you made it super heavy (enough to have a similar anchoring effect), that would also require lots of force to pull it back up.\n\nAnd that anchor would be heavier once it’s back above water (which would weigh down the ship) and require more material which is expensive. ",
"Think of it this way.\n\nWhen the anchor is ON the boat, the boat doesn't sink. As you lower the anchor to the seafloor, the boat is \"floating\" the anchor. So the weight of the anchor doesn't hold the boat in place.\n\nThe anchor holds the boat in place by interacting with the floor of the ocean (or lake).\n\nSo, the idea is to drop the anchor and enough extra rope or chain to have it lie sideways on the sea-floor, and then the motion of the boat causes the spades of the anchor to dig into the muck.\n\nYou also need to be able to lift it, so you make the anchor in such a way that if you pull straight up, it's not too hard to pull loose from the muck."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2s32it
|
why is it acceptable to produce satirical jokes about people's religion, but unacceptable to tell racist and sexist jokes?
|
With the recent happens in Paris, I'm a little confused why the satirical jokes are accepted but jokes about race and gender are not.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s32it/eli5_why_is_it_acceptable_to_produce_satirical/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnlp5l1",
"cnlpfw0",
"cnlry9f"
],
"score": [
10,
4,
2
],
"text": [
"The difference between \"protected speech\" and \"socially acceptable speech\" seems to be lost on everyone...\n\nFree speech protects you from government censorship. As long as you don't incite violence, you can be as racist, sexist, ageist, etc. as you want.\n\nFree speech DOES NOT protect you from the consequences of your speech. People can hate you, fire you, shame you, ostracize you, all without infringing your free speech.",
"It's not illegal to make a racist or sexist joke, as long as you aren't inciting violence. But we have to make distinction about what is legal and what social consequences it has.\n\nYou are legally allowed to make the joke, but that doesn't mean anyone have to like it. Just like it's your right to make the joke, others have the right to find it distasteful and not like you because of it.",
"A lot of people have covered the choice versus no choice and the socially acceptable versus legal aspects of this issue - but they have not yet covered hate versus humor, so I will go there. \n\nYou can tell a joke about race. You can even tell a mean spirited racist joke. What you cannot do is incite violence. This is the difference between hate speech and satire - whether we are talking about race, religion, gender, what have you. \n\n\"So this Jew is sitting at the death camp, planning his world take - over which starts with having everyone he ever knew hide for 50 years to convince the world they were gassed, when in walks ...\" very poor taste, not funny, but a joke. \n\n\"We have studied the historical record and proven that Jews are plotting to take over the world. They should all be killed.\" Hate speech. It can be recognised by the invented \"facts\", the claims of authority and the incitement to bring harm on an identifiable group. \n\nThere is a difference, and Muslims are entitled to the exact same protections. I have seen a few of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. In my view most of them were not even particularly tasteless - they were no where near hate speech. They were disrespectful - but that is the nature of humor, isn't it?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
6r12mb
|
how are cable standards such as usb and hdmi created, and is the party responsible receiving royalties?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6r12mb/eli5_how_are_cable_standards_such_as_usb_and_hdmi/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dl1jj9w"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"The USB Implementers forum manages USB. Currently there are licensing fees if you want to get your chip certified for USB or use the USB logo on your devices but they're relatively cheap and you can buy other people's USB chips super cheap.\n\nUSB was created when Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel got together in 1994 and decided they wanted a common connector that most things could connect to. Those were the powerhouses of the day, when they all decided they liked this and wanted to use it then it was going to show up very quickly with Microsoft adding software support for it to windows, and the rest pushing the hardware. \n\nHDMI is a similar deal, created by Hitachi, Panasonic, Phillips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson, RCA, and Toshiba. So that's like 85% of the TV and monitor market right there. They built it off the already widely accepted DVI standard which made adoption a lot easier"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
xizy3
|
why is it often difficult to give up a bad habit, despite the obvious advantages it would bring?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xizy3/eli5_why_is_it_often_difficult_to_give_up_a_bad/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c5mrv2b",
"c5mwilv"
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text": [
"The human brain is wired for instant gratification. This goes back to the early (pre-civilization) days of humanity. If early humans saw something that would be beneficial (food, opportunity to mate), they didn't wait around; they did the beneficial thing ASAP because the future survival was uncertain. The brain rewards these beneficial actions with release of certain chemicals like dopamine, which makes you feel good so you'll do it again. As time went on and civilization progressed, man gained more time for leisure activities. These leisure activities also trigger a pleasant response in the brain (release of dopamine), but they no longer were just things required for survival; they were and are just things people like to do (smoking, over eating, etc.) So even though humans are intelligent enough to perceive the benefits of dropping a bad habit, the brain is still hard wired to encourage going for instant gratification. Fighting this instinct is what we call self discipline.",
"Hard to ELI5, but to add to the other comments, Charles Duhigg recently wrote a book called The Power of Habit which, needless to say, addresses giving up bad habits. \n\nOne of the earliest things he mentions is that bad habits can't be eliminated at all, rather they can only be changed. \n\nHabits come in loops, according to Duhigg:\n\nCue --- > Routine --- > Reward\n\nBoredom --- > Eat a Cookie --- > Feel good\n\nHe argues that habits can be changed (or created, for that matter) most commonly by switching up the routine part of the loop.\n\nBoredom --- > Talk to a coworker --- > feel good, no longer bored. \n\nThis is obviously a mild 'bad habit', but it can be applied to all habits if you really dig. \n\nFurthermore, he talks about the aspect of \"craving\", which drives the whole process. The 'trigger' of the cue and the 'craving' are presumably linked to the release of dopamine flowdeluxe has already mentioned. \n\nTake for example the process of brushing one's teeth with toothpaste. While it might seem that that age-old habit grew organically, it was actually pretty much manufactured by ad men. \n\nIn a nutshell, they drew up billboards that said something along the lines of \"rub your tongue along your teeth - can you feel that film? Our toothpaste cleanses the film away!\" - Sub consciously, this created the \"Cue\", as most people would lick their teeth and 'feel' the film, would proceed to brush their teeth 'routine', and get the reward of the film-less smile. As for the Craving? This is pretty interesting actually. Smells, tastes, and that 'fresh bubbly foaming menthol feeling' we get post brush are totally unnecessary in terms of having a clean mouth, but nevertheless it creates a craving for a feeling that we equate with cleanliness. There are several examples of companies and services exploiting this behavior, and it's very interesting to learn just how much we don't know about what other people really know about our behavior. \n\nSo what about people who have seemingly quit a bad habit forever, such as quitting smoking cold turkey? My guess is that they, without making a conscious decision to do so, made changes that mimicked the changing of routines and rewards. \n\nSo to answer your question that was pretty much already answered previously, it's hard to stop a bad habit because it's pretty much 'impossible. \n\nedit: spacing"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
b1zxi4
|
why does rubbing vick’s vapor rub on your chest help a chest cold? i did it last night and woke up feeling tons better but i don’t understand how.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b1zxi4/eli5_why_does_rubbing_vicks_vapor_rub_on_your/
|
{
"a_id": [
"eipblnk",
"eipd5ak"
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text": [
"The menthol can temporarily constrict the vessels in your nasal passages which = decreased congestion. This effect is very mild, but having slightly less congestion over night while the inside of your nose is \"still\" (no sniffing, lighter breathing) can help you feel better the next morning",
"As an interesting aside (interesting? gross? yes? both?)....Vicks Vaporub can also help reduce/clear toe fungus....but you have to use it on your toes, won't help on your chest. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2o62qm
|
why do nordic countries and "the west" seem so much better off than most countries in the southern hemisphere?
|
Seems counter-intuitive to me. Civilization was basically started in Africa and the Middle-East, so one would assume that they would have a head start on the peoples who settled Europe and the Americas. They also have favorable weather and very fertile lands for the most part (deserts notwithstanding). Up North, it's shitty weather, the ground is frozen for some part if not most parts of the year. Europe basically destroyed itself twice in the 20th century and yet they do well today. One could point towards ethnic/religious tension, but that is also true in the Balkans and they found a way to finally make things work. I know all about colonialism and neo-colonialism, but how did the European powers manage to conquer and enslave the whole of Africa in the first place when the Africans had lived there for thousands of years. I'm not trying to start a racial argument but I think it's a puzzling question on many levels. thoughts?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o62qm/eli5_why_do_nordic_countries_and_the_west_seem_so/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cmk1qor"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"The book [Guns, Germs, and Steel](_URL_0_) attempts to answer this exact question.\n\nThe ELI5 answer is...\n\nEurasia is a huge continent that runs East to West. This means \n\n* all these people and land experienced the same climate. They can pursue agricultural similarly, what works in one place can work elsewhere as well.\n* There were big domestic animals that could do work\n* There was nothing preventing the exchange of knowledge.\n\nThe Americas (and Africa) on the other hand, run North/South.\n\nSo agriculture is not universal along the land mass. There are also geographic features that made it difficult for people to travel to far off places and share knowledge. Finally, the Americas lacked large mammals suited for domestication.\n\n---\n\nSome additional things to think about.\n\nThe Chinese were far more advanced than Europeans, BUT... when they started spreading out and exploring the world (long before Christopher Columbus, and in much bigger ships) the emperor of China ordered everyone back, because he realized that his bureaucracy could not rule further than mainland China.\n\nBefore the Pilgrims arrived in North America, there were thriving societies with far more advanced civilizations than we previously believed. A plague wiped out 10s of millions of people, leaving a small fraction of the previous population. Enough time had passed for structures to be overrun by nature (hiding them), but road ways and agricultural lands were still open enough to make things easier for the European settlers."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel"
]
] |
|
dmqglx
|
how is it possible for someone to have to serve a sentence in prison well passed a human's life expectancy?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dmqglx/eli5_how_is_it_possible_for_someone_to_have_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"f540hpz",
"f541bq0"
],
"score": [
4,
2
],
"text": [
"The sentence is automatically ended when the person dies. But the extra-long sentence has some purposes:\n\n1. Sends a strong message\n2. Ensures that even if the sentence is later reduced (say, by half, in a parole hearing) it's still a life sentence",
"Good question. Turns out there is a good reason for senencing people to hundreds of years. \n\nNot many people know that a \"life\" sentence does not mean actually your whole life. In some states a life sentence is 25 years. Tennessee makes it 51 years and there is constant argument that it is too long. Regardless, a person can be sentenced to \"life\" and walk free after 25 or 51 years. So if a person has committed multiple crimes, say dozens of rapes. they can be sentenced to 15 years for each count, and the years add up to over 100 years. Then even with time off for good behavior, they will never get out. it's the way to make sure they don't."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1jmw6o
|
how and why are chinese hackers sponsored and working for the chinese government attacking the united states?
|
From my understanding these aren't rogue groups but actually some form of government workers. How is this not an act of war? Maybe I just don't get it. What type of information are they stealing? My best guess would be information on new technologies so they don't have to spend the billions we do on R & D.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jmw6o/eli5_how_and_why_are_chinese_hackers_sponsored/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cbg8xdm"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Chinese corporate espionage costs billions a year. They steal designs from Boeing and other corporations that sell to the government, so they can both engineer their own and know what they are up against. Cyber warfare was used by the US in a similar manner, and exactly as we were warned, it set a precedent that this does not constitute overt acts of war. Now that this has become more commonplace nations want to set guidelines for cyber warfare like a Geneva convention. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
69rvg7
|
what stops people in the patent office fron rejecting an idea and patenting it for themselves?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69rvg7/eli5_what_stops_people_in_the_patent_office_fron/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dh8v4ak",
"dh94jjz",
"dh98n37"
],
"score": [
239,
34,
5
],
"text": [
"If they patent it themselves, aside from the difficulties they would have in explaining it to others or higher ups at the office, the original claimant can present his receipt and dated file that shows exactly how and when he came up with the idea, the implementation, and the submission date/time. \n\nThese two would be more than enough for the immediate firing of that clerk.",
"There is a law against it, in the US at least.\n\n > Officers and employees of the Patent and Trademark Office shall be incapable, during the period of their appointments and for one year thereafter, of applying for a patent and of acquiring, directly or indirectly, except by inheritance or bequest, any patent or any right or interest in any patent, issued or to be issued by the Office. In patents applied for thereafter they shall not be entitled to any priority date earlier than one year after the termination of their appointment.\n\n_URL_0_",
"When you register a patent, you are simply declaring when you developed the idea. The application that was rejected will still be recorded, and this will be enough proof that the actual registered patent came after the original.\nThe same principal applies with prior-art. Proving that a thing was a thing prior to the patent will invalidate the patent.\nThe big trick with patent trolls is that they make it expensive enough to fight the patent that simply paying is the cheaper option.\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s309.html"
],
[]
] |
||
69pl9u
|
where do the mice/cockroaches come from when we leave food out? how does it attract them?
|
I never understood where they magically came from. Are there colonies of rodents and pest waiting for us to drop food so they can come out?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69pl9u/eli5_where_do_the_micecockroaches_come_from_when/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dh8ep6q",
"dh8m5up"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"They have very sensitive smell and they're in the neighborhood already looking for food. If you leave food around they're going to notice it and spend more time in the area.",
"The other day a cockroach popped out of my bathroom sink drain when I turned the water on. It has happened twice since I first noticed it. So I now suspect they enter the house through the drain and vent holes in the sink because this bathroom seems to have more roaches than anywhere else in the house."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
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