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31stah
|
why did this battery blew up like a balloon? [youtube video link inside]
|
_URL_0_
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31stah/eli5_why_did_this_battery_blew_up_like_a_balloon/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cq4mwsi"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Broke through the outer layers, exposing the lithium to the moisture in the air, which caused a chemical reaction causing it to blow up like a balloon with hydrogen gas."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://youtu.be/fkP-b1ADvbk?t=3m40s"
] |
[
[]
] |
|
37wx1w
|
what would it be like to have an extra chromosome?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37wx1w/eli5what_would_it_be_like_to_have_an_extra/
|
{
"a_id": [
"crqgc9b",
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],
"score": [
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2
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"text": [
"You'd have Down's Syndrome probably. That's what causes it, an extra chromosome on your 21st pair of chromosomes.\n\nOr you might have a disorder of sexual development or be intersex. There's a few variations here. You can be 47XYY, meaning you're a male with an extra Y chromsome, this one is actually mostly harmless but people with it are usually taller than average. Or you can be 47 XXY, which is where you have a penis and testicles but also have some female sex characteristics like reduced body hair and breast growth people with this disorder, called Klinefelter's Syndrome, are sterile. And lastly you can have 47 XXX, which results in anatomically normal females but with usually a few developmental issues like dyslexia and delayed speech acquisition, and also sometimes increased height. ",
"It depends which chromosome. There are only a few chromosomes that you can survive having 3 of. Having 3 of the 21st chromosome is often survivable, and that person has Down's Syndrome. Having 3 sex chromosomes (XXX, XXY, XYY) is survivable but you may have some problems. If you are XXY, you will be male but may be sterile and may have breasts and a few other feminizing issues. If you're XYY you may be totally healthy, though there are some indications that you may be particularly aggressive, unusually tall, wide shouldered, and have a lot of acne. You can also have trisomy 18 (Edwards Syndrome), which is usually fatal. Some can live longer but die in childhood. Former senator Rick Santorum has a daughter with trisomy 18 who has been able to survive quite a long time though is often ill. Trisomy 13, 9, 8 and 22 also exist, but are generally quickly fatal, if not before birth, than shortly afterwards. Other trisomies can happen in utero but generally the fetus naturally aborts early in the pregnancy."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
65390h
|
how it came about using 8 to be interchangeable with all single digit numbers
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65390h/eli5how_it_came_about_using_8_to_be/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dg749x8"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Do you mean in a digital clock?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
kfaga
|
why can't we play xbox or ps games on a pc?
|
Software restrictions? Hardware restrictions? Both?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kfaga/eli5_why_cant_we_play_xbox_or_ps_games_on_a_pc/
|
{
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"text": [
"Whenever you see a game that is released for multiple platforms, you can be sure that most of the source code is identical from version to version. The developers write the \"core\" of the game - stuff like how enemies behave, what happens in level 2 when you throw the red switch, that sort of thing - and then things get complicated.\n\nThe real difficulty is that each platform sets different expectations about how the game should work - for instance, 360 games are expected to mute their in-game music if the user starts listening to their own music using the console. PC games are expected to be able to run in a window alongside other apps.\n\nWhat happens is that the developer makes the core of the game, including a graphics engine with different settings that can be tuned, probably with both controller and keyboard/mouse support. Then they write a bunch of code specific to each platform - xbox-specific code to integrate with xbox live, PC code to integrate with Steam or with some other windows-only feature. They might even have to write platform-specific \"patches\" for the game core to work around bugs that are only found on one platform.\n\nThen, the developers compile the code into different \"builds\" - one for each platform. Each build includes the game core and all the stuff specific to the targeted platform. It might also do things for consoles like lock down the graphics settings to some defaults that have been tuned for performance. \n\nOnce compiled, the game code will only run on the target platform, and nothing else, for two reasons:\n\n1) It assumes the existence of all the platform-specific hardware and operating system functions, and will crash out if they're not present.\n2) It's compiled to run on the processor used by the target platform. This is a general computing thing and isn't limited to games.\n\nAny DRM being used is usually applied as part of the publishing process, not as part of the overall game development process.",
"A very simple analogy for this would be languages. \n\nXbox only understands English \nPS3 only understands French \nPC only understands German\n\nNow if you give your PC a disc from Xbox it can't understand it, it's speaking a completely differently language.",
"Whenever you see a game that is released for multiple platforms, you can be sure that most of the source code is identical from version to version. The developers write the \"core\" of the game - stuff like how enemies behave, what happens in level 2 when you throw the red switch, that sort of thing - and then things get complicated.\n\nThe real difficulty is that each platform sets different expectations about how the game should work - for instance, 360 games are expected to mute their in-game music if the user starts listening to their own music using the console. PC games are expected to be able to run in a window alongside other apps.\n\nWhat happens is that the developer makes the core of the game, including a graphics engine with different settings that can be tuned, probably with both controller and keyboard/mouse support. Then they write a bunch of code specific to each platform - xbox-specific code to integrate with xbox live, PC code to integrate with Steam or with some other windows-only feature. They might even have to write platform-specific \"patches\" for the game core to work around bugs that are only found on one platform.\n\nThen, the developers compile the code into different \"builds\" - one for each platform. Each build includes the game core and all the stuff specific to the targeted platform. It might also do things for consoles like lock down the graphics settings to some defaults that have been tuned for performance. \n\nOnce compiled, the game code will only run on the target platform, and nothing else, for two reasons:\n\n1) It assumes the existence of all the platform-specific hardware and operating system functions, and will crash out if they're not present.\n2) It's compiled to run on the processor used by the target platform. This is a general computing thing and isn't limited to games.\n\nAny DRM being used is usually applied as part of the publishing process, not as part of the overall game development process.",
"A very simple analogy for this would be languages. \n\nXbox only understands English \nPS3 only understands French \nPC only understands German\n\nNow if you give your PC a disc from Xbox it can't understand it, it's speaking a completely differently language."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
56lwzo
|
why does our eyelids form crystal like substances while we sleep?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56lwzo/eli5_why_does_our_eyelids_form_crystal_like/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d8kcv9r"
],
"score": [
31
],
"text": [
"Tear ducts lubricate the surface of the eyes occasional dust and other minute particles reach the surface of the eye, these are then blink washed away a bit like a windscreen wiper. This material then accumulates at the edges where some of the liquid evaporates leaving behind the solid material."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
6b0opu
|
why do humans like to sleep on soft surfaces such as memory foam? how does this fit into survival?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b0opu/eli5_why_do_humans_like_to_sleep_on_soft_surfaces/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dhiuqwc"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Lol memory foam is a bad example, we used to sleep on gathered leaves.\n\nMost animals prefer to sleep on soft things because hard, uneven surfaces will press into us and cause pain. Animals often still lie on flat hard surfaces because their fur cushions it, but humans are just skin with various prominent bones poking at the skin. Lying on flat hard surfaces hurts for us, especially for sleeping."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
7cdbep
|
how are there so many million dollar homes in california if the median income is only about $70k?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7cdbep/eli5_how_are_there_so_many_million_dollar_homes/
|
{
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"text": [
"It should but it doesn't. Australia is the same. I'll never be able to afford a house here.",
"Because most people in the area aren't selling their houses, but a lot of people want to buy. If there's more people willing to spend a million dollars on a house than there are houses for sale, then you end up with a ton of houses worth a million dollars and a lot of people who can't afford to buy a house.",
"It's a complicated topic and I'm no economist, but there are certainly a few factors at play here that I'm aware of. \n\nReal estate is usually a safe investment. Back when the Great Recession hit, national banks dropped their prime lending rates to encourage investment in capital. People chose to invest in real estate, and they started buying homes they previously couldn't afford. A lot of people also began basing affordability on dual incomes, as opposed to a single income as they did in the past. As urban areas began to gentrify, this pushed up their property values. Meanwhile, developers have been unable to build fast enough to meet the huge surge in demand.\n\nSpeculators also began jumping in on the market. A lot of foreigners have been buying up investment properties in Canada and the USA. The Chinese are best known for this practice, particularly on the West Coast. The PRC government limits how much they can invest through traditional channels. So it's led to real estate being commodified over there, which has spilled over to other countries where wealthy Chinese do business. A similar phenomenon has been seen on the East Coast with Indian and Arab investors, largely for the same reasons. \n\nThe thing with these investment properties is they're actually worth more completely empty. They can be converted back into liquid assets (cash) more quickly than an occupied unit. But it's exacerbating the supply problem by creating artificial shortages. You still have this huge demand for people who want homes to actually live in, but a lot of choice units are owned and just sitting vacant. Again causing prices to rise. \n\n",
"California has 2 policies driving the increase in prices; \n \n* Prop 13 means that the longer you live in a home, the lower (in real terms) the property taxes you pay. This encourages people to sell homes far less frequently which restricts supply. \n* Zoning regulations in the most in demand parts of California restrict developing enough homes / apartments for the growing population. This restricts supply further. \n \nIf you restrict supply of homes in an otherwise growing economy, the prices will rise. Basic economics. It hurts the middle class and lower class the most. Ironically, these policies are positioned as left side of politics, but impact the least fortunate the greatest.",
"Part of the problem in California specifically is that the cost of building new properties is *astronomical*. Due to worries about gentrification or ruining the \"culture\" of areas, getting permission to make new buildings can be extremely draconian, taking months just to get permission to build, so the existing properties are becoming more and more valuable because getting new ones is so cost-prohibitive. \n\nI've spent like a half hour trying to find this really in depth article I read, but haven't had any luck, sorry."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
7nyqqp
|
if i put a light bulb on a very sensitive weighing scale and turned it on, will the bulb weigh more?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nyqqp/eli5_if_i_put_a_light_bulb_on_a_very_sensitive/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ds5ic1p"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"No. It will weigh the same. Technically speaking if it runs long enough it can hear up the gas inside it and maybe take an infinitesimally small weight off the scale but its mass will be the same."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
176b23
|
wet dreams
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/176b23/eli5_wet_dreams/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c82lwio"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"men are constantly producing sperm. if too much sperm builds up in the testicles then the body releases it at night, usually triggered by an erotic dream. a solution to wet dreams is masturbation, to \"clean the pipes\""
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1ysymi
|
selling "futures"
|
I don't really understand the whole "selling futures" thing when it comes to economics. To me all I ever hear sounds like one big scam to ruin any competition to change anything for the better.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ysymi/eli5_selling_futures/
|
{
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"cfnginu",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"You're selling goods that will be presumably made later. If I'm a farmer I want to know I can sell my crop before it rots in the silo or whatever so I might sell my crop of corn before it's even matured yet just to make sure I will sell all of it.\n\nThe benefit to the farmer is knowing that they'll sell and for how much, and the benefit for the buyer is knowing they have a certain amount they'll receive and at what cost. \n\nWorking it out when the corn is sitting on the stalk waiting for harvest, and especially working it out when it's harvested and sitting around, can be a bit hectic. ",
"Futures are much more a finance term than an economics term. \n\nFutures are just a promise to deliver something at a future date. Almost all business contracts are like future contracts in that they settle in the future. Futures markets just standardize the terms so that many people can participate. \n\nSo for example a futures contract might be to deliver 5,000 bushels of wheat in August. A farmer could sell 20 contracts and plan with knowledge that his revenue will be relatively fixed. A baker could buy 5 contracts in August, November, February, and May and plan knowing that he only needs warehousing space for 25,000 bushels of wheat and what his grain prices would be for the year. A speculator can buy from the farmer and sell to the baker because he can compare the two prices with the cost of holding 80,000 bushels of wheat. \n\nIn this way everyone who trades can be made better off (and people who would be made worse off don't trade). ",
"Suppose there's two persons: Mary Baker and John Farmer. Mary's a baker, John's a wheat farmer. Therefore, Mary often buys wheat, John often sells it.\n\nNow, John has two problems:\n\n1. How does he plan how much wheat to grow during the season? If he grows too much, he will have spent too much money on seed, fertilizer, etc. If he grows too little, he will not have earned as much money as he could have.\n2. Suppose he makes his plan, grows the wheat, but then at when it's ready, the price of wheat has dropped a lot. In this case, he may lose money—or at least not make the profit he expected.\n\nMary also has a problem. She makes most of her money from wedding cakes. Everybody gets married in the same season, but they want to know the price of the cake six months before the wedding. But Mary doesn't know how much wheat will cost when she makes the cakes—so if she gives a quote with current wheat prices, and the price goes up, she may end up losing money.\n\nThere's a way to solve all of these problems in one shot: John and Mary come to an agreement where Mary will buy John's wheat 6 months from now, but at today's wheat price. This way, John knows how much wheat to grow and how much he will be paid for it, and Mary knows how much she will pay for her wheat as well.\n\nWell, futures trading is basically what you get when you recognize that this idea can be improved by making it work like sports betting:\n\n* We have a bookie (the futures exchange) that takes bets on the price of wheat—always taking a bit off the top as payment.\n* Mary figures out how much wheat she will need, and then she goes to the bookie and offers a bet that wheat prices will go up. The size of the bet is based on how much wheat she will need, and she wins or loses money proportionate to how far the price ends up from today's price. So now, if wheat goes up she loses on the cakes but makes up for it by the earnings of the bet. (If wheat goes down, she loses on her bet but spends less on the wheat for the cakes.)\n* John goes to the bookie as well, sees Mary's offered bet, and accepts the other side of it—he bets that wheat prices will go down. He uses the amount of Mary's (and other people's) bets to plan how much wheat to grow. That way he doesn't grow too much wheat, and if wheat prices actually go down, he makes less on his wheat but wins it back from the bet.\n\nSo that achieves the same thing as the first solution, but Mary and John didn't even need to know about each other—they just deal with a common third party (the bookie/futures exchange).\n",
"Futures means you sell something at a later date. It allows people to guarantee a future sale at a certain price and thus allows them to plan ahead."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
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[]
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|
a0lzte
|
why does latin america have mestizos while places like the us/canada don't have much? why haven't white settlers in other places intermixed heavily with the natives like latin america?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0lzte/eli5_why_does_latin_america_have_mestizos_while/
|
{
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"text": [
"Well it’s simple, in the us, the settlers killed and drove off the native Americans. Mexico and further down, the Spaniards raped them",
"In Canada we have a very large Métis population and Métis were a French-Native mix. There were also English-native mixes but due to the English gaining possession of Canada they didn't form their own identity like the Métis did.\n\nSo while we don't have mestizos which are Spanish-Native mixes we do have our own mixes.\n\nEdit: I'm not certain if there are any groups with their own identity in the states however it also had colonists mating with natives. ",
"It’s due to the ‘one drop rule’... originally practiced in the United States. (Can’t comment on Canada).\n\nWhile the Spaniards who colonized Mexico, Central and South America had the casta system which categorized different races and the races of their offspring by different combinations of mothers and fathers (races). \n\nWhile the casta system was clearly racist, it did provide a way for those in the so-called ‘lesser’ races to ‘improve’ their standing in the casta system. Even allowing for respected citizens although physically of obvious mestizo or other combinations of races to ‘improve ‘ or alter their place in the casta system through ability/good works/social standing.\n\nMeanwhile in the United States slavery was going on and having even one black grandparent or a great great grandparent or the like would brand you as black. \n\nThat’s the one drop rule in a nut shell. A system that led to white US citizens today having very low levels of native or African American genetics while Mexicans have around 40% Native American DNA."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
71wjdy
|
with so many end of the world prophecies being consistently proven wrong, why do there continue to be true believers of the next end of the world prophecy?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71wjdy/eli5_with_so_many_end_of_the_world_prophecies/
|
{
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"dndzpu3",
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"score": [
2,
4
],
"text": [
"Playing the odds i guess. I mean that cant ALL be wrong right? RIGHT!?!?",
"Because the true believers aren't true believers that someone will predict the end of the world, as much as they are true believers of the charismatic individual that they follow who happens to prophecy the end of the world. Usually they are already sucked into the group, and it's not usually the same people that fall to it multiple times. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
40zzgf
|
how did some animals (lizards etc.) get an ability to regenerate limbs evolutionary?
|
I mean what was the process to aquiring that ability? And maybe the best example is Turbellaria for their amazing ability to divide.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40zzgf/eli5_how_did_some_animals_lizards_etc_get_an/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cyyk3se"
],
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"text": [
"All species have the capacity for regeneration, some to a higher extent than others. \n\nWhat you are referring to is called autonomy (self amputation) and in most cases it was developed as a defence mechanism that allowed an animal to escape by sacrificing a limb and then regrow a substitute one (albeit imperfect one in most cases, as they can and do regrow differently to the natural ones, e.g. Deformed in some way).\n\nA good example of this are certain lizards that will leave a part of their tail as a decoy (it will continue moving after becoming detached) to flee from a predator. The tail will grow back, however it will not have the same bone structure as the original one as it will be mostly replaced by cartilage. \n\nEdit: a very good example of this in humans is liver regeneration. A human liver will regenerate back to its original size even if 80% of it is removed. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
37ad33
|
why did so much technological innovation happen in the old world rather than the new world? was there anything stoping the native americans from inventing new things?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37ad33/eli5_why_did_so_much_technological_innovation/
|
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"text": [
"They did some things that weren't done in the old world, like [permanently changing the soil](_URL_0_). \n\nAs I understand it \"Old World\" refers to Europe, Asia, and Africa. New technologies flowed through these three continents and compounded upon each other through trade, which the Americas were isolated from for a long time. ",
"The best book I've ever seen on this is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. In short: Europe and Asia had the fortune of many domesticable species of animals and plants unavailable in the new world and much of Africa and Australia. This led to all sorts of advantages, including disease resistance as a result of animal agriculture which spelled doom for native peoples in the western hemisphere. But it all goes back to which plants and animals were found where a people lived, basically. In effect, luck of the geographical draw. ",
"Trade and population. Pretty much everyone in the old world could get to each other on foot if they walked long enough, and the ones that were isolated fell behind (like the British isles being full of primitive cave dwellers during the height of the Roman, Greek, Egyptian, etc empires). People who can get to each other trade, fight, talk, and generally generate and exchange ideas on a huge scale that grows exponentially the more people you have (see also: printing press, radio, TV, Internet. Each one sped up the exchange of ideas and the speed of technological advances significantly). The same is true of the new world, but the people here didn't settle all that close to each other and so never developed continental trade routes like the silk road. \n\nThe old world had an advantage over the new world because the people there settled down and created huge empires in a bunch of places (Europe, Asia, Africa, etc) whereas those in the Americas only had a few major ones pop up which were pretty isolated from each other. Those huge empires conquered most of the small tribal groups around them and had their tech and their social ways kept around to be constantly built on even if the empires fell (like what happened in Europe). That kept going on for so long that eventually the old world was way ahead of the few sparsely scattered groups in the new world, and were able to take them easily. \n\nEveryone invented new things, it's just that for every 1 guy in the new world inventing something on his own there were about 50 guys in the old world inventing something and then either talking about it with the other guys or using it to go kill them. That works out to a serious lead over time. ",
"As some have mentioned they lacked various benefits of easily domesticated animals and easily cultivated crops. This can't be the whole story though as Incas had lamas and various native groups had both maize, bison, and fish in abundance in various parts of North America. I think a huge part of it was the lack of major communication and trade between the different parts of the Americas. Due to geological or climate barriers such as mountains, jungles, and deserts the major civilizations of the Americas were mostly isolated. Without the free trade of ideas, technology, and culture the Americas had a huge disadvantage to the silk road civilizations of Europe and central and east Asia. Another large part of it is also the availability of natural resources. Not only the lack of a specific material but also the massive abundance of easier alternatives can prevent the development of technologies. However I would put the lack of continental trade is the biggest factor, especially when you look at what the Europeans were actually ahead of them in; transportation, warfare, and economic technology. Also the global circulation of people really helped to spread resistance to disease which is what really won the war for the European powers and is why Africa was not as easily conquered and the previous settling attempts by the Vikings failed.\n\nHowever I think a large part of it is that we never realized or knew about what discoveries they had made. It is estimated that up to 90% of the native population died from diseases brought by early explorers before any real exploration of the interior ever happened. Chronicles of the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto of Florida and the American Midwest reported the area being filled with different native tribes and settlements making travel difficult. Later expeditions found the areas mostly deserted and empty. Areas thick with different peoples, cultures, and developments were emptied and the remaining people may have had to abandon their developments in favor of more survivalist culture, or perhaps their advances were lost when the peoples who made them died. Remember that over 100 years passed between the very first explorers and the later colonization, a lot of time for whole tribes to just disappear.\n\nLuckily there are some things that we have been able to find since. One thing we know about them is that in many places they had superb carving and building techniques. You can see this from the [Puebloans](_URL_0_) to the [Inca](_URL_1_) (whose stone building is still standing in better condition than the Spanish built stonework added later which you can see in the picture). So in terms of architecture and carving some native cultures had even better tech than Europeans or maybe even Asians at the time. Also it seems that they had agriculture and animal cultivation down pretty well. Archaeological data shows that the population of bison in North America actually boomed after the first explorers had reached America. This has been interpreted as the native Americans had been keeping them in check through hunting and when the Native population declined they were left without any natural predator. Unfortunately for the bison they boomed just in time for the European settlers to hunt them to near extinction. There is also the presence of incredibly fertile soil, created and replenished by the bacteria that exists in it, known as biochar. It was found in small plots throughout the Amazon and often enough near the remains of ancient settlements. It has been hypothesized that those original natives created it but if not they knew enough to cultivate and distribute it to other places in the Amazon to grow their crops and, now that they are gone, to sustain and grow the rain forest itself. There are a lot of modern biotech companies attempting to copy and mass-produce biochar thinking it will revolutionize the agricultural industry and, due to it capturing a lot of carbon, help stop global warming.\n\nSo yeah, the natives were really behind in a lot of ways, but they definitely had lots of technological advances that rival the other civilizations of the world and even our modern technology. However the lack of trade between different cultural epicenters was the major disadvantage."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_Puebloans",
"http://www.herschelsupply.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Dobie_Peru_12.jpg"
]
] |
||
38uu6v
|
if price collusion is illegal, how does opec get away with setting the price of oil?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38uu6v/eli5_if_price_collusion_is_illegal_how_does_opec/
|
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"text": [
"because OPEC is not in america, or any other country that could regulate it. \n\nyou could sanction them I guess... boycott their oil. but \"we\" need the oil. ",
"It's illegal in the U.S. OPEC doesn't much care what we think and they control enough of the oil that no one has leverage. ",
"Price Collusion is illegal *in certain countries* like the US.\n\nOPEC is an international organization of governments... the laws you are thinking of don't apply to them, and nobody is too put out by them as a general rule because they have (historically) really sucked at being a cartel. \n\nThe members of OPEC are too back-stab happy to ever truly realize the potential of an oil cartel, so it's better just to let them be.",
"The don't set the price, Opec sets quotas for member states to meet. They control the price somewhat by controling supply vs the existing demand.\n\nPrice colluision is two companies agreeing to set a price above what the market should be. Debeers controls the supply of jewlery grade diamonds, and therfore affects the price. They don't set the price, but if it is too low they just limit inventory until it goes up. \n\nOPEC has a lot of influence on the price but their are other Non-OPEC producers who are also in the market. That limits the amount they can affect price. ",
"OPEC is really barely a coherent organization these days. They only have 5 of the top 10 oil producing nations as members -- and one of those (Iraq) could easily fall out of the top 10 due to their war."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
j2ok6
|
li5: can someone explain how someone can embezzle money from a city, state or company?
|
How does one go about embezzling money from a company or city (in the case of a corrupt mayor or city official).
Does this happen?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2ok6/li5_can_someone_explain_how_someone_can_embezzle/
|
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"text": [
"As a corrupt mayor or city official, you have some say as to where the budget is spent that year, and which companies/contractor you will hire. Embezzling can be as simple as hiring a company you own to do work for the city, taking bribes so that one (undeserving) company will get a contract over another, etc. ",
"I wrote a check to AAA Widgets. It's for a bunch of stuff that we go through all the time (Paper? Car repairs? Meat for your restaurant?). No one pays any attention to it. \n\nExcept.. I didn't. I wrote it to my buddy Bill who I owe some bar tab for. Check is written to AAA Widgets in the bank register, but Bill cashed the check (and it was written in his name).\n\nAccountant is going through the books. Shit, we buy stuff all the time from AAA Widgets. Nothing interesting about a $947.53 check here. \n\nSame theory, different execution. Jack got fired a few months ago. But that's been kept a secret and we have turnover all over the place. Who can keep track of all of these jerks?. Payment to \"Jack\" keeps going. No, I haven't seen him lately. He must be on that project out in Main Street.\n\nBut again.. the check isn't going to Jack. It's going to fuckin' Bill cause not only do I have a crazy bar tab but I made a few bets on games that I can't pay for.\n\nIf you're in control of the actual banking.. you're in control of a lot. It takes a LOT of effort to tie this shit together and figure out what actually happens.",
"Embezzling can happen many different ways. In short embezzling is the same exact thing as stealing but there is usually complex paper trails that cover tracks. It can be as simple paying for a non-business related dinner with your friends and then submitting the receipt for repayment to your company as a business expense. Or it can be as complex as what happened in Enron.\n\nI am not sure I can explain all the different ways you can steal and hid money from different entities, but I can explain what happened in Bell.\n\nCity of Bell:\n\nIn 2005 CA has a law that put a cap on salaries for council members for “general law” cities, this limits the amount of money a council member can make per year. This was put in place because the council members are they ones who set the salaries for themselves so it prevents corruption. \n\nIn Bell, they held a special election asking voters to approve a measure calling for to turn Bell from a general law city into a charter city.\n\nMaking the city a [\"charter\" city](_URL_0_) was sold as a move to give more local control by allowing the city to be governed with its own city charter rather than governed by state, provincial, regional or national laws. The special election was attended by less than 400 people.\n\nWhat was not told to the voters was Charter cities, by definition, makes them exempt from the state regulation of salaries. Since the measure lifted salary caps on council members, they went on to approve further drastic pay raises for Rizzo and themselves.\n\nI hope this helps\n\nEDIT: oops you changed your original question about Bell while I was typing :("
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_city"
]
] |
|
47nbrt
|
why do hospitals prioritise type specific blood transfusions, when type o works for everyone?
|
I believe o type is also the most common type in most countries
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47nbrt/eli5_why_do_hospitals_prioritise_type_specific/
|
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"text": [
"Type O makes up 47% of the world population.\n\nBut since not near enough people donate blood, there is a limited supply.\n\nThis means that they want to reserve Type O for people who can't survive long enough to have their type tested.",
"The other answer is good, but it's missing a major component of WHY we care what blood type you are. \n\nBefore I can dive into that, I'd like to cover some background information about blood, what's in it, and how typing works. \n\nFirst of all, the average male has around six liters of blood in their body. Three two liter bottles of coke; a surprising amount of blood to most. \n\nThat blood, contains multiple distinct components; which we can break down into cells, and proteins. \n\nCells, include the red blood cells, and the white blood cells, and platelets. Red carries oxygen, white is your immune system, platelets help with clotting. \n\nMost of the content of your blood, is water and various proteins. These proteins do a ton of things, but the one group of proteins that make this Blood typing thing important, are called Antibodies. Antibodies are proteins, released by your immune system that help it identify things that are not YOU (and kill them). \n\nType O blood is defined as lacking two markers; Marker A, and Marker B. Type O blood, has antibodies against both A and B. \n\nWhen you provide a blood transfusion of Type O blood, those Anti A/B antibodies come along for the ride, and start reacting with the patient's blood. \n\nThis reaction, is called blood agglutination; but conceptually means turning blood into a solid. \n\nUnder normal situations, you aren't giving large volume transfusions, so the antibodies against the patient are in the minority and it isn't a big deal; however if you are doing larger surgeries, where significant bleeding will occur, and lots of blood transfusions are possible, you have to match the blood type. This agglutination reaction since it's forming clots, also dramatically increases the risk of secondary complications involving clots plugging up healthy blood vessels, and damaging healthy tissue, eg-Stroke\n\n",
"We often think of blood as categorized two ways, the \"A B O\" system and \"Rh positive and negative\" system\" based on what antigens (or what I call \"immune system artillery\") a person has, but in reality [there are over 30 other ways that blood can be compatible or incompatible.](_URL_0_) It's just that the A, B, AB, O, and + or - are the most common triggers for a bad reaction. In reality, even when you match someone's AB blood with another person's AB blood, there are still other little factors that have to match up and even then, the person receiving the blood may still have a bad reaction (each time someone receives foreign blood, the body can react different ways and build up different defenses for one of those other 30+ triggers). Sometimes even O- blood from someone of a different ethnicity can trigger a reaction or have less efficacy in a recipient that has O- blood type. \n\nIt's my understanding that only in a very last ditch emergency situation should someone receive blood type from the \"universal donor\" if they themselves are not type O. Instead of \"universal donor\" I think they really should say \"less likely to automatically kill you than the other choices\" :P ",
"There are more on blood cells than the parts that Identify it ABO. The goal is to introduce as few different markers to the person as possible. Some emergencies require more than 1 donation of blood, some diseases require multiple trips to the hospital over their lifetime to receive blood.\n\nHere are other markers on red blood cells that white cells can identify as something that doesn't belong: D, C, c, E, e, K, k, Fya, Fyb, Jka, Jkb, M, N, S and s antigens \n\nThese are identifiers on the red blood cell that require typing for potential interactions of those who have received blood before. Those who are frequently on the receiving end of blood transfusions can develop immune system responses to those other identifiers of blood type, meaning even type O can kill them because they have antibodies against these other red blood cell markers"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_blood_group_systems"
],
[]
] |
|
1hebik
|
why are airlines allowed to so obviously collude on pricing?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1hebik/why_are_airlines_allowed_to_so_obviously_collude/
|
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"text": [
"They don't collude on pricing. There are frequently articles about one airline lowering a price and others following or not following. But it's much easier for them to respond to competitors because the product is a commodity (directly comparable) and the prices are published.\n\nEvery industry does the same thing; in the old days, this required constantly making phone calls to check prices, or sending people into stores. It's gotten a lot easier with the internet.",
"There is a difference between collusion and charging the same price.\n\nIf two gas stations are across the street from each other, if one drops their price a penny, good chance the other is going to follow. Collusion is when they both agree to raise the prices 10 cents higher.\n\nIn this day and age, when a simple web search can give consumers up to the second price, airlines can't afford to not match each other's prices."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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] |
||
250b3y
|
why birds congregate on telephone wires?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/250b3y/eli5_why_birds_congregate_on_telephone_wires/
|
{
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"text": [
"Bird feet are built for perching. Most birds have four toes, the first one pointed back, which makes them able to grip stems and twigs. When a bird perches, it tightens a tendon running the length of the foot. The tendon has projections that mesh together, pulling in the bird's toes and effectively locking them to the perch.\nBirds are social animals and like to interact with each other as they roost on power lines. Being up high gives the birds a good vantage point to see the surroundings and be on the lookout for predators and food sources.\nElectricity wires have high resistance they tend to warm up when electricity flow in them. The warmth in the wires tend to be much appreciated by the birds hence attracting the birds to perch on the cables\n\n\n\n",
"I also wonder if birds can sense electrical fields, as some of them rely on magnetic fields for navigation. Perhaps they like the effect? (good buzz)\n But yes, as previous comments point out, sitting on a wire will give birds unobstructed view around them (unlike being inside a tree top) thus making it easy to spot a would be predator."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2ibq6m
|
why are common viral infections so difficult to treat?
|
Influenza, Common Cold, etc. With modern medicine, why are they so difficult to cure and/or treat?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ibq6m/eli5_why_are_common_viral_infections_so_difficult/
|
{
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"text": [
"Bacteria are alive, you can kill them.\n\nViruses are not alive - they're little more than floating strands of DNA. Anything you do to destroy them will negatively affect all the other DNA in your body.",
"At a most basic level, viruses basically 'live' inside of our cells and use our cells own machinery to replicate. It's very difficult to target the viral replication mechanisms without targeting the cell itself. There are a few agents that manage somewhat. Most anti-flu drugs work by not allowing the flu virus to separate from the cell. \n\nBacteria, on the other hand, live outside of the cell and have their own replication mechanisms (note there are a few exceptions to this but it's not important in this discussion). It's much easier to design agents that selectively go after the machinery far different from ours.",
"Viruses can undergo processes called antigenic shift, and antigenic drift. Antigenic drift allows viruses to change their surface proteins (of themselves or of the cells they infect), which are what your immune system uses to identify them. If they can switch up their surface proteins (and they can, and do, all the time), your immune system no longer recognizes them as the same virus anymore, and it takes quite a bit of time for it to catch up, recognize the new face of the virus, and attack it. The antibodies your immune system makes are targeted to attack cells with a certain antigenic, or surface protein, profile. Antigenic drift is part of why we need a new flu vaccine almost every year. Antigenic shift allows viruses of different strains to combine and create basically a new virus, with different antigenic profiles as well as potential hosts. Antigenic shift is how \"bird flu\" and \"swine flu\" came to infect humans, and how the influenza that usually infects horses is now infecting dogs.\n\nFurther, viruses can often hide out and go dormant for a very long period of time. They do not grow or develop, and so they do not need to feed in order to survive. An example of this are many strains of herpesvirus, which can travel along your nerves and \"hide\" in ganglia (bundles of nerves) until the body becomes stressed or ill and the immune system is weak. In that moment of opportunity, the virus reactivates and causes clinical signs. As you can imagine, though, it is not very easy to get a virus out of a nerve or ganglion once it has hidden itself there, so these viruses are typically lifelong and without a cure.\n\n",
"Well, most antibacterial drugs are based on blocking or destroying certain crucial molecules that only exist in bacteria. Since they don't have very much in common with us, there are plenty of potential \"targets\" that we can affect without hurting our own cells in the process. Even for functions we do have in common, like producing DNA, they have slightly different enzymes from the ones we have, so we can often find drugs that stop the bacterial \"version\" without stopping ours.\n\nViruses, on the other hand, use our cells to do almost everything they need to do - all of \"their\" crucial molecules are really *ours*. To stick with the DNA example, we can't create molecules that selectively tell our enzymes to keep replicating our DNA but stop replicating the viruses' DNA - we can only stop them completely. Basically there are very, very few possible \"targets\".",
"The question is asking the wrong way round.\nViral infections that are difficult to treat are common - since they are difficult to treat."
]
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|
[] |
[] |
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[],
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|
zhxvb
|
why police e-fits are so rubbish and why they don't just use accurate sketches.
|
Is it just to do with money and time?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/zhxvb/eli5_why_police_efits_are_so_rubbish_and_why_they/
|
{
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"text": [
"\"Accurate sketches\" are *also* complete rubbish. You just don't know about that, because a lot fewer people are willing to seriously investigate traditional police investigative tools. (For instance, did you know that there has never been a large double-blinded study to determine the reliability of fingerprint matching?)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3pcck1
|
how can a bunch of 0's and 1's make a computer run?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pcck1/eli5_how_can_a_bunch_of_0s_and_1s_make_a_computer/
|
{
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"text": [
"You can count to any number using just ones and zeroes.\n1 is 1 \n10 is 2 \n11 is 3 Etc. \nIf you can count you can use that to represent words or instructions or anything you can talk about in english. \nYou can also do logic with ones and zeros.\nAND \nOR \nNOT \nExclusive OR \nIf you can do logic, you can do math.\nSince you can do math and words and images and anything, computers can do what they do with only 1s and 0s\n",
"They can't. The 0's and 1's are what is holding their current state.\n\nWhat makes the computer run, is\n\n- electricity (needed to sustain the computer's state as 0's and 1's, power the devices, and send out impulse signals)\n\n- transistors (wired together so that a particular state of a bunch of 0's and 1's coming to them, end up resulting in a meaningful state coming out of them.)\n\n- its internal clock (sending out impulses ordering to advance from the current state as input to the transistors, to the next step as output from the transistors.)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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||
3l6iy1
|
why can't i donate blood if i had hepatitis b
|
when I was around 6 yo I was diagnosed with hepatitis B, I don't remember much about it just my parents being worried all the time about my condition. however I was told later that I will no longer be able to donate blood and I really never asked why. I would like to know if blood gets cleaned over time or something. thanks everyone
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3l6iy1/eli5why_cant_i_donate_blood_if_i_had_hepatitis_b/
|
{
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"text": [
"While this happened a long time ago, and in all likelihood, you are now free of Hepatitis B, blood banks don't want to take the risk that they may infect someone else with hepatitis B. The nature of viruses is that they are very hardy. Just because you don't have symptoms doesn't mean that you aren't still infected. If you are still infected, the reason you don't have symptoms is because your immune system is controlling the spread of the virus and preventing symptoms. \n\nHowever, consider this example: If you were to donate blood, and that blood sample happened to be contaminated with Hep B, and that contaminated sample went to an anemic cancer patient (with a compromised immune system). That patient would have liver failure in no time (Hep B attacks the liver) because that patient would not be able to fight off the Hepatitis B infection. The overall point of this example is to emphasize that it isn't worth the risk for the blood banks. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
74qnf8
|
why do some hand lotions burn my hands?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74qnf8/eli5_why_do_some_hand_lotions_burn_my_hands/
|
{
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"do1487v"
],
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"text": [
"You are allergic to one or more ingredients in them. Start comparing ingredient list from ones that dint to ones that do to figure out what it is.\n\nFor example, I can't use products that have tree extracts. It will give me a rash. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
bblsyy
|
why is it said that the laws of physics are time-reversible?
|
Sure, if you have a video of objects orbiting a planet, you could just play it in reverse and do your calculations in reverse following the laws of gravity and motion, and it would all work out, and you couldn't tell which was correct and which was reversed. But not if one of those objects spiraled into the planet and impacted it, for example.
If you were to reverse *that*, there is no known mechanism that would make gravity work the opposite way, making the object shoot out spontaneously from the planet and into orbit.
Or perhaps I'm not understanding what they mean by "time-reversible"?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bblsyy/eli5_why_is_it_said_that_the_laws_of_physics_are/
|
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"text": [
"I feel that you have completely misinterpreted the meaning of time-reversible.From what souce did you learn about this?",
" > But not if one of those objects spiraled into the planet and impacted it, for example. If you were to reverse that, there is no known mechanism that would make gravity work the opposite way, making the object shoot out spontaneously from the planet and into orbit.\n\nThat is not gravity working the opposite way. Run a movie of that in reverse and you will still see gravity working exactly the same. Whatever made it \"spiral into the planet\" was not gravity, since gravity does not work that way - there is no such thing as a spiral orbit.\n\nSo what did happen? Perhaps the object collided with the atmosphere, imparting more and more energy to it, until it slowed down enough to hit the ground, sending out shockwaves. Play that in reverse and you see shockwaves converging on an object on the ground in precisely the right way to launch it into the air, then the random motion of hot air molecules coalescing into powerful winds that lift it up and out of the atmosphere into an escape trajectory.\n\nYou are right that that would never happen. But not because it's *impossible* - every step of that is basic physics behaving correctly, in terms of fundamental forces, conservation of energy, etc. It's just *spectacularly unlikely*. Random vibrations of every molecule on Earth *won't* just happen to align into a converging circular shockwave, but since they are *random,* they *could*.",
"To be clear: the way you \"time-reverse\" a process is you make all the final conditions initial conditions and then you replace t with -t.\n\nYou might be getting confused because I think you're translating \"the laws of physics are time-reversible\" to \"nature is time-reversible\". A more precise way to think of it might be \"the Newtonian mechanics of single particles are time-reversible.\"\n\nImpact craters, tacks, posters, and humans capable of tacking posters are not within the purview of the Newtonian mechanics of single particles, so you can't expect phenomena involving those things to be time-reversible.\n\nOnce you start talking about aggregates of many particles and considering them as somehow \"comprising\" a larger system, you're outside the domain of applicability of the rule. Thermodynamics and statistical effects begin to take hold in this case, and thermodynamics is definitely not time-reversible.\n\nIn fact, more of physics than just the Newtonian mechanics of single particles happens to be time-reversible, but they won't be useful for understanding the interpretation of the phrase.",
"The point is this: take a physical description of a system and play it in rewind. It is still a physical description of a system - nothing breaks.\n\nLet’s take a simple example than two planets colliding - let’s say open a bottle of perfume, and slowly but surely it evaporated into the room.\n\nIf you play a video of this in reverse - it’s still a perfectly valid physical system: all the perfume molecules move around the room like they would under the appropriate forces, until they perfectly reorganize in the bottle.\n\nSure, this is unlikely to happen. But it isn’t impossible. You could act such forces on each molecules to make them perfectly go in the bottle.\n\nThis is why we say physics is time reversible. The only law that says why this can’t happen (the second law of thermodynamics) doesn’t say its impossible - just that it’s really really really unlikely."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
comtyj
|
what's the difference between material evidence and circumstantial evidence, and why do lawyers get cranky about the latter?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/comtyj/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_material/
|
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"text": [
"Material evidence is direclty relevant evidence, as one would understand: it's proof that you commuted the crime, like a Security recording that cought you in the act. Circumstancial evidence are circumstances that point towards you, but aren't actual evidence, for example sirveilence showing you were close to the scene at the time of the crime, or you owning the same type of weapon that it was committed with. It points towards you as a perpetrator, but it could just as well be coincidence\n\nu/therealcase77 has a more accurately\n/better worded explanation.",
"Material evidence is a knife covered in blood they found on you after someone was stabbed. Circumstantial evidence is a video of you buying a knife a few days before the stabbing that you say you lost. \n\n\nThe first one is pretty straightforward, while the second one looks bad but may also be totally innocent (maybe you were buying a knife because you do constantly misplace them and just happened to do so a few days before).",
"Material is something directly evident that leaves no doubt as to its origin and its purpose in the crime committed. Circumstantial is something at a crime scene that may or may not have a purpose for being there a it relies on an inference to connect it to the crime. Lawyers would very obviously get cranky about the latter because it can’t guarantee guilt or innocence in a crime.",
"There are two main categories of evidence: Direct and circumstantial. Direct evidence is when a person witnessed the crime. (Eg “I saw Bob shoot Chris.”) Circumstantial evidence is when an inference is necessary to link the evidence to the crime. (Eg “I heard a gun shot, and then saw Bob running away.”) In this example, the witness did not see Bob shoot Chris, but the prosecutor infers that Bob fleeing the crime scene indicates Bob’s guilt.\n\nWhere people get confused is that TV misrepresents what “circumstantial” means. You can already see many of the posts here think “circumstantial” is somehow bad or inadequate. (Eg “Just because Bob was at the scene doesn’t mean he shot Chris.”) And that is exactly what the defense lawyer will argue. It is the jury’s job to decide how much weight a piece of evidence carries.\n\nImagine the suspect’s fingerprints were found at the crime scene. This is also circumstantial. It is possible the suspect was at the scene for an innocent reason at a different time. However, that evidence makes it impossible for the suspect to deny ever having been at the scene, and it is the prosecutor’s job to argue that it indicates guilt.\n\nOr you could watch the movie, “Twelve Angry Men.” The prosecutor finds a certain knife and introduces it as evidence, claiming that it belonged to the suspect. If so, that is pretty good evidence that the suspect committed the crime. However, another character finds a store near the crime scene that sold identical knives. This indicates that the evidence is of less value. \n\nBeing “circumstantial” has nothing to do with whether the evidence is weak or strong. It turns out MOST evidence is circumstantial and circumstantial evidence can produce a very strong certainty.\n\nSo what, then, is material evidence? Material is something the lawyer can introduce to the trial and retrieve for demonstration later. In the examples above, the fingerprint and the knife are BOTH material AND circumstantial evidence.\n\nThe reason lawyers “get cranky” about it is that, as I mentioned, circumstantial evidence must be interpreted. The prosecutor will argue that the evidence indicates guilt, while the defense lawyer will argue reasons that it may not."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
8oztup
|
what’s the purpose of the wooden slacks in between railroad lines? wouldn’t tracks work the same without them?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8oztup/eli5_whats_the_purpose_of_the_wooden_slacks_in/
|
{
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"text": [
"This is the sleepers as the rails are \"sleeping\" on the wooden or concrete support. They serve a few different purposes. Firstly they keep the rails parallel. The rails and ground can actually move a bit independently of each other and to prevent derailment it is very important that the two rails stay parallel. Secondly the sleepers distribute the weight of the rails and train onto a much larger area. The rails themselves have a very tiny footprint and will quickly sink into the ground if you drive a train over them. However the sleepers have a huge footprint and it requires a lot more weight to be able to push them into the ground.",
"they hold the tracks in place,you can also use concrete but they dont last as _URL_0_ they would not.",
"They hold the rails the right distance apart and anchor them to the ground. Especially around corners trains exert some sideways pressure on the rails as they drive over them. Without the ties there the rails would be free to move around, which would be bad for the train.",
"They are called ties. The steel rails are secured to them with heavy bolts, and the ground is usually filled in with gravel. Some ties are also made of steel for portions of the track that need extra durability or precision, like turns or switches. \n\nRails need to be extremely straight and consistent in order for the train to travel efficiently with the minimum amount of disturbance. But trains also weigh hundreds of tons, which means that simply laying down rails on the ground would make them sink or move around under the pressure. Securing the rails to ties every few feet helps to keep the width of the rails consistent, and filling in the intervening space with dirt or gravel allows the track to absorb vibrations without shifting.\n\nEven so, the sheer forces involved are so great that railroad tracks need constant supervision by experts to make sure a misaligned rail doesn't cause an accident. Individual rails and ties are replaced often.",
"They're called [ties](_URL_0_) which probably gives you a good idea of their purpose.\n\nIf you just put the rails on the ground, they'd wobble around, sink, and be generally useless. Fastening the track to your ties keeps it in place & helps spread the weight around. The ties are partially buried in a bed of rocks, the [ballast](_URL_1_), that helps hold them in place, further spreads the weight & allows the tracks to drain properly.\n\nThere's other ways of building tracks, such as using a concrete foundation, but you can't just put rails directly on the ground and expect it to work.",
" > Wouldn’t tracks work the same without them?\n\nAs in placing the rails directly on the ground? they would quickly sink down, and move away from each other, any structure need a good foundation. \n\nYou need something for sure, but it doesn't necessarily need to be wooden slacks to hold the rails, but (gravel to keep the growth away and) wood placed sparesly to keep the rails in place is actually really cheap compared to most other kinds of foundations. And when you need a foundation that runs hundreds of kilometers, the costs can quickly run away."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"long.no"
],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_tie",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_ballast"
],
[]
] |
||
48q9rj
|
why does it always seem like the world is falling apart?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48q9rj/eli5_why_does_it_always_seem_like_the_world_is/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d0lnpdg"
],
"score": [
10
],
"text": [
"Information isn't just at your fingertips, it's being shotgun blasted into your retinas. \n\nYour attention span is a hot commodity, so everyone with something to say is going to radicalize it so you take notice. \n\nWe live in the most peaceful time in history, we have more control over diseases and better healthcare than mankind has ever known. \n\nDon't worry, don't believe the hype. Go on and enjoy your life. \n\nIf need be, stay off social media and go out of your way to avoid the news for a few days... You'll feel better. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
43lowz
|
why are most lawyer offices come in duos? 2 lawyers working together in one office?
|
Every ad I've watched in the US and in Canada shows lawyer office's names with 2 names, 2 lawyers.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43lowz/eli5_why_are_most_lawyer_offices_come_in_duos_2/
|
{
"a_id": [
"czj4dm4",
"czj5735"
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text": [
"Running a law office adds a healthy number of fixed costs (like a library and a receptionist, a high volume copier, etc) but one lawyer usually does not come close to fully utilizing these services. So two lawyers partnering can share these costs, each paying half, with plenty of capacity for each and increasing the income of both. \n\nTechnology can reduce their dependence on some fixed costs, but it's not perfect, and isn't always a good substitute (an attorney with a virtual assistant in another nation might be just as effective but looks cheap to clients who may pass them over for another option). ",
"Why do two broke young people just out of college become roommates? It cuts the costs on all the stuff they'd have to pay for anyway."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
2061mx
|
in the special relativity thought experiment "the twin paradox", what does each twin see happen to the other twin during the experiment?
|
In the special relativity thought experiment of the twins, where one twin flys away at near the speed of light and returns to his much older twin still on Earth, the Earth twin sees the space twin's time slow down when he is moving really fast away, go normal speed while space twin is turning around, and slow down again when he is returning, thus the Earth twin is older. From the space twin's perspective, shouldn't he see the same thing and expect to be the older twin?
I get that the space twin's time is the one that "actually" goes slower because he is the one being accelerated, but I just can't figure out when during the space twin's journey he would see his twin grow old really fast, because the space twin shouldn't ever see the Earth twin's light clock tick away faster than the light clock on his ship.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2061mx/eli5_in_the_special_relativity_thought_experiment/
|
{
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"cg05b2w"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Imagine that the two twins send each other a picture of themselves every minute at the speed of light, so both twins can track their twin's aging process.\n\nIf Space Twin is close to Earth and practically stationary, the twins will send and receive their pictures practically simultaneously. Now what happens when Space Twin travels away from the Earth?\n\nAs Space Twin approaches a good fraction of the speed of light, Earth Twin will notice Space Twin's pictures are coming much slower than before. This is because, although Space Twin is sending them one minute apart, each one has to travel an extra distance which delays their arrival. Near the speed of light the distance you can travel in a minute becomes very significant and so the time between retrieval of pictures will be very delayed. However, from Earth Twin's perspective, he is still sending his pictures at a steady one-per-minute rate. So from this perspective, Earth Twin *observes* his twin aging slower, while he is still aging at the same rate he was before his twin left.\n\nNow let's consider Space Twin's perspective. Despite the fact that he is travelling extremely fast (and presumably has better things to do) he is still sending a picture a minute. However, he discovers that Earth Twin's pictures are arriving at a much slower rate than one-per-minute, for the same reason that his appear to arrive slower to Earth Twin. Therefore, from Space Twin's perspective it is *Earth* Twin who is aging slowly, while his rate of aging hasn't changed.\n\nNow what happens when Space Twin stops and heads back towards Earth? Suddenly all of the pictures from Earth Twin which he hasn't yet received will flood in, and from his perspective Earth Twin will begin aging at a rapid rate. Meanwhile, Earth Twin will not receive any extra pictures from this change of acceleration, so this is the exact point when their observations diverge.\n\nOn the return trip, Space Twin will receive the pictures slightly faster than he sends them, as will Earth Twin.\n\nWhen they meet up again on Earth, they'll discover that Space Twin received more pictures than Earth Twin because of the flood he received during his change of acceleration, and thus Earth Twin will have aged more during the trip than Space Twin."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3t5fr6
|
why do cows have hooves instead of feet?
|
This was [posted](_URL_0_) in [r/3amjokes](_URL_1_) and I was wondering if there is an actual explanation.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t5fr6/eli5_why_do_cows_have_hooves_instead_of_feet/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cx37n88"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Evolutionary adaptation and natural selection.\n\nYou ever spent your entire life wandering around rocky fields? It would make sense that the animals with the harder covering for their feet would suffer less infections and then be less likely to die off."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/3amjokes/comments/3t2ljl/why_do_cows_have_hooves_instead_of_feet/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/3amjokes/"
] |
[
[]
] |
|
7kzdfc
|
why is it that, when someone is passed out, we check for a pulse instead of just feeling their heartbeat through their chest?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kzdfc/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_someone_is_passed_out_we/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dric93m"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"It is a lot easier and faster to get to someone's hand, neck or wrist to feel for a pulse than through layers of clothes to put a hand on the chest."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
ed2c45
|
why do different animal species have similar anatomical structures?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ed2c45/eli5_why_do_different_animal_species_have_similar/
|
{
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"text": [
"Similar anatomical structures may be due to homology, which means the structure was inherited from a common ancestor that already had that structure. Humans and sharks both have hearts and two eyes because their last common ancestor did.\n\nSimilar anatomical structures may also be due to homoplasy, which means the structures independently evolved in each lineage. Hippos and alligators both have eyes and nostrils on the top of their head, independent adaptations to living mostly submerged in water.",
"Same technology stack. We all share mostly the same source code in our DNA. Cells work mostly the same. Skeletal structure has been optimized through trial and error over hundreds of millions of years and hundreds of billions of tweaks and changes. \n\nEverything comes from sharing 80+% or more of the source code and technology.",
"well animals had a very long time to be different shapes and sizes over a very long time. usually if a shape is bad they get eaten so the animals who arent that shape survive to be other shapes. some of these shapes simply work very well so at some point more than one animal was that shape and it worked really well so they kept it and didnt change shapes.",
"Convergent evolution. The animals with the best designed bodies are most likely to survive long enough to breed and pass on their genetics.\n\nAn example is ichthyosaurs, sharks and dolphins. All are built very similarly but they're not related. They're a reptile, fish and mammal respectively. But that design is great for streamlined swimming and attacking the prey they do. So the animals with those features naturally survived more than those without if their niche was eating the same fish sharks and dolphins do."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
510him
|
why do some things have no smell until heated?
|
For example, why can I not smell pop-tarts until I've put them in the toaster for a bit?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/510him/eli5_why_do_some_things_have_no_smell_until_heated/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d78c9lu"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"We smell things because a minute portion of the stuff gets evaporated into the air. Some things require more heat than others to start vapourizing before you smell them.\n\nFor example, a flower contains aromatic hydrocarbons that because gaseous at room temperature... so we always smell flowers. Your pop-tart would have to get fairly warm before you start smelling *it*. \n\nRelate this to things like plastic or wood that, once you can smell them, you know that they're probably *really* hot."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
34vpw2
|
why so often do movies and documentaries related to world war 2 focus exclusively on the ~6 million jews killed in the holocaust, but seem to neglect the slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally retarded, and others also sent to the death camps?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34vpw2/eli5_why_so_often_do_movies_and_documentaries/
|
{
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"text": [
"A few reasons.\n\n1) Jews were the most prominent group targeted. None of the other groups targeted have the same political power now; let alone in the 1940s\n\n2) Many of the other groups targeted are still subject to discrimination, and were back then too: Gypsies (Romany) are still discriminated against in parts of Europe; Alan Turing, who helped win WWII, committed suicide because he was homosexual, which Brittan wasn't okay with back then (US too); the mentally retarded still face discrimination, etc.\n\n3) No other group had the same number of people killed: There were 11million total deaths: 6 million were Jewish.",
"* 6M Jews\n* 2M Ethnic Poles\n* 270k disabled\n* 220k Romani\n* 200k Freemasons\n* 25k Slovenes\n* 15k homosexuals\n* 5k Jehovah's Witnesses\n",
"Well, a) they don't. See Bent, for example. Or A People Uncounted. B) there were more Jews than any other group who died in those camps--Probably more Jews than all the other groups combined. It specifically targeted Jews in a way that it didn't target the others. See the Warsaw Ghetto, for example. Part of the Holocaust, but not in the camps themselves."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
d4x5fb
|
if muscles get tired and need to rest, why is this not the case for sphincter muscles etc...
|
I fully appreciate that there are multiple different types of sphincter in the human body. These muscles seem to spend the vast majority of their time in contraction whilst only occasionally relaxing.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d4x5fb/eli5_if_muscles_get_tired_and_need_to_rest_why_is/
|
{
"a_id": [
"f0hgmrf"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Sphincters, generally speaking, can be either smooth muscle (like your intenstines) or striated muscle (like your heart). Both of these kinds of muscles can keep working, generally speaking, for as long as they need to keep working because they don't tire in the same fashion as skeletal muscle does. In striated muscle, it's because of the extra mitochondria inside of them that act to power the muscle, and in smooth muscle, it's because the rate of ATPase can be up to 100 times slower than in skeletal muscle. \n\n\nThe downside to being able to work so much more efficiently is that those types of muscles just aren't anywhere near as strong as skeletal muscle."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
n8l5i
|
what is the point of a zip code's four digit extension?
|
The regular five digit zip code will tell you exactly where it is already. What is the point of the extension?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n8l5i/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_a_zip_codes_four_digit/
|
{
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"text": [
"To provide an even more specific location. Some zip codes are huge. Some cross city/county/state boundaries. The +4 really helps.\n",
"EDIT: since other people did a better job of explaining like you're five, i went ahead and gave a more detailed explanation. Hope it helps provide a bit more information. I'll pretend you're a really smart five year old.\n\nIt's called a Segment Breakdown Code. As some people have already pointed out, zipcodes follow pretty standard practices: the first digit is the central sorting facility (of which there are 10), the next two digits are the distribution facility, and the last two are the local post office (generally, that is. Some post offices facilitate multiple zip codes).\n\nThe extra four digits in the zip code are actually for the sorting machines/software that the post office uses, and it actually breaks it down into the delivery order. This used to be important for a period of time due to the limitation in the machinery, but is fairly insignificant at this point since the machines have the capability to read the address on the letter and spray the letter with a barcode which contains the full zip.\n\nTl;dr: it's excess information that makes the letter easier to sort by machinery that places in delivery/route order.",
"I mean, it's the same as the point of having zip codes in the first place. It helps the post office narrow their search to an even smaller region.",
"Most big companies use +4 zip codes for their mailings because of discounted rates for presorted mail. Imagine you're AT & T and you have to send out 1000s of bills at once. If you presort your mailings, the post office has to do less work on their end, thus you get discounted pricing. you'll also see that horizontal bar code below or above the address; this is the zip code that machines can read.\n\nIf you send something like a birthday card, somewhere along the line, the zip code bar code with be added. The machines will read the handwriting and add the bar code. If the handwriting can't be deciphered by machine, someone will manually have to do it.\n\nELI5: You have 1000 houses all in the same area (zip code). Some company on the other side of the country has to send everyone in that zip code a letter. You Have a few options -\n\n1) throw all the letters in a nearby mailbox where they get mixed up with all the other mail in the box. USPS has to sort all of that mail by zip code. Once it gets to the destination, that local post office needs to sort that mail so that the mail deliverer has his mail organized to deliver to each home.\n\n2) you take the 1000 letters to the post office with a 5 digit zip code. This mail gets to the destination zip code more efficiently since the post office already knows the zip code. It's already sorted. The destination post office still needs to sort the mail for the mailman. \n\n3) you take the letters to the post office with a 9 digit zip code. As with #2, the mail gets to the destination post office. Since the mail is sorted by a 9 digit zip code, the mail is a lot easier to separate for the mailmen.",
"To provide an even more specific location. Some zip codes are huge. Some cross city/county/state boundaries. The +4 really helps.\n",
"EDIT: since other people did a better job of explaining like you're five, i went ahead and gave a more detailed explanation. Hope it helps provide a bit more information. I'll pretend you're a really smart five year old.\n\nIt's called a Segment Breakdown Code. As some people have already pointed out, zipcodes follow pretty standard practices: the first digit is the central sorting facility (of which there are 10), the next two digits are the distribution facility, and the last two are the local post office (generally, that is. Some post offices facilitate multiple zip codes).\n\nThe extra four digits in the zip code are actually for the sorting machines/software that the post office uses, and it actually breaks it down into the delivery order. This used to be important for a period of time due to the limitation in the machinery, but is fairly insignificant at this point since the machines have the capability to read the address on the letter and spray the letter with a barcode which contains the full zip.\n\nTl;dr: it's excess information that makes the letter easier to sort by machinery that places in delivery/route order.",
"I mean, it's the same as the point of having zip codes in the first place. It helps the post office narrow their search to an even smaller region.",
"Most big companies use +4 zip codes for their mailings because of discounted rates for presorted mail. Imagine you're AT & T and you have to send out 1000s of bills at once. If you presort your mailings, the post office has to do less work on their end, thus you get discounted pricing. you'll also see that horizontal bar code below or above the address; this is the zip code that machines can read.\n\nIf you send something like a birthday card, somewhere along the line, the zip code bar code with be added. The machines will read the handwriting and add the bar code. If the handwriting can't be deciphered by machine, someone will manually have to do it.\n\nELI5: You have 1000 houses all in the same area (zip code). Some company on the other side of the country has to send everyone in that zip code a letter. You Have a few options -\n\n1) throw all the letters in a nearby mailbox where they get mixed up with all the other mail in the box. USPS has to sort all of that mail by zip code. Once it gets to the destination, that local post office needs to sort that mail so that the mail deliverer has his mail organized to deliver to each home.\n\n2) you take the 1000 letters to the post office with a 5 digit zip code. This mail gets to the destination zip code more efficiently since the post office already knows the zip code. It's already sorted. The destination post office still needs to sort the mail for the mailman. \n\n3) you take the letters to the post office with a 9 digit zip code. As with #2, the mail gets to the destination post office. Since the mail is sorted by a 9 digit zip code, the mail is a lot easier to separate for the mailmen."
]
}
|
[] |
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[],
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] |
|
4s16vj
|
what is the difference between my computer's processor and ram?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4s16vj/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_my_computers/
|
{
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"A processor does the actual calculations like 2+2=4\n\nRAM is the memory that temporarily stores that value. Warrior.health = 20\n\nOpen up what ever programs you normally use, then open Task Manager. Under the performance tab, see how much ram is being used. If you have a lot of free RAM, you don't need any more and more will not help you. If most of the RAM is being used, more ram will help out. \n\nDepending on the age of your system, it may or may not be worth an upgrade. It may be better for a replacement. Go to /r/buildapc with your specs and they will point you in the right direction."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
7e62w7
|
why do some people sweat when in a cold place?
|
Title.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7e62w7/eli5_why_do_some_people_sweat_when_in_a_cold_place/
|
{
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"text": [
"Sometimes they are used to lower temperatures so what they consider hot is different from what you consider hot. \n\nSometimes they are in poor health so sweat easier than others. In fact sweating when not appropriate is a warning sign of a lot of different conditions including heart attacks. \n\nSometimes it is activity level. It does not matter how cold it is if you are active enough your body will start to overheat and you will sweat. This can actually be a major problem if you are caught out in the cold because after you stop being active the sweat on your body and clothes will cause you to cool down extremely rapidly and will increase the chances of hypothermia. ",
"They’re in menopause. Sweating “for no reason” is just a regular part of life for many menopausal women. Personally speaking, I sweat whether I’m burning hot or tooth-chattering cold. There is zero rhyme or reason."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
5upnaj
|
why are airline crash victims described as souls typically when most other deaths are described as lives or people?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5upnaj/eli5_why_are_airline_crash_victims_described_as/
|
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"text": [
"Do you have any proof of your claim? Reports of airline accidents involving deaths usually say \"X people died\" or \"X people lost their lives\" and don't usually say anything about souls.",
"Also souls is used in boat accidents",
"Airplanes during distress may be asked to \"say your souls\" in order to provide an accurate count of the number of passengers and crew. \n\nThis is related to nautical terminology that also relates persons as \"souls\".\n\nAirlines and naval vessels have many other areas of overlap in terminology. ",
"Commercial pilot here. \n\nWe use the term souls in flight planning and communications. Believe it derived from nautical use. ",
"souls meaning living persons. which is passengers and crew\n\nairliners carry corpses too and they're held as cargo, not passengers. \n\nwhen you have a crash and you end up with 100 bodies, you need to know how many actually died in the crash."
]
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|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
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] |
||
5e67ti
|
with technology growing and what not, why hasn't there been a phone battery that can last a week rather than a day?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e67ti/eli5_with_technology_growing_and_what_not_why/
|
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"text": [
"We can totally make a phone battery that can last a week. But what if it weighs a pound? What if it's half an inch thick? The market has spoken - the vast majority of people want to buy sleek, super thin phones, and as long as the battery can last through the day it's acceptable. \n\nIf you do want those things and don't mind the extra weight, there are many options for external battery packs.",
"There have been phone batteries that can last a week or so. Then the phones got more advanced and use the battery up more quickly.\n\nBy the time more advances are made in battery life, phones will have advanced more and use more power again.\n\nIf you really want a phone that can last a week you can get one. But don't expect it to do much more than call and text.",
"As we improve battery technology at a slow pace, two things also happen at the same time. \n\nMore powerful processors come out, eating the gains of efficiency from maturing smaller processes. \n\nManufacturers insisting on keeping the size of phones down, which limits capacity.",
"It is widely discussed that the rate of miniaturization/capacity and speed of charge have lagged what would be ideal to spawn a true technological revolution. Notably, it resists the exponential improvements we've seen in processor speed, memory capacity. In some ways we've become addicted to this sort of pace of improvements and expect it everywhere...just ain't happening here.\n\nTo be clear though, it is _not_ for a lack of trying. Battery research is a both huge in academia, huge in govt funding and huge in commercial research. It's just a _really tough problem_.",
"Phones are designed with the mass market in mind. What the most people want is what they get. And they don't want a phone with a battery that lasts a week. They want a phone that is a computer connected to the internet doing 100 different things all the time, and that also is very sleek. \n\nYou could have a fatter phone that would last a week and do less. But then if you tried to sell it, people wouldn't buy it - because everyone knows you can plug in your phone to charge when you sleep. And they'd rather have a phone that can do 'everything' when they are awake and then plug it in each night rather than a phone that doesn't do much and is heavy and bulky but only has to be plugged in once a week. ",
"Batteries got a lot better when we switched from nickel-cadmium to lithium ion batteries about 15 years ago. That change allowed for a much larger amount of energy to be stored in the same area. The problem now is that we've perfected Li+ battery technology and there's not much more we can do with it. Some sort of alternative energy storage medium will be needed to go much farther, but most people in the tech industry are thinking that's at least 5 years out.\n\nAs a rule, storing energy is really tough. Storing energy in a compact, portable form for use on demand? Even tougher.",
"What i notice about newer phones are the gimmicks that come with them, hardware wise. stuff we really dont need but its there, when i would rather have a battery that lasts for more than a day, they give me a touch sensor, and dual lens cameras.\n\nWith tech being made in more compact ways (Sleek books, Really Slim phones) why cant they create a Technology or the Technology to make a Battery Compact but **Can** last for more than a day or two. ",
"Instead of adding battery capacity, phone manufacturers are shrinking the battery and adding more components that draw power. The flip phone from 10 years ago could easily last a week with current batteries. When battery technology improves, they just shrink the battery to keep the same amount of capacity.",
"Most consumers are content with 1 day and just consider it a fact of life that you will recharge the phone daily.\n\nPre-smartphone, phones indeed could last a week.",
"As I understand it, we're approaching the maximum amount of electrical energy we can store with lithium ion batteries. \n\nSo, exempting a major revolution in the basis of how electricity is stored, we can't shove any more power into the current batteries. There is a very physical limit. Coupled with large lit screens, small computers with inefficient heat removal, and a need to constantly communicate with a far away tower, and that limited amount of electricity is going to be removed at a fairly rapid rate. \n\nAlso, batteries don't scale well, which means that just making them bigger not only irritates consumers used to light devices, but they become less efficient, which tends to encourage engineers to move away from them, as they can get similar performance at a lower price with the smaller batteries.\n\nA lot of people are working on making better tech, but until something like graphine or nuclear batteries come along, it isn't necessarily feasible to create a easily transportable device with a battery large enough to last a week. \n\nI don't think hardware gimmicks are the issue, as simply because turning on airplane mode will allow a phone to approach a week, but the need to have constant communication with the rest of the world means that a simple solution like that would irritate more people than it would please.",
"Battery life has gotten better however what people expect their phone to do has gotten more intense as well. Put a modern battery on a phone that only makes calls like a nokia brick and it will last a week if not more.",
"Growing technology is the problem. As battery technology improves, hardware components develop which needs even more battery power. With more power to draw from, phone manufacturers put faster processors, higher resolution screens and more sensitive cameras. The end result is the same battery life.",
"It's perfectly possible for phone batteries to last over a week, if you're a light user. The reason they don't for most people is because not only are phones thinner than ever, but people expect their phones to do more than ever as well. Mobile apps have expanded their capabilities significantly to match the new power afforded them by phone hardware, and in turn drain batteries faster than ever.\n\nI have a Galaxy S3 with an extended battery, and my average battery life is around 7 days or so. Now, I would classify myself as an exceptionally light user by the standards of virtually everyone on this site, as I almost never use more than 100mb of data, but this definitely shows that it's quite possible to get significant battery life from a smartphone. The longest I've ever gone between charges is just over 12 days.\n\nFor some reason, whenever I post about this I almost inevitably get a number of people who are super defensive and hostile replying, asking why I even have a smartphone if I'm not going to use it like one. I dislike using the internet on my phone, as the user experience of phone browsing is shit imo, and when I DO, I'm virtually always on wifi. I would estimate that 90+% of my data used on months that I actually use close to or over 100mb is from google maps.",
"Because we're not using phones anymore.\n\nWe're using small, handheld computers that have a phone app.",
"In many cases, it's the phone that's the problem... not the battery. I have an LG Optimus V (ICS) from 2011 that'll last a week on its single charge in a 3800 mah battery. My s4 (KK) might go four days with a 7800 mah battery.\n\nBoth of these are aftermarket batteries on phones software/firmware modded for increased battery life... I don't use location services, voice commands, and turn off wifi unless I know I'm some place that uses it. I do play games and web browse regularly, though.\n\nPoint is... the Optimus V has a smaller screen, a slower processor, and a software/firmware environment that's much more \"locked down\" (less background data being sent/received) than the s4. We DO have cell phone batteries which will last a week, if you're willing to use a more basic device and adjust your usage habits.",
"I wish phones came with a smaller display and resolution (4.5\" and 720p is not bad) so the phone didn't have to push many pixels. It could be a little thicker and house a bigger battery and be hot-swappable so I didn't have to plug in my 'mobile' phone to a power outlet ever and be truly mobile. Samsung has 100s of models, can't they release one which has the above features?",
"Maybe we could make phones a little bulkier with a bigger battery I wouldn't mind the extra weight",
"Something that I haven't seen mentioned yet is this:\n\nBatteries actually do get better. But as they do, so do our displays. On a current smartphone, roughly 70% of the power usage is just the display.\n\nDownloading a youtube video doesn't take much cpu and therefore battery power. Most things you do on your phone don't take much cpu and therefore battery power.\n\nThe simply fact is the bigger and better the display, the more power it will drain. On top of that sometimes OS updates make it use more power too, but at least on android it's usually the other way around.\n\n",
"15 years ago my nokia 3310 lasted a week on a single charge. If you put modern battery tech into it you could probably get a month or two.\n\nWhat's changed since then? Phones draw more power.\n\n * Phones are keeping an internet connection open most of the time (the 3310 stayed nearly dormant other than listening for 'time to wake up' pings but today my phone is fetching emails, app updates, etc)\n * Phones are running a high-powered CPU, GPU, and screen (the 3310 had a teensy CPU, no GPU, and an LCD display)\n\nThere's also a variety of 'gimmicks' (e.g. touch ID, front & rear cameras, NFC) but they don't make a big difference to the battery life.",
"Technology and science are two different things. We often think about them the same way but really, they hate one another.\n\nScience says \"hey look, I can make this material act weird!\" and technology says \"here's a million dollars, scientist, now make me a battery.\" Some of the scientists will do that and others will stick their tongue out at those scientists. The second group of scientists wants to know \"deep truths.\" These are some really cool super secrets that nature is keeping from us. For instance, how do you convince a material to act like mommy and daddy's divorce lawyers? That is, keep two different materials from doing what mommies and daddies do after you go to bed.\n\nMommies and daddies aside, that second group of scientists doesn't know how to get those secrets from nature. They are guessing just like you and me. They use some really boring techniques to force nature to tell them the truth. They're like detectives who have nature under a bright light. But nature is a super good liar. Like the best.\n\nSo, while those snobby scientists are busy yelling at nature, the other scientists are trying to figure out how to make our lives better!\n\nNote: I subscribe to [this](_URL_0_) theory of intellectual purity.\n\nEdit: So while the first group of scientists are trying to make batteries not suck, they don't know how! Eventually, one of the scientists screaming at nature will find a clever new secret. That secret may help batteries last longer but until then we're stuck with our 1 day or less batteries.",
"I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion here, but the main factor standing in the way of decent battery life is design trendiness.\n\nI'm still currently using a Samsung Galaxy S5. Stock, it comes with a 2800 mAh battery. The stock battery is invariably too small for me, so the same day I got the phone I got a ZeroLemon battery, 8800 mAh. It's not a battery case; it's basically a stock battery with two other batteries stuck to it and a case that fits around the whole phone. It's like having an OtterBox.\n\nAll of this basically adds up to a battery life that's what I feel is appropriate. On a normal day I'm still over 50% when I go to bed. This is fine and works well, but due to my job and hobbies I have a lot of \"non-normal\" days where I actually have to charge the phone during the day to make it to the end of the day: the screen is on a lot or the phone is searching for service all the time because I'm in the middle of nowhere.\n\nKeep in mind that it's not a battery *case*. You take the back off the phone, remove the battery, replace it with the new one, and replace the back with a different piece that comes with the battery. I can't emphasize enough how much better this is than an external, secondary battery. I tried a few of those on previous phones and they were pretty annoying. There are extra layers of plastic, so they take up a lot more volume per unit of power, extra circuitry, and the efficiency loss due to charging one battery with another degrades the performance even more. \n\nHonestly given the size and shape of the phone I'd prefer that there was a battery on the back the size and shape of the current phone itself. I think that would be probably about four times the volume of my current ZeroLemon battery, giving a life of about a week.\n\nThis of course will never happen. The reason it won't is that nobody in the design field is even willing to propose an aftermarket battery that makes the phone so heavy and large. It's not \"sexy.\" These people seem to be in an arms race to drive the phone to thinner and thinner dimensions. I couldn't care less about having a phone the thickness of an ordinary pencil; I just want to be able to go off-grid for a few days and not have to worry about charging.",
"Guess what?\n\nThe old-school Nokia handsets WOULD last a week. Sometimes ten days. \n\nNo camera. No video. No GUI.\n\nBut you could run over them with a car and they would keep working.\n\nApple built us a beautiful, but fragile toy that sucks power down. And we all want all those fancy features.",
"If I put my Galaxy S7 edge in ultra power saving mode it will last a week... as a phone. I mean just phone calls and texts in a grey scale screen.\n\nIf you have 30 different in the apps pulling data on wifi with GPS and bluetooth burning all the time then not so much.",
"Scientist: \"Hey look, our battery is size 100 and it holds 100 energy!\"\n\nTIME PASSES\n\nScientist: \"Hey look, our battery is still size 100 and it holds 110 energy!\"\n\nExecutive: \"Make the battery size 90\"\n\nScientist: \"But that only holds 99 energy\"\n\nExecutive: \"Exactly, basically the same\"\n\nMarketing department: \"We now have the **THINNEST PHONE EVER!!!1**\"\n\nThe masses: \"I must buy it because it's the *thinnest ever* and that's the best! Oh, and I need a new Otterbox for it\"",
"as battery technology improves, newer phones get more powerful and suck more energy. i have an old school phone (call and text. thats it) with a modern battery. it can go like 3 weeks without needing a charge.",
"Boils down to three things:\n\n * Cost\n * Weight/Size\n * Features\n\nTo increase the battery capacity you'd either severely increase the bulk of the device, leading to an increase in raw material cost, transport, mining operations. \n\nYou research lines such as increasing the stability of more energy dense solutions. Which in turn will lead to increased cost from all the above factors, plus research.\n\nFinally, you reduce the load on the battery a la early 2000's phones. Marketing suggests, in the West at least, whilst these style of minimalist phones are available to purchase, they're just not economically viable. The market share is infinitesimal and the profit margins are woeful. They tend to be aimed at older folk, there does exist a small market of hardened specialized phones for heavy industry too. But that's again a small market with most choosing to go for the fancier device + insurance.\n\nI guess, your final hurdle to an all new battery or power source would certainly be regulatory. With the recent Note 7 debacle, most regulatory panels will certainly want empirical proof that these \"new\" cells are stable under a number of circumstances beyond normal operating procedure. This again is not only expensive, it's also remarkably time consuming and doesn't favour ambiguity in the slightest.\n\nAll that being said, our biggest hope for lightweight cells is to be found in either superconductivity at room temperature (longer way off) or the recent \"Paint-on battery\" announced by Rice researchers. We'll likely see a lot of this Ion based cells combined Graphene to form lightweight, robust, longer-lasting cells. Research into efficiency when recharging is desperately required too. There's no escaping the fact that recharging a battery is damaging it. There are of course ways of reducing the harm, but the number of charge cycles you get from a modern cell is a surprisingly small.\n",
"Your battery last a day!? \nI'm lucky if I get 8 hours.",
"Well you sleep at night, so you plug in your phone to charge overnight. It's probably not that a phone battery couldn't last longer it's just that it doesn't need to. "
]
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||
18bu86
|
what is the difference between a vpn and tor? and, how do they complement each other?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18bu86/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_a_vpn_and_tor/
|
{
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"text": [
"Tor is a method of making you anonymous when accessing services on the internet. For example, say you want to go to google and search \"how to get away with murder\" and you don't want Google being able to tell the FBI who you are. Use Tor to access it. Google doesn't need to do anything to let you use Tor.\n\nVPN is a way of preventing 3rd parties from knowing *what* you're sending. You might use it to securely connect to your office (you work at Toyota) and as you download plans for the Toyota Camry 2014 from Toyota's internal servers, somebody from Honda couldn't intercept your transmission and get those plans too. Toyota has a server on their end that lets you connect via VPN."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
a17ppj
|
why is it that a single bright light on our eyes blinds us but a well-lit room has no effect?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a17ppj/eli5_why_is_it_that_a_single_bright_light_on_our/
|
{
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"text": [
"Think of it like heat, a warm room vs holding a match to your hand. The concentration of the energy is what hurts us. So having it spread out and diluted does not hurt us as much, even if it is overall the same amount of energy.",
"When you look at something, like a wall, what you see is the part of the light that is reflected of this object. A portion of the light that hits the object is absorbed by the object, which results in a lower energy level the light has, when it leaves the object than before. Depending on the surface structure and the material of the object, you see more or less light reflected. Vantablack or similar substances can absorb over 99% of the light.\nAditionally, the light isnt reflected in a straight line, but diffused, distributing the energy in a wider area.\nAnd on top of that, the intensity of light declines over distance squared, meaning if you double the distance, you only receive 1/4 of the intensity.\nWhen you look directly into a light, you don't have the reduction through reflection, the light isn't diffused and you are probably close to the lightsource.\n\nI hope this answers your question. Please excuse my poor English skills."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2h6khg
|
why don't checks clear instantly yet?
|
I understand how a while ago financial transactions would take time to process, considering every transaction had to be processed manually by an actual person. But nowadays everything is computerized. So why does it still often take days for a check to clear? And more specifically *business* days, meaning the process is more likely than not being held up by something that needs to be done manually. (Even the slowest computer wouldn't care if it's the weekend after all.)
The only manual process I can think of that would be holding up the line is verifying handwritten checks are read correctly. But I've deposited tons of checks in the ATM before (you know, those newer ones that actually scan checks and bills) and so far it's never failed to read the amount properly. Besides, the same delay occurs with printed checks and even *purely-electronic bank transfers* from PayPal. If I want to transfer some money from my PayPal account to my bank account, I would expect the process to go somewhat like the following:
1. I log into PayPal and see my balance is, say, $100, and tell PayPal to transfer it all to my bank account.
2. PayPal checks my PayPal balance to make sure that it is, in fact, greater than or equal to the requested amount.
3. Upon verifying that I have enough, it deducts $100 from my balance and tells my bank's server to add $100 to my account, at the expense of PayPal.
**tl;dr:** Why do I need to wait however-many business days when depositing a check or doing an electronic transfer from PayPal when computers can do things pretty much instantly?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h6khg/eli5_why_dont_checks_clear_instantly_yet/
|
{
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"text": [
"The United States is using an extremely antiquated computer network to process transactions, and there doesn't seem to be much demand from to make it faster.\n\n[NPR did a podcast on this if you have 20 minutes](_URL_0_)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-489-the-invisible-plumbing-of-our-economy"
]
] |
|
38fh4a
|
what does it mean when one country refuses to acknowledge the existence of another country?
|
Usually this happens after a change of government or creation of a new country. For example, many of the Arab nations refused to acknowledge the existence of Israel. What does this mean in terms of international affairs, travel, trade, etc?
Much appreciated
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38fh4a/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_one_country_refuses/
|
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"text": [
"It can take all shapes and sizes. Most simply, think about it like a spat between lovers. They are physically there, bound by the same laws (i.e. UN and international law) but they refuse to talk (diplomacy), shopping (trade) or go to the cinema (cultural exchange). They may interact every now and again when necessary but its messy and often hushed up for the sake of keeping up the idea that they are fighting to the outside world.\n\nUltimately, you have absurd situations like Taiwan refusing to recognise Mongolia's passports as they think that they have sovereignty over them, even when almost everyone recognises them.",
"Many reasons. Politics, butthurt, money after some examples. I'll speak about Palestine and Israel as that is what I'm most familiar with. \n\nIn the case of Israel and the Palestinians, UN human Rights declarations state that any displaced peoples can return to their land. Israel took land from Palestine (see Balfour declaration). No Palestine, no Palestinians, no return.",
" & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;It depends on the circumstance, after all, what is \"a country\"?\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;At its core, a country is just the combination of a bunch of rules and the ability of some authority to enforce those rules. Let's say you live at home with your Mom & Dad. They have rules that you must obey, and failure to obey those rules means you get punished. Let's say one day you decide you've had enough of them, so you proclaim, \"My Bedroom is now a Country.\"\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;You may have the support of your friends and neighbors, but all that really matters is what Mom & Dad think about that. Perhaps they humor you at first and let continue saying you are your own country -- and perhaps you continue to be a good child and still obey your parents. They give you some space and it looks like you are, indeed, independent of the rest of the house...\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;However, the real test of your independence is \"What happens when you disagree with Mom & Dad?\" Let's say you refuse to do your chores, and you no longer listen to your parents when they call for you... then, one morning, you wake up and see your Mom & Dad inside your bedroom. You've been invaded.\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;How could these people intrude into your country? How could they violate your borders? \n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;The real question: What are you going to do about it?\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;You are just a child inside of their parent's home. Even if you were physically strong enough to fight your parents off of your land, your parent's will call in reinforcements (police) to recognize that they, and only they, own their home. \n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;**However**, let's say that it so-happens that those neighbors who supported you have a lot of power. So much power that they can intimidate your parents from acting against you and deter anyone else from supporting your parents.\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;Guess what? Suddenly you are your own country.\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;That may sound silly -- but let's say that China, Russia, and the UK all decide that your bedroom, right now, needs to be its own country. Not only are they willing to go to war to make that happen, but they will use every form of embargo, sanction, and economic influence to bankrupt the United States if it doesn't recognize the new sovereign territory of /u/DeySeeMeRollin_'s room. If faced with annihilation, it's possible that the United States may say, \"Well, would you look at that! It is a country!\"\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;Likewise, the second that the rest of the world stops supporting you, and there's nothing keeping the United States from annexing your country back into itself, then your territory no longer exists.\n\n & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp;In the end, Countries are lines in the Earth that exist so-long-as the people within their boundaries have the ability to defend them. So while Arab nations may not recognize Israel as a country, they sure treat it like one... otherwise they would find themselves in a war against Israel and many countries who **do** recognize Israel. On the flip side, you have regions like Hong Kong which are established, near-autonomous governments... yet few countries will recognize them as independent because they don't want to disturb China, which does not want it recognized as independent. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1wqqwg
|
why does my pee stream go everywhere after i have ejaculated.
|
Seriously, it's like a fire hose. You just grab on and pray to god it doesn't get into your eyes or mouth.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wqqwg/eli5_why_does_my_pee_stream_go_everywhere_after_i/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cf4iiwt",
"cf4jab3"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Tiny bits of dried up semen remain in your urethra, which block the direct path of the urine.",
"I've thought about this before. I always thought it was because I'm coaxing my cock downward to aim toward the toilet... pissing with a rock hard boner I'd quite the task. Now I just piss in my shower afterward. It's liberating and I can wash my member."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
5zftd8
|
why hasn't miami beach seen significant drops in construction investment yet? won't global warming put the city underwater soon?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zftd8/eli5_why_hasnt_miami_beach_seen_significant_drops/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dextmae"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Depends on if you believe in global warming/climate change/sea level rise. I'm sure the beach front sales guys are saying \"Nah, that climate change is a bunch of liberal horsehockey. Sign here and here.\".\n\nBesides, it won't be a sudden \"Oh shit, the ocean is in my front yard\". It'll be a gradual thing and those are easy to ignore/overlook."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
18l4o9
|
why is everything more expensive in australia
|
[Adobe photoshop](_URL_0_)
[Steam](_URL_1_[term]=australia & filters[primary]=images & fromLegacy=true)
This is not the first thing i have seen. I have seen posts of video games, and other digital software that is more expensive in Australia than in other areas of the world. Is it because of taxes or corporations taking advantage of people or what?
Edit: Thank you all for the answers. Global economics are a bit complicated and doesn't always seem to tie into common sense, but at least you all helped me understand it a bit more.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18l4o9/eli5_why_is_everything_more_expensive_in_australia/
|
{
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"text": [
"One factor would be where Australia is situated the world. \nThat is to say, the cost of certain goods will be higher simply because of the time & distance they need to travel to get there. \n\nHere's an excerpt from a Wiki article regarding 'Transportation Geography':\n\n“The ideal transport mode would be instantaneous, free, have an unlimited capacity and always be available... \n\nSpace is a constraint for the construction of transport networks. Transportation appears to be an economic activity different from others. It trades space with time and thus money”\n\nFor example, a bottle of Scotch has to travel nearly 17,000 km to be enjoyed in Sydney while, that same bottle only needs to travel 600 km to wet the whistle of someone in London.\n\nAs a result, an Australian will theoretically pay more for that same bottle of Scotch because of the time & distance associated with it's travels.",
"We have the same problem in Canada but to a lesser degree than Australia. However, in our case we're right beside the US. Our currency is at par and pretty much everything is more expensive here, especially cars, electronics, clothes, food and books, fuel etc.\n\nThen the Canadian government whines when people go cross border shopping. Wish I could too but it's an almost 1000 km drive to the border for me.",
"$17 for a 6 pack of local beer\n \n$40 for a 700ml of hard liquor \n\n$20 for a pack of cigarettes \n",
"[I said it might be Purchasing Power Parity a while back.](_URL_0_)",
"This might be better in /r/AskSocialScience/. \n\nI'm not an economist but my understanding is that it's because people are willing to pay. A seller will always try to charge as much as he can, it may be more than is \"fair\" or justifiable and the buyer may hate him for it but if they buy it anyway then they believe that it's worth more to them than the cash was. This isn't just corporations taking advantage of people, it's how capitalism works.\n\nThere may be many factors that force up prices in Australia but these are usually justifications for the price rather than the reason for it. One way to test this is by looking at the prices in countries that have things in common with Australia (location, population, GDP, etc.). I'm sure that similar products will be cheaper in SE Asia, despite being geographical proximity.\n\nHere's one thought experiment. Motorists often complain about the price of petrol (Gasoline), it can vary depending on where you live. Motorists point to the price of fuel some distance away and ask why they are forced to pay more. The problem here is people aren't prepared to drive long distances to save relatively little. If there was a station on the mexican border that was half the price of one on the US side, the US station would have to lower it's price enough so that it would undercut the mexican station enough to persuade people to stop their rather than drive a little further. This would result in a ripple effect as stations further away would have to cut their prices to prevent customers from being lured away. This would result in gradually decreasing prices, a station 100miles away has no need to be as cheap as the one on the border because no one is going to drive that far. Likewise if there's an expensive product far away it's likely that someone will bring it closer to the people who want to buy it and charge less than it would cost them to get it themselves but more than it would cost them to buy. ",
"Australia is in the southern hemisphere,which means software developers have to go through all their code to ensure it will work when run upside down. \n\nIn particular, this means changing all the 'drop down' menus to 'drop up'. This disproportionately affects Windows and Mac computers, which heavily rely on drop down menus. \n\nSoftware houses often invest in expensive Australian-market test rooms where computers are hung upside down from the ceiling to imitate being on the other side of the world. Several beta-testers die each year from the stress of being strapped into a chair upside down whilst trying to airbrush photos of Kim Kardashian. It is rumoured the insurance costs alone have forced Adobe to charge Australian users a premium price but a [non-disclosure agreement](_URL_0_) prevents them from admitting as much directly."
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://gizmodo.com/5984298/its-less-expensive-to-fly-to-the-us-and-buy-adobe-cs6-than-to-buy-it-in-australia",
"http://media.beta.photobucket.com/user/tooler101/media/SONAustralia001.jpg.html?filters"
] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/155vjm/my_australian_friend_showed_me_this_earlier_how/c7jr4e8"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-disclosure_agreement"
]
] |
|
5juozx
|
why are there different seasons, and why do they occur at different times in different parts of the world?
|
Honestly, I've been thinking about this recently and realized how stumped I became at this question. I'm not sure whether the answer is simple or not, but I figured this would be a good place to get one from!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5juozx/eli5_why_are_there_different_seasons_and_why_do/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dbj3zw7"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"The Earth's rotational axis is tilted, so during winter your hemisphere is pointed away from the sun.\n\nYou get sunlight for less time and at a shallower angle while the other hemisphere gets many more hours of more direct sunlight.\n\nOnce the Earth circles around to the other side of the sun, the situation is reversed.\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2wj5q0
|
why does water taste worse after i've been drinking alcohol?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wj5q0/eli5_why_does_water_taste_worse_after_ive_been/
|
{
"a_id": [
"corcavi"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Perception of taste isn't a consistent thing. When you're starving, everything tastes delicious, when you're stuffed to the gills, even your favourite food loses much of its appeal. \n\nWhen you've been drinking, you have consumed a great deal of liquid. In actuality, that liquid has left you rather dehydrated, but your body doesn't immediately pick up on that. All it knows right off the bat is that your stomach is pretty full of liquid, so your brain tries to limit enthusiasm for imbibing more by not rewarding you with pleasurable delicous taste signals when you drink it. \n\nThe best illustration of this process I've found is a lemon-juice based drink. When I'm sitting at home doing nothing, I find it overpoweringly sour and unpleasant. However, after a few hours of sport or exercise, it tastes almost sweet, a life giving nectar I can drink by the barrel. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2jz5wa
|
when i read a headline that says something like "warren buffet loses $2b in two days," where does the money go? do other people get it or does it simple cease to exist? if the latter, how is that possible?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jz5wa/eli5_when_i_read_a_headline_that_says_something/
|
{
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"clgejwa",
"clgenu7",
"clgep94",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"A businessman like Warren Buffet doesn't have that $2B in a bank account somewhere. Buffet is what we call asset rich, this means he owns a lot of things (companies, property, shares/stocks etc.).\n\nBecause of this, his net worth is calculated by how much his assets are worth. If the outlook turns sour and the people only want to pay $1B for his assets he is then only worth $1B. Someone who is asset rich be it in businesses or commodities (like gold) are only worth what there asset is worth.\n\nSo in answer to your question, no money goes anywhere. It just means someone would no longer pay him that $2B if he decided to sell up.\n\nTL:DR he never actually loses the $1B, his worth is only a future prediction on what his assets would be worth if he decided to sell them.",
" > If the latter, how is that possible? \n\nImagine you buy a car for $20,000. Then your car is in an accident, and very badly damaged, so it's now only worth $5,000.\n\nYou've just lost $15,000. Where did that money go? Nowhere. It hasn't gone to anyone else. It's just that what you own used to be worth a certain amount, and now it's worth less.\n\nStocks, property and all kinds of other assets can lose money in exactly the same way, and when someone \"loses $2B in two days\", it generally means (I don't know about this specific case) that their assets are worth $2B less than two days earlier.",
"The money never existed in physical form. A persons assets can rise and fall due to any number of economical factors. I'm sure I read somewhere that less than 8% of the worlds money is physical.",
"People like Warren Buffet have mostly assets that currently trade for a certain value.\n\nFor example you have 10 magic cards and someone would buy them for 10 dollar each. Now you calculate that your cards are worth $100. Next day the magic card marked collapses because huge amounts of cards are being sold by collectors who have them. Now you only find someone who would buy them for $5 each, so your cars are only worth $50 in total.\n\nYou have just \"lost\" $50 the same way Warren Buffet lost $2B."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3cuylx
|
why do some reddit users delete their top voted comments?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cuylx/eli5_why_do_some_reddit_users_delete_their_top/
|
{
"a_id": [
"csz7vtt"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Like in a thread when the top rated comment got deleted? That's typically a mod stepping in and removing it for whatever reason. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1s9q9x
|
what controls the rate that turn signals blink at on automobiles? also, what causes a turn signal to blink super fast when a bulb blows out?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s9q9x/eli5_what_controls_the_rate_that_turn_signals/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cdvc50c"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"The turn signals are controlled by a special relay called a flasher. The flasher (on older cars) contains components that heat up when electricity flow through them, and when they get hot enough it breaks the connection, which shuts the signal off, and after a moment it cools enough and the circuit re-engages turning the signal light back on.\n\nWhen you have a bulb out, the amount of resistance changes, causing the process to happen faster.\n\nModern cars control the signals electronically with a computer, typically it is the BCM (body control module) which also controls things like the windows and radios.\n\nSome good reading - _URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://auto.howstuffworks.com/turn-signal2.htm"
]
] |
||
3nzqr7
|
why does state sponsored terrorism exist?
|
I get that its all 'alleged' but why would a country want to sponsor a terrorist group who harms their own people(eg: Syria!!)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nzqr7/eli5why_does_state_sponsored_terrorism_exist/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cvso1dt",
"cvsoe7d"
],
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3,
2
],
"text": [
"Many possible reasons:\n\nTerrorism makes people fear for their lives, and will be more likely to elect or support a leader who is running on a platform of aggressive tactics who promises to wage war on terror.\n\nThe terrorist group may not be targeting just anyone but targeting people with opposition to the government. For example, they could bomb an opposition rally.\n\nTerrorism can be used as an excuse to go to war with another country.",
"IMO, growth. War means equipment, equipment means\njobs, jobs make elections and elections promote growth.\nPeace equals death..,.ain't that a bitch"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
34iloz
|
why does scientology oppose psychiatry so vehemently?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34iloz/eli5_why_does_scientology_oppose_psychiatry_so/
|
{
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"text": [
"Mostly because psychiatry offers explanations and treatments for things Scientology offers. Therapy and medications are better than E-meters and auditing, so Scientology wants rid of the competition. ",
"There are a couple reasons for this. The \"official\" reason (meaning the one that Scientology published) is that the church is against all of the abuse and ridicule that the \"mentally ill\" have been subjected to over the last couple hundred years. They believe that psychiatry has no scientific background and is simply trying to distract and sedate people as a means of \"curing\" them. But, from a religious anthropological stance, the reason why they are opposed is because they are rivals for the same desire. They both want clients. People often turn to religion as a means of feeling included or \"fixing what is broken\" in their life or themselves or their relationships. They also use it to try to explain \"why me\" when it comes to suffering. Psychiatry pushes people away from needing the church, therefore taking its following or potential following away. ",
"If you go to a Psychiatrist, Scientology loses out on that cash. You have to pay to play in Scientology.",
"L. Ron Hubbard himself suffered from a variety of mental illnesses. \n\nWhat's the one thing that a crazy person hates?\n\nA person (or medical science) who knows they're crazy. ",
"The way this opposition started was purely juvenile. L. Ron submitted his work on Dienetics to the APA (American Psychological Association) who rejected it. This is when he turned on them. He began to loathe them completely. His hatred was so strong that it permeated the mythology of Scientology. All of Xenu's top officers were, drumroll, psychiatrists...",
"In a single word? Like you are 5? *Competition*\n\nIf you are more curious than that, and willing to take a look at this in a more complex, deep way. It's a long history and it started when Hubbard attempted to get the APA (American Psychiatric Association) to accept Dianetics as a new discovery. They refused, you might even go so far as to say they laughed him out of the office. His \"findings\" were not based on any form of Scientific observation or experimentation. His theories were later tested in two independent studies and both concluded that his theories were at best not true and at worst, harmful. The first, [Dianetic Therapy: an Experimental Evaluation](_URL_1_), tested the claims as to what Dianetics could produce as results. The second, [An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard’s Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics)](_URL_3_), studied whether Hubbard's theory of engrams was verifiable. The text is available in your browser or in a PDF downloadable in the link.\n\nHubbard did not like being turned away, and I suspect he hated hearing his work was being studied, first in 1953 by Fischer, then in 1959 by Fox, and that the null hypothesis was not being rejected (that is to say, as near as anyone could tell, he was full of shit). This, combined with his pathological need to be the top of the food chain (can be seen in his military record, his actions throughout his career in Dianetics and Scientology, and his multiple wives, each of which seemed to come out the worse for wear) meant he was unable to accept that maybe he was not the foremost expert on the human mind on the planet. I believe he began to resent Psychiatry and Psychology. \n\nThis was also during a time when an \"anti-psychiatry\" movement was gaining ground, as can be seen in [this article](_URL_0_) on wikipedia. Shortly after WW II when Hubbard was working on Dianetics and first publishing it, there was a large increase in the field of Psychiatry. Along with that came news headlines of new drugs, such as chlorpromazine, which had fairly negative side effects, to include inducing a sort of zombie like state in which one was hardly able to function. Lack of verifiable evidence to support the use of brain altering practices at that time lead to a belief common at the time that Psychiatry was out dated and archaic. Hubbard, seeing enemies in everyone he met, believed they wanted to hold onto power and would try and destroy Dianetics to prevent it from revolutionizing mental health. As it turned out, Psychology was far more popular and ended up becoming the more common belief and practice behind mental health of the two. Today a combination of the two is often used, with some drugs used to treat severe cases while most moderate cases are handled purely with therapy or with a very mild drug with minimal side effects. \n\nYet for Hubbard, Psychiatry was the enemy. He never adapted his views to meet current research or developments and was stuck in a time when Psychiatry was, admittedly, doing some SHADY shit. Somewhere along the way, most likely, I believe, when Psychology was garnering more public favor than his beloved Dianetics, he rolled the two sciences into one, using the term \"psychs\" and claimed they were equally bad (though somehow it seems Psychiatry was always worse...)\n\nFast forward about 30 years, to 1985. Hubbard is in his last months of life, his vehemence that Psychiatry was the enemy of mankind still rampant throughout Scientology (the love child between his \"science\" Dianetics, and his desire to create a religion in which he would be the messiah, the god, and the prophet, all rolled into one). Hubbard's hatred for Psychiatry only grew over the years, as I believe he saw the value of adversity and wanted to have some enemy to rally his followers behind. I also think he saw that public favor was more and more in the hands of Psychology (which to him was just an off shoot of his bitter enemy, Psychiatry) which made sense, as they were advancing in scientific discovery while he remained trapped in the pop-self-help scene of the 1950's.\n\nOn Jan 24, 1986, Hubbard died in Creston, CA. During his autopsy it was revealed that there was a large amount of a powerful anti-psychotic called Vistaril in his system. [This article](_URL_2_) explains the events surrounding his death in great detail if you would like to know more. Suffice it to say that Hubbard was no stranger to drugs, even though he constantly spoke about how horrible they were, even making the introductory service to his \"Bridge to Total Freedom\" a drug purification process known as the \"Purification Rundown\". I have no doubt you could find a lot more information that I have listed here, but this should give you a simple rundown (pun intended) of the history of Dianetics and Scientology and some of the reasons behind why Hubbard despised Psychiatry and Psychology.\n\nI do not know anyone who is 5 who could have followed that, but I hope you forgive the complexity. I quite literally left out entire sections on this subject to avoid delving into Scientology or Dianetics doctrine. If you are interested you could look into his theory on Engrams and why he believed psychotherapy is (potentially) harmful to an individual. You could research what he believed happened to a person on a spiritual level during electroshock therapy. You could explore his unique beliefs about drugs and their effect on the body, and more importantly the mind, and most importantly the soul (or thetan as he called it). You could learn the ins and outs of how Scientology is practiced and why they believe that other practices are harmful, to include Psychiatry and Psychology, but also to include meditation, yoga, prayer, or any other spiritual practice. This topic is a bottomless well of information and a historian could make it his lifes work and never run out of information.\n\n\n\n\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry#1940s_and_1950s",
"http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/fischer/Fischer_1.html",
"http://home.earthlink.net/~snefru/deathoflrh/",
"https://scicrit.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/an-experimental-investigation-of-hubbards-engram-hypothesis-dianetics/"
]
] |
||
8b6356
|
how does a relatively small amount of plutonium/uranium in a fission/fusion bomb translate to several gj/pj of energy in an explosion?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8b6356/eli5_how_does_a_relatively_small_amount_of/
|
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"text": [
"1. Plutonium and uranium are very \"heavy\" elements. They pack a lot more \"stuff\" like protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter, into the space they occupy.\n2. Matter is basically just compressed energy.\n3. A fusion or fission bomb is a reaction where matter is decompressed into energy.\n4. The formula for conversion of matter to energy requires you to multiply the mass by the speed of light, which is a HUGE number, and then do that again.",
"Atoms are made up of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. With fission and fusion, the electrons are pretty much irrelevant. The nucleus is made up of nucleons, that's neutrons which have no charge, and protons which have the same charge as an electron, but positive.\n\nThe nucleons are bound together in the nucleus by a variety of forces. Adding more nucleons increases the binding energy. Basically you're adding more things that are sticky to it, making everything stick together better.\n\nOnce you get to a certain point, namely iron, adding more nucleons reduces the binding energy per nucleon because the \"stickiness\" has to be spread out over too many nucleons.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is a graph of the binding energy per nucleon of chemical elements.\n\nAs you can see on the left, there's a sharp rise in binding energy per nucleon. When we fuse atoms, we move up this slope, releasing energy.\n\nWith fission we start on the right and move left. This slope is shallower so you don't get as much energy out per nucleon.\n\nThese energies are on the order of MeV per nucleon, so that's about 10^-13 Joules of energy per nucleon. That's small. But in about 20 litres of gas, there will be on the order of 10^23 atoms. So you're looking at about 10^10 joules. Suddenly that's not so tiny.\n\nThe big thing here is that the masses of the start and end products are not the same.\n\nIn a chemical reaction like a flame, if you could capture and measure all the inputs (oxygen, fuel) and outputs (CO2, water, ash) then the mass would be the same.\n\nIn a nuclear reaction mass is not conserved. Mass m is converted into energy E with a ratio given by the infamous E=mc^2. c is 3×10^8. That's a 3 with eight 0s after it, squared. That's stupid big.\n\n\nPS. Fusion only releases energy when small elements are fused. Thermonuclear bombs use a fission reaction to create the conditions for fusion.",
"You have probably heard of Einsteins formula E=mc² : Energy is Mass times the speed of light squared. The \"speed of light squared\" part is a very, very big number. So if you manage to turn some mass into energy, you get quite *a lot* of energy.\n\nAnd a fusion or fission bomb does exactly that: A very small amount of mass is turned into energy - the Hiroshima bomb got its destructive power from turning about eight grams of mass into energy."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://cdn.miniphysics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Binding-energy-graph.jpg"
],
[]
] |
||
2s87zb
|
why does the stereotype of a crazy vietnam veteran exist?
|
What about the Vietnam war was different from other wars in reference to its veterans?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s87zb/eli5_why_does_the_stereotype_of_a_crazy_vietnam/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnn2kpk"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"The Vietnam war was known for guerrilla tactics. Instead of your pals being shot and stabbed, you got to see them fall into spiked pits, impaled by spiked balls, crushed by log traps, etc. Not to mention the Vietcong could jump out of the trees and slaughter everyone at any moment. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4b2ix2
|
why does backing every horse, or it's equivalent, not actually work in practicality in gambling?
|
Thought this recently when a guy put a fiver on for leicester to win the premiership and paid out for (circa) £75000 - could he have put a fiver on at two bookies, one to pay out with and one to leave on in case they actually win?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b2ix2/eli5why_does_backing_every_horse_or_its/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d15jmri",
"d15jsep",
"d15ww19"
],
"score": [
11,
5,
2
],
"text": [
"Look at the pay out of the lowest odds horse. If there are 5 horses, five on each horse, is a total bet of $25. If the lowest odds horse wins, pay back might be 5+3, or $8. A net loss of $17. \n\nIf he bet only $5 on the horse he thinks is most likely to win, and it does not. Net loss is only $5.\n\nThis is only a hypothetical, since we don't know the odds of all the horses in that 1 race. But you get the idea. Keep in mind nobody likes to pay out, especially bookies. So the horse with the highest payoff is the one that the bookies and fellow gamblers think is least likely to win.",
"It would if the horses with the worst odds won, but in reality they usually don't. \n\nThe bookies set the odds so that the most likely result gives the worst odds, meaning that if a favourite wins this will result in a net loss if you bet on every horse because the return is much lower.\n\nOf course, rank outsiders do sometimes come in, and in those races you may well turn a profit but you'll lose more often than you win.",
"You couldn't back every horse in the race and win money. Bookmakers have a profit margin in their prices (odds)\n\nThe easiest way to explain this is with a coin flip. You would expect the odds of a coin landing on either heads or tails to be equal, or 1/1. However a bookie would make the odds of it being either result as 4/5. \nTwo people backing either result for £1 would result in the the bookies taking £2 from the customers but only paying out £1.80 when one of them wins. That 20p being a bookmakers guaranteed profit but if you were to back both results you would lose 20p. \nThat's how a book works but in a more complicated manner as with 10 horses in a race the odds go in and out depending on the betting to maximise a bookmakers chance to profit. \n\n\nThere's another type of betting you touched on with Leicester called arbitrage betting. You could back Leicester to win the league at (for the sake of the argument) 10/1 for £1 and win £11. Then go to an online betting exchange and lay it ( backing Leicester NOT to win the league) at 3/1 for £1. \n\nLeicester win: £11 return\nLeicester lose: £4 return\nStaked £2 on the only 2 possible results but winning AT LEAST £2 or as much as £9. Either way you cannot lose money. \nAs a side note, don't cash out on Leicester... They are going to win.\n\nSource: I work for William Hill. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
5n7ft8
|
why is a emulator so hard on my pc when a gamecube could play the same games no problem 15 years ago?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5n7ft8/eli5_why_is_a_emulator_so_hard_on_my_pc_when_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dc98mbq"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Because a PC emulating a game isn't running the game, it's running a simulation of the entire other system running the game because GC games don't run on the same x86 architecture that PC games do. It's simulating the other hardware within its software, which is incredibly more complex."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
a2fmpp
|
does electricity passing through a conductor damage the conductor?
|
What I mean is will an electrical circuit eventually fail because the conductor has broken down and can't conduct electricity any more.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a2fmpp/eli5_does_electricity_passing_through_a_conductor/
|
{
"a_id": [
"eaxt5hs",
"eaxtgrb",
"eaxtmfu"
],
"score": [
3,
8,
2
],
"text": [
"Generally not, but there are exceptions. If the wire is too thin or the current too high then the conductor will heat up. If it heats up enough the conductor can melt. Even just a little heating can cause individual molecules of the conductor to migrate which causes some parts of the wire to get thinner and eventually fail.\n\nBut, if the conductor is kept cool enough, passing electricity through it won't damage it.",
"Not if the circuit is operating as designed. \n\nAll normal conductors, like copper in your walls, or gold in your computer, have some amount of resistance. Resistance turns otherwise useful power into heat. Better conductors have lower resistance. \n\nIf too much current is pulled through a conductor, as in an overload, the conductor will get hotter, possibly hot enough to melt away its insulation, start a fire, or simply melt through and break.\n\nIt's also possible to supply too great of a voltage to a conductor, where the power might arc right through the insulation, permanently damaging it, and making it more likely to arc again.\n\nWith very old wire, the plastic insulation can be degraded by simple age.\n\nUnder normal circumstances though, the wire shouldn't be degraded by normal use.",
"In general no. A wire will be able to conduct electricity forever in normal conditions. There are however a few things which can make a wire fail. Firstly if you send too much electricity through a thin wire then it will heat up and this might damage the wire. Secondly wires are usually made of metals which will oxidize over time if exposed to air and/or water. The oxidation will not conduct electricity. The electric charge in the wires will change how fast it oxidizes. So applying a voltage to a wire can damage it sooner then it would if there were no voltage."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
asehl1
|
what would happen if you chewed/dissolved pills instead of swallowing whole
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/asehl1/eli5_what_would_happen_if_you_cheweddissolved/
|
{
"a_id": [
"egtohs3",
"egtol63"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Depends on the pill in question. \n\nDelayed/extended release medications might be released all at once (or mostly at once) if crushed before swallowing which might be dangerous. \n\nSome tablets are coated to delay the release of the ingredient because they can taste pretty bad or be destroyed by stomach acid.",
"Two big things. First, it might irritate your throat going down. Pills are coated so that the contents aren't directly exposed on the outside. Those contents might burn or otherwise feel bad going down.\n\nSecond, the chemical will be absorbed faster. This could cause problems if the drug is intended to be slow release."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2ddzv6
|
what would happen if i pulled my eyes out of their sockets?
|
Would I still be able to see?
Could I move my eye with my hands and see around me?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ddzv6/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_pulled_my_eyes_out_of/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cjolfdb",
"cjolx3m"
],
"score": [
10,
3
],
"text": [
"You would scream ",
"If they were still attached to the optical nerve. Maybe. But they'd dry out or become dirty and infected quickly "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1qvs9k
|
when i touch something sticky my hands become sticky too. why doesn't my tongue act the same way as the rest of my body does when it touches something sticky? (serious)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qvs9k/when_i_touch_something_sticky_my_hands_become/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cdh0bwv"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"The saliva in your mouth acts to deactivate that, specifically to prevent that from happening."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3o1pxu
|
why kids love spinning rides but they make adults neauseas?
|
Used to love spinning rides, now I can't even tolerate them without feeling like I'm going to vomit like they do in "Sandlot". (Minus the chewing tobacco)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3o1pxu/eli5_why_kids_love_spinning_rides_but_they_make/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cvth9h2"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Your body has many senses , which all of us know sight , hearing, touch , smell, and taste. There are more though. \n\nThe sense that is important in this situation is your vestibular system, which tells your body if its upright, or sideways, etc. The vestibular system is inside your ears, and you use it for balance purposes. \n\nBasically, theres a fluid in your ears that nerve endings pick up on to figure out inertia, gravity, or the position of your body. This is the system that gives us motion sickness, because the fluid is moving differently than what we are seeing and your brain says what should be happening. When you're older, your vestibular system gets worse, and you become more sensitive to these movements as the fluid in your ears get thinner/more viscous.\n\nThe same thing happens when you drink alcohol, as the alcohol will actually dilute the fluid in your vestibular system causing the bed spins or however you may experience it.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1moxcs
|
why is it when i drink a glass of liquid i urinate at least twice as much back out?
|
always wondered this never have gotten an answer.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1moxcs/why_is_it_when_i_drink_a_glass_of_liquid_i/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ccb8tdo",
"ccb8ujc"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text": [
"Urine isn't just made of water. Your kidneys constantly filter out a lot of salts and wastes from your blood which all contribute to urine.",
"Your bladder only sends the \"time to pee\" message to your brain when it reaches a certain level of fullness. So the amount you pee out doesn't just represent the glass of water you just drank, but all of the water you have drank since the last time you peed plus the water your body needed to dissolve the waste products it excretes in urine (urea, creatine and some other compounds). "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1pipxf
|
why is it when you eat after you smoke marijuana you start to lose your high or by a noticeable difference be less high?
|
PSA: I am high now.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pipxf/eli5why_is_it_when_you_eat_after_you_smoke/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cd2rek1",
"cd2t0qx"
],
"score": [
5,
2
],
"text": [
"Some of the effects of Marijuana that we associate with \"being high\" are actually due to the effects that marijuana has on blood sugar. **Source : _URL_0_ When you eat, you alter your blood sugar/insulin and therefore alter those effects. You would then feel different, but not necessarily \"less high.\"",
"First, we have to look at your high as a finite, measurable amount. So let's call it Stoner Points, SP for short. For example: Toking up gives you 20 SP. Now from here, every activity you do costs you SP, depending on how stimulating the activity is. Watching TV costs 2 SP, playing video games costs 4 SP, climbing a tree costs 9 SP, and so on. So basically, the more senses that are stimulated, the more SP is consumed. Now think about eating. You see it, and you get hungry. Then you smell it. Even hungrier. You hear it. Yes, you hear it. Whether it's the sizzling of fresh cooked meat, or the distinct crisp snap of a freshly opened beer, you hear your food. The next part is the double wammy, because once the food is in your mouth, two senses are stimulated at once, which of course has a luxury tax of 50% on the SP. So basically, if we thought of being high as currency, eating would be the ultimate luxury in the world. Hmmm.... I think I just solved world hunger."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(13)00200-3/abstract**"
],
[]
] |
|
4ycvw8
|
what is the difference between having more or less blades on an airplane or helicopter propeller?
|
What determines the amount of blades they should have? What are the differences between having two, three, four or more blades on the propeller?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ycvw8/eli5what_is_the_difference_between_having_more_or/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d6mr4xa",
"d6mt4xj"
],
"score": [
6,
2
],
"text": [
"There are a lot of factors at play but I'll try to summarize. Firstly is efficiency. The more number of blades means that the system is less efficient. This is because the blade operates in the wake of the blade in front of it. The blade moves air out of the way and therefore the following blade cannot lift as well since there is less air.\n\nHowever more blades are needed for two main reasons, weight distribution and rotor speed. The blades can only hold so much weight so adding more helps alleviate the load on each. Secondly the more blades there are the more power you can generate as lift. You can also achieve more lift by I creasing rotor speed but due to aerodynamic conditions the tip of the blade must remain at subsonic speeds. So basically we want to add more blades only if we need more power or more weight\n\nTL;DR Compromises between weight of aircraft, efficiency, and power desired",
"Adding onto what others have said, more blades makes the helicopter quieter, likely because all the blades **collectively** (not individually) generate more lift, which means the blades can be spun at lower velocities to generate adequate lift force. Lower rotor velocity means less noise."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
253sw3
|
why do dogs act guilty?
|
Dogs can go through the trash, make a mess and hours later when owner gets home, the dog knows it did something wrong. What exactly is going on here?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/253sw3/eli5why_do_dogs_act_guilty/
|
{
"a_id": [
"chdeude"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Dogs don't really know what they did wrong hours before, as they don't have much of a short term memory. They can, however, tell that you are upset with them. But that doesn't mean they understand why you are upset. And they certainly don't relate your anger to their actions hours before. That's fear, not guilt.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n*That's why you shouldn't try to discipline a dog for doing something wrong unless you catch them in the act. They really don't know why you are angry, they just know you are and that you're capable of being mean. It's very counter-productive.\n\n > Dogs can certainly learn from bad behavior, but rewards or punishment are most effective right after the wrongdoing, said Beaver, the veterinary professor. \"The farther it gets from that, the less connection is made with the behavior,\" she said.\n\n[Behaviorists: Dogs feel no shame despite the look](_URL_1_) - USA TODAY"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.dogforum.com/dog-training-behavior/does-dog-know-he-did-something-27561/",
"http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/26/dogs-shame-guilty-look/5833395/"
]
] |
|
3albzq
|
how the boundaries of the continents were decided and when?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3albzq/eli5_how_the_boundaries_of_the_continents_were/
|
{
"a_id": [
"csdofzc",
"csdomvv"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"Continents? They were decided by the plates moving. Look up [Pangaea](_URL_0_). The whole world was one landmass, which broke up 100 million years ago. Are you talking about countries?",
"The definitions of continents are just conventions. Different cultures actually define them differently.\n\nThey are loosely based on landmasses, which came to be that way because of tectonic plates. But not always.\n\nEurope is the really odd one out. Europe is clearly part of the same land mass as Asia, and it's on the same tectonic plate. There's no logical reason for it to be considered a separate continent, and in fact many cultures don't. In Russia for example, they consider Eurasia to be one continent.\n\nThe Americas are another case that's different in different cultures. In the English speaking world, we'd say that North and South America are different continents. But in many Spanish speaking countries, they are one continent.\n\nPeople don't always agree on the exact borders of continents. Particularly between Europe and Asia. It's generally taken to be the Ural mountains that separate Europe and Asia. But historically various rivers have been used as the border between them.\n\nWhen countries span two continents, it's kind of arbitrary which you say it's in. Usually you'd decide based on culture, or where the majority of people live. For example most of Russia is in Asia, but most of the people live in the European side, and Russia is culturally closer to other European countries than Asian ones. So most people consider Russia to be a European country. Although as I mentioned before, that's not how most Russians would see it as they generally don't consider Europe to be a separate continent."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea"
],
[]
] |
||
bd6o48
|
when you break a bone in space does it repair like it would on earth or is it altered because of zero gravity?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bd6o48/eli5_when_you_break_a_bone_in_space_does_it/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ekw7tad",
"ekw7w8e"
],
"score": [
5,
26
],
"text": [
"Bones remodel (and heal) themselves in the direction force is applied to them. In space there is little force being applied from and direction. So the remodeling/healing process wouldn’t have any clear instructions to grow. Broken space bones would definitely have a different microscopic structure compared to a bone broken on earth.",
"Proper bone is composed of these long, interlocking, concentric tubes called [osteons](_URL_0_). Osteons are formed by repeatedly tunneling and rebuilding. You have these cells called osteoclasts which are the tunnelers. They form a circle and go in a straight line, eating up matrix. Behind them are osteoblasts. They're the builders. They follow in this tunnel made by the osteoclasts and lay down new matrix. Over months to years, this results in the overlapping, concentric tubular structure you see in that picture above. When you break a bone, these rings are broken and the process is needed to rebuild the bone back to its original structure. It takes months to years to do this. \n\nHere's the thing: the osteoblasts only know which way to go based on the forces applied to the bones. In particular, they run perpendicular to applied forces. This is how martial artists can train their hand bones to break strong bricks, because by repeatedly smacking things with their hand in that fashion, over time, the whole bone remodels to absorb that kind of force. Gravity is one of the primary forces acting on you, and it's how your bones know how to build themselves. In space, they just tunnel around willy nilly, laying down very weak and disorganized bones. This is one of the big problems with long space flights."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.iofbonehealth.org/sites/default/files/osteofound/filemanager/health_professionals/images/basic-bone-biology-2.gif"
]
] |
||
3w6aa3
|
how does data capping effect gamers?
|
I know a lot of the fuss has been on streaming sights such as Netflix and Hulu, but how much data does playing a game require over the course of a month? What about professional streamers?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w6aa3/eli5_how_does_data_capping_effect_gamers/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cxtqt7q"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"The data required to play video games is quite small compared to the amount of data needed to stream video.\n\nThe bigger issue that data download caps have on gamers is for downloading the digital versions of games and the resulting patches. Games nowadays are approaching the limits of Bluray disks (50 GB). Star Citizen supposedly will have a [100 GB client](_URL_1_).\n\nEven if you do not download the digital version of games, video game patches are getting quite large as well. [The Witcher 3's 1.1 patch came in at 15 GB](_URL_0_). If you have a library of many games, just downloading the patches over the span of a month will push you towards your download cap.\n\nLastly, in terms of live-streams, you are generally uploading data rather than downloading. I'm not sure if it counts against the download cap but it should be at roughly the same data rate as someone viewing the stream."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.polygon.com/2015/10/8/9481855/the-witcher-3-110-patch-notes",
"http://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-client-expected-to-be-around-100gb/"
]
] |
|
2elu1j
|
why do people get so attached to the past, that they let life pass them by
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2elu1j/eli5why_do_people_get_so_attached_to_the_past/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ck0psyc"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Well in many ways it is about remembering who you are. We all have some level of a personal identity and in a world of billions, we like to cling to things that we use to define ourselves. \n\nAlso change can be hard for people. New places, new phases of life, and new people can all be uncomfortable at first if not scary. It is easier to try to cling to the past than to accept the future.\n\nWe also tend to look on the past as a positive. We have rose colored glasses and remember the parts we want. It is the fun times we had playing with those toys or how awesome our trip to the beach was that we like to look back on."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
apt306
|
why events occur “at” a certain time, “on” a day, or “in” a month or year?
|
These phrases are all used to describe when something happens, but all use different prepositions. Why do we treat them as such different concepts, like time as a location and year as a container?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apt306/eli5_why_events_occur_at_a_certain_time_on_a_day/
|
{
"a_id": [
"egb5rdp",
"egb6h4n"
],
"score": [
4,
2
],
"text": [
"When prepositions are used literally, they generally have specific meanings: *on* the table, *in* the drawer, *at* the station, etc.\n\nWhen they are used figuratively, that is, not to describe physical locations, prepositions are often arbitrary. We say \"at a loss\", for example. There's no particular reason, or at least none that is obvious, why we can't say \"in a loss\" or \"on a loss\".\n\nBut there is some sense to the prepositions we use with time, probably because we tend to think of time as stretched out in a line, that is, as if it were a physical entity. \"At\" is used for a precise location (\"at the end of the street\"), and so it makes sense to use that for a precise time (\"at 4pm\"). Similarly, \"in\" is used for location within something that has physical size, such as \"in a row\", \"in a field\", \"in the room\". So it makes sense to use \"in\" for time that has a duration, as in \"in March\" (a time of 31 days' duration) or \"in 2019\" (a time of 365 days' duration).\n\nThis reasoning doesn't explain \"on Tuesday\", however. Depending on whether we view a day as a point in time or a duration of 24 hours, we could say \"at Tuesday\" or \"in Tuesday\", but for some other reason, we don't.",
"I have an English degree and asked my professors once. The answer was basically \"we don't know\". At some point there was probably a reason (could be to do with sounds, influences from other language, grammar that stopped being used), but it's just been forgotten. \n\nLanguages are living things and if most of the population/speakers agree that something should be used a certain way, then that of usually what ends up happening. Most phrases/prepositions that can only be used one way or in one context are holdovers from old grammatical rules or idioms."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
56glau
|
how come that when a person is knocked out for more than a few minutes, it's generally guaranteed they will have brain damage, yet it's possible for people to wake up from extended comas with no real adverse effects?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56glau/eli5_how_come_that_when_a_person_is_knocked_out/
|
{
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"text": [
"Knocked out: patient goes unconscious for whatever reason. Falls. May sustain secondary damage. Body position is random. Unless they regain consciousness spontaneously, they will likely obstruct their airway making breathing impossible. Within minutes their oxygen levels plummet, their carbon dioxide levels skyrocket (making waking up even less likely) and the brain suffers from anoxia, or lack of oxygen. A few minutes later, cardiac arrhythmias develop (heart beats irregularly) until a malignant rhythm develops (there is erratic electrical activity without any coordinated muscle movement) and the person dies.\n\nComa: patient is in a supervised medical setting. Their airway is secure providing the body with oxygen and removing carbon dioxide. You can keep a comatose patient alive for decades with the proper care with minimal deleterious effects (bed sores, muscle wasting, muscle contractures).",
"It's not the fact that they were out a few minutes or a few months that causes the brain damage. It's what knocked them out to begin with. If you hit someone over the head and they don't come out of them on their own in 5 minutes, they've probably got permanent brain damage. It wasn't being unconscious for 5 minutes that caused the brain damage. The hit over the head caused the brain damage. Them being unconscious for 5 minutes was a side effect. Likewise, somebody being in a coma for months is because of whatever caused them to be in a coma. Whatever that cause, it might also have caused some brain damage, but just being in the coma doesn't necessarily add to that, and the whole point of the coma might be to give the brain time to repair the damage."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
9jqazx
|
would van gogh pass art school?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jqazx/eli5_would_van_gogh_pass_art_school/
|
{
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"Probably not--his contemporaries did not like his style. So, if art schools as we know them today existed back then, and he went to one, he'd probably fail. That said, artists who have a very distinct style can also draw/paint differently if they want to/need to. So perhaps there's a chance he wouldn't fail after all.",
"He was very ill. The way the end of his life went and how modern art school is I doubt it.\n\nArt school kids are already depressed enough."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1tt2p3
|
what is the oculus rift development kit and why is it different from a "ready to release" oculus
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tt2p3/eli5_what_is_the_oculus_rift_development_kit_and/
|
{
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"text": [
"The development kits disregards design and comfort.\nE.g. it comes with tons of bulky cables and a very bulky power adapter. You have to use a lot of wires to make it work.\nIn the ready to release version they will probably limit it to only 1 USB cable which will also provide power.\n\nAlso, the design might be changed overall. Basically a development version isn't there to attract sales, but rather to review it by developers.\n\nsource: I have a development kit",
"Not only is it lower resolution, (1280 x 800 I believe, split between both eyes so 640 x 800) but there is a distance between each pixel which creates a \"screen door\"effect. The kit has a control box that needs power and one display (dvi or hdmi) then that box only has one permanent cord to the headset. \n\nSource: bought a development kit off eBay for $500, tested it, showed all my friends, passed it on on eBay",
"The dev kit is essentially for developers to begin developing software for when the consumer product comes out. The rift dev kit is not at a point where they'd feel comfortable releasing it to the general public. Like others have mentioned, it's low resolution, but it also has several other issues that they've mentioned should be fixed for the consumer release. Low res, screen door effect, motion blur, lack of positional tracking, and latency in head tracking are all things that diminish the experience in the dev kit and also cause VR sickness. They recently said that they have improved all of those things significantly in their prototype, to the point where VR sickness is almost completely eliminated. You can look forward to them making a big announcement early 2014, probably at CES.\n\nThis is a great article if you want more details:\n\n_URL_0_"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/13/5207906/flush-with-cash-oculus-plans-ambitious-new-vr-headset"
]
] |
||
cz3g9y
|
why are you able to turn on devices after they have supposedly ran out of charge?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cz3g9y/eli5_why_are_you_able_to_turn_on_devices_after/
|
{
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"eyvsd6b",
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],
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5
],
"text": [
"Using a cell phone as an example, 0% isn’t actually 0. Batteries have operating levels and a fully drained battery is garbage. Usually they get down very low and cut off until recharged to protect the cell. \n\nWith that in mind, phones shut off at 0-5% displayed battery, but the battery still has charge in it. This is especially obvious when you have a phone that cuts off at 5% and shuts down to preserve data/whatever. The battery doesn’t have enough juice to keep powering the phone, but still has a little sippy cup of power on hand.",
"Noone mentioned yet that your clock would literally reset to 0 if it drained (until your system has data connection or you set it up again)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1niurm
|
how does singapore's healthcare system work?
|
I've heard arguments that Singapore has one of the best designed healthcare systems in the world. I'm curious if it is something that could be used in a much larger nation, say, oh I dunno... the United States of America.
How does their system differ from the rest of the world? Is it successful?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1niurm/eli5_how_does_singapores_healthcare_system_work/
|
{
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"text": [
" > _URL_0_\n\nProbably the best explanation of the system.\n\nFor ELI5, I'd say that the Medisave program (a mandatory health savings account), puts the responsibility of costs more onto individuals and employers instead of the government. There is also MediShield which is a low cost insurance scheme for catostrophic and long-term illnesses. Lastly, there is Medifund which is an endowment set up to help pay the costs of low income people.\n\n > Administrative overheads alone, for example, are responsible for over \n20 percent of the United States’ total healthcare expenditure. It is thought \nthat private insurance can also be responsible for over-consumption of care \nby patients, and over-delivery of services by doctors, as neither group is \nincentivized to keep costs in check as long as insurance companies will pay\n\nOver consumption of health care services is actually a big problem in a lot of countries. There was a study done a few years ago about Oregon's Medicaid program. They expanded it and found that while people who now qualified did use more health services (more regular check ups, etc), the actual health of those people didn't improve compared to those who utilized less services.\n\n > One step the Ministry of Health has taken to stoke competition is \nto provide price transparency by publishing the hospital bills for common \nillnesses on its website. One example of its effectiveness that I found striking \nis the drop in the price of LASIK surgery. In 2004, the price of the surgery \nfor one eye was S$2,300. By 2008 the price had decreased to approximately \nS$1,400—a savings of S$1,000 per operation per eye.\n\nOne of the reasons US health costs are so high is because people don't know the actual prices of various procedures. Prices get inflated because it becomes the hospital having to negotiate with insurance providers. There are many times where if you were to offer straight cash, the total cost you have to pay is less than what you would with insurance.\n\nLargely off topic, but one of the things I heard that always struck me as odd was a comparison of health insurance to car insurance. Car insurance is pretty much exclusively for catastrophic events (collisions, etc) and yet health insurance is used for nearly everything. If my car insurance doesn't cover oil changes or getting new tires, why should my health insurance cover yearly check ups?\n\nThat's essentially how it is in Singapore, individuals pay for general health services through their contributions to MediSave, and when the can't (low income or catastrophic event) the Government pays the rest."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/press/books/2013/affordableexcellence/affordableexcellencepdf.pdf"
]
] |
|
2trlja
|
how can fruit be gm'd or selectively bred to have no pips (eg oranges) if they wont be able to reproduce?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2trlja/eli5_how_can_fruit_be_gmd_or_selectively_bred_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"co1osqu"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"They graft branches from the seedless variety onto pre existing root systems of non seedless varieties.\n\nfwiw, where are you from? Pips is not that common a term for seeds."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
63aovm
|
what are the actual differences if quality of education between the top tier colleges and the average or low quality ones?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63aovm/eli5_what_are_the_actual_differences_if_quality/
|
{
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"text": [
"professors are more skilled, they are attracted to top tier colleges for their budget, their credibility, and their facilities.\n\nthe coursework is indexed to the ability of the students. There will be a faster pace of more advanced subjects at MIT than nebraska CC.\n\nin line with that, the student body will be more educated and ambitious/committed which means the general atmosphere of group work and study groups will be more advanced.\n\nand lastly, for all of this, the alumni network will generally have greater connections to in turn pay it forward.",
"Yes, Higher status college can afford to higher more accredited professors. They have lower acceptance rates so they have smaller class sizes allowing for more 1 on 1 with a professor. Finally there departments have higher budgets so they can afford more resources to aid in students.",
"Faculty and Connections/Alumni Network/Prestige that helps you get in the door down the road."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2xp2qs
|
why is it still so expensive to call internationally, when i can download free apps and do it for free?
|
Seems like charging per minute is a little outdated.
EDIT: Thank you all for the thoughtful, well written responses. I genuinely appreciate it.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xp2qs/eli5_why_is_it_still_so_expensive_to_call/
|
{
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"Phone calls and data calls are treated differently. You aren't billed for connecting to another computer on the internet, but you are billed for establishing a phone link to another country. Even though almost all phone calls are now routed via IP over the internet, they are still not treated as such. Skype to Skype is not using a phone company, so is not billed by a phone company.",
"Because people are still willing to pay it. The data travels through the same submarine cables, so I don't see a reason why there should be an extra charge. The companies just don't treat data and phone calls the same, even though they get routed to other countries the same way.",
"Because the way the systems work are different.\n\nWhen you make a phone call, it gives you a dedicated connection from you to the person you are calling (which is known as circuit switched) and making that dedicated circuit for you can be expensive.\n\nWhen you use an app, it flings packets of your voice call in to the aether, and if they don't all arrive or arrive out of order, the programs are designed to cope with that. This is known as packet switched.\n\nYou can look at it as the difference between a rifle shot and a shotgun blast- with the rifle, you are making one long distance connection that takes some effort to produce. With the shotgun you are flinging a lot of little bits at your target and enough of them should hit that it gets your message across.",
"It's all down to the cost of termination. \n \n(as a Brit, I use Mobile instead of Cell) \n \nLet's say you want to dial a UK mobile number from your mobile in the US. \n \n- You key +44 xxxxx in your mobile \n- Your mobile provider terminates the call on it's international gateway provider \n- The international gateway terminates that leg of the call on it's counterpart in the UK \n- The UK counterpart terminates that leg of the call on the number range provider \n- The block-owner of the number range terminates that leg of call on the mobile phone (the call is finally answered) \n \nEvery single leg of the calls' journey is charged by the various terminating parties. Your actual mobile phone provider has to cover each of these charges + a percentage mark-up to make money. \n \nUsing made-up costs and working backwards: \nUK Number range owner charges the UK international gateway $0.10 who charges US International Gateway $0.20 who charges your mobile phone company $0.30 who finally charges you $0.10 + $0.20 + $0.30 + 50% = $0.90 per minute\n \nThis is the most direct way but the bit in between the US international Carrier and the UK internation carrier may go between many other carriers for a cheaper price, which may or may not be passed down to the customer. \n \nInternational Carriers buy minutes off other carriers by offering lower termination prices. So if you're getting a good connection during a certain time of teh day and a bad connection at other times, the internatonal carriers have routed your call through cheaper, lower quality connections",
"So how does one call internationally for free from my cell phone in korea?",
"Don't forget that there is still a cost associated with owning a smartphone. You aren't paying for individual phone calls from your smartphone using that \"free app\", but you still need to pay for a data plan.\n\nThat being said, the main reason (in my opinion) of the price difference is with the vastly superior technology (i.e. the Internet) used in modern packet-based telephony, as you can squeeze a lot more voice data given the same amount of hardware/bandwidth. Traditional POTS systems (as they're called in the industry) must maintain backwards compatibility with 100+ year old technology, so it can't take advantage of all of the cost reducing innovations that have been made since the invention of the analog telephone.",
"Quality of service provided by a Telecom company depends on the extent of its infrastructure. Moreover, the probability of a new consumer joining a telecom service increases with the number of people already subscribed to the service. \n\nGiven these two elements, its easy to see why the Telecom industry is one of the hardest markets to penetrate. The result has been that most every country developed its own oligarchies and monopolies. AT & T does not have cell towers in France. So if you want to call someone in Paris from the US, your carrier, AT & T will send your call request to a French telecom giant with whom AT & T has already made arrangements with to handle each other's calls. Your call will be routed from AT & Ts network to say, Vodafone's network. Now, because Vodafone is part of the oligarchy in France, they are free to charge AT & T absurd prices. AT & T simply doesn't have the luxury of choosing from competing vendors. The additional cost is passed onto you.",
"Which apps allow free international calling? ",
"Because they can.\n\nA couple of the answers here argue that it's due to the \"last mile\" or destination country telco. This is easily disproven by looking at VoIP to regular phone prices. These still have the same last mile issue, and yet they are dirt cheap.\n\nI have set up my router, which is also a SIP adapter, to automatically route international calls via a cheap VoIP provider. If international calling was really that expensive for the telco, they could use the same setup. And guess what, they do, just with equipment that scales better and volume pricing that is even cheaper. The difference is called profit.",
"The real reason: because they can. It's why right now data is expensive, 10 years ago texts were expensive, 20 years ago calls were expensive. Each time there is an explanation why you're not being robbed, then prices magically drop when the next big thing hits. The telecomms always find some way to squeeze you",
"Because carriers are dicks. That is really what it boils down to.",
"Because US providers are garbages.\n\nI pay 19€ per month for 3GB of data, unlimited sms and unlimited voice to 130 countries.",
"This is very late, but hopefully it will help.\n\nELI5 explanation:\n\nAll your apps use the internet to make calls. The internet is not owned by anyone. So they use an existing free framework to make calls.\n\nTelephone operators set up expensive networks. Each network owned by a different company. To use these networks, you pay money. In case of international calling, you are using multiple networks in different countries. Hence, you pay even more."
]
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|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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[],
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|
8ha0ee
|
the is/lm curve in macroecononics
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8ha0ee/eli5_the_islm_curve_in_macroecononics/
|
{
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],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"The LM curve is monetary politics where the IS curve is fiscal politics. By analyzing positive and negative policy changes in these categories we can shift the curves and show a given output (Y) and interest rate. \n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1rfnk0
|
how does a person become immune to caffeine?
|
How does a person who drink a lot of caffeine eventually become immune to it, or in other words, why does it take more and more caffeine to stimulate your brain the more you drink it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rfnk0/eli5how_does_a_person_become_immune_to_caffeine/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cdn3pk3"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"You develop a tolerance for it, essentially your brain changes in response to the presence of drugs like caffeine.\n\n Your body naturally produces adenosine and GABA as inhibitory neurotransmitters and caffeine stops these from working. When your body notices that the original levels of these neurotransmitters aren't having the same effect as they used to, your body changes to make the neurotransmitters more effective (typically by developing more receptors for the neurotransmitters or producing more of them). As a result of these changes it takes a larger amount of caffeine to produce the effects you originally felt."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2m6s0b
|
what real value does a stock market provide? and what value does high speed trading provide to that market?
|
Honest question. I don't see how high speed trading is beneficial to society and to a certain degree wonder about trading stock in general.
Thanks in advance for showing me the way
Edit: thanks for all the response so far. I mainly posted this with the questions of high speed trading in mind. I understand how and IPO provides value initially, but my more general question about the value of a market is about what happens after the IPO. Thanks again for all the responses.
Edit 2: Lots of debate back and forth about HFT. I think I have a clearer picture of each side of the story. Thanks for all the input. I'm going to mark it as explained (but not because of any one particular answer, a bunch of them together), but feel free to keep up the discussion.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m6s0b/eli5_what_real_value_does_a_stock_market_provide/
|
{
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"If you know that you can trade your ownership in a company on an open market you'll be much more willing to invest in that company. More people investing in economic growth is beneficial for everyone as it grows the economy.\n\nWith regard to high speed trading it doesn't really have the same benefit. But there is concern that artificially limiting trades based on an arbitrary definition of what \"high speed is\" might hamper the market.",
"The markets exist to distribute risk to those who can best handle it",
"The gist of it is that high speed traders are *market makers*. They allow you to sell right now even if no one else wants to buy, and then they make a few pennies when (if) someone else comes along they can sell to.\n\nThe only reason that market maker #1 needs to trade at high speed is to compete with market maker #2. \n\nI wrote a fairly detailed tutorial about it a few years back:\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nFurther, I'm sure someone will show up here claiming that they don't want to pay the aforementioned pennies. Here is how to not pay:\n\n_URL_0_",
"There's kind of a lot of ground to cover on the first question, so I'd start by asking you if you understand the value that bank loans provide to society? Because the stock market is part of (and a kind of inevitable side effect of) the primary alternative to loans from banks. I don't want to cover a lot of ground you already know, but I've found that often the basic value proposition of financing is not well developed for people who have these kinds of questions.\n\nAs to the second point, you're not going to get a good answer, because no one really knows. High speed trading is a new form of arbitrage, and there was debate about whether old fashioned arbitrage was beneficial, harmful, or maybe somewhere in the middle but worth/not worth regulating and so on.\n\nThe basic argument for why stock arbitrage (there are other forms, but in this context if you just said arbitrage people would understand it to be stock arbitrage) is a good thing is that it creates liquidity in the markets. Put simply, when someone wants to buy something, they'll be able to buy it quickly, and when someone wants to sell something, they'll be able to sell it quickly, and in both cases at something approaching the \"market\" price. By contrast, in a world without arbitrageurs, maybe you would need to wait minutes, hours, days, months or whatever to buy that block of Proctor & Gamble that you wanted to buy, or else you'd have to raise your price to substantially above what you really thought it was worth. Conversely, if you suddenly took a dim view of P & G, and wanted to rid yourself of the stock, then even if the market thought it had a value of $100/sh, maybe at the time you wanted to sell, there were no ready buyers for the amount you were selling, and so you'd be forced to sell it in pieces, or lower your price, or wait much longer than you'd want. Not so with arbs in the market--they'll take what you're selling, in the amount you're selling, at a price pretty close to what they think is the market price, which is also probably the price you're looking for (or, at least, the price you'll be able to get).\n\nIn addition to the convenience, increased liquidity should improve the accuracy of the pricing in the market. Market prices are, after all, just what people are willing to pay/take for a given thing, and the only way to find that out is for market participants to make a deal and for the consideration to actually change hands.\n\nNow, arbs weren't (and aren't) doing this as a courtesy. They try to lowball you when they're buying and highball you when they're selling, and generally they'll succeed, because if they can't buy lower than they sell, they'll go out of business. But when there are many arbs, and they're competing with each other, the spread is going to be pretty small. Just like with everything, in theory, a competitive market will push the implicit service down to cost plus a reasonable return.\n\nNow, hopefully that all sounds pretty good, because that's the argument for. The argument against is that you don't really need arbs to create liquidity in the public markets, because there are so many participants anyway. If that's true, then they really are either a neutral or dead weight. Another argument against is that arbs are bad participants, because they're likely to exploit inside information or otherwise rip people off. There's actually a debate about whether insider trading is bad, from a market efficiency perspective, but stick a pin in that for now. The main gripe against high frequency traders is the latter one--otherwise ripping people off.\n\nNow, I don't have great information here, and I'm not sure anyone else (other than some of the high frequency trading firms themselves) have really great information about how much \"otherwise ripping people off\" is going on. I've heard accusations like \"high frequency trading firms have a way of seeing what you're going to bid before you bid it, and then they front run you and force you to buy from them slightly higher than they just bought.\" Sorry if that's not well articulated, but the basic idea is near-instantaneous front-running at a small margin. If that's all they're doing, then it's probably just a deadweight loss. At best, it's adding no value that I can see.\n\nThat said, I don't know that there's any proof that any of them are actually doing anything like that. If, to the contrary, they're really just running automated versions of old-school arbitrage, and doing it at a lower return because of their higher volume and efficiency gains due to automation, then they're probably an improvement over the old situation, where human beings were manually doing this. Of course, even if that's true, then you have to consider knock-on effects, like the possibility of \"flash crashes,\" like the one on May 6, 2010.\n\ntl;dr on the HFT question: it's a complicated and technocratic policy question, and the information for answering it is not really available yet.",
"There's high speed trading, and there's High Frequency Trading (HFT). Then there's beneficial HFT, and abusive HFT. The majority of HFT are making markets, program trading, and arbitrage...all legal and normal. Abusive HFT's try to game the market by quote stuffing, gaming imbalances, and other illegal strategies.\n\nThere's also the grey area...legal strategies that are unethical. Read Flash Boys for a good story about this.\n\nSpeed has totally changed the landscape of the market, for people who make their living from it. For the average investor, speed has been beneficial.",
"There are some good comments here on the importance of the stock market, so I won't get in to that and instead focus on the second question.\n\nHigh speed trading has very little value except to those using it. In fact it really just screws everyone else. It's a complicated issue, so I'll use an analogy. \n\nImagine you go to a farmers market to buy a 100 bushels of apples. You know that there are at least 100 bushels there to buy, so you go to the first stand. The first stand has 15 bushels to sell, so you buy them at the market value of $100 per bushel. But there is someone standing by the first stand who sees your order and knows you intend to buy more, so he races ahead of you to the other apple stands and buys all the apples and then sets up shop to sell them to you at $105 a bushel. \n\nSame thing in HST. If we own a mutual fund and that fund wants to buy 100 million of Apple stock, they may not be able to buy that all in one spot. They would enter the purchase, but it would need to be purchased from multiple sources, so the first part of the purchase might be accepted, but buy the time the purchase order gets to the next seller/market, someone has beaten you there and will be willing to sell you the shares for marginally more. \n\nIt's not illegal, but it probably should be. ",
"How's this for ELI5? Here is a fun cartoon to help you answer the first question. \n\n_URL_0_",
"liquidity. That is all it's good for.\n\nIf you own shares in a company, you OWN SHARES IN THAT COMPANY, you should be getting the earnings from the company related to your shares. You get a DIVIDEND.\n\nBut sometimes,\n\nIn a business you have to determine whether it's better to hold cash for potential business opportunities that could increase your potential earnings in the future! So then the company can decide to NOT pay out a dividend!\n\nSo what a stock is partial ownership and rights to the earnings or profits!\n\nIf you keep that in mind, everything else kind of makes sense. \n\nSo imagine, you buy a share of a company for 10 bucks.\n\nit later beomes worth 100 dollars.\n\nyou have a dividend of 3 dollars which is only 3 percent of 100,\n\nbut 30% of 10!\n\nSo on that initial 10 dollar investment, your getting a 30% return every 4 months! FOREVER! (until the company tanks or something)\n\nIf someone now wants to buy that stock from you for a 100, They'd only be getting a return of 3%, but perhaps they think the yield can stay at 3% at a stock price of 200 in the future. \n\nyou decide you have found a new opportunity that you want to move your cash into, instead of seeking out buyers and going through a huge hoopla you can now instantaneously sell your share do to the structure of our current market!\n\nso you get bigger better earnings potential vs the 1 or 2 percent you get from earning interest at a bank!\n\nHope that helps.\n\n\n\n",
"I'll chip in with the economist's take on things.\n\n**Stock market** was historically a trading venue where you would sell cattle, grain and other similar goods. The stock market that we know today where you trade shares of companies actually served a different purpose. You bring your company there to acquire capital in exchange for dividend - a share in future profits - and some voting power in the company. That was the primary role of the stock market and price determination was just a coincidence. It serves as a determinant for the price of shares and valuation of companies because that's the main (often only) center of share exchange (purely legal reasons). As for the difference between huge IPOs and subsequent drops it is just part of the natural process of establishing real value of a good. The price is never set - any price - for good and it fluctuates constantly.\n\n**High speed trading** it is the same thing only done in a much shorter timeframe. The reason for it is mostly that the biggest volume of hi-speed trading is in options, futures and financial markets where there's no real capital other than money or title to money changing hands. In that respect it there's very little in terms of actual direct influence on anything other than the *price* of the good being traded. For example a share in a company implies share in profits, decision-making and other related areas of the company's life besides its value. That means that a change of shares can cause change of strategy, personnel etc - and often it's precisely the point of the acquisition or sale of shares. In terms of financial instruments it's very rare for someone to want to acquire instruments for purposes other than price manipulation and/or realization of profits... say political blackmail. It's true that if you are an investor holding an instrument you might want to keep it for some specific reason (say you prefer a particular issuer or underwriter ... like preferring US or British bonds over Greek ones) but most people want just money and it is precisely *those people* who enter hi-speed trading markets. Those who have other aims stay away. So in that sense once you get the blackmailers and specific holders and other weirdos out the only real reason for trading such instruments is to realize temporary gains in value resulting from the instrument or options on it. Since you can only realize the gains if you *sell* the instrument it is absolutely logical and natural for the traders to want to have as many transactions as possible because every single transaction is an opportunity to generate profits or minimize losses. Especially that in most such arrangements investors don't buy specific shares but portfolio units in the managing funds.\n\n-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nTL;DR - financial instruments on the hi-speed trading market are owned by people who do not care about anything other than pure financial value and the resulting loss/gain. Since they can be only realized in a transaction the larger the volume of transaction the better. Since you can't multiply instruments beyond certain parameters (options, derivatives etc) the only solution is to trade faster and faster and faster. Again the price-determining feature of the hi-speed market is purely coincidental.\n\n-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nAs for whether it's good or bad there's really nothing wrong with it in principle and even if you consider the practical issues (bandwidth, database location etc) it's still just regular stock market sped up. If you realize that the stock market is just a huge marketplace with shares instead of potatoes then either *all* of it is wrong or *nothing* is. The problems with hi-speed trading are either those practical issues of inter-market violations which are not issues from the *economic* point of view - errors in execution or criminal activity (violation of agreed-upon rules) can't undermine it any more than the existence of theft and robbery never undermines voluntary transactions. They also often are just an attempt to equalize other genuine problems somewhere else. \n\nTake this example - many people demand higher taxes on financial institutions because of the implied reasoning that their high profits are somehow unfair (and they are). At the same time the unfair nature of their earnings is direct result from certain specific legal solutions put in place so the actual addressing of those issues would be to remove those solutions. Instead people focus on the immediate and say \"we don't care about your unfair privileges if you share the loot\". A lot of the rationale behind the attempts to tax or outlaw hi-speed trading, hostile takeovers and other similar practices is precisely that. People want to keep the stock market generating profits and growth but want to get rid of \"excesses\" or \"pathologies\" without understanding what begets what here. In other words they just want to both have the cookie and eat it at the same time. There is no economic argument for that, most of the existing ones are just political ones (as in economics being different from political economy)\n\n-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nEDIT: I forgot to explain why hi-speed trading exists in the first place. Explanation amended.\n",
"Short answer: for the common investor, it adds no value and in fact reduces the value of investing. \n\nFor large institutions and the people doing the high speed trading, they get an unfair advantage and make money by arbitrage by buying and immediately selling fractions of seconds. The dollar difference may be on fractions of pennies, hence very large volumes necessary.\n\nThe stock markets themselves now sell, to the highest bidders, access to put their servers as close to possible to the market's own servers so they'll get even a fraction of a second advantage over others. \n\nMichael Lewis just wrote a book about this very topic. \n",
"I think that many high frequency trading firms are not very well understood. From what I understand, much of what these firms do is act as market-makers. This means that they supply the bid and ask price for a stock, so that when a company or individual wants to make a trade, they are immediately quoted a price. Their chief function is to provide liquidity, always taking the position on the other side of orders.",
"I think one thing people should realize is that for every buy order fulfilled at a stock market, someone that previously owned that stock had a sell order fulfilled. This includes high speed (and even HF) trading. Look into bid/ask pricing and how it works and how it drives a stock market.\n\nYes I'm making a lot of generalizations - if you trade with an institution like TD Ameritrade it's very unlikely your order, either buy or sell, nver really hits the market. Most firms will continuously net their buy and sell orders using their own customers first, in order to avoid paying market settlement fees but still being able to charge fees on both the buyer and seller. So for example, if you instruct your broker to sell 10 shares (asking) of MSFT at $51.45, they will try to pair that up internally with any one looking to buy (bidding) up to 10 shares of MSFT at or above $51.45 a share. And if that institution doesn't reveal either the bid/ask pricing or the buyer/seller's info, you've just described a \"dark pool\". \n\nedit: additional text here: Because the stock market works on a buy/sell order fulfillment basis, if you put in a mischievous buy order - say for example you put a buy order (bidding) in for 100 shares of AAPL at $1 a share, the only way that order will be fulfilled is if someone puts in a sell order for 1-100 shares of AAPL (asking) $1 or less. AAPL currently trades at over $100/share, so no one in their right mind would up put sell order asking for a price that low. However, if my understanding is correct, that's exactly what happened to Knight Capital - a bug in a new trading algorithm put the wrong price on sell orders and other firms, recognizing this, put in matching buy orders matching the ask price, and Knight was forced to sell stocks at prices up to 1/100 of the value. \n\nImagine, if you will, because of a typographical error, you sell your house for $25,000.000 instead of $250,000.00, because you put the decimal place in the wrong spot in a string of 0's.",
"The market provides value to investors through the possibility of earning a return on your capital greater than say a treasury bond or a CD. Also some companies pay out their income in dividends quarterly or annually, which can be an augmentation to your personal income. \n\nHF traders provide this wondrous tool called liquidity. They buy and sell nearly constantly, so that if you or I would like to get in or out of a position in the market, we could do so nearly instantly. They take away your risk of being saddled with something you don't want. Unless as we saw in the 2010 flash crash they drop off and stop providing liquidity. But the markets bounced back from that in literally 20 minutes. \n\nTl;dr Stock market helps companies raise capital and investors earn returns, HFTs make it possible to do so without liquidity risks "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/how_to_not_get_ripped_off_by_hft.html",
"https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology2.html",
"https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.html",
"https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html"
],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50yJHK_g_Ts"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
rf33e
|
what move ratings do (like r, pg-13, etc)? when a movie is released unrated what are the implications and why don't more movies do this?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rf33e/what_move_ratings_do_like_r_pg13_etc_when_a_movie/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c45alj8",
"c45bihv"
],
"score": [
11,
7
],
"text": [
"The Motion Picture Association of America rates movies based on their guidelines.\n\nA movie does not have to be rated, but many theaters wont air an unrated movie.",
"[Ratings:](_URL_1_) G is for kids [example Disney or Pixar animation movies]. PG is \"kid friendly\" but not a super kiddy[example Night at the Museum]. PG-13 is still \"kid friendly\" but may contain adult content such as violence[example: The Fifth Element]. R is for 17 and older only or under 17 with a parent [example: Pulp Fiction]\n\nMovies are rarely released unrated because many movie theaters have contracts with the studios saying they will only show movies rated by the MPAA. Also theaters are protecting themselves by allowing a 3rd party to take responsibility for censorship, therefore they are not liable if a person is offended by a movie. \n\nThe studios also have side-deals with the MPAA as well, as a sort of \"open secret\". Since the MPAA is only a company, not a government organization, they have no real rules they must follow, which leads to deals about what movies get what ratings...sometimes irregardless of their content. Generally, the only point of contention is if a movie gets a PG-13 rating or R rating. As receiving an R rating could significantly impact the amount of money the movie can make because kids couldn't freely see it.\n\nMovies are rated by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) Guidelines are published, but loosely followed. A small group of about 10 people decide on what the rating for each movie is. \n\nViolence isn't treated too harshly. Nudity, sex, and language is treated severly. For example, a movie may be quite violent and have lots of guns and death and be rated PG-13. A single sex scene, boob, or \"f you\" almost certainly attributes an R rating.\n\nI also highly suggest you watch this film about how the MPAA actually conducts ratings... its a racket. Probably NSFW [This Film Is Not Yet Rated](_URL_0_)\n\ntl;dr, \n[See the Ratings here](_URL_1_). Movies are not released unrated because the studios and theaters have deals not to do it. The MPAA is [legally] corrupt anyways."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://youtu.be/gIncrMYRUJ0",
"http://movies.about.com/od/miscellanous/f/film-ratings.htm"
]
] |
||
2udnpq
|
how (or can we) tell if a star has a planet orbiting around it if the planet's orbit is perpendicular to our viewing plane?
|
I know that we use the doppler effect and the hanging brightness of stars to detect planets but it seems like this would only work if the planets orbit is close to parallel with our plane of view.
Can we detect planets if the orbit is perpendicular? If so, how?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2udnpq/eli5_how_or_can_we_tell_if_a_star_has_a_planet/
|
{
"a_id": [
"co7gqvf"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"A planet don't orbit exactly around a star, the planet AND the star orbit around the center of mass of both. \n\nSince the star is way bigger than the planet at first it seems that it just rotates in it's own axis, but with some equipment and our good friend mathematics it's possible to detect that there's a planet there and some information about it's position and size.\n\nOther way of detecting planets is watching changes in the luminosity of a star, if the planet passes in front of the star it'll change the amount of light that reaches us.\n\nThese two methods are used to discover planets that are too far away for us to see directly."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1w41hc
|
how is it legal for djs to play other peoples music in public?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w41hc/eli5_how_is_it_legal_for_djs_to_play_other/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ceyhmws",
"ceyhsxc",
"ceyit2v",
"ceymtcf"
],
"score": [
8,
11,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"I can tell you about Germany, where the DJs (or mostly the club owner / festival operator) pay GEMA, which is a fix amount of money to play in public. It's calculated by the people that fit in the club/the festival and the amount of tracks you want to play. \nThe music owners register to the GEMA as well and get payed monthly or once a year.",
"I'm really not an expert but the way I had it explained to me was basically owners of venues that will have music performed, pay the RIAA a flat fee. That money is not given to the artists whose songs are actually performed at the venue,(cos who could or would want to keep track of all that) but goes into a giant pool of cash that is distributed among all the artists associated with the RIAA and is doled out in accordance with how well their songs performed in the charts.",
"I worked at a venue - you can get a yearly, blanket license from BMI or ASCAP (ideally, both) that covers anything in their repertory for an annual fee.",
"SOCAN is the Canadian organization dealing with this. For radio and the like, they provide a set list and SOCAN distributes royalties. They collaborate with ASCAP etc for international artists. For restaurants and other venues that wouldnt have exact records of whats played, they collect a flat fee, and all SOCAN members get a cut under the assumption that some one maybe played their song at some point."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
30pae0
|
how is data/info inserted into and carried over light?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30pae0/eli5_how_is_datainfo_inserted_into_and_carried/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cpuhrii",
"cpuhs30",
"cpukpar"
],
"score": [
6,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"In binary, based on whether the light is on or off. With fiber optic systems, that can just be done very, very quickly",
"Basically the same way as it's sent over wires: As 1s and 0s. You have one device that sends a signal, one device that receives it, on is 1, off is 0.",
"Then once the series of 0s and 1s are received on the other end they travel back up through the layers of the OSI model. Physical, Data, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application. These are the theoretical layers of the model.\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3ojtp3
|
legally why can a person be held responsible for paying child support if they have no legal rights to choose to be a parent or not?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ojtp3/eli5_legally_why_can_a_person_be_held_responsible/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cvxw9xn"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Well, if you are looking strictly for legal precedent, [Dubay v. Wells](_URL_1_) is a case that was claimed \"Roe v. Wade for men.\" The case essentially argued that women get the right to choose abortion, adoption, or keeping the baby, but the male doesn't have a choice and pretty much has to go along and finance whatever decision the woman makes. However, according to the [US Court of Appeals](_URL_0_):\n\n\n\n\n > Dubay’s claim that a man’s right to disclaim fatherhood would be analogous to a woman’s right to abortion rests upon a false analogy. In the case of a father seeking to opt out of fatherhood and thereby avoid child support obligations, the child is already in existence and the state therefore has an important interest in providing for his or her support.\n\nSo, according to this mindset, men can't just refuse to pay child support because they don't want to be a father because the child exists, and because of the fact that he is biologically the father, he has a responsibility to provide for said child. In the case of abortion for women, according to the way the law is interpreted, an embryo is not considered a person, so she has different rights in regards to how she decides to treat the pregnancy."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/07a0442p-06.pdf",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dubay_child_support_case"
]
] |
||
46bzi5
|
why can a human be treated for rabies after they've been bitten, but when a dog is bitten it's too late?
|
Why is it when a dog is bitten they're automatically put to sleep instead of being treated?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46bzi5/eli5_why_can_a_human_be_treated_for_rabies_after/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d03wlmd",
"d045dao"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"It's not automatic. It's up to the specific guidelines established by health authorities in that area. North Dakota for instance: \n\nWhat happens if my dog, cat, or ferret is bitten or fights with a wild animal or another animal that may have rabies?\nIf the animal that bit your pet can be captured, have the animal's brain tested for rabies. If the test is negative for rabies and your pet has not been vaccinated, you should vaccinate your pet immediately.\n\nIf the biting animal tested positive for rabies and the pet is current on its rabies vaccination, the pet should be given a booster vaccine immediately. Observe your pet for 45 days for any symptoms of rabies after the booster shot. \n\nIf the biting animal tested positive for rabies and your pet has never been vaccinated, the recommendation is to put the pet down. If you are unwilling to euthanize the pet, it must be confined for 6 months and vaccinated against rabies (the rabies vaccine must be administered at least 1 month prior to release). \n\nIf the biting animal tested positive for rabies and the pet is NOT current on its rabies vaccination (i.e., it was vaccinated against rabies in the past, but is now overdue for a booster vaccination), it should be evaluated based on severity of exposure, time elapsed since last vaccination, number of previous vaccinations, current health status, and local rabies epidemiologic factors to determine need for euthanasia or immediate revaccination and observation with isolation. \n\n If the animal cannot be captured, assume it is rabid and proceed as described above.[1](_URL_0_)",
"Some vaccines/treatments/etc only work if they are applied before the body is exposed to the disease. The body gets the dead/weakened/deactivated version of the virus/bacteria/parasite, recognizes it as an invader, and develops the proper response. When the body is exposed to the actual disease later, it already knows how to respond and can fight it off. This is how the rabies vaccine works in dogs.\n\nSome vaccines can work if the body has been exposed to the pathogen but hasn't been completely taken over by it. The body hasn't really noticed the invaders yet and hasn't taken started taking action to fight it off. The large number of weakened versions of the invader wakes up the immune system, causes it to generate the proper response, and kills off the actual invader. This only works if the disease is in its very early stages. Otherwise, the immune system is hopelessly behind by the time it notices the invaders and never catches up. Catch it early, and you're cured. This is how the rabies vaccine works in humans.\n\nNow, why can't the vaccine be administered after exposure to dogs and have it cure them the same way it cures humans? 1) Human and dog immune systems aren't exactly the same. What works for one may never work for another. 2) It might actually work, but the risk of it not and the animal passing rabies to another animal or person if it doesn't is too great a risk. 3) Humans are much more likely to invest millions of dollars in research towards keeping humans alive than they are to invest in keeping dogs alive."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.ndhealth.gov/disease/rabies/qanda.htm"
],
[]
] |
|
f08cfc
|
why do film projectors need lenses?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f08cfc/eli5_why_do_film_projectors_need_lenses/
|
{
"a_id": [
"fgs3n7w"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Imagine arrows coming out of the phone light, through the film onto the wall. If you have a point light source, then everything is fine, each arrow can only go through a single possible point on that film and that film sets the amount of light that goes through at that point.\n\nNow imagine the same thing but two points close to each other, now each of those points projects these rays of light, the key is each point maps the entire film then the entire wall, so two points means there are two different rays going to the same point on the wall, each going through a different part of the film. \n\nNow add in another two points of light, 4 points, each point on the wall gets 4 different rays to it, each from different parts of the film.\n\nKeep adding points. \n\nYour phone camera is not a point source of light, it is likely a round shape a centimeter across. Were it a point source of light there would be no problem. But it isn't. \n\nSo we use a lens to correct the trajectory of the rays."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4pjna3
|
catalysts and catalytic converters
|
Are they the same thing. How does a catalyst get used in a chemical reaction.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pjna3/eli5_catalysts_and_catalytic_converters/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d4lnvza"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"A catalyst is just a substance or material that promotes a chemical reaction. Put simply, a reaction requires a high-enough temperature to kick it off, and a catalyst typically reduces that temperature. This is good because temperature is a measure of how much energy is required to start the reaction, and so reducing the temperature reduces the amount of energy you need to put into the reaction. Using different catalytic materials (platinum, palladium, rhodium, etc.), you can fine tune a chemical reaction to make it do precisely what you want it to do, and avoid by-products or other negative things from happening.\n\nA catalytic converter on your car does the same thing. It targets the exhaust gases you don't want (CO, hydrocarbons, NOx compounds) and turns them into exhaust gases that you *do* want (CO2, H2O, and N2)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3clpxe
|
what measures are in place to protect communities from fracking operations which may put a ground water supply or local environment at risk?
|
The debate about how good or bad fracking is for the environment is ongoing, but clearly there are risks, so I assume there must checks and balances in place to oversee which wells can be extracted using the fracking method.
I am curious to know what is done at the Federal and State level. Also, which States have lenient regulations and which have stringent regulations. (I live in Michigan, so any info about that would be really great)
Thanks!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3clpxe/eli5_what_measures_are_in_place_to_protect/
|
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"This isn't really an answer to the part of your question where you ask what is done to regulate the industry on a state and federal level, I'm hoping someone one else can explain that better than I \n\nBut this is what can happen on a local level. \n\n\nGrassroots efforts to bring to referendum (petitions to get issues on the ballot) ways to regulate the industry are the most effective way for a community to protect themselves from gas drilling, whether they want to outright ban it or impose regulations. \n\nRight now in my county a petition to allow homeowners the right to refuse surveyors for a pipeline company to enter their property. The company announced today it is suing 4 households for noncompliance. \n\nIf communities want to be protected they have to take charge and push for petitions . ",
"Well, if you are from the US, I'm pretty sure one of your politicians decided to sneak something into a federal bill that exempts fracking companies from all or part of a whole pile of regulatory acts in your country including: Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act\n\nTo add to this further, a lot of the oil and gas industry in the US has basically been left to police and regulate itself because there just aren't enough government resources to really enforce what regulations do exist."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
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[],
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9t7vvr
|
what kind of data is stored in a black box of a plane?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9t7vvr/eli5_what_kind_of_data_is_stored_in_a_black_box/
|
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"There are two flight recorders. The cockpit voice recorder is recording any sound from the microphones in the cockpit so you can hear exactly what the pilots are saying and hearing. Then there is the flight data recorder that records data from the airplanes systems such as its orientation, forces, flight control input, speed, oil pressure, etc. If the aircraft investigators are able to collect the data from the flight recorders they know what the pilots were experiencing and doing in addition to what the aircraft and environment were doing. There is a good chance that this data alone can tell investigators how the aircraft crashed and some of the reasons why.",
"It's varied over the years.\n\nAt first it was a log of altitude, airspeed and angle of the plane\n\nThen they added throttles, position of all the control surfaces (flaps, rudder, slats, etc) and where each instrument was\n\nBy 1956 we have James J. \"Crash\" Ryan's Flight Recorder which maintained a continuing recording of aircraft flight data such as engine exhaust, temperature, fuel flow, aircraft velocity, altitude, control surfaces positions, and rate of descent.\n\nToday the basic requirement for a commercial aircraft in the US is 88 parameters which is sampled multiple times a second and they can store 17-25 hours of data\n\n_URL_0_\n\nBoeing and Airbus's new data recorders in the new types (747-8, newer 777s, 787, A380, A350, etc) are recording over 2000 parameters and save 50 hours of data\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/121.344"
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||
5qcr3p
|
if sound travels better through water, why is it always quiet under water ?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qcr3p/eli5_if_sound_travels_better_through_water_why_is/
|
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"text": [
"While sound travels well underwater, sound does not change mediums well. Sounds made above water will sound muffled at best underwater. But sounds generated underwater such as tapping metal objects together or the sounds of aquatic mammals will travel very well.",
"The simple answer is because there are very few sources of sound underwater. Most sounds on land are either animals or man made. Very few fish/mammals are close to beaches - the most likely place you'd stick your head under water - and there are few man made devices producing sounds anywhere in the ocean.",
"I'm assuming you're saying it's quiet in a pool, or possibly a lake. If you ever go swimming/diving/etc in the ocean, you'll find it's quite loud, especially in areas with coral. There, you can hear fish crunching away at it constantly, like pop rocks always by your ears. That sound travels very well, so it's all-encompassing. If you hear a whale or dolphin, even if it's fairly far away, you can usually hear the sound. However, directionality of the source of the sound is nearly impossible to tell when underwater.",
"Above water there are a lot more sources of sound. Birds chirping, leaves rustling in the wind, cars driving on roads, etc.\n\nBut if you dive into your backyard swimming pool, there is almost nothing under the water making any noise. That's why it's quiet - because the noises from above have a hard time transferring from air to water. Most of the sound will bounce off the water and remain in the air. But if the sound is generated underwater in the first place, it will be plenty loud. Just go under water with 2 rocks and tap them together.",
"When we were little, my friend and I played a game where we would both go under water and one of us would yell something to the other person and then we would both come up for air and the listening person would have to repeat what the yelling person said. We must have played that game hundreds of times. It does not sound as fun as at was to us back then. \n\nEdit. This was in the pool. It did not work nearly as well when we tried to play the game in the ocean.",
"I went to a spa and they had underwater music everywhere. It worked really well, however it got weird when there were birds singing and waterfalls splashing.",
"You can actually hear the \"buzzing\" of boat engines quite well, for hundreds of meters if you have your neck under the water. You'll hear it from over the water through your ears, and under the water through what I would guess would be your spine. It's a weird noise.",
"Sound travels 5x faster in water.\n\nAbove-ground noises are significantly attenuated when they cross the air-water barrier. So every sound originating above water is muted. Underwater sources aren't affected by this.\n\nHowever, making noise underwater requires more energy per dB, because water is 1000x as dense. You need to vibrate 1000x the mass, which is ~~30dB~~ *60dB* (darn convention changes) of attenuation. Our ears also judge sound logarithmically, where each 10dB sounds about 2x as loud. So equal sound sources at equal distances underwater sound about ~~32x~~ *64x* as quiet.\n\nAdditionally, you'll kind of feel muffled, not just from the drop in volume, but because the sound doesn't seem to come from any direction. Our brains are very well trained to find the direction of a sound source by the difference in time of arrival between our ears. That tells us left, right, or center, and the shape of our ears and face blocking sound from certain directions helps us judge forward/backward and up/down by subtle differences in volume.\n\nSound traveling 5x as fast makes the time delay only 1/5 as long. And since the volume is already significantly attenuated, we have trouble judging forward/backward from the small difference in volume caused by the shape of our ears. So everything sounds like it's coming from right in front of us, or on top of us.\n\n**TL;DR** Sound under water is ~60x quieter, and it's really hard to tell where it's coming from. Hence the claustrophobic, near-deaf feeling you get like you're walking past one of those anti-echo fabric boards in an auditorium.",
"It's easier to imagine by putting your ear against, say, a table. If you then lightly (very lightly, as it gets quite loud) tap on the table, you will hear it incredibly clearly. Now, if you then block your other ear, so your only hearing is from the table, and then somebody speaks, you won't hear it very well, because even though the table is conducting the sound much, much better than the air, the air doesn't transfer the sound to the table.\n\nWhen underwater, it's like a really, really big table. You can hear any sound that originates from inside the water or from a collision with the water, but, like with the table, sound from the air won't transfer. \n\nSo while water does conduct sound incredibly well, you still need something to introduce the sound into the water.\n\nEdit: changed 'day' to 'say' and 'eat' to 'ear', thanks to u/ponyphonic1",
"If there is nothing producing sound underwater it is going to be very quiet because sounds in the air don't transfer to water very well. Human ears aren't adapted to water hearing either, so underwater sounds appear muffled to us. If you go underwater where there are a lot of boats, you can hear them even miles away, however.\n\nThis reminds me of an environmental predicament we are currently facing. Don't get me wrong, the ocean is a very, very noisy place. Huge cargo ships are constantly shipping goods from continent to continent, and manmade sonar is incredibly loud and can kill marine life. Noise pollution is becoming a huge problem for wildlife. Check out [this video](_URL_0_) on underwater noise, as I think the importance of this issue is understated.",
"From my experience, working as a commercial diver for many years, sound travels very well under water. A ship can be heard pretty far away, and metal clunking sounds very clear. \nHowever, what is difficult to determine underwater is the direction of where the sound is coming from. Example; I was trying to locate a particular seal in a ships hull. The crew decided to bang metal against the hull around the seal for me to find it. I would hear every bang very clearly, but they might as well have come from behind me, nevermind pinpointing a small hole.",
"It isn't quiet, but our ears aren't built to hear under water. The acoustic impedance of water is very different from what our ears can process. \n\nWater is heavy, so even loud sounds don't move it very much, that is, the amplitude of sound in water is small, but it moves with a lot of force. Our ears expect the opposite - they expect air that moves with a large amplitude, but with very little force, as the air density is rather low. The middle ear is largerly responsible for \"compressing\" the movement from high amplitude/low force to low amplitude/high force needed by the cochlea. \n\nSound with 0.001mm amplitude still moves the eardrum just by 0.001mm, even though it corresponds to much louder sound in water. The rest of the energy is reflected/wasted and doesn't pass to the inner ear.",
"Energy, as sound is, has a hard time crossing between materials (different density, rigidity, resonance, etc). This is called an \"impedance mismatch\" and it results in some energy making the crossing and the rest either being absorbed (converted to, say, heat) or reflected. Water and air are quite dissimilar so there is a large impedance mismatch, which prevents a lot of sound energy from moving from one to the other. That's why it's hard to hear the noise of a busy swimming pool when you're diving under the surface, and why you can't hear fish talking when you're on a boat.",
"Got a little background in underwater noise as I was a submarine Sonar Technician for 9 years.\n\nFirst off my opinion is that it is a lot louder underwater than it is above, at least in oceans. Ships, Shrimp( they sound like popcorn popping, or mouse clicking), and dolphins are extremely noisy.\n\n\n\n I am assuming your question is more to the point of why does it seem quieter when my head is below water that above. Like when you are at a lake, pool,or even in the ocean. Well first off your ears are designed to work out of the water. They may work okay'ish underwater, but not to the same degree. When your head is underwater, your inner ear typically maintain the little amount of air within them, as getting water to your middle ear can cause issues. Anyone who had tubes in their ears already know this. \n\n So in order for you to hear anything underwater, sound has to transfer to air first. When sound goes from one medium to another(water to air in this example) it loses energy depending on what the difference in density one is from the other(and it doesn't get much more different from air to water). A good example of how sound loses energy when going through mediums would be ear buds. A physical object that is much higher density prevents the vibrations from reaching the air drum because sound doesn't transition well from Air to solid objects. When your head is underwater its the same thing, but the densities are reversed, the sound never reaches your eardrum as most of it bounces off the air bubble retained in your ear.\n\nNow if you got yourself an underwater microphone, you will notice a completely different amount of noise underwater.",
"I'm guessing that you have never been scuba diving before. It can be quite loud down there. I can hear whales that are miles away. Sounds produced underwater travel quite far. Sounds that are created above the water line and cross underwater get muffled. If a cruise ship is nearby it is downright deafening, talk about noise pollution...the fish hate it and take off ",
"Crack your knuckles under water sometime. I swear everybody with his head under water will be able to hear it.",
"Acoustics researcher here!\n\nSound propagates quite well underwater, what doesn't work well are human ears. Sound waves struggle to propagate between differing mediums, in this case from the water to the air in our ears.\n\nIn fact, very little of what you hear underwater is from sound waves entering your ear canal. The human body is mostly water, and as such an underwater sound wave passes quite nicely into our flesh. This results in the sound wave resonating through our bones themselves. Much of the sound you hear is bone conduction!",
"It's nowhere NEAR quiet under water.\n\nHere's one of my dive videos where you can hear the pebbles being pushed by current against each other as well as hear my bubbles ascending. \n\nat the 3min mark you can even hear a small dubber dingy's engine as it passes overhead 30m above us.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nBonus video of an eel swimming around with a bunch of ambient noise. The constant crackling is the noise of small rocks and pebbles and fish eating off parts of the coral. \n\n_URL_1_",
"The ocean will actually drown out higher pitch noises like a screeching voice. But low pitch sounds like a deep voice can be heard very far away. In electronics we call this action a low pass filter. \n\nEdit: backwards logic",
"Fish are smug assholes and have nothing to say to us. This division started years ago with the advent of the fishing pole. That is why it is quiet underwater for humans. ",
"Not very many Best Buys under the sea? ",
"Studying Diagnostic Medical Sonography, I'll give a go. When sound waves hit the boundary between two mediums, such as air and water, much of that sound is reflected. The more different the mediums, the bigger the reflection created at that boundary. This is why bones show up as crazy bright on Ultrasound -- speed of sound is massively different in bone than in muscle or fat. \n\nNow when noise from the open air hits the water, it loses a lot of intensity. Not only that, but there's always a little air inside your ear when you're underwater -- and that constitutes yet ANOTHER change in medium that causes reflection. Compare that to when you're in open air, and there's no change in medium at all because it's all air. 0 < 2. Even if the sound originates in water, it still crosses into the air in your ear. \n\nThe speed of sound might be much faster in water than air, but it's the change in medium that attenuates the sound.",
"Because your ears aren't full of water up to the eardrums. The air between your eardrums and the water muffles sounds. ",
"All these scientific answers, but I think you may need one comprehensible to a layman. Next time you go swimming, take a friend with you. Have him go underwater and shriek obnoxiously loudly like a little girl. Above the water, you won't hear it. Tell him to do it again, but this time go underwater with him. This time you will hear it, and it'll be rather loud. \nHope this helps ",
" > why is it always quiet under water ? \n\nAre you serious? It's noisy as fuck underwater. Others have explained why you can't hear surface noises underwater, but underwater noises carry very strongly. I find the ocean to be one of the noisiest places you can be.",
"All of the answers i have read are SOUND (get it) responses. As a SCUBA diver, and to explain like you are five... Sound needs a thing to travel through. Water is thicker than air... there are more bits to vibrate. However, there are also more bits vibrating. So, imagine i am standing in front of you, lets say six feet away. I say \"HEY OP\" very loud, you'll hear me. Now lets say there are six people one foot apart that all yell \"HEY OP\" five times faster than the speed of sound (about 650mph i think..) after one another. You can still hear it, but the background noise will \"muffle\" my yelling. The sounds being generated by me and crowd become one sound. For you to hear me, I would have to yell EXTREMELY loud for your brain to differentiate the sounds. \nOur brains are really good at blocking sound. The \"quiet\" you hear underwater is actually a lot of noise that is not important. So it \"becomes\" quiet. \n",
"Sound doesn't travel better under water. That's a widespread myth.\n\nInstead, sound travels *faster* underwater. It's like a light beam traveling through oil versus water versus glass versus air. All four materials are 100% transparent, ideally. We don't say that light travels \"better\" through a glass prism. Instead we say that the glass surface reflects light, and also it refracts (bends) the light which passes into the glass.\n\nThe same is true of water surfaces:\n\n* Sound in the air will reflect off the water surface.\n* Sound in the water will reflect off the air surface.\n\nIn other words, the underwater world is quiet because all the sources of sound in air are being bounced off the water surface. And, usually there are no large crowds of noisy fish. \"Underwater wind,\" when the water flows past objects, doesn't produce audible sound. Water \"blowing\" through kelp forests isn't like wind in the trees.\n\nStick your head under water, and mostly you'll hear noise from waves on shore, plus human traffic sound (the boat motors.)\n\nWhy would people think that sound travels \"better\" under water? Here's one reason. If you knock two stones together in air, most of the vibration stays within the stones. It bounces around inside. The \"crack\" of colliding stones in air is very, very feeble. Now knock the stones together underwater, and most of the sound comes right out of the solid surfaces. The wave-reflection between rock and water is very low. The wave-reflection between rock and air is very high. Whacking rocks together underwater is *intensely loud.* But it's caused by the rock-liquid coupling effect.\n\nHeh, if you repeatedly collide two rocks together under water using your hands, soon your hands will ache. Your tissues received a bit of ultrasonic damage. Possibly you could even bruise yourself, just from the acoustic pulse radiated by the colliding pebbles.\n\nPS\n\nTo make things a bit less quiet under water, try the following trick.\n\nGet two stones, make a big cloud of underwater bubbles, then whack the stones together near the bubble-cloud, or inside it. BONG BONG BANG BING BEENG! You'll hear intensely loud underwater musical notes. And the pitch increases as the bubble-cloud shrinks in size against the water surface. This is bubble oscillation, where the group of air-pockets has a collective resonance, like a bell. (The closest \"dry version\" to this is to tap on a thick, closed book, and hear the \"boomp\" tone. Paper sheets with a bit of air between them will collectively form a sort of \"resonant cavity.\" Hmmm, play books with drumsticks? Thinner books are higher pitch.\n\n\n",
"Where do whale noises come from?",
"If light travels faster than sound, why can I always hear the horn before the light turns green.",
"If ever you go snorkeling somewhere that has a lot to do with the table, sound from the other.",
"Scuba diver here: \n\nIt's actually a really loud place down there! You can hear shrimp clicking and clacking, boats in the distance, and even whales singing even if they are miles away. \n",
"It is also very difficult to ascertain directionality of sound for humans under water due to our skill structure and auditory system. Sound travels much faster under water and traverses the distance between our eardrums too quickly for us to discern where the sound is coming from. The sound of water pressing against the eardrum also muffles much of the noise. For this reason among many, aquatic mammals have an enlarged fat filled melon through which they detect in much the same way sonar is used.",
"There's also the fact that our ears are very carefully tuned impedance matching devices for Earth's air density. Water, however, has a different impedance than air - not unlike how the air-water interface reflects light at some angles.",
"While it seems very muffled and \"quiet\", the ocean is a very noisy place with alot going on. Just swinging in calm surf by me you can hear hundreds if not thousands of fish grazing on the rocks for barnacles, water movement, boats driving by, etc. ",
"I remember swimming in an olympic size pool as a kid and having a wrist watch that would beep when the timer was started. I had a friend that could hear the beep clearly and amplified from the opposite end of the pool when underwater. Was really interesting to hear.\n\nAlso, I just realized that this was a Cool story bro' on my part.",
"Because there is an air pocket in your ear canal, and your hearing is mechanical based on the percussion of small bones designed to work in an atmosphere of Air. Both the change in density of sound transmission from water to air, and also the density of water itself changes the parameters of your hearing. The mechanics of your hearing is designed for air, along with your brains training through your lifetime. Analogous to your eyes becoming occluded and opaque through life whilst your brain adjusts making whites white and colors the same. ",
"Your ears aren't designed to work under water. That's all.\n\nThe guy asks to \"explain like I'm five\". Yet people come here to write scientific papers.\n",
"I used to live on a popular summer lake, and my family had a dock and often went to the beach. Underwater, I could hear engines whirring over one another all the way from the shore. Not to mention the sand and pebbles under me shifting with every wave. At our dock, I could hear underwater when someone came thumping down the thing, and exactly when they jumped off. I could hear when someone was lowering the boat hoist, or when the water pulled at the rafts chain. \n\nThere's tons of stuff you CAN hear underwater. Just not a whole lot of stuff useful to our survival."
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2nvk9a
|
is there an argument against curing autism, and if so, why?
|
I saw a post on tumblr saying that people who don't fall on the autism-spectrum don't have to right to discuss why it needs a cure, which confused me a lot. Is this just tumblr being tumblr or am I missing something?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2nvk9a/eli5_is_there_an_argument_against_curing_autism/
|
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"Perhaps instead of a cure we could figure out a cause that might be helpful. Im not a behavioral analyst or anything",
"There is a minority of autistic people who believe that the way they process the world is different (true) and even better than neurotypical people. So trying to \"cure\" autism is a bad idea. Here is a video of an autistic woman about this. It also shows you a lot about autistic behaviors. The opening shows what is known as \"stimming\", a common thing among autistic people. Don't get weirded out.\n\n_URL_0_\n",
"They're idiots whose only experience with autism is 'people being a little quirky'. My cousin has severe autism and he can't speak to us at all. He's already a teenager, but can barely function at a 4 year old level. His mom left my uncle because she couldn't handle raising him and the pressure of dealing with him alone has left my uncle a broken, joyless man. Some spoiled little shit on the internet saying that we shouldn't be trying to give him a chance at a normal life because it would possibly hurt someone's feelings makes me angrier than I think I've ever been.\n\nFuck these people. Autism needs a cure. ",
"People on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum sometimes argue that they don't need a cure, they can function but are just socially awkward or whatever their prominent symptoms (I don't necessarily disagree with them). However, it's important to remember that autism is a spectrum, and a very wide one at that. I'm pretty sure the families of the children and adults at the lower functioning end of the spectrum would strongly disagree. There are people with autism that go to public school, drive, work, live independently, etc. but there are way more that cannot speak, read, or write, get very violent when challenged or interrupted, constantly over eat and hoard food or selectively eat to the point of near starvation, need help bathing/toileting/eating, etc. \n\nIMO it's kind of a moot point to even discuss a \"cure\" at this point; A lot more work needs to be done on figuring out the cause part of the equation. If this happens it's possible that as more cause is figured out the spectrum approach will be retired in favor of many new classifications that emerge as a result.\n\nThat being said, the argument to not cure makes sense in certain circumstances but that doesn't mean a cure shouldn't be researched or found. It absolutely should and people should be able to choose whether or not they use it.",
"This is really not just a question that is specific to autism but really to many disorders of both the mind and body. I think, firstly, most benevolent people can agree that we should strive to support a general standard of human dignity, though how that dignity is defined can vary wildly from one person to the next.\n\nIt has long been suggested that many of our greatest thinkers and artists of both past and present have displayed evidence of what the current medical establishment would consider to be 'atypical' neurobehavior. Modern psychologists and psychiatrists pore over this historical data and have found such evidence of mental illness in icons like John Nash, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe, Beethoven, and Isaac Newton, just to name a few. One conclusion to draw from this research is that, had these individuals been 'cured' (if such a thing is possible), we would have lost out on their particular brand of genius. That is certainly difficult to prove, but so be it.\n\nSo, should we seek a cure for the various mental disorders? I think most scientists would agree that not pursuing biomedical research into understanding this kind of neurobiology is akin to looking up at the moon and thinking, sure, we could go there, but why would we want to? It's desolate and cold and I'm tired. To the contrary, I think there is a certain pioneering human spirit that craves advancement and shouldn't be squelched. \n\nThe second and more interesting question: if a 'cure' is found, what should we do with it? Here, there is a balance between autonomy (you have the right to do with your body as you please) and competency (you have the right to make decisions for yourself only if you are able to rationally understand the facts and consequences of your actions). Medical ethicists use these, and many other relevant concepts, to understand these kinds of decisions every day. And, it should be noted, opinions are constantly fluent. \n\nIt seems to be the consensus that if a particular syndrome or disorder is seriously impairing an individual's ability to function, as /u/quixotic120 mentions, interested outside parties should take action to improve that person's relationship with the world, as it were. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to misunderstand someone's mental state, especially if it is odd or foreign to us. I had a friend in college that would sit in the Quad and look up at the sky for hours. He had memorized the schedules and flight paths of all the planes coming in and out of the three major airports in the area and could recite the airline, departure city, and arrival city just by sight. It certainly took up a lot of his time, often at the expense of other activities, but it did truly give him a certain joy. In the video to which /u/quixotic120 graciously linked, you can see a quite dramatic display of self-stimulation (or 'stimming'), which is common for people with autism. It seems bizarre, truly. It's easy for the majority of people who see this kind of activity to jump to the conclusion that the autistic person is distressed in some way. In fact, as it has been explained to me by several people, these are actually very positive behaviors, akin to feeling the sunlight on your face or receiving a hug. So, how exactly and to what extent can our brain appreciate another's?\n\nEchoing previous comments, I think the common belief, among humanists at least, is that science should and will go forward and that individuals should, within reason and with proper counselling / support, be able to choose whether or not they wish to avail themselves of treatment."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
9z8srz
|
what does it mean for, at high energies, the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces to combine into one force? how does this force act and why do the three forces combine?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9z8srz/eli5_what_does_it_mean_for_at_high_energies_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ea7i63i"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"You're thinking about it backwards. It's not that there are separate forces combine at high energies, it's that there is a single force at high energies which splits into multiple at low energies. It's a phase transition.\n\nAt a certain energy scale, there is a reduction in symmetry, which causes the one \"unified\" force to split into multiple separate forces.\n\n[This figure](_URL_0_) schematically shows what we think we know so far. So we aren't entirely sure that all four forces should be unified at high energies, but it looks like they could be just based on the behavior of their couplings.\n\nBut just look at the electromagnetic and weak forces. At high energies, you have a single electroweak force. But as you go to lower energies, there is a spontaneously broken symmetry, which splits the electroweak force into two forces with separate gauge groups. Specifically, it splits into a U(1) theory with one massless gauge boson (the photon; this is the electromagnetic force), and an SU(2) theory with massive gauge bosons (the W^(+/-) and Z^(0); this is the weak force). You can read more about this [here](_URL_1_)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_constant#/media/File:Coupling_constants_as_function_of_energy_(sketch\\).svg",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction#Formulation"
]
] |
||
21vedl
|
why are tv episodes so cheap to produce compared to movies?
|
A producer can push out ~15 high quality 45 minute episodes per season at maybe one million dollars each where 90 minute movies can cost tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars to make and take 2 years to shoot and produce and A-list tv shows aren't exactly lacking in production quality either, so what's happening here?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21vedl/eli5why_are_tv_episodes_so_cheap_to_produce/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cggw22k",
"cggw4pl"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"$1M/Episode is a pretty cheap episode of TV. House of Cards is estimated to be more like $3-4M/Episode.\n\nBut yes, in general, TV is cheaper than film.\n\nReasons for this include (and these aren't absolute or all encompassing): reduced production costs (filming in a cheaper place than Hollywood), reduced marketing costs (posters, trailers, etc.), reduced writing costs (TV writers are cheaper), reduced actor costs (most TV actors aren't A listers), reduced directing costs (Spielberg and Lucas don't usually do TV), cheaper equipment costs (only need an HD camera, not a 4K/IMAX/Other expensive camera(s)), reduced SFX budgets (TV dinosaurs rarely look as good as Jurassic Park dinosaurs).\n\nThey also get to spread big costs out. A $2M set this year is free for every recurring year the show get's renewed.\n\nAgain, not hard and fast, and none of these necessarily mean low production value, just low production cost.",
"While there's no hard and fast rule for the reasons why, it usually boils down to three things:\n\n\"Location, location, location\", scale, and Who's in it.\n\nMost TV shows are filmed on a set, or have multiple sets that they use and reuse between episodes, meaning the cost to construct the set is reduced on a per-episode basis. Generally, TV shows feature longer exchanges of dialog within each set, so the cost is further reduced by the increased screen time in each location - light and rig it once and you're good to go for a good chunk of episode time. Locations are used sparingly, and most outdoor locations are close to a single environment (where the TV show is happening) or at a permanent / semi-permanent outdoor set.\n\nOn the other hand, movies travel the world. Yes, set work is a large portion of it, but there are typically many unique sets within a film, often one for each scene, and depending on the world that's being created these costs add up quickly. Add exotic locations, which is a blockbuster staple, where you have to fly, house, and pay additional per-diems your key crew and talent, and you can be spending millions there alone.\n\nNext, we have scale. Modern blockbusters often spend millions of dollars on visual effects. This allows them to create and use large, grandiose virtual environments, create photo-realistic dragons and particle simulations. And boy, does that cost money.\n\nHigh quality television programs, especially dramas, usually reduce the amount of visual effects - one big dramatic establishing shot that's shorter than it would be on film, fewer visual effect elements and more practical elements. Most dramas & comedies don't even use visual effects because they don't need to. When you start looking at Hollywood comparables there, you realize that without visual effects, dramas and comedies in Hollywood, especially independent films, have much less costs than a Blockbuster.\n\nBy 'scaling down' in terms of what you're covering, emphasizing the subtle over the spectacular, you cut costs.\n\nLastly, Who's in it. This can be summed up simply as TV actors get paid less than Movie Actors (actor, btw, is the gender neutral used to describe both sexes), especially the \"Name\" movie actors (A-List Stars). Movie actors end up with much bigger pull for revenue at the box office than a TV actor does for a television show. Now, don't get me wrong, I love television actors! There are a few shows that I will watch just because they have an actor in them, like there are films I'll consider seeing just because an actor is starring in it. But the name draw of an Adam Sandler is bigger than that of a Jim Parsons because on television there is a greater association of the actor with the Character. Don't know Jim Parsons? He plays Sheldon, on The Big Bang Theory. But Jim Parsons is a lesser known name than Sheldon! This means that movie actors, whose names are better known than their characters, can command bigger salaries because their name alone can draw viewers into the theaters, while many television actors, whose names are less known than their characters, can't. Many A-list stars command tens of millions of dollars for their appearance in a film, while the best television actors often command a few hundred thousand per episode at the most. It's a REALLY big expense difference!\n\nNow, these, of course, are simply generalizations, and every production and every case will be slightly different. But generally, those are the three biggest expenses in the film world that you don't see in television, which allow television production costs to be lower."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
bbolql
|
what is the psychology behind the unwillingness to spend money on video games?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbolql/eli5_what_is_the_psychology_behind_the/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ekk9nd5"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"For me at least, a good chunk of that is \"will I actually use this thing I'm buying?\" \n\nIf I go to a movie, I'm taking a bet on whether or not I'll actually enjoy myself, but I'm definitely getting what I paid for: two hours or so in front of a very big screen. If I buy dinner, I'm betting on whether the meal will be any good, but no matter what, I'm not going home hungry. If I buy a game, or a book, or an album, or whatever, I'm taking a bet on whether it'll be enjoyable or not, same as anything... but I'm also betting on whether or not I'll take the time to actually use the thing I'm buying. Because it's very easy to pick up a game for $5 because it's cheap and then let it sit on the shelf (or on Steam, or whatever) for the rest of my life, because there's dozens of other options distracting me from it. And it's not like losing $5 is the worst thing in the world, but that can add up.\n\nAt least if I buy a movie ticket, I've already committed myself. And I'm probably going with other people, making an occasion out of it. But it's easy to throw away money on a piece of home media and never realize that value - which creates a much stronger feeling of \"do I really want this?\" when I go to buy something."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
b6ce18
|
what are the major political systems?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6ce18/eli5_what_are_the_major_political_systems/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ejjh5jj",
"ejjkps2"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"The main system in practice now is liberalism, indicated by a representative democracy accompanied by private industry and property ownership, there are deviations, like social democracy providing basic needs to their citizens and implementing higher taxation. \n\nCommunism is a stateless, classless society generally organised through workers councils, akin to unions, which determine the laws and distribution of basic goods. Luxuries are a personal endeavour, more like an art than an industry. There is ideally no currency, as currency is seen as an inefficiency designed to hoard goods.\n\nSocialism is a transitory ideology to communism, where the state, (representing the working class,) assists the masses in liberation be means of a planned economy and quite possibly putting down counter-revolution. This is often touted as communism, but is intended to be the period between the revolution and the Utopia.\n\nFascism, which is far less institutionally in control but is designed to undermine liberalism, is an authoritarian form of government akin to social democracy, lacking free elections and equal treatment under the law. It is generally a reactionary ideology to socialism, initially crushing the revolution, then forming an underclass that will do the majority of the low skill labor, leaving desirable careers to the superior class that is then formed.\n\n",
"I mean, there are a couple dozen of them, and each of them are split into several subclasses, and many of which are not mutually exclusive, and even worse: some might not even be referring to the same thing!\n\nSo, let's go trough the major things listed by \"Basic forms of government\" by wikipedia. \n\n#Chapter 1: Where does power come from?\n\n* Democracy: The rule of the many. In a democracy the general public in one way or the other holds the power to rule. This can range from direct democracy, where every decision made by the state is made via public vote, to representitve democracy where the people elect representitives to rule on their behalf. Most nations, such as the US, Canada, France, South Korea, e.t.c are representitive democracies. \n\n(Sidenote, the word 'Republic' is notoriously ill defined, with definitions ranging from \"Where the matters of the state is a public matter, not private; a nation where power can be held by a member of the public, and 'not a monarchy'. Generally it is often used as some synonym of \"Representitive democracy\"). \n\n* Oliarchy: The rule of the few. Usually means that only a specific class or group govern the entirety of the nation. Imagine a nation where only teachers are allowed to hold political office, and only teachers can vote. \n\n* Autocracy: The rule of the one. All power is vested in a single person. Think a king, military general, or a dictator. While naturally the ruler relies on his subordinates to be loyal and not overthrow him, in practice if the leader makes a decision that decision is as good as law. \n\n* Anarchy: There is no state, there is no leader, and there is no hiearchy. Order is maintained trough voluntary institutions and social ousting of those that go against social integrity. \n\n* Theocracy: The rule of god. Of course God can't really take time out of his busy schedule to micromanage a nation, so instead priests or heads of a given religious institution rule in his name. \n\nFun fact, the monarch of the United Kingdom still is the head of the english church and derives their power from god (according to tradition). you could thus argue that the UK is a democratic theocracy ruled by a monarch. \n\n\n# Who is ruling again and what can he do?\n\n* Monarchy: A nation that has a monarch; a King!\n\n* Absolute : The rulers word is literal law. the ruler has absolute power, and no bounds are on his decrees\n\n* Constitutional: Where the ruler is bound by the framework of a constitution, be it written (like the constitution of the US) or unwritten (Like the various laws in the UK that together build a framework even if they don't declare themselves to be a foundational law)\n\n* Parlimentary : The \"Ruler\" is a parliment, a collection of officials that come together to devise rules and elect their leader from their midst. A president may or may not exist, but he usually is a symbolic leader and a diplomat, not the person who runs the government.\n\n* Presidential: The Ruler is elected from the public by the public, and he leads the government. An example is f.i the US: where the president does *not* have to have the support of parliment to lead the government (albeit he probably won't have a very good time if he doesn't have half of congress on his side). \n\n* Semi-presidential: Imagine a blend of a presidential and parlimentary system. The leader of government is a president (instead of f.i a prime minister) and he isn't just a figurehead, but there is also a prime minister that answers to parliment. \n\n\n# Chapter 3: But what do all these people actually *want?*\n\n* Socialism: The state, not private citizens, own the economy and means of production. The state is responsible to care for the citizens and ensure that each citizen is cared for. Socialism wants to break down social classes and ensure that all men are equal with equal opportunities and equal status. Socialism essentially operates on the idea that public owns the state, and the state owns the economy, and will use that economy to serve the public. Unlike f.i communism socialism *doesn't* advocate for a stateless or money-less society, only that all men are equal, the economy is state-run, and that if you need something the state should provide it. Many nations implement facets of socialism, for instance by providing welfare, public healthcare, a monopoly on certain industries, and the collection of taxes from the public that go to public projects that benefit the public itself.\n\n* Communism: The workers (i.e public) own the economy and means of production. Imagine a small village where everyone is equal, everyone works as much as they have to to ensure the village survives, and the village instead cares for you and provides for you so you do not starve. Now scale that up to an entire nation and you're getting pretty close to communism. Communism pushes for social equality, the abolishment of the state, and the abolishment of currency (After all, if everyone works together to ensure everyone has what they need, why would you need money?). \n\n\n* Totalitarianism : The state is absolute. The state holds all power, and will enforce that power without mercy. Imagine facist or dictatorships. The state will snuff out opposition parties and dissent against the government, and will exercise an unusual amount of control over both public and private life of it's citizens. usually the default \"Evil\" ideology class in all dystopian movies (for a pretty obvious reason). If you're at risk of being killed for critizising the government you're probably living in a totalitarian state. \n\n* Libertarianism: the word \"Liberty\" means the ability to do as one pleases, so it probably is at no suprise that libertarians want the government to leave them alone, if something needs to be done induvituals will do it just fine, thank you. Of course this is super simplified, but you get the idea: The state is essentially a body that can do what nobody will do on their own accord, but the right of private citizen to lead their own lives without intervention. this is a pretty broad camp, so you're going to find a lot of arguments on the details, but then again that applies to all of these definitions.\n\n* Authoritarian: The opposite of Libertarianism. The state holds all the power while the liberty of induvituals is supressed. The right and powers of the state will always trump the right of the person, and as such authoritarian states usually are just absolute monarchies where the state itself is the monarch. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
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