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5bo0m8 | how do people have distinct walking patterns and what causes them? | You can always tell your friends from far away based on their "walk" . But if you also take a hard look at random people you'll notice they have a certain way of walking that is different than your own. This is also exaggerated in people who have mental disabilities, is there a correlation between the two? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bo0m8/eli5how_do_people_have_distinct_walking_patterns/ | {
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"1. different length legs will _require_ different walking approach in order to not fall over.\n\n2. different leg size will require use of muscles differently to achieve a walk.\n\n3. different length arms will result in different movement of center of balance when walking.\n\n4. different postures will require different movements to stay balanced.\n\n5. Muscles developing differently do to exercise, type of activities, genetics will all result in varying strengths in specific muscles, different mass distribution and so on. all will impact gait. \n\n"
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2n6dhc | how are the majority of netflix movies available in hd when most of them haven't seen a remastered release? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n6dhc/eli5_how_are_the_majority_of_netflix_movies/ | {
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"~~DVD releases are typically 720p, which qualifies as HD. It's not \"full HD\" 1080p, but it's HD.~~\n\nNever mind, I'm wrong.",
"The content is run through an application that upscales the dvd source into an HD resolution."
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368hes | why does a flame burn up in gravity, but burns out in zero gravity? | Link to video of flame in zero gravity _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/368hes/eli5_why_does_a_flame_burn_up_in_gravity_but/ | {
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"When flame heats the air, it expands and becomes less dense than the air around it.\n\nIn gravity, the lighter hot air will rise, and that gives flames their distinctive shape. Without gravity to pull the heavier air down, the flame doesn't have anywhere in particular to go.",
"When there's gravity, the hotter gas created by the flame pulls upward, creating the shape you're used to seeing as well as feeding the flame fresh air as new air moves in to replace the upward moving air.\n\nIn zero gravity, the heating of the air doesn't cause it to move upward (no gravity!) so the flame can only use up the oxygen directly around it. Once that is gone it can't burn anymore."
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3fvd9b | if all life evolved from single celled organisms, does that mean trees and humans have a common ancestor? how did plants and animals evolve into separate groups? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fvd9b/eli5_if_all_life_evolved_from_single_celled/ | {
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"Yes, in fact all life on Earth has a common ancestor if you go back far enough. Plants and animals are both types life that have nuclei in their cells, and all life with cellular nuclei have a common ancestor that is not shared with bacteria. \n \n \nBut plants evolved from a cell that became photosynthetic with chloroplasts and animals from a different kind of cell that used mitochondria to get energy from metabolizing other molecules. ",
" > **3.5 billion years ago**\nThe oldest fossils of single-celled organisms date from this time.\n\n > **3.46 billion years ago**\nSome single-celled organisms may be feeding on methane by this time.\n\n > **3.4 billion years ago**\nRock formations in Western Australia, that some researchers claim are fossilised microbes, date from this period.\n\n > **3 billion years ago**\nViruses are present by this time, but they may be as old as life itself.\n\n > **2.4 billion years ago**\nThe “great oxidation event”. Supposedly, the poisonous waste produced by photosynthetic cyanobacteria – oxygen – starts to build up in the atmosphere. Dissolved oxygen makes the iron in the oceans “rust” and sink to the seafloor, forming striking banded iron formations.\nRecently, though, some researchers have challenged this idea. They think cyanobacteria only evolved later, and that other bacteria oxidised the iron in the absence of oxygen.\nYet others think that cyanobacteria began pumping out oxygen as early as 2.1 billion years ago, but that oxygen began to accumulate only due to some other factor, possibly a decline in methane-producing bacteria. Methane reacts with oxygen, removing it from the atmosphere, so fewer methane-belching bacteria would allow oxygen to build up.\n\n > **2.3 billion years ago**\nEarth freezes over in what may have been the first “snowball Earth”, possibly as a result of a lack of volcanic activity. When the ice eventually melts, it indirectly leads to more oxygen being released into the atmosphere.\n\n > **2.15 billion years ago**\nFirst undisputed fossil evidence of cyanobacteria, and of photosynthesis: the ability to take in sunlight and carbon dioxide, and obtain energy, releasing oxygen as a by-product.\nThere is some evidence for an earlier date for the beginning of photosynthesis, but it has been called into question.\n\n > **2 billion years ago?**\nEukaryotic cells – cells with internal “organs” (known as organelles) – come into being. One key organelle is the nucleus: the control centre of the cell, in which the genes are stored in the form of DNA.\nEukaryotic cells evolved when one simple cell engulfed another, and the two lived together, more or less amicably – an example of “endosymbiosis”. The engulfed bacteria eventually become mitochondria, which provide eukaryotic cells with energy. The last common ancestor of all eukaryotic cells had mitochondria – and had also developed sexual reproduction.\nLater, eukaryotic cells engulfed photosynthetic bacteria and formed a symbiotic relationship with them. The engulfed bacteria evolved into chloroplasts: the organelles that give green plants their colour and allow them to extract energy from sunlight.\nDifferent lineages of eukaryotic cells acquired chloroplasts in this way on at least three separate occasions, and one of the resulting cell lines went on to evolve into all green algae and green plants.\n\n > **1.5 billion years ago?**\nThe eukaryotes divide into three groups: the ancestors of modern plants, fungi and animals split into separate lineages, and evolve separately. We do not know in what order the three groups broke with each other. At this time they were probably all still single-celled organisms.\n\n > **900 million years ago?**\nThe first multicellular life develops around this time.\nIt is unclear exactly how or why this happens, but one possibility is that single-celled organisms go through a stage similar to that of modern choanoflagellates: single-celled creatures that sometimes form colonies consisting of many individuals. Of all the single-celled organisms known to exist, choanoflagellates are the most closely related to multicellular animals, lending support to this theory."
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6ha0o7 | why do small fish swim under or by the fins of sharks and whales? are they trying to hide? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ha0o7/eli5_why_do_small_fish_swim_under_or_by_the_fins/ | {
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"They are being scavengers. They are following alongside the shark and stealing shreds of food from a shark's meal. The shark will occasionally snack on one of the fish, but enough survive leeching off it's leftovers to successfully live and breed.\n\nThere are a few species of cleaner fish that go over a fishes' body and pick parasites and other irritants on them. The larger fish get cleaned and massaged, the cleaner fish get fed."
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1r1al7 | how criss angel, and other magicians levitate! | Especially with Criss and some of his more extreme stunts. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r1al7/eli5_how_criss_angel_and_other_magicians_levitate/ | {
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"Criss will tell you here: _URL_0_",
"You didn't specify which type of levitation. The most common is instructed in my link. For all others the answer is wires and pulleys.\n"
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1i7ncl | how does computer storage work, and how do files "take up space"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i7ncl/eli5_how_does_computer_storage_work_and_how_do/ | {
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"Computer storage consists of millions of switches. Each switch can either be on (which represents a 1) or off (to represent a 0).\n\nThe space a file takes up is basically (but a little over-simplified) the number of switches it takes to represent the information in the file.",
"Imagine storage drive as a huge array of cells, each of them can hold \"0\" or \"1\". On SSD/Flash they are NAND-gates that captures electrons, on HDD it`s small magnets.\n\nSo, for 1TB disk you have 1 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes or 1 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8 cells. \n\nWhen you put your file on disk, system will write file`s content into this cells.\n\nBut how system know which cells are \"free\"? It maintains a special part of your drive for storage info, like table where each file starts, file names, attributes, etc. Format of this table is filesystem (NTFS, FAT, ext). \n\nSo in this table there are records for each file like \"music.mp3 located at cells from 435264 to 325463465\"\n\nFile size is how many cells it takes to store it plus additional system info for this file plus alignment (disk logically is dividet into sectors for easier index, so if file takes 5kb with 4kb sector it will take 2 sectors, or 8kb to store file). You can see the difference in file's properties \"filesystem size\" and \"file size\".",
"In order for things like video games to exist, everything has to be represented as smaller things; this website has to be represented in code, which in turn represents various images and colours and shapes. \n\nFor an image on this website, it too is represented by a series of numbers, which tell what colours should be shown for each pixel in the image.\n\nAnd then, for each of those numbers, they too have to be represented by a code of zeroes and ones.\n\nEach of those zeroes and ones? They represent whether a particular switch should be set to open, and let electricity through, or stay closed.\n\nSo for a single image of a kitten, we might need half a million 0's and 1's, all of which need to be stored.\n\nOn a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray, this is done by making rings on the disk, with bumps or flat spots, which reflect a laser, or, when a disk has been made with a CD/DVD/BD burner, it will have little microscopic burn marks which change how much light is reflected by a laser beam.\n\nOn a hard drive, a special needle hovers above a special plastic disk, which has metal particles in it. On the edge of the needle is an electromagnet; a magnet that can be switched on and off. As the disk is spinning, the electromagnet changes the magnetic poles of little tiny portions of the disk. It can also read the direction of the magnetic pole, by passing the electromagnet over it; depending on which way it's facing, it'll make electricity flow through the electromagnet one way or the other.\n\nFor a solid state drive, or a USB drive, there are a few ways it can be stored. But ultimately, the principle they both work on is having switches, like in the computer, but these ones are designed to stay open or closed for a long time. Some, like in your computer's RAM, needs a constant current to stay open, but more advanced memory doesn't and will simply flip to one state or the other (it'll stay as either a zero or one, without a supply of power).\n\n---\n\ntl;dr - everything you see on a screen is a very, very complex pattern of millions or billions of zeros and ones.\n",
"All computer memory is stored in \"bits\". A bit can have two states only, 0 or 1.\nA byte is made of 8 bits, and was basically used because its the smallest amount of bits to represent a character. (Kb, mb, Kb, tb are all multiples of bytes)\n\n\nSo, basically, on your hard drive you can only physically fit a certain amount of distinguishable 0s and 1s on the drive to be reliably stored and read back. Same goes for flash memory, magnetic, punch cards, ram, etc.\n\n\nIf you save a text file, for example, it will need one byte of data per character which will correspond to a certain amoun of physical space on your drive, or storage medium. Imagine a typed page, each character takes up the same amount of space and so therefore you fit the same amount of words per page, and those pages take up physical space as a book. (Some characters might need less space but you allow enough for *all* characters).\n\n\nCompression is where you take out all the duplications and empty spaces and replace them with a method (that takes less characters or space) to replace them upon uncompression.\n\n\nEncryption is where you scramble all the characters so they can only be unscrambled with the same key (a key is the map of what character is replaced with what scrambled character). \n\n\nMake sense?",
"If you're talking about physically on the disk, there are areas on hard drives that work just like CDs - they are written to by a ~~laser~~ magnetized read-write head. They have \"platters\" which are essentially multiple stacked CDs that hold a lot of data.\n\nSpace is taken up when the ~~laser~~ read write head writes something in an area on one of the platters.\n\nPlatters look like pancakes on a kebab.",
"And \"space\" is a metaphor. Nothing actually occupies more physical space when files are there; it's just a handy way of saying \"uses up storage capacity\".",
"I'll go simpler than the other people ITT. \n\nYou can speak a sentence right? You can also write it down. It takes up space on that piece of paper. Your hard drive is just a big notebook that your computer writes in. Same rules apply. you can erase sentences and write new ones in their place."
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3ml1a7 | since a specific day of the year is in basically the same spot away from the sun as every other year - why aren't those days the same temperature? | What creates such a wild fluctuation in record highs and record lows on the same exact date year to year? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ml1a7/eli5since_a_specific_day_of_the_year_is_in/ | {
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"Relative position of the sun only accounts for how much of the sun's energy reaches the planet. A simple difference like the moon being in a different spot, perhaps obstructing the sun's light on some of the surface, could mess that up, and that's still within the realm of \"cosmic planetary bodies\" kind of thing.\n\nYou've also got the rotation of the earth, which might not necessarily be in *exactly* the same spot, so different surfaces are receiving the sun's energy, and that means that, particularly when it comes to water vs land, different amounts of that energy are interacting in varying ways (land generally heating up more vs water evaporating more). Mind you also that the Moon as previously mentioned has some impact on the ocean's tides, even if it isn't a big difference, it's still a thing.\n\nWith different amounts of land & water heating up and reacting differently, you get different atmospheric outcomes; more water evaporating means more water vapor in the air, which eventually forms clouds and rains - clouds by the way would block some of the sun's energy too. More land heating up transfers some of that energy to the nearby air, which heats the air up, causing the air to rise & flow differently than cooler air not near the surface.\n\n...\n\ntldr; because of all the other interconnected systems at work, just because a day is in roughly the same position doesn't mean it's *exactly* in the same position, nor does it mean any part of the earth receives exactly the same amount of the sun's energy on any given day as it did the year before."
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5074z6 | why are apples synonymous with k-12 education? | Pretty much everywhere I see an educational utility or resource advertised there is always a ruler, pencil and an apple. I can understand the ruler and the pencil but the Apple? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5074z6/eli5_why_are_apples_synonymous_with_k12_education/ | {
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"This is mostly an American thing as I understand it. As the frontiers were expanding, teachers were needed to provide basic and advanced education for these new regions. Because there wasn't public funding or local government, the teachers had to be paid directly by the family of the students attending the school. Since many of these people were farmers, ranchers, hunters, etc. then in addition to any coinage the teachers received they would often be paid in food / whatever product was available as a form of bartered exchange.\n\nIt became customary for a student to bring something simple like an apple to the classroom to give to the teacher. That tradition continued as a form of respect even after teachers received actual wages. It mostly died out in practice after the 70's or so but you can still see it in films and such that were actually filmed at the time or are intended to match the depiction of that time."
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blhv3z | why are all economies expected to "grow"? why is an equilibrium bad? | There's recently a lot of talk about the next recession, all this news say that countries aren't growing, but isn't perpetual growth impossible? Why reaching an economic balance is bad? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/blhv3z/eli5_why_are_all_economies_expected_to_grow_why/ | {
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"If the economy is growth neutral, then as population grows, demand increases and there isn't enough to go around. Economic growth is necessary to support a growing population.",
"It’s because of how money is structured. All money is imaginary, and is is initially loaned out on interest. This creates perpetual debt that needs to be counteracted by printing more money, which leads to more debt. That’s why all companies need to grow, because their investors are expecting returns on interest. That’s why smaller mom and pop stores don’t have the problem of growth, because they’re not beholden to their investors. But the system as a whole must grow. It’s actually a pretty busted system that needs to be overhauled completely. It was originally created because money lenders and bankers wanted more money. We see the results of medieval money lending systems to this day.\n\n**EDIT:** This blew up, so I’ll add some quick qualifiers. \n\nOne, my explanation is admittedly simplified. Many well informed comments below fill in some of these gaps. \n\nTwo, greed does play a factor, but I would argue that greed created the system and sustains it, but is no longer the main ingredient. The system itself is designed this way. \n\nThree, loans and investments (speculative growth) will most likely still be necessary for a long time. A 1:1 trade-based system isn’t viable yet.\n\n**So four, my *humble* proposed solution is this:**\n\nCreate a two-tiered economic system. The foundation of our society can be an abundance-based, post scarcity, 1:1 economy. It will be recession proof and will ignore the growth imperative. Regular people can live their lives without worrying interest and credit. Growth is paid for in cash. \n\nThe second tier can remain mostly the same as it is now. Interest based, scarcity oriented. Large companies can expand and crash without making huge waves in the economy.\n\nOf course this solution requires some assembly out of the box, but the I believe the concept is viable.\n\n**EDIT: ABUNDANCE BASED ECONOMICS DOES NOT MEAN RESOURCES ARE INFINITE PLEASE DO SOME RESEARCH BEFORE YOU POST**",
"If the economy is in perfect equilibrium, the only way you can get richer is if someone else gets poorer. If there is a growing population, then everyone must be getting poorer on average; the same resources have to be shared with more people.\n\nBecause we want more for ourselves and for our children, we want economic growth. Perpetual growth isn't impossible, because much of our wealth is man-made, and even natural resources can be made more efficient or plentiful by new inventions. We *should* be concerned about our consumption of natural resources, but we can also strive for economic growth.\n\nEdit: I feel like half the responses are not reading the question or answer. *If* the amount of wealth in the economy will stay the same, *then* it it really is a zero-sum game. That is not the case in reality, which is my point.",
"Other answers have all answered some of the reasons why, but here's another: Innovation and increases in technological capacity should be cumulatively and continually increasing. So long as this is true, then the economy should naturally grow with it.",
"The assumption is that people get better at things. We learn what works and what doesn’t. Then we take what works and see what works better. If this isn’t happening then it’s reasonable to assume that something isn’t working.",
"An interesting read on the topic I found when I had the same question, [Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist](_URL_0_)",
"In short: to be richer now than 30 years ago; and richer again in 30 years than we are now.\n\nAnd not merely richer in the *number* of pounds or euros in our pockets, but in real terms. Think in the most general sense, and it's clear that our lives are richer (I would say \"better\", but that's subjective) than they were in the past. A modern person is plainly better off in material terms than one who lived in 1900, and that person better off again than their counterpart in 1700.\n\n*That's* what this economic \"growth\" is measuring (or describing): that process of enrichment; and presumably it's clear why everybody would like it to continue.",
"To be clear, economists do predict an equilibrium. It's just that the equilibrium is generally a positive growth rate (which is explained by other responses).",
"There's another point here. If company X stays stagnant (doesn't try to increase revenue or efficiency) and its competitor company Y does try to grow; company Y will grow powerful enough to push company X out of the market (better advertising, cheaper/more efficient products, etc.)\n\nEven if a company, or a country, wanted to maintain equilibrium, unless all other competitors do the same that company/country will get beaten.",
"Very hard to do in ELI5... Words like “good” and “bad” are subjective. If the economy is “growing” and wages and standard of living are growing at the same rate or greater, it is better for everyone. If the economy is growing (inflating) and your wage is stagnant, then prices are going up and you don’t have the increased wage and your standard of living goes down. So it’s all relative. If the cost of houses is too high and there is a recession in the market, it’s a good thing. Unless of course you’re trying to sell your house.",
"Economics graduate here.\n\nEquilibrium isn't necessarily bad, it's where all markets clear (aka simply, supply meets demand). This is great in the SHORT term as the whole point of economics is allocation of limited resources in a world with infinite wants and needs. If what people want/need =what is produced, no wasted resources, everyone's happy. \n\nOne of the main reasons for LONG term economic growth is the issue of Prices. If prices remained the same then growth would not occur (growth leads to higher consumption, increased demand etc).\n\nCentral banks (like the federal reserve, bank of England) target very small increases in prices year on year. Aiming to keep prices the same puts the economy at too close of a risk of deflation (decrease in prices, WAY worse than an equal amount of inflation, increase in prices)\n\nIn order to make this happen, the Central banks do a number of things to 'encourage growth' such as setting interest rates (the rate commerical banks pay to borrow central bank money) etc\n\nEverything they do is to ensure stable price increases (~2%) and growth enables this to happen.\n\nThere's a lot more detail around the source of growth, what comes first etc but this is probably the simplest explanation (that I could come up with) for the modern global economy.",
"Capitalism requires growth to function, a stagnant economy is more or less a crumbling one. The nature of our economy depends on competition amongst businesses, so industries must continually find cheaper sources of labor while at the same time finding ways to make more profit. Sometimes this necessitates paying workers more to create better products but fundamentally, you want to produce something for as cheap as your given parameters allow and sell it for as much as your parameters allow, so the interests of workers (those who physically produce goods) and interests of business owners are opposed to one another. Constant growth under capitalism isn't sustainable and these various contradictions make economic crises inevitable.",
"You should really direct this question to /r/askeconomics. \n\nThe answer is quite simply that the economy doesn't *have* to grow. But we expect it to because of productivity-increasing technological advancement. When productivity rises, people can make more things with less time and other resources. We get richer. \n\nA steady state economy has been heavily analysed and was life for most of human history. It was a steady state because of the lack of technological advances causing higher productivity and higher output. \n\nThere's also a difference between equilibrium as in no movement and equilibrium in economics: the latter describes forces that return a market to its clearing state. \n\nHowever that is, answers talking about interest rates driving growth are wrong on a number of fronts. First, interest rates are a price. Prices are determined by supply and demand, not vice versa. Second, investment happening does not magically create growth opportunities. The relationship goes the other way: growth potentials happen and people invest in them. Third, a steady state economy (ie where c_t = c_t+1) will have positive interest rates based solely on liquidity preference: that people prefer to have cash now and are willing to exchange a series of payments (ie interest) for it.\n\nEDIT: Apparently, that people want money now and are willing to exchange future payments for it, absent an inflationary environment, isn't widely believed. Consider the Sumerians: They had a relatively stable money supply (they did not even have coins) and they had loans. Most early cuneiform tablets are in fact there to record those transactions. Next, consider a thought experiment where inflation is always zero (using magic). People will still borrow to meet transient consumption shocks that they cannot meet with cash on hand (healthcare is the classic example of this, also consider identity theft and natural disasters). Borrowing still exists.\n\nEDIT (cont): Even in a world with inflation, that inflation exists and people want to earn more than inflation doesn't explain why people would _borrow_ money, only why they would _lend_ it. There are always two actors in a non-coercive market interaction. To explain why credit markets exist, one must also have an explanation for why people borrow. If anything, inflation's existing would lower credit supply unless the interest rate were higher than inflation. \n\nRegarding perpetual growth: there is definite an upper bound to how far humans can develop economic output. We definitely are not anywhere near physical limitations on output. I've always found this claim to be something of an exaggeration. It's like saying that because FTL is impossible we should not expect any advances in spacecraft propulsion technologies.\n\nA number of helpful AskEconomics threads:\n_URL_0_\n_URL_2_\n_URL_1_",
"Because capital needs to replicate itself to survive. Profit is necessary to then reinvest, so gains constantly have to be made. Read Marx",
"So there are two different questions here. The first is \"why should we expect all economies to grow?\" and the second is \"why is a lack of growth bad?\". I'll try to answer them both from the perspective of an actual economist since most of the top level comments so far are fairly uninformed.\n\n**Why should we expect all economies to grow?**\n\nThe basic premise that we need is that *ideas* are the primary driver of economic growth. The desktop, laptop, or phone that you are viewing this post on is made out of the same materials as sand^1 , but is worth substantial more. So growth is limitless because we can always come up with better ideas. My laptop is a few years old and newer laptops are substantially more valuable while being made out of more or less the same materials.\n\nSo growth can be limitless, but why should be *expect* it to be limitless? There are two properties of ideas that mean we should expect positive growth. The first is that ideas can be *shared*. When an inventor invents something, they can tell everyone about it and then everyone can use it^2 . This means that each generation doesn't have to rediscover the ideas of past generations. The second property is that old ideas help us come up with new ideas. For example: transistors (what computers are made of), batteries, and monitors are all pre-existing ideas that go into the creation of a laptop. This ensures that we never \"run out\" of ideas to invent. Each invention creates new possible inventions! Combining the fact that we always expect to be discovering new ideas with the fact that there are an unlimited number of ideas to discover leads us to conclude that we should always expect economic growth.\n\nFootnotes:\n\n1) Roughly. I'm not a chemist so don't yell at me\n\n2) Many countries have a system of patents to facilitate this\n\n(Further reading: [Bloom (2019)](_URL_1_), [Notes on Romer model](_URL_2_), [Notes on Romer model for those w/ math background](_URL_0_))\n\n**Why should we care about economic growth?**\n\nI think most of us care about the welfare of future generations and the welfare effects of growth over a long time horizon are *staggering*. I won't be alive in 200 years, but I care about the welfare of the people who will be. The difference between growing at 2% vs 3% annually for 200 years is a factor of 7! That's equivalent to the income difference between Norway and the Philippines!\n\nHere is another comparison if Mawali (one of the countries that I've study quite a bit) grows at 2% per year, in 200 years they will be roughly as rich as Norway. On the other hand, if Mawali grows at 3% per year, in 200 years they will be more than 4x richer than the current richest country in the world (Luxemborg). A single percentage point of growth can make a huge difference over time.\n\nI'll leave you with a quote (made slightly simpler for our purposes) from Bob Lucas about growth\n\n > The consequences for human welfare involved in questions about [growth] are simply staggering. Once one starts to think about them, it's hard to think of anything else.",
"This is actually quite a big point of contention between economists. There have been many books written on the subject (see \"The Growth Delusion\" by David Pilling) which tackle this question. \"The Growth Delusion\" argues not only that infinite growth is impossible, but also that it should not be the exclusive aim of economies (one of my favourite quotes from the book: \"In economics, infinite growth is called the aim, in biology it is called cancer\"). The book also digs up some unsettling incentives that GDP creates (e.g. Hospitals overcharging patients increases GDP, while Spotify/Youtube destroying their respective traditional markets actually decreases GDP). It's quite interesting, and you may want to take a look if you are interested in this subject.",
"Because the compelling logic of capitalism is endless compound accumulation. The purpose of production is not based on human need, but for profit. The tendency is for rate of profit to fall (without a massive conflagration of global warfare destroying a significant amount of fixed capital investment), and this encourages an endless and repetitive cycle of concentration of capital into monopolies. Add to this pressures of population growth, and in order to maintain the capitalist system, you need to grow at a compound rate annually (think 4% annually, multiplying the size of the global economy by 1.5x every 5-10 years) in order to prevent the natural cycle of upward wealth redistribution. When your system is predicated on the theft of surplus value from your workers to a tiny minority of capitalists, you are entirely reliant on endless compound growth to hide this endless upward redistribution. If the growth stops, the redistribution accelerates. Same as when you strip the ability of the liberal state to redistribute wealth back to the working masses. Why do you think income and wealth inequality has accelerated drastically since the 1970s?\n\nOnce again, *the sole, overriding moral imperative of capitalism is the pursuit of profit*. Capital exists to reproduce and accumulate more of itself. It's money that makes money. Capitalists are perpetually in competition with each other. They are literally compelled to pursue the accumulation of capital, forever. If they don't, a rival will, and with the falling rate of profit and concentration of capital, that rival will inevitably drive them into the ground and absorb their capital for themselves. This applies on a national level as well. So long as capitalism exists, imperialism must sustain it. Nations must endlessly compete with one another for access to resources that fuel capital accumulation.\n\nThis is also why climate change will only ever get worse. Capitalism can never solve it, it fundamentally incapable of doing so. We must continuously grow the economy. This, in turn, means perpetually growing consumption. More resources turned into commodities, more commodities sold, more emissions in between. Capital accumulation simply does not abide limits. And because capital interests control every aspect of the political process, they will never place limits on themselves. Any limits will be purely voluntary and non-binding, such as in the case of the Paris Accords, and emissions will perpetually increase despite them. It's a crisis that is an existential threat to the capitalist system for good reason.",
"Because we pay for the things we want to do today with the promise of money we will earn tomorrow",
"Economies are expected to grow because the amount of output we get for a given amount of input grows (this is denoted [productivity](_URL_0_).\n\nFor example, in the past a single farmer and his ox might be able to manage 100 acres and grow 300 bushels of corn. Then someone invents a better plow and he can grow 500 bushels on those same acres with the same labor. Then someone invents a cheaper irrigation pump, or replaces his ox with a tractor or comes up with a better strain of corn for the climate or one that requires less water or fertilizer. Maybe we come up with a better corn storage system so less of it spoils or is eaten by vermin and we get more to market intact. Now the same farmer working the same hours can make 1500 bushels. And with his tractor and irrigation, the labor of one farmer is enough to manage 1000 acres or more, which means more corn for less labor. \n\nThis continues across all sectors. A factory might find a way to build cars with less steel (material inputs) and more automation (less labor inputs). Certainly computer-based tasks like bookkeeping and inventory are many times faster now -- think about a grocery store doing inventory of all kinds of cereal by hand, now it's handled instantly by some database somewhere. Cars are getting many more miles per gallon than they used to, so are airplanes. Construction is a lot faster, uses less material and produces far more energy efficient housing. Shipping packages is also a lot more efficient, as FedEx and UPS figure out ways \n\nThere's other kinds of productivity that are increasing. When a company finds useless tasks, they can streamline. For instance, instead of having some poor shopkeeper manually remove all the boxes of cereal and stack them neatly on the shelve, places like Costco will make their stores so they can drop an entire pallet of cereal in-place. At the airport, we can most check ourselves in faster on our mobile phone and get a digital boarding pass instead of a paper one.\n\nAll in all, we should expect the economy to grow if we get more output for the same input (or the same output for less input). Many economics believe that productivity growth is the major driver of economic growth over the long term.",
"In a capitalist society, competition demands innovation to create productivity. If I can create more with less, I win. Without getting into the economics weeds, if you had a point of equilibrium, you're saying that there are no advances left to make to improve service or quality. Now, occasionally economies do stall or shrink (see also: recession) but normally those are corrections for poor policies or false values for goods, which can happen when demand drives the cost of something up artificially, like a housing bubble or the dot-com bubble.",
"A truly simplified (oversimplified?) ELI5 explanation is:\n\nThe best way to make money under our economic system is to loan out money or invest money with the hope that you will get more money in return for doing so. This presumes that the person that you loan money to or the venture that you invest in will increase in value; that is that they will grow. When you have a whole economic system based on getting these kinds of returns, then you have an economic system that needs growth to maintain profits at all. It's also an economic system that disproportionately benefits the people at the top of it because the best way to make money in it is to already have a lot of money to begin with.\n\nWhy is equilibrium bad? It's not - at least in the broad sense. Under the current system, where most money is made by using money to grow the economy, you basically turn \"profit\" into \"growth\" and the end of growth means the end of profits in the financial sector which would collapse the current economic model.\n\nIn the broad sense, equilibrium is a good thing. In fact, our climate disaster is entirely caused by too much growth. The world is finite, but the demands of capital are theoretically infinite. Equilibrium is only bad in a narrow sense. It's actually mandatory to obtain equilibrium for the continued survival of our species long term.",
"I always wonder why few think to question eternal growth on a finite, overpopulated planet? Anyone read the UN Biodiversity report today?",
"No one here can give you a solid answer because they all fail to address the fundamental issue with Capitalism. Basing the success of an economy on an arbitrary factor like “growth” constricts the progression of a society to the value of an annual percentage. When there’s a Starbucks on every street corner, when the population stagnates, when people stop buying into the same crap rehashed into something new (à la Disney movie remakes) then that’s when capitalism truly fails. There’s aren’t enough resources on this planet to cater to that growth-minded economic model. Equilibrium is bad because that’s when the facade of our economic systemic rears its ugly head. It’s an unsustainable model for how a society should function. In the long run, this setup is unsustainable for our planet, our people and our governments.",
"In the end it is a rule of the capitalism as a system. Without growth there is no capitalism. The capital always needs higher revenues, rising stock markets. If this is a healthy thing to do, say for the next 200 years is another question.\n\nResources are not unlimited. The state of our planet and climate is a product of the constant pressure for growth. \n\nAs an example take Bitcoins. We did burn precious coal & gas to power our computerst to generate a binary currency to speculate with. \n\nIf aliens would watch us from outside, many things we do wouldn't make sense. \n\nOther example is growing strawberrys in south africa to ship them to europe. Doe not make sense, cause if is very resources intensive. \n\nPollution of the oceans or rivers, makes no sense unless you think in terms of capitalism and everlasting growth.",
"Congratulations, you've just found the inherent flaw in capitalism. In socialism an equilibrium is not only good, but actually possible.",
"Truth? Because there wouldn't be mountains of money going to the rich and the playing field would level out. Constant growth is a fallacy that has resulted in what we are dealing with now, climate change, the vast gulf between the rich and regular folks, the destruction of the environment, it's basically an insane theory put into practice at ultimately, everyone's expense.",
"This is a modern phenomenon in many ways, yet it can be traced back to our more local/tribal/familial past.\n\nGroups of people have always organized decisions around ideas of maximizing the return on energy, whether those are about where to forage or hunt for the day, which God to pray to, or in which company to invest.\n\nWe now have politicians, investment fund managers, CEOs who have specialized knowledge, and an easy way to judge their ability to make decisions for us is the concept of \"return on investment, which is what comes as a result for your effort, whether it's time or money.\n\nWe put this expectation on decision-makers, because we expect that if they do their jobs well they are improving things.\n\nThe economy can grow in ways that truly lifts all boats, and the average standard of living has improved dramatically over the last few centuries. Vaccination, travel infrastructure, and indoor plumbing are wonderful examples of the benefits of our innate desire to constantly improve our living standard and our efficiency. \n\nNow for your second question. The philosophy of constant growth is the same philosophy as cancer, and it will be our downfall if we are not careful. Nature craves equilibrium, yet we have allowed our systems to run amok simply because of the limitations of our leaders' ability to make decisions with a long time horizon. We don't think long-term, because we evaluate our decision-makers based on what they can do before the next election or financial quarter. Well-paid people regularly lose their jobs when they don't tow the line of constant growth, usually by a group decision to choose someone who promises more growth.\n\nAs a result, the appetite for growth has led to policies, rules, and decisions that are ultimately running the planet into the ground. For most of human existence it must have seemed that the planet's resources were inexhaustible. The way we make group decisions has been slow to accept the limits of our environment, and we may well exceed the carrying capacity of our planet.",
"From what I've pieced together reading other posts, the ELI5 answer is, I had a shitty start in life with poor parents. I shouldn't be damned to a shitty existence. If the economy is zero sum, I have to damn someone else to a shitty existence for life not to suck. If on the other hand there becomes enough for other people and for me to all have happy lives even though we didn't before, that situation is by definition a growing economy.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThen just extrapolate my desire for upward mobility to groups of people banding together with the shared goal of upward mobility, call some of these groups businesses and others lenders, and I think that fairly summarizes the replies here.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nExcept to say, that there are consequences to constant increases in the things that you and I find immediately valuable, that in the long run are bad for us and our environment and / or are unsustainable. Which newer generations are seemingly becoming more and more conscious of.",
"Because the people we're always listening to about the economy are fucking rich people who want to destroy the planet more and more and more and more and more.",
"Because the capital class is collectively a group of greedy bastards who have an insatiable appetite for wealth and would rather let the world burn than exercise restraint.",
"Sometimes i love to quote Marx to stir shit up:\n\n\"Capital is said (...) to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. (...) With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 % will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 % certain will produce eagerness; 50 %, positive audacity; 100 %. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 %., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.\" - Karl Marx, T. J. Dunning, (1861)",
"Most countries' populations are growing, whether from immigration or from births. If the economy does not grow, but the population has increased, then the economy has actually decreased, relative to the population.\n\nAlso, think about what an economy is and a measurement of its growth, it's not just dollar amounts, it's what those dollars represent. Fundamentals for life (food, shelter, healthcare), things which increase the standard of living, conveniences. If the economy hasn't grown, then there is a good chance, that the quality of life for people has not improved either, at best it has stagnated, at worse it has gone down.\n\nLife getting better over time has been a fundamental assumption ever since the Renaissance too. Most economists and policy makers are optimists, that's been a foundation of Western Civilization now for 500 years. Prior to that, people generally didn't think life got better with time, if anything they always thought the past was the best, the glory days.",
"Some interesting answers here, thanks. In the LONG long term, however, growth just cannot continue. We live on a planet with finite resources, which eventually will get used up. We are already seeing the effects of this. Capitalism and steady growth works for a while, but one day it won't.",
"Capital is God and only Capital. Within this existence of yours here on this planet you will spend more time accumulating capital then any other single activity twice over. This correlates to experience = capital. To exist you must bow before god.",
"In brief? Capitalism",
"Our economic system, capitalism, is based on constant expansion of businesses and production to generate larger absolute profits for the capital owners. Part of expanding this productive capacity is expanding the pool of avaiable workers.",
"Econ Professor here - Lots of poor responses, will attempt to elucidate. This is usually how I teach growth in my classes. \n\n\nFirst question: Why is there growth? \n\n\nIncome is equal to production, since anything that is produced must be income for someone. \n\n\nImagine a country and all of its resources that can be used for production (e.g. land, labor, capital, human capital, time, or anything else you can think of that might be used for productive work). Let's also suppose the supply of resources is fixed (i.e. we can't make more land and more babies takes time). Now imagine that all of the resources are currently being used to produce goods. This is called full employment. (Obviously we never get to this mythical level of production. There is always some unemployment, and some frictions that cause us to always be somewhat less than fully employed, but it will do for the sake of illustration). In this economy, there is a fixed amount of wealth, and we just simply decide where to spend our resources, in order to produce the socially optimal quantity of all the goods we need. This economy can be said to be \"at the frontier\", because it's producing as much as it possibly can, given its currently available supply of resources. \n\n\nNow let's suppose a new method of producing one or more of our goods comes along. Economists call this a **technology shock**. A good example of this is computing. Computers allow a single person to do way more work than 100s of people doing the same job in the 1960s. Other good examples are fertilizer (we can grow more food on the same plot of land than before) and steel (skyscrapers allow people to live and work on very small areas of land). The new technology makes it less costly to produce one of our goods, so we can produce more of it with our fixed amount of resources. **So technology increases the productive capacity of the nation by making better use of existing resources.** The increase in productive capacity in that good can redirect resources to production of other goods as well. **The end result of this is that the economic frontier expands, and we produce more.** Since all production is identically equivalent to all income, then income also expands, and hence the economic pie grows. \n\n\nSecond question: Can growth continue forever? \n\n\nThis is a great philosophical question that's been debated ever since we began having sustained economic growth in the late 1700s (see the writings of Malthus, and later environmental/population alarmists). The great economist, Julian Simon, wrote a book on this I highly recommend called The Ultimate Resource. Essentially, he states that economic growth can continue forever as long as we continue to be clever enough to develop new technologies good enough to solve our problems. **Hence, the Ultimate Resource is the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the human brain, and, growth can (and will) continue for as long as we can be smart enough to solve our problems.** \n\n(There are lots of caveats and alarmism around this topic. I tend to come down on the side of belief in human inventiveness. Some people believe economic growth will somehow collapse and lead us back into the dark ages of history. Believe what you wish. I choose to believe we're smart enough to solve all our problems, no matter how big. My evidence would be that these arguments are not new. They've been made for at least two centuries now, and never once have they been close to correct.) \n\n\nThird question: What makes an equilibrium bad? \n\n\nEquilibria aren't necessarily bad. I think you (and others) may be confusing the concept of equilibrium with the concept of a steady state. The two are similar, but not the same. An equilibrium just describes a system in perfect balance. There are many growth models in modern growth economics that conclude with an equilibrium that has a positive rate of growth. A \"steady state\" could be thought of as a state where no growth occurs. The economy is never really in a steady state (you might think of them as mythical). Instead, steady states are generated by the level of technological progress, and our real life economy can be thought of as chasing these new steady states forever, without ever really getting to one.",
"Fewer people live in extreme poverty than 50 years ago. This is a by product of a growing economy. Id say that’s the most important to constantly grow our economy. \n\nWe, which includes people, governments and businesses, take on debt. Typically we borrow with the expectation that we will generate a return on our invested capital or that at least our income will remain the same or grow so we can make monthly payments. For those that expect return, a stagnant economy may cause a default, which then causes the lender to also likely loose; and now we have a shrinking economy. Obviously a shrinking economy would lower more people’s standards of living.",
"This is ELI5. You're all working on a high school level at the very least.\n\nEconomies grow because people have more babies than people die. This means that there are more people all the time to do all the work that needs doing.\n\nEconomies grow because people go to school for longer than they used to, and now they can work better.\n\nEconomies grow because people have better tools than they used to, so now they can do more with less effort.\n\nEconomies grow because people buy from each other, so people are doing less of what they aren't so good at.\n\n\nIf these things aren't happening, then economies shrink. Most people would say these are good things. If they aren't happening that might be bad.\n\nEquilibrium in these things doesn't really mean anything. Are we supposed to have exactly the same number of people die and be born every year? Are tools supposed to stay the same all the time? Are people supposed to go to school for the same amount of time learning the same things people used to? We all want to do better. We all want to be more. That's good.",
"There is no natural law that an economy has to grow, it is just that we want it to and are unhappy if it doesn’t. \n\nInvestments into new technologies that make one more efficient should allow each economy to grow. If there is investment into efficiency and the economy is still not growing this means there is something else in the economy that’s shrinking and pulling the average down. \n\nAs long as there is growth, there can be some growth for everyone individually. If the economy stops growing, individuals can just grow by taking away wealth from others - so a war over distribution of wealth.",
"[Alright, listen up, imma say this once, and I'm not gonna repeat it. Greed, see, is like a little pet. And the more and more you go and feed it, the more hungry it'll get. But ya know, you really can't blame greed, nah that's stupid. You see it's got a worm inside. Aw yeah that's right. That's one that always needs to feed, and its never satisfied. You get it?! But the more you try to find it, the more it likes to hide. Now listen, that is a nasty little worm. I like to call it, pride.](_URL_0_)\n\n\n-- Danny Devito on why we must keep biggering.",
"Equilibrium isn't bad.\n\nCapitalism argues that profits should always be growing, which is why we're all getting screwed now.",
"I hate econ, but it's got a lot to do with population. As the population of a community/state/nation grows, the number of people who can be expected to have a demand for services and products grow as well. Of course, there are a number of mitigating and exacerbating effects that the growth of a population has on an economy, but in general, larger nations trend towards larger economies."
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"http://www.princeton.edu/~moll/ECO503Web/Lecture10_ECO503.pdf",
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28hhno | the status of kurds in the middle east and peshmerga | EDIT: Also, what's the history of the Kurds, and why have they been repressed by those in power? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28hhno/eli5_the_status_of_kurds_in_the_middle_east_and/ | {
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"We have always been living in the area known as Kurdistan which encompasses Kurdish populated areas in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. There are between 25-40 million Kurds in the world which makes us the largest nation in the world without its own state. The Sykes-Picot agreement arbitrarily drew today's middle east borders and divided Kurds among the four countries mentioned before. These countries continuously tried to repress us, exterminate us, and deny our existence. In Syria Kurds were not allowed to hold citizenship and Bashar's father killed tens of thousands of Kurds. In Turkey, until recently, uttering the word Kurd or Kurdistan or speaking Kurdish would land you in jail indefinitely. Instead they called us Mountain Turks. In Iraq, Saddam was hell bent on exterminating us through his genocide campaigns. He killed close to 180 000 civilians through bombardments, executions, chemical weapons, and mass burials of people who were still alive. In 1991 Kurds in Iraq rose against Saddam and kicked him out of Kurdistan. In 2003 we helped the US topple his regime. We have been establishing a functioning democracy that's hard to find in the middle east. Kurdistan is much safer than Iraq and therefore has had enormous amounts of FDI which has led to extraordinary economic development. The peshmarga are Kurd fighters. It means those who front death. For Kurdish children growing up under Saddam's oppression peshmarga were somewhat like superheros mainly for their bravery. Now they are helping to keep Kurdistan safe from terrorists. We do have many shortcomings as well like our civil war in the mid 90 s. Now though the future seems bright for us. I hope I answered your questions. Feel free to ask more.",
"If its any conselation sala hadien? The leader of islam in the crusades was kurdish"
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yqx3o | our sense of sight | Specifically, in the brain, after my eyeballs hand it off. What am I *actually* 'looking' at? A hi-res screen in the back of my brain? What are the 'pixels' -- molecules, photons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yqx3o/eli5_our_sense_of_sight/ | {
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"After light waves hit the receptors in your eye, the receptors activate small electrical signals in the optic nerve. The optic nerve is basically a wire, carrying the signals further back into the brain.\n\nOnce the signals reach the optical center in your brain, your brain starts trying to recognize patterns. Broadly speaking, it compares the signals it is getting now, to its memories of other signals it has gotten before, and the decisions that have been made based on them. This is done by electrical signals bouncing around everywhere. I'm going to anthropomorphize.\n\nYour optical center uses a complex network of associations, to notice where there is a large amount of any given color grouped together, and seperates everything out into objects. It compares apparent sizes of objects, and color intensities, and a thousand other little cues, and decides what is near and far, and big and small.\n\nA pattern-recognition part of your brain then tries to match the objects it has recognized in the sensory input to things in your memory : What have you seen before that may be similar to what you are seeing now? It primes any memories that are similar to this pattern of information, so that those memories are easier for your brain to find, and are ready to be triggered on a moment's notice. This is a long process, and involves a lot of logical leaps -- going from direct observations like \"that is a blob of green\" to **decisions** like \"that is a blob of green shaped like a dress, therefore that might be a dress\". When you recognize shapes in clouds, this is your brain making patterns out of nothing.\n\nNow that a selection of memories are ready to be triggered and you've recognized loosely what is going on, the patterns you've noticed are fed to the thinky part of your brain in an extremely summarized format. Instead of the entire long process of \"Oh. That's a human. That's a green dress. The green dress is closer than the human. The green dress overlaps the human. The green dress moves when the human moves. The human is wearing the green dress. The human has red hair. The human is smiling. The human is familiar. The human has been seen before. The human's face is familiar. The human is Sarah.\" you just get \"Sarah is wearing a green dress and smiling.\" There is a lot of data lost along the way : 99% of it is not important. As long as none of it was wrong.\n\nSometimes this summary process means that you don't notice minor things that are in the background, because you haven't focused on them enough for your brain to process exactly what it is you're looking at. It's still stuck at the \"There is a blob of color in the background\" stage, rather than recognizing \"There is someone in a horse mask behind her\".",
"To be honest, the processes inside the brain that go from, \"Hmm, here is the light patterns the eyes received\" to \"Woah! this is my 2nd cousin patrick that I haven't seen in 6 years!\" isn't all that well understood. We have theories with big gaps.\n\n[Visual Cortex](_URL_2_) is the part of the brain where [Visual Processing](_URL_0_) happens. Our current understanding of visual processing is called [Two-Streams Processing](_URL_1_)."
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6jf3mo | why vehicles depreciate in value so quickly as soon as you leave the lot? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6jf3mo/eli5_why_vehicles_depreciate_in_value_so_quickly/ | {
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"Supply & demand are factors, as well as the psychological tendency to desire something that is brand new, never been touched, \"out of the box\", etc. With most cars (there are exceptions for difficult to source models) a buyer can find a new car with ease. In that scenario, a used car of the same model will need to compete against a large supply of the same cars. In order to make that sale, the car will need to lower the price to attract a possible buyer. The lowering of the price will dictate the new market value and effect depreciation. The depreciated value is merely a reflection of what someone is willing to pay for something. ",
"Imagine if somebody just bought a new computer and within a few days tried to pawn it off on you. Would you take this as a generous offer, or would you assume there's something wrong with it? \n\nCars might be made in factories, but there are a number of moving parts that can go wrong, or worse, it could be a lemon. Within those first moments of going off the lot, you can only have things go wrong. If you want to resell it, why? You obviously aren't going to get the same price you bought it for, so you aren't trying to flip it for profit. Statistically speaking, there is something wrong with that car. \n\nNow lets say you waited a year. The new models of cars have come out and there could be dozens of reason one wants to sell last years car. Even if it was a lemon, the resale value is much higher than it was right off the lot if only because it's more reasonable for somebody to get rid of such a \"fine\" products. Unless the model in question had several recalls and/or a particularly bad reputation, you can expect a higher resale value than you would get had you sold it right out of the lot.\n\nOne last thing of note is, practically everything about selling cars is a headache of many people in the know selling to a customer they hope is ignorant. Sales people will try to mark up everything where they can, well past the actual value of the car, and sometimes up-sell things that are assumed standard in a resell market as \"features\" to wriggle even more money from customers. It is fairly rare that cars are actually sold at their proper value as even people who are good at negotiating a fair price get fatigued by tenacious sales practices. One of the reasons cars depreciate so quickly, is because they were never actually as valuable as the price they were bought for. ",
"Thats because the market is broken because of imperfect information between buyers and sellers. \nSay you're a buyer looking for a new car and contact a few sellers. These sellers tend to say their cars are in amazing condition, even if theyre not. Thus you will probably end up paying more for a car that should be costing less (since its actually defective and not in the amazing condition the seller claims it to be in). Buyers realise this and so they end up being less willing to pay for a new car.\nSo because buyers are willing to pay less, your resale price drops.",
"When you buy a car from a dealership you are paying for two things.\n\nOne is the car.\n\nThe other is the dealership's fees, commissions to the dealer that sold you the car, and general mark up. The car is the same (but starts having mileage and wear and tear). Suppose you never even drove it, not one inch. It's still worth less than when you bought it simply because the value of the car itself is the same but the dealer markup is something altogether different. \n\nIn a sense think of it as though you were buying a car and paying them the service fee of getting it to the lot and doing the paper work and what not.",
"It doesn't in all countries. If this is a US based question, a lot of it has to do with status, and the fact that most car profits, for dealers, are made in the second hand car business.\n\nNew cars tend to sell at much smaller margins of profits than used cars. Used cars are an enigma, people are scared and wary of buying them, and the majority of cars are \"trade-ins\". You trade it in for a value about 20% less than the dealer is going to sell it for. If you sold it yourself, you would get much more money.\n\nAlso, depreciation varies drastically among models, with elite sports cars depreciating the most (the \"status\" factor), and longevity cars (honda, toyota) depreciating the least. Cars that won't be reliable beyond the 5 year warranty also depreciate quickly.",
"They don't, it's just a big number.\n\nWhen you subtract dealer fees they depreciate less than 5%, there aren't many used items that depreciate that little.\n\n",
"There are a lot of comments on here just ragging on dealers. OP did not ask a question about a dealer at all. \nThe answer to this question is simple. \n\nIt was new, it is now used. Simple as that. \nWould you pay more or less for a used car that has two owners as compared to one? No. Your previously brand new car has its warranty started, it has guarantee of the condition, nor is there a guarantee of the upkeep of a vehicle, and the carFax no has it listed as a one owner used car. A brand new car has no title issued to it, never sat under that tree dripping sap onto it. Never had a 16 year old kid bang it into the parking barrier at the mall. \n\nYou pay a premium to know this car is brand new and that no one has been stuffing their farts into the driver's seat for the time that they owned it",
"Choice. One of the advantages of buying new is that you get to spec it exactly as you like. You lose that benefit when buying used.",
"The depreciation is very simple. Dealers sell cars with a margin to make a profit. Let's say a dealer buys a new car from The factory for $20k. They then sell it for $23k, netting a $3k profit. Now, if the owner comes back the next week to sell it back to the dealer, the dealer might only offer them $19k for it. Why? Well it's intrinsic value was only $20k new and it now has to be sold as a used car, so they discount it $1k. The dealer is no going to pay retail for the car because they need to make a profit on it. So the buyer decides to sell it privately, but consumers don't want to pay retail prices for a used car. Even if you mark it down to $22k, a private buyer says \"well, for only $1k more I can have a brand new car and know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. So you may get more than the intrinsic value of $19k, but it will never be what you paid for it new. You might only sell it for $20k.\n\nOf course, the markup is different on different vehicles. High end, low production, exclusive cars like a Ferrari have a much higher markup when sold, so the depreciation is much higher. The markup is higher because fewer cars of that model will be sold, so the margins have to be higher to actually make a profit.",
"Would you pay the same price for a car somebody just bought put 100 miles on it and then turned back in?\n\nWhat what you're speaking about refers to a time decades ago when the profit margin on cars was up to an average of 17%.\n\nToday most cars are sold at a loss brand new. Most dealerships do not make money on the cae, they make money financing and fixing them. The average profit on a new car was actually negative from 2004 until 2012. Under Bush, consumers were being squeezed and car sales slunk..plus there was a lot of shifts within the industry and competitive practices were ramping up. Then Along Comes Google and it's game over for profits in the new car business\n\nIn 2012 the average profit on a new car finally turned positive and it was a whopping 120 bucks.\n\nFrom time to time you'll see people complaining about dealerships and saying if we got rid of them average car prices would drop by $2,000 this is based on that time. Decades ago. The internet has changed everything, leveling the playing field to the Buyers Advantage except when it comes to your trade-in but even then just be smart. Hate to say this but if you want a good deal on a car you got to go to a big city and you got to find the guy that sells the most cars he's the one who gets the best deals from the manufacturer and is willing to lose the most upfront. At the dealership I worked at for about 6 months, they had brand new focuses with an effective price cheaper than used ones.",
"This is much more simple than folks realize and no one I've seen has touched on it yet. \nSome of the largest volume purchasers of cars are rental companies (Enterprise/National, Hertz, Budget, U-Haul). Enterprise alone maintains a fleet of over 1-million vehicles which cycles regularly. \n\nAll of these companies have business models that involve buying new cars at an extreme discount renting them out for 1-2 years (sometimes more, sometimes less) than reselling. The resale happens sometimes through their own lots, but more often through wholesale options auctions. \nWholesale auctions like [Manheim](_URL_0_) are the primary source of inventory for both used car lots and used cars new car dealerships (no dealer likes to admit this). \nSo basically at any given time there is a flood of 1-2 year old cars available for resale at all time over-supplying and lowering price. \n\nYou'll notice cars that don't often get used by rental industries (Exotics, High-option package vehicles, cars with manual transmissions, etc...) tend to hold resale values better than say a Chevy Impala or Chrysler Sebring. \n\nSource: I was an executive at Enterprise for 11 years "
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20c635 | why are drones not used to find the missing airplane? | It seems like such a waste to use planes and helicopters. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20c635/eli5why_are_drones_not_used_to_find_the_missing/ | {
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"Planes and helicopters come standard with equipment not found on drones: humans.\n\nHumans who can quickly pan around to see a greater field of view, and aren't limited by the gear on the aircraft.",
"The main use of a drone is that if it gets shot down nobody dies (in the plane at least). There isn't much risk to human life in looking for a plane crash.\n\nYou seem to be operating under the assumption that drones are somehow cheaper to operate than a manned aircraft."
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ceixog | what’s the difference between a municipal area and a metropolitan area? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ceixog/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_municipal/ | {
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"municipal area is within the confines of a single city, metropolitan are is a main city and all suburbs surrounding it.",
"A municipal area is defined by law with strict boundaries. Basically if any city has certain ordinances or taxes then that applies to those lviing in the municipal area.\n\nMetropolitan area is kinda more fuzzy as it looks on how people interact in a region. for example where they live and where they work, or shop, etc.."
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4a997a | in terms of wealth, is modern day usa the most dominant superpower in human times? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4a997a/eli5_in_terms_of_wealth_is_modern_day_usa_the/ | {
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"In terms of wealth, no. Remember that back in history most of the world had no civilizations. So Rome, Parthia, India, and China basically divided up the wealth of the world between them. The U.S. has a lot of wealth as a country, but not so much compared to everyone else. China almost certainly had more of the world's wealth back in ancient times. The Silk Road was basically the gold and silver of the west flowing east to China to buy its goods.",
"The US used to be more dominant - after the end of ww2, it held around 50% of the world's GDP."
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7u92a9 | if "spicy" is not a taste, then what is it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7u92a9/eli5_if_spicy_is_not_a_taste_then_what_is_it/ | {
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"Spiciness is just a burning sensation in your mouth and throat. You don't feel it with your taste buds, you feel it with your heat sensing nerves."
]
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2eun4n | why do deaf people not have the same grasp of grammar as hearing people? | My sister is deaf and we are just under over a year apart in age - I'm 19 and she is 18. We are very close and talk all the time but I often have to severely simplify my words when I explain things to her. She also just generally has "poor" grammar: she will mix up tenses and sometimes miss out prepositions, among other things. Is this just due to the fact that she can't really hear people talking around her and subconsciously pick up language conventions from hearing conversation in the background like hearing people do?
My sister's first language was BSL but she quickly dropped that and now mainly lip-reads. She has cochlear implants on both ears but the second one is recent, i.e. she grew up with one. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eun4n/eli5_why_do_deaf_people_not_have_the_same_grasp/ | {
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"It is because Deaf people do not learn language on the same way. and basically don't \"think\" the same way a hearing person does.\n[linky](_URL_0_)",
"Sign Language rarely uses the \"little\" words. Prepositions, articles, and the like are often ignored. For instance to say \"I want to go to the store\" the signs would say \"Want go store\". \n\nEven with lip reading and implants; it's like living in a country where they speak a different language but you only have year one of that language. You're listening/watching for the key cues you understand to get by- but you're not proficient.\n\nYou would think that reading would help improve grammar, but most deaf people are speed readers (there again; looking for high points for understanding rather than individual words).\n\nDeaf people can learn to excel grammatically, but it takes a lot of dedication and practice. \n\nSOURCE: I used to work in a learning center that helped deaf and disabled learn to read and speak like hearing people.",
"Grammar is a part of language.\n\nDeaf people use their own language. Their language has their own grammar.\n\nSo it's the same reason that French people will talk about the house big blue, while Americans will refer to the big blue house."
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46n45w | why rockets and shuttles are launched from cape canaveral at sea level instead of denver at 5, 690 feet. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46n45w/eli5_why_rockets_and_shuttles_are_launched_from/ | {
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"Lots of reasons, two chief ones being:\n\n* Being near the equator gives you a speed boost, and [speed is really the kicker](_URL_0_)\n\n* Launching towards the sea means that if things go south and the rocket explodes/nosedives, it doesn't land in the middle of a populated area",
"It's less about initial altitude and more about population over-flight and proximity to the equator. When you consider that most orbits are far higher than the 60 mile \"space\" border, 1 mile doesn't amount to much. There are also more people down-range in Colorado than there are in the Atlantic. Plus, being closer to the equator gives the launch a bit of a boost in initial velocity, which means burning less fuel to reach escape velocity.",
"_URL_0_\n\nThe distance between the ground and orbit is not the difficult part of getting into orbit. The hard part is getting going fast enough to stay in orbit. Orbit is moving so fast while falling that you continuously miss hitting the Earth. That is REALLY fast. About 8 km/s fast. How high you are off the surface barely matters at all."
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ctm475 | how does card counting in black jack work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ctm475/eli5_how_does_card_counting_in_black_jack_work/ | {
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"By keeping a running tally of the high and low cards that the player sees dealt, they can (slightly) more accurately predict when the deck is full of tens and face cards. If you're currently holding a 7 and an 8 and haven't seen many high value cards dealt, you might think twice about asking for another card.\n\nCasinos usually use multiple decks at a time and shuffle after every hand in order to minimize the benefit that card counting has.\n\nThe Kevin Spacey movie \"21\" covers a ring of math students who make money by counting cards and sending a player in to clean up when the deck is ideal.",
"In Blackjack the dealer follows automated rules, that we now know are sub-optimal. They must hit on hand values of 13, 14, 15, and 16 no matter what the players cards are. The players however get to make a choice based on what the dealer's up card is. \n\nThe dealer's rules means low cards (2, 3, 4, and 5) are better for the dealer while high cards (all the face cards and 10s) favor the player. \n\nCounting means keeping track of how many low cards vs high cards are left in the deck and adjusting your bet up when the low cards have fallen earlier in the shoe (because now it's more likely that the dealer will bust before reaching 17), and down when the high cards have fallen earlier in the shoe (because now its more likely that the dealer will beat the optimal strategy). \n\nCasinos watch for people changing their bets with the count, and take actions like telling the dealer to shuffle earlier in the shoe or ask the player to stop playing blackjack. The strategy of successfully counting cards is a meta-game of figuring out ways to vary bets without tipping off the casino."
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234pyr | are white people more suited to northren living than other ethnic groups - why do northren aboriginal folks have darker skin then caucasian folk? | I have this vauge notion in my head that skin tone is related to available sun exposure. . . Groups of people who have spent a lot of time in warm and sunny places (like Africa) have dark skin due to constant exposure to warm tropical sunshine. Light skinned groups of people have less pigmentation to allow small amounts of sunshine to absorb to a greater degree.
Am I correct in thinking the caucasian heritage is largely northren europen and russian?
Why do North American northren aboriginal people (Inuit) have darker skin than common white folk? Can one assume that the caucassian group has spend more time dwelling in northren climates?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/234pyr/eli5_are_white_people_more_suited_to_northren/ | {
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"White people's skin is better at absorbing vitamin D from the sunlight. In northern climates, less vitamin D is available and natural selection caused people to have whiter and whiter skin over generations. So you are correct that white people are from Europe, where less vitamin D is available than i Africa. \nInuit people migrated to the arctic from Asia very recently in comparison, and vitamin D can be found in their diet as well, so no need to have white skin\n\nHere is a nice article about human migration _URL_0_",
"_URL_0_\n\nSummary: Humans use sunlight to produce Vitamin D from cholesterol. When people moved north, they began to suffer from Vitamin D deficiencies, so they evolved lighter skin to take full advantage of the limited sunlight. The Inuit never had this problem because their diet is packed with naturally occurring Vitamin D; it doesn't matter whether they synthesize it from sunlight. ",
"This has nothing to do with snow and ice, but with diet. Inuits have dark skin because the amount of vitamin D they got from their diet (oilyfish) was high enough to compensate for the lower amount of sunshine. There never was any pressure to get a lighter skin, so they remained dark."
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174fhi | explain speaker watts and their relation to audio receiver out put. | I have a 5.1 AVR which outputs 100 watts x 5. But I am looking at speakers that can output 200 watts. Am I wasting money on buying speakers with more watts? Also, the salesman at the audio/video store told me not to pay attention to speaker watts. That they don'y mean anything. Explain like I am five. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/174fhi/explain_speaker_watts_and_their_relation_to_audio/ | {
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"To add to nalc's excellent answer, sound volume doesn't exactly equate to speaker power. It is possible to send the same power to different brands/models of speaker and get different perceived volume levels. \n \nThis is related to the speakers' efficiency, that is, how good a job they do at turning electricity into sound. It will be rated in some units like dB Sound Pressure Level per milliWatt. A bigger number means that the speaker is more efficient. \n \nThe efficiency isn't usually all that important for speakers, but it can be for headphones. It can matter somewhat if you have an underpowered stereo coupled with very inefficient speakers, though. \n \nMost headphones have efficiencies around 100 dB SPL/mW, if I remember correctly. "
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2wo8uk | why is greenland called greenland if it's all icy, but iceland called iceland if it's all green? what happened historically? | Seriously though, it is very enigmatic. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wo8uk/eli5_why_is_greenland_called_greenland_if_its_all/ | {
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"I believe I've read that scandinavian explorers gave them those names to discourage people from going to iceland so that they could settle it easily, and encourage them to go to Greenland, which would be very difficult for them to live in.",
"This seems like a really good explanation _URL_0_",
"It was the early Scandinavian settlers who gave the country the name Greenland. In the Icelandic sagas, it is said that the Norwegian-born Icelander Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for manslaughter. Along with his extended family and his thralls, he set out in ships to explore icy land known to lie to the northwest. After finding a habitable area and settling there, he named it Grœnland (translated as \"Greenland\"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers",
"Greenland was discovered and named (and yes, the name was also a sort of advertising for settlers) during the Medieval warm period when Greenland was warmer than it is today (or, at least, warmer than it was ~40 years ago, now we are looking at ice melting there due to climate change again). When it started freezing again during the Little Ice Age (1300s and onward), the Norse settlements died out and only the Inuits stayed there. While we talk about the Norse settlements being frozen out, we should note that they lasted in Greenland 500 years or so, which is about as long as Europeans have been in what is now the United States."
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5jxhjy | how do creatures like eels produce electricity? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jxhjy/eli5_how_do_creatures_like_eels_produce/ | {
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"Eels have three organs in its abdomen responsible for its electricity. \n\nThe electric eel generates large electric currents by way of a highly specialized nervous system that has the capacity to synchronize the activity of disc-shaped, electricity-producing cells packed into a specialized electric organ. The nervous system does this through a command nucleus that decides when the electric organ will fire. When the command is given, a complex array of nerves makes sure that the thousands of cells activate at once, no matter how far they are from the command nucleus.",
"Electric eels have specialized muscle cells as noted below (~4/5 of their body length) optimized to generate much more electricity than normal muscle cells. Essentially they are big biological batteries that can power up and discharge at will. \n\nKen Catalina at Vanderbilt University has done some remarkable research on these unique creatures. The eel's electrical output is used in at least 3 ways. 1. It uses low level pulses designed to force prey to \"twitch\" involuntarily revealing themselves to the eel. 2. Higher level \"disabling pulses\" that act directly on the prey's muscles \"locking up\" the prey's muscles (without contact with the prey, it's just through the water) preventing them from escaping (kinda like a Taser). And 3. massive discharges used to disable larger prey and protect against predators. Sometimes during the larger discharges, the eel will leap up out of the water against the threat pressing their heads up high with their tails kept low in the water creating a longer and more effective and powerful electrical circuit through the threat.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n\nDisclosure: I work for Vanderbilt and get to hang with Ken occasionally. He's great.",
"Top answer is specific to eels but some people seem to still be curious how cells/life can produce electricity on a chemical level.\n\nA cell is a self-contained membrane-bound environment, like a bubble. And what goes in and out of a cell is under strict control. So, a cell can have channels in its membrane that only allow positively charged sodium ions in. After a while, the cell will then have a higher concentration of positive ions relative to its surroundings and thus, it has achieved a positive voltage potential. The cell could then discharge this potential (through a different kind of channel perhaps) and harness the stored energy it has developed in a number of different ways.\n\nIf youd like to see a really interesting example of using cellular electric potential to do physical work, look up \"atp-synthase\" on youtube. This is the protein that uses a built up electrical potential to turn a molecular motor which in turn synthesizes atp: an essential stored-energy chemical. Its really cool when you see a visualization of it. And those atp-synthase motors are in the mitochondria of most living creatures, including you! ",
"I am an eel farmer in Nepal. Let me give you one bit of advice. Never grab a sleeping eel by the ankles. I have had two of my best friends from around the world die in mysterious ways. ",
"Mostly this is a conundrum because grade-school textbooks have such poor explanations of electricity, in particular batteries. Once you know the real explanation of batteries, electric eels seem far less mysterious.\n\nImproved battery explanation: batteries *do not produce electricity.* Instead, batteries are *electricity pumps,* charge-pumps, same as solar cells and dynamos. The electricity was already inside the conductive parts. We don't have to create electricity, we only have to pump it. Batteries are pumps which create a flow of electricity, an electric current. (And remember, heh, the electric companies take back every electron they gave us. They're not selling any electricity And with AC, the electricity goes back and forth without being consumed.) Batteries: when water forces a metal to corrode, the dissolving atoms always leave some electrons behind in the metal surface. The water becomes strongly positive, and the metal negative. Water-corrosion produces an enormous charge-pump effect.\n\nBesides dynamos and batteries, other electricity-pumps exist as well: animal nervous systems. In nerve cells there are microscopic electricity-pumps, called \"charge pumps\" or \"ion pumps.\" These molecule-sized pumps are forcing positively-charged atoms to pass through an insulating wall which surrounds each nerve cell. Basically, a 'battery plate' is created by this thin wall, with its charge pumps.\n\nElectric Eels produce voltage in the same way that your nervous system does: they use living cells with microscopic insulating walls, and these walls are full of molecular charge-pumps. Yet in your nerves, the tiny charge-pumps are still behaving like batteries: they can only create a few volts at most. So, how do electric eels produce lethally dangerous 600-volt outputs? They do it just like we can do with batteries: they hook all their cells in series! All the \"battery polarities\" must point in the same direction. And, the electric-eel organ is based on proton pumps, \"positive electricity.\"\n\nWe normally connect bunches of 1.5V batteries in series to create a 6V or 9V battery, or 12v [or anything.](_URL_0_) An electric eel connects its stacks of cell-membrane \"batteries\" in series.\n\nPS\n\nMetal-plate batteries have an insulating layer too. It's called the \"Helmholtz Double Layer.\" Today the double-layer is being used as the insulating dielectric when making Supercapacitors. (See, science hangs together, and has connections all over the place, but only after all the grade-school misconceptions are removed.) In batteries, the metal-corrosion process is forcing all the dissolving metal atoms to move across that insulating Helmholtz layer. Each corroding metal atom is positive-charged; a positive ion. So by pumping positive ions along, a battery builds up a net-charge, and a voltage. But unlike dynamo coils or PN junctions in solar cells, the batteries and the nerves aren't based on electron currents. Instead they're based on proton-flow and proton-conduction in water solution.\n\nBatteries and nerves and eel electrical organs: same basic idea, but living cells can do it all without needing any metal plates. If they had to use electrons and wires, the \"electric-fish weapon\" probably would be impossible, and have never evolved.\n",
"How do you Electric Eels not electrocute themselves?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/06/06/electric-eels-make-leaping-attacks/",
"http://science.sciencemag.org/content/346/6214/1231",
"http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141204-electric-eels-fish-science-animals-remote-control/",
"https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/science/the-surprising-power-of-an-electric-eels-shock.html?_r=0",
"http://www.npr.org/2014/12/13/370538665/electric-eels-jolt-their-prey-by-remote-control"
],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0QvbThCxm4"
],
[]
] |
||
1zs0px | how come the default font in microsoft word is calibri and not new times roman? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zs0px/eli5_how_come_the_default_font_in_microsoft_word/ | {
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"1. Growth of digital consumption. We believed that more and more documents would never be printed but would solely be consumed on a digital device. Given we started this work in 2003 (long before Surface, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, etc.) this was a somewhat controversial opinion (more when it would happen, not if).\n\nTo support digital consumption the new fonts were created to improve screen readability. They do this via a technology called ClearType. You can learn more about that ClearType here: ClearType Overview. There is an excellent blog post from the Engineering Windows 7 blog that gives additional detail on the ClearType: Engineering Changes to ClearType in Windows 7\n\n2. At the time, Office was looking to modernize the look and feel of documents created by the Office applications. They hadn’t changed substantially since the early 90s. Among many other improvements, the introduction of the new fonts had a big impact on the modern look. The use of san serif Calibri as our default body font (instead of the old standard Times New Roman) was one of the more controversial changes.\n\nCalibri was just one of several fonts introduced at the time (ClearType Font Collection). Many other ClearType fonts for various languages have been released since. New Fonts in Windows 7\n\n_URL_0_",
"Times is a typeface with [serifs](_URL_1_) - the little dangly bits on the edges of some of the letters. Calibri is [sans-serif](_URL_0_) - it doesn't have dangly bits.\n\nThe general consensus among typographers is that sans-serif faces look better on screens than those with serifs. The detail of the serifs is too fine to come through clearly on a screen which normally has around 72 pixels per inch of resolution. Once you move to print, with a resolution of 300 dots per inch or better, the serifs come through better and a serif face, like Times New Roman starts looking nicer.\n\nOn top of that, Callibri was designed by Microsoft to take advantage of the new text drawing features that shipped with Vista. Using it by default (which started in the Vista-era Office) helps introduce people to their new flagship font & makes sure everyone notices just how damned good it looks."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/12/18/why-did-microsoft-change-the-default-font-to-calibri/"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif"
]
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||
4f1fad | i see [these] brackets quite a [l]ot on wikipedia when someone is being quoted. what are [they] for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f1fad/eli5_i_see_these_brackets_quite_a_lot_on/ | {
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"The brackets typically represent an understood word that would otherwise not be know out of context.\n\nExample. \"Yeah, he had a great career and it'll be a long time until another great like him comes along.\" May be quoted in an article or Wikipedia as \"Yeah, [Kobe] had a great career...\"",
"It is a journalism technique that is adding clarifying words that the person being quoted did not say, but are necessary for readers to understand what the subject they are talking about is. It normally just gives names or pronouns but can be used for anything being added to the quote. ",
"they're used in quote to indicate something that the speaker meant but didn't directly say. So to quote your question\n\n > I see [brackets] placed in sentences, in a way that doesn't make immediate sense to me why [the brackets are] placed there\n\nThey're also used when quoting written works if the capitalization in the original differs from how it must be used in the article quoting from it due to grammar rules."
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1e0sbv | what is real life's "resolution" from our eyes view?.. (if we were to replace one wall of a room with a screen what'd be its resolution? ) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e0sbv/what_is_real_lifes_resolution_from_our_eyes_view/ | {
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"Taken from the first result when google searching \"eye resolution\";\n\n > The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small angular amounts and continually updates the image in one's brain to \"paint\" the detail. We also have two eyes, and our brains combine the signals to increase the resolution further. We also typically move our eyes around the scene to gather more information. Because of these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher resolution image than possible with the number of photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image that would be required to show what the human eye could see when you view a scene.\n > \n > Based on the above data for the resolution of the human eye, let's try a \"small\" example first. Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be:\n > \n > 90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).\n > \n > At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see:\n > \n120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.\n > \n > The full angle of human vision would require even more megapixels. This kind of image detail requires A large format camera to record.\n\n[Source.](_URL_0_)\n\n**TL;DR:** 576 megapixels",
"This subject hit the news a few years ago, when Apple introduced their Retina Display. They claimed the pixels were smaller than your eyes could see - and this prompted people to query how many pixels your eyes can actually see.\n\n[Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has some relevant quotes:\n\n > Raymond Soneira... says that the physiology of the human retina is such that there must be at least **477 pixels per inch** in a pixelated display for the pixels to resolve (become imperceptible to the human eye) at a distance of 12 inches\n\n > Phil Plait notes, however, that, \"in my opinion... Soneira, while technically correct, was being picky\"\n\nbecause this figure only applies to someone with better than 20/20 vision. And\n\n > The Boys of Tech podcast published their own analysis and concluded that Soneira's claim was invalid... This was primarily due to the fact that Soneira misinterpreted the manner by which the acuity of the human eye can be tested. The retinal neuroscientist Bryan Jones offers a more detailed but similar analysis and comes to a similar conclusion.\n\nSo there doesn't seem to be a definite answer, but it's something a little less than 477 pixels per inch, for someone with 20/20 vision, when viewed from 12 inches away.",
"Others have discussed the eye, but what about the wall itself - what's it's resolution?\n\nAll of reality is believed to have about 61873000000000000000000000000000000 'pixels' per meter.\n\nA square of wall the size of a decent TV would have somewhere around 2500000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 megapixels\n\nYour eyes can't see that well. No instrument we have developed can 'see' that well - and likely never will. This is entirely theoretical and comes out of the math of very very small things. Specifically, something called the 'Planck length', which is theorized as the smallest distance between two points that can be distinguished. It's an area being actively researched today."
]
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1q7q7d | why does the forehead get hot when you are sick? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q7q7d/why_does_the_forehead_get_hot_when_you_are_sick/ | {
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"Ok, so your entire body temperature raises. The brain requires a lot of O2 to work, and thus the head is a very blood vessle dense area of the body, and the flesh between the skin and the network of muscles, and skull is incredibly thin, with little fat to act as insulation. The forehead is also bare of hair, so thus the rise in temperature is most easily felt by touch there"
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5kj9s2 | why we can receive hd television broadcast instantly, but streaming videos on youtube needs to wait and sometimes not even on hd? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kj9s2/eli5_why_we_can_receive_hd_television_broadcast/ | {
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"The broadcast is already \"there\" --- it doesn't have to be fetched and delivered specifically to you. Whether you're on the channel or not, whether your TV is even on or not, the data from the broadcast is already there ... and delayed by the amount of time it takes to get to your home. You just don't notice the delay because you immediately get the picture and sound which was broadcast a second or two ago. ",
"A TV broadcast is like a loudspeaker pumping out tunes at a concert. Tens of thousands of people at the concert can all hear the same music at the same time, just like your TV can pick up the same broadcast as everyone else's at the same time. As long as you're happy listening to the same music (or watching the same shows) as everyone else this system works well, and technically it's relatively simple to implement.\n\nThe downfall to this system is that if one member of the audience wants to listen to Jimi Hendrix and another wants to hear Radiohead, unless that's playing on another stage (channel) they're out of luck. It's a one-way system, you have to tune in to the same thing as everyone else.\n\nThe internet on the other hand is a two way street - you can request special content just for you. But how? Continuing the concert analogy - imagine those same tens of thousands of concert-goers all yelling out to be heard so that they can hear their special song all at the same time, and imagine it all being played loudly over the same speaker system - the result is chaos.\n\nIn order to cater to these special demands, the internet has been carefully arranged in a way that each person makes a request on their own personal line. Those requests are then sorted and queued in an orderly fashion so that one by one they reach a server that can then respond with what they asked for. This system brings order to the chaos and allows each person to get what they want, when they want it. But it comes at a cost.\n\nNow the server is no longer broadcasting a single blanket signal to the entire audience, it's individually responding to many users all at once with different content. This uses up the available space on the line (\"bandwidth\") much quicker and as a result it's not always possible to send each individual their content (music or video) fast enough to play it back immediately at its natural pace.\n\nThe way around this is to spend a short time collecting a \"buffer\" of content on the receiving end before beginning playback, so even though the content is arriving slower than it's being played back it's possible to enjoy it at its natural pace, after this short wait."
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1jovgo | what is a "lockout" in sports? | What is it? Why does it happen? How does it get resolved? Who does it involve? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jovgo/eli5_what_is_a_lockout_in_sports/ | {
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"A lockout can happen in pretty much any labor dispute, not just sports. It is basically the opposite of a strike. It occurs during a labor dispute between laborers (players) and management (team owners), usually over money, or more specifically what percentage of revenue is going to the players and what percentage is going to the owners. A strike is when the players refuse to play until the owners meet their demands. A lockout is when the owners won't allow the players to play until their demands are met. In either case it is resolved when both sides come to an agreement over whatever the issue is."
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5niv9p | what's the difference between an uber and an unlicensed taxi? | Isn't Uber basically private cars operated as taxis without taxi license a.k.a unlicensed taxis? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5niv9p/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_an_uber_and_an/ | {
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"Uber is not a taxi, it is private hire.\n\nA \"taxi\" is licensed to pick up passengers who flag them down from the street or from a taxi rank, without prearrangement. Anybody else doing that is breaking the law (if doing it for payment). \n\nA \"private hire\" is just paying someone to drive you from A to B. As long as it is pre-arranged and not flagged down from the street, you don't need a licence.\n\nObviously laws will vary from place to place",
"No. Uber is a way to organize town cars, not taxis. A taxi license gives you the right to pick up fares from the street. This is similar to how a street vendor might need a license to stand on the street corner selling you things. However if you had contacted someone to buy something and you meet on the corner to exchange the goods and money that does not make him into a street vendor. Similarly Uber is a broker of transportation services. Once you have bought a ride the driver is free to pick you up without a taxi license. This is just as legal as pirate taxis taking orders from people and showing up for their ride. Town cars have done this for a long time and are keeping it legal.\n\nThe part that might not be legal depending on legislation is that in addition to the taxi license you might need a license to take fares for transport. This is the same if you are a taxi driver, town car driver, limousine driver, bus driver or Uber driver. Uber Black drivers are required to have such licenses but regular Uber Pop drivers are not and may be operating illegal.",
"It depends a lot on the location and what their laws are. In the UK, there are two separate categories: taxis (formally know as Hackney carriages) which you can hail down from the street, and Private Hire Vehicles which must be booked in advance. The licensing of both taxis and PHVs is carried out by local authorities, and so there can be some variation in the licence rules. \n\nUnder this scheme, Ubers are classed as PHVs and *do* need to be licensed as such. Trying to sign up as an Uber driver without a PHV licence would be illegal."
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5dikt1 | why do people say that southern people are lazier than nothern people? (stereotype) | My father has been living in some countries in Europe (Spain, France, Switzerland, Germany...) And he always noticed that nothern people complain about southern people being lazy. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dikt1/eli5_why_do_people_say_that_southern_people_are/ | {
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"I assume the stereotypes began due to the difference in climate and then was passed on throughout the generations.\n\nImagine 100 years ago you had a farm in Canada. You can only grow a few things and you can only grow them for a percentage of the year.\n\nThen you compare it with a farm in Florida from 100 years ago. You can grow much more things and chances are you can grow at least something at any point in the year. IE, a crop that prefers colder temperatures in the \"winter\" and a crop that prefers tropical temperatures in the summer.\n\nIn order to survive the Canadian winter, you need to do as much as possible during the summer. Then you kinda do nothing except try to not die during the winter. Florida you do the same amount of farming but spread it out over the year instead of just a few months.\n\nOn top of that, if it's a really hot day, the Canadian will likely be uncomfortable, but keep farming, while in Florida the farmer would likely die from the heat if he exerted himself too much, so it would likely be common to see farmers and field workers napping under a shady tree in the afternoon when the day was hottest.\n\n",
"We have a *much* slower pace of life down here in the South. For those that don't know any better, who are used to a more fast paced way of doing things, it can look like laziness.",
"It might be related to being closer to the equator where it's warmer, and people are more relaxed: No need to plan for winter, working hard makes you sweat...\n\nYou might want to know that in Brazil, this is inverted, and Northern people are stereotyped as lazy. We are mostly below the equator, so South colder.\n\nIf you look at a wealth and development map, you'll see a tendency of lower statistics in the tropics, so maybe this helps with the stereotype.\n\nWhen the first Portuguese stepped in Brazil, a letter was sent back to Portugal saying \"In this land, if you plant, anything grows.\". It's too damn easy, why rush then?",
"**Regarding the southern U.S.**: historically, hookworm was extremely prevalent and it created a stereotype of the people there being lazy, as that is one of the symptoms.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n**Regarding southern Europe**: part of the explanation is that the south is largely Catholic compared to the Protestant north. Catholicism celebrates numerous feast days (i.e. holidays) and is in some respects more permissive than the more austere Calvinism and Lutheranism of the north."
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67acfe | what is millennials ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67acfe/eli5_what_is_millennials/ | {
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"We tend to refer to a whole generation of people by a name, because their fashion and internet memes / fads change from generation to generation.\n\nMillennials are people born in the 1980's and 90's; unlike previous generations, they grew up with computers and internet and phones, and are quite active with social media. They were also just about out of college when the recession of 2001 hit the computer industry and caused a lot of them to be unable to get jobs.",
"It's a reference to people who are becoming adults since the beginning of the 21st millennium. "
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6wk8gz | how did the student loan crisis start? was it a gradual change, or was there a | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wk8gz/eli5_how_did_the_student_loan_crisis_start_was_it/ | {
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"It's been a gradual increase in tuition at above inflation rates, while wages have stagnated relative to inflation, as well as the imploring everybody that they \"have to go to college\" even when that's not the right or best paying solution for everybody. This means that people have to pay a higher percentage of their income toward loans than in the past, making it more and more onerous and delaying the ability to afford other expenses like buying a house or starting a family. And people who might have done better in a trade school or other career either start college, rack up debt and then don't get the degree to benefit their career, or get the degree in a field where they don't earn enough to justify the investment in the degree.",
"There were several factors that have contributed.\n\n**Decreasing taxpayer support for college**: many state colleges received state taxpayer dollars to pay for their operations. (which is one reason why out-of-state tuition is higher than in-state tuition) But, over the last 20 years, the portion of direct-support funding from the state to colleges has been steadily decreasing, which means the amount of tuition needed to make up the shortfall has been increasing.\n\n**Increasing demand for degrees & credentials:** employers have been cutting employee training programs for several decades, and demanding that starting employees have more education, usually represented by a credential like a bachelor's degree or trade certification. At the same time, many young people were sold on the idea that having a certification or degree would improve their odds of finding a high-paying career. \n\n**The Rise of the for-profit university**: With more demand for certifications and degrees, a lot of people turned to community colleges to either start their bachelor's degree or get a certification. However, demand **far** outstripped supply, and into this need came the for-profit colleges like University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, and other similar organizations. These for-profit organizations purchased *existing* colleges which were already accredited. Having accreditation as a school is important, because it means the school can take advantage of Federal Student Loans. \n\nIf you just started 'avonstringer's school of learning and good stuff', you could charge people tuition, but they couldn't take out student loans until your school went through the accreditation process. Buying an existing school let the for-profit schools skip that step.\n\n\nSo you have organizations that won't hire people without a 4-year-degree, even for retail work. You have people getting very expensive culinary certifications only to find out that they can only get hired as line-cooks. And you have \"schools\" that are really only interested in getting you enrolled and getting you to max out your loans. \n\nThe last administration started to take steps to curtail the worst actors in the scene, with requirements about graduates being able to find work in their field, and taking away accreditation from universities that couldn't retain or graduation enough students. But that ended with the new administration, which has much more of a 'free-market' view. ",
"Here's an Adam Ruins Everything that recently came out about [student loans and where they are today](_URL_0_)"
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2y5wkl | what's currently happening in the ebola affected countries concerning the outbreaks? is it still the pandemic that cnn sensationalized it to be? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y5wkl/eli5_whats_currently_happening_in_the_ebola/ | {
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"Some countries such as Guinea and Sierra Leone are still being hit hard with about 100 new cases each week. However, a news article reported that [Liberia now has no known cases](_URL_0_)",
"The situation is [improving](_URL_0_), especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but they're not out of the woods yet. Concerted work is needed until there are no new cases or the outbreak could flare up again. \n\nEven once there are no new cases the work in these countries is still not over. Ebola has devastated the already weak healthcare systems in these countries and many of the survivors (many of whom have lost loved ones) are being shunned in their communities. And humanitarian agencies still don't have all the resources that they need. There is real concern that loss of focus now could lead to the outbreak worsening again.\n\nAnd I wouldn't necessarily call the coverage of the disaster sensational (though the risk of Ebola in the west was largely overblown) - it got the international community to mobilise resources to combat the epidemic in West Africa, without which things would have been much, much worse (and the worst case scenario predictions you saw on the news would be coming true). As it was, the response was still way too late and serious questions are being asked of the WHO and others why they weren't on this sooner (the answer is easy - they don't have nearly enough money for a comprehensive disease surveillance program). ",
"They've contained the outbreak and are currently working on ending the epidemic. I don't know how much CNN sensationalized it, but it never was a world(or country) ending disease as some thought it was. Currently there's been about 24k *reported* cases, 40% of which are already dead with an estimated death rate of 50-70%.\n\nThe rate of infection is slowing down and if the current trend continues then the outbreak will be over in half a year. However the likelihood depends on how large a percentage of the cases are reported(estimates range from 30-80%)"
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5g0lbx | is there a limit to how many different sound signals a speaker can reproduce at any single moment? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g0lbx/eli5_is_there_a_limit_to_how_many_different_sound/ | {
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"Yes, the limit is 1.\n\nThe speaker has a moving part that's powered by a coil and there is one signal going into that coil.\n\nHowever, that's not how many \"sounds\" a speaker can make. Think of an orchestra, many people playing many instruments. Each instrument makes it's own sound. With one microphone you can record the sum of all those sounds, because sound waves add together to produce combined waves. That signal signal can then be played back into the speaker and you hear the sound of an orchestra. Maybe if you're an orchestra fan you can recognize the sound of a specific instrument, but what you are hearing is the sum of all the instruments.",
"Yes. The limit is one. A single speaker cone can only make one sound at a given moment. That's ok, though, because your ear can only hear one sound at a given moment (technically two, since you have two ears).\n\nWhen you're listening to multiple sounds, you're not processing multiple different sound waves, your ear drum is moving according to the complex wave function formed by the overlapping waves, [like this graph](_URL_0_). Your brain is just *really damn good* at analyzing that single complex wave and rebuilding all the individual, simple waves that created it, so you can \"hear\" multiple sounds.\n\nLikewise, a speaker isn't making multiple waves, it's making a single complex wave according to the multiple wave functions being fed into it. So what you're really asking is how complex the wave can be.\n\nSmaller speakers have less inertia, since they are smaller and have less mass, so they can move very quickly. That makes them very good at producing high-frequency waves that need the speaker to move quickly. Large speakers can move a greater distance, giving you more volume, which is ideal for lower sounds that need volume to stand out. How complex the wave can be depends on the size of the wavelengths you're trying to make and how fast and far your speaker can go. Which is to say, it depends on the speaker and the sound you're trying to reproduce with it and the quality of the speaker."
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3g7o75 | how did the first organism procreate? it would have been the *only* organism, no? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g7o75/eli5_how_did_the_first_organism_procreate_it/ | {
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"Many simple organisms replicate by just splitting. The first organisms likely simply replicated itself through mitosis. ",
"Single cell organisms reproduce by splitting in half, leaving behind two independent organisms. The same process is used by multi-cellular organisms to grow.",
"The first organism was single celled and simply divided. Later down the line, a couple organisms had a mutation where they exchanged DNA and started the millions year old tradition of mixing DNA through various means",
"You are thinking in terms of large jumps but evolution is much slower. The answer is that the process evolved over a long period of time with small incremental changes to the process of cell duplication. Cells started by cloning themselves over and over and over. After a while small changes in the DNA allowed for changes in the cloning process. The organisms that could respond faster to changes did not die out as fast or evolve faster. Sexual reproduction is an evolutionary devices to ensure enough diversity to survive. It came about because it was better than just cloning the current system. ",
"There are individual molecules that can self-replicate. RNA makes copies of itself *all by itself* and other molecules can self-arrange and duplicate such as bubbles of lipid membranes (which can split in half to make to smaller bubbles). It's believed that these self-replicating molecules/bubbles eventually evolved into cellular life as we know it.\n\nDuplicating yourself is the simplest way to procreate, and once cells were using DNA to store their instructions it's not so hard to start swapping bits of DNA. Absorbing DNA from eating other cells probably predates intentional swapping of DNA.\n\nMany organisms today, like bacteria, still procreate simply by growing and dividing and only occasionally swapping some DNA here and there."
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5g5gj5 | what happens when you direct a laser pointer to a mirror? why is there a red point both on the mirror and on the wall where the laser has been aimed at? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5g5gj5/eli5_what_happens_when_you_direct_a_laser_pointer/ | {
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"There is a thin layer of glass in front of the reflective component of the mirror (which is usually silver). The laser passes through the glass, illuminating a small point of glass before it is reflected to the wall behind you. \n\nEdit: clarity ",
"Normal mirrors are not perfect. While most of the light that hits them is reflected, a small amount of it is scattered, meaning that it reflects in a random direction. This can happen if the glass or the metal layer isn't perfectly smooth, if there's dust on the glass, or because of tiny impurities within the glass. The red dot on the mirror is the light that is scattered in the direction of your eyes.\n\nOptical mirrors, which are used to direct laser beams, are much better in this regard. They are incredibly smooth, and don't have a glass coating. They can achieve reflectivity beyond 99,99% - you would not see a dot when pointing a laser at one of them."
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ygb43 | why is sweden considered such a paradise? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ygb43/eli5_why_is_sweden_considered_such_a_paradise/ | {
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"Because they have a lot of the things that liberal Americans desperately fight to get a tiny bit of. They have a good universal social welfare system, treat prisoners well, and have consumer-friendly intellectual property laws. Of course, any Swedish person can tell you that their country is not a magical fantasy land, but in America getting any one of them *is* a fantasy.",
"The grass is always greener.\n\nAlso many on reddit tend to be very liberal politically and Sweeden is very very liberal. ",
"Being swedish and having lived there (but having grown up elsewere) all I can say is that the *true swedes* (those born, raised and lovin' it) are a bit blind to the reality of their situation. For some reason there's a worldwide belief that sweden is all about sexy girls, life being awesome and without worries and just peace and fun. And true swedes believe that what their country is offering them is the best they can get.\n\nIT IS NOT. It has one of the highest rape incidences in the planet, very detached and awkward social interactions, no meritocratic student aids (which leads to worthless students getting state-sponsored studies and debts) and a goddamn awful weather.\n\nFor all the things that work well in Sweden, it's not worth the bad things... **unless** you've lived there your whole life and grew accustomed to it.\n\nYou get one brand of milk and one brand of butter. You can only buy alcohol for a very few hours during weekdays on a state-controlled shop (and there's only ONE in each 'neighborhood'). You didn't? You're stuck with fake piss-beer from 7-11 with barely any alcohol.\n\nSo yeah, it's mostly about media romanticizing Sweden as they do stereotypes of every other nation.",
"I have literally never ever heard about Sweden being a paradise and I happen to have about 3 good friends in Sweden. No country in the world is a paradise, or considered a paradise. So may I ask who exactly told you Sweden is considered a paradise?",
"Because it's small, relatively unimportant on the global stage, and a developed member of the EU.\n\nIt's smallness means that it's less likely to have remarkably horrible random things happen there. Sweden has less than ten million people. The US has over 310 million people. That means that there are 31 times as many potential mass murderers, serial child molesters, and garden variety monsters in the US. Regardless of the actual per capita rates of monstrosity in Sweden v.s. the US, it's very unlikely for a newsworthy negative human interest story to come out of Sweden in the global news. Thus, we never hear about evil Swedes.\n\nSweden also doesn't have a great deal of influence over the rest of the world. Unlike, say, the United States, they do not have the power to kill all land-based macroscopic animal life on earth with nukes. They can't hope to wage a successful offensive war, and have been militarily neutral for a while. They're ranked 22nd in nominal GDP - they may be doing well per person, but in terms of the amount of stuff they can actually make, it's not that amazing. Thus, nobody cares about them. Nobody worries that they have an actual nationalist party that \"opposes integration\" of immigrants. Nobody cares that they have a *Christian* party that's, y'know, an actual *christian* party, and not just a quasi-christian party like the Republicans. That's just two things the stereotypical left might dislike about Sweden. There are probably a lot of other things people of all sorts might dislike about Sweden, but it never get's mentioned, because it's not like, genocide bad, and it's just Sweden. Nobody really cares about Sweden as an actual place.\n\nFinally, Sweden is safely \"on our side\". They're not going to join the Communists or the Islamists or the Robots or Space Hitler. Nor are they vulnerable to wandering bands of warlords, nor do they have malaria, nor are they seriously effected by poverty. The public consciousness has a limited repertoire of stories about bad things in \"minor\" foreign nations, and Sweden doesn't play into any of them. So you'll never hear a story about whatever problems there really are in Sweden. According to Patrick667 there's a lot of rape there, and only one sort of butter. Will you ever hear about that? No, because for some reason (and I *really* don't understand this) rape rates aren't one of our standard stories, and for fairly obvious reasons neither are dairy monopolies. Talking about Sweden's dark side doesn't play into any of our standard narratives.\n\nAll of this adds up to a situation where we have no reason to point out the issues with Sweden, and in the absence of damning details we're tempted to imagine a fairy-tale land where everything is wonderful.",
"I'm a 33yr old north american (split my growing up between Canada and the US) and I've been living in Stockholm for almost 4 years now.\n\nSweden does a ton of things really well. The thing is, the planet has gotten so much smaller in the last decade or so, and I don't believe that their system will continue to flourish. It hugely relies on people not trying to screw the system, and there are just more people willing to do that I think.\n\nI'm super happy here. The liquor store thing is kind of hilarious, but it's manageable. The liquor laws in a lot of states or cities (Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey for a fact) are really not so different from Sweden at all.\n\nThere are huge social safety nets here as I understand it (so people seen begging are treated pretty badly by locals - people pay a huge amount in tax in order to not have those problems). The minimum amount of days off from your job is 25days/yr, most seem to get 30 though. Parental leave if you have a kid is LONG, and split evenly (if you choose it) between the mother and father. So they can each take 9months off from work and no one will make them feel guilty about it.\n\nMy personal favorite is: [Semesterersättning](_URL_0_) which is basically a bonus of 12% of your salary for every day you take off. No one ever believes me when I tell them this exists.",
"As a former Swede (been living in the US for the past 5 years now), I can confirm that rapes indeed seem to make most of the headlines. At least, that's the way it feels like sometimes. Murder doesn't happen that often, and when it does it's all over the news. Correct me if I'm wrong, Patrik667, but I was always under the impression that whenever a teenage girl has been raped, and alcohol was involved, most of the times it always ended up getting dismissed in court since \"it couldn't be proved that the girl didn't consent to it at the time\". Always pissed me off.\n\nOh yeah, the social interaction part. Here in the US when I'm in a grocery store and accidentally bump into to somebody the following conversation, or very similar, anyway, ensues:\n\n-Lady: Oh, hun, I am sorry, I didn't see you there *laughs*\n-Me: It's okay, I'm sorry *grins*\n\nNow, obviously, that doesn't happen everywhere in the US and it depends from person to person, as well as from place to place. No doubt, there's a fair share of assholes wherever you go. However, right where I'm living people are generally very friendly to random strangers they meet. Here's how an identical bump-in would work in Sweden, 95% of the times when I lived there.\n\n-Lady: *almost incoherently mutters an apology, averts eyes and moves on*\n-Me: *averts eyes, makes an awkward apologetic movement with my hand* \"Mmmh... ye, sorr-... eh...\"\n\nIt's not that people are rude or disrespectful. We're just... *awkward*, and afraid to look strangers in the eye, or talk to them or *something*. We just don't seem to like to talk to strangers, that's all. It's weird behavior, and most people seem to prefer to keep their privacy, anyway. Which could be a good thing, if you don't like to be bothered. Although, in a way I guess it makes most people seem very rude. Again, don't expect it to be like this in every random encounter of your Swedish person you bump into at the supermarket - it depends on the person, and the situation. \n\nThere's also something in Sweden known as the Jantelagen (Law of Jante?), that seems to be drilled into the majority of the people here. I found a good quote on a website: \n\n*\"Jantelagen is a term often used. It means that you should never think that you are better than anyone else. To be understated is important. What Swedes consider bragging would in many countries only be to tell it like it is. If someone compliments you on a job well done or your new haircut a Swede rarely responds with \"thank you\". Instead we explain how easy it was and how anyone could have done it or that the haircut really doesn't look very good or that at least it wasn't expensive.\"*\n\nI remember talking to my mom about it when I was younger, and she told me how fed up she was off that typical behavior. She told me she envied the US, where it wasn't as \"taboo\" to admit that, yes, thank you, I AM good at Piano. I've been practicing my whole life! No, no, not in Sweden. You better be modest, or you're seen as being braggy and a little bit full of yourself. \n\nThe reason most people put Sweden on a pedestal (here on Reddit, mostly), is probably because the majority's atheists, believe in individual freedom, equal rights for women and gays, etc. Those things I *am* proud of, when I'm talking about my homeland. I think religion isn't really frowned on like it is by you guys here in the US, despite the low numbers of believers in Sweden. Probably because it's not near as immersed into the culture, and the government and its laws, like it is in the States. You don't have to put up with the same religious crap Swedes do. In fact, if you walk up to the average Swedish person and tell them you believe in Jesus Christ, Buddha, the almighty Basheeba, or whatever, they'll most likely nod and smile politely. God forbid they insult your religion, or disrespect it in any way. They don't want to make you feel uncomfortable, or upset you. Just keep smiling, and ask polite questions, act interested in their beliefs.\n\nIt's generally seen as disrespectful to be anti-gay and against women's rights. Key word is *generally* because there's no doubt plenty of hate towards both - homosexuality especially. If you go throw junior-high as a homosexual you're still gonna get picked on, even here in Sweden. I know it sucked for me in school - and I wasn't even gay! They were still convinced of it, though... fucking bastards. Made my life hell. Once you're out school, and far away from immature idiots, you'll usually pretty accepted into society. Sweden is seen as one of the most gay-friendly countries in the world, where couples can enjoy the benefits of same-sex marriage, as well as adoption. \n\nGender roles in Sweden aren't the same as they are in other countries either. Most women in Sweden work, as well as it's very common that men are expected to help in the household, with the cleaning and raising the children. Very often do you hear about men staying home doing all the cooking, cleaning, raising the children, while the women are working. The man-like stereotype of a man always paying the check doesn't apply in Sweden as it does elsewhere, either, and is often met with a question mark. It's only fair, and not considered rude to pay for your share of the food, whether it's a date, or a group-meal (not uncommon that people in groups sit for a long time, trying to figure out what each and every one owe, and pay for only their part).\n\nIt's also common, or was for me in my upbringing, anyway, that everybody's expected to be able to take care of themselves. Individualism is extremely up-held in Sweden. My wife, whom I met and married here in the States, always found it extremely strange and downright... scary, that my mother left me and my little brother (14-15 years old) all by ourselves for days to travel to Stockholm (6 hour drive, maybe), and take college courses. \n\nWe knew how to cook, wash our clothes, clean, buy groceries, and was perfectly fine on our own, and didn't see anything wrong in it at all. My wife refuses to believe that she left us out of anything but pure selfishness. Maybe she did. You know what, though? I don't blame her. It's not like she LEFT us, left us. We had money, our own money, actually. She'd give us roughly 120-160 dollars *each* a month to buy food with, that she'd get from child support (my parents were divorced), as well as child allowance (if you have a child, and you're registered with the FSK - The Swedish Social Insurance Agency - you get around 150 dollars a month). She'd still come back and cook whenever she was home. We accepted it and didn't begrudge her at all. Most people move out of their parents homes and get their own apartments, and jobs in their late teens and early twenties. \n\nIt's just something my wife, as an American Christian, with traditional family values, just can't comprehend. Her family has lived right beside each other almost all their live, and she's stated that she can't imagine what I went through when I traveled over here, me just having turned 19 at the time, traveling over 2000 miles, through 3 different airports, to meet up with somebody living in a completely different country that you've only met on the internet. She's never lived far away from her mother, or the rest of her family, and she's in her 40's. Lets see, when was the last time I talked to mine... at least 2 months ago. I love my mom, and we enjoy talking to each other a lot, but respect that we have our own lives so we don't necessarily feel the need to call everyday. When we do talk, we talk happily for an hour, like we seen each other just the other day, and once we hang up we don't see each other for another month or two. \n\nHigh taxes. We definitely got those. In return, we're generous on welfare, got free healthcare, college and universities are free to attend, school lunch is free (when I got to the US I was actually shocked that kids have to bring money to school, in order to buy their lunch), parental benefits such as paid maternity leave - for **both** parents. I think it's 480 days per child, and they can take it any time until the child is 8 years old, although fathers are specifically entitled 60 days (usually the 480 days are shared, but technically the mother can take 420 of them, apart from the last 60 days, which belongs to the father, by law). Most people are entitled to 80 percent of their salary, paid by the state. So it's all pretty sweet. But taxes. Hiiigh taxes.\n\n*continued...*",
"It's our internet connections",
"I spent a week in Sweden for work, not in Stockholm mind you, but a small town in the interior.\n\nFor those six days my eyes were constantly assaulted by a never-ending string of increasingly hotter women. I have never seen anything remotely like it. \n\n\nIt took twenty minutes to make the simplest decisions bc we, quite literally, were struck speechless every forty-five seconds.",
"i'm not sure that anyone really cares, but i think that sweden is considered a paradise because we used to have a strong middleclass, with not to many rich people and not to many poor people. it was due to high taxes, and the government keeping monopoly for many bussiness. it has changed now, with the new government. so my explanation would be that we USED to ba a good welfare country. it's not the same anymore. sure we still have good welfare and all, i'm not saying that it's bad. i'm just saying that it was better before. keeping that in mind, if it was better before, it must've been way better, compared to all the countries that have improved alot since then. so that is my explination. it used to be very good, and even better in comparason. please also, if you have something to tell me about this, don't mention my english, didn't exactly use any spell correct, and it isn't relevant. also i know that this isn't waterproof, feel free to point that out, but there is no reason to hate :) "
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5v0vuu | what determines the shape of a cloud? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5v0vuu/eli5_what_determines_the_shape_of_a_cloud/ | {
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"Wind sheer, humidity, temperature, atmospheric pressures, storm systems near by, pollution levels, convection, the jet stream, and altitude. Amount other things. Its why no two clouds seem to ever be identical."
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97wu3q | how is induction cooking different than a typical electric stove top? don’t they both just send an electric current to create heat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97wu3q/eli5_how_is_induction_cooking_different_than_a/ | {
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"No, induction ovens use changing electromagnetic waves to heat up your *pan* directly.\n\nBasically, an electric stovetop goes: heat up coil - > heat up pan because pan is on coil\n\nInduction: heat up pan\n\nOf course, that means that ceramic pots and pans (which are not conductive) won't work at all.\n\nFun fact: this is also how wireless charging works",
"Regular electric stoves send a lot of current though thick wires, causing the wires themselves to heat up. The stove heats up, and then heats up the bottom of your pan. \n\nWith induction the stove itself doesn't heat up. It **induces** a current in the bottom of your pan, causing the pan to heat up directly, instead of indirectly from the stove. The current is induced by using alternating current. That creates an alternating magnetic field, and the other way around that induces a current in nearby (ferromagnetic) conductors. ",
"In an electric stove, an electric current passes through the coils, generating heat. This heat is conducted into the bottom of your pan, then from the bottom of the pan up through to the top of your pan, and then into your food.\n\nIn an induction stove, a changing magnetic field is generated by the stove, which causes an electric current to swirl around directly in your pan. This generates heat, which is conducted into your food.\n\nBecause the heat is generated directly in the pan with an induction stove, it can get the pan up to temperature faster. It also means that the stove top itself isn't necessarily hot, other than insofar as it gets heated up by the hot pan which is sitting on top of it. This makes the induction stove somewhat safer, as you could turn it on full blast and then put your hand on it without getting burned. You won't accidentally melt a plastic spatula or burn a wooden spoon if you set it on the cooking surface. One big downside, though, to induction, is that it will only work in conductive metal pans; because an electric current can't really be generated in a glass or ceramic pot, you won't be able to cook with these."
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19u1sw | dolphin communication | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19u1sw/eli5_dolphin_communication/ | {
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"EEEEE EEEEEE EEEEEEE EE EEEEE",
"Well, dolphins are amongst the most intelligent animals and are capable of squawking, chirping, squealing, and just making noise. They do appear to have some method of basic communication, as they can alert each other of danger and show signs of communication.\n\nFor example:\n\n > When the going gets tough, for instance, some dolphins call for backup. After being bullied by a duo of bottlenose dolphins, one spotted dolphin returned to the scene the next day with a few pals to chase and harass one of the bully bottlenose dolphins. \"It's as if the spotted dolphin communicated to his buddies that he needed their help, then led them in search of this guy,\" says Herzing, who watched the scuffle.\n\n^^[Source](_URL_0_)\n\nHowever, we humans have yet to truly understand dolphin communications. I guess they feel the same way."
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5pgarx | why is breast cancer, and to a lesser degree prostate cancer advertised so much? i don't think i've ever seen a kidney cancer ad | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pgarx/eli5_why_is_breast_cancer_and_to_a_lesser_degree/ | {
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"They're both extremely common when it comes to cancer. Breast cancer is usually focused on the female gender where prostate cancer awareness is directed for the males. ",
"Because they're both common and can be treated effectively if they're found quick enough. Other cancers like skin cancers are the same but it probably depends where you are in the world vs your risk. Where I live, there's lots of psa's about skin cancer, having moles checked, wearing sun screen etc ",
"Breast cancer is by far the most common cancer among women, followed closely only by lung cancer. Kidney cancer on the other hand is only 3% of cancer cases in women. The statistics for prostate cancer in men are similar (it is 2nd only to lung cancer).\n\n_URL_0_",
"What these people said is true, but it also has to do with public activism. There were some very effective organizers and large organizations which have gotten behind the cause and given it publicity. Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women, but it's also one of the most survivable at this point. Colon cancer caused 10,000 more deaths last year, but because there's not as much activism behind it and it's not as easily glamorized, if you will (think of all the \"save the ta-tas\" campaigns), it just doesn't get the same attention. \n\nAt this point there are huge organizations, like Susan G. Komen, which profit off of breast cancers' visibility, and they'll work hard to keep it in the spotlight."
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523mrt | why did so many vietnam protesters blame soldiers who were drafted? | I've read so much about the Vietnam war and the protesters. And these people gave soldiers who were drafted all this grief. Then you had people like Neil Young who was living i nth U.S. but was immune to the draft protesting the war and giving the soldiers a hard time when he wasn't even on the inside of it. Did they just need someone to blame? Or a cause to get behind? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/523mrt/eli5_why_did_so_many_vietnam_protesters_blame/ | {
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"* they needed someone to blame...emotions ran pretty high, and returning soldiers were a very visible and accessible part of the war\n* part of the outrage was due to alleged war atrocities, which some, albeit very few, soldiers participated in\n* many of the protesters dodged the draft and suffered for it, and felt soldiers could have taken that option\n* the soldiers themselves were defensive about the war, and in some cases participated in counter protests\n* while confrontations with soldiers did occur, they were often blown out of proportion to make the the anti-war effort look bad"
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1y6yr6 | how do we breath when we're unconscious? don't we need an alert and functioning brain to carry out the mechanisms of breathing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y6yr6/eli5_how_do_we_breath_when_were_unconscious_dont/ | {
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"The nervous system can be broken down into two groups. Somatic and autonomic. The somatic system is responsible for voluntary movement while the autonomic is responsible for involuntary. Breathing is one of the more interesting functions because it's both voluntary and involuntary. When you focus on it, it becomes voluntary and when your not, it's involuntary. Because the nervous system is controlled by the innermost \"hind brain\", you could damage the outer parts and still keep breathing.\n\nBasically, your brain is always \"alert\", even when your not. Especially the parts closest to the center."
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9k3fmn | the significance of normal force in dynamics | I'm currently studying forces in my physics class and I understand why friction forces and gravity exists when I'm drawing diagrams, but I'm completely lost as to why we need a normal force and also why it is sometimes at an angle. Can someone clear this up for me? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9k3fmn/eli5_the_significance_of_normal_force_in_dynamics/ | {
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"Wikipedia define is as:\n\n > In mechanics, the normal force F_n is that component of the contact force that is perpendicular to the surface that an object contacts.\n\n\nSo if you stand on flat ground gravity have a force that draw you towards the center of the earth. Because you stand sill on the ground and don't accelerated to the center of the earth like if you jump from a airplane there has to be a force that is as strong but with the opposite direction of gravity. That is the normal force. \n\n\nFor a inclined plane you will not sink in to it as it is completely rigid in introduction classes. That result in force perpendicular to the surface. You can still slide down the plane because of gravity and you can be hold in place by friction.\n\nBecause the early physic classes use completely rigid system the surface can provide a unlimited force perpendicular to the surface because it does not deform. So exact so strong so it counteract all forced paralleled to it towards the surface.\n\n\n\n",
" > I'm completely lost as to why we need a normal force and also why it is sometimes at an angle.\n\nThe \"normal\" force is basically the force that is exerted by a surface when another force is applied to it. For example, when you stand on the ground--the force that prevents you from going straight through the ground is the \"normal\" force. When you push on a door, the force that prevents your hand from punching a hole in the door is the \"normal\" force.\n\nThe normal force is perpendicular to the surface in question--that is, it comes straight out of the surface at whatever angle the surface is. If your surface is on an angle, the normal force will be perpendicular to that surface and so will also be at an angle."
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3p82wr | if computer files can be compressed to be a smaller file size (e.g. zipping a file up), how come the file is not originally created to be a smaller file size? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p82wr/eli5if_computer_files_can_be_compressed_to_be_a/ | {
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"It takes CPU power to compress and decompress a file. Therefore, opening, editing, or saving a compressed file will consume more CPU power than dealing with an uncompressed file. That makes the computer feel sluggish and responsive, which isn't a good thing.",
"Many file formats do already use compression of their own if file size is important, and so can't be (usefully) compressed further. JPEG images, MPEG videos and MP3 audio are all compressed. Since an uncompressed video is huge, it's worth the trade off that the MPEG file is much smaller but requires more CPU power to play since it must be decompressed as you play it. Microsoft's docx and xlsx formats use zip compression, you can actually rename them and open them as zip files.",
"There are hidden \"costs\" of working with compressed files. Others have mentioned additional cpu load. An uncompressed file can be more easily read and modified by the user. (Think of modifying a text our xml settings file for a program.) Code to compress/decompress the file is more complex and therefore more likely to have bugs (likely leading to file corruption and data loss.) There are also whole-disk compression/encryption tools built into most modern computers, so if you real want to maximize space you can do so at the OS level, transparent to the individual programs.\n\nIt basically comes down to the cost of storage being insanely cheap nowadays. There's very little incentive to compress.",
"Compression is a CPU intensive process so it doesn't always make sense. It also makes the software used to read those files more complicated and that means there are greater chances of bugs and exploits in it.\n\nSome formats have compression built in like image, sound and video file formats as well MS office document formats. Others don't like plain text, HTML or executable files. \n\nIn some case compression is used during data transmission over a network. In the case of HTML, javascript and CSS files the web server and web browsers may negotiate a common compression algorithm and use that. ",
"The same reason your clothes could fit vaccuum sealed into a few small moving boxes, but typically we have them hung loose in the closet. They are easier to manipulate, use, and put back away, and you find paying for more closet space a fair trade off to the time and energy of vacuum packing and unpacking your clothes each morning. ",
"Some files are. Take a Microsoft .docx or .xlsx etc. and change the extension to .zip. You can extract the internal resources and look at the XML content that defines your document."
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8g5xx6 | why are humans, a social species, susceptible to social anxiety? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8g5xx6/eli5_why_are_humans_a_social_species_susceptible/ | {
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"We all usually understand morals and ethics. We aren't just social but we're extreme orderly and organized in what we consider is good or bad. So for social species it only makes to very careful about seeming confident and amicable in our social endeavors. \n\nWhile this is from personal experience, it might still help answer your question. I used to not want to talk to new people or make new friends, not because I didn't want to, but because I really thought I'd manage to mess up. My shyness came from being always comfortable with family and the few friends that approached me initially. The possible chance that I'd mess up an encounter would give me anxiety. It was completely unrelated to being an introvert or someone who doesn't enjoy social company. \n\nThis is probably the case with a lot of people. Even if we talk to some people once in our entire lifetime, we value their acceptance. But it's not just for the sake of being accepted, it's also an ego thing. We want to be the best we can, and if we mess up, chances are we're going to beat ourselves over it more than anyone else. ",
"I think your answer is correct, actually! Most human things exist on a spectrum (ie happy-sad-depressed), social anxiety is just what happens a small percentage of the time in species that have evolved to be extremely dependent on social approval and support. I think also it might have something to do with a faulty serotonin system or some other neurotransmitters, but maybe someone more knowledgable than myself can explain that side of it! ",
"The lifestyle of the modern human is very different from the situation we evolved to manage. Prior to civilization, human beings lived in small tribes where they would generally only associate with either one or two sets of people for their entire life.\n\nAs a result, what you describe as 'social anxiety' is really just a rational fear of strangers that our distant ancestors would have regarded as a useful adaptation.\n\nTake a look at how young children act sometimes. Around their parents, they're reasonably comfortable. But take them out of their comfort zone and they quickly become panicked. We actually have to spend a good deal of time socializing people so they *don't* have 'social anxiety'. Even then, a significant part of social anxiety involves not having a support group (a tribe) surrounding you: people tend to be much more comfortable when there's a group of people they trust around them."
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3f92i9 | im tired all day until it's time to go to bed | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f92i9/eli5_im_tired_all_day_until_its_time_to_go_to_bed/ | {
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"Pretty much the same deal for me when I'm working. For me though, I think it's just stress. Once I've been home for a while and started to wind down and get into something interesting (some Unity programming for eg), I seem to get my second wind, then I can't sleep.\n\nWhen I'm on holidays, totally different....sleep just fine, although obviously I don't get up as early, or go to bed as early.\n\nI seem to find it exceptionally easy to get into that 'get up late, go to bed late' routine almost immediately, whereas maintaining the 'early to bed, early to rise' thing is just so much harder. Maybe you have a similar body clock to mine?"
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5s48th | why do we feel extreme chronic pain? wouldn't a little pain feel good but it seems like a chronic pain would lower our survival skills | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s48th/eli5_why_do_we_feel_extreme_chronic_pain_wouldnt/ | {
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"Pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong. Just because something is wrong for a long time doesn't necessarily mean the body should quit warning you about it.",
"Natural selection is all about tradeoffs. Pain is largely a pretty good system for avoiding tissue damage, and therefore staying fit enough to reproduce. Animals without a strong pain response were at a disadvantage. Sure, those with a stronger pain response took on some increased risk of pain that wouldn't go away, and might even decrease functioning, but it's still a favorable tradeoff.\n\nBesides, chronic pain tends to come on long after humans are capable of reproduction, and often longer than our ancestors would have ever lived in the wild. From the point of view of natural selection, it's a moot point.",
"Chronic pain is actually a condition that has a definition. It's when you feel pain, long after any injury has healed, and without a clear cause in the muscles or skeletons. There is no reason to feel the pain, but you still do, and it can hurt a lot! It can happen at any age or in any part of the body. Essentially, a neuron has woken up and won't turn off. When the signal gets to the brain, the brain also can't turn it down. Sometimes, the brain even turns the signal up. You're right that it is not good for survival, but it's a malfunction of a system. Sometimes, people with chronic pain stiffen up the hurting area and try to protect it by not moving it. This can actually make the pain worse over time! There is also evidence that waiting a long time to get a pain treated, or not getting it treated in the right way, may make it more likely to become a chronic pain.\n\nOne of the best treatments for chronic pain is actually to get treated for depression. There is something going on at the chemical level! Likewise, taking ibuprofen can actually help people with emotional pain.\n\nActivity is also very important. "
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2bgwuv | the names of pharaohs if we don’t know how to speak ancient egyptian | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bgwuv/eli5_the_names_of_pharaohs_if_we_dont_know_how_to/ | {
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"We do know how to read ancient Egyptian, as for the correct pronunciation; that's mostly an educated guess based on the knowledge we have of the hieroglyphs and sources in other languages. Still we could be wrong with that.",
"Because someone found the translation dictionary - [The Rosetta Stone](_URL_1_)\n\nThe Rosetta stone had the exact same information written in 3 languages.... Greek, Demotic phonetic characters, and Hieroglyphics. \n\nIf you have the same message in three languages you will have a way to match up what the language you don't understand means.\n\nEdit to add: And they figures out that all the [Pharaohs](_URL_0_) circled their names so they'd stand out from usual words.\n\n\n\n"
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1kkyrx | muslim brotherhood | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kkyrx/eli5_muslim_brotherhood/ | {
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"I see what you're asking, but a bit more specificity would probably get your question answered.",
"I also would like to know maybe try /r/islam",
"The Muslim Brotherhood is a political organization, but also a religious and social movement. They want conservative rule by Islamic law, which is known as Sharia. For any non-Muslim man, woman or child, as well as any Muslim woman, this means the *oppressive* rule of nonsecular law, instituted through force by whatever political system adopts it. ",
"The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest political party in Egypt, so they have had time to become the biggest and most popular. So even though they don't have a majority, no other political party can beat them at the polls. Their goal is to govern Egypt on Islamic principles."
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69zn5q | if there is no mechanical storage to read or write on, where and how is data stored on ssd? | There are players that claim that there is no movement of mechanical parts in SSDs, and that leads to better performance (?) Energy efficiency And less heat.
If this is true, then how is the data stored? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69zn5q/eli5_if_there_is_no_mechanical_storage_to_read_or/ | {
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" > If this is true, then how is the data stored?\n\nIt is true. The data is stored in solid-state chips which use semiconductor switches to direct electrons into insulated \"cells\" that will trap the charge and store it long-term. This allows binary data to be encoded in a very small space and be retrieved without any mechanical movement.",
"The data is stored on silicon. \n\nSilicon has a funny property of being a semiconductor. Simply put, imagine 3 wires, A, B, and C plugged into a box. We'll call the box a semiconductor. \n\nElectricity wants to travel from A to B, but it can't. If we allow electricity to flow from C to B, however, electricity will flow from A to B and also C to B at the same time. Cut power to C and A stops letting power in. This is the basic action of a transistor. \n\nWith enough transistors, you can store values. The question \"Is electricity flowing from A to B\" is how you determine what the data is. In short, \"Is this transistor in an On or Off state\"\n\nOnce you have a large mass of transistors with on and off states, you're really not far off from a hard drive platter full of North and South oriented magnets! \n\nThere are no moving parts in an SSD because only the electricity moves! The semiconductors do all the \"on-off\" functions, and as far as the computer is concerned, it's just a hard drive",
"Just imagine a giant prison, billions of rows deep, wide, and maybe 64 stories tall.\n\nIn SLC, the good fast kind, if there are three electrons in the cell it it is a zero. If there are five electrons, it is a one.\n\nThen you just use two conductors (prison guards) to measure the charge inside to get the value, and to change the value you let every electron in a given prison block (512 byte cluster) out into the yard (cache) and then put them back in with the desired number of electrons (lockdown).\n\nAfter you write enough times to one cell, the door hinge breaks and that cell is retired. \n\nExtra unused cells are held in reserve for this eventuality, Enterprise drives with less capacity are just reserving more cells because they expect more writes.\n\nIn tightly packed TLC prisons, a third value of seven electrons can be used to finagle some extra info out of the same cell, increasing density. "
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28ksfz | how are arcade machines priced? or why are they so high? | I have been going to my favorite movie theater for years now and i have never seen the arcade games being played. I have considered doing it my self as i like what they have (zombie shooting games)but they want often a dollar to play. Or they have tokens or some card system where i have to drop 20$ to shoot zombie faces before the movie.
the thing is; the games are always empty. people don't want to spend 5 bucks on a game, they want to spend a quarter but clearly the price is too high.
so why is this? is this some sort of deal with the manufacture/developer? are they required to set prices to some raito relative to the movie ticket sales? how could they possibly not make more money with lower prices given that they are never in use?! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28ksfz/eli5how_are_arcade_machines_priced_or_why_are/ | {
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"Having been in the arcade business before, I don't think any newer game is a quarter anymore. B ut, on toi your question.\n\nIt doesn't pay to have them at a low price. \"But they'll get more play!\" you say. Yes, maybe. Will they get four times the play? Maybe, but maybe not. You never see anyone playing them? I see them play. Go to a kids' movie matinee and poor daddy is either playing to get away from the kids, or handing out cash for his kid to shoot zombies.\n\nSo, what would be the problem with lower prices? You'd get more play, but not enough to make up for it, especially in a theater where most of the crowd is just there to watch the movie and take their date to Taco Bell. Also, most of them have consoles or gaming PCs at home, and might, just might put a quarter or 2 in the machine.\n\nIncreased use also means increased maintenance. Joysticks and buttons break, and coin mechs are notoriously bad, especially with dirty popcorn oil-covered coins. It costs money to send out a tech to fix that crap.\n\nIf they didn't make money, they wouldn't be there for long."
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7t7znk | explanation of what organelles are made up of | Cells are the basic unit of structure in living organism and several cells can group up to form tissues and different tissues can form organs, but what exactly are the organelles in our eukaryotic cells made up of? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7t7znk/eli5_explanation_of_what_organelles_are_made_up_of/ | {
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"Pretty much the same thing the outer cell membrane is made of, phospholipids and proteins\n\nPhospholipids are structures where 2 free fatty acids (long chains of carbon with hydrogen attached to each carbon, and an OOH structure at the end) are attached to a glycerol molecule, which has 3 spots to form bonds, and a phosphate group is attached to the last spot. These structures make up the entirety of cell membranes.\n\nEmbedded in the membrane are proteins, that function depending on their location. \n\nOrganelles are just compartments made up of folded up membrane"
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153476 | how is it that my mobile 4g data can be faster and cheaper than my at home, broadband internet? | I pay Verizon $30 a month for unlimited 4G data(grandfathered in) and I get uploads of 5mbps and downloads of about 2.5mbps. Yet I also pay Verizon $80(I believe) a month for home internet, which only provides 2mbps upload. How is it that that's possible/okay? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/153476/how_is_it_that_my_mobile_4g_data_can_be_faster/ | {
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"Your ISP is massively fucking you over quite simply "
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1uclnu | why do humans like to sleep with pillows under their heads, and no other animals seem to care? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uclnu/eli5_why_do_humans_like_to_sleep_with_pillows/ | {
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"Our shoulders are too wide for us to lie down and keep our spine straight without some support. Animals that are similar to humans, like chimanzees and gorillas will typically make nests when sleeping, and use something to support their heads. Other animals, like cats and dogs can lie down in many different ways, and their spines will be slightly curved and supported, so they don't need extra support for their heads. ",
"You should meet my dog...",
"I had a pekingese who liked to hump pillows but she didn't care to sleep with one under her head. "
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6i2r2v | why everything in a lab is white | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6i2r2v/eli5_why_everything_in_a_lab_is_white/ | {
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"If you spill something you can definitely see where and what you spilled. And it is easier to see dirt and other things to keep clean. ",
"Lab counters are actually often black. This provides visibility for spills of substances which are often white powders and crystals, and hides potential discoloration.\n\nWhite elsewhere such as cabinets and floors looks clean and reflects lighting to make the room bright."
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6hrn50 | how are whales, some of the largest creatures on the planet, able to survive by eating krill, some of the smallest? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hrn50/eli5_how_are_whales_some_of_the_largest_creatures/ | {
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"Their specifically designed teeth, which filter water and small krill. Whales actually have a very tiny throat, one of which a human wouldn't even fit through. They simply swim around with their mouths open and with little effort, obtain a meal. ",
"Quantity. Pure quantity. Whales can eat 40 MILLION krill a day (approx 3600kg/8000pounds)",
"Simple. They eat a fuck ton of it. A single blue can eat 40 million krill every day. That's ~8,000 pounds of krill, in case you were wondering. ",
"The biggest animals always thrive on the smaller resources. Just like gigantic dinosaurs ate massive amounts of leaves, whales eat massive amounts of little crustaceans. Why? Those resources are more available and can support such gigantic size. ",
"In terms of total mass, krill might be the most abundant animal on earth. Even though they are small individually, they comprise of a ton of food for whales to eat.",
"Well they eat a lot of them.\n\nYou've eaten rice, haven't you? A single grain of rice isn't going to fill you up or give you a lot of nutrition, but you don't eat just one grain of rice, you eat a bunch of them. Similarly, whales eat a (figurative) ton of krill to maintain their nutritional requirements.\n\nEdit: Might be a literal ton too. I'm unwilling to do the math on the subject at 1:47 am.",
"With the exception of the sperm whale (toothed whale), most of the larger whales are baleen whales (mystecetes). They have a specialized mouthpiece called baleen which is made of keratin, and acts like a comb to scoop up a ton of small food at once, and then they push any water out of the baleen bristles, keeping the food in their mouth. ",
"Yes they eat a lot but there's more to it. Krill are also a direct source of energy. Since krill are primary consumers (eat phytoplankton, very small plants with all the nutrients from the sun), whales are able to gain a lot of energy from the krill. As you move up the food chain, an organism only gains 10% of the energy from what they are eating. If a whale were to eat a fish, and that fish eats krill it would be a less direct way to get energy, resulting in a 90% energy loss at each step in the food chain, therefore they get less of the overall energy. A huge whale just needs to eat a lot of krill to get the energy they need to survive without any energy loss that would happen through the food chain. \n\nClarification on energy loss in the food chain: \nIf a whale ate a fish, that ate a krill, that ate a plant there would be less energy available as food at each step. Put this to a larger scale, the energy is based on what can be eaten. It's not simply 10% of whatever your eating, but each step will result in losing some of the source of energy, the amount that can be eaten based on availability of the food source. \nEdit: Sorry I didn't explain well, the energy loss is not per organism. It's just easier to see if pictured that way. It's per level of the food chain. Fish are very nutritious to eat and krill are not necessarily better than fish. Different animals are adapted to eating different things. I just meant it explains how a huge whale can gain enough energy to survive from a small organism by eating such a large amount of them. \n\n \nEdit: A huge number krill with a more direct source of energy fuels a BALEEN WHALE. This is just how such a small organism can help a whale to survive. Toothed whales eat fish and are very happy about it. \nAlso apparently baleen whales eat some fish too... I didn't study whales specifically so that's pretty cool. \n\nSource: B.S. in marine science ",
"Not a Bioligist, but I did just return from a National Geographic trip and this is what I learned from the naturalists. \n\nLet's look at the humpback whale. The humpback whale has baleen on only its upper jaw that it uses to filter out the massive amounts of sea water it can take while swimming up to the surface (Up to 15,000 gallons, or about the size of a swimming pool [1](_URL_0_) ). Baleen are made up of the same material as our fingernails, keratin, and there are numerous long strips of them that can be taller than a grown man.\n[2] \n(_URL_1_)\nAs you can see in this diagram, the part under the whale's bottom jaw is able to expand due to its accordion like skin. [3](_URL_2_)\nThe whale then filters out this massive amount of water by using its tongue to push out the sea water through its baleen which is located on its upper jaw. The krill and other small sea creatures are trapped in the baleen while the sea water is able to exit the mouth with ease. While krill is a part of their diet, it is not their only source of food. We saw the humpbacks also target herrings as another option. Rinse and repeat and this is how these whales are able to sustain themselves.",
"No good answer.. so i googled up that shit.\n\nTldw:\nWhales eat only during 4 months a year. Krill multiplicate in those months. There are lots of krill. Whales accumulate so much fat that they survive the \"winter\"\n\nDuring the antartic summer the water gets warmer and the currents pull up plancton from ghe bottom. Thus is the core meal of the sea. Krill will feed on the plancton and in the arctic summer krill will proliferate and multiply. Now these little fuckers are like 2 inches long. Yet during the summer the total mass of all krill will surpass the mass of all humans on earth. Krill are the feast of the seas because they travel in tight packs. Since there are billions of them you have a tight patch of krill that spans for literal miles.\n\nMakes easy to hunt and eat... just drive thru and open wide.\n\nNow (not only)the whales will travel to the krill area in the summer and use some tricks to trap krill and will eat about 2 ton of krill every day building up fat.\n\nThis spectacle repeats every year. The ciecle of life\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n",
"A view that I haven't seen mentioned here is that due to their size, they struggle to perform the quick hunting manoeuvres required to catch larger prey. So they have evolved to simply find a large cloud of krill, swim through it and open wide. ",
"To add on to the other explanations, the method of feeding can also impact their size\n\n \nThe largest whale species have a method of feeding called \"lunge feeding\" which allows them to (edit: efficiently) gather enough food to allow them to grow to their large size.\n\n\nThe downside of lunge feeding, from what I can recall, is that lunge feeding also prevents them from growing larger than the sizes that they are currently capable of achieving (edit: due to the physics involved in lunge feeding).",
"It's easy, the big one eats the little one. I'll be more shocked by the first colony of krill to devour an entire whale. ",
"Simple matter of the conversion of biomass. The bigger the animal, the more biomass it must consume to sustain it's bodily processes etc. Krill-eating Whales are optimised to consume extremely high quantities of krill in order to maintain a healthy bodily system - homeostasis. Of course not all Whales eat krill i.e. killer whales eat highly nutritious larger animals such as seals. ",
"I grew up being taught that baileen whales only eat krill and plankton. After witnessing Humpback Whales feed on adult 10\" adult bait fish, I realized that was incorrect. Like all other mamals, whales are opportune feeders. And they can really eat, proof:The fall run, Long Island _URL_0_",
"Krill do not swim around on their own, they appear in [MASSIVE swarms](_URL_0_). A whale just has to swim through that with the mouth wide open to swallow literally (literally literally) tons of that stuff a day. So the answer to your question is - they simply eat a lot of krill.",
"Maybe they eat krill in very large amounts?",
"How is it that an animal as large as a human would be able to survive off eating Cheerios? A 200lb person, eating a Cheerio that probably weighs less than an ounce. Wouldn't they die?\n\nWell, like whales eating krill, humans just don't eat one Cheerio (or one krill). They eat an entire bowl of cereal, which is a hundred or so Cheerios. \n\nI do love how \"explain like I'm 5\" turned into \"Explain like I'm any age\" because it's just too dang hard to simplify things, apparently. Especially something insanely simple like this. ",
"Krill contains a wide range of macro- and micro-nutrients needed by mammals eg whales or humans.\n\nKrill are nutrient dense at 95 calories/100 grams. They contain protein, fats and negligible carbs, as well as Vitamins A, E, B1, B2, B6, B12, folate, pantothenic acid, Vitamin C, sodium, potassium, calcium magnesium, phosphorous, zinc, iron, manganese.\n\n(To be honest there is virtually nothing missing in the nutrition profile. Not too many foods have vitamins C and B12).\n\n\nSource: _URL_0_",
"By eating a lot of it? Like, you seriously have to ask this?\n\n",
"How can billions of people live by eating rice? A rice is so tiny.",
"If you look out the window, you have grass on your yard right? Theres grass everywhere. Much like the Ocean, except instead of grass, theres krill. Now all these Krill behave like any other animal: there are seasonal migrations, except these migrations not just happen over land, they happen over depth as well. When its summer time in the ocean, all these Krill rise to the surface of the ocean, and thats when whales eat. The whales will have one season, and one only to eat ALL the krill they can. They get so fat, they dont have eat anything for the rest of the year. Since theres so much krill, its basically a regenerative non-exausting source of nothing but krill for 4 straight months.",
"Check out the Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE). It states that the smaller the organism the faster the metabolism, and respectably, the larger the organism the slower the metabolism. So sense whales are the largest organisms on earth they would have the relatively slowest metabolism which would mean they don't need as much caloric intake as one might think. \n\nNow don't get me wrong, as others have pointed out they do eat a large amount of krill. However if the average blue whale (largest baleen whale) weighs 300,000lbs and eats roughs 8,000lbs of krill that's the equivalent of a human (of roughly 137lbs) eating 3.65lbs in one sitting (which would be the same as eating 9.73, 6 ounce steaks)",
"Just imagine you, big hunk that you are, eating small bacon bits. But you eat buckets of it. ",
"Kind of like how humans could survive on grains of rice.\n\nYou eat a metric fuck ton of them.",
"Big animal eats small animal for food. \n\nBig animal eats LOTS of them, their mouths are like big nets that just catch whole swarms of them and filter out the water with baleen, a sort of brush they have for teeth.",
"How do humans survive eating rice when rice is so small?",
"There's more biomass in krill than in whales. I.e. All the krill in a pile are much bigger than all the whales in a pile. ",
"How did a big cow survive from eating grass?",
"The answer is simple. There is a LOT of krill. We never talk about them because they are very hard to see and make bad documentary subjects. But it is amazing how most of ocean life depends on them.\n\nTo get a sense of scale, look at any videos of African wildebeest. See how big they are? See how many they are? Yet what do they eat? Grass, which barely grows past their hooves. So, how do they manage on eating just grass? Because there is a LOT of grass! There are miles and miles of grass. And grazers eat grass all day. Thats all they do.\n\nMore amazing are Reindeer herds, which may survive on just lichen, of which there is much less of.\n\nNow imagine a grassland that much, much bigger than the savanna. Its the ocean. And the grass of the ocean is not visible. They are called plankton. They are single celled plants that float on the surface of the water. And they are the primary source of energy of any ocean ecosystem. Have you seen the amazing diverse ecosystem of ocean reefs? They are fed by planktons. (Corals can photosynthesize, but that is not their primary source of energy). They make up for their size by sheer numbers. If you have ever been to a beach or coast and looked upn the sea, you have looked at the ocean \"grassland\". Millions and millions of planktons harvesting the suns energy. And you cannot see them even if you dive down underwater.\n\nKrill are primary feeders of plankton. They are so small they are also hard to see. But their food source is so huge, they can also grow to be huge in numbers.\n\nBasically whales have a food source that is larger than anything else we know. It is hard to comprehend how much plankton/krill there is because they are hard to see. 70%of teh world's oxygen is produced by marine plants, mostly plankton.",
"The larger the animal the less calories it needs as a percent of it's body mass to survive. So a small animal might eat more than it's body weight in food a day, while a huge animal will eat only a small percentage of its body weight a day. See also Kleiber's law _URL_0_",
"**Super short answer:** Sheer numbers.\n\n**Short answer:** Krill are very small, but tend to form *huge* swarms, so to a whale they're like giant clouds of food. It's similar to how rice grains are very small but you can get full from eating a heaping bowl of rice.\n\n**Full Answer:** The main difference between plants and animals is that usually plants just need sunlight and water while animals have to eat.\n\nSome animals eat plants, some animals eat other animals. In order for an animal to survive there must be enough food for it to eat.\n\nIn many places it works like this:\n\n1. Plants grow from water and sunlight\n2. Animals eat the plants\n3. Other animals eat those animals\n4. Other animals eat *those* animals\n5. And on and on and on...\n\nThere are two important things to understand:\n\n1. **All** of the food originally comes from plants.\n2. Not all food that's eaten gets turned into new food that another animal could eat.\n\nWhen an animal eats it uses food to grow, which means it creates more food if another animal eats it. But not all of the food an animal eats becomes growth. Some food gets used up when the animal runs around, and some just becomes poop.\n\nFor every 10 ounces of food an animal eats, it only produces 1 ounce of food for another animal to eat. This means a few things:\n\n* In order to be a big animal you have to eat a *lot* of food.\n* There is a *lot* more food if you eat plants than if you eat animals.\n* There is a *lot* more food if you eat an animal that eats plants than if you eat an animal that eats other animals.\n\nKrill eat plants, specifically algae, and algae grows *incredibly fast*, which means krill have *huge* amounts of food to eat when algae is growing. The krill grow very fast, and have lots of babies because they're completely surrounded by food and can eat as much as they want all day long and never go hungry.\n\nThis turns into a giant swarm of food that other animals could easily eat, and whales can get absolutely gigantic because all they have to do is swim through the swarm with their mouths open and they get an easy mouthful of food.\n\nEasy food for krill means giant swarms which means easy food for whales.\n",
"How do whales drink sea water but humans can't?",
"Same way a person can survive eating a few thousand grams of chicken meat every so often. Little shit adds up.",
"*\"Krill is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something\"*\n\n-**Mitch Whaleberg**",
"Simply put, let's think about this from an energy perspective.\n\nThe larger the animal, the more energy you require, right?\n\nLet's go back to elementary school science:\nremember when you learned about the concepts of **food chain** and **energy flow**? And We're about to revisit them and expand on them.\nAlso, I'm going to bring up the **1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics** but not until it becomes relevant just to give a heads up.\n\nSo living things either make their own food [energy] to survive (like plants) or depend on other livings to survive by consuming them (like animals). The first group are called **autotrophs** or **primary producers**, and they get their energy from their surroundings, like the sunlight. The second group, **heterotrophs** or **consumers**, use the autotrophs as food aka energy. \n\nYou can think of a **food chain** as being made of primary producers and consumers. Every step in a food chain is called a **trophic level**. It's important to note that in the real world, most ecosystems are made of complex interwoven structures called **food webs**, but for the sake of answering your question, we're going to stick to a straight-line food chain.\n\nNow is a great time to bring up the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermodynamics *as it relates to ecology*. You've probably learned these in chemistry and physics classes but it applies here too! So the **1st Law** is the one that states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed, and the **2nd Law** states that when energy is transformed, there is a **loss of energy** through heat.\n\nThis means that there is only a 'set' budget of energy the autotroph receives from the sun. When a heterotroph consumes it, the transfer of energy is not 100%--the next trophic level is only getting a fraction of the energy of the previous level. Why? Because some of that energy that autotroph used for its own biological processes, such as photosynthesis, and some got lost through heat.\n\n**In fact, only an average of 10% of energy is getting passed on to the next trophic level. Only one-tenth!**\n\nSo what can we infer from this?\n\nThe more 'links' or trophic levels in the food chain, the less energy available to higher levels.\n\nNow finally, let's go back to the whale.\n\nThe short, 3-step food chain of **diatom-- > krill-- > whale** is typical in Antarctic waters. **Diatoms** are microscopic, one-celled, organisms that can do photosynthesis. [This is just useless info, but their outer shells, or frustules, are made of glass and are really something else, google them, but I digress.]\n\nSo these microscopic diatoms use the sun's energy/sunlight for photosynthesis. Then krill come along and eat the diatoms. Then blue whales eat the krill. Energy is transferred from diatoms to krill, from krill to whale.\n\nThis very short chain is *crucial*. Let's use some example numbers using our **10% rule** from above, which again says that on average about only 10% of energy in one tropic level is passed on to the next.\n\nLet's say that the diatoms in our Antarctic food chain contain a total **10 million calories** of energy.\n\nWhen the krill consume the diatoms, they only get 10%, so of that 10 million only about **1 million calories** make it to the krill.\n\nThe blue whale gets 10% of the 1 million cal the krill got, which means that **the blue whale will only get about 100,000 calories**.\n\nSo whales (I'm referring to and assuming you meant the group we call baleen whales; 'dolphin' whales like orcas are another story) can *only* survive by eating some of the smallest organisms on the planets. \n\nsource: MS in oceanography",
"Isn't there also a theory where eating something a lot earlier in the food chain had better nutrition than something high up? ",
"Volume... Blue whale have huge mouths full of, for lack of a better term, filters. They swim through a cloud (swarm, idfk), of krill, open their mouth, swallow a shit ton of water, then push it back out through their filter, leaving the krill behind in their mouth. Wash, rinse, repeat. All those shit tons of krill add up to a fuck ton after a while..."
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"https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/84/63/65/8463654cda8c3436a997506fdae84528.jpg"
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6t3njw | why do people get the impulse to jump and shout when something unexpected happens? | For example, crowd reactions after buzzer beaters, walk offs, etc. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6t3njw/eli5_why_do_people_get_the_impulse_to_jump_and/ | {
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"Humans are a social species. We have a built-in desire to alert those around us if something important and surprising just happened.",
"We evolved to be tribal animals - a lot of our communication behaviors actually have a genetic basis to help us protect our tribe members.\n\nJumping and shouting are one aspect of that. When a pack of wolves stalked out of the forest, the caveman who jumped and shouted at the scare may have helped his family and tribe escape danger (even if he didn't!). The caveman who didn't do any of that got his tribe ambushed and killed. So that first tribe (including his relatives who had that jumpy gene) survived and had jumpy kids, and eventually you end up with us.\n\nThere's no reason for us to stop doing that, so it stays in our ingrained behaviors and gets passed down. "
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1vm03e | why so many people believe in aliens? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vm03e/eli5_why_so_many_people_believe_in_aliens/ | {
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"Because there is no conclusive proof that they don't exist.\n\nThe universe is *really really really really* big. Just because we haven't found anyone else yet doesn't mean they aren't out there.",
"There are two kinds of \"believing in aliens\"\n\nThe first is belief that life must exist elsewhere in this mind bogglingly large universe. The odds are in their favor.\n\nThe second is belief in intelligent life that has actually made it to Earth and interacted with inhabitants.\n\nThese are the same people that believe in bigfoot and elaborate government conspiracies.",
"Because they find it hard to believe that in such a tremendously large universe, we're the only life-forms, not to mention the general public's never-ending \"sightings\" and stories that coax people to follow them. Then of course there is the History channel..*sigh* oh pathetic, pathetic History channel.",
"Because to many of us, it seems highly improbable that other life in the universe doesn't exist. \n\nIf we estimate that the average number of stars in a galaxy is 1 billion (A common estimate), and we estimate there to be about 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe (estimation done by counting the number of galaxies in the [Hubble Extreme Deep Field Picture](_URL_0_) and extrapolating that data), the total number of stars in the observable universe is around 200 quintillion! \n\nIf only 0.00001% of those stars have an inhabitable planet (that is an extremely low estimate!), and that 0.00001% of those have developed any form of life since the big bang, and that 0.00001% of those *currently* have some kind of life, there would be 200,000 planets that currently have life living on them.\n\nThe chances that there actually is life somewhere in the universe seems quite big. The chances that they have visited earth however, are extremely small to non-existant. "
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1rzie5 | what would amazon's drones be powered by? | At first I thought the whole thing was a hoax, but everyone seems to be taking it seriously. How would they be powered? What would their range be? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rzie5/eli5_what_would_amazons_drones_be_powered_by/ | {
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"They are electric quadcopters. There is a video of them, just search youtube.\n\nThey are powered by batteries. Most quads of that size have between 10-30 minutes of flight time when carrying a load on one charge. Their range would be dictated mostly by their flight time and speed. Half their flight time (since they have to go forward and back) and multiply by their flight speed.\n\nRough ball park estimate:\n\n20 min flight time= 10 min in each direction.\n\n30 mph flight speed (this is probably too fast).\n\n30 mph * 10 mins = 5 miles."
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58yyq6 | torque vectoring, how its regulated, and its uses. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58yyq6/eli5_torque_vectoring_how_its_regulated_and_its/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThese are the two best sources I can give. It's basically an advanced system for traction control. It's used to limit wheel slip and keep you moving along in adverse traction conditions. It also helps with cornering by putting more torque to the inside tire/s. The video gives you a good description in common terms. If you don't know how a modern differential operates I would suggest you do some research on them as well as this system uses the differential and two or more sets of clutch packs to achieve proper operation."
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"https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=BerrP_mGsuM"
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m939h | most recent common ancestor. | It was mentioned in this [TIL](_URL_0_) post.
I read the [Wikipedia article](_URL_1_), but I still don't quite understand. As ableman [pointed-out](_URL_3_), Native Americans were isolated for longer than 2,000-5,000 years. Also, there was a story just a few months ago that *some* [humans have Neanderthal DNA](_URL_2_). Wouldn't that make homo-sapiens MCRA hundreds of thousands years ago?
Am I confusing the concept?
EDIT
Added Wikipedia link. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m939h/eli5_most_recent_common_ancestor/ | {
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"I don't know any of the specifics about Native Americans or Neanderthals or whatever. However the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) is a fairly simple concept. \n\nTake a group of living things. The MRCA of that group is the great great great ... great great grand father/mother that the group shares. So the MRCAs (plural) of you and your brother would be your mother and father. The MRCAs of you and your cousin would be your grandparents. The MRCA of all humans might be some creature living in Africa a million years ago.",
"I don't know any of the specifics about Native Americans or Neanderthals or whatever. However the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) is a fairly simple concept. \n\nTake a group of living things. The MRCA of that group is the great great great ... great great grand father/mother that the group shares. So the MRCAs (plural) of you and your brother would be your mother and father. The MRCAs of you and your cousin would be your grandparents. The MRCA of all humans might be some creature living in Africa a million years ago."
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"http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_kolbert",
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2bysg2 | why is there no plans to end gerrymandering? | It essentially makes it damn near impossible for a party to lose the congressional district they own. I understand the "job security"aspect, however shouldn't politicians be more concerned with doing enough good too keep their jobs, rather than drawing the proper districts? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bysg2/eli5_why_is_there_no_plans_to_end_gerrymandering/ | {
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"It's largely due to the lack of a viable alternative.\n\nSome people suggest an \"independent body\" to draw the lines, but how is the body staffed? It would be by appointment from governors and/or legislatures, and their influence would likely show in the decisions that they would make.\n\nSo... we are stuck with gerrymandering for now.",
"Because very often the same people who'd be in charge of implementing such a plan benefit the most from the gerrymandering.\n\nThat being said, it is possible. California, for example, now has their districts drawn up by a committee designed to be neutral. \n\nHow such a system could be implemented in other states varies depending on their local laws, but it just hasn't been a priority worry for most citizens. ",
"Because it's something that both sides do. If Democrats start to complain about the horrendous districts in Texas, Republicans can point to the horrendous districts in Maryland or California. And vice versa.\n\nThe people in power have a vested interest in staying in power. Nobody is going to say \"well, the interest of the people would be better served by a more-free election.\" They'll say \"*We* know how best to serve the people. The people would be best served by keeping our party in power, votes be damned!\"",
"The same reason there are no serious and honest attempts at campaign finance reform. The people who would need to make these things happen are benefiting directly from the corruption in the current system unfortunately. Gerrymandering didn't just happen, politicians came up with it and MADE it happen. Citizens United didn't just happen, corporations and SuperPAC's MADE it happen because they want more influence over politicians and politicians allow it to happen and continue, because they want the millions of dollars they need to win elections. \n\nNone of this will ever change until enough people demand that it changes or the change comes from the very top, but the system is rigged. The president couldn't get away with issuing an executive order ending all the grift in Washington if he wanted to. Ironically, the system of checks and balances meant to prevent an imbalance of power prevent this from happening. "
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7dn4h3 | why does hand sanitizer give the illusion of cold air when it's rubbed into hands and waved to dry? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7dn4h3/eli5_why_does_hand_sanitizer_give_the_illusion_of/ | {
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"It evaporates. When fluids evaporate the absorb energy, and it takes that energy from your skin. This makes it colder.\n\nThis is also how air conditioners work by the way."
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||
5l7e8n | why do websites request your email twice when signing up? | I can think of some obvious reasons, one of which is making sure you've entered the correct email. But in that case, a lot of websites will ask for you email twice but not a password twice, which would strike me as the more concerning of the two. Are there other reasons for this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l7e8n/eli5_why_do_websites_request_your_email_twice/ | {
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"If your email address is wrong, then you're _fucked_. The email address is often your username, and more importantly the method for a password recovery is via email. So...if that email is wrong, then your account is irretrievable.",
"it's so they / you know for sure the email address was entered right.\n\npassword is not as critical, because if you still entered your email correctly but not the password, they can email you a link to reset your password. "
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5ebfpg | why do airplanes have no smoking lights, why are they there if they don't go off | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ebfpg/eli5_why_do_airplanes_have_no_smoking_lights_why/ | {
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"Many aviation regulatory bodies require lit non-smoking signs on aircraft for health and safety reasons. It's not so much that they never go off, but rather that since they are always on it's a constant reminder to not smoke.",
"They used to not be on all the time.\n\nMany, many years ago, you used to be able to smoke on flights. But not during take-off and landing, so the No Smoking signs were turned on for take-off and landing.\n\nIn those days, when you checked in, you could specify whether you wanted a smoking seat or a non-smoking seat. I don't know what happened if you got a non-smoking seat (did the light stay on all the time?) because my mum was a heavy smoker, so we always got smoking seats. By the time I was old enough to fly without my mum, all flights were non-smoking.\n\nSo that's where the light comes from historically. Why is it still there? I don't know. I'd guess just because people are used to it being there.",
"You used to be able to smoke on planes. Then it was banned so no smoking lights were installed. A lot of commercial airbuses are 20+ years old."
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1ar8sk | how do orally ingested medications fulfil their purpose if they end up in the stomach? | For example, how do anti-depressants do their complex job if they go straight into the stomach acids? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ar8sk/eli5_how_do_orally_ingested_medications_fulfil/ | {
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antq13 | how do breweries and wineries maintain a consistent flavor profile for their products, year after year? | There's a winery, Josh Cellars, that makes a cheap cab I really like, and no matter the vintage it tastes exactly the same.
Same thing goes with beer: You know that the beer you like is always going to taste the same, no matter what.
Which is strange to me, considering that so many environmental factors go into making wine/beer, like the amount of rainfall and how hot/cold it's been. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/antq13/eli5_how_do_breweries_and_wineries_maintain_a/ | {
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"Lots of chemical science and a base batch of fermented liquid to flavor.\nThere isn't a lot of nuance in mass marketed booze, and practically every part of a flavor can be measured and replicated. The varietals are all put together the same way with tried and tested yeasts for exact Temps and times. They've removed a lot of the human variables.\n",
"Grubbalicious points out one way. There are several ways to create flavor consistency.\n\nAnother way is to produce several batches of product. Some of the batches are base, several have a lot of the flavor profile you want, and other batches are to correct for certain characteristics.\n\nThe key here is to having a blending standard and someone who is intimately familiar with the goal flavor profile. Then you have to taste and score all the batches, and then blend based on the scoring. ",
"So, this is about whiskey rather than beer or wine, but it's a similar idea: I was on a tour of a distillery recent and they answered this exact question: A master taste will sample each barrel, then mix certain barrels together to get the desired taste. Sometimes if they get an exceptionally good barrel they'll sell it as is as a special limited edition.\n\nI'm not an expert on wine, but my understanding is it's *not* consistent. Environmental factors like what you described mean wine from different years will have a different flavor.\n",
"In terms of beer, brewing is recipe based, you follow the recipe just like baking a loaf of bread. If you're malting grain, the amount of sugar that gets extracted into the wort can change a little from batch to batch, so you check the amount by specific gravity and adjust accordingly. \n\nFor wine, an excellent winery will have variation from year to year, but they're fairly consistent because they're in the ideal climate zone. For most wines, [they use reverse osmosis machines to adjust the concentration and add tiny amounts of juice from ultra-flavorful grape varieties with names like \"Mega Purple\"](_URL_0_) \n\n > Is that Cabernet not tannic enough? Add some powdered tannin. Is it too tannic? Fine it with isinglass. Is the Chardonnay not tart enough? Pump it up with some tartaric acid. Is it too tart? Initiate malolactic fermentation. Want to unlock flavors of rose petals? There are at least 20 strains of cultured yeast that will do that for you. You just have to choose which one you want. Want a deeper color for your Pinot Noir? There are a dozen enzymes for that, too.\n\nTL;DR the flavor of wine that is less than $20 per bottle is always fake as fuck. More expensive wine is sometimes fake."
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47xha5 | why do banana skins turn darker faster when they've been opened than when they're closed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47xha5/eli5_why_do_banana_skins_turn_darker_faster_when/ | {
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"There are two types of browning you see in bananas:\n* browning of unpeeled/intact bananas \n* browning of banana after it's cut/peeled.\n\nThe first type is the natural ripening process in bananas, where the color slowly changes from green (unripe) to yellow (ripe) and finally to brown/black (over ripe). This caused by a gas called *Ethylene*, which is also responsible for ripening of many other fruits (apples, pears, etc. )\n\nThe second type happens when a banana is peeled and the insides are exposed to air. When you look at an unpeeled banana, the outside skin is exposed to the environment, while the inside isn't. As long as the skin is on the banana, the inside is sealed from the outside environment. After you peel the banana, certain chemicals on the inner side of the peel react with air, which causes the browning (even the banana flesh turns brown after cutting).\n\nThis is called as *'enzymatic browning'* and it's brought about by *'oxidation'*.\n\nThis is my first time explaining here and I have tried to explain it as simply as possible. Hope this helps."
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4c5suz | how do djs get the acapella vocals to remix a song ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c5suz/eli5_how_do_djs_get_the_acapella_vocals_to_remix/ | {
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"Professional DJ's just ask for the raw vocals from the original artist. \nAmateurs do 2 things: Either cut our frequencies and hope to get a mediocre result and people find it good or\nGoogle: *song* vocals only and hope for the best result. ",
"One way to do it if you have a track with instrumentals and vocals and the same track but instrumental only is to invert the phase of the instrumental track and then sum the audio from both tracks. Doing so applies the superposition principle, which basically means that the instrumental part of the track with vocals will be subtracted as that audio is the same in both the instrumental track and the one with vocals, but the audio in the instrumental only version is \"flipped\" and can thus be removed. That way, the difference between the two signals (tracks) can be extracted which for this case is the acapella. ",
"The answer you are a looking for is called \"Stems\" - Stems are sometimes released, and usually when a song gets added to a video game like guitar hero or one like it there are Stems available for that song.\n\nSource: someone who has Stems and sometimes remixes.\n\nEdit: \"song title\" Stems",
"To add on the what others have said, many hip hop records used to contain the single, a remix, an acapella, and an instrumental. ",
"As everyone else said, professional DJs usually request the raw vocals from the artist. If you've ever been to /r/mashups and you're curious how they do what they do there, you could also check out /r/songstems!\n\n\"Stems\" from a song are basically all the little pieces that make up a song. Vocals, drums, guitar, kick, backing vocals, etc. Some artists or companies will release the stems for contests or simply for free. Some people get the stems from a game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero.\n\nOther times, people will edit a song to isolate the vocals, or remove the vocals to make an instrumental.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nEdit:: oops, i feel like now's a good time to mention I'm still getting into mashups and editing music, so there's probably things I should have mentioned and left out, or were wrong about, or what have you. Definitely poke around to find more information, because there are people below who know more than I do!\n\nedit 2: /u/bisonST mentioned /r/isolatedvocals, which I forgot to mention!",
"artists can 'bootleg remix' a track by loading it into their DAW(digital audio workstation) and cutting/EQing/filtering/ect to isolate primarily the vocal range. There are even some VST plugins that are meant for it.\n\nor they will get the 'stems'(audio samples from one track all separated) from a remix competition put out by the record label for promotional purposes\n\nor they will/their people will contact the singer/singer's people directly for the stems ",
"Many artists release their accepella tracks to DJ pools because they want to encourage DJ's to remix their tracks (ex: Jay Z Black Album).\n\nIMO, the best website for accepellas is: _URL_0_\n\nThe people who run this site have done a great job of curating and expanding their selection for a long time now.",
"Using an audio mixing program take the instrumental track, invert it, overlay it on the original. The two will cancel each other out. what will remain is the vocal.",
"I have done my fair share of mashups and not being a famous musician, I can't drop a call to an artist and request their studio masters. \n\nOn a few occasions the original artists releases an isolated track on their own, like Jay-Z black album. \n\nOther times someone in the industry releases selected parts of a famous song, like Freddie Mercuries isolated vocals in Radio GaGa. \n\nBut most of the time I'm stuck trying to isolate the vocals from the same song they sell on Itunes. \n\nOne of the tricks you can use is to process the stereo image to remove anything which is not directly in the center. So left minus right, or right minus left, and what you are left with is mono phonic. Since most vocals are recorded right in the middle of the stereo image, you can get lucky and get a pretty clean sample of the vocals. It's the opposite of what karaoke machines try to do with voice removal tricks. \n\nOften the drums or bass guitar share the center channel as well though, so you have to use things like high pass and low pass filters to filter out the high and low sounds outside of the range of human speech. \n\nThen if there are still other instruments mixed with the vocal, you edit it in a sound editor piece by piece to try to cut it out around the vocals. Another trick is to use phase cancelling. Say there is a drum loop over the vocals but there is a part of the song where the vocalist isn't singing and the drum loop plays by itself. You capture the loop and make a new track with just that loop in it. You then match up the vocal track with the drum track and move the drums bit by bit until they are perfectly in sync with the vocal track. Then you reverse the phase of the drums and voila, they cancel out the original drum sound every time leaving only the pure vocal track. \n\nThere are many more tricks like this that I've used and I'm just an amateur music lover so I can only imagine what tools a pro might use. \n\nIt might take several hours or days to extract the audio you need from the original song, and several more hours or days to create your mashup or remix. It's a lot of work. ",
"There are a number of resources online that have acapellas and songs available to remix. \n\nShameless plug, I started a website _URL_0_ for this\n\nThe site enables legal remixing and licensing with great content. And we're constantly onboarding new content, from labels including some of the majors. So perhaps you can find some great stuff to work with over there. ",
"Been DJing for almost 20 years. Artists will typically produce acapella and instrumental versions of their more popular songs when releasing an EP. Any DJ can buy them to use in their sets or for remixing in the studio. \n\nCheck out _URL_0_ or other related electronic music sites. They usually cost only a few dollars to own.",
"Not really a DJ myself as much as someone who enjoys making music, but as plenty of people have said, there are plenty of ways:\n\n1) Acapellas4u or similar sites. Acapellas4u is EXTREMELY useful, and has a great data base that works especially on old, or hugely popular songs. Give it a try and search the song there before anything else.\n\n2) Asking the artist. Now this NEVER worked for me, sadly :( but it also depends on who you ask to. Consider that probably 10000 dudes have asked Goulding for an acapella because remixing her is what's \"trendy.\" Reaching out to the label or the manager directly may work. \n\n3) Buy it. iTunes and Beatport have got nice acapella catalogs and compilations that are under 2 bucks a song. The quality is extremely good here. Electronic music labels drop acapella catalogs of their top hits OR organize remix contests, where you even get the song stems (or parts). PRO TIP: keep the stems and sample the jam out of them, especially for drums, impacts and what not. Top engineers worked on them. NOW, iTunes (usually for old songs) has not the real acapella, but someone's cover of the song, in this case you may have to search a while to find a singer who nailed it.\n\n4) Search the web for someone who already made the edit and ask them for a download. In case of huge electronic or pop hits, people isolate the vocals and upload a tutorial/file to YouTube and or Soundcloud.\n\n5) AND LAST BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, LEARN TO DO IT YOURSELF.\nNow, I have BARELY worked on music making (self taught, BTW) for 3 years, and I still have got an INSANELY long way to go. But, I know a thing or two and making edits of a song or getting specific syllables of a singer is fun, so this is how I go about it. IT'S NOT SUDIO QUALITY, NOT PERFECT, but you lose less time AND learn a bit of audio. This, of coure, only applies if you make music as well.\n\nStep 1: Find a part of the song where there is not much other than the vocals going. It could be the intro, the outro or a bridge, but not the chorus (or the drop, bro, because edm bro) because there is a lot from the other instruments in there. In parts like the outro and stuff, you MAY not get the entire lyrics and just get 2 lines, a hook, or a full verse. For remix purposes, that seems enough. ;)\n\nEDIT: Step 1.5, import the song in your DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).\n\nStep 2: EQ. (Free tool I reccomend: SonEQ vst) FUNDAMENTAL. EDIT: (I forgot this was ELI5, so I want to further explain this part). Equalizing is the process where you amplify or reduce the volume of the frequencies in a song. I...can't think of an ELi5 way to explain what freqs are, so I'll put it this way: the bass, the kick drum, the toms and deep chords are all low freqs. Melodies, voices, strings, a guitar (etc.) are mid freqs. Really high sounds, like the last octaves of a piano, Ariana Grande's ear hurting iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii's and ooooooh's, a crash, hi hat, a guitar solo and so on are high freqs.\n\nVocals of a woman are most likely mid high and high frequencies, while male vocals are most likely only mids. That means you need to High Pass (or turn down a hell lot) frequencies below, let's say, 500 Hz. RARELY, would you need any sound below 500 Hz. Now turn up between 3-4 dB the mids (500-700), and the highs (1-2 dB) between 2000 and 3000 Hz. THAT IS ONLY A START, further Eqing is on you, so take your time and really work around the voice until it sounds not to bright (not too much highs) but not cheap (like you're hearing it through an old radio).\n\nStep 3: Use a plugin (third party tool you can install and use in your DAW) such as Modern Exciter VST to add some harmonics on the low frequencies. (HEY, BUT YOU SAID TO GET RID OF ALL BASS YOU CLOWN) But here, you want to \"excite\" your already processed signal, again, to make it sound warmer (more bass) and real, not coming from cheap speakers or the radio.\n\nI NEVER reccomend further compression (compression: making the loud parts quieter and the quiet parts louder so the signal sounds all...the same) once you did this. If anything, try a bit of reverb.\n\nAgain, this will not yield pro results or studio quality. I gave you plenty of options, but if you choose to try and make it your own, AND you search the vastness of the internet for tips on this and the power of audio tools, you'll be a guy that knows his audio.\n\nGood luck mate, let me know how it turned out.",
"Sorry, but I've been recording for the better part of my life and the term \"stems\" is a relatively new buzzword. They have pretty much always been referred to as tracks or session files since the inception of Pro Tools. Edm guys using ableton are the only ones I hear using the phrase. ",
"What happens most of the time is an artist/producer/DJ will actually be asked to remix the song before it's even released, or at least very shortly after if the song is doing well.\n\nIf accepted the original artist sends a stem or remix pack (individual song parts) to the remixer and lets them get on with it. \n\nRemixes are generally used in the industry as a promotional tool, most often a way to reach different genre bases and fanbases with a single release, a very good way to reach a variety of dance floors. Over the years remixes have begun to surpass the 'promotional tool' idea with artists taking stems in more original and creative directions.\n\nIf i was to give advice to anyone who wants to do a remix, it would be simply to keep writing music and exploring your own creativity until you are in a position where you start getting asked by other friends and artists to remix their work. Bootlegs (ghetto remixes with parts sourced via studio magic) are a totally fun way to get a song into your set, but if you are serious about getting noticed for your work, doing it on your own terms is always the best way in my opinion. \n\nThis is all quite broad of course, electronic music is a wonderful world of ideas and possibilities. Just thought i'd pitch in with a more standardized summary of remixing as I hadn't seen any comments that hit the nail on the head yet. \n",
"There are a couple of ways, like /u/StormTheParade said, you can request stems from the artist, but getting them can be a crap shoot depending on the difficulty getting a direct line to said artist, many are legally bound not to distribute parts of a song if said song is released on a label that keeps legal control of all music they release, which is just about every large label. \n\nHaving said that, there are other ways DJs and producers can reverse engineer tracks to try and isolate the vocals or instruments in a track, I'm no expert on the process however, all I know is it involves using a digital audio workbench (DAW) to sort of invert the frequencies on a track to kind of cancel out certain parts of a track, silencing it. This is a tricky procedure, however, as processing audio in any way is not any easy process, especially when you're still learning how to do it. \n\nThe easiest way to find acapellas and other tracks is just to search for them online or through friends who also DJ or produce. Some artists do things called remix contests where they distribute certain stems or portions of the track (isolated by instrument category, generally) online and set a deadline date for submissions, the winners of these contests usually get their track released by the label / artist who released the original track, as well as prizes and/or cash. Sometimes the incentives are awesome and are well worth pouring over for months, whereas some aren't worth any effort at all.",
"I haven't read through all the comments, so not sure if It has been stated already. But you can use a technique called phase cancellation, by which you get the instrumental version of a track, and then the version of the track that has the vocal you want, and line them up perfectly so they become in phase, at this point all the frequencies between the two tracks will cancel each other out and you will be left with the vocal. [Here is a tutorial on the process using audacity](_URL_0_)",
"I'm a self taught engineer and have been for many years since I was maybe 10. So i can explain a lot of this. \n\n\nThere are different methods to getting acapellas. You can simple cut out a spectrum on an EQ and it will take out that part. Not the best method. You can choose to isolate the middle vocal (vocals are a lot o the time panned dead left, dead right, and middle. Lead vocal is usually middle.) Also not a great idea. You get this wish-washy sound and the quality's not great. Then you get official instrumentals meaning they came straight from the artist. You take those and you make them into a mono track (many programs, including Audacity will do this). Mono means one. So it goes from stereo to mono. Now you take the full song that you purchased off iTunes and make it mono. Now you have two mono tracks. You invert one. What people don't realize is that you can cancel out frequencies on a computer. So when you invert the track, everything gets canceled out except the vocal, cause there's no clash there. The last way is to ask the artist from them. \n\nUsually these things get leaked by people working at the studio or Rock Band or something. ",
"You take the track with vocals\nTake the track just instrumentals.\n\nFlip the instrumental frequencies so they cancel each other out, the only frequencies left should be the voice granted this isn't always clean but its a good tactic when you can't find vocals",
"there are a lot of acapella vocal tracks you can find online just by simply googling and searching for acapella vocals. that's what i did since i was just a beginner and wouldn't be able to contact artists or producers for these tracks. ",
"If the isolated vocal does not exist, you can use sound physics!\n\n1 - put the full mastered track, preferable uncompressed audio, I to your favorite DAW.\n\n2 - put a parametric e.q. on the stereo track. E.q. so that the vocals are not changed, but try to reduce everything else.\n\n3 - make a copy of this to a second track with the eq. Flip the polarity of the left side, then convert to mono.\n\n4 - flip the polarity of track. 1.\n\nThis will do quite a bit results may vary.",
"1. Acquire actual vocal recordings without anything else in the track. \n2. Use equalizers to \"pull out\" all the frequencies in the song that are not in the frequency band that the vocals are using. In other words; try your best to pull everything out of the song except the vocal. \n3. There is a new program out that can rip vocals out of songs. I saw a demo and it looked pretty good. But i haven't actually looked into public reviews/usage to see if it is anything yet. \n4. A thing called \"Phase Inversion\".... this is gonna be the hardest to explain to you. Hence why i left it till last. \n\nOk.. If you have the sound of a dog barking and you then play that exact same recording of the dog barking with another exact recording of the dog barking at exactly (I am talking down to the exact milliseconds) the same time, what will happen is that the volume will be exactly 2 times louder than the original sound of the dog barking. \n\nThe way phase inversion works is it takes one sound of the dog barking and then a second sound of the dog barking, BUT, the second ones sound (soundwave) is inverted. Its like when you see an electrical wave on a screen like this > [(click me and leave open)](_URL_0_)\n\nOk... see that picture i showed you, you will be needing that. Imagine that that sine wave is actually the soundwave of the dog barking. And now we have the second sound wave of the dog barking, BUT, now this sound wave is \"inverted\", meaning it is exactly the polar opposite of the first soundwave of the dog barking. \n\n[(click me 2)](_URL_1_)\n\nOk, I hope you have clicked this second picture. \n\nSee how we have 2 different coloured sine waves? Lets say the blue one is dog barking 1 and the red one is dog barking 2. Remember how i said in the begging that if you take 2 exact same sounds and put them exactly over each other that it will be exactly 2 times louder ? That is when 2 \"peaks\" on the sine waves are over the top of each other [omg look at this!](_URL_2_) < see that, see how their 2 peaks are going up and down together? if you were to merge those 2 sine waves they will become double the height, ie. double the volume. \n\nSo what would happen with [(click me 2)](_URL_1_) these 2 sine waves? Well seeing as their 2 peaks are inverted, it would then created no sound at all. \n\nSO! If you were to have 2 sounds. \n\nA) The sound of a dog barking\nB) The exact same sound of the dog barking but a cat meowing along with it)\n\nand you put A exactly over the top of B, BUT you inverted the sound wave of B, what would you get? \n\nThats right! You would get the sound of only the cat meowing. \n\nSO! if you take the sound of \"Madonna - What it feels like for a girl\" with her singing and all the instruments playing. Then you take a second version of the same song, except this time there is no vocals of Madonna singing. You put these two sounds together but you invert the one with only instruments. What do you get? \n\nThats right! You get only Madonna's voice! \n\nAnd thats how you steal (er I mean get) a vocal to use for your DJ set. ",
"Ooh, a question I can answer!\n\nThere are plenty of ways to obtain an acapella. The best way is through vinyl record singles (and sometimes CD's and cassettes, but it's not as common on these platforms). Usually if, for example, a rap artist puts their song on a vinyl single, they'll put on the explicit version, the clean version/radio version, the instrumental, and if you're lucky, the acapella. That way, you now have the acapella and you can do whatever you want with it.\n\nOr, you can go online and find other people's vinyl that they put onto their computer and download their acapellas for free. \n\nSometimes artists will release the acapellas and instrumentals to their albums (such as Death Grips which has lead to many mashups) and you can download if for free or for a fee from there.\n\nAnd lastly, if you know how to correctly, you could mess around in a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and use some effects and you can get the acapella from the original song. However, this takes lots of trial and error, skill, time, multiple animal sacrifices, etc. This method is not the most trustworthy as the ending result almost always has some of the instrumental in the background and it can make the acapella very low quality.\n\nAlso, if you're some one like Skrillex or Diplo and you have some good connections with musicians in the industry, you could ask them for the acapellas and they could probably be down for a remix/collaboration. And if you're a sneaky person, after you do that collab/remix, you could leak the acapella online and other people can find it.",
"In most cases, the label or whoever payed for the physical recording owns that property. When they want remixes done, they give the raw recorded tracks to the remixers. 99% of the time only the vocals are used, but usually they have access to all of the original tracks. Sometimes stem tracks are used (pre-mixed portions of the song grouped together ( vocal stem, drum stem, guitar stem, etc ), though it's not preferred since you generally want full control over the vocals and not be committed to the effects and processing of the original mix. But I did get stems from time to time.\n\nMixed records for 20 years.",
"The record labels release them to djs. I used to subscribe to some \"mp3 pools\"that were for \"professional djs only\" an cost about $10 a month. unlimited downloads, and would have a lot of music that wasnt on the radio yet, etc, and theyd randomly throw acapellas on there.\n\ndid a lot of DJing a while back.\n\nits freakin hard to do much with them though!",
"They do it with photoshop. They extract the vocals from the beats and make sick dj sounds from that. That's the easiest way I can explain it. ",
"hi! electronic producer + remix artist here\n\n3 ways\n\n1. record label reaches out to you to remix a song and will send you stems\n\n2. it leaks and is found on the internet somewhere (usually the person who receives it in the above will leak it...or someone in the studio)\n\n3. if you find an instrumental, you can cancel out frequencies to get a DIY acapella ",
"There's actually a sub that is dedicated to giving vocals from a track for remixes: /r/IsolatedVocals",
"Most people grab the instrumentals from the internet, which are everywhere for most songs. They take the instrumentals, invert them, and then combine them into the regular song. That isolates the vocals and removes the instrumentals\n\nImagine a wave that goes up to a height of 5 inches hitting a valley that goes down 5 inches, they would cancel each other out and the result would be a point where the water is at rest, this is deconstructive interference and that's what is happening to the audio.",
"Here's a tutorial on how it's done when you have a copy of the instrumental version. _URL_0_",
"OP, if an artist has out an instrumental only album, you can use a computer program to see the sound waves. \n\nYou flip one upside down, so that the sound waves of the music actually cancels out the negative of the other other one, so that all you are left with is just the vocals. \n\nIf we both have right hands, but your hand this time has 6 fingers, then I flip your hand around, it's the exact same thing as my right hand and it cancels out everything except for your 6th finger you were seeking in the first place. ",
"As a music producer myself - I usually look for it online first, or if all else fails, I use a series of equalizers and similar VSTs to \"edit\" out specific frequencies. ",
"There are three main ways I know of this happening,\n\n1) The track has the vocal acapella available...simple\n\n2) Using software like ADX Trax Pro _URL_0_\n\n3) Getting a copy of the Instrumental version as well as the regular version. If they are both the same then the difference (one minus the other) is the vocal track. This is done by inverting the phase of one of the versions so it cancels the other out.\n\nThere are also a tonne of user communities online that collect and exchange acapellas, either home made or professional acapellas.\n\n\nSource: Music producer for 10+ years\n",
"Just to add to the answers already given:\n\nBack in the days a lot of artists used to have an acapella track when they released their singles. \nOther times you'll also have to do your best to isolate the vocals and let it blend in. A trick is to pitch it up making the vocals stand out more. If you listen to \"Cold as Ice\" by M.O.P that's what's done there. \n\n",
"The beginners have websites like acapellas4u and some soundcloud accounts also release the acapellas for free. Some DJs are generous and give the acapella away for free."
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Simple_sine_wave.svg/1024px-Simple_sine_wave.svg.png",
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"http://i.stack.imgur.com/iwjnX.png"
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1q5xq7 | if a deep sea submarine we're to implode at extreme depths, what would happen to the crew and what would they experience? | Edit: I'm looking for a little more information than that they would die. That's a given. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q5xq7/eli5_if_a_deep_sea_submarine_were_to_implode_at/ | {
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"They would die... \"Crushed\" is the medical term I believe",
"Submarines do not experience a significant internal air pressure increase. So first let's assume that they do not have water flood the compartment and they slowly experience in increase in pressure that matches the pressure on the exterior.\n\n~40 meters below the surface: Nitrogen narcosis becomes an issue, and the sailor would experience a feeling akin to drunkenness, although it isn't lethal by itself.\n\n~66 meters: Oxygen toxicity is a risk, which can cause pulmonary and cardiac issues as well as seizures. Lethal consequences are possible. (Maurice Fargues managed to make it to 120 meters, where he died to one of the two previous conditions making him go unconscious and loss the grip on his mouthpiece - with a special air mixture, ~150 meters [may have been](_URL_1_) hit, but I don't believe they use this mixture on submarines.\n\n~74 meters: deepest flooded submarine rescue (that I am aware of): The men were able seal off a compartment, where they waited for rescue. I do know know if they experienced the full pressure.\n\n~ Deeper. Unknown. It is fairly certain that you would die faster at such depths, but no one to my knowledge has done experiments like this as there is little practical information to be gleaned and it is rather unethical. \n\n\n\nNow let's look at [sudden pressure increases](_URL_0_) (from atmospheric to external pressure).\n\n3.5 meters: 1% chance of ruptured ear drum\n\n10 meters: lung damage likely\n\n35 meters: 99% chance of ruptured ear drum, ~1% chance of fatality\n\n41 meters: 99% chance of fatality due to sudden pressure increase\n\n\nCauses of death in this scenario typically consist of massive pulmonary hemorrhage or a pulmonary air embolism",
"As far as I know, no submarines have ever \"imploded at extreme depths\", so it is difficult to say.\n\nHowever, in 2000, the [Russian nuclear submarine \"Kursk\"](_URL_0_) experienced dual explosions while testing torpedoes. The first explosion was equivalent to one of 250kg of TNT; the second was equal to one of 7 tons of TNT. The submarine sank in relatively shallow water, bottoming at 108 metres (354 ft) about 135 kilometres (84 mi) off Severomorsk.\n\nOut of 118 sailors, 23 have survived the initial explosions in one of the sections of the submarine; others died almost instantly. The rest have lived for another 4 hours - in darkness and waist-high water - until an accident caused a flash-fire.\n\n32 hours after the explosions, when the Russian Submarine Rescue Vehicle attempted to mate with the aft escape trunk, none of the Kursk's sailors were alive."
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8sjpvj | when adding white to red or black why is the result is considered a different color but adding white to other colors is considered a lighter shade of the same color? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8sjpvj/eli5when_adding_white_to_red_or_black_why_is_the/ | {
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"This is mainly due to a lack of knowledge of color names. You know what grey and pink are called but don't know names such as \"Celadon\" for a light shade of green.\n\nUltimately the delineation of colors depends most on how many names we have for the shades. For example in the past the color blue was not in the vocabulary of some languages so the ocean might have been described as \"copper\" colored.",
"The most basic colors humans (and many animals) perceive, before any others, are white, black, and red. This is a physical phenomenon, across all cultures and even some other species. They are in a sense the most fundamental colors. \n\nSo we are particularly sensitive to variations in them. Off-white, off-black, and off-red all appear to be \"something else.\""
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5ay3fe | what is a body detox? how do you know when you need one? how often should one be performed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ay3fe/eli5_what_is_a_body_detox_how_do_you_know_when/ | {
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"It's BS made to put money in someone's pocket other than yours. \n\nYou don't need them, and you shouldn't perform them unless you feel like you have too much money.\n\nOften the idea rests around fuzzy concepts like \"toxins\" in your body, or your intestines being full of \"rotting food\" which are either simply hogwash, or misunderstandings of the fact that your intestines are *supposed* to contain food, since that's where you pull nutrition from it. ",
"It's mostly just new-age woo characterized by total misunderstanding of how our body functions. \n\nDrinking only juice or a week is not a detox. Wearing weird foot pads is not a detox. Drinking fungus piss-vinegar is not a detox. \n\nOur livers do the detox. If your liver is functioning properly, your body is detoxing just fine. \n\nAnyone who tells you \"eat this for a total body cleanse!\" or \"wear this to detox!\" or \"drink this nasty crap for a month to detox!\" is just trying to explain why their sugar water is $20 a bottle. Snake oil salesmen of the 21st century.",
"There is an actual process of detoxification that happens as your body returns to a normal state after a chemical imbalance such as drug use or alcohol use. This almost always involves your own body metabolizing the substance and removing it on its own.",
"It's a marketing scam.\n\nIf you have a functional liver and functional kidneys, your body will detox itself. And if you don't have those organs, you need a hospital, not an overpriced juice box.",
"Detox is done internally via the Liver and Kidneys. \n\nWhat you have to understand is that when we consume something, that food item is first held in a sac with a pH of about 2 (a very strong acid). Then it is subjected to harsh peptidase activity in the small intestine (particularly the deuodnum/jejunum). Nothing really survives intact.\n\nThe idea of a detox is essentially a snake oil sale. The best way to detox (via liver and kidney) is to keep hydrated, take your vitamins and minerals to assist any metabolic functions these organs perform, and exercise often but not too much that it causes deep rooted issues. If people lived to be centenarians before the invention of all this stuff (detox pads, juices, etc.), then it is a sign we don't need it to live a decent life. ",
"In theory, or in practice?\n\nIn theory, the idea is that your body has certain toxins in it, and you need to do something to get rid of the toxins in your body, usually be abstaining from taking in any (restricted diet), increasing the rate at which they leave (steam baths, diuretics or laxatives, etc.), or doing other things (wearing certain things, performing certain behaviors, etc.).\n\nPractically, there is no medically accepted process or reason for them.",
"Your body has a built in detox system, it is called the \"liver\". As long as you stay hydrated, your liver can do its job.\n\nAnyone trying to convince you to detox is likely trying to sell you a method to detox. Are you really going to trust a Magic-Water salesman about the lifechanging abilitys of Magic-Water? Probably not, not should you. Scams like this have been going on throughout the ages."
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2oz8ll | why do i get razor burn on my neck but not on my face? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oz8ll/eli5_why_do_i_get_razor_burn_on_my_neck_but_not/ | {
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"Two main reasons. First, the neck isn't nearly as flat as your face so it's more difficult to shave, which makes it easier to irritate. Second, the hair on your neck grows in a lot of different directions making it hard to avoid shaving against the grain. The hair on your face tends to all point towards your chin, so it's easier to make sure you're shaving with the grain."
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19y4lt | can the us government target americans in drone killings, and is there evidence they have done so before? | It seems ludricious to me that some how it could be legal that the US government could target citizens with drone strikes. I keep getting facebook feeds about Rand Paul and just want some clarification on the issue | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19y4lt/eli5_can_the_us_government_target_americans_in/ | {
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"Yes. They have killed two US citizens with drone strikes. ",
"[Anwar al-Awlaki](_URL_0_) was American born and killed by a Predator drone strike in Yemen. One side is arguing that it is illegal to kill an American citizen without a trial. The other side is arguing that he is an enemy of the state and has forfeited his right to judicial protection by taking up arms against the United States.\n\nIn Rand Paul's case his filibuster was to get the administration to state concretely that American citizens within the United States have full protection of the law which the administration has come out and stated that they do and drone strikes within the United States are illegal."
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6dvyaa | why do different clothing brands differ so much in regards to the size of their clothes for example being able to go in one shop and buy a large but going somewhere else and having to buy xl? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dvyaa/eli5_why_do_different_clothing_brands_differ_so/ | {
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"On top of the size there is also the fit. You can get a button up dress shirt regular or fitted, for example, and they'll be the same size but the fitted shirt will be more constrictive. \n\nMost clothing, like say a T-shirt, doesn't advertise the fit because marketing wants you to feel bad about body image and spend more time shopping to compensate for those bad feelings. \n\nIf you buy professional dress clothing you're expected to have a tailor measure your size as well as a flattering fit for your body type, vs \"off the rack\" which is buying dress clothing without being fitted, trying it on, and hoping for the best.\n\nIf you sick to a single brand the fit within a size should remain fairly constant. Some brands favor certain fits over others within a size."
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3ulls1 | when animals appear to be smiling, are they really doing so out of joy or is it just a human misinterpretation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ulls1/eli5_when_animals_appear_to_be_smiling_are_they/ | {
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"Animal body language and signals are very different from ours. Apes for example, can be taught to smile as we do, but in the wild, displaying your teeth is a threat or sign of aggression. Their \"happy\" smile is an open mouth with no teeth showing. ",
"When you see a primate engaging in what looks like a smile, this is often what we call a \"fear grimace.\" This is a face that is often used in social situations, and which shows that the animal is \"afraid\" of another. This is often used in dominance interactions, where the subordinate animal is actively indicating to a dominant individual that they recognize their lower social rank. Showing such a face likewise tends to reduce agonism between the two individuals, and keeps social relationships within the group \"well greased\". Note that I use the term \"afraid\" in quotes. Although we can get a handle on the emotional content of animals thoughts to some degree, in the behavioral sciences we try to deal only with what can be observed externally, as we can never truly know the animal's internal mental state (although Japanese primatologists will often infer emotional states, but that's another post).",
"When it comes to dogs they're just panting: breathing through their mouths. A dog is *happy*, is you want to call it that, when his tail is wagging. Sometimes they'll fold their ears back if you go to pet them, generally that's a good sign but they also do that to show fear or stress. Cats are completely different and indeed every species has its own body language. There is no reason to assume that any animal displaying body language similar to human body language is doing it for the same reason. It might be in some cases but that would just be coincidental. You're much safer not anthropomorphising animals although many borderline-delusional pet owners have trouble with this and read waaay too much into their pets and ascribe all sorts of emotions and feelings to animals simply not capable of showing emotions that complex. \n\nI await your downvotes, delusional pet owners. ",
"If we're talking about teeth bared and mouth closed:\n\nPrimates: Joy if they're trained or were raised around humans, fear otherwise \nDogs: Joy if raised around humans, fear if not accompanied by aggressive posture, anger otherwise \nCats: Itchy whiskers \nDolphins: Joy \nHorses: \"I'm being a dickhead and I know it\" \nDonkeys: See Horses \n\nIf you mean upturned lips, like this :) then that pretty much never means anything unless they were conditioned to do it.",
"_URL_0_ I can't link it properly but here's a video on this very subject",
"Cats don't really use facial expressions - which also explains why they can't really read human facial expressions.\n\nInstead, it's better to watch their body language:\n\n* Tail up, tip pointed slightly forward = interested, curious, intrigued\n* Pushing head against you = marking you as a friend with their scent\n* Showing you their butthole = trust, acceptance\n* A slow blink, eye squinting = affection, trust, acceptance",
"It depends a lot on context and I can only speak for dogs. There is no one behavior you can look at to know what's going on in a dog's head, but looking at a group of behaviors can give a good idea of what's going on. That said, a tail wagging dog with soft eyes and an open mouth with tongue lolling out is considered a sign of a friendly dog. It pretty much looks like a smiling dog, so in this case it wouldnt really be wrong to call it that.\n\nOn the other hand, if you are mad at your dog and he starts \"smiling\" at you while stiff in the body with the tail tucked in between its legs, this is considered a submissive or calming pose (to calm YOU). He's not so much smiling at you in our human sense of the word as telling you \"I'm no threat to you please stop making me nervous and scared. I'll be good please make this bad feeling stop.\" Note, many people think this is the dog being silly or feeling guilty. It's not. The dog is simply reacting to your tone of voice and body language and is trying to appease you without having any idea what it did wrong. Back off the poor dog. \n\n "
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40dtpz | why does turning my phone's wifi off/on help my phone suddenly connect to my router that was, only a few moments ago, apparently out of range? | When on one end of my house, I can lose connection and have no access to my wifi network. However, when I disable the function on my phone and then re-enable it, it quickly regains signal. What's the deal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40dtpz/eli5_why_does_turning_my_phones_wifi_offon_help/ | {
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"It's because you are basically starting a new line of communication with the router. Rather than the phone weakly telling the router that it's there, when you turn it off and back on this tells the router to close that connection, then once it sees your phone again it will then reestablish that connection. The best way to eli5 it would be to say disabling WiFi on the device officially tells the router that device is no longer connected. Turning WiFi back on starts a new connection",
"Maybe your router has the functionality called \"roaming assistant\" or similar enabled. In this case when signal levels drop to say -70db or whatever preset value the router will intentionally terminate the connection. It does this so your device won't try to maintain a poor connection, instead connect to another AP which has a better signal. When your phone reconnects to the router it \"knows\" that the device couldn't connect to anywhere else so it won't drop it this time. \n\nEdit: your router may or may not allow you to tweak/disable this, it depends entirely on the model. "
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1u0ods | why do bugs like ticks and other ones not drown when you hold them under water? | Say you have a tick on your arm. What does it not drown when you hold it underwater for 5 minutes.
or does it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u0ods/eli5why_do_bugs_like_ticks_and_other_ones_not/ | {
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"They will, eventually, but it takes quite a long time. Bugs like ticks and fleas breathe not with lungs, but with little tiny holes in the outer shell that are connected to little tiny tubes that run throughout the inside of the body. These little holes (called spiracles) are so small that the surface tension of the water near them prevents it from flowing inside. If you put a little soap on a flea or a tick, and then hold it under water (the soap destroys the surface tension) they drown pretty quick. \nEDIT: This is why Raid and WD-40 are so good at killing insects. Raid is mostly the same stuff as WD-40 is: petroleum distillates. These liquids have no surface tension, and flow rapidly into the spiracles, coat the tube network inside, and the insect suffocates quickly.",
"Some bugs actually hold and air bubble around their bodies to breath underwater. _URL_0_"
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1a5jy1 | why do whole blood, plasma, and platelets have different donation compatibilities, and which types are compatible for each donation? | I know that the main blood types are O, A, B, and AB with Rh + and - for all, but why can one not always be compatible with another and why do the different donations have different compatibilities? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a5jy1/eli5_why_do_whole_blood_plasma_and_platelets_have/ | {
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"Different blood types have different antibodies. Antibodies are agents that destroy harmful things that could hurt you. A type has antibodies against B. B has antibodies against A. O has antibodies against A and B, but no blood type has any antibodies against O making O the universal donor. AB has no antibodies making it the universal recipient. The Rh factor deals with antigens more specifically the antigen D for Rh positive and negative. These are used during transfusions and to test for hemolytic disease of the newborn."
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7wa9ed | how is source code kept from the public? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wa9ed/eli5_how_is_source_code_kept_from_the_public/ | {
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"Because normally it's kept private if it's important.\n\nFront end code is easy to see - all you have to do is click \"view page source\" in your browser. So, you typically find ways to keep important things out of that code.\n\nBack end (or code that is typically run on the server) is normally kept locked in a private file system somewhere if it contains \"secrets.\" The only way to get this code would be to get onto the server to get the code artifacts (and try to work backwards to get the source code) or get into where they actual store the code (normally in a private repository).\n\nThere are also things like applications you download. These don't really put source code on your phone/pc - you install packages that are typically made from source code. There are ways to get the code from them - but the source isn't really meant to be available. Again - most applications tend not to have \"secret\" code in them for this reason. ",
"In a nutshell, program source code isn't everywhere. A program gets compiled from source and turned into a binary format. That is what gets installed and distributed when you download a program. The source is typically only used to compile the program once. (Ignoring interpreters, JIT, etc).\n\nThat said, there are decompilers but they can only do so much. Comments and variable names are lost and the optimization process often makes a non human readable mess of things. ",
" > Programs and devices use the source code all the time\n\nThey actually don't use the source code at all. They used compiled machine code.\n\nThink of source code as being like the recipe to bake a cake, and the machine code as being the cake itself. \n\nIf you have the recipe, you can bake the same type of cake. And you can easily modify the recipe to make a slightly different cake, too. But you can't eat a recipe, just like the computer can't run the source code. You have to \"bake\" the source code by compiling it into machine code. Then the computer can run it, but it loses most of the stuff that makes it understandable to humans in the process."
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76t85d | how does your body determine that it needs to use carbohydrates as immediate fuel, to convert and store carbs as glycogen in muscle cells, or to store carbs as fat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/76t85d/eli5how_does_your_body_determine_that_it_needs_to/ | {
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"I can't speak to the exact speed of these processes, but I can give an extremely basic explanation of how the body knows what to do--\n\nEssentially what's happening is that every cell in your body is constantly monitoring its ATP levels. Not only does ATP give you energy, but it (and it's byproduct, ADP) also acts on dozens of enzymes, influencing how active they are. \n\nFor example, one of the steps in breaking down sugars requires an enzyme called \"Fructose 1,6-Bisphosphate.\" ATP will interact with this enzyme (which ultimately creates ATP), stopping it from breaking down more sugar. ATP will also \"turn on\" other enzymes which store energy for later. Everything is based on interconnected feedback loops, whose sole purpose is to keep ATP at \"normal\" levels."
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1qw1vm | how does a cpu understand and execute machine code when it has never done something similar before? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qw1vm/eli5_how_does_a_cpu_understand_and_execute/ | {
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" > never done something similar before?\n\nI'm not sure what you are asking/implying.\n\nCPUs are designed to understand machine code. It isn't a learning machine.",
"It doesn't _understand_ it per se, any more than a ball 'understands' it should roll down hill. It is just a (complicated) set up to generate certain outputs given certain inputs. Here's a really good mechanical illustration of how a CPU adds numbers:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTo take it to the next level, someone build a CPU in minecraft that you can actually observe working:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nYou can start to imagine how when you put a few of those together you might get something that can play battlefield 4.",
"Your question is actually, \"How does the CPU do what it has been specifically designed to do?\". A CPU is designed to execute machine code. Machine code is 'programmed' by the placement and connection of the transistors in the CPU.",
"Suppose you have a calculator that can perform 4 simple operations: add, subtract, multiply and divide. You can use those 4 operations to calculate arithmetic expressions. For example:\n\n ((4 + (6 - 3)) * 2) / 7\n\nWe could represent the above expression as:\n\n add 6 ; answer = answer + 6\n sub 3 ; answer = answer - 3\n add 4 ; answer = answer + 4\n mul 2 ; answer = answer * 2\n div 7 ; answer = answer / 7\n\nA CPU works much the same way. It supports operations such as `add`, `sub`, `mul` and many others. Higher level programs written in a programming language are then converted by another program called a compiler or an interpreter to lists of CPU instructions, just as the arithmetic expression above was converted into a list of arithmetic instructions."
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20ypx5 | why can my cat eat the same thing for every meal every day of his life, but i can't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20ypx5/eli5_why_can_my_cat_eat_the_same_thing_for_every/ | {
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"You can if you wanted to, or you didn't have the choice.\n\nYour cat doesn't have the choice, or the ability to express it's choice if it had one.",
"You technically could if that meal had all the essential vitamins and nutrients required to sustain you. You'd get sick of it, sure, but you won't starve to death or die of malnutrition.",
"you can. /r/soylent",
"Thank god pets can't complain. Dog's are the only ones I've seen express guilt.\n",
"You could, you just prefer variety and have the ability to seek it.",
"Because you choose to feed your cat the same thing for every meal everyday, and you choose to feed yourself something different every meal everyday. ",
"You would eat the same thing every day if you were starving. The cat chooses not to starve. "
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c34lo7 | when you put a speaker next to a microphone, why is the feedback always really high notes and not whatever pitch the microphone heard last? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c34lo7/eli5_when_you_put_a_speaker_next_to_a_microphone/ | {
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"Suppose you have a sound with a certain frequency of its wave. The speaker, microphone, amplifier, etc. don't operate instantly so when what the microphone hears comes out it is going to be combined with whatever the current ambient sound waves are. Even with a constant tone it is unlikely to be precisely synchronized or on some even multiple.\n\nSo now you have the two waves combined which tends to result in more peaks and valleys per sample period. Keep looping and it continues to increase the overall frequency of the wave.",
"The note is the resonant frequency of the system. That is, it is the frequency which is most strongly amplified in the amplifier/speaker/room/microphone/preamplifier combination.",
"Sound engineer here:\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe most common kinds of feedback people experience is either mid to high range and very low. The big factor is the size, shape, and material of the speakers and the room. Each of those things impact which frequencies tend to get accentuated. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nHigher pitched tones don't need as much energy to be heard by humans so those are the ones that tend to end up in feedback loops. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAnother factor is that the folks in charge of sound systems tend not to let feedback go too long before dealing with it. If you let feedback continue to ring, it can start to encompass other frequencies. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAlso in some circumstances you can get very low frequency feedback, especially because low frequencies need a lot more power than higher ones and that can lead to sound engineers turning those low frequencies up too much. It can easily happen in a scenario with a hip-hop DJ having the rumble from the sub-woofers shaking the turntable that's feeding the sound system."
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52pzv3 | why do we taste eye drops after inserting them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/52pzv3/eli5_why_do_we_taste_eye_drops_after_inserting/ | {
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"You know how you get a runny nose when you cry? Your eyes and your nose are connected. You know how it's really difficult to taste things when you have a stuffy nose and can't smell them? Your nose and your mouth are also connected. ",
"I have never in my life tasted eye drops after using them. Are you sure you're not doing something wrong?",
"There is a small tube from each corner of your eye that connects to your nasal cavity called the [nasolacrimal duct](_URL_0_). \n\nAs well as what the smell receptors contribute to what we think of as \"taste\", from the nasal cavity it's also possible that some of the fluid would go down your throat and perhaps make it's way onto the back of your tongue in the process.",
"This is because of their lacrimal punctum. Go to the mirror and pull your eye down and look at the red bit near your nose, you see the hole? That's it. When you produce tears or have another liquid in your eyes, some of it drains into these holes and then into the lacrimal sac, the nasolacrimal duct, and eventually into the back of your nose and throat, where you might get a taste.",
"When you produce tears or have another liquid in your eyes, some of it drains into these holes and then into the lacrimal sac, the nasolacrimal duct, and eventually into the back of your nose and throat, where you might get a taste. This is normal and safe, but eye drops aren't exactly designed with flavor in mind.",
"Have you heard of an [ear nose and throat doctor](_URL_0_)? It's because they're all connected in some convoluted way. "
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4eucy9 | why do some people enjoy being healthy and some enjoy being unhealthy? | I know some people are a mix a both but is there any measurable factor that makes some people enjoy working out and eating healthy, and some enjoy drinking, smoking, etc? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4eucy9/eli5_why_do_some_people_enjoy_being_healthy_and/ | {
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"Self control. People who are healthy have enough discipline to make habits of health and learn to enjoy it. Others (such as myself as a prime example) get a quick rush from things like nicotine consumption, alcohol, junk food. I for one have horrible health habits yet am still very light weight for my lifestyle. "
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2u2g2x | why do i always wake up right when i realize im dreaming? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u2g2x/eli5_why_do_i_always_wake_up_right_when_i_realize/ | {
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"This is a problem of reverse causation. It's not the fact that you dream that causes you to wake up. It's the fact that you're waking up that makes you able to remember that you've been dreaming."
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dv7a9g | why can we not make new elements we know the properties of using a particle accelerator? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dv7a9g/eli5_why_can_we_not_make_new_elements_we_know_the/ | {
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"Because elements larger than uranium tend to be unstable. The larger, the more unstable it is. This means they have a tendency to undergo radioactive decay in order to reduce its atomic number. In laymans terms, they just start throwing away their mass to get smaller.",
"Because the larger the particles get the more unstable they become so going past the particles we've already discovered is incredibly difficult as already the ones we have discovered decay before we can properly measure them, so if we go further they will decay before we can acknowledge their existence",
"We can and do. That is how the heavier elements in the periodic table were created. We had placeholders for them already, but only after creating them in the lab were they officially discovered and named.\n\nSuch elements are incredibly unstable, so we can't really do anything useful with them afterwards. The challenge is to isolate a few atoms of the new element for long enough to properly measure them and confirm the discovery."
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2zcqo6 | how is off-shoring and outsourcing work and effect people? | I have a project that i need to do for school that has to be an informative pro con (non-persuasive). It has to deal with outsourcing and off-shoring and how it effects America. I'm having trouble finding what things on this topic. So Reddit, what can you tell me about outsourcing, off-shoring, its effect on citizens, global economy, and jobs and how it works? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zcqo6/eli5_how_is_offshoring_and_outsourcing_work_and/ | {
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"Let us start with a few definitions, since I hear the terms used interchangeably very often. Outsourcing is when a company or institution pays someone else to provide a service for them, instead of doing it themselves. This can be something as small as payroll processing, or as large as their entire network or data center. \nOff-shoring is when someone outsources a service to an other country, usually to take advantage of the lower costs. So, in short, all off-shoring is outsourcing, but not all outsourcing is off-shoring. \n\nBoth scenarios provide a lower cost of doing business, and in many cases, an increase in functionality. It allows companies to focus on their core business. For instance, a bank is into managing money, not operating a data center to processes all the bank's data. Staying with this scenario, let's say Bank A outsources their IT to another company. There will be people at Bank A, that used to work in its IT department that will lose their jobs, no matter if it is done in-country or off-shore. The new company will undoubtedly leverage their own employees since they are more efficient due to economies of scale. The benefit for the bank is lower IT costs, which can mean better profits, more money for raises, or better return to shareholders. But, in short, there is a net loss of jobs. \n\nIf Bank A outsources to a company that will deliver the services off-shore, the savings to the bank will most often be higher. The net loss of jobs will be the same, but the net loss of jobs in-country will be much greater.\n\nWhat does all this mean? Lower prices. The fact that I can buy a 4 pack of t-shirts at Walmart for a few dollars proves this point. Outsourcing and off-shoring are so ubiquitous, it effects just about everything you buy, and transaction you make. The effect on the US has meant a massive shift of our manufacturing sector to foreign countries. The effects on foreign countries has been enormous, as well. This has allowed a middle class to form in China, India and other countries throughout the world. IBM now has more employees in India than they do in the US! Many more. Markets have no conscience or morality, and the incessant drive for lower costs, coupled with a global communication network, make it easy for this to continue. \nSource: this is what I do for a living. PM me or reply if you have any follow-up questions. \nEdit: changed companies to countries"
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2eq42l | why do top doctors fighting ebola not follow "scene safety?" | Another top doctor working to treat ebola patients has died after contracting ebola: _URL_0_
In my first responder training, "scene safety" is the most important rule. It's the first thing to are to assess in any scene, so much so that it's an automatic fail in practical exams if you do not call out "scene safe, BSI [gloves, etc]" during every scenario.
I've read that ebola is somewhat difficult to catch. Are these doctors just raw dogging it with the patients? Why are they not protecting themselves more? Not for selfishness, but as in first response, it doesn't help anyone if the caregiver gets hurt or dies. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2eq42l/eli5_why_do_top_doctors_fighting_ebola_not_follow/ | {
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"Yes, they are practicing 'scene safety'. But in under developed countries, infrastructure is poor and inherent safety is nearly nonexistent. First World doctors and infectious disease specialists have been responding to Ebola and Marburg outbreaks in Africa for decades, generally with excellent safety. Most of the doctors and nurses that have gotten sick are native residents of that area, and are hampered by the lack of infrastructure.\n\nThese docs are very dedicated and working very, very hard to save lives under more than trying circumstances. They are in and around the virus every day. Any slip up, accident or failure of personal protective equipment has the potential to expose them. And under the conditions there, those things happen all too often. These men and women are certainly not \"raw dogging it\". They know the risks and that there will be little that they can do to lower those risks more than they already are, and STILL they go there to help people.",
"BSI (body substance isolation) requires access to personal protective equipment including disposable gloves, respirators, eye shields, and the like. We take these resources for granted in developed countries, but in developing countries the thought of wearing a pair of gloves for 5 minutes during a patient encounter and then throwing them in the garbage is mind-boggling. Even access to clean water and soap for hand-washing between patients can be challenging."
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dlyupb | how do criminals who plead not guilty to crimes they clearly did...? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dlyupb/eli5_how_do_criminals_who_plead_not_guilty_to/ | {
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"Hail Mary for reasonable doubt in the judge/jury’s eyes?",
"probably they are contesting that the definition of the crime that they are being charged with is not the same as the actual act.",
"Sometimes there's little alternative.\n\nUsually when you're basically doomed the prosecutor will offer a plea deal and agree to push for a slightly lesser sentence in return for a guilty plea that dramatically shortens the legal process.\n\nIn cases of excessively heinous crimes or those with tough mandatory sentencing the prosecutor may not make this offer (do you want to be the guy who \"went easy\" on the serial rapist?) or make a very weak offer, and there's no benefit to a guilty plea.\n\nIn that case, your best option is to plead not guilty and hope you can bamboozle a jury or an incompetent prosecutor and spread a reasonable doubt about the supposedly rock solid evidence.\n\nIt doesn't work often, but it *can* work (O.J. anyone?) When the only alternative is life in prison or the firing squad, it's worth a shot."
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5dvok4 | why do some people stalk others? | When we're told someone has no interest in our attention why is it that some of us can accept that and not bother a person while others just won't leave well enough alone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5dvok4/eli5_why_do_some_people_stalk_others/ | {
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"Stalking is usually the result of having an unformed sense of self. People who stalk may have borderline personality disorder, or erotomania. Essentially, the person doing the stalking thinks they cannot live without the person they're stalking. Unable to tell the difference between themselves and the person stalked, they seek contact in order to feel loved (erotomania) or to avoid imagined annihilation. Basically, there has to be a lot of bad stuff going on mentally for anyone to trespass the usual social boundaries enough to stalk. (And anyone who stalks another person may have a combination of mental illnesses.)",
"Because they are psychologically disturbed. My ex was stalked by her ex for years. The thing is he was a former big cat trainer and had been attacked by a tiger he had not worked with before. The tiger had his whole head in his jaws and was crushing his skull before he got to safety. After that though he suffered seizures and was never the same."
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2b0j0z | the point of using marijuana. (aside from medical reasons) | Usually when I ask someone what being high feels like, they typically respond with something along the lines of, "Well...it just makes everything better."
Why would someone want to experience anything at a higher degree of "good" if they have to come down and experience the same thing in reality? Does this make everything boring and mundane? I see no real incentive to living while not under the influence if I'm constantly aware that everything I'm experiencing could be better.
**I don't want any statistics or reasons as to why Marijuana should be legalized and used by everybody.**
I just want to understand how people who frequently get high, can enjoy the small (and big) things in life while not high.
And please don't say anything like, "You haven't tried it, so you wouldn't understand." It's annoying, and extremely unhelpful. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b0j0z/eli5_the_point_of_using_marijuana_aside_from/ | {
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"It's very calming and helps the user to focus and lighten up. \nOr so I've heard...",
"Why drink a beer, eat a candy bar, or gobble up pizza? Because, they're a safe, simple pleasure in life. Nothing wrong with that. Of course, if you don't want to do it, don't. Just like drinking a beer, eating a candy bar or gobbling on a pizza. I think when they say you \"wouldn't understand\" it's because it is a different sensation from being \"drunk\". They're probably also just a 14 year old dweeb. ",
"It's kinda like being drunk, but not really. Different types of alcohol make some people feel differently, different types of pot also have different effects. I'm too high to elaborate.",
"Here are some specific things that smoking marijuana does for me:\n\n* I feel dissociated from any stress I am feeling.\n\n* I concentrate on small details and the beauty they have (for example, the intricate vascular structure of a leaf)\n\n* Emotions are heightened; what would have been funny is now hilarious, and by the same token what would have been scary is now terrifying.\n\n* Minor things become super interesting. A wikipedia article on the history of Kazakhstan might be kind of boring, but while high it comes alive as a thrilling story of warlords and generals, heroes and villains, etc.\n\nI don't smoke much, maybe once per month. But it is a pleasure when I do.",
"I love to laugh and relax simple as that. ",
"I use it exclusively when I play live music. It has several benefits for me, and these are not necessarily true for other musicians: \n\nit lowers inhibitions - being tense or self conscious when performing just kills things for me. It starts a spiral of nervousness and shame that makes me perform considerably worse, because I tend to focus too much on mistakes. Pot helps me gloss over them and focus on the larger picture.\n\nIt heightens senses - no doubt about it, pot tweaks your pleasure centers, and makes music sound more 'present'. When I play music, I hear it in a different space and react to it in a different way\n\nIt dials me in to other musicians - somewhat related to the previous, but this is more about interpersonal communication. I'm not the first or last musician who will say they feel more connected and tuned in to what other band members are doing. It's almost as if I can deconstruct, analyze and react better under the influence.\n\nNow, none of this is to say that pot makes me necessarily more creative, or even a better musician, it really just puts me in a more conducive state of mind to ALLOW myself to be more creative and play music in a different way. \n\nFinally, I play a lot of improvisational/jam type music. If you play the kind of music that requires attention to detail, lots of memorization, sight reading, transposition, etc., then pot is a non starter. ",
"So your main question how can people who smoke a lot enjoy reality while not high also..i've rewritten this like 5x now, but I think a good way of saying it is when you smoke everyday your mindset changes and outlook. So when I recently stopped for a couple weeks on an international trip to Europe, it was interesting to notice my outlook and thought process while not high again. Yes I didn't eat as well and truthfully thought the beautiful views probably would have been more enhanced with weed, but it wasn't overwhelming differences. At the end of the day yes-- MOST, but NOT ALL things are better with weed, but with anything you have to make sacrifices eventually for everything. ",
"Let me put it this way. Fried chicken is fuckin' delicious when I drench it in some honey mustard. However, I'm not gonna *ever* turn down fried chicken, or even go as far to say I hate it because there's no honey mustard. ***I FUCKIN' LOVE FRIED CHICKEN!***\n\n...and weed.",
"Well, for one it doesn't make *everything* better. A lot of people may like to use marijuana and watch TV before bed, but probably fewer people would enjoy going to say a formal extended-family gathering after using marijuana (of course some do!).\n\nThink about all the things that you enjoy. To stick with TV... maybe you enjoy watching TV on your big screen HDTV. But when you are traveling you watch on your laptop. Is it better on your HDTV? Sure. At home you always choose it over the laptop. But if the HDTV isn't available or is inconvenient, you still enjoy watching your favorite show on your laptop. It's not ruined by the knowledge that your experience could be better.",
"You ever wanked off? It's kinda like that. I guess. From an entirely hypothetical standpoint. You feel good, and you don't necessarily feel worse when you come down.\n\n\nEdit: Expansion of idea",
"Read this. Carl Sagan explains it better than I ever could.\n\n[Carl Sagan - Marihuana Reconsidered](_URL_0_)\n\nPersonally, and Carl Sagan goes into this as well, cannabis has increased my overall, sober appreciation for many things in life. I smoked for a few years and then there was a long period when I didn't smoke at all, and that appreciation stayed with me the entire time. ",
"I'll tell you about my personal experience. I used to smoke a lot of weed. I mean like Snoop Dogg levels of weed every day. Basically my typical day was wake up, smoke weed go to work or school, get home, smoke some weed, eat, smoke some more, play video games, smoke some more. Rinse, repeat.\n\nDuring that time I would visit my family in a different state and wouldn't smoke when I went because, you know, no weed on planes. Anyways, during that time I wouldn't really feel any different. Maybe I just smoked so much I was still high. I don't know. But my appetite was fine, didn't snack as much. I've never really been one to sleep more than a few hours even when I smoked, so no change there. \n\nA couple years ago I quit completely. Wanted a better job and they drug tested, and honestly I was kind of bored of it. So first couple of days I was kind of bored. It's so easy to be entertained when your baked because you can just zone out. So I just found shit to do. Clean the house, walk the dog, exercise. It's really not hard to find something to do. But that was it, maybe two days of feeling a little more bored than normal. I didn't have trouble sleeping or eating. \n\nIt all comes down to how you view things and what kind of ambition you have. Pot won't change that about you. Drugs don't change who you are, they might enable you to be a lazy asshole like you want to be and give you a scapegoat for your problems. But they aren't the problem, it's the personalities of the people using them. ",
"It's not that it's better or worse, it's just different. Generally speaking the world feels a little friendlier and warmer, funnier at times but also seemingly simple tasks can become quite complicated and confusing... I feel like I'm more aware or focused on my feelings.\n\nIt also slows down my thought process a little and pretty much eliminates my ability to multi-task. This means that I tend to focus more on exactly what I'm doing at any given that moment. If I'm taking the dog for a walk, I'm not thinking about work, I'm thinking about the amazing flowers in that garden that I never noticed before, or how warm the sunshine feels or how much fun it is to play fetch... Seriously, how much fun is fetch!\n\n(I know, I know, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen)\n\nGoing for a swim in the ocean feels amazing, the cold water, the warmth of the sun, everything feels great. Music sounds better, you'll pick up new things in your favourite albums, things you've missed because you were doing something else at the time.\n\nI'm less cynical about things, movies with plot holes that would normally bother me don't, I guess it's beacuse my mind is busy focusing on what's happening right then and there... I'm not comparing this experience to any others, I'm just taking it for what it is.\n\nThat being said, tasks that are normally mentally taxing become impossible... doing your taxes while high would be a nightmare, even assembling IKEA furniture is next to impossible. By the time I've read through one page of the instructions I've forgotten entirely what it said on the last...",
"I smoke daily. I'm pretty much just addicted at this point. If I take a break for a few days, I usually enjoy the first day or so then after 2 or 3 I decide \"fuck it\" and go pick up some more. ",
"Its kind of like describing colors to a blind man but i will say this- you could almost compare it to drinking beer, and you could say similar things about drinking ie: everything is better when drunk. Its just that altered state of mind, and its nothing more than a opinion. Its different from booze though in a few ways. firstly theres euphoria, which really is impossible to describe; its responsible for all those feel good feelings and the release of endorphins. Secondly, it is a great muscle pain reliever. When i sprained my wrist i smoked a bit and it seemed to numb the pain. It didn't really get rid of all my pain but it removed that edge i can only describe as a constant almost anxious painfull ache feeling.\n\nLastly i will answer some of your questions.\n\n > \"Why would someone want to experience anything at a higher degree of good if they have to come down and experience the same thing in reality?\"\n\nPersonally i don't agree that pot makes everything better, but it seems to be a common belief. I have friends who want to be high before they go to that concert, or before the pizza delivery guy comes, and i admit sometimes i do as well but i don't believe that it really *dulls* reality as your inferring. I dont have to be high or drunk to have a good time, but sometimes i do want to get wasted. In moderation my friend :P\n\n > \"Does this make everything boring and mundane?\"\n\nAbsolutely not! I have smoked somewhat with my girlfriend a few times but i honestly prefer to just be with her sober and cuddle watching netflix. This may be true for hard drugs but i don't feel this way about mary jane.\n\n > \"I see no real incentive to living while not under the influence if I'm constantly aware that everything I'm experiencing could be better.\"\n\nI get that- and your not really missing out. in all honesty its not much more exiting than having a few drinks, however i do prefer smoking over drinking because drinking is more intoxicating, and you can loose complete control. \n\nIf your interested in trying it for yourself i will leave on this note-\nPeople say its not addictive but in my opinion it can be habit forming, in all honesty i believe its something everyone should try because life is short and its an experience that's worth it.",
"I use it to alleviate my PTSD symptoms. I get super anxious and hyperaware constantly, smoking helps to calm me down and just let me relax. ",
"I am not doing it, but to challenge your philosophy of it - if you have occasions when you can see everything in a very positive light, then in ordinary times you can still remember it and think that it is a matter of perspective, so strive towards seeing it in a positive light on your own.\n\nSo as a primitive example, you eat expensive food, and then later on you can only afford cheap food, and some magic pill makes the cheap food feel better than the expensive food, then you later on think \"wow, so my enjoyment depends not on what food I eat, but what is happening in my mind? so I will try to consciously enjoy this cheap food better, change my mindset and like it more\".\n\n**Although I don't condone of drugs but rather prefer if people pursued highs with meditation practices, I sayachieving highs is very useful because you realize that your low is not in your circumstances, but in your mind.**",
"I'm a bit of a weekend warrior when it comes to weed. A puff or two throughout the evening and here are my reasons for doing so:\n\n1) It makes me stretch.\n\nI get relaxed. Tension in my back and legs loosen and I start feeling all stretchy. So then I just start stretching out and leaning this way and that and it's all very enjoyable.\n\n2) I listen to music and I really, thoroughly hear it.\n\nWhen I listen to music throughout the day I'm normally doing something else too and the music is just a beat to keep the pace. When I'm listening to music high, music becomes the sole focus and I start to hear all sorts of shit that the musicians are doing and get, for a time, swept away in the whole ordeal.\n\nHeadphones are the best.\n\n3) Practicing scales on guitar has never been so fun.\n\nFor me this lasts about 30 mins or so but practicing something I normally find boring or tricky while under the influence becomes so much more enjoyable and intricate. That is if I can get past tuning my guitar. I'm sure others can relate but tuning your guitar while high can take like an hour.. you'll have the most in tune guitar ever.\n\nThese are some of the reasons I like getting slightly high by myself after the family has gone to bed and I get a little 'me' time.\n\nIf you know what your limits are it can just put you a tiny bit left of 'normal' and it will change the way you think about your day and it just puts a bit of a different spin on otherwise mundane activities.\n\nThat's me though. There was a time when the goal was to 'smoke all the weeds' and see how high I could get and there was a time when it was a daily thing but those days are long gone... and I don't miss them at all.\n\nI really enjoy a little recreational weed though. It's a beautiful thing.",
"My secret is that I don't enjoy anything really anyway..",
"People say stupid things while high because it's like the smallest thing or detail becomes fascinating, and you tend to overthink things, having these strange tangents going off in your brain, then you forget that not everyone is having the same thought train as you and blurt out something which to you would be utterly profound at that moment but to everyone else is simply gibberish or you're an idiot. You don't normally think the same way so it's a nice change. There is no point, unless you enjoy it. It's about enjoying something. I stopped enjoying it and it was a habit and now don't indulge anymore, but it's not like you need it to enjoy anything. It's just an enjoyable feeling. Much like other drugs I imagine. Obviously problems arise if you need a drug to enjoy something. That is called dependency my friend, and bad things will happen. ",
"Your arguments against getting high could be applied to any pleasurable activity. Smoking weed is enjoyable, and it is best done in moderation.",
"This explains it pretty well: _URL_0_\n\nTo put it shortly, it feels good, isn't particularly expensive, helps alleviate stress, and significantly enhances stuff you already like. Especially sex, food and music. And it makes Adventure Time truly adventurous!"
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1my6c5 | why are we afraid of death? | are we born with the fear, or was it implanted into our minds. If that, then why do animals have the fear of death? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1my6c5/eli5_why_are_we_afraid_of_death/ | {
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"Because it has an evolutionary benefit. Creatures that fear death are more likely to avoid it, and thereby survive to pass on their death-fearing genes to the next generation. Those genes become more common in the population and in time, every member of that population will have a fear of death.",
"We fear death because we are able to comprehend the idea of 'self' - that I exist, I am here and I can do things that make me feel good. Because we comprehend self we also comprehend 'other' and we see when others go away they miss out on good things happening. We don't want to miss out on the good things, especially the things we love and care about like seeing our loved ones smile or laugh. It is a scary thought to think you won't see that smile or hear that laugh again. ",
"It is the fear of the unknown. \n\nA person does not know what happens after death, because no one has ever came back and told them, therefore they are afraid of the unknown. \n\n"
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5yb0g0 | why are ship names either italicized or in quotation marks but names of other modes of transportation isn't? | We have to italicize the names of ships, but individual planes, trains, and automobiles (didn't intend on making a movie reference) aren't.
Why not? How is a ship name proper but another mode of transportation isn't?
Thanks for any insight. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yb0g0/eli5_why_are_ship_names_either_italicized_or_in/ | {
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"If the vehicle has a specific name, then it gets italicized. \n\n*Spirit of St. Louis*\n\n*Enola Gay*\n\n*Glamorous Glennis*\n\n*Fifi*"
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583mke | how does the_donald get so many threads to the front page all the time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/583mke/eli5_how_does_the_donald_get_so_many_threads_to/ | {
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"Early hours of the morning - aka the time when most users are asleep and reddit's front page is more vulnerable to voting blocs\n\nr/the_donald is an interesting place... you basically have a community of people who have mutually agreed to slam upvotes into any piece of content posted on their subreddit (and downvote anything that disagrees with that viewpoint). Given the way Reddit calculates the weights for the front page, it is possible for a large and dedicated group of people to pump up multiple posts to the front page.\n\nThe same could be replicated on any subreddit... most subreddit's just don't care."
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8w0nsa | how come in the us, chinese food is synonymous with takeout/fast food, while japanese food is relatively up-scale? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8w0nsa/eli5_how_come_in_the_us_chinese_food_is/ | {
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"Sushi and their special beef are the only thing I have heard being upscale. China has similar stuff, but it isn’t as popular in America.",
"why is it that Pizza is a speciality in Italy but misconsidered fast food in most of the world?",
"In many (or most) parts of the US, Chinese-American fast food is the only available \"Chinese food\". It is generally not very good. In places with larger Chinese populations, there are more traditional Chinese restaurants, often focused on a regional cuisine, some of which are up-scale. Some up-scale Chinese restaurants are modern/innovative takes on the traditional cuisine. In such places (I'm blessed to live near one of them), Chinese food is not synonymous with takeout/fast food.\n",
"I think that Japanese food is known for presentation. Whether it is sushi, or ramen, or teriyaki, or donburi, or hibachi (teppanyaki), there is a specific presentation to it. Obviously people go to hibachi for the show. A lot of American Chinese foods are bowls meats or rice or stir fry, where there is no presentation. The extra time for the presentation also affects the price. Cheaper price kinda relates to the takeaway image.",
"I'd say there's a number of reasons.\n\n* Japanese cuisine has historically had a higher degree of emphasis on presentation than Chinese cuisine. This is true both of the plate itself, and of the entire restaurant (think: hibachi).\n* The Chinese migrants during the 19th and early 20th century represented a significant amount of immigration, and their cuisine then had more exposure to everyday Americans as well as more time to be assimilated into fusion foods. Japanese migration has been much less pronounced, and also was more of a recent phenomenon. It's mostly the fusion dishes that are thought of as \"fast food\" now.\n* The Japanese diet simply differs in ways that made the food a little more challenging to make a \"fast food\" variant of. A lot more fish and noodles, as opposed to rice and beef/pork/chicken. The things that are comparably fast, such as ramen, are culturally thought of (in America, not in Japan) as quick microwavable things for kids and poor college students, rather than as sit-down restaurant meals (which is a pity, because ramen can be quite a meal experience when done right).\n* The Japanese dishes that are likely the most to-go ready, like sushi, are even more-so reliant on presentation than usual (seriously, order a roll to go, and look at how much detail goes into presentation even just inside the little container) and are also typically of a higher cost here.",
"Japan is also an exceedingly coastal nation and the vast majority of thier culture and history comes from being in close contact with the sea. A lot of thier diet is fish based because of this, which tends to be expensive and up-scale in other parts of the world that aren't coastal.",
"It all comes back to who's presenting the food and why.\n\nThe US got high numbers of relatively poor Chinese-American immigrants. Those immigrants started their own restaurants and adapted their menus to better accomodate American tastes, as some traditional Chinese dishes can come off as strange to most Americans. They mostly catered to the lower-end market, and had great success with take-out and delivery.\n\nJapanese food in the US was introduced more as a novelty, something new that would draw in the slightly more upscale cultured crowd. Consider how sushi is primarily introduced and perceived as being \"raw fish\", something that seems strange and exotic, when it actually refers to the kind of rice that's used in it, and there are many kinds of sushi that don't include fish. Raw fish is sashimi, not sushi. It didn't evolve from a large immigrant population like Chinese food did so much as it was imported. You'll find many Japanese restaurants with non-Japanese management.\n\nAmerican Japanese restaurants, like Chinese, also change for American customers. While Chinese restaurants focused on being easy to eat or pack into a to-go container, Japanese restaurants focused on exoticness and presentation. That's why the most common Japanese restaurants are teppanyaki (hibachi) grills and sushi places. These places play to upscale (or at least middle class) customers who are looking for something different, rather than most Chinese places who are only looking to feed people cheap and efficiently.\n\nBy the way- those hibachi grills honestly have very little to do with Japanese cuisine. You can find teppanyaki restaurants where the chef will cook a steak in front of you, but they're not very common, they don't do any sort of the showman stuff you get in American hibachi restaurants, and if you ask a Japanese person they'd probably be more inclined to say that they were western cuisine rather than Japanese. I've seen videos of hibachi routines posted on Japanese sites get thoroughly mocked.\n\nBy contrast, you hardly see any actual lower-end Japanese food get taken over to the US. Stuff like *don* bowl dishes, noodle dishes like udon, soba, soumen or ramen, pseudo-western food like omurice or hamburg steaks, Japanese-style curry rice, izakaya food like yakitori or kushikatsu, street foods like bento or onigiri, etc. There's a weird, kooky image of Japan that Japanese restaurants try to play into, and that includes including weirder foods."
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