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6z7d2q | how do they conclude that north korean missiles could reach the us mainland and alaska when they landed only on the sea of japan, or somewhere too far from the us? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z7d2q/eli5_how_do_they_conclude_that_north_korean/ | {
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"Its all about how high they went. You can calculate how much energy the rocket was capable of by how high it went. To reach the USA the missile wouldnt have to go very high, graph i seen after the 3^rd July test said 1,000km, that test reached 2,800km. So if it followed a traditional trajectory rather than going as high as it did and wasting that energy it could travel farther than it did. Its then just math to see what the effective range might be. "
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40snda | would consuming 4000 calories in a day and not eating the 2nd day yield the same results as consuming 2000 calories a day over two consecutive days? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40snda/eli5_would_consuming_4000_calories_in_a_day_and/ | {
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"over the time frame you are talking about (2 days) I'm going to say yes it would, your body isn't gonna start tapping into fat or muscle that early as the previous poster suggests (it would have to deplete glycogen stores first which given the time frame I doubt would be happen).",
"Intermittent fasting (skipping all food for a day) is rumored to be [healthy](_URL_0_). If that is true, it may be better to each heavily on one day and fast the next, in contrast to eating a constant amount every day.",
"If you engaged in the exact same physical activities on the two days, yes it would have the results - i.e., the same final weight. But it wouldn't *feel* the same (you would get very hungry/unhappy on the second day), and in all likelihood you would be too full to exert yourself on the first day too weak to exert yourself on the second day.",
"This would be a good question for r/askscience as you can see for this subject especially, people like to make unfounded and absurd claims left and right.",
"Actually literally just read an article less than fifteen minutes ago where they were saying that it seems that two individuals eating the same number of calories/food but in a different daily time frame could drastically alter weight gain/loss.\n[Article](_URL_0_)",
"Never ask the internet about anything to do with human metabolism. The tumblr idiots will come out of the woodwork with every flavor of pseudoscience. ",
"The short answer is no because there is scientific evidence that alternate periods of eating and not eating has a number of different impacts on your metabolism. (source: just go to pubmed and search intermittent fasting). \n\n\n\nThe longer answer is that if someone did this as their long-term diet, it is likely that there would be some differences between the two strategies for calorie consumption. This is confounded by the potential for intermittent fasting to impact the body's signals for hunger and other things-but assuming it was calorie equal either way; long term it is likely to yield different results \n\n\nbetter or worse? highly significant? \n\nhard to say \n\n\ndifferent? \n\nmost likely.\n",
"Just to add, in an ideal situation yes. But our bodies ability to absorb isn't linear, so really realistically this wouldn't be the case. Time is a big factor when it comes to nutrient absorption which will determine down the line how your body utilizes the energy and how much of it deposits as fat. ",
"Not exactly, especially if we consider this 4k calorie load to be 'new' food for your stomach, in which case its not as efficient with it's breakdown. If split over 2 consecutive days, more bacteria exists to handle it more efficiently, but the overall impact is low.\n\nYou'll just struggle with increased ghrelin sensitivity with an expectation of another 4k while fasting. Lower loads consecutively pay off more.",
"Hi OP! Please let me explain how your proposed diet plan works:\n\n1st day: you eat a bunch of food, your body has too much in its stomach. Bloated, storing fat, excreting useless remains that went unused.\n\n2nd day: no food. Your stomach is empty and starving, your body goes into survival mode, resorting to fat and muscle stores to provide energy.\n\nTwo days isn't a long time. Your body wouldn't be destroyed from not eating the 2nd day. Therefore, you won't yield any statistical comparative results from a 4000/1day 0/1day to a 2000/2day diet. However, just seeing the difference in those two days shows that it's better to have a consistent daily ritual, rather than throw your body off... Now *that's* unhealthy."
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2h3tgh | how do large animals mate? | Firstly I'm thinking of hoofed quadrupeds like horses and cattle. Is it doggy style? Can the male's penis reach the female's vagina? And can the male not only jump onto two legs to get onto the female's back, but then can the female hold all that weight while they do it? On video I've seen turtles do it doggy style and the sheer physics of it amazed me. And then what about say, crocodiles which have a big tail, do they go belly-to-belly? Also elephants, what the ungodly fuck happens there? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h3tgh/eli5how_do_large_animals_mate/ | {
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"Yes, most large mammals (including elephants) do it doggy style. And yes, they are generally well hung to be able to do so.\n\nEdit: Not 100% sure on crocs, but id be surprised if they did it any other way than in the water belly-to-belly",
"Having lived on a farm for years, yes.\n\nLarge farm animals such as cattle, horses, even pigs, all do it \"doggy style\". In fact, that's how most 4-legged mammals mate, cats, lions, wolves, tigers, goats, sheep, etc.\n\nThe male less jumps onto two legs and more tips himself back onto them while climbing up the female with his front legs. Imagine trying to climb onto you kitchen table while on all fours.\n\nMost animals are incredibly \"well hung\" to be able to do this. Hence where the term \"hung like a horse\" comes from. It should also be noted that the vaginal opening isn't on the bottom, but right next to the anus, if not sharing the opening.\n\nThe females can generally hold a lot of weight. Think of a horse, a healthy horse can easily hold a 200 lbs man, plus his supplies for extended periods, the few minutes (if that) needed for the male to mount is easy."
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1oeisx | why inbred people/animals have mental and appearance issues | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oeisx/eli5_why_inbred_peopleanimals_have_mental_and/ | {
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"Think of a family you know. Preferably one with both parents and a couple kids. Do they have a common look? Perhaps a common cheek structure? Big forehead? Small ears? Let's go with small ears.\n\n\nSomewhere in their genetic make-up is a gene that's controlling that small ear size. It's balanced with the other parent's big-ear or normal-ear gene, so it's not quite a super small ear, but it's smaller than normal.\n\n\nIf the kids reproduced with each other, it's genetically more likely that both parents have a higher likelihood of having that small ear gene, and the offspring then has a much higher chance of having really small ears. Not just small, but smaller than their parents. If that child then reproduced with another family member, the small ear gene is even MORE likely to show up strongly in the child, and maybe that big forehead I mentioned earlier starts to make a more pronounced appearance too.\n\n\nIt can take a number of generations for minor issues to show up, but serious issues - most notably, some really ugly genetic diseases - can show up almost immediately.\n"
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403ptv | how exactly do people actually support el chapo, and want him freed? | I just can't understand how I can go on social media and see people rallying for the release of El Chapo, with hashtags such as #freeelchapo. Is turning an eye to murder, child kidnappings and drug trafficking suddenly okay? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/403ptv/eli5_how_exactly_do_people_actually_support_el/ | {
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"like Escobar I imagine he Won over the public with privately funded benefits/welfare for the poor using his drug money, Robin hood tactics I think they call it.",
"The same reason people support organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda: in areas that are treated poorly by the government criminal organizations provide state-like services and people like them for it. It's hardly ever middle-class urbanites who support people/organizations like this. It's typically rural poor or oppressed minorities and the like."
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9zb97e | why do benzodiazepines and barbiturates inhibit the rem stage of sleep? does gaba play a role in stages of sleep? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zb97e/eli5_why_do_benzodiazepines_and_barbiturates/ | {
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"GABA transmitters, in basic and incomplete terms, are similar to an on/off switch for neural transmission.\n\nWhenever you ingest a psychoactive, it does it’s best to mimic neurological activity, and your body basically sees itself as already producing similar chemicals. When these two factors come into play, it results in the undesirable effects of physically addictive drugs.\n\nThe animal mind is complex, and is constantly working to survive as effective and efficient as possible. When it can take shortcuts it will.\n\nAnd while those drugs can mimic the effect of GABA, it doesn’t form the chains that will persist into something else at later stages of metabolism and electrical potential after and during the absorption and breakdown of GABA...as well as what is being substituted being taken into account. GABA is a relatively simple chain, but most of the drugs taken that inhibit its receptors are not, equaling more/less activity than desired.\n\nSo with those factors, simulation/substitution and non-escalation, the brain is left on a broken loop, if you will abide such a crude term. There are constant streams of “misfires” from compounds that resemble GABA chains making it to the absorption stage, and the brain is still seeing the transmitter being satisfied, regardless of ill result.\n\nEssentially, your brain is being satisfied at this point in time. It doesn’t know that this substitution is going to stop, so it relaxes itself. The GABA inhibitors don’t do the complete work of GABA, so the chain of events are left unsatisfied in the brain and body, causing a traffic jam...just to be short and simple, not to mention incapable of having a better term. This traffic jam turns into signals downstream that aren’t resolved from a full amount of actual GABA doing the job and being present, so more signals go upstream, to the brain, basically saying, “hey, I’m gonna do this.” Your brain catches that signal, and it probably won’t directly respond...but I like to think of it as a computer. It will sweep the system, but that just sends more signals across that body....and due to GABA not being able to be responsive before, during, and after, it doesn’t filter out appropriately, so channels that aren’t intended to have that pulse get it.\n\n*I almost didn’t post, but I figured that that artist level of bullshit deserves to be posted:)*"
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svpwl | monounsaturated fat, saturated fat, trans fat... fat's fat right? fat. | Which ones are good, which ones are bad... and which kind of fat is the fat you can see on a juicy red steak? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/svpwl/eli5_monounsaturated_fat_saturated_fat_trans_fat/ | {
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"Fat is a long carbon chain with a bunch of hydrogens attached to all the carbons. There's also a little head at the top of the chain but that's not really all that important for here.\n\nSaturated fat is a straight chain. It's a straight line of carbons with multiple hydrogens attached to them all.\n\nUnsaturated fat means there's a kink/bend somewhere in the chain because some hydrogens are missing (it's not *saturated* with hydrogen. Hence: *unsaturated*).\n\nMonounsaturated has 1 kink/bend (mono meaning one). Polyunsaturated has more than 1 kink/bend (poly meaning more than one).\n\nThose straight chains are like legos. You can stack them on top of each other pretty easily and they'll make a nice dense bunch, that forms a solid. That's what animal fat is. Saturated fats are also linked to heart disease.\n\nUnsaturated fats don't stack as well because legos with kinks in them don't fit on top of one another nearly as efficiently. They can't conveniently stick together as well, so they're typically liquids rather than solids. They don't have as strong of a link to heart disease.\n\nRule of thumb: Solid fats like animal fats are saturated and liquid fats like oils are unsaturated. Unsaturated tends to be healthier.\n \n\nEdit: Forgot to mention trans fat. Trans fat is unsaturated, but it's not kinked. Normal unsaturated fats are have cis- bonds, which means that they give the chain a bend. Trans- bonds, like the ones in trans fats keep the straight chain. They can stack like saturated fats. The problem is trans fats are man-made, so your body doesn't really know how to process them. It has enzymes for dealing with the cis-bonds in unsaturated fats, but those trans-bonds cause a lot more problems for those enzymes. Avoid trans fats.",
"Trans fat is the only super super evil one for you. It's best to just consider it a poison.\n\nSaturated fat isn't nearly as bad for you as people think. It doesn't cause plaque build-up: cholesterol does that, specifically, vldl cholesterol. Some people believe (incorrectly) that sat. fat increases these vldl's. In fact, your body stores its fat as saturated fat. SO by that logic, when losing weight and processing all that extra fat, if this theory were true, you'd see a huge JUMP in vldl's, right?\n\nTurns out, no. When losing weight, you do see a jump in cholesterol, both HDL and LDL. *But not vldl*. (vldl is 1 of the two types of LDL. vldl is the only bad one of the two types).\n\nPolyunsaturated fats are a little more complicated, as they get broken down into (/ contain? sorry, need clarification here) Omega 6 or Omega 3 fatty acids. Scientists aren't exactly sure on the correlation of Omega 6 to Omega 3. there's a ratio that your body prefers, but we haven't narrowed it down yet. We DO know that more Omega 3 is very good (hence Fish oil, which is almost pure Omega 3), and Omega 6 is bad in excess. "
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5r9jsb | since smartphones are basically tiny computers, why aren't people assembling their own phones like we do for computers? | Is it just a matter of everything being too small, and the parts being too specialized? Don't most phones have similar processors and chips etc? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r9jsb/eli5_since_smartphones_are_basically_tiny/ | {
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"you got it. same is true of laptops and AIO^*edit PCs.\n\nto gain the nescessary density, the components are uniquely designed to shoehorn together into the specially sized case. all of the bones of a phone are proprietary. \n\nEven modular parts like sensors and memory chips are largely soldered in place because slots and ports take too much space.",
"People have been hooking up telephone modems to computers for many decades, and that's all that makes a \"smartphone.\" But the trouble is that people want them to be very small and, like laptops, they have to fit a particular form factor. These design requirements make it harder to keep components accessible, and manufacturers have no real incentive to do so. This makes it a lot harder to assemble your own smartphone compared to a desktop computer with a modem. And accordingly, because most people have neither the desire nor skill to do so, there is large consumer market for the components in the way there is for desktops."
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3jddvn | what's the benifit of working at your desk while standing instead of sitting? | A number of people at my company have something at their desks that they can raise up to stand while working. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jddvn/eli5_whats_the_benifit_of_working_at_your_desk/ | {
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"It's better for your back/body. Sitting for long periods of time is bad for the human body. By standing you remove those health problems, including back strain from poorly adjusted chairs/desks.\n\nEdit: Yes... standing all day is equally bad. The point of standing desks is to stand for a few hours and sit for a few hours. The key is **balance** people.",
"I got one. Varidesk 48\" pro. It's not that standing is some magical cure. It's simply to give me alternate positions throughout day. Prevents repetitive injuries. Plus I tend not to slouch when standing.",
"Improves posture, can burn calories, makes people feel less lazy than sitting at a desk all day, etc. ",
"IIRC doing too much of anything is bad for your body, whether that's standing or sitting. Our bodies seem to do best in changing situations rather than being static.",
"[This might help](_URL_0_)\nThere's a lot of scientific backing that Im not familliar with enough to ELI5 but these guys are.",
"Aside from the postural benefits everyone else has posted, a lot of my colleagues have said that standing had had benefits for collaboration in team environments. People are more likely to gather around someone who's standing, than someone who's sitting. Standing seems to appear more open and approachable, sitting comes off as more private.",
"If you are standing up occasionally your butt won't get so sweaty, thus, less Swass. \n\nAlso, sitting for long periods of time is apparently unhealthy, and can cause hemorrhoids. \n",
"I do it to keep awake right after lunch. Its a little harder to fall asleep at your desk while standing.",
"Bad knees and plantar fasciitis vs back pain and increased risk of heart disease/blood clots.",
"There's a great podcast called [99 Percent Invisible](_URL_0_) that has an episode about chairs. It's a design podcast, but just generally very interesting. According to their chair expert they interview, sitting is becoming the new smoking (what isn't?). But consensus is stirring toward sitting all day being a serious detriment to the human body. So people are adopting the use of standing desks to reduce sitting exposure.\n\nI should add: their expert recommends sitting in a variety of chairs to give your body a variety of positions/comfort levels and whatnot so it still gains some resilience if you must be sitting. Gives some credibility to quirky cafes with loads of assorted chairs. ",
"For me, one of the biggest benefits to my treadmill desk (I alternate walking and standing) is improved concentration, which with ADHD, is no small thing. _URL_0_",
"Its definitely better for your body and posture if you stand and move around as much as possible in place of sitting. It is, however the current fad and as such, the benefits are greatly exaggerated by a lot of people. I've literally heard someone say sitting is the new cancer. That person has clearly never been around someone with cancer.",
"It is actually better to alternate. If you stay in one position for too long it will cause problems. I alternate throughout the day. A couple years ago I got a herniated disc in my back just from sitting. Nothing else, just sitting. Sitting will destroy your back but standing will destroy your knees and different parts of your back. You just need balance between the two.",
"Others have mentioned on posture and circulation, but it also helps burn more calories. You're actively having to maintain your balance while standing, which takes effort, even if you're unaware of it. I've known of people losing like 15 pounds, and the only thing they did differently is start to use a standing desk.",
"Just watch this, this is the most concise video i found about this topic so far. _URL_0_",
"It's better health wise (improved circulation, insulin sensitivity, lower triglycerides, using muscles, etc) to be moving on occasion like getting up to walk every 30 min or so, than sitting for like 3-4+ hours straight. Standing more often is probably the next best thing if walking isn't an option.",
"I actually built at desk that goes from standing to sitting to zero-G lay down mode. I had a herniated disc in my back and could not stand or sit. After a few weeks in lay down mode all is good. Now I switch between three positions + go walk around a bit every now and then...",
"Haha fuck off. I have been standing 8 hours every fucking day. Fuck standing. My workplace never gives good shoes and you have to beg for it for weeks to get certified steeltoe shoes. \n\nFuck off 'insert workplace here' ",
"Mostly, you get to tell people that you're better than them because you stand at your desk. \n\nIt really just switches out one group of problems for another. If you have a sitting desk, get up and stretch at regular intervals. If you have a standing desk, get a stool or something for parts of the day. \n\nLike many health fads, the benefits are exaggerated both in scope and quality, although I will note that a standing desk will help in many things that typically trouble office workers, who have no problem finding time to sit down during the day even with standing desks. (Meetings, coffee breaks, talking with clients, etc.).",
"In the pelvis there is a muscle called the illiopsoas. It originates in the base of the pelvis and inserts on the upper portion of the femur. It acts to flex the leg at the hip. When you sit this muscle is shortened, chronic shortening (aka sitting a lot) makes the muscle stay in this shortened position causing an anterior pelvic tilt. This seems unimportant but in terms of biomechanics having an anterior pelvic tilt puts a huge stress on the body to compensate for an inefficient distribution of weight through the pelvis. Hope this is helpful.",
"The problem isn't sitting or standing, it's working. Humans were never designed to do the same stupid bullshit for eight hours a day. It's stressful and bad for you. But, since we can't find a way to have a society that benefits some people more than others without it, by all means buy plants, meditate in the free time you don't have, and stand up for eight hours at a time to be \"healthy.\" Don't forget to avoid GMOs and gluten, and pay to go to the gym regularly. ",
"While most people talk of the health benefits versus sitting, there's a bunch of other neat things you experience.\n\nI transitioned from sitting 15+ hours a day (yes, sitting on your couch at home counts, too!), to standing 9+. I'm inherently lazy, but once you get over the first couple of days standing, it becomes easy. \n\nSitting for extended period becomes uncomfortable, so you want to be active more. I haven't gained any weight since I stopped sitting at work, and this is without any diet changes or any exercise.\n\nFocus and productivity increase. I don't get tired while working as much, if at all. Work is more pleasurable. I end the day with far more mental and physical energy to do stuff at home. My thighs are noticeably more ripped. Even bowel movements occur closer to the natural cycle than before. The only major factor I can attribute to these improvements is my change to standing more.\n\nThe above is purely anecdotal, but there are many studies and other analyses that validate similar changes.",
"Sitting reduces circulation by placing too much pressure on the veins and nerves in your legs and butt. Standing poses fewer risks sitting does but even standing for long periods of time can also impact your circulation by causing pooling around your ankles. Your heart ends up having to working harder to draw the blood from around your feet back up to your heart. Standing needs to be accompanied by moving. Humans were designed to move and not to be still for long periods of time due to our hunting/scavenging nature. Being still for hours a day is really bad for us.",
"I work in hotels, on the operations side, so I'm constantly standing... For example, if I have a shift for 8 hours, I will be standing for 7.5 hours (assuming I have a half hour meal break). The benefit, I feel, is that time actually goes by quicker. The first week of work was when my feet and legs hurt the most. Nowadays, I don't feel any pain from standing so much. If I were seated that whole time, I feel like I would snooze off so easily. ",
"I've been doing it for years and would never go back to sitting. If there is one main difference, it's my alertness and overall energy level",
"Desks are built for you to sit in front of them, so when you stand, you make yourself incredibly uncomfortable. This makes you quit working sooner than you would if you were sitting, so you go off to do things that you actually enjoy and are happier.",
"Very little is actually proven about the benefits of standing/sitting versus just sitting. Right now, there's a lot of speculation and some data that suggests that standing at your desk occasionally is a good idea, but nothing I've seen that would make it any better than going for a walk once or twice a day.",
"It's because you're burning more calories which is generally better for your health if you're sedentary.",
"What I know is that after a decade working split shifts in retail standing all the time I am enjoying every second I spend sitting on my chair in my office job. I'm sure it's different all over, but the few people at my work who have requested standing desks are all recent grads from ritzy schools who never have had a job before. Maybe standing is the wave of the future, but I will stick with my chair.",
"it's easier to talk about your crossfit milestones and gluten free lifestyle with coworkers.",
"It's so that people will create knee and hip problems to accompany their neck and back problems. Get a standing desk and find yourself slouching, putting all your weight on one leg and hip then alternating - making your entire body into an S shape. Sitting is not bad for you if proper posture is used. To use proper posture while standing requires far more energy and will be compromised much faster. Keep your chair. Get up and walk around every 30 minutes or so. ",
"You get to tell everyone about all of the amazing health benefits while you look down upon them.",
"All the standing desks I've found are inordinately expensive. I just need something big enough for my laptop! Maybe big enough for a coffee mug, if I'm getting greedy. Why do they all cost so much?\n\nIf anybody can point me to a simple standing desk that I could use around my house, I would be grateful. ",
"If you work in a sales position, standing is also recommended as it makes you more active and energetic - you move around more so you sound more excited and the like.",
"I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but a lot of the issues for people when sitting for long periods of time arise because of the weight that is immediately (and completely) transferred to your lower back. \n\nYour lower back typically isn't designed to bear this much weight (even if you regularly work on core strength), and so this of course isn't ideal for your body's overall skeletal & muscular health (given the importance of this area of your body).\n\nConversely, standing for a long period of time - particularly if you're largely static - will have similar consequences on your structural health (e.g. people often lean to one side naturally).\n\nDon't be too immediately taken in by figures (\"death rate per 100,000; sitting vs. standing\" etc.) - they simply don't robustly accommodate other lifestyle factors (including the ambient workplace environment / stress etc.).\n\nI personally am not convinced of the strength of argument that people lend to standing over sitting; As many people have already stated in general reference to sitting vs. standing, the key is balance. If you're job requires you at a desk, I would say a high quality ergonomic chair, regular movement away from your desk and moderate core strength-building exercises are key.",
"Oh me me me me! Ask me! B.S. in Exercise Science and M.S. in Strength and Conditioning. \n\nThe issue isn't limited to sitting versus standing. It's about balance. We've lost the balance in many of our body's systems due to industrialization and ease of life. One of the biggest hits is our muscular system. Imagine you are constantly sitting on your heels on the floor and lying your chest on your thighs all balled up. Well this is the closest you could get to what we would call total body flexion. The result is roughly half of your muscles would be forever shortening and the rest forever lengthening. Horrible for being able to do anything if you were to unravel and try to move functionally. Well, sitting is a less dramatic version of that yet people still do it for 8-10 hours easily and this causes the same outcome. ",
"Scientists have discovered that the best walking speed for solving problems is 1.8 mph. Read that somewhere.",
"Stander here. I don't get tired at 3 pm since I started standing 2 1/2 years ago. My productivity is way up in the afternoons. Also, I am free to just roam about and grab water from the kitchen or head over to the copy machine because I don't have to get up. I also find that my endurance when standing at shows or just in general is a lot better.\n\nOn the downside, I get really tired and feel lazy as fuck if I sit down all day. Also, when someone comes over to my desk to chat, I awkwardly don't know what to do. I sort of move away from my computer to the side and just face them. It's... awkward.\n\nIt does not make me stronger, better, more likable, or a superior human. I also don't plan on going back to being a sitter.",
"I can't sit still I need to move all day, I went from a service job to an office job I can't sit still fuck seats they are the opiate of the masses sheeple rise, rise, rise sins ",
"I sit at a desk for more than 10 hours a day. A while ago I constructed a standing desk from IKEA parts, and started alternating between sitting and standing. I generally felt much more energized and I could concentrate better. \n\nWe moved office a while ago and I didn't bring my unstable IKEA setup, but I supported a [kickstarter project (JASWIG)](_URL_0_) last week that has built a nicely designed standing desk. It's worth checking out, and their webpage has a lot of information on this exact question. \n\n",
"Actually, I can't believe most of the top voted comments are related to posture and blood flow. I took some I/O (Industrial and Organizational) Psych courses in college. I was very interested in this. This field of psychology deals a lot with efficiency in the work environment. My professor actually had an article published comparing standing, sitting, and rotary bike working stations. This was not to test long-term benefits such as blood circulation or health effects, but to test levels of brain activity and efficiency. The rotary stations were beneficial, as compared to standing and sitting, the two of which could not be claimed more beneficial. \n\nTL;DR: the brain gets bored, more easily distracted in sedentary positions. Moving around allows for, in theory, more efficient thinking/production.",
"Don't feel the need to poop. Like when I fart it doesn't feel like its about to bust the chair and diaharea explode now",
"Aside from the physical effects, it also seems to stimulate your mind a little. Being seated leads to a more sedentary mind as where your whole body (and, thus, the brain) is ready to be more active.",
"One effect that I haven't seen mentioned: as a result of having a height-adjustable desk, which lets me have a mix of sitting and standing, I'm now much more comfortable standing for reasonable lengths of time. I'm much less inclined to sit down whenever I have the chance, because often standing is just as comfortable (or more so if it's a bad chair).\n\nAlso, it's much easier to leave your desk when you're standing. For example, when my water bottle reaches empty I'm more likely to immediately fill it up if I'm standing.",
"Blood circulation is the advantage...cardiac health essentially. Standing requires more work for your heart/vessel system. More work is better than less work.\n\nStanding > sitting for improved vascular performance and heart function",
"You look like such a douchebag that no one ever invites you to lunch again. \n\nSo not only do you save money on going out to lunch, but while everyone else is out you can steal their stuff. It's a win-win situation. ",
"You get to feel pompous and look down on your coworkers at the same time. It's the ultimate win win for a cross fitter or vegan. That's the trifecta of douche.",
"I'm sure it would a big relief for guys to have less heat collecting at crotch level. When standing, the testicles hang a little bit away from the thighs. Male physiology requires that adult testicles be a bit cooler than the rest than normal body temperature (a little less than 37 Celsius or 98.6 Fahrenheit). That's the reason the scrotum gets so sweaty. Nature intends the sweat to cool off that part of the body, but without clothing that's airy enough, that can't always occur. Certainly, if you look at pictures of tribal peoples who are still living in that old lifestyle, you'll probably see that the men typically squat rather than sit (even though their boys are comfortable sitting). Oftentimes, men in those tribes might sleep in woven hammocks rather than beds, which allow more air circulation.",
"transport London showed that on London busses where the busses have a driver (who sits) and ticket taker (that stands often) the ticket takers lived an average of 8 years longer.",
"Standing is also great for people who need to talk on the phone all day, it frees up the diaphragm.",
"No more butt sweat marks from my fat boss' ass. Whose idea was the plastic chairs anyway?",
"As bipedal organisms, humans have evolved several mechanisms which make standing/walking incredibly efficient. From the orientation of your hips, the structure of your knees and ankles to the arch in your feet, everything from the pelvis down is equipped to be stable and use the least amount of energy when standing. On the other hand, sitting has only been around relatively recently and it was only in the past few decades that we started spending the majority of our day in chairs.\n\nWhen you are sitting the center of gravity is your lower back which is supporting most of your weight (especially when slouching). When you are standing however, most of this weight is effectively balanced between your two legs. Due to these evolutionary adaptations, your legs are well equipped to handle these forces (bonus that you have two of them to distribute the load).\n\nThis famous graph from a study in 1976 demonstrates the comparative loads on the discs in your spine in different positions:\n_URL_1_\n\nAs you can see, sitting and slouching are the worst possible positions due to the heavy strain on your back. Along with weight from a big belly and low fitness levels, this places stress on the ligaments and muscles holding your back together resulting in things like a herniated disc. It is thought that this is the reason why back problems are so prevalent in our society today.\n\nAlso, recent studies have shown that sitting for prolonged periods of time is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and death. This effect appears to be independent of the amount of physical activity done. The mechanism of this association is currently unknown. In other words: no matter how much you exercise, if you sit for more than several hours a day you are more likely to get diabetes, cancer, and dead.\nRef: _URL_0_ (paywall)",
"It will be good for the spinal column and the overall structure of the body. And I thinks some companies are trying to encourage this kind of work environment already. _URL_0_",
"I worked as a retoucher for years, so lots of computer work. My back couldn't take it anymore so I could no longer sit for more than 3 minutes without my upper back hurting, no matter how much I paid for a chair or whatever recommendations I followed.\n\nSo I \"made\" myself a standing desk (IKEA wall mountable folding kitchen table - [link](_URL_0_)) and the pain went away instantly! In fact I could work for any amount of time without back pain.\n\nHowever, instead, I had some foot and hip pain but that's easily remedied by not standing still constantly. It also probably requires more energy to stand, so it does make you more tired and you'll want to sit down eventually, so it's nice to be able to sit down and continue working for a short time, then stand back up again. But if you stand still all day it's also bad for you. The key is moving around a bit *often*.\n\nAlso if you're standing you can easily walk around for 10 seconds while you download a file or something, which means you never stand still for long. If you're sitting, you're hardly going to stand up for that.",
"i think the practice of standing at your desk is to learn and take your bosses dick up your ass. if not also walking around with a stick up your ass like he does. depending on what company you work at, and what your boss's personality is like.",
"A lot of people use them as an excuse to not exercise; a replacement if you will. Sure, there are benefits. Burn a few more calories, not sitting on your ass all day (sitting while working, and then going home to sit while relaxing). I think it's dumb though but I also don't work a job where I have to sit all day."
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"http://donsnotes.com/health/spine/loads.html"
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"https://news.illinois.edu/ii/15/0115/employees-stand-while-working.html"
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"http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/90245890/"
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4k7hml | why can't cryptographic algorithms be reversedly used? | Maybe I didn't explain myself good enough in the question:
If I understand correctly, for cryptographic algorithms like SHA-256 you put your input (for instance, "Hello, world!") and the algorithm makes some kind of steps (I guess always the same steps) to transform it into a string of numbers and letters.
So, if I am the creator of the algorithm and I know what steps does the algorithm (because I created it and I designed the steps), why can't I make those same steps backwards to decypher the outputs?
Please if you don't understand what I mean or this doesn't make any sense tell me and I will try to explain it better.
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k7hml/eli5_why_cant_cryptographic_algorithms_be/ | {
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"SHA and other hash algorithms are one way only. That's not so strange: addition is also a one-way operation. \n\nTake 3 and 5. Add them, and you get 8. \nIt's not possible to go the other way: if you start with 8 you can't tell if it's the sum of 1 and 7, 2 and 6, or 3 and 5. \n\nHash algorithms are more complicated, but the principle is the same. ",
"The functions used are inherently one way, meaning that there is no way to exactly determine what was used to get this result in the first place. \n\nAn example for that kind of function is modulus: It is the remainder of a division. E.g. 15 / 10 = 1, remainder 5. So 15 mod 10 is 5.\n\nBut there is an infinite number of numbers for which mod 10 returns 5:\n\n5 mod 10 = 5 \n15 mod 10 = 5 \n175 mod 10 = 5 \n1523786182736128736182615 mod 10 = 5 \n\nIn other words: every number which ends with 5 will have that same result. So if you know that the result is 5, you have no way of finding out what the password was.\n\nOther operations are logical operations like bitwise OR: You compare two numbers in binary bit by bit, and if one or both bits are 1, the bit it the result is also 1, otherwise it's 0. Example:\n\n1100 (12) OR 0101 (5) = 1101 (13)\n\nAgain, you have multiple ways to get the same result:\n\n1101 OR 1101 = 1101 \n1000 OR 0101 = 1101 \n...\n\nThen there is the good old fashioned multiplication. Multiply two large enough numbers, and you'll have a very hard time finding the factors. Example: 24567\\*5773=141825291. All you can do is to divide that number by prime numbers until you have only prime numbers left - which can take very, very long with large numbers, especially if you used very large prime numbers as factors.\n\nCombine multiple operations like that, and you get a very hard to crack hashing function. It doesn't help to know how the hashing function works - ideally, the only way to reverse it without testing all possible inputs is to use the key which allows you to reverse it. "
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5l6fo4 | why when you look at a computer screen from below it seems to change to shades of red and from above shades of blue? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l6fo4/eli5_why_when_you_look_at_a_computer_screen_from/ | {
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"All LCD monitors are made up of tiny red, green, and blue boxes. These boxes are arranged in at least three different layouts, and each layout has its own quirks / weird effects. Think of it like driving by a corn field or watching something through vertical fence boards as you walk by it: what you see changes depending on the angle. \n\nSpecifically, the least expensive 90% of monitors (and expensive gaming ones) use TN panels. That type of panel has the most color change when you move to the side or (most of all) look at it from below. "
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7g6js1 | how do movie prop belt-fed machine guns cycle through rounds that appear to have real projectiles in the casing, and eject an empty casing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7g6js1/eli5_how_do_movie_prop_beltfed_machine_guns_cycle/ | {
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"They probably do some shots firing blanks, but not many because blanks cause jams very frequently.\n\nAfter that it's probably just good camera angles to make you think they are ejecting.",
"It depends on the shot.\n\nSometimes that might actually be a gun firing at a target that's off-camera somewhere.\n\nOther times, it could be a prop that's specifically made to have a shell spit out and a belt of fake bullets fed in through some hidden mechanism (if it were me, I'd use a \"sandbag\" to have a tub of casings and somewhere for the belt to go, for example)\n\nOther times, it could be a blank or squib round.\n\nPart of the job of the crew is to figure out what's appropriate and safe for the shot they're doing.",
"practical effects: fire a blank round that doesn't have a bullet, only powder and either crimped or wax sealed. the barrel of the gun is plugged so the combustion gases can still operating the full auto cycle. \n\ncomputer generated effect: actor holds up the prop, pretend it shoots. do some rattling, then it's off the CGI team to make fire and sound and add in the visual of empty casing popping out.\n\n\n\nthere have been lots of cases where the CG is wrong. in Matrix, the lobby scene, Neo comes out from behind the pillar and fires full auto CZ Skorpion from both hands. the scorpion fires a pistol round, which has straight walled cases. except the cases that are dropping in the scene are necked cases, which obviously don't come from the scorpion\n\n_URL_2_\n\nstraight wall casing: _URL_1_\n\nnecked casings: _URL_0_"
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/223_Remington.jpg/300px-223_Remington.jpg",
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEuZgK669zY&t=97"
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7lyw0i | why are car designs today so mundane opposed to car designs of the past (1930s-1990s)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7lyw0i/eli5_why_are_car_designs_today_so_mundane_opposed/ | {
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"From 1930 to 1990 ish oil especially in America was very cheap so they made all kind of designs and now oil is more expensive so cars have to have aerodynamic designs to save oil. "
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92b30h | how can we see the light from other planets from earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/92b30h/eli5_how_can_we_see_the_light_from_other_planets/ | {
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"text": [
"The same way we can see the moon, they are basically big sun reflectors, the brightest ones are Venus and Jupiter, one because it reflects a lot and is close, while the latter because it reflects a lot and it’s huge \n\nYou can definitely also see mars, and it probably could be the brightest due to some orbital position that makes it close to the earth or something ",
"Same way you see the moon. Planets, moons, comets, etc, reflect light from stars and since there's nothing to stop the light waves from reaching earth you can see the shine.",
"Mars is especially close right now. A few years ago it was the closest it has been in like 30000 years and now it's only 3% further away than that. It has to do with planets having elliptical orbits. But yes, it's the Sun's reflected light.",
"The way we see anything and everything is by the reflection of light off all surfaces in unique patterns into our eyes, which translate those unique patterns into visual info.\n\nColor comes from the particular wavelength absorption capabilities of that surface.\n\nShape comes from our eyes’ analysis of spatial distance of the varying infinite points of that surface.\n\nIt works the same way with planets!\n\n"
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122job | emergency room admission prioritization. | I just feel like there's probably some crazy system in place and I'd like to know more about it in case I ever find myself in a situation. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/122job/eli5_emergency_room_admission_prioritization/ | {
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"Assuming you're talking about walking in, rather than arriving by ambulance:\n\nThey take you to talk to a nurse who reviews the basics of your case, assuming there was no immediately obvious medical emergency (like bleeding all over the place).\n\nThat nurse then decides how pressing your treatment is.\n\nFor example, a broken bone or possible fall injury generally don't require immediate treatment, beyond making sure the person don't move affected areas (arm, back, etc). They can just fit you in to the X-ray machines and such as there is time.\n\nHowever, if you were there for something like suspected internal bleeding, stroke, etc the time that they spent waiting could have a serious impact on your chances of survival and recovery. So they could prioritize having the doctors see you over someone with a broken arm.\n\nThe emergency room has guidelines like these for a wide range of cases - and it generally comes down to who is likely to die or be seriously maimed for life first.\n\nWhich is also why people who arrive by ambulance generally get to skip the line waiting for a room - if you couldn't even get there under your own power, it's much more likely you need immediate treatment.",
"It's called Triage. Not a crazy system, but a long time medical practice. Fix the most broken people first. Treat the worst injuries/time sensitive threats first. I.e. You have a broken wrist, the other guy is having chest pains, and someone shows up with the sniffles. Your wrist isn't getting any broker, but swift intervention may stop a heart attack. Assess for heart issues. Chest pains turn out to be a gas bubble. place on ignore. Now we look at the wrist, gas bubble waits. whoops, gunshot victim shows up. Wrist waits for a while while gunshot person is stabilized and sent to surgery. Sniffles over there watches another rerun of SportsCenter, and we go back to that pesky wrist. Gas bubble falls asleep, but then farts it all out so he's woken up and discharged. Sniffles complains, but then again, who cares. Back to the wrist. call someone in to X-ray and cast it, but then a motorcycle rider shows up, on a stretcher. Tox screen and radiology. Holds up the wrist x-ray for a while. Sniffles is now on his ipad signing up for a fantasy football league. You get fed up, grab a scalpel and cut your other wrist, up and down, like a pro. Start bleeding on the floor. Now you're a priority.",
"I just went to the ER on Saturday and I was assigned a \"2\". I was asked to go sit down, but was called back 1 min later. I had a nasty gash on my forehead.\n\nCan someone explain the numbering system?",
"I just want everyone to know: OP once viewed his own sperm under a microscope.",
"Triage. \n\nThe more serious, life-threatening cases go before an arrow to the knee. "
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3sn4wp | how does storing ice cream upside-down prevent it from crystalizing? | When I was younger I remember seeing a local ice cream shop turn all the ice cream upside-down at closing. I was told that it's to help keep it from crystalizing. How is this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sn4wp/eli5_how_does_storing_ice_cream_upsidedown/ | {
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"text": [
"Maybe try /r/askscience? Because I've never heard of this, but Googling tells me it's true, so I'd be curious to hear an answer too."
]
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[]
] |
|
1wzh6k | why do sites like reddit need to shutdown for maintenance while sites like youtube does not? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wzh6k/eli5_why_do_sites_like_reddit_need_to_shutdown/ | {
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"YouTube has multiple servers that they can redirect traffic to while they are fixing a broken server. Reddit does have multiple servers, but not as many as any huge company such as Google, Apple, GoDaddy, etc.\n\nEdit: Clarity",
"You own a taxi service with a dozen taxis. Even when one breaks down, you can still be hired because you have lots of taxis. I own a taxi. When it goes in for maintenance. I'm out if luck because it's my only taxi.\n\nThe main benefit of having multiple taxis is that you can have more people use your service than can fit in a single taxi. But taxis are expensive, both to obtain and to maintain, so unless having one taxi would cause regular user problems, ie lots of people want to get in the taxi but it's full, then you don't go out and buy more, because it's not economically viable. Besides, your taxi usually has room for all the people who want to ride in it simultaneously.\n\nTaxis in this analogy are called servers. Roughly, servers are processing units that store the information that can be accessed in the website. Just like all the information in your word documents is stored in your computer, all the information on Reddit, the posts, log in data for every user, the programs that determine how the website works, all that is stored somewhere. That somewhere is on the server.\n\nEDIT: Added a bit of explanation of what servers are."
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1yyahh | why are new york guns laws so much more strict than the rest of the country? | The reason that I am asking is because New York Knicks guard is charged with felony possession after his estranged wife gave the gun to the police and told them it was his. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yyahh/eli5_why_are_new_york_guns_laws_so_much_more/ | {
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"New York politically leans fairly solidly left, and that tends to go hand-in-hand with an anti-gun position. Due to federalism, where many laws and policies are left to the states, each state has the ability to set many of its own gun laws, and so more liberal states tend to have stricter gun laws than more conservative states.",
"Because the city (New York City) is the basis of power in the state. The majority of the population as well as the income of the state flows through NYC. As such, what NYC wants is what the rest of the state has to live with.\n\nThe most recent wave of laws that passed within the state was branded as being well received publicly, but was actually pushed through on short notice and without the approval of the majority of NY counties. Parts of the laws have been struck down recently, but legal progress is incredibly slow. \n\n_URL_0_"
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4wd5e8 | why isn't there a big centrist party in the us? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4wd5e8/eli5_why_isnt_there_a_big_centrist_party_in_the_us/ | {
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"*Both* parties *used* to be a lot more centrist. At this point in time the country is a lot more divisive than it used to be. ",
"Normally, the two main parties are either left or right, only because the center is defined as the ideological place between the two main parties. There are normally two parties because when you've been in government long enough, you inevitably lose an election, under first past the post, larger parties win so you need to group to win elections.\n\nIn the US, it isn't worth it to be centrist because parties get more votes from making their own supporters angry enough to vote (by being more extreme) than trying to win the few centrists in a polarised country.",
"It's the fault of the of the [voting system](_URL_0_) we use. A two party system is an inevitability that has nothing to do with what the American populace actually wants. And without a very large change in the system, it's impossible to have more than two parties.\n\nAny 3rd party will just end up unintentionally sabotaging the party that it's closest to. Say a bunch of Democrats decide to vote for the Green Party instead. Well now the democrats just lost a bunch of votes, allowing republicans to win, which nether the green party nor the democrats want.\n\n"
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jskwm | what's so bad about corporate personhood? | People are always ranting about how "the corporations" are inherently bad, that corporations make unethical decisions, that they're eating our children, etc... I'm pretty liberal in my political views, but I feel I'm not knowledgeable enough to form a proper opinion about "the corporations". What are the good sides of corporate personhood and what are the downsides? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jskwm/eli5_whats_so_bad_about_corporate_personhood/ | {
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"Corporate personhood essentially absolves those running the corporation of all responsibility for their actions. What primarily drives corporations to be \"evil\" is that they are pressured to have their profits grow every quarter. Above all else the corporation answers to its stockholders who want higher dividends and for their stock to be worth more. \n\nEverything else takes a back seat to this and we end up with people making decisions that range from laying off several employees despite the company not losing any money because it will grow the profits for that quarter to cutting corners and passing on the costs of pollution to the taxpayers.",
"[watch this (partially) animated short.](_URL_0_) Maybe not tooootally ELI5-appropriate, but maybe like ELI12ish?\n\nalso: be sure to check out the little pop-ups that appear as the video goes on.",
"The biggest problem with corporate personhood is that this legal fiction is used to justify the ability of powerful corporations to flood the political campaign system with lots of money. As such, it becomes more important for politicians to please the people (in this case, \"corporate persons\") who fund their election campaign than it is to please their constituents.\n\nThis is why, for all the supposed disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats as supposedly middle-right and middle-left parties, both are actually radically corporate, and many of the most important issues aren't discussed in a fair, open way, because \"both\" parties agree with each other about them.",
"watch [the corporation](_URL_0_). it's a great documentary that is currently streaming on netflix.",
"Corporate personhood essentially absolves those running the corporation of all responsibility for their actions. What primarily drives corporations to be \"evil\" is that they are pressured to have their profits grow every quarter. Above all else the corporation answers to its stockholders who want higher dividends and for their stock to be worth more. \n\nEverything else takes a back seat to this and we end up with people making decisions that range from laying off several employees despite the company not losing any money because it will grow the profits for that quarter to cutting corners and passing on the costs of pollution to the taxpayers.",
"[watch this (partially) animated short.](_URL_0_) Maybe not tooootally ELI5-appropriate, but maybe like ELI12ish?\n\nalso: be sure to check out the little pop-ups that appear as the video goes on.",
"The biggest problem with corporate personhood is that this legal fiction is used to justify the ability of powerful corporations to flood the political campaign system with lots of money. As such, it becomes more important for politicians to please the people (in this case, \"corporate persons\") who fund their election campaign than it is to please their constituents.\n\nThis is why, for all the supposed disagreement between the Republicans and Democrats as supposedly middle-right and middle-left parties, both are actually radically corporate, and many of the most important issues aren't discussed in a fair, open way, because \"both\" parties agree with each other about them.",
"watch [the corporation](_URL_0_). it's a great documentary that is currently streaming on netflix."
]
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a7bs5s | what kind of tax break do filmmakers get when they film their movies/shows in canada? | I've often heard about the attraction for Hollywood to come north to Canada to film movies and TV shows, but I've never understood exactly why. So I'm curious about what tax breaks these filmmakers get, as in the specifics. Why does Canada offer these attractive tax breaks as opposed other countries? Any downsides financially to filming content in Canada? Are there any other financial incentives to filming in Canada? And which cities in particular (I'm guessing Toronto) have seen the most content produced there and why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7bs5s/eli5_what_kind_of_tax_break_do_filmmakers_get/ | {
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"The government of Canada, and the provincial governments, give tax credits to film companies that make things cheaper. For example, in British Columbia where Vancouver is located there is a refundable tax credit that covers the amount paid in labor costs. \n\nRight off the bat the film company can get 47.5% of the costs they paid their workers back as a tax credit. Since the credit is refundable, that means that the film company gets the full amount, if even they didn't actually pay that much in taxes. This effectively makes hiring people cost half as much in Canada as it would elsewhere.\n\nThere are then additional tax credits for distant location filming, training, post production and visual effects and script writing.\n\nWhy does Canada do this? To attract film companies to their country and regions. First there is the prestige value of having celebrities working in your city. But, there is also the economic benefit of the work they bring to the region. Even if the government loses money on the film production itself, there are other jobs created such as caterers, drivers, hotel workers, etc. that benefit the economy.",
"People vastly underestimate how the tax credits drive production settings. It's not just Canada - it's many, many places. Ever wonder why everything was shot in New Orleans right after the Katrina cleanup? Taxes. Canada? Taxes. Why are all of those 90's movies shot in suburban Chicago? Taxes. \n\nIn general production companies can get up to three kinds of tax incentives when shooting in areas that offer tax breaks. There are credits, deductions, and so called \"national production\" or \"co-production\" tax breaks. Credits and deductions work basically the same way as personal credits and deductions. National production incentives come up when countries offer further deductions if the film can be labeled as a \"product\" of that country. Typically it means that a certain amount of the labor, talent, or production staff is from the country where it's shot. Rules vary by country but it isn't uncommon for production crews to hire a bunch of local talent to help with the shoot so that they qualify for the extra breaks. \n\nThe twist in all this? It's very, very rare that the film company itself actually uses the deduction itself. There's actually a secondary market for these deductions where individuals and other companies can buy the deductions to use for themselves. This turns a future credit into cash now to help finance the film. \n\nThese incentives are offered to drive tourism, real estate, the local economy, help get jobs for local production talent etc. In turn, the Hollywood machine simply follows the biggest and best tax incentives. ",
"Another big incentive to film in Canada is the lower value of the Canadian dollar. Paying Canadians in Canadian currency costs an American studio about 70% of what it would if they were to film in the US with an American crew.\n\nToronto is a popular location since the city can easily look like any other major North American city, it's often used as a stand in for NYC for example. Vancouver is the main city for Canada's film and TV industry though. With mountains, forests and beaches nearby it's easy to find locations either in the city or a couple of hours away that can be set up to look like anything from a haunted coal mine in the Midwest, a luxury skyscraper in Shanghai, a secret military base in the wilderness of Siberia, a quaint fishing village in the Northeast or a billionaire's ski chalet in the Alps. Studios will still choose other locations when it makes sense but there's a lot to be said for filming in a location that's well developed, everyone speaks the same language and is close to home.\n\nThe main reason for Canadian cities and provinces to offer these tax breaks is to convince studios to come here with projects that will create jobs for Canadian film workers. I live in Vancouver and know a ton of make up artists, costume designers, caterers and so on who wouldn't have any work if studios didn't film here so frequently."
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d59al2 | why does food residue on dishes become very sticky and hard to remove the longer it is left idle? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d59al2/eli5_why_does_food_residue_on_dishes_become_very/ | {
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"Most of the time its because of processed foods and what is in that food. Most starchy foods will do this like noodles sitting out on a plate after getting wet. Most left over foods will get to a point where they evaporate enough water to become sticky and thus become like glue to plates and dry like that unless you soak your dishes. That's my basic understanding."
]
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||
d7oasq | why are sfx screens almost always green and not any other colour? why aren't the blue ones as popular? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d7oasq/eli5_why_are_sfx_screens_almost_always_green_and/ | {
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"I see blue used often. Will smith just posted a video on Instagram where his backdrop was green but he was sitting on a blue box, they put him on a bull or some shit lol",
"The whole concept of chroma is creating as much contrast between the background and the subject so that the software can do the heavy lifting instead of animators rotoscoping each and every frame. If you take a look at a color wheel, chroma green is the farthest color from the reds, which is the predominant color in human skin tones. \n\nBlue backgrounds are used when there is a significant amount of green on the subject ex. Jungle foreground or green lantern costumes. Humans also tend to wear blue clothes such as jeans. (blue clothes on blue background = floating body parts) Blue also tends to register darker on camera compared to chroma green - adds to the difficulty when you're shooting darker scenes. \n\nRed is the least used because again, skin tones but when there are leaves and blue skies to consider, it is the way to go.",
"When they change the background they tell the computer that everything a certain colour is to be changed with the background. This is easiest with one of the prime colours red green or blue. They don't use red because its usually too close skin colour. As for blue and green, they tend to use whichever is furthest from what they're filming, say if they were filming a brocali monster they would use a bluescreen",
"For visual effect editing you need to clearly distinguish between foreground and background in a scene. Imagine photoshop or any other photo editing app and the magic wand tool which selects an area with a similar color or color spectrum.\nNow just transfer this example from 2D image editing to editing motion pictures. \nThink of X-men where you have mystique in her natural blue appearance, definitely needs a green screen in the background while shooting scenes as it would be harder for the editing software to detect whether it‘s mystiques body or the background with a blue screen. \n\nYou have probably seen these hilarious bloopers where weather reporters standing in the studio presenting the weather forecast and their outfit contain blue or green elements and the weather is literally project on those specific body parts. In this case the Software thought it was a background. So Long Story short : foreground and background must be distinguishable and determine the respective usage of blue or green screen.",
"Physical rainlooks better in your scene if you use a blue screen key rather than a green screen. \n\nThe more you know",
"Two main reasons one, as many have mentioned is the contrast you get, but another important reason is resolution. Most digital cameras capture the green channel in a higher resolution due to the way color are captured and processed called 'demosaicing'.\n\nResolution is also the reason why blue was the more popular choice for traditional film, where each color channels had different grain (think analog pixel) sizes, with blue having the finest grain."
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1rhepc | fruit flies in my wine? | Outside on a warm summer's evening it takes all of 5 seconds for my glass of cheap box wine to become a swimming pool for these lemmings. What attracts them?
As a follow up - I often dip my finger in the surface to rescue them. Trapped within a single drop. I place them on the table and they are able to dry out quickly. Why does the alcohol not kill them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rhepc/eli5fruit_flies_in_my_wine/ | {
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"Fruit flies like fruit. Rotting fruit in particular.\n\nRotting fruit produces alcohol (that's how wine gets made). Fruit flies are attracted to alcohol."
]
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|
3n6gy9 | the logistics of google updating their logo so quickly. | I'm curious how many logos actually needed to be updated.
Is it some sort of giant find and replace feature they would have built or was it more manual? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3n6gy9/eli5_the_logistics_of_google_updating_their_logo/ | {
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"Web pages aren't stored as one big word-document style file. The images are stored separately from the actual web page file. When you put an image in a web page, you're basically just leaving a note telling a web browser where to find the picture you want. Since the images aren't actually built into the web page, you only need *one* copy of the image, regardless of how many pages you have that show the image.\n\nTl;dr: I don't know exactly how many images they had to update, but if I had to guess you could probably count the number on your fingers without running out."
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558t0g | how are write-in names and absentee ballots counted given that election results are announced that same night? | I'm referring to the US Presidential election.
Are they only considered if there's a recount, and logistically how are write-ins tallied? Have they ever influenced an outcome? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/558t0g/eli5_how_are_writein_names_and_absentee_ballots/ | {
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"Writein ballots (in states that allow them) and absentee votes are usually a very small percentage of the vote.\n\nIf Candidate A has 400,000 votes, and candidate B has 300,000 votes, and you still have 20,000 write-ins and absentee votes, then you already know who won.\n\nAlso, it's important to note that it's several days before the count is official. On election night, unofficial results are announced, but the state doesn't certify the results until they have counted every ballot. But like I said, you usually will know on election night because the margin of victory is greater than the number of uncounted ballots.",
"Election results are announced the same night because the easily countable votes are usually enough to know who won. \n\nSo for instance, imagine that there are 100000 votes cast. After five hours of counting, ballot candidate X has 45,000 votes, and ballot candidate Y has 30000. Another 15000 are divided among minor ballot candidates. The remaining 10000 are write ins. In this scenario, even if all 10k write ins were for the same person, it wouldn't change the winner. \n\nIf the numbers were different, if enough write ins were left to change the outcome, then they'd wait to call the election",
"Votes are counted at precinct level, which don't include all that many people. So there aren't going to be that many ballot irregularities in any given precinct, and there are usually judges present to rule on any questions. Within the few hours they take to count all the votes, there's plenty of time to work through the unusual ballots. Write-ins also usually don't count anyway unless someone has registered with the state as a write-in candidate. All those Elvis and Mickey Mouse votes are counted as 'Other' in most cases.\n\nBut as far as I'm aware, write-in votes have never mattered.",
"Because there is no practical or likely case where a write-in candidate would ever matter. The only time would be if said candidate got a majority of the electoral votes, which would be obvious because the reported number of votes would be drastically lower than the actual number of votes, in which case they would have to review all those votes manually and see that there was some write-in candidate getting all of those votes.\n\nIt is highly improbable that a write-in candidate would be so popular as to get so many votes but not be an actual candidate (and plenty of states have rules on candidates that can be written-in).\n\nEven if they got enough votes to rob other candidates of a majority (without getting a majority of themselves) all that would do would trigger an election by the Houses of congresss, so it wouldn't even matter who they really were.",
"The early counts are usually correct, but some races have been decided by absentee ballots. All ballots are counted in each **official** count. Maryland for example doesn't count absentee ballots until 2 days after the election, so their **official** count isn't done until then. \n\nThe winner of the election is not based on the popular vote. It is based on the electoral college vote. Each state gets as many votes as they have members of Congress, so the minimum number is three (2 senators and one representative). So some people's popular vote carries slightly more weight than others. The electors meet in their states on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. They are sworn to vote the will of the people, but they can cast their vote against the people's will or abstain. Some states have criminal penalties for not voting how they are supposed to. \n\nEdit: Washington, DC also gets 3 electoral votes. ",
"In most scannable ballots, you have to indicate that you are writing in as well as writing it in. [Example](_URL_0_)\n\nIf Candidate A has 50,000 votes and Candidate B has 45,000 votes, the fact that \"all write-in candidates combined\" has 8,000 is irrelevant to the fact that Candidate A won the election. \n\nNow if write-in was over 50,000, they'd have to individually tally all the write-in votes."
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8443wz | why does a laser pointer, when shone on a surface, appear to have a grainy,staticky pattern in the beam? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8443wz/eli5_why_does_a_laser_pointer_when_shone_on_a/ | {
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"What you are referring to is probably laser speckle.\n\nI can't provide an amazing explanation off the top of my head, but i'll try for something simple. \n\nIt all depends on the surface. The surface of a wall is uneven, so when a laser shines onto a wall and into your eye, the sections of light are all travelling slightly different distances. Because of these slightly different distances, our eyes see bright and dark spots, which are the result of constructive and destructive interference.\n\nWe only get this interference effect because laser light is (to put it simply) a consistent colour (wavelength). ",
"The light from a laser is coherent, all the waves of the same wavelength, color, and all in exact lockstep with one another. When the beam strikes a surface and bounces off and the wavefronts collide with one another and can reinforce and/or cancel one another. \n\nThe [sparkle pattern](_URL_0_) of a laser can be compared to the choppy surface of a lake on a windy day as waves cancel and reinforce one another to the extent that no regular pattern of waves can be seen.",
"The main concept behind this is Interference. This specific type of interference is known as speckle effect.\n\nInterference can occur when you have a coherent light source(same wavelength, same waveform, constant phase difference). It can be either constructive or destructive depending on the phase difference between two waves.\n\nThis phase difference can be caused by a difference in path length. Surfaces, no matter how polished they appear to us, aren't completely flat, so the Laser's reflected light(interpret these as being a multitude of waves) will have some path length differences, which will interfere with one another, giving you spots with destructive interference and spots with constructive interference, which appears grainy to your eye.\n\n\nThis is as concise as it can be without removing too much information.\n\n * By the way, *fluorescence* generated by the Laser will not be coherent, so if you want to see the necessity of coherence to generate interference, just shine a laser with a wavelength short enough to cause fluorescence on an object (a 405nm laser on a white piece of paper will do), and you will see that the resultant light has no speckle effect whatsoever.",
"The sparkle pattern can contain a lot of information.\n\nIf you split a laser beam, reflect one of the beams off an object, and capture the sparkle pattern created by the interference of the reflected beam with its non-reflected twin, you have a hologram. \n\nTypically this is done by exposing photographic film. You’ll want to use a special kind of thick film (or even a chemically treated glass plate) so there is some depth to the interference pattern. \n\nDeveloping the film and shining a laser of the same wavelength through the pattern will reproduce a 3-D image of the object.",
"This is known as \"laser speckle\" - the wiki describes it here:\n\n_URL_1_.\n\nIn simple terms, think of the light waves like the waves in a pond. Toss a rock into the pond, you get a wave - that is like the start of the laser light forming. Imagine this occurs inside the laser pointer \"at the dark end\". As the waves travel down the laser pointer they bounce off the walls, each 'pseudo-wave-particle' travels a slightly different distance then the next. \n\nAt the end of the laser pointer is a \"collimating lens\" ( it takes all of the light and focuses it into a single beam, aka: a column of light hence the name: collimating ) Think of a flashlight - that you can twist/turn to change the focus from \"wide\" to \"narrow\". \n\nNo matter how hard you try, each \"pseudo-light-particle\" travels a slightly different distance, and they are oscillating like a wave (up and down, or bright/dark - hard science guys will say there are more details but I am trying to keep this simple).\n\nEventually \"pseudo-particles\" exit the laser pointer, travel across the room and hit for example a piece of paper. \n\nThere is a term called: \"Super position\" - think about lots of waves in the ocean, as they come together the combine. If two RISING waves join you get a DOUBLE, or maybe two opposite waves cancel each other out. If you have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of waves (aka: pseudo-light-particles) they can really \"add-up\" to very bright or \"subtract up\" to very dark.\n\nWiki talks about super position here: _URL_0_\n\nthe point here is this: The different pseudo-light-wave-particles have come together to form light and dark spots. \n\nBecause the laser is not really constant the speckle moves around.\n\nThere are ways to combat speckle, by making the wave front more incoherent and combining more and more lasers.\n\nOne method is splitting the beam into multiple paths (aka: beam spliter) then recombining, or overlapping each of them more and more. The second method is to \"chop\" the laser signal at a very high frequency (ie: in the gigahertz range) causing the laser wave to start/stop at different points in time. \n\nIf you combining these two methods it make for a dramatic improvement. \n\nAn example of this can be found in something called a PLIM - Planar Laser Illumination module.\n\n",
"I don't know if this has been ELI5'd successfully or not yet, but just in case, here is a non-scientific explanation using water, a wall, and a spray hose: imagine a hose. Now imagine a wall. Now imagine yourself spraying the hose at that wall at an angle - the water bounces a bit, but it keeps going, right? Now imagine spraying at the wall \"head on\", a consequence of which is the wall back-spraying a bit, water going everywhere. That's pretty much what is going on.\n\n",
"Speckle Effect. Black spots are where a crest and trough hit and \"cancel\" out. It just opposite phases of the light wavelength. Since all the light coming out of the diode is the same wavelength you'll get this as the effect."
]
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||
3fidxu | why does the water recede when missives ships pass by close to shore? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fidxu/eli5_why_does_the_water_recede_when_missives/ | {
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"Link to the video please. Common sense dicatates that the movement of the boat pushes water away from the bow, creating waves. No water is sucked towards it. When the boat ahs passed, the water will flow back to fill the gap the boat leaves. "
]
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[]
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||
1ew2qp | how do currency counting machines only grab one bill at a time so quickly and accurately? | It drives me nuts wondering how these machines are able to do this so fast when i have trouble grabbing just one bill using my hands! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ew2qp/eli5_how_do_currency_counting_machines_only_grab/ | {
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"Suction, per my husband, who used to work on ATM machines. ",
"They use rollers with a rubbery surface that grab one bill from the bottom of a stack (just like your printer does with sheets of paper). AFAIK there are also models that have a light shine through the bills to detect if more than one bill was grabbed.",
"In canada our currency changed from paper to well... plastic.\n\nThe ATM\"s accurately give you either the old orr the new currency even tho they feel totally different and the plastic one feels much lighter.",
"Each denomination of currency has a unique chemical composition. A very small mass spectrometer inside the counting machine identifies this unique composition. For example, the US $5 bill has a distinctive signature containing sodium chloride. This is the origin of the phrase, *\"crisper than a salty fiver\"*."
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7wr4u2 | how is a camera able to "see"? (also, what are photons and how do they work?) | I'm struggling to understand the concept of what exactly photons are and how they're responsible for things like light and all that. I've also wondered for the longest time how cameras are able to "see" whatever is in front of it. I know the two are connected, I'm just not sure how. Using analogies will help me understand it better if that helps any of you explain it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wr4u2/eli5_how_is_a_camera_able_to_see_also_what_are/ | {
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"Photons are units of electromagnetic energy, just like electrons can be thought of as units of electricity. They're radiated off by particles as the particles lose energy. That energy is carried by photons.\n\nElectromagnetic energy comes on a spectrum of wavelengths. At one end of the spectrum, you have microwaves, TV and radio signals, and infrared. On the other end, you have gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet. Between infrared and ultraviolet is the \"visible light spectrum.\" Those are the wavelengths we can see with the naked eye. (Makes sense, right? We step down from infrared to \"red.\" We step up from ultraviolet to \"violet.\" If you know \"Roy G. Biv,\" the mnemonic device for all the colors in the spectrum, we can see they all fall between those two.)\n\nFilm cameras allow the photons to hit the film. When photons hit something, they transfer some energy to it. Film undergoes different chemical changes depending on what wavelength and energy of light hits it, and becomes a picture. \n\nDigital cameras have sensors that can detect photons hitting them, and send different signals back depending on the wavelength and energy level of the photons. They translate those hits into information, which is then assembled into a picture."
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2siona | the feeling of a 'broken heart'. | What causes the body to feel like it does after a break it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2siona/eli5_the_feeling_of_a_broken_heart/ | {
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"wouldnt it have something to do with hormone levels? when you are crushing on someone or are in love your serotonin and endorfins etc are constantly raised. once you loose that source of \"joy\" its kind of like withdrawal from a drug. add that to the psychological effect a break up might have on a person. im no expert but thats how I rationalized those feelings in the past. ",
"Your body frequently turns emotions into physical sensations. This process is called \"somatization\" which basically means making something relate to the physical by. This might have to do with the fact that the same things our brain uses to create and change emotions also cause and effect other things, like hunger or sleep or pain. Some people who have depression get aches in their body like you might get with a flu. Sometimes, because a feeling is so extreme and you cannot process all of it as emotion or thoughts, your brain turns it into something easier to understand, like a physical pain or a stomach ache. (In some extreme cases, this process can make someone feel unable to move part of their body or even see. These extreme cases are called 'conversion disorders'). Emotions are really powerful that way. So some scientists think that this is what's happening when you feel pain in your chest when something really emotionally upsetting, like a break-up, happens.\n\nIt is also possible that some of it has to do with the ways sadness and anger are usually felt in the body. When you are sad or crying, you often breathe differently. Being upset also makes your heart beat faster. Getting less sleep can cause the body to hurt as well. It might be that when all these signals meet in your brain it feels like your chest is hurting.\n\nLastly - we can sometimes think our brains into creating feelings. We all know that break ups cause a broken heart - it is possible that our thinking about this actually makes us feel as though something in our chest is hurting.\n\nTL;DR emotions and physical sensations cross over more often than you'd think in a whole bunch of different ways."
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1i37fq | some questions about wireless routers | I was looking through my wireless router's configuration page (I'm not sure if that's the correct term for it, it's where I could see details about the router and change settings) and I realized I didn't know what a lot of it meant. I have a few questions:
1) What is the MAC Address? Why would I need to know it and what is it used for?
2) What is the difference between WEP and WPA protection?
3) It says that the operating mode is 802.11b+g. I have the option to change it to 802.11b only or 802.11g only. What does this mean and what are the differences between them?
4) I have a USB wifi adapter that has 802.11b/g/n written on it that I was never able to get working. Could this have something to do with it? (It has been a while since I tried it, but I think when I ran lsusb (a command that lists the USB devices plugged into the computer) in a Linux terminal, I saw 802.11n written someplace. If I changed it to b or g on the USB adapter, could this fix it?)
5) It says that Wifi Multimedia Mode is disabled, but I have been able to play songs and watch videos from another computer on my laptop using UPnP. What Wifi Multimedia Mode do if it doesn't affect me streaming like this?
6) There is an option that deals with port forwarding. What is port forwarding? And what is the difference between range of ports and trigger ports?
I know very little about networking or wireless internet or anything but I find it interesting. Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i37fq/eli5_some_questions_about_wireless_routers/ | {
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"1) MAC Address is a unique identifier that is specific to that physical device. it's set at the factory as part of the manufacturing process, and it can be used to identify that specific device uniquely. It's typically NOT passed around on the web (IP Addresses are your computers identifier to the internet), but some programs make use of them, and it's visible to users via the OS. \n\n2) WEP and WPA are two different standards for wireless security. Don't use WEP. Ever. There are tools available for anyone to google and download to crack WEP inside of 5 minutes. WPA is more secure, but still crackable. WPA2 is (I believe, could be out of date) the current standard, as WPA was a 'quick-fix' to WEP's security problems, but was quickly broken as well. Use WPA2 if possible.\n\n3) There are 4 (soon 5) different standards for sending wireless signals. These are defined by the ISO standard 802.11, with the four variants being a, b, g, and n. There's also a new one coming out soon, I forget the designation. n is the current standard, but not all devices support it yet. Prior to n, g was the standard, and is widely supported by most devices. Each standard increases the maximum speed allowed via the wireless signal. a and b are pretty slow, g is decent, n is pretty fast. Look at wikipedia for exact figures on speed. Using b+g will have your router use a g-type signal **until a device requests a b signal**. Once you have one device that uses a b signal, most routers will drop down and only send out a b signal. Most devices nowadays don't use b, so you should be fine, but if you introduce a new device to your wifi network and suddenly notice a slowdown, this can be a good thing to check. Personally, I'd set it to g only and then if you have a device that won't work, try b+g (then get rid of the b device :P)\n\n4) The wifi adapter lets the computer it's attached to use b, g, and n type signals. It sounds like the device was set to look for n signals, though by default it should be looking for n first, then g or b if it can't find n, so I'm not sure why it's not working. If you can specify the signal type, change it to g and see if that gets it working.\n\n5) I'm not familiar with Wifi Multimedia Mode, could be a feature of that router specifically. google it.\n\n6) Port forwarding is the act of 'opening up' a specific port so that a program can use it. Ports are like little gates that packets from programs must pass through to get through your router. By default, most ports are closed, and a standard set of them are left open. There are networking standards which define which types of programs should use which ports. For example, internet browsers use port 80 for http requests, but https requests use port 443. Port Forwarding is useful if you're having trouble getting a program to connect to the internet (like skype or utorrent). Somewhere in their config menus they should list a \"port\" to use. Go to port forwarding and add a listing for that port (for TCP, UDP, and/or Both) and that program, and your router should then let the traffic through.\n\n\nLet me know if you have any other questions.\n\nSource: Former IT Technician turned software engineer",
" > 1) What is the MAC Address? Why would I need to know it and what is it used for?\n\nThe MAC address is an address which is (in theory) a unique identifier of the hardware, rather than an IP address which can change freely. In practice the MAC address can be spoofed if you so choose and the only reason to know it is if your internet service is set up to only work with one MAC address for security or whatever. In that case you can set your router to spoof itself to look like your machine's MAC address so things work properly.\n\nChances are you can ignore it.\n\n > 2) What is the difference between WEP and WPA protection?\n\nWEP was the first encryption standard, and it isn't as secure as WPA or WPA2. Use the newer WPA if you can, but if you have an old device that can't handle it the router is capable of backwards compatibility.\n\n > 3) It says that the operating mode is 802.11b+g. I have the option to change it to 802.11b only or 802.11g only. What does this mean and what are the differences between them?\n\n\"b\" and \"g\" are different transmission standards, as well as \"n\". \"b\" is the slowest, \"g\" is in the middle and the most common, and \"n\" is the new standard which is still developing and becoming more common. You could only use one standard at a time, but there isn't much reason to do that unless you are having specific problems.\n\n > 4) I have a USB wifi adapter that has 802.11b/g/n written on it that I was never able to get working. Could this have something to do with it? (It has been a while since I tried it, but I think when I ran lsusb (a command that lists the USB devices plugged into the computer) in a Linux terminal, I saw 802.11n written someplace. If I changed it to b or g on the USB adapter, could this fix it?\n\nSince your router only supports \"b\" and \"g\", if you are set up only to use \"n\" then that wifi adapter isn't going to work until you set it back to \"g\". I can't really say if that was your original problem of course.\n\n > 5) It says that Wifi Multimedia Mode is disabled, but I have been able to play songs and watch videos from another computer on my laptop using UPnP. What Wifi Multimedia Mode do if it doesn't affect me streaming like this?\n\nMultimedia Mode is likely a feature that gives priority to audio and video streams, so that if your connection gets saturated with other traffic the multimedia which is very time-sensitive will tend to flow more smoothly and the other stuff be delayed. It isn't really relevant if you aren't pushing the limits of your capacity, and doesn't really apply in something like YouTube which handles buffering on its own anyway. You could turn it off and it isn't going to prevent you playing video streams, it would just disable what under some circumstances would be a marginally beneficial performance tweak.\n\n > 6) There is an option that deals with port forwarding. What is port forwarding? And what is the difference between range of ports and trigger ports?\n\nPort forwarding is a way of making one or more ports of your computer equate to ports on the router.\nFor a bit of background, computers talk over a network based upon \"ports\". Think of it a bit like a Post Office having one physical address (the IP address) but tons of numbered PO boxes through which various things can be passed. For example, port 80 is the standard \"http\" port where web pages and such information is passed back and forth. It is important to realize that this is just a *standard* rather than a necessity; if you so chose you could use that port for anything, but if you went to an unknown system it would almost certainly be treating conversations on that port as if they were web-page-related.\n\nThe issue is, a router acts just like a computer in that it has one IP and a bunch of numbered ports, but it is serving likely multiple computers behind it. So if something comes in through port 80, where does it go? Each computer behind it has a port 80 of its own, to who was it intended? Port forwarding can be used to link a port on the router to the port of specific computer at a specific IP address, so for example your router would send all traffic on port 80 to the computer at IP address 192.168.1.101:80 (the first bit is the IP address, and the second bit after the colon is the port number).\n\nThis is a useful feature if you are trying to host a server from behind your router, and people will be trying to connect to a specific port on your computer. However because this is all going on behind the scenes, there is no requirement that the ports which are linked be the same port. You could transfer all traffic that the router gets on port 80 to port 3045 on whatever internal address you felt like, even regardless of if a computer exists to receive it at all! You can even shift swaths of ports all at once by specifying a range; if you just specify a range of one then it is one, but you could do thousands at a time. All the specified ports are opened and directed to where you say.\n\nPort *triggering* is similar, but the ports which you specify are only opened on the condition that your computer inside the router first sends *out* a message through a specific \"trigger\" port. So your computer could contact another through port 21 and then arrange for a series of different ports to be opened to affect the transfer of files.",
" > 1) What is the MAC Address? Why would I need to know it and what is it used for?\n\nA device's media access control (MAC) address is a unique identifier (kind of like a person's social security number) assigned to network interfaces for communication. They are usually assigned by the manufacturer and should be visible on the device as well as programmed into it. You usually only need it when setting up a network or activating/changing network connectivity.\n\n > 2) What is the difference between WEP and WPA protection?\n\nWiFi Protected Access (WPA) and Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) are security algorithms your network can use for encrypted security. WEP came first and is still a standard virtually everywhere, however it's primary weakness is in its use of a single standard key that it uses to encrypt all transmitted packets. Encrypted packets can still be intercepted and, given enough time, it is pretty easy to piece together a patten so that an attacker can either guess what is being sent or guess at the key needed to decrypt the packets. WPA uses temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP) which allows it to scramble keys which makes it more secure. There's more to be said, but let's keep it there. =)\n\n > 3) It says that the operating mode is 802.11b+g. I have the option to change it to 802.11b only or 802.11g only. What does this mean and what are the differences between them?\n\nFirst came wireless A which had maximum bit rate of 54 Mbit/s and could only go 100 feet before the signal was lost. Then came wireless B which had a maximum bit rate of 11 Mbit/s, but allowed you to go 150 feet before the signal was lost. Then came wireless G which has A's maximum bit rate of 54 Mbit/s and B's distance of 150 feet before the signal was lost. Wireless N is the newest and has a maximum bit rate of 74 Mbit/s and allows you to go 230 feet before losing your signal. More below\n \n > 4) I have a USB wifi adapter that has 802.11b/g/n written on it that I was never able to get working. Could this have something to do with it? (It has been a while since I tried it, but I think when I ran lsusb (a command that lists the USB devices plugged into the computer) in a Linux terminal, I saw 802.11n written someplace. If I changed it to b or g on the USB adapter, could this fix it?)\n\nFor the adapter to work you have to configure your router to send out the same signal. A router configured to wireless B will work with an adapter that can receive B, for example. In answer to your question, if you change your router to wireless B or G and then enable your usb adapter to receive either, or both, of those signals then yes, it will work. You cannot use your adapter as a wireless N receiver if you do not have a router which can transmit N signals.\n\n > 5) It says that Wifi Multimedia Mode is disabled, but I have been able to play songs and watch videos from another computer on my laptop using UPnP. What Wifi Multimedia Mode do if it doesn't affect me streaming like this?\n\nThis sounds like it is router specific. Try to search for a solution. Pro-tip: most of us computer guys actually aren't that smart, we just google stuff we don't know. To us, Google is one big help manual.\n\n > 6) There is an option that deals with port forwarding. What is port forwarding? And what is the difference between range of ports and trigger ports?\n\nYour router/network uses ports like little portals or gates. When you buy a router it will come with a standard set open, but most of them closed. This is meant to increase security. When you send or receive packets they sometimes have to go through these ports and, if they're closed, the data won't be transmitted correctly. You'll also see an option called DMZ, which stands for demilitarized zone. DMZ effectively opens all ports for a single address. This can be very dangerous and it is not recommended. Try to only open ports within known ranges for specific programs."
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302mai | the difference if i bought a 3.5 ghz i5 processor or a 3.5 ghz i7 | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/302mai/eli5_the_difference_if_i_bought_a_35_ghz_i5/ | {
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"So I'm going to make some assumptions here:\n\n1. The i5 and i7 are from the same processor generation. There have been five generations of processors to go under the \"Core i\" series name, and there are major performance differences between the first and last\n\n2. The processors have the same number of cores.\n\nThere will be two main differences between the processors. First, the i7 will have hyperthreading. Hyperthreading allows each core to do two things at once. It's not the same as having 8 cores because there's still only four of each unit, so it can only do four basic math operations at once but it could, for example, be running a basic math calculation at the same time it's doing a comparison. And second, the i7 will have a larger cache. The cache is a small amount of memory on the same chip as the processor. It's tiny - only a few megabytes- but it's way faster than reading from RAM so the computer keeps data it knows its going to need soon there.",
"Cache amount mainly but the i7s have hyper threading which to the most basic terms means the 4 processors can act as 8. Opposed to one thread per core on the i5 the i7 has 2 threads per core do to hyper threading. "
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dqo1dp | does rising co2 levels make it more difficult for humans to breathe? is it safe to breathe air with a higher concentration of co2 than we are used to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dqo1dp/eli5_does_rising_co2_levels_make_it_more/ | {
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"No humans use CO2 levels in our bodies to register when to breathe when the concentration reaches too high an internal level we breathe, drastically reducing oxygen levels like at high altitudes is an issue but relatively small increases in CO2 don't cause us a major problem, high levels of CO2 or moderate levels of CO are needed to cause serious issues. _URL_0_",
"The concentration of CO2 that it would take to poison us directly is way beyond the amount required to render the planet uninhabitable via global warming. CO2 is less than 0.05% of the atmosphere, but it takes roughly 1% or more to start having health effects from inhalation.\n\n_URL_0_",
"No. The C02 concentrations that are causing climate change are far below the amounts that will cause us breathing or health problems directly. The vast majority of the gasses in the atmosphere will continue to be nitrogen followed by oxygen. It just so happens that C02 is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and that even small amounts (relatively speaking considering the size of the atmosphere) can cause big environmental changes."
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1l2185 | why can the brain not be "turned on" again once it's died? | I've never really thought about it before, but I was reading a book about various experiments the other night, some of which involved attempting to reverse death, and I got to wondering; Why can't the brain etc be restarted by pumping blood or whatever artificially?
I mean, the brain will be getting its necessary oxygen and whatever other goodies the blood does, why doesn't it get itself going?
I haven't asked this question very well, but I hope you know what I mean. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l2185/eli5_why_can_the_brain_not_be_turned_on_again/ | {
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"The moment you die, you start decaying. The softer the tissue, the quicker it goes, and the brain is very soft. Our memories and skills and all that are formed by a network of electric signals. The most obvious comparison is RAM memory in computers. If the power goes off, the electricity dies off, and what were solid connections just cease to exist, so when you reboot, its wiped. Te balance that holds together our brain and forms our mind would even after a short amount of decay not be able to restore itself in exactly the same way, resulting in memory loss at the very least. Obviously the longer the decay, the worse the results. Frankenstein and zombie flicks arent too far off. "
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1q1cgq | why doesn't the earth's oxygen escape into space? | If space is mostly a vacuum, what is stopping Earth's gasses from "diffusing" or "escaping"? Are there cases where gasses in space enter Earth?
I tried googling for simple answers which turned up terms like "atmospheric escape" and "solar wind" which in themselves are difficult to understand | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q1cgq/eli5_why_doesnt_the_earths_oxygen_escape_into/ | {
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"Gravity. If the earth were smaller, it all would have escaped long ago. The larger the planet, the lighter the molecules it can keep in its atmosphere. ",
"The same reason that nothing else floats off into space - Gravity. Nothing more complicated than that.",
"mostly gravity.\n\nbut a tiny tiny bit does escape. ",
"1. Gravity.\n\n2. Our electromagnetic field keeps solar winds from ripping it off of us. Mars isn't so lucky, so despite having enough gravity to hold onto a small atmosphere, the solar winds have ripped it mostly away.",
"For the same reason that you don't escape into space: gravity.\n\nSome of the light elements like hydrogen and helium does escape from our atmosphere and into space. Every year 95,000,000kg of hydrogen and 1,600,000kg of helium escape.\n\nAs you said, particles from space can also enter earth like the solar wind creating the visually stunning Aurora Borealis. Also every year the earth receives 40,000,000kg of stardust.",
"Gravity is half the reason, it is slightly more complicated than that. If gravity were the only reason, the next question would be 'why doesn't the moon have an atmosphere?' \n\nEarth's temperature range is such that within that, all 'important' atmospheric gaseous molecules have an 'effective (i.e. root mean squared) velocity' and 'most probable velocity' which is less than the escape velocity. Hydrogen and helium do escape in considerable amounts (as lower molecular weights implies higher molecular velocities). \n\nOthers *do* escape negligibly, since molecular velocities are probabilistic in nature, so there is always a non zero chance of exceeding any particular velocity. The moon has a much lesser escape velocity, lesser than the 'most probable velocity' for any possible gases on the moon, hence it has no atmosphere rather than less atmosphere :), since all of them molecules found their chance to escape!. Give earth enough time and theoretically, she will also lose her atmosphere probabilistically, although practically, she will die much earlier from the expanding sun."
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4ke1ra | why do some societies not accept men grooming themselves the way women do ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ke1ra/eli5_why_do_some_societies_not_accept_men/ | {
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"If you mean like shaving / waxing or such, it probably boils down to something as simple as it not being seen as \"many\" or being \"effeminate\", combine that with the idea of \"the weaker sex\" and you've just labeled yourself as weak in comparison to other men."
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1r2wld | on a motorbike, if you drove at the speed and direction of wind, would you feel/hear any air passing by? | On a motorbike, if you drove at the speed and direction of wind, would you feel/hear any air passing by?
Or like if you had a mustache would the mustache be sitting totally still on your face due to no wind making it flutter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r2wld/eli5_on_a_motorbike_if_you_drove_at_the_speed_and/ | {
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"Theoretically, this would be correct. However, rarely does wind blow in exactly the same direction of a road. And even if it did, it often changes direction and speed.",
"no.\n\nThe concept is called apparent or relative wind speed; it's common on a sail boat and curiously we often use an example of a person on a bicycle to illustrate it. \n\nso, start by thinking of a day when there's no wind. You get on your bike and travel 5 kph (in any direction since there's no wind). You feel apparent wind of 5 kph. Now, if on another day, before you hop on, you realize that there's a 5 kph wind moving south, and you travel 5kph moving north, if feels as if there's 10 kph of wind; if you turn around and travel \"with\" the wind south, it would feel as if there's no wind.\n\nthings get a little more complicated when not going directly into or away from the actual wind.\n\nWhen you're traveling with the wind, often it feels like there is no wind; yet if you look over the side of the boat you can see that you're moving quickly.\n\n",
"If you 100% matched the direction and speed, then yes, you wouldn't feel the air brush against you or your moustache.",
"One time, while riding my bike with the wind at my back, I was pedaling a steady 30 MPH, and felt no wind whatsoever. It was ridiculously easy to maintain that speed. It felt like I was flying in a vacuum. Really weird.\n\nSo yes, if you manage to be moving exactly the same speed as the air around you, you will feel no wind, but wind is hardly ever so steady, and it's pretty rare to be able to match the speed and direction for long."
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30o5tz | why do loose teeth that children expel as part of the growing process always appear to be broken? | Asking from my own experience as a child, and as a parent. I've never seen a baby tooth lost come out with a root. What is the deal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30o5tz/eli5_why_do_loose_teeth_that_children_expel_as/ | {
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"They are not broken. The permanent teeth underneath push up against the roots of the baby teeth and that pressure has the roots dissolving which makes it easier for them to fall out. Part of the root is reabsorbed by the permanent tooth underneath to grow.",
"Because they are broken. As the newer, stronger, adult tooth comes in, it is literally disintegrating the root of the older, weaker, baby tooth. It does this to the point there isn't enough root to hold the tooth into the gum, and it falls out."
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dymtnq | lsd | What is LSD, what does it do to your brain and the reason it's not lethal even at large doses? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dymtnq/eli5_lsd/ | {
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"Edit: **I want to make a note here that all the stuff I wrote about were studies of various qualities that I have read over the past 10 years. They are not personal anecdote, and they are not necessarily \"facts\" in the sense that the results the studies found are not the end all be all of the effects of LSD. I have never done LSD, and this post is not advocating doing so. For your own safety, please DO NOT take what I wrote in this post as advice on how to do LSD, or encouragement to take the drug.**\n\nLSD is a drug that has hallucinogenic properties-- in other words, it can trigger you to see or hear things that aren't really there. We actually don't know much about LSD, since most scientists are more interested in studying drugs with a greater adverse societal impact, like nicotine, cocaine, or heroin.\n\nHowever, we do know that LSD has a molecular structure very similar to that of another neurotransmitter called serotonin. This similarity led a lot of scientists to think that LSD must somehow affect serotonin transmission. \n\nThere is a cluster of neurons in your brain stem called the raphe nucleus, and almost all of the neurons that produce serotonin in your brain originate in the raphe nucleus. The raphe nuclei neurons then project to basically every other structure in your forebrain. \n\nStudies in cats show that blocking serotonin receptors will block the behavioral effects of LSD. In humans, released serotonin is broken down by a molecule called monoamine oxidase. A class of antidepressants called monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) will turn off monoamine oxidase, which will result in more serotonin in the brain. The way the brain works is that if you flood it with a neurotransmitter, it will try to adapt by reducing the amount of receptors for that neurotransmitter. So for people who have taken MAOIs for a long time, they will have lower amounts of serotonin receptors, in order to compensate for more serotonin in their brain. These individuals are also less susceptible to the effects of LSD. Furthermore, when attempting to synthetically create hallucinogens like LSD, it turns out that the better the drug binds to the serotonin receptor, the more potent its effects. These three lines of evidence lead to the idea that LSD works by binding to serotonin receptors somewhere in the brain.\n\nBut where? Well, let's take a step back. Besides inducing hallucinations, what else does LSD do? Well, individuals who take LSD report symptoms of \"oceanic boundlessness,\" or this feeling of dissociation with the self, and feeling \"at one\" with the universe. They also report feelings of \"anxious ego-disintegration,\" where they feel completely removed from the self and feel like they have no control over their actions.\n\nOne idea is that it affects a network of neurons throughout the brain called the default mode network, or DMN. The DMN is composed of neurons that are MORE active when people are daydreaming, relaxed, or reflecting about the self. They also turn on when people are reminiscing about the past, or thinking about the future. In other words, the DMN looks like it activates when you're engaged in personal, introspective sorts of thinking-- activities of the \"self\". On the other hand, if you're actively looking for something or doing something, the DMN will turn off. \n\nSo maybe the DMN represents the \"core self?\" What will happen if the DMN is permanently turns off? One really interesting thing is looking at individuals with Cotard's delusion. Individuals suffering from Cotard's delusion wholeheartedly believe that they either dead, or do not exist. It turns out that individuals with Cotard's delusion show significantly reduced activation of the DMN-- in other words, it looks like that in order to have a sense that you exist as an entity, your DMN needs to be active. \n\nVery interestingly, then, studies have shown that LSD actually turns off our DMN. The amount that an individual's DMN is turned off by LSD correlates strongly with how much they experience its effects. Together, these results suggest that the DMN being active is at the core of having a sense of self. It looks like LSD binds to serotonin receptors in the DMN to suppress the sense of self, which can lead to people who take it feel disassociated with the self, or one with the universe.\n\nEdit: The target audience of this response obviously isn't literal 5 year olds. One of my pet peeves is that people who write on ELI5 often have no idea what they are talking about, and simplify their answers to the point of uselessness. My goal was to write a response that took a bit of effort to read, but would be as complete and accessible as I could make it. This is by no means the complex version of this answer, and if you're confused by anything, I'm happy to elaborate. If you don't think this is accessible **let me know and I will be happy to edit my post and make things more accessible**",
"LSD is believed to act mainly (although not exclusively) on some of the \"serotonin receptors\" in your brain. Serotonin is one of the many neurotransmitters that enables the brain to send signals through selective synapses, creating \"circuits\" that we interpret as thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. \n \nLSD mimics serotonin well enough to bind to the receptors, but it doesn't act quite like real serotonin. This causes parts of the brain to work in unusual (and somewhat variable) ways. \n \nIt isn't lethal because it is apparently similar enough to the natural neurotransmitters to not cause a major malfunction in the brain. And while the human body has serotonin receptors in other places (most notably in the gut), LSD does not apparently disrupt them to the point of fatality either. \n \nAnd while there are few (or no) credible instances of LSD overdose inducing death, in very large doses it can cause physical harm. Probably the most famous instance was when eight people snorted very large doses of crystalline LSD at a party, apparently thinking that it was cocaine. They were hospitalized, and some of them were put on life support. All eight survived.",
"I assume lysergic acid diethylamide. \n\n\nI feel like the previous comments have already explained the scientific side really well. So, from a user’s standpoint, words honestly cannot do it justice. The psychedelic experience is amazing, beautiful, and indescribable. The visual effects are beautiful, music sounds godlike, lights and colors are pretty, life is positive and everything is love. Puts you in the most childlike and blissful state. My best friend and I tripped together, one time in particular, and we threw glow sticks at each other in my closet and I really did feel like a kid again. Listened to music and rolled around on the carpet. Sensations and feelings are heightened. A fuzzy blanket feels so good on the skin. Feels good to touch and be touched. Highly recommend it.",
"To be fair, as I recall there IS a lethal dose of LSD. Heck, there's a lethal dose of plain water. In both cases, I think it's physically difficult (though not impossible) to ingest that much due to volume limitations of our digestive system.\n\nIn other words, to take a lethal dose of LSD, you might have to drink more than your stomach could hold. You certainly couldn't absorb that much any other way, at least not fast enough. Someone would probably have to keep feeding it to you steadily for a long period.\n\nOf course, that much potent hallucinogen may kill you anyway, since you could easily forget to drink for more than 3 days (which is fatal), or have a fatal accident (walking into traffic or some other dangerous environment, oblivious to what is really around you, etc.). Obviously that could happen on even a short trip, but a really, really long one would multiply your odds for sure.",
"In normal circumstances your brain's various regions are isolated from eachother. You only perceive one at a time and they go through a part of your brain that acts like a switch keeping them from talking to eachother. LSD silences that switch and parts of your brain that never talk can now speak directly. This gives you weird perceptions, you see how the lower parts of your brain process information and imagery and the barrier that separates things you imagine from what you perceive becomes blurred the higher you go in dosage. This leads to things like seeing sound, or recognizing objects as other objects, having walls move etc. You're just seeing raw unprocessed data that your brain normally hides from you.\n\nThere is another layer in your brain that acts as shortcuts. A good way of explaining it is when you take the same path to work everyday for months and then one thing changes and you suddenly recognize a building you've never seen before like it's appeared out of nowhere. The truth is your brain through repeated exposure drew a line to useless information because you repeatedly told it that it wasn't important. Then when it became novel because something changed your brains filtering is disrupted and you see it. \n\nThinking is expensive and at times uncomfortable so your brain is as lazy as it possibly can be and relies heavily on these shortcuts for everything. Depression and addiction can exist within this system, where people have issues/patterns that trap them mentally in circular thoughts they can't escape. They cannot change their perception to adapt to their realities. When you take LSD in a dose high enough to induce ego death you are removing these shortcuts. This is where psychedelics can be transformative and it allows you to rewrite the shortcuts, to give new interpretation to events and circumstances. This allows you to figure out what view point serves you best which you can then use to let go of traumatic events, reorient your relationships and transform how you view yourself. You'd be surprised how many people truly hate themselves and how much it negatively effects their life in ways they are incapable of normally perceiving. \n\nIt may well be true that what we experience as our ego is just a series of ingrained mental shortcuts that while useful is not without its downsides. There are technical/scientific terms for everything I'm describing, but I find these descriptions do it justice. I have a decent explanation of religious experiences too, but I've been told it kills the mystery of psychedelics for some people.",
"I see people talking about consuming large amts and having good to bad experiences. So how does micro-dosing help people?",
"When erratic, maladjusted, mentally unstable or just downright unlucky people take LSD, then things like \"bad trips\", abuses of others and of the self, and lasting adverse psychological effects can occur. Lots of people have taken LSD though. No one has ever overdosed and died from toxicity. \n\n\nIn my opinion, LSD is much scarier and far more mystifying to people who have never taken it and will never take it.\n\nWhen very smart and receptive people take these psychoactive drugs in a concerted way, amazing advancements in human understanding and technology are sometimes facilitated.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_) \nRead the bit about \"use of hallucinogens\"",
"Hey follow up questions...\n\n1) Is the trip like Mushrooms?\n\n2) It's not addicting right?\n\n3) considering 2, why is it illegal?",
"5-HT2A receptor partial agonist. Activation of 5-HT2A causes hyperexcitability of layer-5 pyramidal neurons in the cortex. These neurons are somehow involved in inference processing. Inference processing, aka pattern recognition, helps your brain save energy since it can just re-use previous patterns in place of processing new sensory inputs in order to resolve it's approximation of the environment.\n\nThe resulting mindstate is, in my opinion, best described as \"hyperinferential\". Your visual cortex, in it's normal operation, uses inference processes to fill in the gaps of your vision (the cause of many optical illusions). In the psychedelic state, these over-excited inference processes spill over. This explains the hallucinations. More importantly, it also explains why hallucinations grow in intensity when one's field of vision remains fixed (like staring at a single point).\n\nThe hyperinference also explains the cognitive effects. You'll make connections between ideas that you normally wouldn't make because, in a regular state, you, by default, recognize that such connections are nonsense, but in the psychedelic state, those filters are overridden. It's a double-edge sword, because it means that you should write down and later scrutinize any \"acid thoughts\" afterwards, (writing things down when tripping isn't that hard, seriously).\n\nIt's not lethal at large doses, to my knowledge, because it is not a full agonist at 5-HT2A and it doesn't have much action at other receptors. Potentially-lethal non-traditional psychedelics like the NBOMe series cause lethal vasoconstriction by agonism of the alpha-1 adrenergic receptor and full-agonism of 5-HT2A, causing excessive activation of the sympathetic nervous system.\n\nDisclaimer: I'm not a neuroscientist. I just read [a bunch of studies](_URL_0_) while doing megafuckloads of the stuff last year. If any actual neuroscientists read this and any of the information I've presented conflicts with your knowledge, please let me know. I do not wish to spread misinformation."
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9h9ce6 | does anyone know why these 'metal soaps' that remove odour work? | I just have people insisting that they work or using them instead of soap. This baffles my neanderthal brain. Any help is appreciated | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9h9ce6/eli5_does_anyone_know_why_these_metal_soaps_that/ | {
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"The molecules in the steel bind with the sulfur molecules left on your fingers from things like garlic and onions, and when you rub your hands against the steel under cold water, the molecules are washed away.",
"Steel is about 92 - 98% Iron.\n\nIron will selectively rip sulfur off of other molecules to create iron sulfide and iron sulfate. This is an exothermic reaction and requires initial energy.\n\nThese \"Metal soaps\" however are made of stainless steel, and are famously inert. They do not react with sulfur. There is no published proof that they work.\n\nBaking soda, Sodium Bicarbonate, NaHCO3 is much better at this. Most Lipids will break down into acids during decay, the NaHCO3 will absorb them and create various gasses and salt + water.\n\nHowever, only activated charcoal can actively trap smells, everything else will try to mask it or convert it.\n\n90% of Metal Soaps work is done by water, the other 10% is you rubbing your hands together under the water.\n\nEDIT: Forgot this part, you nose will adapt to most foul odors in about 30 seconds. Or just about the amount of time it takes to rub your hands on something metal after first smelling the odd smell. Go ahead and get onion juice all over your hands, use a dry metal soap, then smell it in an hour after not washing it in any way. Will still smell of onions.",
"What if the metal soap was copper? That would kill any microbial/bacteria based smells at source.\n\nEdit: _URL_0_ It has its own website.",
"/u/SIMoss88 has answered. I'll just weigh in to say that this is a property of stainless steel...it doesn't need to be soap-shaped like some home goods stores try to cash in on.\n\nJust get a slab/chunk of SS for 1/20th of the cost."
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4pfwhm | since the beginning men have always fought and perished in plenty wars all over the planet, why isn't there an abundance of women? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4pfwhm/eli5_since_the_beginning_men_have_always_fought/ | {
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"Before the modern era, women frequently died in childbirth. Having babies was dangerous due to lack of medical knowledge, lack of safe c sections, lack of basic hygiene, and lack of antibiotics.",
"Why would there be an abundance of women? Do you know of anyone who's husband died in War of Troy or even First World War and is still single and alive? It affects only the generation that is **in** the war. The next generation is again 50/50\n\nThink about it. There is a couple with man and woman. Man dies 20 years earlier than woman because of war. How would this affect the amount of men and women after 25 years considering both of them are dead anyways? A man dying doesn't mean their children suddenly turn into girls does it? Neither it means that the future children this woman has with another man will turn into girls. The birth rate is always around 50% boys/girls and parents dying doesn't affect it in any way.\n",
"[In any situation where the sexes are unevenly distributed at the age of sexual maturity, genes which promote the birth of the sex that's least present are selected for because they have more potential mates. This reactive selection pressure tends to move sexually reproducing species back toward a 1:1 ratio over time.](_URL_0_) \n\nIn humans and at present, it means [*slightly* more male children are born than female on average](_URL_1_), with slightly more males than females dying before they reach reproductive age. ",
"Let's take your example to an extreme\n\n**There's a war which kills everyone except one man and all the adult women**.\n\nSo we have something like 2 billion adult women, and one man. Now let's pretend that he has an incredibly busy month and impregnates each and every woman on the planet.\n\n9-10 months later, there are ~2 billion new babies. 1 billion male, 1 billion female.\n\nThen all of the first generation dies off (the 1 man and 2 billion women), and we're back to a 50-50 population",
"For two reasons. \n\nFirst, war fatalities have a far lower impact on the population than most people think. In modern history, the most deadly war fought was World War II (before that, it's thought to have been the Mongol Conquests of the early second millennium), which killed 60 million people. That's a lot of carnage, but it's important to remember that it's only 3% of the world population — not an insignificant amount by any means, but relatively small given the scale of the conflict. Yet of those 60 million deaths, only 15 million of them were soldiers; the other 45 million were civilians. So the vast majority of fatalities were mixed-gender; in other words, while 15 million soldiers (presumably all or almost entirely male) were killed in combat, about 45 million civilians (presumably 50% male and 50% female) were killed. Throughout history, while men have been doing the fighting, far more casualties were accrued by civilians of both genders than by soldiers who were men.\n\nSecond, such fatalities are easily corrected. Every baby born has a 50% chance of being male and a 50% chance of being female. After the generation affected by war (in other words, the generation that has slightly more women than men) dies of natural causes, the population that remains will be 50-50 again."
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cgtpnq | how does the open refrigerator at the store with cheese, butter, etc. not spoil the food, but our refrigerators at home need to be closed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgtpnq/eli5_how_does_the_open_refrigerator_at_the_store/ | {
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"There are fans that blow cold air around, creating an air curtain. As far as I am aware, they’re not efficient but they do the trick.",
"The refrigerator in the store has a substantial airflow that forms a \"door like\" region, trapping cold air close to the food. This consumes much, much more electricity, so you can't have something like this in your house. Even stores are moving towards physical doors when remodeling to reduce energy use.",
"In addition to what's been posted, most cheeses and butter are safe at room temperature so they don't need to be refrigerated to the temperatures you would have in your home fridge.",
"Fluid dynamics!\n\nThe refrigerators at a store rely on something called \"laminar flow.\" There are fans at the top of the fridge that blow air along a straight path where all particles are moving in straight lines (\"laminar flow\", as opposed to \"turbulent flow\" where all the particles are moving in different directions).\n\nThis creates an effective curtain of air that pushes warmer air out of the way, creating an invisible door made out of air. \n\nIt's not as good as a real door, of course, but it's more than good enough for a dairy case.",
"Not sure on the specifics/ mechanics but yes there are fans that pump air from bottom to top and then the cold air falls down (because density) from vents at the top edge and into vents at the bottom edge creating a wall of cold air inside which milk and stuff can stay cool.",
"It’s a question of energy use. It takes more work to cool things that are rapidly rising in temperature due to an open container. Keeping it closed slows the heat transfer to the food from outside temperature. So it saves energy and speeds up cooling process. Stores, however, make enough money to afford leaving their containers open. (They also have more powerful, commercial coolers made to keep cooling while open). Your home fridge isn’t powerful/fast enough to keep everything cool while open and you run your home electric bill up.",
"Also- different foods are more or less likely to spoil. At my store milk is in a cooler with a door. But yogurt and cheese and butter are in an open cooler.",
"It's also only used for stuff that is somewhat shelf-stable. Cheese and butter have always been a way of storing dairy beyond its expiration, especially before pasteurization was around. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is actually a lot of tech and nuance that goes into things like grocery stores. The supply chains for some of them are just ridiculous."
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a6j43h | why are asian languages often mistranslated into english so poorly? | After seeing this post
_URL_0_
It occurred to me that most incorrect translations (often hilarious) are from an Asian languages to English. Why is this so prevalent?
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6j43h/eli5_why_are_asian_languages_often_mistranslated/ | {
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"Often it's because in some isolated Asian location the company cannot locate a native English speaker, and they make the mistake of assuming that anyone with a dictionary can translate decently.",
"Dictionary translation. Good translation software doesn’t translate worded individually, it looks at phrases and the relationships between words.\n\nIn the case of the post you linked, that would have been a non-native speaker translating the word Jerk, not knowing that Jerk is different than aggressive when talking about chicken.",
"I've lived in Asia for past three years and can tell you it's because Asian languages don't have direct translations to English.\n\n\nThere are many examples of this. Like the Japanese syllabary (their \"letters\") \"R\" and \"L\" are the same. So even Japanese who are professional translators can make the mistake of mixing up the L and R in words. Also there are lots of words in Japanese that are nuances and have many meaning depending on the context rather. So translating is difficult since the most direct 1 to 1 translation might not correctly explain what the person was trying to say.\n\nAlso, lots of phrases we say in English make no sense in Asian languages and the opposite is true, making mistranslations very very common (and often funny)"
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1rdcjg | why are almost all processor companies (intel, amd, qualcomm, nvidia, etc.) u.s. companies? | I heard that the fabricators that Intel uses to create their processors are top secret, but is that keeping foreign companies left behind to play catch up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rdcjg/eli5_why_are_almost_all_processor_companies_intel/ | {
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"The US electronics industry saw a lot of production move overseas as Asian electronics companies were increasingly able to produce cheaper radios, audio equipment, televisions and commodity chips at equal or better quality. But where their education systems and industries are good at producing the kind of engineers who can refine a process, the US still has the edge in creative thinking. And processors require creative thinking, much more so than memory chips.\n\nAs for the equipment American, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies use to make computer chips, the market is more egalitarian. In a fab I worked in, there were machines from the US, Japan and Korea.",
" > I heard that the fabricators that Intel uses to create their processors are top secret, but is that keeping foreign companies left behind to play catch up?\n\nIntel is basically one fabrication process ahead of everyone else in the industry, including AMD which is sort of a US company (they are based in the US, publicly traded but a major interest is owned by Abu Dhabi). \n\nIn the history of computing equipment IBM, which has been around since before computers, was the big dog. They bought any 'business machines' that seemed to be useful to them, including european ones. As time went on and you had branching of the industry most of it went to US companies closely connected to IBM (not necessarily allies but competitors too). Where IBM owned the business market Microsoft (which got its start working for IBM), and Intel made stuff for IBM computers. Then someone came up with the idea of an IBM clone (I'm being vague that's a whole history tale unto itself) but Intel and MS took off, AMD formed to compete with Intel and Nvidia hit it big when 3DFx imploded. \n\nPrior to the 1960's there were some big microelectronics companies in Japan (that still exist in one way or another), as well as smaller ones in the US. Siemens, the german megacorporation has always been involved in some ways but they seemed to leave the integrated circuit business mostly to other people. \n\nSo that's kind of it. IBM bought local because they could rapidly develop with other local oufits. Taiwan particularly has picked up a LOT of high quality manufacturing of semiconductors, but the big guys for a Long time were Intel and AMD's manufacturing (what is now Globalfoundries) which are mostly US and Europe. The east asian stuff all came later.\n\nJapan has always had a toe hold in the market - particularly storage, but Intel processors were so much better than anyone else that no one can compete with that market, and since Intel owns x86, well, Intel owned the computing business. "
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5ifq9i | why does air hitting your face at high speeds feel like a bunch of chunks of air rather than one constant breeze? | This question might not make a whole lot of sense but hear me out:
If the wind is blowing I feel a sustained and breeze, but if I stick my head out the window it feels like chunks of air hitting my face rapidly in random places rather than just a faster-sustained breeze.
Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ifq9i/eli5_why_does_air_hitting_your_face_at_high/ | {
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"Because your face isn't aerodynamic. You know when you throw a rock into a pond and it makes ripples? That's what your face is doing to the air, so it's \"choppy\" and not fluid anymore.",
"Turbulence.\n\nIf you are outside in a light breeze then pretty much all the air around you moves uniformly into a specific direction.\n\nIf you stick your head out of a car window then you are in the turbulent flow that is created around the car. Basically the air hits the windshield and is pushed away by it because it obviously can't flow through it. When it reaches the edge of the windshield the airflow separates from the body of the car because it can't perfectly follow the sharp edge. Especially if there is an open window. Vortexes Form that are large enough to feel them as the chunks of air that you described.\n\nThink of it like diving through a lake compared to getting dragged behind a motorboat with your face in the wake of the boat. Not quite the same but it should visualize the difference.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nTake a look at this and imagine yourself standing in the animated flow. Each of those vortexes would feel like a chunk of ait hitting your face because they actually are one.\n"
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267ecx | how do they get small children, toddlers or younger, to act in tv shows and movies? | I thought about this when watching Full House reruns. How do they get 1-2 year old Nicki and Alex to say or even remember their lines? How do they keep the children's attention for as long as it takes to film a scene? How does the child know or understand to be sad or happy, do this or that? How do they explain all these things to a child with a limited understanding of the English language or what's going on in the scene. And, how do they recognize small children that may have a knack for this sort of thing?
Edit: Thanks for the responses everyone! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/267ecx/eli5_how_do_they_get_small_children_toddlers_or/ | {
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" > How do they get 1-2 year old Nicki and Alex to say or even remember their lines?\n\nThey don't. Almost every time you see them speak, it is a close up shot of them that cuts in quickly and cuts out as soon as they said the line (or a similar short shot technique). This is because there is a parent and/or director looking at them saying \"say XYZ. come on say XYZ. say XYZ for us\". and as soon as the kid repeats the line, they have their shot and can cut it into the dialog.\n\nOlder kids (5+) are easier to work with because they have an understanding of what is going on around them.\n\n > How does the child know or understand to be sad or happy, do this or that?\n\nAgain really young kids do not. They do not really express emotion. If you have been around a toddler you will know that within a hour they will have gone though the whole gambit of emotions. They shoot what is essentially stock footage of the baby laughing, crying, smiling, whatever so they can plug in whatever they need into a scene. Again, any scene where a toddler is involved and doing something, they are almost always completely alone in the shot and it last only a few seconds. This way they only need a few seconds of usable footage from what is a multi-hour shoot.\n\n > And, how do they recognize small children that may have a knack for this sort of thing?\n\nThey do not at all. Parents bring their toddlers to auditions and they get picked almost entirely on looks and shyness. If the kid does not want to do anything but hide in its mothers arms, it does not work very well. Outside of that, does the baby have the right look.",
" > How does the child know or understand to be sad or happy, do this or that? \n\nThey don't, somebody tricks them. This scene from *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* might be my favorite bit of child acting ever. That reaction at 2m is just incredible.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt was pulled off with the same bag of tricks the Santa photographer at the mall has. Hold up something (or do/say something) off-camera which will provoke a reaction in the child. ",
"You got it dude!",
"Some of the kids aren't as young as they look. One of my students played a 4 year old when he was 8. He got the part because he was was small enough to be believable. ",
"They don't use real kids any more it's all cgi. "
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3k5bjp | what would happen if you put a car in reverse while you are moving forward at a reasonable speed? | I have always wondered what would happen if i accidentally shifted from D to R while driving. Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k5bjp/eli5_what_would_happen_if_you_put_a_car_in/ | {
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"In a standard transmission it's basically impossible. The gears that need to mesh up are spinning so fast and in opposite directions that they'll just make an awful buzzing/grinding noise.\n\nIn a modern automatic the computer will generally prevent your car from actually entering 'reverse' unless you're going REALLY slow. Instead you'll just drop into Neutral for a while, could be dangerous if you're going down the highway and 70MPH and suddenly lose power, which might have bad effects for your brakes and steering (which generally rely on engine vacuum to help you).\n\nIt's possible that a sufficiently 'stupid' automatic transmission might tear itself apart, but even the old hydraulic transmissions usually had some sort of system in them to prevent this kind of thing from happening.",
"Sorry its such a crappy version, but this is a good video to see what happens.\n\n_URL_0_",
"There is a mythbusters episode about this\n\n_URL_0_\n\nbasically, you can fuck up your car but nothing major happens."
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1wo2do | how do tiny non island countries exist? | I was thinking about this last night, and while I think I get the current political reasons, why at some point say 100 years ago didn't the French army just march on Monaco and inform everyone they were French now? Or Liechtenstein, I think the Swiss agree to protect them, but why? What possible benefit does that give Switzerland? Is it just tradition? Do powerful people in powerful neighboring countries hide assets there? What's the deal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wo2do/eli5_how_do_tiny_non_island_countries_exist/ | {
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"It's mostly tradition and face saving. It varies, of course. Vatican City will have differing reasons for still existing than Andorra, but generally, it's about preserving the status of a family or organization while removing most of their real estate holdings and actual power. ",
" > why at some point say 100 years ago didn't the French army just march on Monaco and inform everyone they were French now?\n\nFrance would have nothing to gain from doing so. It would involve violating their treaty with the ruling family of Monaco, and would (rightly) make France look like an aggressive state. If countries are allowed to violate treaties with weaker nations then, sod it, they might as well take Wallonia from Belgium as well while they're at it, or annex Luxembourg. And then Germany can do the same to any of its weaker neighbours, as can Russia, etc. etc. Basically, France would get no benefit from claiming Monaco, they've no historical claim to it, and they would be violating a treaty and portraying themselves as bad guys all for the sake of a speck of land."
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12svai | why is the stock market going down after the election? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/12svai/eli5_why_is_the_stock_market_going_down_after_the/ | {
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"It's public perception of the future. In general, republicans are considered to be more business friendly than democrats. \n\nSince Romney lost the election, investor confidence has been reduced causing people to want to sell. When a significant amount of people want to sell flooding the market shares go down.\n\nMy thoughts on this is that it is a temporary knee jerk reaction, and will likely see a few days of instability of it jumping up and down, and then it will return to its normal price. \n\nIf Romney was elected you would see the stock market jump up and then down, then up etc and then it would go back to a steadier value.",
"Barack Obama has supported a series of monetary policies called Quantitative Easing, which is basically printing more money to pay off debts. This policy is good for banks, but bad for businesses and consumers in the short run because it devalues the dollar. Mitt Romney had come out against the policy. Had Mitt Romney been elected, the stock market would have remained stable (it would not have increased) because of the promise of monetary policy that would be in favor of private business. This is a very short term drop in the stock market and doesn't really mean anything.",
"Random variation.\n\nHundreds of millions of shares are sold and traded every day in an attempt by traders to make money. The overall gains and losses in the market are based on the value of a set of the most valuable companies traded on the stock market, but this measure is basically worthless when used as a measure of economic growth, and is generally not related to political events.\n\nPeople in the media routinely attempt to tie various political events (x law passed, y report came out, politician gave z speech) but there is not any correlation.",
"Or, you know, something else:\n_URL_0_"
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5ceuhc | how does mathematical modeling work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ceuhc/eli5how_does_mathematical_modeling_work/ | {
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"It really depends on what type of model you are talking about, but at a high level a mathematical model is just a series of related equations that all come together to spit out a specific answer (or series of answers). The goal is to isolate variables so you can see what changes to any individual variable will do to the end result.\n\nThere are tons of ways to build models, but the goal is always to experiment with different variables to predict results.",
"Mathematical modelling is a broad topic, but the basic principle is that you use data to estimate relationships between variables, and can then use those relationships to predict how changing one variable will change another.\n\nA very simple example would be looking at a graph of age against height. You can imagine taking 100 random people and plotting their age and height on this graph.\n\nA 'model' is essentially drawing a line through this data to find the main pattern. A very simple model would be a straight line. This probably wouldn't fit the data very well. So rather than drawing a straight line, you might use another equation to draw this line (e.g. a [Logistic curve](_URL_0_)).\n\nThis would enable you to predict a person's height just based on their age.\n\nFurthermore, you could have an even more complicated model which includes more variables. For example, age and gender. This would effectively be drawing two curves through your data, and enable you to more accurately predict height than with just age.",
"Most of these answers revolve around top-down modeling where you look at data and do analysis to try to see what contributes to it.\n\nAlso important is more bottom-up modeling where you look at a real-life system, make an educated guess (often drawing from existing literature outside of mathematics) about how relationships should work out, and then do the math and hope the emergent behavior looks like real life.\n\nLike ecosystem models start with the assumption that more predators means more prey gets eaten, and more prey means predators eat and therefore reproduce more. Then we try to fit certain rate constants of the model so the overall behavior matches real data. Then we can look at the model and see what happens of we catch 5 tons of salmon in a year and if it doesn't significantly impact the model (because there's tons of salmon, or because they're not under intense predation pressure, or because given the state of the model fewer salmon in the ecosystem would increase salmon birth rates to compensate) then we give the fisheries the go-ahead to catch the salmon."
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1wwksu | why do girls get so emotional (angry/sad) during their period? is there an evolutional reason? | Im a girl and during my period I cry over commercials, get mad at everybody over nothing. What's the use of this? I mean, are or were these moodswings useful? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wwksu/eli5_why_do_girls_get_so_emotional_angrysad/ | {
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2cvehc | if sperm carries a mans dna and the egg carries the woman's dna. why is each kid different? with the millions of sperm in the average ejaculation, are they all completely different people theoretically | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cvehc/eli5_if_sperm_carries_a_mans_dna_and_the_egg/ | {
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"Sperm and egg cells are created through the process of meiosis. Without going into detail, your sperm (and eggs) do not carry an exact copy of your DNA. You DNA consists of chromosomes (a set of genes) from your mother and another set of analogous chromosomes from your father. The sperm you create would be a jumbled mix of that but only consisting of one half of the pair needed to be complete. The other half would come from your partner. \n\nThis means that genes expressed in your parents may not be expressed in you, yet you may still pass those genes on to your children.\n\nEach of your sperm (and egg) cells have a different jumbled mix so each of your sperm cells are different (wouldn't be right to say different \"people\" since it is only half the number of chromosomes it would need to be complete).\n\nIf you want to know more, [this video is a good introduction.](_URL_0_)"
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9dit1a | why is italy worldwide known for its coffee, while not producing a single bean in their territory? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9dit1a/eli5_why_is_italy_worldwide_known_for_its_coffee/ | {
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"Their coffee methodology — grinds, various methods of preparation, and the culture behind it. Massive innovation in the way they deal with coffee, vs much of the rest of the world that just made black coffee with it. ",
"Innovation in the methodology of preparation. All those drinks you see on the menu at Starbucks are Italian in origin—espresso (the king), cappuccino, macchiato, etc. Other cultures did amazing things with coffee (the Turks and the Cubans come to mind), but the Italians led the race. ",
"A little off topic, but I'm on way back from Milano right now. My office is bang opposite the new Starbucks megastore/roastary (first SB in Italy I believe) that is opening as i write this. Anyway, came here to say that the locals aren't impressed; seems more to be for tourists. It's a real shame SB's got in.",
"The best way to know is to go get an espresso in a bar (yes in Italy the bar is where you get coffee, it's open in the early am and serves pastry as well). Get it without sugar and without milk. Make sure to go to a neighborhood bar, away from touristic spots. When you see a lot of people going in and out on their way to work that's your bar. Ask for \"un espresso per favore\" and drink it at the counter.\nDone"
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cqs2sz | why couldnt older humans have infinite transplants using younger organs to stay alive? | I read somewhere that people die of old age due to organ failure. Could younger organ donors be the answer to living forever? Theoretically if could withstand all operations that they would undergo. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cqs2sz/eli5_why_couldnt_older_humans_have_infinite/ | {
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"1. Organ transplants involve cutting you open and replacing a failed organ. This causes a lot of trauma to the surrounding area and the body as a whole. You also need to take anti-rejection medications, as your body doesn't like a foreign object taking up residence. These are also hard on your body and don't always work.\n\n2. Even if you could say, grow a new organ from your own cells (which is an area of research) and get around the rejection problem, and a body was always healthy enough to recover from the trauma of surgery, what happens when the brain dies? You can't just transplant a brain from someone else. And stuff like transferring memories and personality from one person to another is complete science fiction.",
"Not everything can be replaced. The brain and Central nervous system, skin, eyes, etc. Also organ transplant surgery is incredibly dangerous. It also wouldn't slow the deterioration of the person's DNA which would kill them eventually. Even assuming 100% success rate with the transplants the most you could hope to achieve is a few extra years. Definitely not immortality.",
"Well are you saying that we should kill younger people to get their organs? Or force them to give organ they can live with only 1? But let put aside the morale side of the question.\n\nLike someone else said, you have rejection of transplant, and surgery is always dangerous. But more than that, you can't replace everything. You can replace the brain, but also can't replace all the blood vessels, nervous systems, articulation. At some point, too much problem accumulate that we can't all fix with transplant.",
"I remember reading a book as a kid based on this premise. Was called House of the Scorpion.\n\nAnyways biggest reason is that eventually your brain would die, since you can't really do a \"brain transplant.\""
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4nfljo | what is a hedge fund? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nfljo/eli5_what_is_a_hedge_fund/ | {
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"Normally when you invest on the stock market, you can invest in single stocks of specific companies. However this can be quite risky and will consume a lot of your time to manage your investments.\n\nYou could hire an investment manager to do this work for you but this is costly and isn´t really feasible for the majority of private investors.\n\nInvestment funds are basically a collection of managed stocks and assets that you can invest in as a whole. In essence you and many others share a common investment manager (represented by the fund) who manages a diverse portfolio of stocks and assets for you.\n\nThis way you gain access to risk management, diversification and economies of scale you would never have access to as an individual investor.\n\nHedge funds are special cases of investment funds, instead of being open to the public with many smaller investors, it´s basically a private group of investors.\n\nSo hedge funds like normal funds invest in stocks and assets (like buying and selling other companies) to grow capital. Unlike normal funds their capital does not come from issuing out \"shares\" to many smaller private investors but from a small host of private investors.\n\nFor example, imagine five rich guys each investing $1M into a hedge fund, that hedge fund now has a capital of $5M which it will invest in diverse assets to try and grow the capital.\n\nEdit:\n\nTo add, because it has been pointed out several times (and quite rightly) another defining feature of a hedge fund is that they are less regulated. As hedge funds are not publicly traded they are subject to few regulations and can use a wider variety of financial instruments that mutual funds cannot (e.g. shorting).\n\nEdit2:\n\nBecause it is a FAQ, hedge funds are not mutual funds. Unlike mutual funds (as they are commonly understood, it's bit a legal term) hedge funds are not publicly traded and are subject to less regulations (e.g. what type of assets they can actually invest in).\n\nBroadly speaking hedge funds are a special type of mutual funds.",
"They enable you to invest in a large variety of different \"things\" - far more than you'd be able to if you were just using your own money - so that if one \"thing\" goes bad, all the other \"things\" mean you don't lose all your money. \"Hedging\" is usually an intelligent process of working out \"If this goes down in value, this will probably go up so let's buy both\". This limits your potential growth, but also protects you against significant down swings, ideally. ",
"I work in one but I must say the investopedia definition is already very relevant. \n\nHedge funds come in all shapes and sizes. In one sentence they're a group of investors who are legally allowed to invest money on your behalf in exchange for a maintenance fee and a chunk of performance fee should they be successful ",
"Hedge Fund is a [card](_URL_0_) from the game Android: Netrunner published by Fantasy Flight Games. It's an operation that costs five credits to play but returns nine credits, creating a net gain of four credits for one action.",
"Tried to make a dumbed down version since some of these answers are a bit convoluted- \n\nHedge fund where you give money to a person (or team of people) and they will invest it in all sorts of different shit for you. The \"fund\" is just the group of all the people's (like you) money combined basically\n\nA mutual fund is essentially the same thing. \n\nThe difference between them, is that hedge funds are mainly for rich people because they are less regulated and have more freedom in how they can invest and what rules they can make up . But for that reason, the people who make the rules for investment industry don't let poor people invest in them cuz they'd probably get fucked over from having no clue about what's happening (even the rich people probably have little clue what's going on but at least they are not gonna be homeless if the hedge fund loses all their money) ",
"I've been a partner in a hedge fund for almost 20 years. A hedge fund is very similar to a mutual fund except, as others noted, its closed to the public. There are less regulations on hedge funds so investors have to be \"educated\" and rich so they don't lose their life savings. Also hedge funds aren't allowed to advertise at all for this same reason. The attraction of a hedge fund vs a mutual fund is that you are paying for smarter people and better returns supposedly. Before 2008 our fees were 2% and 20%. Which means that we charge you 2% on your investment regardless of performance and get 20% of any profits. Those days are over and the hedge fund industry is shrinking fast. People are realizing that overall performance has been similar to mutual funds that are a fraction of the cost to the investor. ps \"Hedge\" is just a term that caught on...most funds don't hedge any of their positions because there is no \"alpha\" in that. ",
"A hedge fund is similar to a private equity fund or mutual fund in the sense they are all money managers, but generally there are 4 main differences:\n\n* Hedge Funds are more speculative (riskier investments) to generate high returns\n\n* Hedge Fund are not necessarily limited to public markets or any specific asset class. In fact, their investment strategies may be purposefully vague.\n\n* Their investment term is relatively short ( < 1 year), including some that may make investments for just a few seconds (like arbitrage opportunities)\n\n* Investors in hedge funds are generally restricted to high net worth individuals or institutions\n\n\nUnfortunately, there is no real textbook definition, so these are all generalities.",
"A group of people put their money together into one hedge fund. This hedge fund is managed by investors who find ways to turn this money into more money.\n\nEdit: This is ELI5 not ELI50AndHaveAPHD",
"A hedge fund is a type of investment that specializes in \"Alternative\" ways of investing. Much like \"Alternative\" music, what these types of funds actually do can vary widely from fund to fund. It's probably better to contrast them against traditional investment funds.\n\nBoth Hedge funds and Traditional investment funds will invest your money for you. You give them money, they make investments, and after some time (if all goes well) they give you back the money plus a little more money. \n\nThe types of investments made by traditional investment funds are generally straightforward and easy to understand. For example: buy a stock / bond and wait until you ask for your money back. In our music analogy, traditional investing is like Katy Perry or Maroon 5. It's formulaic and appeals to most people.\n\nThe types of investments made by hedge funds are usually more difficult to understand . There are legal restrictions and regulations on who can invest in hedge funds for this reason; you have to know what you're doing. The reason hedge funds choose these weird strategies is to be uncorrelated with the mainstream stock and bond market. In music, hedge funds are the bands you never heard of. Maybe they're really good but just haven't been given a chance by a major label, or maybe they have a specific appeal for a niche audience. The point is, they're not for everyone. You're not going to see these guys in the Superbowl half time show. \n\nTo go further, some strategies hedge funds pick are really arcane and tend to be in fields where they can get better information than other people. Some examples I'm familiar with include: \n1. legal arbitrage - taking advantage of legal loopholes to guarantee profits, financing class action lawsuits that are otherwise too expensive, taking advantage of a regulation change, etc. \n2. weather related funds - betting on what the weather will be like (via derivatives), buying catastrophe bonds (e.g. betting how bad a hurricane will be), paying storm watchers to get up to the minute information about weather before it's published on the news. \n3. index arbitrage - taking advantage predictable market movements when an index publishes changes. \n\nThere are tons more and it's impossible to list them all. [Here's a Quora](_URL_0_) with some interesting strategies listed. Relating this back to music, you have some \"alternative\" music artists that get on the radio or get publicity like Sublime, MGMT, or the soundtrack of Garden State. However, there are those really out there guys like Frank Zappa or Ween or They Might be Giants that take some big chances. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. \n\nI hope this answers your question.\n\nEDIT: formatting",
"I'm sure everyone has explained by now but if you want to see a dramatised version of how they operate I cannot recommend the show Billions enough",
"It's a savings account for when the hedge gets older so that you can pay to have it sculpted into any animal you want. ",
"The name hedge funds comes from a group of investment funds that aimed to make money from the stock market going down as well as up. They bought stocks in the best companies and \"shorted\" stocks in the worst companies. When you \"short\" a stock you make money if the stock goes down in value. \n\nThese were known as hedge funds because they were supposed to make money whether the market went up or down. This is known as a \"hedge\". \n\nWhen the market went up the stocks would increase in value but the shorted stocks would lose money. When the market went down the shorted stocks would make money but the bought stocks would lose money. \n\nThe theory is that the profit from the market going up or down is always bigger than the loss. \n\nIn theory stocks in good companies would increase in value more than bad companies when the market went up. The profit from the bought stocks will therefore be more than the loss from the shorted stocks. \n\nWhen the market went down bad companies were expected to lose more value than good companies. The profit from the shorted stocks will therefore be more than the loss on the bought stocks. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n",
"Some of the key differences between hedge funds and a traditional fund (such as a mutual fund) are the use of derivatives, leverage, and shorting securities (ie. the hedging aspect). Hedge funds are also privately run, which means there is less regulation and transparency.\n\n\nLeverage is borrowing money from prime brokers (big banks) to invest more in the market. Using leverage can significantly increase return potential, but also creates greater risk of loss.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nDerivatives are your options, swaps, futures, etc.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nShorting is selling a security that you do not currently own. To do this, you must borrow the stock from a prime broker, sell the securities in the market, and are then obligated to repurchase the securities sold at a future date. Essentially you are trying to sell the stock today, and then buy it back cheaper in the future. \n & nbsp;\nHedge funds are usually specialized and employ a large number of different strategies as well:\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Event Driven Strategies:** are typically based on a corporate restructuring or acquisition that creates profit opportunities\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Relative Value Strategies:** involves buying a security and shorting a related security with the goal of profiting when a perceived pricing discrepancy between the two is resolved\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Macro Strategies:** based on global economic trends (pretty self explanatory)\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Equity Hedge Fund:** seeks to profit from long or short positions in publicly traded equities and derivatives\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThere are quite a few subcategories here (a couple examples are):\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*Market Neutral*: idea is that you are going long on undervalued securities and short on overvalued securities in approximately equal amounts (close to a net exposure of 0%). Thus you are eliminating market risk and only being rewarded for your stock picking ability\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*Short Bias:* employ a predominately short positions in overvalued equities (overall negative exposure)\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*Long/Short:* idea is that you are buying long positions in companies you believe will appreciate it value and shorting correlated stocks to diversify risk\n\n & nbsp;\n\nSource: I work at a hedge fund\n",
"A hedge fund is a specific type of investment fund, built around the philosophy of \"hedging\" portfolio risk through various strategies. Traditionally, hedge funds focus on publicly traded stocks (\"equities\"), investing in a portfolio of companies. The key difference is that, unlike mutual funds (commonly called \"long only\"), hedge funds operate by both buying AND selling. In this way, hedge funds are indifferent to whether the market rises or falls -- they aim to produce low-risk, positive investment returns consistently for their clients, regardless of the market environment.",
"First of all, be aware that many of you are invested in hedge funds without even knowing it. Almost all pension funds for public employees are investors in hedge funds. Most university endowments are invested in hedge funds. Many churches are invested in hedge funds. You get the idea.\n\nWhile hedge funds historically may have featured \"hedging\", this characteristic is no longer a distinguishing feature of current hedge funds. The primary distinguishing feature now is the structure. The investor usually pays the standard \"2 and 20\", or 2% of one's account value annually in a \"management fee\" and 20% of the gains in the account (after accounting for repayment of the 2% to the investor). By comparison, traditional mutual funds do not participate in a share of profits, and rather charge the investor something less than 1% of invested capital.\n\nIt's a very expensive structure for an investor and is generally characterized by materially more risk than a traditional \"long-only\" mutual fund (where the manager only buys stocks in anticipation that these stocks go up, as opposed to investing in stocks and various derivative securities which may move up or down based upon the movements of underlying assets or liabilities). As a result, these funds are generally not available to regular-way retail investors.\n\nAlso, while hedge funds are theoretically a \"liquid\" investment, many rules (constructed by the fund manager) will limit if, when and how an investor is able to \"redeem\" his interest in the fund for cash. As a result, during challenging times, it may be difficult for investors to withdraw their money from a fund (note the conversation in The Big Short between the investor and the manager...).\n\nJust by way of illustration, over the last few years, hedge funds have invested in ordinary equities (e.g., Apple stock), claims to Bernie Madoff's assets that were sold by defrauded Madoff investors, the debt of Icelandic banks, Puerto Rico municipal bonds, life insurance policies of individuals expected to pass away in the near term, the bonds of the failed public utility Energy Future Holdings, just to name a few interesting event-driven investments.",
"The name \"hedge fund\" is a little misleading. \"Hedging\" is the practice of reducing your risk by making bets both ways (it'll go up or down). Of course, this reduces potential return. Not many firms like to do this because it limits upside.\nAnother popular strategy at hedge funds is \"relative value,\" meaning they pick 2 companies in a certain sector, one they really like and one who they think won't do well for whatever reason. They buy the one they like, and \"sell short\" on the one they don't (betting it'll go down). This insulates them from broader market risk, such as a mortgage bubble crashing, and only exposes them to risk in their own sector.\n\nThey should just call them '\"funds,\" because hedging isn't the core part of their business. The core part of their business is trading the market. Some hold trades for years, others (who trade based on algorithms with no human element) hold trades for fractions of a second, clipping pennies from retail investors, which is a morally questionable practice but the regulators don't care because there's a lot of lobbying money behind it.",
"Unfortunately, everyone in the thread seems to be repeating \"it's like a pool of money\", without mentioning the things that make that pool of money interesting.\n\nA hedge fund is a pool of money managed by a company, yes, but what makes hedge funds interesting -- and different from the funds you and me can buy -- is that they have three benefits: an enormous amount of capital, good connections, and different laws that apply to them. This means that hedge funds can invest in companies that aren't public, like Facebook or Google pre-IPO. Better yet, it also means that they can disregard laws meant for other funds, such as laws about leverage. Leverage is a way to multiply your gains by buying more of whatever you're buying by using a loan. It's illegal for normal funds to do this, but hedge funds are allowed to leverage their investments.\n\nInterestingly, hedge funds are now falling out of favor among the superrich. Why? Well, it turns out that all the advantages hedge funds have don't do them all that much good, as they also have higher fees. Warren Buffett made a bet with a prominent hedge fund manager, Ted Seides of Protégé, that simple index funds would outperform hedge funds over a ten year period. The bet turns 9 this year, and Buffett's index fund -- which anyone can buy -- has returns three times higher than the hedge fund.",
"The term hedge fund applies to abroad class of alternative investing that has little to do with the practice of hedging. In fact many hedge funds apply strategies that are quite speculative and would be considered high risk. The term generally refers to a class of alternative investing strategies and the practitioners of those strategies. \n\nThey are called hedge funds because they provide an alternative and thereby hedge against traditional investment strategies like buying stocks and bonds.\n\nSource: Many years working on the investment team of a Wall Street hedge fund\n\nEdit: meant alternative NOT non-alternative strategies",
"Imagine you and your 4 friends, all 5-years old want to invest in rare pokemon cards.\n\nThese cards can range from $5 - $100, and you don't know which will be good investments, so the $20 you have isn't really enough to get into the market saying you'd buy two $10 cards and hope neither is a dud. (hope??)\n\nBut, if you and your friends all pool your lemonade stand savings, you've got $200!!\n\n - You can diversity and buy some $5 cards and some $50 cards\n - You can buy some today, and some in a week at a convention\n - **You guys have created a hedge fund!**\n\nYou can invest in stocks, used cars, complicated securities, whatever you want. If you were a mutual fund available to the public, you'd be regulated up the wazoo, but saying you're a private hedge fund among buddies, you're free to do what you want.",
"This is my job. A Hedge fund just is a group of wealthy folks (or institutional investors like pensions) who contribute money to a pool of money that the manager then invests. the manager may invest in whatever he feels like, from stocks to oil to airplanes. Everyone typically pays the manager 2% of the investment per year in management fees and 20% of whatever profits they make in incentive fees, sometimes called a carve out.",
"I guess there might already be a similar answer, but I also see a lot of misconceptions or at the very least things playing into common perceptions (\"hedge funds are only for rich people\"). Of course the following is a vast simplification, but it hits the economic intuition.\n\nIt's important to understand some basic economics first, so let's start with that:\n\nImagine you had $100, and instead of buying something right away you'd prefer to save your money because you want to save on a new computer.\n\nYou could put the money under your mattress. While you will always know where your money is, and thus it's a risk-free way to save, there are other such risk-free ways to save money, for example a savings account in a bank.\n\nWhy would you use such a savings account instead? Because it normally would increase your money over time to do so - the bank basically pays you for giving them your money for some time. There is a lot of reasons for this and explaining how they are able to do so would go beyond this post, but the main point is that the bank needs the cash now while you do not need it, and they will pay you for basically lending them the money.\nBoth your mattress and the normal savings account have no risk of i.e. your money being less than what you paid in next year. If the bank claims to pay you 1% each year, then with a normal savings account you will have $101 next year - guaranteed.\n\nNow of course 1% is not much at all for most people - $1 each year will not help you much to save for that computer. However, lending money to the bank is not the only way for you to make money, because other people look for money as well. One such \"person\", or better group of persons, is a company.\nA lot of companies decide to \"split\" ownership through so-called stocks. If you own a stock, you own a very small fraction of the company, and this stock guarantees'* you a part of the company in case they get, for example, decide to stop being a company and sell all of their offices, machines, computers, ...\nNow a company is not like your bank - it faces much more risk. Your bank, for example, would invest your money into the government, while the company depends on its customers, different markets around the world, its products, production, ... - on the other hand, a single company tends to grow more than just 1% per year and thus your return is higher than when you give your money to the bank.\n\nNow, a clever guy would say to simply split his $100 into 100 $1 bills and invest in a lot of different companies, for example Apple, 3M, some energy company, some construction company, ... - generally companies that have as little relation in their businesses as possible. That would get rid of a lot, if not most of the individual company risk, and is in fact what so-called market indexes like the S & P500 try to emulate so you do not have to do it. While you would still have some risk (i.e. if the economy generally goes down, ...) it would be much less than if you only invested in one company, while at the same time your return is still higher than just from the savings account. However, if you prefer a safe but lower return of course the savings account still has a point, or you could simply go ahead and split up your savings across both if you want to have just a little less risk than the market!\nIn fact, a very well-known theory in finance and economics (\"Capital Asset Pricing Model\") and its fundamental assumptions basically say that you cannot do better than this strategy - every investor should always want to hold this market portfolio of many companies in combination with a risk-free savings account, because it is impossible to have a better trade-off of return and risk. Even in a situation where you want more return than the market at more risk, the model says it's best to borrow money and put it into the market instead of building a new portfolio altogether. This theory is also where the most common saying in finance comes from: \"you can't beat the market\".\n\nNow, why am I explaining all of this and where do hedge funds come in? Well, obviously this saying, \"you can't beat the market\", doesn't stop people from trying. This is basically what the often-mentioned mutual funds promise - against a small fee, they will build you a portfolio of many companies that consistently, at the same or less risk, does better than the market. Such mutual funds are relatively open to all kinds of investors, because their investment activities are still pretty simple and easy to understand to someone with no economic degree - however, it is important to also keep in mind a majority of their investors are not rich people but actually other institutions who want to invest their money. This also means they are quite regulated in their activities - for example, if they want to increase their return by borrowing money, they are limited in this due to the high risk involved. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, those funds often follow passive strategies - they build a portfolio of companies they believe will perform well from a lot of research and keep following that strategy without changing the basic portfolio by much.\n\nA hedge fund, as mentioned here, is basically a special kind of mutual fund that is not available to the public and often promises even higher returns. Its activities are less regulated, however at the same time they are not allowed to advertise their services to i.e. an inexperienced investor. Furthermore, the people who are allowed to invest in them are also highly restricted to people with investment experience and corresponding licenses, and again primarily consist of institutions.\nTheir strategies to beat the market are often not based on simply holding something forever but instead active strategies identifying and using \"inefficiencies\" of the market. Such \"inefficiencies\" are commonly called arbitrage and basically are things that do not make much sense and are logically inconsistent - a very basic example would be a stock that is differently priced on two stock exchanges and thus allows you to make money for free (buy on the cheap exchange and sell on the expensive one). Others \"short\" stocks - basically bet against a stock increasing in value because they think the company will perform poor in the future.\nAlso very important is the fact that they tend to \"hedge\" their risk a lot. Hedging could be described as being similar to diversifying your portfolio and building a market, but specialized on one certain asset. For example, if you are a company that needs oil for its production, you could hedge against oil suddenly becoming much more expensive by agreeing with a seller that they will always sell you oil at a fixed price in one month from now. Hedge funds very often integrate such schemes in their strategies to migrate specific risks or limit losses from their strategies (while of course also losing a bit of profit in the process).\n\n'*this is not 100% true as it depends on a lot of factors - particularly if the company also got money from the bank through loans, which they would have to pay off first. But to explain that would go way beyond this post!",
"It's what I wish I was in today, because I just blew 5% off my net worth (10% off my liquid capital) with a risky strategy. That's today, as in, down 5% in one day.\n\nSee y'all tomorrow. I'ma get drunk now.",
"Hedge funds are not actually a defined entity unto themselves. Hedge funds are a Limited Partnership, so to first define a Hedge Fund, let's talk for one second about LPs.\n\nA Limited Partnership has two partners. First, a General Partner who manages the operations of the the partnership, and one or more Limited Partners, who are involved through investment only. So a simple example would be like this: Let's say Joe decides to start an ice cream stand but needs to raise $10,000 for his equipment. Joe starts a Limited Partnership where 80% of the stake is held by his brother-in-law, David, who invests $10,000. 20% is held by Joe which allows him to benefit in the profits of the partnership even though Joe is not investing any money. \n\nThis 20% is what is called sweat equity. 20/80% is a fairly common split.\n\nNow, let's imagine this isn't an ice cream truck, but is instead an investment fund.\n\nJoe thinks he can outperform for investors by investing in private label pasta factories instead of stocks on the market. Joe realizes to buy a bunch of pasta factories, he needs about $100 million. So, again, Joe raises capital through limited partners to invest in his business, the business of buying pasta factories. Joe is still the general partner in a limited partnership, the legal distinction is no different than when he ran an ice cream shack, but the nature of the business has changed.\n\nHedge funds has become a catch all term to describe companies employing unorthodox investment methods with their capital. In reality, what it is MEANT to be, and where the word \"hedge\" comes from, is a series of risky investments along with counteracting investments to help \"hedge\" those risks. \n\nA classic example of this would be a hedge fund that invests not in pasta factories but instead in common stock in oil drilling and exploration. An oil drilling company is a risky bet, so a hedge fund, hedging its bets, might also buy \"put options\" on the price of oil, in laymans terms, a way to profit if the price of oil goes down. \n\nThat way, should the oil exploration suffer due to lower oil prices, the put options will gain in value and reduce the financial risk of the equation. If the oil exploration stocks do well with a high price of oil, the put options will lose value. \n\nBecause of that, the transactions are risk reducing. \n\nHowever, this is not what hedge funds have become. Many hedge funds use these very options to extend their risk, and hedge fund ultimately means any investment fund that is not available to the average person-- in order to invest in a hedge fund, you must be an accredited investor, which means someone who earns $250k + or has over $2,000,000 in liquid assets.",
"Most of the answers here seem to be pretty bad, either uninformed people making a good effort or people who claim to be in industry but their answers suggest they are only tangentially involved. Too tired to bang out a whole response but feel free to PM if you want to understand better or know what goes on day to day. It's really not as glamorous as media or TV makes it out to be.",
"OK Let's ELI5 this whole thing.\n\nSuppose your mom lets you keep all the change she gets when you both go shopping for groceries. You grab all your coins and as a bubbly 5-year-old would do, keep them on a piggy bank.\n\nNow one day at school you come across Joey, who's a couple years older than you and you talk to him about the toys you wanna buy and how you're gathering fortunes in your piggy.\n\nJoey then goes like: \"Hey, since you got so much money in your piggy, why not let me lend it to other kids for a while so I can make more money for you and you can buy more toys?\"\n\nYou think about it for a bit, almost 5 seconds, and concludes that an absolutely genious idea. More toys are always better than less toys, right? \n\nAlright. So there's some caveats to this. Joey obviously won't do this for free, and will take a few of your coins in exchange for his \"service\" every month. Also, if Joey manages to make too much money for you, he gets to keep some of it to buy his own toys.\n\n(As you can see, Joey's got very attractive, upside-only risk exposure.)\n\nAnyways, the school rules regulate how kids can lend their money to each other, and Joey's got a special certificate which allows him to lend it to bold kids with bold ideas which might not work at all, but if they do, there will be an avalanche of coins (high-risk assets). \nIt also allows him to pull off very complicated lending structures, like signing an agreement to buy Dorito's for 10 coins from Mary in 12 months, then selling that agreement to someone else (structured derivative products).\n\nOther kids can't do those things. Joey, however, cannot advertise his services on the school's news board.\n\nYou probably don't know all of this, but you probably should, since your piggy is so important to you and you really want your toys real bad.\n\nAfter talking to your mom, and after she explains all these things to you, you realize there's a chance you might lose all your coins, specially since you don't recall Joey explaining any of those things to you. You then decide to keep them stored safely in you piggy and go back to gathering change, and live happily ever after!\n\nThat's a hedge fund.",
"Your average plain vanilla mutual fund, established according to 40-act can indeed short stocks. It's weird how many of you think otherwise.\n"
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3w5dlo | why does fiber optics perform better than copper in terms of internet speed (upload, download)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3w5dlo/eli5_why_does_fiber_optics_perform_better_than/ | {
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"You can transmit more information through them than through copper cable. Therefore the ISP can afford to sell you better internet speeds without worrying as much about overloading their network with too much demand.",
"Fiber comes from a hub, goes to a \"node\" where it then gets turned from fiber to coax. The coax leaves the node and runs through taps and amplifiers. Between the node and your modem you can have any number of things that can cause bad bit error rates. Basically causing your modem to ask for information more than once. \n\nWith fiber you don't have parts that can get corroded, parts that are affected from hot and cold. You just have light. What can cause issues are tight bends in the fiber, dirty connectors and a bad fusion splice. These are all easily traceable were coax is not as easy to find a connector that has sucked water and is now corroding the center conductor. \n\nIn a perfect coax world you can obtain the same speeds as fiber by channel bonding multiple frequencies. It's just not as reliable as fiber. \n\n**edit - missed word \"not\". **",
"Copper actually transmits information faster than fiber optics. Copper – 2.3 × 108 m/s while fiber is Fiber – 2.0 × 108 m/s [source](_URL_0_)\n\nHowever copper has a tremendous signal loss due to it's properties. An unshielded copper wire will lose signal 328 feet from the source (without a booster)\n\nFiber on the other hand can go up to 25 miles in a single-mode cable style.\n\nFiber also picks up less background noise. The core is glass wrapped in insulation unlike copper which can pick up electromagnetic noise.\n\nBandwidth wise, copper companies developed Cat # type cables. Basically ethernet cords designed for faster speeds. It can generously do 1 gbps in ideal scenerios (note: not pure copper wire) Fiber on the other hand easily does 1 gbps, common for 10 with industrial ones maxing out at 100.\n\nWhy would we even bother with copper then? Copper was used in phone lines strung to every house. It offers 24 analog voice channels in the 3,000 hz spectrum. Fiber is digital and offers 32,000 channels! But they are digital and thus more expensive on both ends. The copper infastructure was already in place, so rather than dig up streets for fiber, they can run optimized fiber CAT-6 cables to central hubs that then run copper to homes.\n\nCost: \nA 500 foot cat6 cable costs $50 on Amazon. $230 for 500 feet of fiber optics. \n\nedit: 500",
"As you have known, fiber optics transmits data by light instead of electrical signal. This offers a couple advantages:\n\n1. No cross talk between channels because light doesn't interfere with each other. Imagine both you and your friend each have a laser pointer and try to cross the light beam. Nothing happens. Both light beams will ignore each other and just keep going. Therefore, we can send multiple beams of light inside the same fiber optics and they will travel independently. Note: fiber optics has specifications on what light frequency you can send in. We also can't send two beams which frequency are too close to each other because at the receiving end we need to distinguish which light send what data. On the other hand, we can't do the same thing with electrical signal because electrical current in copper cable flows like water in pipes. It fills in every gaps and two currents will get mixed up inside the pipes, effectively destroying the data.\n\n2. Data processing using light can be done much faster than using electrical signal. For example, when a light beam needs amplification, we can do the same trick as in laser generation, which process is fast, much faster compared to, say, generating electrical pulse.\n(Sidenote: this opens up another question: if processing in light is faster than in electric, why don't we use light signals in our computer then? The answer is because we can do much more fancy tricks with electrical signals than with light beams. Referring back to point #1 above, two light beams don't interact. This becomes a problem in computing because, well, how do you add 1 + 1 in light-based-computer if two light beams don't interact? The idea of building light computer has been around for some time, but we haven't figured it out (yet).)\n\n3. Lastly, the light we use in fiber optic offers huge bandwidth. Say we use light with wavelength from [1260-1360 nm](_URL_0_). This range translates to frequency from 220-237 THz. That is 17 THz bandwidth, which is huge compared to electrical signals, which is typically in the range of GHz.",
"Total information capacity is a function of frequency and signal-to-noise.\n\nBasically, think of a wave. Now, if you offset that wave slightly (up a little or down a little) you can transmit a 1 or a 0. The more waves per second, the more opportunities to send a 1 or a 0. Copper cables send frequencies in the millions of hertz range (millions of waves per second) while optical fibers send light which is in the trillions of hertz range.\n\nAdditionally, let's say I choose to have more than one position for a given wave, instead of offset for a 1 and not offset for a 0, I could do several \"in between\" offsets to represent a 0, 1, 2 or 3 per cycle. This is great for cramming even more data down a pipe, but there is a limit to how much you can do this. The more noise there is in a signal, the harder this is to do. So if the ratio of signal to noise is high I can cram in more data, while if the signal to noise is low I can't. An optical fiber just doesn't get as much noise as a copper wire. You can shield the copper wire to improve the signal to noise, but it still doesn't beat fiber. Your phone company uses unshielded wire for your DSL, while your cable company uses shielded coax for DOCSIS, giving them an advantage in signal they can use to provide higher speeds.\n\n_URL_0_"
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artg79 | why is it impossible to make dough from bread that has been baked? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/artg79/eli5_why_is_it_impossible_to_make_dough_from/ | {
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"The yeast in the bread dough is killed off during Baking. Without the yeast the loaf won't rise and bake properly.\n\nI dont know if adding yeast to crushed up bread would work.",
"Imagine smoking the ash from the joint you just blazed , thats impossible right \nSame goes for baking , once a dough is baked into a bread it changes its state as all the gases from anaerobic respiration leaves the dough making it fluffy , moisture evaporates to give it a texture and thus baking it to give us fine bread ."
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3mkawx | how gifs like this are made | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mkawx/eli5_how_gifs_like_this_are_made/ | {
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"CG Supervisor here. It's a little bit complicated to explain this method to people unfamiliar with how a certain plugin works within after effects, but maybe i can record a quick video screen capture of the process if I get enough requests.\n\n**Edit** : [Here's a test I did at my office using the method listed below](_URL_1_)\n\n* Basically, you will need After Effects, the RE:Flex plugin from Re:Vision, and a still image that you will want to create this loopable effect.\n* The first thing you need to do is tell the plugin that the \"From\" image and the \"To\" image are going to be the same. This means that you are essentially morphing an image to itself.\n* The way you morph images using this plugin, is by creating Curves that will outline the accents or contrasting elements. (example would be the the branches, or the planks, the walkway, or the arch [in this image](_URL_0_)\n* Once those have been traced, these will act as features, that will stretch and pull the \"From\" image to the \"To\" image, giving you an animated morph.\n* So now that you have these \"From\" curves, you would duplicate them to essentially make the \"To\" curves. The plugin will see these \"From\" curves and animate them to match the positions of the \"To\" curves.\n* You simply take the \"To\" curves and move them in perspective or in the direction you want these features to grow or morph. Now the image will move itself in the direction you are telling it to with these \"To\" curves, and at the same time blend itself back to the original image.\n\nIf it's too complicated, I wouldn't mind making a quick run-through of the process."
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5izi3y | why didn't nations in the past have to conquer all the enemy's territory to win a war? | It is so different to read about military fronts from the WW1/WW2 and the Hundred Years' War for example.
There's WW2 and the Eastern Front: when the Axis advanced into the Soviet territory, the frontline was longer than 2000 kilometers, and both sides had their soldiers distributed evenly (or relatively evenly, important locations and cities had more defenders/attackers of course).
That is 2000 kilometers of an imaginary line, this way the enemy cannot get through. They had to be sure every city, town gets captured etc, so nothing is left behind, every place gets checked for enemies, spies, rebels, resources.
In the medieval times however, nations would rather just rush for the capitals or castles. There were often villages left behind, huge areas untouched, many people wouldn't even know that there was a war, they lived so spread out and in places difficult for the armies to reach.
I may be wrong though. What I find really interesting is that sometimes the two nations would clash their armies at the border, without even advancing into each others territory. And so the war was won very soon.
When did continous front lines appear in the history?
How could kingdoms/empires win war and annex entire countries
with capturing only the capital city?
Let's say nation A wins over nation B, in the peace offer B has to cede a chunk of their territory. Maybe the battles weren't even fought in that territory. The majority population living deep in the forests/hills were often detached, connected with no roads to each other: Why didn't the armies of nation A spread out to make sure *every* village, *every* port is conquered, why were they so sure there's no enemy left behind or avoided?
Thank you very much, and I am sorry if I wrote something wrong or generalized heavily. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5izi3y/eli5why_didnt_nations_in_the_past_have_to_conquer/ | {
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"Because as now, most people do not want a war, most people do not even give a damn about which government is in power, most people just want to live, eat, drink, take some drugs, listen to music and have lots of sex.\n\nwars are fought for the ego's of the greedy ruling elites, once you stomp on their main military, the rest is just making deals.\n",
"Probably because most of the peasants didn't care who ran the country as they had no say either way. One taxing entity just got replaced with another taxing entity? Okay fine, as long as they don't come along and wreck our shit, um, long live... Whatshisname!",
"Communication is the driving factor here. In the Middle Ages armies would not receive news for ages from their head of state if they were in another country, and the same for the army they fought against until they reached their target city. If the supreme leader of the military cannot talk to his armies easily, he will consolidate them into small masses and move them on simple paths. This is why you get medieval armies that are huge and cut basic swaths towards capitals or cities.\n\nIn the twentieth century, and basically from the American civil war, it was possible to talk to even small sections of your armies. As such, you could split them up and create more advanced missions. Thus, an enemy would have to also split himself up in order to counter your diversified attack plan.",
"Also not much for full time armies. Mostly just the Knights and a smaller contingent of troops. When wars were declared it was a huge chunk of conscripts.",
"It's not about territory per se. Napoleon famously would decimate enemy forces in a decisive battle and then march on the country's capital. The country is left with no coordinated military resistance. ",
"Continuous front lines didn't emerge until WWI, and even then not everywhere. Armies otherwise behave like fleets, with battle units in front and a supply train in back, free to move around each other.\n\nShort answer: Populations changed, the nature of warfare changed, what it meant to be a nation changed, the size of the planet stayed the same.\n\nLonger answer:\nMost of the famous battles of pre-industrial history involved tens of thousands of troops, 150k tops, and most of those figures were probably inflated. Stalingrad has more than 1M on each side.\n\nThere weren't continuous fronts because there simply weren't enough men under arms to cover the territory involved. Also, prior to widespread use of high powered rifles, machineguns, and abundant artillery, the only way to concentrate firepower was to concentrate manpower, marching side by side. In that sense, armies behaved more like navies, freely moving around each other for weeks and months until one of them was in a position to threaten an important resource (supply line, capital city, mine, port, etc) that the other one simply couldn't stand to lose. Then and only then would a battle take place.\n\nWhen a battle did take place, it lasted usually just one day, a few at most. At the conclusion of the battle, it was obvious who had won and who had lost, and some sort of peace terms were settled upon, because it was really expensive to keep a standing army fed, and most of these guys needed to get home to plant crops for next year. Really epic wars were notable because battles took place every year (after the harvest of course, when farm hands are finally idle), or in extreme cases multiple battles took place in the same year. Industrialization freed up a lot of farm hands for fighting.\n\nOur current notion of nationhood is a product of industrial-age communication, rising populations, and greater infrastructure. As late as Roman times, tribes that were tired of losing fights with their neighbors would pack up everything and move to another uninhabited valley...because there were uninhabited valleys to be had, bringing with them their identity of who they were (language, customs, names) intact. That tribe could live 50 miles from you, and you might not interact with them your whole life.\n\nSo back at that time, a \"nation\" was a power structure of \"these people agree that they're united under this ruler, and they control these armies, ships, ports, cities, castles, and all the traffic on this road and that river\". But get far enough away from those cities and roads and rivers, and you could be completely independent as a tribe, despite being surrounded by cities of that other nation. The nation/empire would only mess with you if it was profitable to do so. To conquer that nation *was* to take the city, the port, the river. The rest of the countryside didn't figure into it.\n\nRising populations leads to an increase in the number of those cities, ports, and roads, and shrinks the number of uninhabited places to a point where it's impossible to move into the area without at least somewhat integrating with the people already there. Languages unified regionally (some more slowly than others), and slowly common mass cultures arose, leading a person to have an identity of \"French\" or somesuch. Get enough French people together, and the place they're at becomes France, and they won't stop being French no matter how many times you take Paris."
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8jp328 | why is fire not dangerous to stare at, as opposed to something like the sun? (ex: bonfires) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jp328/eli5_why_is_fire_not_dangerous_to_stare_at_as/ | {
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"It’ll already be uncomfortable to stare at an uncovered 100W light bulb. Now consider that the sun is 3,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times brighter than that bulb. ",
"Well, one is much brighter than the other. Office lights for example, are around 300 lux. A campfire is probably well under that. Sunlight is 100,000 lux",
"The problem with staring at the sun is it emits copious amounts of UV light, which light bulbs and bonfires don't (effectively). Looking at the sun can cause sun burn on your retina.\n\nFluorescent bulbs use UV light from mercury vapor to excite phosphors that coat the interior of the glass, which emit visible light. There's no real harm in looking at such light.\n\nArc lamps emit UV light, which is what makes looking at arc welding so dangerous. Welders wear full body protection because UV can reflect off surrounding surfaces and even burn the back of their neck, nevermind the sparks.\n\nSheer lumens is also dangerous, but for reasons I can only speculate.",
"Depends on the fire, staring at magnesium burning can be bad, the arc of a welder can be bad. Same reason why standing near a fire can warm you up, jumping in the fire might not be a good idea.\n\nIntensity and proximity matter"
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30oo4o | if your head gets separated from your body do you die instantly? if not, could you still feel pain in your body or do your nerves not work the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30oo4o/eli5_if_your_head_gets_separated_from_your_body/ | {
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"As far as deaths go, beheading is rather fast. Your head probably wouldn't die instantly, but would lose consciousness rather fast due to blood loss.",
"The general scientific consensus is, no one knows. \nWe cannot really measure and differentiate subtle levels of conciousness. \n\n\nAs far as we know, the sudden complete loss of blood pressure alone is enough to instantly lose all cognitive abilities. But who knows. We don't even know exactly how time perception works in a dying brain, and how 'long' cosciousness can feel even if it is only 1ms. \n\nIs there brain acitivity in a decapitated head? Of course. But we cannot even truly conclude consciousness from brain activity in living people, and certainly not in decapitated heads. The whole thing is shrouded in an additional layer of mystery because obviously, this is not a thing anyone really truly studies in any scientifically relevant capacity. ",
"As I recall after the french revolution people said that heads live after decapitation because they sometimes react to stimuli. That is probably reflexes though. \n\nOur brain need a lot of oxygen to work, once that supply of oxygen disappears our brains shut down almost instantly. Especially the neocortex.",
"I read somewhere that the Russians kept a dog's head alive for quite some time. This must prove that you don't die instantly if you get your head cut off.",
"This was answered when France used the guillotine a lot during its revolution. Heads is still alive when it falls in the basket. ",
"Observations of beheaded people seem to indicate that a person does retain some form of consciousness after the fact. Obviously there hasn't been much study in the area but in 1905 there was a scientific observation of a french prisoner who was sent to the guillotine. When the prisoner's name was called after being decapitated, he opened his eyes and focused on the person calling him.\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n",
"There's a passage about this in Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower (a detailed look at the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn). I believe her conclusion was yes, victims of a beheading retain consciousness for a few moments after death. She says this is why the executioner would hold up the head after - they wanted the last thing that person saw to be a crowd of hateful onlookers.",
"...how would you feel pain in your body after it is separated from your head?",
"To add to this; and fully explain this phenomenon: the brain is the epicenter of the nervous system and all pain is a survival instinct. Pain is a signal from your brain to your conscience that what you just experienced will harm you more if you persist; ie: breaking your leg while skateboarding. The brain is using pain to tell you *\"DON'T DO THAT AGAIN!\"* and *\"DONT WALK ON THIS!\"* and also *\"SEEK HELP/PROTECTION/SHELTER!\"* or the obvious can and might happen (more damage; bone protrusions, infection, preyed on by predators; etc.)\n\nAll touch and feel sensations are processed by the brain and figuratively \"allows\" the hand to feel heat of the fire. This is why pain medications are meant to target the brain specifically to block the receptors that receive the signals of pain in a specific nerve cluster. Take enough meds and your hand will no longer be able to feel heat because the brain is no longer shooting off the electrical impulses that signal pain in your nerves; the feeling of pain in the case of heat is your brain telling you \"Hey, you're gonna get burned, back up!\" This is how painkillers work. Just like vision/color perception; the sensation of touch is all an illusion from a brain thats processing the physical tangible world around you\n\nThat being said: *theoretically*; yes; you will still feel pain in your \"body\" once your head has been separated; however, it won't be from your actual separated body for obvious reason. What happens in this context is what many studies on amputees have revealed the \"Phantom Limb\" phenomenon. These studies have shown that an amputee missing a leg or arm can still *feel* that corresponding missing limb if the lobe on the neocortex that is dedicated to the sensory information in that specific cluster of nerves is stimulated by artificial means (such as producing electric impulses in the brain by means of a machine in a laboratory). The amputee can *feel* their missing arm or leg, even if it's not there; as the brain is receiving stimuli from the love dedicated to the missing limb, so the missing limb **must** exist according to the pragmatic process of the brain, correct? What we see from this is that sensory information is all part of the illusion of the brain trying to process the inputs of the \"outside\" world.\n\nThat said, theoretically; someone who is decapitated **can** and *might* feel touch and sensations of **a** physical body, but it most certainly will not be the actual separated body. If there are any impulses firing or developed consciousness of the head itself, it will be of a phantom body created by the impulses firing off in the brain's neocortex doing its best to process sensory information; even to the very last breath\n\nPretty stalwart of our brains to do so, no?",
"Have you ever stood up too fast and gotten lightheaded? That's from not having enough blood pressure to supply your brain for that fraction of a second. Now imagine that feeling ad infinitum. You might feel something but the shock sensation should overrule it and you'd lose consciousness quickly "
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1mcjf0 | why do those car-accident lawyers exist (like in texas) if everyone is required by law to have car insurance anyways? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mcjf0/eli5_why_do_those_caraccident_lawyers_exist_like/ | {
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"Because not everyone does",
"Not only do some people not have insurance, many insurance companies will stiff-arm the victims and tell them they aren't entitled because of bullshit reason A or bullshit reason B. \n\nHaving a lawyer is insurance (pardon the pun) against the company. Once a lawyer is involved, they know they can't push you around or get you to settle for the minimum, because NOW there is a separate party involved that could also profit, meaning the problem of paying the victim won't just go away with a rude phone call or a measly settlement offer.",
"I don't understand your question.\n\nAre you asking why people might go to court over a car accident? Could you try to be more clear about what you're asking?",
"When the \"car-accident lawyer\" files a lawsuit for you, you are suing the other driver's insurance company, not the other driver themselves. \n\nGenerally, if you are in an accident that was someone else's fault, this is what will happen...\n\n(1) You file a claim against the at-fault driver's liability insurance.\n\n(2) The liability insurer will either deny liability altogether or offer you an absurdly low amount of money to settle, because every dollar they don't pay out in claims is an additional dollar of profit for them. You can either (a) accept that, or (b) pursue legal action, which you would do through a personal injury lawyer.\n\nSource: Me. I work for a major personal injury law firm in Texas. "
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egndb9 | why when we sit on the toilet for a prolonged time we get 'static legs', but not when we sit down regularly, in class for instance, for a far longer time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/egndb9/eli5_why_when_we_sit_on_the_toilet_for_a/ | {
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"Because your elbows are pressing on your thighs and you’re leaning forward while you look at your phone.",
"A combination of the low seat height of the toilet causing the seat to dig into the back of your thighs as well as your posture on the toilet only emphasizing the effect of the low seat."
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3jcb2l | how did medieval engineers aim catapults (or trebuchets)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jcb2l/eli5_how_did_medieval_engineers_aim_catapults_or/ | {
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"They did some pretty serious math when it came to picking a site for the siege engine and then building it. Remember that these things were way too big to move around and most of them were built on site by the engineers. Once they were set up there was still some fine tuning to be done, which was a combination of yet more math and years of experience working with the machines. \n\nWhen cannons started becoming useful in sieges there was even more math and a bunch of chemistry got involved too.\n\nYou can see why a good team of siege engineers were worth their weight in gold to a commander. It was a very specialized and closely guarded set of skills."
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95kk9d | union membership in the usa | In the U.K., you can join a workplace union. They vary in size depending on the type of work. My employer recognises four different unions covering about 20,000 people - though those unions have hundreds of thousands of other members employed elsewhere too.
I pay a union fee. It entitles me to certain things: voting in union matters, obviously, but it also goes towards a pot the union can draw on for any legal fees I might incur at work. The union also offers workshops for boosting your employment prospects, health stuff, and discounts in some shops.
But I *don’t have to join the union if I don’t want to.* If I don’t, I don’t pay the fee. I don’t necessarily get the benefits, but I don’t pay. Simple. Furthermore, union membership is confidential, and an employee does not have to disclose to an employer whether they are a member or not.
Some employers don’t recognise unions. Those employers suck. You can still join, but the employer will not meet with union representatives to settle disputes, etc.
Every time I see unions mentioned in the States, I get the feeling that *you have to join the union to work* and that *you have to pay to join the union*. Which seems to me like *you are paying for the privilege of working*.
Have I got that right? I already know that *right to work* is a bit of a misnomer, but what’s the deal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95kk9d/eli5_union_membership_in_the_usa/ | {
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"Most US \"labor unions\" (as they call them) were formed by a majority of the relevant workers at whatever company they operate with, and under American law they then negotiate conditions for *all* such workers, members or not. While it's *possible* to form a union that represents only those workers who voted to form and join it, most American unions aren't like that. On the other hand, once a majority union is \"properly\" established, an employer is legally *required* to recognise and engage in negotiation with it.\n\nMost employers in the States aren't \"union shops\"; you don't *have* to join a union to work there. Since you're covered by whatever contract the union (if any) negotiates, though (because, as mentioned above, the union negotiates for *all* employees), there's an incentive to reap the benefit *without* joining the union (and therefore without paying towards its costs). A union might respond by including a clause in the contract it negotiates with the employer whereby non-union-members covered by the contract must still pay something towards the union's costs, even if it's less than union membership dues. \"Right-to-work\" laws forbid that kind of clause, the professed thinking being that this is essentially an obligatory second-class union membership (and the actual *motive* being to reduce the funds available to unions). They also make it illegal to require someone to join a union to work somewhere.\n\nIn some ways, this model has advantages: Once a union is formed, an employer legally *must* negotiate with it, and because any contract that results must cover *all* workers it's much more difficult to bring in scabs who will work outside of the union (because there's little short-term advantage, what with the union contract necessarily covering the scabs). Your question hits on some of the downsides.",
"Under the labor laws of the US, if a workplace is unionized, the union negotiates on behalf of *all* of the workers, whether or not they are members of the union or not. They can't make an agreement solely for union members; it's for all of the workers.\n\nBecause of this, unions want the collective bargaining agreement to include language that states that if any worker isn't a member of the union, that dues be subtracted from their paycheck to cover the cost of the union's negotiating activities. It's not as much as a full union membership, and they don't get access to many other union resources, but those non-members do have to pay.\n\nFederal law allows states to pass laws that prevent such language being in collective bargaining agreements. States that do this are called \"right-to-work\" states. A worker that doesn't join the union doesn't have to pay any dues, but the union is still required (under federal law) to include those workers in any collective bargaining negotiations.\n\nIt's a contentious issue. It's a choice between forcing an individual to pay for something they don't want, or forcing a union to pay for negotiating or someone who isn't paying them."
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dm7ws9 | why does debt such as loans (automobile, home, consolidation, etc.) increase your credit score but credit card debt decreases it? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dm7ws9/eli5_why_does_debt_such_as_loans_automobile_home/ | {
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"Banks are looking for people who pay their money back in the way that it was originally agreed upon. So if you if you have a mortgage and pay the correct rate every month, that is good. If you have a credit card and pay it off on time, that is good. On the other hand, if you have your credit card and rack up more and more balance, that is bad, because you are essentiall creating debt and not paying it off, when the credit score is a measure of how well you are paying off debt."
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ayc83n | why do re-released video games sometimes have issues with music licensing when re-released movies seemingly don't have this issue? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayc83n/eli5_why_do_rereleased_video_games_sometimes_have/ | {
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"Movies do have this issue as well. \n\nCheck out the original Wayne's World: _URL_0_\n\nCompared to Video release:\n_URL_1_\n\nThe joke doesn't make any sense.\n\nBut in general it happens less because movie know they are going to follow up with video and TV releases so they get all the rights to begin with.\n\nTV shows on the other hand, didn't plan for DVD releases or streaming, so they are more likely to have not gotten all the rights they needed for the music. \n",
"Some movie studios, like Sony, also own music rights. This gives them the option of using a large library of songs without any real complications later on unless they sell those rights, which isn't common. ",
"It's an issue of licensing and it applies to all media. When movies and games are made the licensing contracts they sign for usage rights apply to specific published works and do not usually extend to re-release or updated formats. \n\nFor re-released media to utilise the same copyrighted material they may have to negotiate new licensing terms with the copyright holder in order to legally be allowed to use it. \n\nSometimes the licensing fees associated cost more than a publisher is willing to pay and unless a musical piece is absolutely necessary to the story of a movie or game (such as the classic scene in Wayne's World where they sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody in the car) they will look for other options to save the cost. This usually means using music they already own copyright to or producing an original score to replace it. \n\nAlso, sometimes a copyright holder won't license usage because they have misgivings about how the usage might reflect on them. "
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2kcxkt | how are people with adhd good at video games when it requires a lot of concentration? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kcxkt/eli5_how_are_people_with_adhd_good_at_video_games/ | {
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"ELI5:Because all the distractions in the game play with their head really well",
"It activates the frontal lobe and stimulates what's known as the \"Mastiobigenesis.\" it's a special neuron which when excited serves as a catalyst for the production of adrenaline. In ADHD patients this serves as a good alternative to the current medicine we give these kids. Little is known as to why it increases their focus specifically but current research is trying to decrypt that engram.",
"As a person who has ADHD and is not a poser who just can't pay attention, we have this seemingly super ability I like to call \"super focus\". It doesn't only apply to video games but rather anything that gets our attention. Think of it like 'being in the zone'. We literally zone out all outside distractions and focus on one task, and one task only. I'm not talking about one simple task either. I mean the process. If the task means painting the Sistine Chapel, we'll not only paint it and blow your mind with detail, we'll fix every leaky faucet, sagging ceiling tile, sticky door and knob, nonworking whatever the fuck and have a God damned smile on our face once we've accomplished it. We probably don't stop there but usually once the task is done we usually lose focus and go find the next shiny object to obsess over.",
"The games (unlike real life) are designed to be playable. It is not hard for someone who has ADHD to focus on something that is interesting by design. Perhaps better way to understand ADHD is not so much that it prevents one from focusing but that it greatly decreases ability to direct focus."
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3ovpec | "three guesses, and the first two don't count" | I've heard this phrase all my life, and while **I understand the idiomatic meaning** (that something is very easy to guess), I don't understand the literal translation of the phrase.
If it's easy to guess, why would the first two guesses not count? Shouldn't the person be able to get it in the first try, if it's that easy? In which case they wouldn't need three guesses, nor would they need the 'free passes' of having the first two strikes not count against them...
What am I missing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ovpec/eli5_three_guesses_and_the_first_two_dont_count/ | {
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"I think your last theory is correct.\n\nIt probably derives slightly from 'three strikes and you're out'. The logic is that since the question is so easy to answer, even if we took away your first two tries and left you with your third and final try(something that is usually undesirable in a game), you'd hardly be inconvenienced in answering the question.\n\n...That might not make a lot of sense, but things said in sarcasm often don't.",
"You're putting way too much thought into it. You said it yourself. It's something where the answer is already evident, but the person saying the phrase thinks they're witty (I'll give you three guesses if they actually are witty, and two don't count)",
"You are looking for logic where there is no logic to find. As you yourself say, it's idiomatic (or rather, rhetorical). It's not meant to make literal sense. When you say something like that, you're not actually expecting the other person to guess. "
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8g0efa | why doctors are so often not timely with their appointments and don’t compensate you for your inconvenience if you run late? | It is common to wait for 30-60 or more minutes past your appointment time for doctors appointments. Why are they so untimely compared to say, restaurant reservations? Why don’t they offer compensation to their paying customers (e.g. pick up the copay) the way a restaurant will give you free drinks, appetizers, etc if a table is not ready within a reasonable time past a reservation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8g0efa/eli5_why_doctors_are_so_often_not_timely_with/ | {
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"Because they are expected to spend 15 min or less with a patient and that rarely is sufficient time to fill out the paperwork let alone give and accurate exame. So they will always run over delaying things. \n\nIf you are seeing the doctor the expectation is that you will take the whole day, or several hours off. You have no expectation of getting your window exactly, and there is no expectation of compensation for being delayed. They are not restaurants, they are doctors. ",
"It's been my experience, here in the Midwest, that if you don't want to wait for your appointment, you should make the effort to be the first appointment of the day or the first appointment after lunch.",
"It's too variable to be able to estimate correctly. \n\nWhen you go to eat dinner there's probably 50 tables in the restaurant and let's just say there's 10 different tables sizes. So you show up with a party of 4, that means there are 5 tables available for your party to eat at. Even if one party of four takes 3 times longer at their table than everyone else, there are 4 more tables that if they get done early you can sit and eat. Even if all 5 of those tables take too long they can use every table that's larger than you need, or push 2 smaller tables together. \n\nAt the doctor's office, there's like 5 rooms total, so the chances that all 5 go longer are much greater than all 50 tables at a restaurant going over. Additionally it's much easier to estimate the time someone will spend when they say \"I want dinner\" vs. \"my throat hurts\". Your throat hurting could be 50 different things, which requires inspections, tests, metrics, prescriptions etc. or it could just require the doctor to say \"go buy a cough drop\". How do you schedule appointments around that?!",
"(Most) Doctors run a very busy work schedule when it comes to outpatient visits. There are a couple reasons why.\n\nGenerally speaking, you can see an uncomplicated patient in about 5-7 minutes and fill out the paperwork in 8-10 minutes (or vice versa depending on how tech savvy you are). Because of that, the rule of thumb is 15 minutes per patient and so most doctors schedule patients every 15 minutes. The issue with that is not every patient is so cookie cutter. Often you’ll get complicated patients with 5-10 separate problems or a constellation of symptoms you have to spend extra time working up/diagnosing. Other times you have to talk to suicidal patients, deliver cancer diagnoses, calm down a teenager worried about her first std, sift through emotional baggage. As much as you want to you can’t put a time mark on these situations so the rest of your day gets delayed. \n\n\nAs to why doctors mostly schedule visits every 15 minutes and not more spread out: Relatively speaking, outpatient medicine is poorly compensated by insurance so there isn’t much pay there. Because of that, doctors are required to see more and more patients (20-30 a day) so they can have a reasonable income. \n\n",
"Why does it happen? Things come up, an appointment may take longer than they thought (maybe they found something important they had to deal with right away). If they take walk-ins for \"emergencies\" (that may or not warrant it), that really throws off the schedule too (this was a *huge* problem with my parents' old doctor, since he had a lot of elderly patients who would do this all the time). \n\nWhy don't you get compensated if you have to wait? To be blunt, because their time is worth more than yours. "
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8qwhpt | why do most of canadians live in such a small, cramped area, instead of using all the open land? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qwhpt/eli5_why_do_most_of_canadians_live_in_such_a/ | {
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"Because the \"open land\" you are talking about is mostly inhospitable, extremely difficult to travel, or otherwise unsuitable for continuous human habitation. You'll notice that Canada is north of the US, and the northern pieces of the US get pretty cold and nasty in the winter.",
"Transportation. Most Canadians live near a major sea port, or where major land transport routes intersect.\n\nClimate. Canadians tend to avoid the north, which is extremely cold in the winter.",
"I'd just like to point out that even the \"small cramped area\" in which Canadians live is sparsely populated by global standards. The most densely populated city in Canada, Vancouver, has 5,400 people per km². New York City is about twice that.",
"The same reason we Australians do....because most of the 'open land' is inhospitable. \n\nAlso, it doesn't matter how much 'open land' there is out in Bumfuck, Nowhere. There majority of people want to live close to the major employment and entertainment hubs of the major cities. ",
"Because that open land is not actually open. It is dense forests, mountains, and inhospitable Tundra. It is not easy to build cities in it, nor is it easy to get infrastructure and transportation routes to it. "
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7negwe | catalan independence movement | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7negwe/eli5_catalan_independence_movement/ | {
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"Catalonia is culturally distinct from the rest of Spain. They have their own language and their own cultural traditions. Their culture was suppressed during Franco's reign, so even though that's no longer going on, the memory of it still makes some people want to split from Spain.\n\nCatalonia is also one of the richest regions of Spain, so some people aren't happy that their taxes are being sent elsewhere instead of directly benefiting Catalonia.\n\nThere isn't really a process for gaining independence. The Spanish constitution forbids any part of Spain seceding. So the constitution would have to be changed to allow Catalonia to legally gain independence.\n\nThe referendum they held was not endorsed by the Spanish government. It was declared illegal which is why Spanish police tried to stop people voting. That also means the result had no direct legal effect.\n\nCompare that to the independence referendum Scotland had in 2014. That was allowed by the UK government, who agreed Scotland could be independent if more than 50% of voters chose independence. However, as I mentioned before, secession is not allowed under the Spanish constitution so even the Spanish government wouldn't be able to authorise an independence referendum without first changing the constitution."
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2wxu2y | why don't the police punish cops who do the wrong thing? what do they get out of transparent corruption? | Are there really so few cops that they can't let a few bad eggs go? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wxu2y/eli5_why_dont_the_police_punish_cops_who_do_the/ | {
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"Cops who do the wrong thing (as judged by an official process and not public opinion) are punished so I'm not sure what your question refers to. Could you clarify?",
"Plenty of cops get in trouble for doing the wrong thing. Sure, we hear about ones that did the wrong thing and didn't get punished. Sometimes, we hear about cops that did things that just get framed poorly by the media. But if you look, you'll find a lot of cops that go down for corruption or misbehavior."
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7j8x94 | what causes your mouth to taste so bad after forgetting to brush your teeth the previous night? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7j8x94/eli5_what_causes_your_mouth_to_taste_so_bad_after/ | {
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"Bacteria are able to reproduce very quickly when you give them food and put them in a humid environment. Just like how milk goes bad if you leave it out.\n\nIt becomes difficult to deal with because the bacteria will just form bio mats all over, creating those white areas on your tongue once there are enough of them. brushing your teeth keeps them from reachig that critical point."
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2rlneb | after the dramatic slowdown of the arrests by the seudo strike by the nypd, why can't the city simply fire or reduce the size of their police force? | The NYPD is essentially refusing to do its job and yet New York hasn’t collapsed into chaos.
If according to the statistics, citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.
and parking violations dropped by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241, why can the mayor simply reduce the size of the police force they are no longer needed to that extent?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rlneb/eli5_after_the_dramatic_slowdown_of_the_arrests/ | {
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"People peeing outside or not paying at the meter isn't really hurting anyone except the city itself from the loss of revenue. The NYPD is still responding to the emergency calls, but they are making sure the mayor is seeing the effects of a slowdown financially. If you lay off a sizable portion of the police force, theres a much greater chance of small crime getting out of control, muggings on the street for example. In a city of 8.5 million you need a large police force",
"I want to say, but have no basis for this theory, but I want to put money on the number of officers is related to the number of citizens in the covered area. For example, the city might try to maintain x amount of officers per 10,000 civilians or so. "
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nw48t | why do we get 'butterflys'? | Why do you get that butterflys feeling when your nervous/ talking to someone you like/ about to perform something ETC? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/nw48t/why_do_we_get_butterflys/ | {
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"They're caused by adrenaline pulling the blood out of the stomach, which produces the subsequent feelings",
"Slight expansion on visvires:\n\nGenerally, about 1/3 of your blood is going to you brain, 1/3 to your muscles / extremities, and 1/3 to your \"guts\", digestive tract and all that.\n\nWhen you're nervous you're getting a \"fight-or-flight\" response. Early humans didn't get social anxiety - they got anxiety because they were about to get eaten by a bear. So when you get nervous, you may know it's 'cause you're talking to someone you like. However, your body interprets that as \"holy crap, there's a bear trying to eat us\". The reaction to that is the fight-or-flight.\n\nTo do either of those things (fight or run away) you're going to need your muscles. So your body shuts down the things you won't need in the next few minutes of running away from a bear, like your guts. \"Shutting down\" in this sense means contracting the blood vessels and keeping blood - which carries energy and removes waste - from going there. So there's more blood for your muscles. Obviously, the 1/3 going to your brain is gonna go there no matter what.\n\nBonus 'splanation: Opposite of this is why you don't go swimming after you eat. Your stomach is all full, so there's lots of blood going to your guts to pick up all the energy you're digesting from your cheeseburger. This means there's less energy for your muscles, so when you swim, the waste products will build up quicker and give you cramps.\n\n",
"They're caused by adrenaline pulling the blood out of the stomach, which produces the subsequent feelings",
"Slight expansion on visvires:\n\nGenerally, about 1/3 of your blood is going to you brain, 1/3 to your muscles / extremities, and 1/3 to your \"guts\", digestive tract and all that.\n\nWhen you're nervous you're getting a \"fight-or-flight\" response. Early humans didn't get social anxiety - they got anxiety because they were about to get eaten by a bear. So when you get nervous, you may know it's 'cause you're talking to someone you like. However, your body interprets that as \"holy crap, there's a bear trying to eat us\". The reaction to that is the fight-or-flight.\n\nTo do either of those things (fight or run away) you're going to need your muscles. So your body shuts down the things you won't need in the next few minutes of running away from a bear, like your guts. \"Shutting down\" in this sense means contracting the blood vessels and keeping blood - which carries energy and removes waste - from going there. So there's more blood for your muscles. Obviously, the 1/3 going to your brain is gonna go there no matter what.\n\nBonus 'splanation: Opposite of this is why you don't go swimming after you eat. Your stomach is all full, so there's lots of blood going to your guts to pick up all the energy you're digesting from your cheeseburger. This means there's less energy for your muscles, so when you swim, the waste products will build up quicker and give you cramps.\n\n"
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6lirph | are humans omnivores? why do so many vegans argue we are herbivores? | I am getting assaulted on facebook by OMNI deniers. Pls. Help.
" Lions are natural meat eaters. People are herbivores. Look at our teeth. We don't kill with our physical bodies. We inclose animals and kill them with machinery. People are physically killing themselves eating meat. It is scientifically proven to cause 90% of diseases. Cancer, heart disease, depression, asthma, allergies, diabetes"
What? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6lirph/eli5_are_humans_omnivores_why_do_so_many_vegans/ | {
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"Yes, humans are omnivores. However, vegans would argue that because of our intelligence we now have the ability to find ways to meet our nutritional requirements without eating meat, and that we should avoid eating animal products because it's the moral thing to do now that we've reached a point where we don't NEED to eat meat, even though we naturally would and obviously could.",
"Humans are omnivores but that does not mean we \"need\" to eat meat to survive. Cats are obligate carnivores, which means they must eat meat in order to survive and cannot live long/healthy lives on a \"vegetarian/vegan\" diet. Humans can. So can dogs.\n\nI note that true vegetarians do not eat eggs or dairy - those are lacto-ovo vegetarians. Vegans go further and don't eat honey ALSO they don't wear silk, wool, fur, or leather (and wont use products made of those either). \n\nNow.. as for humans being omnivores - this is proven by the shape of our teeth as well as the length of our digestive tract. \n\nAgain, we are omnivores but that does not mean we must eat meat - most people in the USA eat 3-4 times more meat than they need. Being an omnivore means you CAN eat meat.. not that you must.",
" > Why do so many vegans argue we are herbivores?\n\nSimply, because for moralistic reasons they'd prefer to be herbivores. So they argue that it's humans' natural state. It's a way to self affirm themselves.",
"We're quite definitively omnivores, as other posters have mentioned. One thing worth pointing out though, is that to a degree our ancestral usages of meat were likely limited to scavenger roles, and feeding on softer animals (snails + insects, some fish, maybe the occasional bird. Large prey with what we'd consider \"meat\" probably came fairly later in our evolutionary story - without tools and tactics we're really not physically equipped to take down any animal. \n\nVarious theories suggest that our tool use evolved from our scavenging kills of other animals, cracking open bones for the marrow. This coupled with insect foraging and the occasional small animal would probably have been most of our ancestral meat eating. \n\nThe other big thing evolution and tools eventually gave us though, was fire. We dont eat that much raw food anymore, and that means we can eat a wider range of food (raw potatos are not terribly edible), but we can also digest and eat meat with a much greater degree of ease. This links to what one of the other posters mentioned, about the availability of cheap calories from meat potentially fuelling a cognitive revolution in us. We're not naturally terribly great meat eaters, although we definitely do, but a little bit of very recent evolution combined with our omnivorous heritage has left us capable of utilising cooked meat very well. This isn't to say they might not be right to some degree, it's probably less healthy than plants, meal for meal. I'm not sure if that would extend to lifetime meat free diets or not, but it probably does have an effect. Not a huge one though. Imagine maybe every 5 to 10 meat heavy plates of food a smoker comes along and smokes a cig or two right in front of you, blowing smoke at you for a small dose of second hand smoke. It's probably in that kind of risk category.",
"If you observe human as a whole, we eat plants and animals. That makes us omnivores. There is no debate. If you want to get into physical characteristics anyway, teeth would be a terrible example of us being herbivores. Our teeth are designed to do both.",
"Pretty sure what defines omnivore is the ability to absorb nutrients from both meat and plants. So yeah. Mabye we don't NEED meat. But we certainly can get nutrients from it.",
"Vegan here. Humans are omnivores. A lot of vegans (just like a lot of other people) don't fact check to try and push their personal agendas with \"fake news\". Fake news exists in the vegan world too, where I see articles going around all the time that make me cringe, as I feel the less vegans appear to be nutty extremist, the more chance we have of convincing omnivores to give it a try! \n\nThe fact is however, that we have long intestines and this is shared with herbivores because the process of breaking down plant matter for nutrition takes longer (carnivores don't need this as they have already eaten a herbivore that did it for them). And this is why eating lots of meat is not healthy (they \"rot\" in your intestines, and are also exposed to high levels of antibiotics, mercury or pesticides, which is absorbed in your body. That being said, we evolved eating occasional meat. Fossilized feces from neanderthals shows both a mix of vegetation and meat... so we evolved as omnis, but meat today is not as healthy as it was then (the animals people eat today are not eating what they did then so this has altered their nutritional benefits to us).\n\nThere are several recent and very large studies on the carcinogenic effects of all meat, and also some existing as far back as 50 years. The fact is that very wealthy and powerful people who have a lot to lose from this knowledge do not want the masses to know this, so there is constant fake news being spread in mainstream media to confuse consumers on these facts. \"humans need cows milk to be healthy\" is something I grew up believing, but as soon as I thought about it was so clear to me I had been brainwashed !!! \n\nI would really recommend a website called _URL_0_. It was an organization started by doctors who review scientific papers and make easily understandable videos. they run on donations alone (so no bias towards any industry).\n\nThey do recommend a plant based diet ultimately, but they will be able to give scientific reasons behind everything where your vegan friends on Facebook won't. \n\n",
"the vegan point has SOME validity but the issue is not the meat itself but the quality and preparation of the meat we frequently injest.\n\nover time, our teeth have become less hard and sharp---early man had awful looking big teeth for ripping through skin and hide. the proof, though, is in the enzymes in our digestive tract which are capable of breaking down flesh and bone.\n\nnot only are we not herbivores: we are built to gnaw into whatever animal is close-by and be able to use the nutrients it gives us. Yum!",
"Yes, we are omnivores. Anyone telling you otherwise is either extremely misinformed or trying to justify their own lifestyle choice with pseudo-facts.\n\nIf we were truly herbivorous, then eating a bucket of fried chicken everyday would make us look more like a twig than a balloon, since our bodies wouldn't be able to convert said chicken into anything it could even use. ",
"There's actually strong evidence that meat-eating was a critical part of our evolution. Meat packs a lot more calories and protein than plant-based foods. This made extra energy available to power our brains, the trait that sets us apart from our cousins in the animal kingdom. Your brain is about 5% of your body weight, but about 25% of the energy (calories) you eat gets spent on running your brain. On a side note, cooking our food also had a similar imupact that I'll let you explore in your own. But without eating meat a few hundred thousand years ago, our delightfully powerful brains might never have evolved.\n\nAs others have noted, even though I remain carnivorous, nothing I'm saying here says we are in biologically required to eat meat these days. Thats largely due to industrialization and our ability to globally distribute the handful of plants that provide complete proteins."
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24dtug | why is a store legally allowed to not refund my money of a returned purchase but give me store credit instead? | I feel like they're stealing if I don't want to do business there after or want their products. What if I just wanted my money back? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24dtug/eli5_why_is_a_store_legally_allowed_to_not_refund/ | {
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"In general they're not required to accept your return at all. Have you ever seen \"all sales final\" at a store? So putting limitations on the way they voluntarily choose to allow returns is going to be legal. Any requirement that stores **must** give cash from returns would need to also include a requirement that stores **must** give returns."
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2r1l2z | why do forks typically have exactly four tines? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r1l2z/eli5why_do_forks_typically_have_exactly_four_tines/ | {
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"If you're interested in this it's covered in the book [The Evolution of Useful Things](_URL_0_) .\n\n\n\nIf you click on the 'surprise me' page a few times you might get to see page 10 on which it spends a little time talking about how the fork emerged from being a carving instrument to being a normal part of the dinner table, moving from 2 tines through to 3 then 4 tines. The suggestion is \"4 tines provide a relatively broad surface and yet do not feel too wide for the mouth. Nor does a four tined fork have so many tines that it resembles a comb, or function like one when being pressed into a piece of meet.\"\n\n\nHonestly if you love questions like this that book is well worth a read, it covers the development of things like the paperclip, flatware/cutlery, zips and tools etc."
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46wb4e | why is it wrong to correct people when they make a grammatical error (or any error for that matter)? aren't you helping that person out by pointing out their mistake? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46wb4e/eli5why_is_it_wrong_to_correct_people_when_they/ | {
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"Because instead of creating a worthwhile response to the person. You're pointing out a mistake they didn't even consciously make.",
"It's not wrong, but social rules demand a level of sensitivity and respect for the context. If someone is clearly just being careless, rather than ignorant, it's not useful to correct them--and if you do correct them, it should reflect a genuine desire to help rather than to criticize them.",
"Pedantry is often elitist. It also derails conversations by failing to say anything substantive and instead focusing on grammar. And if you understood what they were going for, language did its job. Plus, strict adherence to rules prevents language from evolving, and when languages stop evolving they die.",
"It really depends on context and delivery.\n\nIf someone posts \"your stupid\" on Facebook posting \"you're*\" as a response is less about correcting the grammar and more about ridiculing the poster. A private message explaining the difference between your and you're might be more favourably received.\n\nSending back a cover letter or resume with corrections is a lot different than doing the same with a postcard or wedding invitation.",
"Imagine you are playing a game of touch football at recess. Everyone there just wants to have fun. But one kid is there that has memorized the official NFL rule book. You aren't professional athletes. There is nothing riding on this game. Everyone knows how to play a schoolyard game. But that guy keeps telling everyone they are doing it wrong and quoting this rulebook. Can you see how that might be annoying?\n\nThose rules mostly make sense in the context of the NFL. It isn't perfect. But they work for giant steroid monsters wearing pads with billions of dollars on the line. This is a schoolyard game. Even if the rules did make perfect sense, constantly complicating things like and being told you're doing it wrong takes the fun out of it.\n\nAdditionally, the rules of grammar are arbitrary decisions made by pedants. Some are useful. But many were actually decided by one man that wanted English to confirm more closely to Latin grammar whether or not it was actually beneficial for communication. \n\nThere is also the issue of understanding the point of conversation. A lot of the time, the point of conversation is not actually about conveying specific information. When two coworkers are chatting about the weather, the goal typically isn't to actually learn about the other's opinion on weather or learn more about weather. It's meant to strengthen the social bond between them or more generally to socialize about neutral, low effort topics. \n\nIn such communication, factual errors and non-standard grammar have no negative consequences in terms of the actual goal of the conversation. They actually have negative effects because telling people they are wrong can make them feel bad and hurts the relationship rather than helps. \n\n[Stephen Fry has a good talk on the grammar part](_URL_0_). As for other corrections: just imagine Dright Schrute. ",
"Here is a fairly good video on the subject by [The Ling Space](_URL_1_). Steven Pinker also discusses this topic in his book [The Language Instinct](_URL_0_).\n\nThere is fairly good evidence that people don't learn to improve their language usage by being corrected. Even if they get acknowledge the correction, it won't stick.\n\nThe more effective thing to is to make a point of using the particular construct correctly in front of the person. People learn by imitating usage by imitating actual language users.",
"[This](_URL_0_) is actually an excellent example of why.\n\nPeople communicate to convey ideas, and when you ignore those ideas to focus on what they would consider a triviality, it's the equivalent of telling them they're boring you. It also shows that you weren't listening to them properly, as you had already decided on your response before they stopped speaking.\n\nYou're only helping them if you know that correct grammar is something they care about. Imagine if you started a really long anecdote with the word \"existentialism\", finished the anecdote, and the person started telling you about how \"the root word for existentialism is blah blah\", you'd feel like they only listened to the first word. It's the same thing, basically, as you might consider knowing the roots of words to be utterly meaningless, so it's not conducive to conversation."
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9s5h9d | ; if you were to stop mastrubating for the rest of your life, what would happen to all the sperm that is being produced? will it just go into nothingness, or will it be broken down as a part of some process inside you? or what will actually happen to it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s5h9d/eli5_if_you_were_to_stop_mastrubating_for_the/ | {
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"Nothing ever just goes into nothingness; it can only be transformed into something else. Unused sperm deteriorate with age and if used won't successfully fertilize an egg so they are - just like all other cells the body doesn't need - broken down and absorbed back into the body. "
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3dczmi | if you want a tattoo removed, why can't you tattoo over it with ink that matches your skin colour? | Seems the easiest way surely | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dczmi/eli5_if_you_want_a_tattoo_removed_why_cant_you/ | {
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"It is hard to match skin color. Your tattoo of skin color will not tan with the rest of your skin. No tattoo artist can stock skin color. Skin color varies from person to person.",
"The new ink would cover up the old ink, but some of the old ink would still be visible, like putting on a new coat of paint without applying a base coat first.\n\nAdditionally, your skin color changes as you tan, sunburn, etc. The tattooed spot would stand out just as obviously as the original tattoo, but look even weirder because of the failed attempt to make it blend in.",
"The previous posters are correct - just wanted to add some extra facts and details.\n\nWhen a tattoo is applied it starts on the upper layer of your skin, the epidermis. Over time it settles in the lower dermis layer of the skin (your skin is a bit like an onion). In this lower dermis level, the tattoo ink always stays wet, for your entire life. This is part of the reason why you'd never reach a perfect skin color match - tattooers nowadays are proficient in creating tattoos over existing ink, but it still will be affected by the existing color in the dermis (imagine you have a bucket of paint - and you have to add other paints to make it lighter and a different pigment. this is hard in itself - anyone who mixes paint knows the easy way is going from light to dark). This is also why tattoo cover ups are in black or very dark colors.\n\nTan is an issue, colors also may reach to sun exposure differently. White ink can turn yellow when it fades. Also, the nature of skin is that is not pigmented in one flat color - there are naturally different blemishes and tones in one person's skin."
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9xlvyi | the german educational system | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9xlvyi/eli5_the_german_educational_system/ | {
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"You go to kindergarten for a few years, usually when your kid is between 3 and 6 years.\nThis is not in the educational system, however. This is somewhat socializing with others, learning to follow basic rules, get a routine and stuff like this. \n\nAfter that, you go to the elementary school (Grundschule), which basically teaches you the basics of ... well, everything. Simple math, spelling, pronounciation, ... you get the idea. \n\nIn my case, the first half (2 years) were not graded. When we wrote a test or something like this, it was simply marked as \"read\" or \"done\". \nStarting in the 3rd year, we go our marks. Depending on your grades, the teacher then recommends you to a school. You don't have to follow that advice, but it is.. recommended. \n\nUsually, you get to chose between 3 schools: \n\n* Hauptschule\n* Realschule\n* Gymnasium (for english-readers: this has nothing to do with working out.\n\nDepending on the school, the stuff teached is different and the amount it takes to finish that school differs: \n\n* Hauptschule takes you 5 additional years to complete (class 5 - 9) -- > Berufsreife\n* Realschule 6 additional years (5 - 10) -- > Mittlere Reife\n* Gymnasium basically 9 additional years (5 - 13) -- > Abitur\n\nYou might argue, that each school has a different pace and difficulty to it, when it comes down to effort. Ending one of this schools, awards you with a \"title\" which is important for your further applications, since you are partially selected on these. \n\nIf you finish a \"lower\" school successfuly, you can still \"upgrade\" your highest, educational level. \nAlso, you need an Abitur to study in an university. \n\nTo add a bit more to this: You are only allowed to study at a university, if you have your \"Abitur\", which is basically the highest, educational level you can achieve (from the basic schools). \nIf you finished with your \"Mittlere Reife\", you can still study in a so-called \"Fachhochschule\" (probably best translated to college of higher education or something like this). \n\nIf you study further in the university, (a few years / semesters) you get your \"Bachelor\"-status. This for example could be \"Bachelor of science\". The amount of semesters is depending on what you are trying to achieve. After successfully obtaining this title, you are capable of going even further to get your \"master\" (master of sience\") and **after that** you can make your \"Doctor\" (PhD). Usually, the intention for making this, is to teach at universities. You get another title as well (Professor). \n\nOne more thing, which I don't know is common in other countries: \nYou have a **Schulpflicht**. It is mandatory that you visit school for \"at least\" 9 years (hence the Hauptschule takes 5 additional years). After that, you aren't \"forced\" to go further. Everything after that is on a voluntary base.\n\nIt is hard to explain everything, specially in ELI5-Mode. Basic rule is: if you want to get a better degree, you always have to chance to. It doesn't matter how old you are or what you finished with. \n\nSource: German dude, born and living in Germany.\n\n**Edit:** \nAs /u/s0nderv0gel stated: There *are* some states, where the duration of school differs. There is no direct \"law\" for this. States have a mediocre level of impact on how they want to have their educational system built (up to adjusting the things you learn). This is kinda important as well, since *some* of the companies value your success depending on the state you are living in, since the difficulty is so variable. \n",
" > Also is Germany the only country in the world with such different or unique educational system but are there other countries as well.\n\nYou will have to explain what you found to be different and unique \nin those articles before this part of your question can be answered.",
"I want to add another thing to DasDaffles's comment: The German educational system is not based on getting kids to college for higher education, there are basically two paths, one academic path and one based on trades. If you want to learn a trade you usually leave school after year 10 at age \\~16 and start to work as an apprentice for about 3 years.",
"To answer your second question if it is unique, it is not - we have almost identical system in Czech Republic and I assume a lot of countries around this part of the world have similar systems as well. The differences obviously depend on what you are comparing to, so you would need to be more specific in order to give more complete answer which systems are similar in that regard.",
"This is surprisingly similar to the English system actually. There are some differences but generally it's quite comparable ",
"Ok. I'm not gonna go over the while thing again. u/DasSaffe did a pretty good job but they could have included a bit more detail on what you can do with the \"Mittlere Reife\".\n\nThe \"Mittlere Reife\" is probably the most common degree (if you wanna call it a degree) and it's the requirement for most apprenticeships.If you don't want to pursue an apprenticeship however, you can go to the \"Berufliches Gymnasium\" or to the \"Fachoberschule\". Both of these school forms are typically found in vocational school centres.\n\nThe \"Fachoberschule\" takes an additional 2 years (12 years in total) and awards the so called \"Fachoberschulreife\" or \"Fachabitur\". It enables you to go to a University of applied scienes/vocational university and you may only enroll in courses of study that are related to your kind of Fachabitur (e.g. Economics).What's special about the Fachoberschule is the fact that you have a partner company. In the first year you will alternate between going to school and working as an intern. Many companies will hire their interns as apprentices once they receive their Fachabitur.\n\nThe \"Berufliches Gymnasium\" takes 3 (13 years in total) years and awards the \"Hochschulreife\" or \"Abitur\", which is the same degree as the regular Gymnasium and it enables you to go to any University you want (as long as they also want you). In the regular Gymnasium you can choose 2 major courses with (i think) basically no restrictions (as long as there are enough other students to form these courses). In the berufliches Gymnasium you get to choose one vocational major course (e.g. mechanical engineering, computer science) which starts in the first year. In the second year you get to choose your second major course, but you only get to choose between English, mathematics and german.\n\nMany germans don't exactly know the differrence between these two.\n\nWith your \"Mittlere Reife\" you can also just start an apprenticeship. Most apprenticeships in Germany use the dual system. You apply for apprenticeships like you would for a regular job. You then work for that company but you also go to school. I believe it's something along the lines of a 2:1 ratio (work:school). The best thing: you usually get paid. It's not a lot in most cases, but it's definitely better than having to pay. Most appranticeships take 3 years to complete but you can also finish earlier if you can manage to pass the exam. Apprenticeships award the \"Facharbeiter\".\n\nSome schools also offer the \"Berufsausbildung mit Abitur\" (Apprenticeship with Abitur) which takes 4 years and awards a Facharbeiter and an Abitur. Not a lot of companies are too keen on this one though, because they don't want to invest into a dude for 4 years who then just goes to university. It's not really a smart investment.\n\nWhen you have your Facharbeiter and at least 2 years of experience you can go to the \"Fachschule\" receive a higher degree of vocational education for example: Meister, Techniker.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: Whene you have a certain degree of vocational education and a few years of experience, you can also go to university and get a Masters Degree.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI really hope I didn't miss anything. If you find any errors in my little text, keep 'em, I have more than I could ever need."
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5n1ye7 | please explain to me the mythos created by hp lovecraft | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5n1ye7/eli5please_explain_to_me_the_mythos_created_by_hp/ | {
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"The point of Cthulhu and the rest of Love craft works is about the fear of the unknown. Nothing is ever fully explained which is kind of the point.\n\nI would suggest getting a hold of the penguin publication \"Call of Cthulu and other weird stories\". Because the stories were written at the turn of the century it can be difficult to follow l. This version has lots of notes with it that give a lot of further insight.",
"\"The Shadow Over Innsmouth\" is Lovecraft's best story and will give you an introduction to the Mythos. For the man see L. Sprague de Camp \"HP Lovecraft - A Biography\". To understand the environment he grew up in, visit College Hill in Providence."
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jlx0g | why does it seem like all australian animals/insects want to kill you, and why are their european counterparts so tame in comparison? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jlx0g/why_does_it_seem_like_all_australian/ | {
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"There were many animals that could be considered quite dangerous in Europe. However, European population growth and the domestification of \"useful\" animals created an incentive for the survival of only tame species. Those animals that would be considered risky to have around your sheep or cows, like big predators, were little by little hunted to extinction; animals that were useful like horses, cows and sheep, prospered. All animals that did not pose a risk for the \"useful\" animals were left alone in the wild. Australia on the other hand, did not have to host a huge Population Growth until the XIX and XX century. This killing off of animals that could pose a risk to \"docile and useful\" animals started very late in Australia, and is visible to this day.\n\nThere are other factors as well. Australia has lots of different climates, in Europe there aren't that many variations and that many extreme differences between said climates. Why is this relevant? Because some climates are better suited for a huge biodiversity.\n\nIn colder climates there tends to be far less variation in vegetative species. Therefore there really doesn't need to be that many variations in animals in order to survive because you will find mostly the same food in huge areas. In Tropical climates, it is common for there to be an enormous variety of plant life, all with different fruits and seeds; in order to take advantage of this difference in food, there is an evolutionary incentive to eat that food which your competition doesn't like. No such thing happens in colder climates (well, it does, but not to the extreme that is possible in the Tropics), so there really isn't a reason for them to enter the evolutionary arms race.\n\nConcerning Marine life, the great barrier reef provides so much and such varied types of food for marine animals that it creates an evolutionary incentive similar to that found in tropical rainforests to eat food that is different from the one that your competitor eats.\n\n",
"There were many animals that could be considered quite dangerous in Europe. However, European population growth and the domestification of \"useful\" animals created an incentive for the survival of only tame species. Those animals that would be considered risky to have around your sheep or cows, like big predators, were little by little hunted to extinction; animals that were useful like horses, cows and sheep, prospered. All animals that did not pose a risk for the \"useful\" animals were left alone in the wild. Australia on the other hand, did not have to host a huge Population Growth until the XIX and XX century. This killing off of animals that could pose a risk to \"docile and useful\" animals started very late in Australia, and is visible to this day.\n\nThere are other factors as well. Australia has lots of different climates, in Europe there aren't that many variations and that many extreme differences between said climates. Why is this relevant? Because some climates are better suited for a huge biodiversity.\n\nIn colder climates there tends to be far less variation in vegetative species. Therefore there really doesn't need to be that many variations in animals in order to survive because you will find mostly the same food in huge areas. In Tropical climates, it is common for there to be an enormous variety of plant life, all with different fruits and seeds; in order to take advantage of this difference in food, there is an evolutionary incentive to eat that food which your competition doesn't like. No such thing happens in colder climates (well, it does, but not to the extreme that is possible in the Tropics), so there really isn't a reason for them to enter the evolutionary arms race.\n\nConcerning Marine life, the great barrier reef provides so much and such varied types of food for marine animals that it creates an evolutionary incentive similar to that found in tropical rainforests to eat food that is different from the one that your competitor eats.\n\n"
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1xcz6c | how do steadicams work? | In addition to the mechanical aspect, what purpose(s) do they fill in filmmaking? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xcz6c/eli5_how_do_steadicams_work/ | {
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"Steadicams mount the camera on a complex mount with hinges and springs so the camera stays steady even as the cameraman moves around. You get a very smooth shot, like you would with a more fixed mount, but have the freedom of motion of a person. "
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7f0dzx | how do shopping cart anti-theft wheel locks work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7f0dzx/eli5_how_do_shopping_cart_antitheft_wheel_locks/ | {
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"There is a braking device inside the wheels which contains a radio receiver. Around the boundary of the store grounds is a transmitter loop, much like an invisible dog fence, putting out a signal.\n\nWhen the cart crosses the invisible fence, it receives the signal from the transmitter and triggers the brakes inside the wheel, locking it up."
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3p0u0o | why aren't all cars made from carbon fiber since it is lighter, stronger and cheaper than steel? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p0u0o/eli5_why_arent_all_cars_made_from_carbon_fiber/ | {
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"I'd really like to see your reference that it's \"cheaper than steel\" because that would be a remarkable manufacturing achievement.",
"From my research RML says carbon composites cost $16/lb where steel costs $4/lb; this includes fixed and variable costs associated with material production and automotive manufacturing on a production line tooled for 250k units a year. They suggest carbon can become cost competitive with steel if it can hit $5/lb, the longer term market benefits begin to overcome the additional costs of manufacturing.\n\nSo figure out how to drop the cost and get rich.",
"Carbon fiber is WAAAAY more expansive than steel. Not from a raw materials point of view, but taking the raw material and making a car out of it is more expensive.\n\nA sheet of steel can be simply stamped into the shapes we need. It's fast, easy, and any moron can do it. Hell, Eminim did it for a job in the movie 8 mile.\n\nCarbon fiber cannot be mass produced in the same way. Therefore, if you are talking about making 1 part it's cheaper to use carbon fiber, but when it comes to mass production steel is WAY cheaper. ",
"Carbon fiber also makes a nasty mess when you break it; carbon nanoparticles can get in your lungs and cause symptoms similar to asbestos exposure, but worse as your body doesn't encapsulate carbon.",
"Carbon fibre is *expensive* - much more so than steel. An all-carbon-fibre car would cost several times that of a metal car.\n\nFurthermore, while carbon fibre may be stronger, it's also very brittle. In a head-on collision, a steel car will deform, with the frame taking the brunt of the impact. A carbon fibre car would shatter, scattering sharp shards all over the place and leaving the passengers to take almost the full force of the blow. Think there are a lot of car-related fatalities today? In a world of all-carbon-fibre cars, there would be even more."
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dbhk59 | what makes the quality difference between knock offs and original products? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dbhk59/eli5_what_makes_the_quality_difference_between/ | {
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"Well, to touch specifically on the materials, \"plastic is plastic\" isn't true. There are different industrial grades of plastics, as there are metals. \n\nHeadphones for instance. The cone that vibrates within the earpiece is made of lots of metal, paper, and plastic. Samsung and Apple will be using the highest quality glue, the strongest metals, and the most durable plastics or paper. The upfront cost for the item is more, but the quality materials that give the item a long lifespan make it worth the cost. Sometimes. \n\nThe difference could also be research and development (R & D). Whereas Apple paid technicians and researchers to study and build the best headphone, insertbrandhere just came behind and copied their work to the best of their ability. For earbuds, maybe insertbrandhere wasn't able to find the perfectly comfortable shape for the ear. Maybe they couldn't get the noise cancellation as correct. That's okay, people aren't paying to have everything perfect. They're paying to have something work until it doesn't. That's why it is best to go with a well reviewed brand, regardless of price."
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157740 | if i were to put rogaine (or a similar hair growing/hair loss preventative substance) on my face, would it make my beard thicker? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/157740/eli5_if_i_were_to_put_rogaine_or_a_similar_hair/ | {
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"If I remember correctly rogaine works by stimulating dormant hair follicles so no it wouldnt make it grow in thicker. Just give it time, shave regularly and it will grow in",
"As far as I know hair on your head is different hair than the stuff on your face/crotch/armpits. There's a name for the two subtypes but I can't recall it.\n\nEdit: crotch hair is \"axillary\" hair.",
"As someone who found a website dedicated to this years ago, this is what they found if I remember correctly:\n\nYes, it does make your beard thicker but:\n\n1. There's a limit about how much it can do. It's not all that effective. Hair doesn't grow where ever you apply it. It just MIGHT grow SOME hair there. I think everyone that tried it had it work to some extent, but no one had really impressive results. Expect it to be in the level of \"you can barely tell\" to \"you can kind of tell\".\n2. It's not cheap and it takes a while for it to work.\n3. It's annoying to apply.\n4. It dries your skin out a bit."
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5ovnum | why does adding slow motion to certain videos create a shutter effect? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ovnum/eli5_why_does_adding_slow_motion_to_certain/ | {
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"Imagine you have a video. You open it in your video software. After some investigation, you learn your video is 1 second long and consists of 24 individuals photos of a cat running. Cute!\n\nBut one of your friends comes along. She isn't very impressed by the video. She says it would look cooler if the cat was moving more slowly.\n\nYou find the option in your program to slow the video down so it's instead 2 seconds long. That should make it move in slow motiom, right? But when you play your now 2 second video back, it looks odd: there's a strange stuttering effect!\n\nThis is because you only have a total of 24 original photographs in your video. The program you put your video into needs twice as many frames to create a video slowed down to be twice as long. Since you had 24 photographs in your video instead of 48, the program compensated for this by creating duplicates of frames you already had.\n\nSome programs compensate for this by creating a strobing effect between each frame (photograph) in an attempt to blend them together as if the frames you have missing do exist.\n\nIdeally for slow motion footage, you need a camera that will take more than the average number photographs per second. Typically film will record around 24 frames per second. Many true slow motion scenes are shot at frame rates much higher than that."
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6831cn | how does a mirror help to fix phantom limb syndrome? | Can't remember where I saw this. If a nerve is sending pain signals, surely just looking at it in a mirror wont stop the pain?
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6831cn/eli5_how_does_a_mirror_help_to_fix_phantom_limb/ | {
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"You saw it on a Ted talk. The mirror is positioned so the person with the missing limb sees the reflection of the remaining limb, which tells the brain the missing limb is still there. It does not stop nerves from firing, it tells the brain the missing limb is in tact and unharmed which works for some patients. ",
"You don't just look in a mirror. You arrange the mirror in such a way the reflection of your intact limb appears where your missing limb is. This visualization makes it easier you to find and relax the neurons that are trying to send signals to the missing limb.",
"There was an episode of House where he did this. I'm too lazy to google it but if you want to watch with a good explanation google away",
"This is what you are looking for: _URL_0_ \n\nIf you really want to go into the subject, send a request via: _URL_1_ "
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3ipkka | why are american houses often of such poor quality? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ipkka/eli5_why_are_american_houses_often_of_such_poor/ | {
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"Maybe their houses are the same strength as ours. It might be just a simple case of Americans being considerably stronger than us and able to punch their way out of anything.",
"From what I see American housing generally seems to be of wooden frame construction. Plastic board (dry wall) interior walls. Now that’s not in the cities but more the suburbs and rural areas.\n\nI assume its due to the cost, timber is far cheaper than cinder block (concrete) and brick construction, it covenant and faster to build.\n\nEdit - Plaster board not plastic (trying to type on here and do work lol)\n\nComing from the UK most houses like europe are concrete and brick construction. ",
"What do you mean?\n\nIf you are talking about being made from wood it is because it is cheap and we can get larger houses by building with it. \n\nPunching houses is not really a problem, only idiots do that. \n\nWood houses are also safer in earthquakes, are equally vulnerable to tornadoes (a tornado resistant bunker is 4' thick walls that are steel reinforced) and hurricanes (most damage is done by flooding, though winds will tear apart buildings similar to weaker tornadoes as the winds are slower). They are more vulnerable to fires but that is the only disaster that they are at a significant disadvantage in. ",
"First off, new builds in Europe are made with the same principles, e.g. wood framing + plaster board/drywall/etc. you might have a brick exterior but the inside of the house isn't a fucking 13th century castle made of limestone or whatever...\n\nSecond, I wouldn't call NA homes \"poor quality.\" I mean yes builders fuck up mundane shit routinely (e.g. get caulking wrong, don't patch drywall cleanly, etc...) but generally speaking framing and what not is built to code. I doubt construction folk in the EU are all perfect either. They're subjected to the same human limitations/biases/etc as we are.\n\n",
"American consumers want a house that is 2-3x the size of the average German or British house and they want it for 1/2 the price that it would fetch in Germany or the UK and this is the result.\n\nMost of Europe very population dense. Which leads to housing being smaller and more expensive. The averge price per SQM in germany for a living space is ~$2700 in the USA it is closer to ~$1550.\n\nMeanwhile the average size of a living space in the US is over 200 SqM while in germany is is less than 100 SQM.",
"But are they? I mean you are talking the dry wall in a house. There is no point of putting harder/heavier/more expensive materials on the inside of the house. As you have the studs in wall in case you need more support. Also take into consideration many houses in the US are built along the coast and made to withstand some Hurricanes, while in the Plains they are routinely hit with Tornadoes and some houses can withstand that. Again it all comes down construction costs, but I also think many homes are much more durable than you think. Keep in mind how much older homes are in Europe and how much less room there is in Europe compared to here. So different construction methods and different materials were used in the building process. I also think that another consideration is that American homes are much larger than in Europe. So if they are of lesser quality, I think that some of the cost may be spread out more materials for larger houses.",
"In addition to plentiful supply of lumber, timber houses can be insulated with narrower walls than stone/concrete homes. Insulation is more important in most of the US, where temperature extremes tend to be larger than in most of Europe. ",
"Houses in Europe average a lot older than in the US. We, too, have many homes and buildings made of structural brick, but the majority of homes here have been built after faster methods and cheaper materials were developed.\n\nWhile there are less than honourable contractors here, there are still plenty that perform quality work and use premium materials. You just have to be willing to pay for it. There are limits to size vs quality when levied against what you are willing to pay. I once worked for an outfit that cleaned up after construction in upscale subdivisions where the buyers had a lot of leeway in furnishings, trim, etc. and I was amazed how the quality would vary. You want nice stuff, you pay for it.\n\nNothing wrong with our wall design, it's just how we do it. Plenty timber and gypsum available. The space inside permits decent insulation. If you aren't an idiot and take care of your home, it lasts. My subdivision is 60 years old. Interior looks awesome after I updated with modern style trim. No cracks in any of the joints, no holes, everything is solid. Not designed for ramming at full speed, so don't. People in Europe don't do that, because the walls would kick their ass.",
"You are starting from a false premise. American houses are not of poor quality and you did not even give an example of poor quality, you just assumed it to be true based on nothing at all. I would love to see you punch through the exterior of a house, or a wood stud. You can cut through drywall, but it's designed that way. Behind the drywall is the structure supporting material (metal or wood), pipes, and electrical wires. If it was solid brick or concrete and you needed to get behind it, you would be unable to do so without a crew of people to bust open holes or drill through it."
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8fc1j6 | why can a person sing with another singer or music but not by themselves? | Sometimes when a person sings with a recording, the music and another singer they can hold the tune and notes, and sound good but when they sing by themselves without music or another singer they can't hold the tune or notes. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8fc1j6/eli5_why_can_a_person_sing_with_another_singer_or/ | {
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"You don't have to find the note if it's being produced for you. If you start out sounding flat compared to the recording, you adjust. If you're rushing or dragging, the recording will pull you back into correct time. No such luxury when you're singing solo. It's like the difference between drawing from a reference photo and drawing with no reference at all. Try getting out pencil and paper and just drawing a giraffe. It won't look nearly as good as if you had a picture to consult."
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5621mw | how would a sports franchise enforce a "lifetime ban" on a patron? with tens of thousands of people at each game, how are they going to recognize a single person? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5621mw/eli5_how_would_a_sports_franchise_enforce_a/ | {
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"Lifetime bans are not so much about keeping you out, but giving them grounds for having you arrested if they do notice you or if you do any kind of minor infraction. ",
"If the person comes back and doesn't cause trouble, then does the franchise really care? \nIf the person comes back and does cause trouble you bring out the options the legal system provides (e.g. try to get them charged with trespassing). ",
"These bans aren't to prevent people from coming in. If the person comes in and behaves then they don't care.\n\nHowever, if the person comes in and misbehaves again, they can not only throw him out but have him arrested for trespassing."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2ly2rl | why don't we have animal organ donor clinics? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ly2rl/eli5_why_dont_we_have_animal_organ_donor_clinics/ | {
"a_id": [
"clz86ij"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"I actually don't know but I would assume that it is because no healthy dog's owner would give up the dog's organs. If a dog is being put down, there is a reason. Thus, organs not salvageable. Also, who would pay for the storage? Vet bills are expensive and I doubt they would spend money on storing organs in hopes another owner would pay for it. \nThe only option I could think of, which is extremely inhumane, would be that a pet owner with the money to pay for it, would pay for a healthy dogs organ to save their own dog. The healthy dog ultimately dying instead. Very sad.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
9obxv2 | why do cops always ask if you know why they pulled you over? does your answer have any influence on how the cop my handle the situation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9obxv2/eli5_why_do_cops_always_ask_if_you_know_why_they/ | {
"a_id": [
"e7svf9s",
"e7svl4f"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text": [
"If you say \"I was speeding\" they document that so you can't go to court and say you weren't speeding",
"It's a mind game. They pulled you over for a very specific reason. If there's something *else* you're doing wrong that they didn't even think about, then the open-ended prompt can cause a lot of people to bring up that other thing and add another basis for a ticket. Which improves the cop's stats.\n\n\n\n\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
48bdz2 | what was the nazi plan for explaining the final solution to the german public? | The general historical consensus is that the Final Solution was not general public knowledge since the average citizen would be against genocide. Theoretically, if the Nazis won, did the 3rd Reich have a plan/idea in place on how they were going to explain the complete absence of Jews in Europe? Or were they going to pretend they were all alive and well "somewhere else"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48bdz2/eli5what_was_the_nazi_plan_for_explaining_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"d0ia8me",
"d0idred",
"d0iv0hp",
"d0izbka"
],
"score": [
12,
33,
5,
5
],
"text": [
"\"The Jews have been working to undermine the state and harm the German people. Those deemed disloyal to the state have been placed into forced labor camps to provide for the welfare of the German people\" more or less.",
"I don't think they really thought that far. Actually, most of the Nazis' plans were half-baked: for example, they were building huge structures all over Berlin and Nuremberg (the few they completed can still be seen today), but didn't have a clue how to actually pay for them.\n\nAt the time they explained to the public that Jews were being sent to labour camps. There's a lot of dispute over how much the people really knew, but the important thing is that anyone who dared voice any misgivings could be terrified into silence.\n\nIt wasn't just the Jews who were being sent to concentration camps, of course: there were also homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (what we call \"Gypsies\") and later religious and political enemies as well.\n\nThe vague idea was, presumably, that once all these \"enemies of the state\" had been removed from Germany, the people who were left would eventually forget them and rejoice in their utopian lives. No need to explain their complete absence: it would, in time, just become accepted.",
"Joseph Goebbels(Nazi's Propagandist) is widely known amongst historians as one of the most influential and effective propagandists to have ever lived. The way he advertised the Nazi Party and Hitlers motives were very impressive. He sugar coated even the most grotesque government actions to the point where most of the German people believed it. \n\nAs well as the fact that Antisemitism was a movement that most Europeans agreed with, it was easy to sway public opinion. \n\nAlso trust in the government was very high due to economic prosperity in Germany from the invasion of France.",
"*Before* the Nazis started rounding people up and putting them in Ghettos or KZs, they spent *years* dehumanizing Jews and other groups through propaganda. The eventual victims of the third Reich were portrayed as being to blame for all of Germany's problems:\n\n- Germany's defeat in WWI (the \"Dolchstosslegende\" or knife-stab legend - claiming that the Jews betrayed Germany by surrendering even though victory was possible)\n\n- The degrading terms of the Treaty of Versailles and post-war depression/hyperinflation\n\n- Acts of terrorism and social unrest (especially aimed at Communists, who were blamed for the burning of the Reichstag - Hitler used this as a reason to claim emergency powers)\n\n- \"Degeneracy\" and immorality (\"Antisocials,\" gays and lesbians, Jews, etc). \n\nLaws were gradually put into place to discourage social contact between \"Aryans\" and Jews, Roma. There was pressure for mixed couples to divorce, etc. So, in many cases, social ties between communities had been destroyed, which meant there were fewer people asking questions. It was no longer that \"Our friends and neighbors, the Rosenblatts have vanished,\" but \"those filthy Jews next door are finally gone.\" Furthermore, many/most of the possessions stolen from the Nazis' victims were redistributed to the rest of the population, which provided an incentive to turn a blind eye. There is a lot of debate about what the average citizen did or didn't know, and honestly, we'll likely never know the truth. Some people probably were quite naive, while others likely knew *a lot* about the crimes being committed.\n\n- Jews were deported, first to ghettos, then to concentration camps. Supposedly, the average citizen knew that they were being \"deported\" or sent away to work, but was unaware of the mass executions/genocide aspect of it. It's worth noting that \"Aryan\" young people were often assigned various forms of compulsory work (potentially away from home) and young men were being drafted into military service and deployed. In that context, people were going away a lot, so being sent off to a work camp not have seemed *quite* as outlandish to the average citizen, even if they had suspicions. \n\n- Disabled people were institutionalized, basically with the explanation that it was \"for their own good.\" Families later got a notice saying their loved one had died of natural causes.\n\n- Homosexuals, \"Antisocials\" (a blanket term that could cover any number of things - lesbianism, refusal to marry, anti-government attitudes, alcoholism, etc), communists, etc, were branded criminals and \"imprisoned.\" \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
58faf8 | what is a tor relay node, and how does it work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58faf8/eli5_what_is_a_tor_relay_node_and_how_does_it_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"d8zz0s8"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"basically there's a bunch of relay nodes and an exit node. when you connect to a website, instead of connecting to the website directly, you connect through multiple relay nodes and then to an exit node, that exit node is where you appear to be connecting from. \n\nbeing a node uses a lot of bandwidth, and you can get in trouble for it. \n\nbasically you ever watch a movie and when someone is doing something illegal online and the cops are tracking that person? they find out where that person is connecting from, but then hold on a minute, they seem to be connecting through point a, point b, point c, etc. those are all relay nodes. \n\n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.hacker10.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/tor-hidden-service-diagram-network.jpg"
]
] |
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