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95iksu | when you are getting your eyes checked, why do you look at the eye exam chart through a mirror instead of just reading it straight on? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/95iksu/eli5_when_you_are_getting_your_eyes_checked_why/ | {
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"This increases the effective distance from you to the chart, so they can have you farther from the chart than the total size of the room.",
"Because the room you’re in is small - the mirror doubles (ish) your distance from the chart. ",
"Every doctor’s office I’ve ever been to never used a mirror or anything, we just looked at it straight on. "
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3d62s0 | why do movie companies show trailers at events like comicon, but not release the trailer on the web? they must know that it's going to get leaked anyways. | Is this a marketing strategy? Knowing what that a poor quality video of the trailer is going to get leaked so that it stirs up buzz for the movie?
Why not just release the trailer the day you show it at the event? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d62s0/eli5_why_do_movie_companies_show_trailers_at/ | {
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"Those trailers are, most of the time, a treat for the people who attended Comic Con. And in a lot of the cases, they contain music for which they don't have the correct licenses to publish them on the web (yet). The film studios are aware that bootlegs will be put on the web but the quality is almost always really bad and in a lot of the cases they are able to get those bootlegs removed. \n\nIt's not so much a marketing strategy, but the extra buzz it creates is something they won't complain about. It doesn't only create extra buzz for the film but also for the actual high quality trailer. In the time between the Comic Con trailer and the release of that trailer or another high quality trailer, people talk about it, especially if the Comic Con audience went mad seeing said trailer. And in the end, people talking about your product, in this case a film, is the best kind of marketing.\n"
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9a3k96 | what is the actual physical cause of sound on an atomic level? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9a3k96/eli5_what_is_the_actual_physical_cause_of_sound/ | {
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"Imagine atoms are like a row of standing dominoes. When something makes a sound, it knocks over the first one which knocks over the next and so on until the last one falls on your ear drum"
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5z00q2 | how do they get recordings of all the words for electronic reading voices? | Does someone literally read the entire dictionary and then some, or how does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5z00q2/eli5_how_do_they_get_recordings_of_all_the_words/ | {
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"Yes, somebody literally reads a dictionary of words. But the dictionary is cut down to include only the ___ most common words and is tailored to the usage they expect you to need. For words that aren't in the main dictionary the voice actor records syllable sounds (phonetic dictionary) so that uncommon words can be read (sometimes poorly). The TTS program may include a secondary text-only dictionary of less common words, in a notation like [IPA](_URL_1_). Very rare words might fall outside of all dictionaries and the TTS program will try to make a best guess at how the word sounds. This almost always sounds terrible, but it's better than nothing.\n\nI've used the default Google voice built into Android, the Samsung one that comes with Galaxy S_, and Ivona (Amazon) Amy (UK).\n\nWhen using Google maps, the Android voice has the most complete and natural sound to most uncommon street names, getting things like \"Sepulveda Blvd\" correct, but Ivona Amy doesn't even come close. So you can tell that Google included many street names and non-English words into their voice dictionary and Ivona didn't.\n\nBut [when reading an eBook](_URL_2_), Ivona Amy sounds almost natural, while the Google voice sounds terribly flat and lifeless. Ivona Amy still stumbles pronouncing \"No.\" as \"number,\" but you can tell instantly that it's much better suited for natural language than the Android, Samsung, and even Kindle options.\n\nBut even if every single word were recorded there'd still be a problem with word stress and phrase pronunciation. \"To\" and \"two\" might normally be pronounced the same, but when saying the phrase \"nine to five\" many people would pronounce it more like \"nine tuh five,\" which can't be easily reproduced by a voice reader.\n\n---\n\nedit: What /u/PirateBaeDotSE describes is only a basic level of TTS (phonetic dictionary). Doing it that way either ignores intonation or does not properly capture natural sounding speech. Compare [Ivona Amy](_URL_0_) to the acapela link and you can hear the huge difference.",
"[Here's](_URL_0_) a fun video where a couple of Google employees explain how their TTS works."
]
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"http://www.ttsforaccessibility.com/",
"https://www.wikiwand.com/en/International_Phonetic_Alphabet",
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5stlwv | if vitamin d is necessary and important and one of the best sources for it is regular exposure to the sun, then why also are we told exposing ourselves to the sun is dangerous? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5stlwv/eli5_if_vitamin_d_is_necessary_and_important_and/ | {
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"In the long run exposure to a lot of sun raises the risk of skin cancer significantly. It is best to wear Sun Screen during long periods outside.\n\nYes sunlight helps activate the precursors so you have enough vitamin D. People who dwelt in Northern latitudes eventually are fair skinned for this reason.\n\nMost people do not get skin cancer.\n\nAll people die.",
"Because both are, annoyingly, true.\n\nUV light is a vital component in the body's process that kicks off the production of vitamin D. UV light is also consistently capable of causing cancer to *eventually* pop up (it does take quite a while) in skin cell samples. Ugh, right?\n\nUsually the people who end up getting skin cancer are those who *work* outdoors, or those who go tanning like, all the time. The best thing you can do is be sure to get *some* sun, but not go overboard and remember to put on sunblock if you're going to be out for a while. "
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b5pxyj | why do butterflies and moths have such large wings relative to their body size compared to other insects? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b5pxyj/eli5why_do_butterflies_and_moths_have_such_large/ | {
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"Imagine you have a small insect that weighs 1 mg and needs 1 mm² of wing surface in order to fly efficiently. It has a larger relative which is ten times as large.\n\nNow the weight of the larger insect scales in all three dimensions: It's ten times as wide, ten times as long and ten times as high, so in total it weighs 1000 mg. Its wings are ten times as long and ten times as wide, so they have an area of 100 mm². So relative to its weight, it has a much smaller wing surface, even though its proportions are all the same, and a smaller wing means it's much less efficient.\n\nThis effect is called the \"square cubed law\". For anything that flies it means that the proportions of the wings need to be bigger, the heavier it is. On top of that, large wings are generally more efficient, whereas small wings are ~~less~~ more aerodynamic - so an insect with very large wings might be able to fly for a longer time, but at a lower speed.",
"Big wings means slower flapping to achieve flight - more surface area to push against the air. This decreases maneuverability but gives them more ability to glide/soar (fly without flapping). This makes sense for some butterflies as they're migratory. Also some large sea birds use this same strategy to soar for long distances. ",
"Has anyone answered the question correctly yet? Someone posted a video saying it has nothing to do with flight: [The giant-sized wings on butterflies have nothing to do with flying](_URL_0_).",
"The combination of size and color suggests that the wings are used to attract mates of the same species. They spend much of there lives as caterpillars. All of the caterpillars on a particular plant may be siblings. Flight gets them away from siblings. After metamorphosis, their goal is to mate and find a good place to lay eggs. The plant they grew up on may die and wings help in finding a new plant for their babies. There are some species that live a long time in the butterfly stage, but most don't.",
"This is a loaded question because you mention two different species BUT I think a lot of it has to do with sexual selection, in the same vain as ornate antlers for deer and large brains for humans. Traits get selected that enable individuals in a species to reproduce more effectively, regardless of their impact on the ability to survive within a given life span. Butterflies have insane visual systems and when they see other butterfly wings, they receive a ton of potential information about that butterfly. Its possible that certain configurations of wing designs can be seen as more or less attractive in their species and that can, in turn, provide certain individuals with a competitive advantage of securing a mate. Their large wings can be thought of billboards advertising for sex more or less lol. There's also just a huge amount of randomness/variability in evolution, so I'm sure there were multiple factors at play in developing the size of the wings (e.g. migration, metabolism, etc). ",
"Look at migration distance of butterflies compared to migration distance of smaller insects. That is likely part of it. ",
"Most likely a variety of reasons where not a single answer could explain why.\n\nFlight and flight power is one however I think some of these creatures have a really short life span.\n\nDefense/camouflage in order to look bigger than they actually are or look like another animal. Moths at night would have markings that look like birds eyes at night to another animal looking larger than they are.\n\nIt could also be for mating in order to attract the best mate who may only go for the healthiest looking colours.",
"Lets compare Butterflies and Dragonflies for a second.\n\nButterflies use large gliding wings to stay aloof, holding them basically immobile most of the time. They feed on the nectar of flowers, which are basically immobile as well. Structurally, Butterfly wings and the muscles to control them are fairly simple. In terms of energy expended to growth them, Butterfly wings are fairly cheap and do the job Butterflies need them to do.\n\nDragonflies are aerial hunters. They have smaller, compound wings attached to highly developed muscle structures to allow each wing independent motion in all dimensions. This gives the Dragonfly the superior maneuverability it needs to catch other flying insects. However, in terms of energy expended, these wings are expensive to growth and to operate. If Dragonfly wings were the size of Butterfly wings, it would have to catch significantly more prey to survive.\n\nButterfly wings are big because it lets them glide easier and they don't need to perform the more complex aerial maneuvers that other insects do.",
"The real question is why do we, humans, not have wings? ",
"1-It helps them soar and glide better\n\n2- butterflies and moths attract mates by the pretty marking on their wings, the more space they have for markings, the better chance they have.",
"I took a graduate-level entomology class this semester that actually answered this question. \n\nBasically, it all has to do with the way their flight muscles and nerves are arranged. Butterfly nerves are hooked up to their wings in such a way that one nerve impulse= one wing flap. This is called “synchronous flight”, and it puts a pretty big limit on how fast butterflies are are able to flap. \n\nBees, wasps, beetles, and flies have nerves arranged so that a single nerve impulse = multiple flaps. This is called “asynchronous flight”, and it allows them to flap much, much faster than a butterfly would be able to. \n\nSo the bottom line is that butterflies can’t flap as fast and therefore need larger wings to make up for this handicap. \n\nInterestingly, dragonflies have synchronous flight, but still manage to be incredibly fast and maneuverable because their flight muscles are attached directly to their wings, which is not the case in butterflies and almost all other insects. "
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5wk7oy | why are rabbits also called "bunnies?" | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wk7oy/eli5_why_are_rabbits_also_called_bunnies/ | {
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"\"Bunny\" comes from Scottish dialect and is of uncertain origin. It's pretty common in English that multiple terms will come from different sources, with none being exclusive.\n\nIncidentally, \"rabbit\" originally referred only the young, the species in general being called *coney*.",
"Because the word is cute and they are cute. [Actually, “bunny” is closer to the original word for the floppy-eared critters than “rabbit” is. Up until the 18th century, the common word used for adult members of Oryctolagus cuniculus was “coney,” which was pronounced “cunny.” Eventually, that word fell out of favor because of its similarity to a word that was becoming increasingly more commonly used as a vulgarity. So timid souls along the way chose a rhyming alternative, and “coney” became “bunny.”](_URL_0_)",
"Welsh superstition: passing something menacing like a cemetery at night you'd say rabbit rabbit rabbit ended by bunny once you passed. Gordon Ramsey did this on an episode of his program.",
"And then why do people use bunny and rabbit together?! ",
"There's also a French sailor superstition that states than any word that is even remotely close to \"bunny\" or \"rabbit\" would spread bad luck over the ship and it will never arrive at port.",
"I always thought bunnies were the chubby, floppy eared sort that you cage as pets, and rabbits were the lean, quick bastards you see running around outside. ",
"The other compelling question is why Manx Cats are not called Cabbits, despite many people attempting to insist they are cabbits, and should be called such. \n\nGenetically they're not a cat/bunny cross breed, but there's a lot of hilarity surrounding the mythos of the cabbit.)\n",
"This is what the OED has to say:\n\nORIGIN early 17th cent. (originally used as a term of endearment to a person, later as a pet name for a rabbit): from dialect bun ‘squirrel, rabbit’, also used as a term of endearment, of unknown origin.",
"Isn't bunny a baby rabbit?"
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3wi4a4 | why are so many major us cities located on state borders? | Kansas City, St Louis, Memphis, Cincinnati, Omaha, the list goes on... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wi4a4/eli5_why_are_so_many_major_us_cities_located_on/ | {
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"This is purely a guess, but I'd say because most cities are near bodies of water and many state borders are formed by rivers.",
"Sometimes it is because rivers are used as borders and other times because people could take advantage of the different state laws. Like alcohol legal in one state but not the other.",
"There are social and commercial considerations, too. There is a \"Beer City\" along Broadway Road in New Hampshire, just on the border with Massachusetts. \n\nThis location takes advantage of some alcoholic beverage rule in Mass., I don't know what, which encourages Mass. citizens to buy their beer in New Hampshire. \n\nIn other cases, an impoverished city on one side of the border realizes that it can parasitically incorporate a another state's city infrastructure into their own by expanding in the direction of the better off city, effectively merging the two. Example: East St. Louis, which parasitically subsists on tourism to the Arch across the river. ESL is still in decline, and is only about half the size it was in 1950."
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15ajw6 | how can foreign iphone knockoffs sell legally on amazon, etc while samsung has been sued by apple for copying "the look and feel"? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15ajw6/eli5_how_can_foreign_iphone_knockoffs_sell/ | {
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"Two reasons.\n\n1) They're probably not legal, but someone has to take the time to identify knockoffs, track down the vendor, etc.\n\n2) Patent litigation is so expensive that Apple and Samsung are only going to do it where the rewards are big enough to offset that cost - Apple pursues Samsung because Samsung is the biggest smartphone competitor.",
"Because almost all the knock-offs are from China. Courts in China are really slow and what's the point of banning some product after four years of its release? So they don't even bother. Samsung is more of an international company and they can sue them in the US/Europe and that's something else."
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1mgoks | i know this sounds lazy but why is that if i feel great and awake when i start doing homework or start studying i get really sleepy? | Happens all the time. I'm wide awake doing something fun but when I have to sit down and do a reading assignment, do math, write a paper, etc. I suddenly get really sleepy. I hate it. Is it psychological? I can feel my eyes being tired. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mgoks/eli5_i_know_this_sounds_lazy_but_why_is_that_if_i/ | {
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"Are you a high schooler? If so, then I have an explanation. (will post as an edit)\n\nEDIT: whoops, nevermind. [Here's my explanation](_URL_0_)",
"Maybe you need your eyes checked. A lot of people have undiagnosed eye conditions that manifest only when looking up close/ reading- otherwise they are fine. The symptoms are not always blurry vision- getting tired when doing close up stuff is a common one. Go see an optometrist if you haven't in a while "
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dvnpv7 | why do people develop fears or phobias of things, if they haven’t had bad/ traumatic experiences with those things? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dvnpv7/eli5_why_do_people_develop_fears_or_phobias_of/ | {
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"I found it was falling in love. I used to be fine with - even enjoyed - flying, but since I met my now wife, I became intensley aware of my mortality through my desire to be with and protect her.\n\nTrick is - close yourself off emotionally from the world, and develop a deathwish - it will also make you an 'anti-hero'.",
"I believe it is about how brain works. When you learn new things your brain learns them via older information similar to this new information. So when you learn more about security, how complicated machinery works or how accidents happen your brain connects the dots. Before you know it, you get started to fear from things you were not feared before. It's not happening instantly, it's generally takes some time.",
"You hear things and that scares you. Like maybe loved ones traumatic experiences affects your brain too."
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1y0aux | why are men typically better than women at sports/activities that aren't dependent on strength (e.g. bowling, throwing darts, shooting pool, etc)? | I understand why men dominate women in sports that require physical strength (football, weight-lifting, etc), but never understood why they also almost always dominate skill based competition as well (sharpshooting, shooting pool, etc). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1y0aux/eli5why_are_men_typically_better_than_women_at/ | {
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"feelin' like some sexist comments are to come out of this. i'll stick around",
"They spend too long parking their cars to get in enough practice time.",
"Male sex hormones and brain structure are said to improve \n\n* strength (nice if you have to hold a bow or rifle steady for a longer time)\n* spatial orientation (where am I, where's everyone else on the battlefield)\n* spatial understanding (assessing the potential trajectory of a ball or dart or so)\n* muscle coordination (complex movements where many muscles have to be used at the same time...not fine motorics:) )\n* motoric learning (they tend to pick up new motion skills more easily and are trained faster)",
"It has a lot to do with the size of the talent pool. A lot of more men bowl and shoot pool, which means there is a lot bigger group from which a top talent can emerge.\n\nAnd size and strength still play a role in those sports. A 5'4\" person will have a little trouble with pool, because their arms aren't long enough to make all the shots. A 120 pound person will have little trouble with bowling, because the ball is too heavy for them to stabilize. This eliminates a lot more women from top competition than men. "
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2u2xt7 | how are old english, such as in this picture, and current english considered the same language? | _URL_0_
They look and sound nothing alike, with the exception of a word here and there, so how are they considered the same language? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u2xt7/eli5how_are_old_english_such_as_in_this_picture/ | {
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"They aren't considered to be the same language, that is why it is called Old English. The same with German, Old German, or to be exact the version spoken by the Angles, is the origins of Old English. \n",
"If you change a language one word at a time. At what point does it become another language? ",
"With only a few exceptions (Written Icelandic and written old Nordic f.i being so similar that modern speakers of Icelandic can with a bit of effort read the Icelandic sagas written c.a 1000-1200) languages change rapidly over time, they evolve. You can sort of make out from what languages other languages evolve, but past a certain point it's just going to be the ancestor on a linguistic family tree. You don't consider your father or grandfather to be the same as you despite bearing resemblance to them. Same here: Old english is 'our' English's ancestor. IT might resemble it from time to time but it is another language all together. ",
"Languages change over time, but very slowly. You probably don't speak in quite the same way as your grandparents. Your grandparents probably don't speak in quite the same way as their grandparents. And so on.\n\nIf you could go back in time and speak to your great-great-grandparents, you'd find their language a bit weird and probably sometimes difficult to understand. But they would not have such issues with their grandchildren, your grandparents. And you and your grandparents also communicate just fine.\n\nOld English and Modern English aren't exactly the same language, but Old English morphed into Modern English slowly. All down through this period of time, every generation complained that their grandchildren didn't speak \"proper English\", but there was never a point where they couldn't communicate: there wasn't a definite break somewhere, where one generation was speaking Old English and their children were speaking Middle English so they couldn't understand each other.\n\nWe like to put neat labels on things, and that works well most of the time; but in the real world, things don't fall neatly into specific categories. We say that two methods of communicating are different languages if they are mutually unintelligible, but the reality is much more complicated: what we really have is a lot of different continuums, and we just decide to draw lines and say, \"This side is Dutch, and that side is German\", for example. But listen to some of the dialects of German spoken near the Dutch border and some of the dialects of Dutch spoken near the German border, and they're actually very similar.\n\nSo, regarding English, what has happened is that the language that was being spoken in the year 800 slowly changed from generation to generation, eventually becoming the language that is being spoken today. The nearest thing we have to a definite boundary is the year 1066, when the Normans invaded, introducing quite a lot of Norman French vocabulary and grammar to the English language, but even that didn't happen overnight: it took a couple of generations, during which the Anglo-Saxons picked up some words from their Norman lords and masters, while the Normans gradually came to use the English language.\n\nBut other than that, it's sort of still the same language (in that Modern English is a direct descendent of Old English), but at the same time it isn't (because, as you rightly point out, Modern English and Old English are mutually unintelligible)."
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5lhb8h | how do card readers know that a card has a chip? | When I see people use their cards at places like convenience stores, sometimes they'll swipe their card and then be asked afterword by the machine to insert the chip instead. How does the machine know the card has a chip, and how can it tell the difference? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lhb8h/eli5_how_do_card_readers_know_that_a_card_has_a/ | {
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"When you swipe your card, the machine is reading information on the card. One of the things it reads is a little message that says \"Hey! I have a chip on me!\" Now the machine knows, so it tells you to use the chip."
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1vpkbt | how is linux open and secure? | "Linux" meaning gnu/linux open operating systems in general, and the varieties thereof. And I'm not saying Linux is un-secure. Just the opposite in fact- hence my confusion.
- "Security through obscurity" doesn't always work. I get that. But doesn't completely opening up everything show ways of compromising security?
- How do I know I'm running secure Linux? Right now, I could download Ubuntu, modify it to include a discrete back-door, and then publish it on a Torrent site. I could even make my own check-sum for the new file. Surely I could get a couple hundred people to download it. Yet this isn't "a thing". Why?
Edit: Explained. Thanks to all who contributed.
Tl;dr summary of what explained it for me:
- 1st question: There are enough benevolent/white hat people investigating source-code. As time goes by it becomes increasingly unlikely for a flaw to go un-found.
- 2nd question: Yes, I could get a couple suckers to use my pirated distro. But no more than that. Trusted sources are well known and easy to find. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vpkbt/eli5_how_is_linux_open_and_secure/ | {
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"You absolutely could change Linux to make it unsecure. You could then put it into a torrent for others to download. The problem you would have is other people probably wouldn't download it. \n\nAnybody can make their own copy of Linux but exactly for the reason you are talking about people only trust Linux from a few sources. Even if you make a checksum for your version of Linux it will be different from the official version of Ubuntu that canonical makes so people will know it's different. Since you are a nobody (sorry) no one will trust you and no one will download your version without checking that it matches the official version first. \n\nNow to your first question. If the code is completely open, cant anyone find a flaw really easily? Maybe if you looked you could find a flaw. fortunately most of the people looking for flaws are looking for them to fix them, not to use them to hurt people. \n\nIf you want to abuse a flaw then you have better find it fast because lots of other people are looking for flaws too and are fixing them as fast as they can. ",
" > \"Security through obscurity\" doesn't always work. I get that. But doesn't completely opening up everything show ways of compromising security?\n\nYes, it does. Fortunately, though, the number of people, paid or as a hobby, that audit the source code to report vulnerabilities or patch them personally outnumber those wishing to misuse the information by quite a lot. A lot of companies have a financial interest in Linux being safe so they pay people to work on it, and a lot of hobbyists enjoy it and/or want to be able to put how many patches they have to the Linux kernel on their resume.\n\nYou also have stuff like the Google and Mozilla offering bounties on security issues being reported.\n\nWindows or other proprietary code has only the people they personally pay and since businessmen with little understanding over-rely on security through obscurity vulnerabilities are more likely to be found by the people who wish to misuse them. (There's a billion and half stories about someone finding some issue with proprietary code who then report it only to have it ignored or actually end up with them being accused of misdoings by the company, so as well as being much harder without source code there are much fewer people willing to do it as a hobbyist thing.)\n\n > How do I know I'm running secure Linux? Right now, I could download Ubuntu, modify it to include a discrete back-door, and then publish it on a Torrent site.\n\nYou could, so download from a trusted source that uses hashes to verify.\n\n > I could even make my own check-sum for the new file.\n\nNot without hacking the website that gives you the desired hash.\n\n > Surely I could get a couple hundred people to download it. Yet this isn't \"a thing\". Why?\n\nA few hundred people is optimistic, most every Linux distro gets free mirroring from many competent and trusted organizations, and those that do use torrenting have the official torrent on their website. Who would trust some unknown torrent on thepiratebay or whatever when I can just download from the computer science club of Waterloo or whatever, or get a torrent off of the distro website directly?\n\nEven if you did do this it'd be much more readily recognized than if someone did it with Windows. Since it's all FOSS software knowing the ins and outs is fairly easy and all, and if I really suspect an issue I could just recompile from source I know to be clean and replace the suspect piece of binary. \n\nOn Windows it's harder to notice because the really deep mechanics are generally only understood by the people MS hires and people who do things like publish infected versions of Windows. \n\n"
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3uloye | why does confirmation for an order take no time at all, but processing it can take up to 5 days? | Just ordered something from a site and it sent me a confirmation, and it says it will take 1-5 days to process; my money was already taken so does that mean the order processed or what is happening here? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uloye/eli5_why_does_confirmation_for_an_order_take_no/ | {
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"Confirmation just requires checking an inventory computer to reserve an item for you. Processing requires the partner company that actually operates the warehouse to retrieve the item, pack it, and ship it -- or sometimes they are still waiting for the truck to arrive with the item, but they don't want to bother you with those details."
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5ujvhb | in most european countries, family culture is a massive factor in life, why is it so different in the us? why do people avoid it and hate it so much? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ujvhb/eli5in_most_european_countries_family_culture_is/ | {
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"I don't really think it's all that different in the US. You're talking about a huge landmass with a diverse range of cultures. There are large families here who are, and stay, interconnected, and there are other families who want nothing to do with each other. ",
"I think you're over exaggerating a bit. The one major difference is multi generational households aren't very common like they are in some parts of the world, but it's not like Americans are walking around in mass trying to avoid their families all the time. There's a reason the day before Thanksgiving is the biggest travel day of the year, and not one of the summer holiday weekends; people are traveling to see their families.",
"I think op is asking why do a large amount of American (white/black) families kick their kids out at age 18. Or once the kid turns 18 s/he peaces the f out.",
"Individualism in America is considered a virtue and a trait indicative of success and leadership. It's like a baby bird leaving the nest and flying on its own and catching its own food. Many Americans are like this, but there are also groups that remain very family centric."
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71d5tw | how do nuclear weapons inspectors verify that no weapons are being built? | I understand that radiation detectors can be very sensitive to specific types of radiation signatures, but an entire country is a huge place to hide things in. How do inspectors do their job? What is their track record? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71d5tw/eli5_how_do_nuclear_weapons_inspectors_verify/ | {
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"Nuclear production requires a lot of space, very expensive specialized equipment, tons of electricity, etc. But yes, it is possible to hide stuff in a whole country.",
"OK. So here's the thing about nuclear weapons. Building one, once you have the materials, is actually kind of simple. Getting the materials is difficult but not impossible, the real trick is refining the raw materials required. Building a nuke is a large industrial project, not a knowledge project.\n\nIt takes industrial plants of significant size to refine the required materials. It's like hiding a large oil refinery, not very easy. The inspectors go into industrial areas and ensure that the large plants that they can see from a satellite are actually normal industrial plants. \n\nEntire countries are large places to hide things, but a plant making fissionable material is very large and would have a lot of activity (deliveries of material and so on). It would take a long time to build it, and a long time to get it running efficiently enough to make proper material for a weapon. It's actually not that easy to just hide one.\n\nSo what countries are known to do is hide the plant inside another plant. So they have some factory, making dry-cleaning chemicals, and inside that plant is a second weapons facility disguised as the dry-cleaning plant. That's what the inspectors are looking for. The issue of \"how do we know there's not some other facility somewhere\" is handled by satellite and human intelligence. ",
"Building a nuclear weapons requires specific types of material in specific quantities. To get these materials requires enormous effort, because they are either very rare and very difficult to refine; or they require a nuclear reactor to produce.\n\nYou can make a nuclear weapon from uranium. But you need at least 1 ton of uranium metal - which is difficult to get hold of, because it is rare and expensive, and restricted from trade by many countries. This means you need a mine, which tend to have a lot of traffic and a lot of activity, and are easy to spot on satellite photos. \n\n Not only that, you need to enrich the uranium to make it weapons grade. This requires a ridiculous amount of effort - lots of highly specialised equipment, requiring a ridiculous amount of energy. This type of plant is very difficult to hide, because they require lots of power lines going in, and the special machinery requires lots of very rare and niche parts or parts made from special, rare materials.\n\nFor example, uranium enrichment needs thousands of centrifuges operating at 50,000-100,000 rpm; so you need special high speed motors, and special electronic high-speed motor controllers. There are only a few manufacturers making this type of motor controller or motor. So, inspectors can just go to these manufacturers and ask to see who is buying these motors and look for any suspicious orders - this type of ultra-high speed motor is rarely needed, and when they are needed for an industrial plant, the plant usually only needs a few. A uranium enrichment plant needs many thousands, so it's really easy to spot suspect orders (anyone buying 10 or more at a time). You then just need to see where they were shipped to, and see what is going on (and even if a fake address or middle man was used, it still gives you somewhere to start looking).\n\nSimilarly, you could look for things like power lines. Enrichment plants need tons of electricity - the UK has one in a village in Northwest England. From the outside, it looks just like a warehouse - except it has 6 high-voltage power lines bringing in enough power to run a city. So, inspectors can look for things like industrial facilities using too much energy, or producing too much heat for what they would expect.\n\nSome countries may admit to having uranium enrichment capability, and allow inspectors in. So, the job of the inspectors is to make sure that the uranium enrichment is being used for power production, not weapons. In this case, the inspectors will examine the enrichment facility, and check how it is set up. They will then put security seals on everything that would need to be adjusted to switch to weapons mode. They'll take samples and inventory of the raw materials, and the processed materials, to make sure they are what they say they are. Then they'll come back 6 months later, and check that all the seals are still in place and haven't been removed, and analyse what has gone in and out, and check that this all fits with their analysis of what the plant can produce and the official plant records. For example, if a plant can enrich 10 tons of uranium a month, producing 1 ton a month of reactor fuel, and 9 tons of waste - then inspectors could come back in 6 months, and check that 60 tons of stockpile has gone down, 6 tons of reactor fuel is accounted for and 54 tons of new waste has been produced. If they find that instead, only 3 tons of reactor fuel have been produced and there are 56.5 tons of waste, and 500 kg unaccounted for, then they know that something suspicious has been going on.\n\nAnother way to produce weapons material is to obtain plutonium from a working reactor. Plutonium is produced as a by-product of \"burning\" uranium for energy. However, special types of reactor are really helpful for this. Most power reactors in the world are not very suitable for weapons plutonium (they use water coolant), but some different designs are much more suitable - but they require special materials (for example, heavy water). Heavy water requires a ton of energy, so a heavy water plant will be really obvious due to its power lines. \n\nIf a country has a reactor (either power or research), then inspectors will come in an ask to inspect the fuel stocks, the used fuel storage, and check all the inventories tally up with no fuel rods unaccounted for, and the correct amount of fuel used for the electricity produced or the scientific experiments run. A running reactor also produces a ton of heat, so inspectors could do drive-bys for steam rising from the cooling towers, or use satellite thermal images for river/sea water heat plumes if the reactor uses water cooling, and check that the reactor's on-off pattern matches what they expect.\n"
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3cnmxb | the uk's new budget | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cnmxb/eli5_the_uks_new_budget/ | {
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"Basically, an increase in wages/decrease in tax and a decrease in benefits/tax credits. So just more redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. Not very surprising stuff.",
"Lower corporate tax which means companies should be able to afford the new higher minimum wage. Individuals won't be able to claim residency in a tax haven then live over here, after \tx amount of time they will be liable for tax. A cap on benefits trying to bring an end to the welfare state. Essentially, they want to stop the problem whereby you get someone churning out kids or large immigrant families where it is more profitable than working. The problem at the moment is that your benefits rise in line with size of family as opposed to a working family whose wages stay the same regardless of family size and they want to make it fairer. No rise on fuel duty and an inheritance tax increase. "
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1sj1t4 | the four examples kant gives of the categorical imperative. | Can someone please explain how these relate to the CI and universal law?
- The suicide example: I will shorten my life when its future brings more pain than good.
- Borrowing case: I shall borrow with a promise even if I cannot fulfill it.
- Helping others: I shall interfere with no other man even if he is in need.
- Talents: I will not develop my gifts or talents when in comfortable circumstances.
I did a search and found some clarification on the CI, but I still cannot fully relate these to the examples Kant gives. And also, please no Kant puns! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sj1t4/eli5the_four_examples_kant_gives_of_the/ | {
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"I'll try to help, but it's been a while since my Kant class and I was by no means an expert, but with Kant, who really is?\n\nSo first the categorical imperative can be summed up to say \"act in such a way that your actions would became a maxim for the world.\" Basically, act how you would want others to act, also like \"treat others how you would like to be treated.\"\n\n* The suicide example: someone wants to commit suicide since he thinks continuing to live would only bring more pain. Kant's issue is that that person is treating himself as a means to an end and not as an end in itself. \n* A person burrows form someone with no intention of fulfilling the promise. Taking the categorical imperative, let's assume everyone burrows from someone else with no intention of fulfilling that promise, so sooner or later, nobody trusts anyone, since no fulfills their promise. A person who burrows and never returns, needs the people he steals from to believe that he would fulfill the promise, so there must be others who do fulfill their promise. So in a world where people burrow and never live up the promise, create a world where people no longer loan out, or lend, or whatever.\n* Helping others: Here Kant gives an example of a man of at least some wealth and wonders if he should help a man in poverty or in need of help. This man says it is okay that he doesn't help those in need since he is not harming them. Kant argues that this man will need others one day, either in terms of sympathy or love from others, so by not doing the same for others, you prevent the same from happening to you. Therefore you should others so others can help you later.\n* Talents: Here some guy does not wish to further his talents because he is comfortable in life, so he chooses a life of laziness. Kant retorts that if everyone do not peruse their talents, there would be no luxuries to enjoy. ex: a chair maker makes enough money from making and selling plain wooden chairs. He could make improve his skills and make luxurious beautifully carved chairs and make more money, but falls into a life of laziness with his plain chair making skills. From that example, people won't have luxuries to enjoy, so you should improve your skills, and others will too. Kant also call it a duty to oneself to improve your own talents.\n\nI hope that helped, since Kant is not easy to understand. I am not too sure if what I said on suicide and helping others is correct, but is the best that I can remember. In short I would summarized the CI as \"act in such a way that you would want everyone, and I mean *everyone* to to act.\"\n",
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. \nLet's take your borrow with a promise example. If everyone borrowed with no promise to return. This would not be moral because you are using the lender as a mere means to an end. Therefore it does not follow the categorical imperative."
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f0ags8 | why are drones and helicopters shaped so differently? | Why are drones and helicopters shaped so differently? Is there a reason why drones have four or more horizontally placed propellors and helicopters one big one small one which a positioned perpendicular to eachother? Wouldn't it be more logical for the 'perfect' design for a flying, hovering machine to look more alike? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f0ags8/eli5_why_are_drones_and_helicopters_shaped_so/ | {
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"Stability and economics.\n\nFor a helicopter, a single large engine is cheaper, more efficient and leaves more room for passengers / cargo. Because having this big heavy thing at the top causes the part below to want to spin in the opposite direction, the smaller blades at the back to fight against that rotation and stop it spinning out of control.\n\nDrones, being electric, can have multiple motors and rotors from one battery withless space / weight cost. Many drones also have built-in software that does some of the flying for the operator, making it easier to fly.\n\nYou can get drone size helicopters (and smaller, I've seen down to matchbox size), just for some reason drones became super popular. Possibly because they look cooler.",
"Both need rotating blades but some kind of counter-rotation to keep the body from spinning opposite the blade direction. Both also need some mechanism for heading in a specific direction. They achieve both of these 2 different ways. \n\nDrones optimized for volume manufacturability. It’s really easy to make the same simple motor + fixed rotor assembly 4 times. They choose direction by varying how much power is sent to each of the 4 rotors. The only moving parts are the motors directly driving the blades. \n\nHelicopters optimized for flight efficiency. Helicopter blades rotate, but they’re also mounted on a highly complex gimbal and usually have independent pitch to each blade. The direction the rotor assembly faces can pivot to spend energy driving the helicopter forward. Then a separate tail system fights counter rotation. This is super mechanically complex but much more fuel efficient for improved range.",
"The ideal designs look alike if they serve the same purpose. In this case they do not. \n\nHelicopters are designed to carry people, which means they need to lift high loads to air and in some cases take these high loads to distances with high speed. You need to apply force to the air to push air down and the vehicle up. For that reason you need the blades as long as possible as only some portion of the blades are actually effectively pushing the air down (for causes like tip vortices). But there is a limit to that as the blades should not break with the forces they apply. When designing the propeller of a helicopter, you end up with a single long (or two depending on how you look at it) blade turning in one direction. As the propeller turns in one direction, and as the helicopter is not attached to anything after take off, the body will try to turn in the opposite direction. So as to overcome this, you need another propeller to oppose this turning. You put it at the end of the tail, so the distance to the center of rotation is large, so you do not need to apply too much force, hence this propeller is smaller. This is good as you need the vertical propeller only for stability and maneuverability, and you do not need to pay money and increase the weight of the total vehicle too much.\n\nDrones are designed for maneuverability. Their payloads are smaller, so the concern is not applying much force but being able to change direction and alignment very fast. First you put electric motors where you can change the force output very fast, then you attach four to six motors (and propellers) with some distance to each other, so you can easily balance the forces in any way you like. As you do not care about carrying high payloads you are not limited to how efficiently you apply forces to the air, so shorter propellers do. And as your propellers are symmetrical and hence balanced, you do not need a vertical propeller to balance the force trying to rotate the vehicle. As you do not need to attain high speeds with respect to the air you do not care about the fact that your body is not very streamlined and your area facing to the direction you are flying is very high during a flight in a straight line.",
"Economies of scale, pitch control, and safety.\n\nHelicopter blades don't just spin around the rotor, they also roll lengthwise, i.e [pitch control.](_URL_0_). This adds a lot of maneuverability to the aircraft, but it's complicated and expensive. When the motor is already complicated and expensive it's worth the investment of pitch controls to get more out of a single engine. \n\nDrones use very simple fixed blades on relatively cheap and simple motors, and they can get the maneuverability they need by using multiple motors, they can also scale up in size by just adding more motors. \n\nBut helicopters with their fancy pitched blades can do something drones can't, they can be controlled and safely landed even when the motor dies, thanks to some aerodynamic properties that need their own ELI5. When a drone loses power it falls out of the sky at terminal velocity. When a helicopter fails it can be glided slowly down just like a plane. This is a make or break feature when you have living cargo."
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5bvzwl | why do some stores have a monitor at the entrance showing the live cctv feed? | I've always wondered about this, and haven't been able to think of a plausible explanation. Does anybody know? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bvzwl/eli5_why_do_some_stores_have_a_monitor_at_the/ | {
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"\"We're watching you.\"\n\nIt's less tempting to steal from a store that you *know* is watching you, than one where they *may* be watching you. Steal, or just be a general nuisance really.",
"Studies have shown that people act differently when they believe or know that they're being watched.\n\nI read an essay once about speeding. They posted a speed limit and monitored the traffic. Then they put a sign with large mean looking eyes next the the speed limit sign. \n\nOccurrences of speeding went down.",
"As Jane Goodall observed while studying gorillas, an organism will behave differently when it is aware that it is being observed. \n\nHere is a link to Scientific American Journal Article that explains what someone else posted about the sign with eyes.\n_URL_0_"
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5ubm9a | how do theives get rid of stolen goods? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ubm9a/eli5_how_do_theives_get_rid_of_stolen_goods/ | {
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"Thieves often 'steal to order' this means that people will give them lists of things they want and the thief will go and get it. This can go for petty thieves stealing anything from cuts of meat, to organised gangs stealing luxury cars. \n\nOften thieves will try to sell their stolen goods to people they know, often from their own community with similar moral standards, or people who are poor and just can't afford to buy these things legitimately, common stolen items are; meat, razorblades, clothes and toys. \n\nOrganised gangs often have plans before they have stolen the item and are experienced in getting rid of stolen goods by the time they are committing these kinds of crimes. Cars are stolen daily and shipped to other countries, often with their identification numbers tampered with. \n\nSome items could be deemed as too 'hot' to sell, so a thief may keep it to sell at a later date or in another location. \n\nI'm sure many stolen goods are sold on the Internet to customers who believe they are buying a perfectly legitimate product. \n\n\n\n",
"cash- it's gone.\njewelry- if you have photos or it's engraved, a police report needs to be made with said info. Otherwise, unlikely to be recovered. Sorry this happened to you OP. "
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4k5ave | why do you mix some ingredients separately first, instead of all together when baking? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4k5ave/eli5_why_do_you_mix_some_ingredients_separately/ | {
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"It's easier to fully mix the dry ingredients together before you add the wet ingredients, and it's easier to mix the wet ingredients before you add the dry ingredients. Once you mix then together you get a sticky mess so it's much tougher to get everything uniformly distributed. Instead you tend to get all the salt in one place, the eggs swirled in and the milk on the bottom.\n",
"It's to make sure everything gets distributed evenly. For example, you should add vanilla to a liquid ingredient not a dry ingredient. Then, you have the mixture of like eggs, melted butter, and vanilla etc. which creates the right flavor, adding in the dry ingredients just firms it up. If you add vanilla to flour, the taste will be off.",
"Also, for many cakes/pastries, you want to avoid mixing the batter/dough too long with the flour in it. The mixing(kneading) process increases gluten development (good for bread, bad for cakes). More gluten development leads to a tougher, chewier product, instead of the delicate crumb of a cake or muffin or brownie where the flour was folded in.",
"America's Test Kitchen does a good job of outlining why somethings are done. I got their gluten free cookbook and there are a decent number of scientific reasons behind the somewhat arbitrary looking instructions, like chilling before baking and stuff like that.\n\nTo best answer your question, I would say, that if it isn't purely just to aid in the mixing process, it can be beneficial or otherwise necessary to allow some ingredients to bind/react before being introduced to others. Those other ingredients may prevent or lessen the reaction that the recipe aims for",
"Usually you keep wet and dry ingredients separately because they will begin to chemically react once they come in contact with each other.\n\nMore specifically, baking soda and baking powder will start to convert to CO2, and the gluten in the flour will start to form once liquid is added to them.\n\nThey are also mixed separately because the amount of mixing that would be necessary to evenly distribute some of the smaller amounts of ingredients would cause over-mixing (mixing helps gluten form)\n\nBasically, you don't want the CO2 to form too soon because it will be lost and wasted, and you don't want too much gluten because it will mess with the texture of the finished product.",
"Sometimes you need certain ingredients to interact with each other before mixing everything together. ex. when you don't use milk you can mix the egg white to create a foam/whipped egg white and then add it to the mix with the rest of ingredients including the yolk. ",
"Lots of reasons.\n\nWet ingredients mix together better with other wet ingredients. Same goes for dry. Also, once you hydrate flour, the more you mix it the tougher the finished result, so mixing dry with dry and wet with wet and then mixing the dry with the wet only until just combined, you minimize toughness. \n\nOn top of that, if you want something with lots of air, you might strategize the order you mix things. If you just put a bunch of shit together and mix it you will get a lot less air than if, say, you separate the egg whites, whip those alone, and then fold that into everything else. Creaming butter and sugar has similar results, the sharp sugar crystals help get air into the butter before you dissolve the sugar into other things. \n\nAlso if you are adding chunks you usually do that last because they get in the way of mixing and they might settle to the edges or clump together if you mix them aggressively, or if they are fragile like fruit they might break apart. Waiting to the end lets you gently fold them in and distribute them nicely. \n\nAnother issue is fats and water. Oil and water don't like to mix, but egg yolks contain lecithin, which helps them mix, so its common to beat together fat and eggs before trying to combine them with other things.\n\nTemperatures sometimes matter too. Softening butter is different from melting butter because melting butter causes the water in it to separate from the fat. If you add ice cold milk to melted butter it can clump up. If you chill a dough with butter in it before baking it will take more time in the oven before the butter melts, which can affect the end result. Choux pastry is partially cooked in a pan before being cooled and piped into a shape because heating and then cooling it causes the flour to gel, which changes the texture.\n\nIf you branch away from strict baking, you'll encounter things like tempering eggs, where you add beaten eggs to a hot liquid. If you just dump them in and mix the eggs will scramble, but if you beat the eggs fast while slowly adding the hot liquid, you can mix the hot liquid evenly before the eggs have time to cook in the heat, and once they are brought up in temperature and increased in volume you can then mix everything together.\n\nEdit: Thanks for the gold!\n\nSince lots of people are asking: I don't know of great book for learning this sort of thing, I wish I did so I could recommend one. The largest single source for me was Alton Brown's tv series Good Eats. He talks at length about these things and keeps it entertaining, so its easy to watch for hours and you pick up a lot. Other than that I picked up a few things here and there so I don't have very specific recommendations. Some people have mentioned books in comments to this one, I haven't read them so I don't know if they are good, but you could look there if you want.",
"[Because cooking is a science, not an art](_URL_1_)\n\n [Modernist Cuisine](_URL_0_)",
"Some ingredients need to be \"activated\" and get a little headstart.\n\nLeveners like yeast, baking powder, baking soda etc are triggered by other ingredients and inhibited by others.\n\nFor example, yeast eats sugar and shits CO2. Salt kills it. That's why in most recipes sugar, water, yeast is added up front to get started.\n",
"It's a lot easier to get the ingredients to combine together properly if you do this, avoiding lumps.\n\nHowever, after doing quite a bit of baking, I have found that you can certainly be...somewhat lazy, but that requires a [heavy duty mixer like this one.](_URL_0_)\n\nI usually mix all the dry ingredients together in the mixer bowl, then add all of the wet ingredients on top of the dry ingredients and mix everything together.\n\nIt's technically *better* to mix the wet ingredients together separately, but *better* in my kitchen usually loses to convenient, as I hate having two bowls to clean.\n\nEdit: A typo",
"Flour and oil first = flaky bread (think of... KFC's biscuits)\n\nFlour and milk/water first = normal \"sponge\" bread.",
"Some ingredients just don’t mix well together. If you add 1 tsp of vanilla extract to 2 cups of flour, you’ll get a 1/4 cup of sticky vanilla sludge in the middle of 1 3/4 cups flour. So most recipes will have you mix dry ingredients with dry, watery ingredients with watery, oily with oily.\n\nWhen a recipe tells you to mix butter and sugar -- sometimes it’ll tell you to cream them together -- it’s because the sugar crystals are sharp, and when you mix them into cool butter they incorporate tiny bubbles of air. That’s why some recipes will tell you to do it for 4 or 5 minutes, or until the butter turns pale in color. It softens the butter, without warming it, so it will mix better with dry ingredients. If you were to soften the butter by melting it, you’d break it down into its components, which are butterfat and water, and you’d have a devil of a time incorporating them back together.\n\nBut there’s still more to it. Eggs are often beaten separately just so that they mix into beaten eggs, not clumps of beaten yolks and strings of whites. And eggs can be affected if you mix things into them. If you mix salt directly into eggs, the salt causes some of the proteins in the eggs to break down, which will change the way the eggs cook. Sometimes you want that, sometimes you don’t. Jacque Pepin says you should salt your eggs before making an omelet; Gordon Ramsay says you shouldn’t. Some people salt the eggs 15 minutes before cooking, some right before cooking, some not until after cooking. It’s a matter of taste, but it definitely makes a difference.\n\nSugar, too, messes with eggs. If you mix egg yolks with sugar, the sugar will make the yolks coagulate, as if they were being cooked with heat.\n\nThen there are base-acid chemical reactions. Remember mixing vinegar (an acid) and baking soda (a base) together? When you make chocolate chip cookies, one of the ingredients is baking soda. Another ingredient is brown sugar. Brown sugar is basically white sugar and molasses, and molasses is acidic. Once everything is mixed up, the baking soda reacts with the acid from the brown sugar, and creates tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide, which gives the cookies some lift. That’s a chemical reaction that runs out eventually, and so any recipe that requires that sort of reaction will be careful not to let it happen too quickly. If you were making buttermilk pancakes, and started by mixing everything together, the baking soda would start reacting with the acidic buttermilk before everything else was mixed together. And then as you mixed it, it would be deflating.\n\nBaking powder is commonly used. It contains baking soda, and a powdered acid. That way you can use it in recipes that don’t have any or enough acid. If you wanted to make chocolate chip cookies with all white sugar, and no brown sugar, you’d want to use baking powder. Most basic cakes using baking powder. But as soon as it gets wet it starts reacting, so timing is important.\n\nIt can be very difficult to mix watery ingredients and oily ingredients. When they really are mixed together it’s an emulsification. Butter is an emulsification; Mayonnaise is another. Mayonnaise is basically oil, lemon juice, and egg yolk. Getting the oil to mix with the lemon juice is almost impossible, but egg yolk is an emulsifier -- it has proteins that are basically oily on one end and watery on the other. So you start by mixing the egg yolk with the lemon juice in a blender. Then you slowly add the oil into the whirring blender. If you just dumped in the oil too it wouldn’t work. You have to drizzle it into the blender slowly. It’s easy to screw up homemade mayonnaise.\n\nAcids will make milk curdle, so if you’re making lemon custard or lemon ice cream, you can’t just add lemon juice to milk. You’ll mix lemon juice with egg yolk, and only after it’s well mixed will you add the milk. And you’ll need to keep whisking it until it’s all evenly mixed.",
"Generally speaking, the reason you don't mix the wet and dry ingredients until last is so that you _mix it less_ once the acid/base chemical reaction starts, that produces CO2. Just like making a \"volcano\" with baking soda and vinegar, milk is the acid and baking soda is the base. This is why buttermilk pancakes are fluffier, buttermilk is more acidic then regular milk. \n\nIf you stir too much (this is why directions sometimes say \"stir just until dry ingredients are wet\") you'll knock the bubbles (ELI5) out of the mixture. *Anything* with baking soda in it you will want to mix dry and wet separately then *combine* the two as the last step.",
"For example baking powder turns into nasty acidic lumps unless you mix them well with flours before you add water.",
"Ingredients mix differently in different orders. Sometimes painting needs purple on top of green, which is very different than throwing red, blue, and yellow together. ",
"Because of chemistry. You dont want to add sugar or other ingredients to unbeaten egg white because you need to change the egg white chemical structure first by introducing air by beating it. The process is supposed to alter the chemical structure step by step.",
"in baking, we got step by step, because we are applying chemistry in making food, each ingredients got different properties, so how we mix each other with what ingredients do effect the final product of our baking process.",
"How you add things and when is very important in cooking anything. It's seems really uncomplicated, but in reality it is a bunch of chemical changes when you cook it. Fully integrating dry ingredients tends to more evenly distribute the product as well. Especially in breads because when adding the dry ingredients to wet, it can be easy for uneven pockets to form, and near impossible to fix",
"It's chemistry and there are chemical reactions happening.\n\nThe gist of it is, if you mix in the wrong ingredients at the wrong time, they may react together in such a way that, when you then go back to put the rest of the ingredients in, the reaction you were supposed to have, doesn't happen anymore.\n\nOne example I have is that I once started making something (can't remember what it was, but it involved eggs, milk and flour) and I mixed the flour and milk together only to realize I didn't have any eggs. Well it was too late to separate the milk and the flour obviously, so I went out and got some eggs. By the time I came back, the mixture was already pretty far gone. I mixed the eggs in anyways and it came out... edible. but it was far from a success and I learned a lesson.",
"I used to be careful about separate mixing but I have found out that putting it altogether works the same in most cases. ",
"The meal is more than the sum of all ingredients.\n\nThe taste of some ingredients will change if you mix them with everything else and just bake the fuck out of it. \n\nYou can try this at home: Put a steak, beans, potatoes and some spices into the blender, blend thouroughly, pour the result into a pan and fry it. That \"pancake\" would be edible, but not the same thing as a nicely medium-rare grilled steak with baked potatoes and cooked beans.",
"Some ingedients flat out destroy each other. I once had to bake a cake. The recipe stated \"mix baking powder and flour with water\". Obviously I mixed water and baking powder first.\n\nWhat I got was a really nice chained decomposition reaction in the form of\n\n > H₂O + NaHCO₃ - > NaOH + H₂CO₃\n > H₂CO₃ - > H₂O + CO₂\n\nAnd thus the baking powder was lost.",
"One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet - if you add salt to yeast then it kills the yeast and your bread won't rise. Mixing the yeast with the other dry ingredients then mixing in the salt minimizes the salt's direct contact with the yeast and allows for a better rise and a fluffier bread.",
"My job in the kitchen in solely mixing whatever the missus tells me to mix. From my well qualified perspective, it's much easier to evenly mix a dry pot of flour and baking soda than breaking my arm on a sticky clump of hells concrete. \n\nAlso warm water activates yeast. ",
"Simply because of chemistry. You dont wish to add sugar or other ingredients to unbeaten egg white for the reason that you'll need to modify the egg white chemical structure initial by introducing air by beating it. The procedure is supposed to alter the chemical structure step by step.",
"Because the order of chemical reactions that occur between different ingredients needs to be controlled",
"Also, the minute you get baking powder or baking soda wet, you activate it. It matters as to how long the chemical reaction goes on. You may end up with too much or too little leavening if done differently. It can also save your recipe when you learn you're out of eggs...you haven't activated the dry ingredients yet, so you have time to go to the store. ",
"Mixing eggwater+flour gives you something slightly different than flourwater+egg, or eggflour+water.\n\nThe same way a Manbear+pig is slightly different than a Man+bearpig or Man+bear+pig",
"Depending on what your making like bread for instance if u add the yeast and the salt together the Salt with break down the yeast and the bread won't rise it's all chemistry haha",
"On food and cooking: the science lore of the kitchen by Harold Mcgee is the bible of cooking in my opinion. Check it out if you are interested in more answers to similar technical questions.",
"I believe it also changes the chemical compound of them when you mix them together first. \n\nI saw a cool documentary on how life began. For years scientists could not put the pieces together how a particular element got there. As it turns out, they needed to mix two elements together FIRST, then that combined element mixed in with the rest. \n\nSo really, we're all just cake.",
"Just chemical reactions. Sometimes you need yeast to neutralize before mixing into other stuff, other times you want it to react with glucose to rise, etc",
"Do you want lumpy cheesecake? Because that's how you get a lumpy cheesecake.",
"For being simple; baking is a lot of chemistry.\n\nIngredients like baking powder (gets bubbly when you add liquid to it) is best activated shortly before putting the food in the oven. If you added liquids too soon, your food would poof up, but then it'd also sink back down & be flat like a soda.\n"
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9v6n3n | how does samsung's fast charger wall adapter charge so much faster compared to a regular wall adapter? | EDIT: I did not mean to come off like an advertisement, I just happen to have a Samsung. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9v6n3n/eli5_how_does_samsungs_fast_charger_wall_adapter/ | {
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"The phone and charger talk to each other and negotiate a voltage and current to be allowed to the device. If Samsung is producing high-quality batteries that can take more charge power, it can negotiate a higher amount of power to be fed in. Each company has their own choice on what USB charging level they aim for, Samsung is probably aiming for a higher one."
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2ctfrf | how can online games tell if i'm using a cracked version? | If I download and crack an online game, how is it possible for the game (or should I say, the company?) to know that it's cracked when I want to go online? Even if it's not servers that the company holds, but personal servers instead (for example minecraft). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ctfrf/eli5_how_can_online_games_tell_if_im_using_a/ | {
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"The exact answer varies from game to game. Some games don't have checks like this at all. Some have secret algorithms to avoid crackers finding out.\n\nOne simple method would be the following: \nA program is essentially made up of a bunch of numbers. \nSay we take all the values of every byte in the program (0-255) and add them together. (Note that changing the program due to a crack would affect this sum.) \nThen we take the last five digits of this total. This is our \"checksum\". \nNow we send a signal to the game company, saying \"The checksum is X, right?\" \nIf the response is \"yes\", the game responds normally, because you apparently have a legit copy. \nIf the response is \"no\", or you don't get a response, some anti-crack provision can take effect.\n\nNote this is FAR from a perfect solution. If a hacker knew the correct checksum, he could just supply that number every time without calculating it. Hence the company tries to make the process more complicated, but not so complicated that it would affect performance.",
"The basic technique for detecting changes to a game or a program revolves around something called a checksum. Let's say you want to check if a given area of memory (say, the region containing the program code) has been altered in some way. You perform a mathematical operation which combines every byte in that region into some final value. A simple example might be adding them all up. You then compare the computed checksum with the value that you expect if nothing's changed. If they don't match, you know that something's different.\n\nSome checksum algorithms are stronger than others, usually at the cost of speed. For example, simply adding up all of the bytes won't tell you if the *order* has changed. Also, it's not too difficult for an attacker to place dummy bytes into the region which cause the checksum to be correct even though some of the other bytes have changed. This is obviously a simplified example, but if you have the sequence [1, 2, 3, 4], with a checksum of 10, and you want to change the first 1 to a 3, you can change the last 4 to a 2 and the checksum will still be 10, assuming you don't care too much about the last value. So we use slightly more complex checksum algorithms which are better at detecting various changes, though the concept is the same.\n\nSome attackers get around the checksum using something called a patch, execute, unpatch attack. It works by altering the desired part of the program (e.g. the part which checks for a valid license) just before it executes, allows it to execute, then changes it back to the way it was before soon after. That way, any checksums which run after the license check has completed won't notice that anything's been altered. We attempt to foil this by reducing the points around sensitive code which an attacker can hook into in order to make changes, and by performing checksums inside sensitive code which sort of self-check.\n\nThere are many other types of attacks, each with their own set of counter-defences. It's a constant arms race, and the techniques for both attacking and defeating this kind of protection get very complex and involved.\n\n---\n\nOther types of attacks don't require modifying the actual binary. Suppose the program contacts a license server; one possible attack might be to create a fake license server and have the network redirect traffic from the game to the fake server. Another technique might be to hook into system calls to the OS that the program makes and fake them. For example, suppose a particular check attempts to ensure that a cheat program isn't running in the background. It would be trivial to defeat this by hooking the system calls that the program makes to retrieve the process list, and simply remove the entry for the cheat program from the results. Defending against these kinds of things requires specific techniques designed for each circumstance."
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8xulfg | how were the prices of recreational drugs, such as marijuana, created? the prices seem arbitrary, why does everyone tend to agree on average what the price is? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xulfg/eli5_how_were_the_prices_of_recreational_drugs/ | {
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"It's not like they were created and never changed... All materials come from a source. There is a cost to harnessing that source. Standard markups for logistics. Competition keeps prices for similar products in check. After that it's literally all supply and demand. Nothing different than why does a gallon of milk cost $3.50?",
"I would say it is set by the same simple rules of supply and demand. I my current case CA, Los angels is covered in weed shops so I won't pay more than 5/gram for marijuana. However in college on Ohio I would pay 60-80 for 3.5 grams because I had no choice because there was no competition. \n\nEdit: while it stated below, this Ohio reference is from 20 years ago. I was simply using as a reference point for supply and demand. ",
"Because markets, without interference, tend to stabilize as customers and providers fond a good point. \n\nIf you are ten bucks more, you won't get my business. It's mostly arbitrary with the baseline of at least covering costs. The profit is arbitrary based upon what people are willing to pay.",
"Supply and demand, plus basic costs of production and overhead. \n\nLike any other product, there is the cost to make it (farmland or grow room cost, fertilizer and other inputs, labor of people to tend to it and harvest it), the cost to ship it (transport and distribution), and then the cost of the store (rent, labor, overhead - for places where it is legal to sell like in Colorado or Washington State). \n\nSo then you have a bare-bones floor price; the product has to sell for that much to even break even. But you want profit. Mark it up too much, and there's more than one seller. People will just go elsewhere except for the truly desperate who don't know anyone else, and if you price it too high, they will buy from you once and then make sure to find another supplier. Everyone generally has the same costs to get the product to market, and so hte competition out there helps keep the price from getting too high.",
"The prices for OTC weed in places like Colorado is a direct reflection of what street prices were before legal. Street prices are like any other market. There's other options and people will pay just so much for marijuana depending on how good it appears to be and rarity. It's really no different than buying fruit. The going rate for high grade marijuana has been steady for decades because ~$100 1/4 is what your average college aged kid can afford. Dirt weed will vary drastically because then you have to figure in distance from source(usually Mexico) and increased risk to reward for trafficking it. If you live close to the border you get dirt for dollars for the handful.",
"I've always wondered this in relation to buying a \"cup\" at a college kegger. It was always $5 a cup. I've graduated 6 years ago but wonder if this holds true and for how long. ",
"It costs as much as people are willing to pay. Some areas might be more or less depending on local competition. ",
" > Why does everyone tend to agree on average what the price is?\n\nGuess what, you just discovered why supply and demand work!\n\nSimply put, price is set by supply and demand, price is an equilibrium state.\n\nDemand can be classified as the price a consumer is willing to pay, they always prefer a lower price and will try to go to that lower price however, but if the price is too high, no sale.\n\nSupply in these cases is best denoted by multiple vendors selling the same thing, each setting a price. They want to ideally sell at as high a price as possible but would rather have a sale rather than no sale, to a certain price, below which it doesn’t make sense for him to sell, as he reaps no profit.\n\nPrice is simply a compromise between these two forces. Supply and demand set the price at what is the most agreeable between vendors and customers.",
"Isn't this a classic question of the invisible hand of the marketplace. You have X number of users, you have X fixed production and delivery costs, you have X supply available at one time. Maybe include the elasticity of demand for the product. Some harder drugs may be less elastic then softer drugs. Take those factors, this controls why any illegal drug costs X to the end user of that product.",
"It doesn’t take rocket appliances, bud. Supply and command. That’s just the way of the road.",
"Weed also has elasticity, which means that customers are more tolerable of price increases. You'd likely be willing to pay a few bucks more than you did last week to get your weed. The gov't of California is counting on this as they tax the shit out of weed!",
"It's worth mentioning that not all drug prices are the same everywhere, even in the same region. \n\nI lived in a small town 150km from the nearest city, pot was $25 an eighth. When I moved to the city it was suddenly 40. \n\nThe same is true for other drugs like coke and MDMA, some dealers in the same city will sell for less then others, some will offer deals based on quantity, some will offer to deliver for a fee. \n\nPrices aren't really agreed upon but based on the sellers overhead.",
"Prices in a free (unregulated by government) market are determined according to the rule: price is what people will pay. Bargaining establishes the “market price”, much as it’s done in an auction of stocks, etc.\n\nAdam Smith documented how capitalist economies work very well - price discovery is a true expression of individual freedom IMO.",
"Some of these drugs used to be available comercially. None of their origins or production processes are a mystery. So, you pay mostly for the transportation And risk that distributors bear for their inventory. They compete with each other. So, prices change from place to place based on demand, supply and risk. ",
"Oh hey! This is something that I can kind of answer. \n\n\nSo picture it this way: the industry is split between growers, producers, and sellers. The growers grow and harvest the weed, the producers package and transport the weed, and the sellers sell the weed (they're the stores). As I understand it, you can be one of three things:\n1. A grower\n2. A grower and a producer\n3. A Seller\n\nNote: a Seller can never be anything more than just a seller however.\n\n\nIn Washington when marijuana first became legal there were a ton of sellers that were able to get all of their stores open before a lot of the growers/producers could finish getting their product ready (grown, harvested, packaged, etc). \n\n\nSo here you have a *huuuuge* new market and they're all demanding product. However, due to the timing there was only so much product to sell. So these growers were able to set their weed prices at such a high rate that a lot of the stores had no choice but to sell the weed at like $35 a gram to start. \n\n\nNow that we're a few years in, and honestly the prices changed significantly before the first year was over, the market is now so oversaturated with producers the rates are fortunately far more reasonable. \n\n\nAs far as why process are they way they are now though, some of the weed, like a lot of products, is more expensive to grow, harvest, and package so the price is more expensive and of course the opposite is true. You also have to take the growers location into consideration. Some of them are located in bumfuck nowhere so just getting it to viable shops can cost $$$.",
"The only difference between normal commodity pricing and the price of illegal drugs is the amount of risk is taken into account. \n\nThe major risk factor that increases the prices is the cost of shipping. This is why weed can be $6/gram in Oregon and $15/gram in Chicago, the risk involved in transporting means that someone gets highly paid to take that risk and it drives the cost up dramatically. Either someone has to drive it or someone has to ship/receive it in the mail, those people often get paid an order of magnitude more than normal truck drivers and mail clerks. The other risk factors that translate to price increases include things like storage and long distribution chains (the more people that a product goes through the more it will cost). \n\nThat being said prices for drugs tend to be slower to change and often run at different rates in different communities. One example is that older people tend to pay more for drugs because over recent time the prices drop, younger people being less risk averse are willing to take on the risks in distribution for less pay. Another is that black neighborhoods prices tend to be slightly higher than nearby white neighborhoods in the same city because the risk of distribution is much higher. \n\nAt the end of the day the price is determined by how much is available on the street and how likely the people are to get caught. Those things tend to be stable in any given area unless there are changes in the political atmosphere so people arrive at what seems like a standard price everywhere. ",
"The rules of supply and demand are very much in play.\n\nExample: marijuana dropped in price per pound (approximately in half) when Colorado and other states went legal because supply went up\n\nExample: marijuana is 4-8 times more expensive in prison because it’s hard to get, ergo supply and demand",
"It’s passed down from the main supplier. Someone buys a key for 15k, then let’s say they split it and (totally unrealistic but we’ll say no one cuts the drug when it moves down the chain) then takes said drug and sells two 500 gram packs to two\nDealers for 10k each. Those two guys then might sell 250g to a lower level guy for 6 or 7k knowing they can either street sell smaller amounts to make up the rest or flip the remainder or portion there of. \nBasically whatever someone paid they need to make back completely plus extra to turn a profit, so they price it accordingly with higher margins for smaller amounts (usually) and slight discounts going up. The pricing model and dynamic nature of the demand/purchases makes it harder for lower level dealers to adequately make their money back as quickly or easily as the higher level person even though they’re taking on way more risk and don’t really factor that in to final price. Many will charge 10-20% over their break even point in order to make enough money to break even, stay competitive (not too high or low) and make a profit to put back on the next pack (minus any costs incurred). ",
"Cannabis is hard to judge the price... a lot of growers take in account the cost of growing, the genetics and the overall product and put it in the price at the end. ",
"Whenever anyone asks about prices, the answer is always the same: \n\nSupply and Demand\n\nfollowed by\n\nSomething is only worth what someone will pay for it"
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bbp7oj | why is donating money to colleges to get your kid in acceptable, but bribing them unacceptable/illegal? what's the difference? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbp7oj/eli5_why_is_donating_money_to_colleges_to_get/ | {
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"The trick in this particular case was that it wasn't a bribe directly, but that a company falsely posed as a charity, and used the money that the rich people \"donated\" to it to pay for efforts to falsify records to make the kids in question seem like much more viable candidates. (Faking records to make them seem like captains of a sport team at their high school, photoshopping team photos to add the kids in question to them.) \n\n\nThe illegal part here is that because this company posed as a charity, the rich people who donated to it got to claim that as a tax-deductible expense, and thus cheated on their taxes by knowingly donating to a false charity."
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6wqlfg | the universe expands from the point of the big bang on. is therefore a big area of "nothing" in the middle of the universe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6wqlfg/eli5the_universe_expands_from_the_point_of_the/ | {
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"The universe doesn't have a middle. The big bang was not an explosion somewhere in space. It was an expansion of *all of space*. All of the universe started expanding. It happened equally everywhere.",
"There is not a single point in the universe where the Big Bang occurred. It is not the things in the universe that is expanding but space itself. So all points in the universe were at the same place. The distance between them were zero. So the big bang happened everywhere at once, and then everywhere started to expand. All the points in the universe started moving away from each other. The distance between points are increasing. It is not we that move away from the rest of the stars and galaxies in the universe but space itself that is expanding between us. So there is no center of the universe and the big bang happened everywhere at once as everywhere were just a single location at the time of the big bang."
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u79cn | hedonism | Some links for further education would be great ^^" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/u79cn/elif_hedonism/ | {
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"As a five year old, you don't really want or need a complicated answer to \"what does good *mean*?\" A thing is good if it's the right thing to do; all that matters to you is what things are or are not good to do.\n\nBut when you get to be an adult, you start wanting to ask that question, and hedonism is one possible answer. It says that \"good\" means \"gives people pleasure\". This pleasure doesn't include abstract things like being satisfied with your life; it only includes direct pleasure, like what you get when you eat candy. So the right thing to do is always whatever gives the most pleasure to the most people.\n\nI can't really give you more links on this, because hedonism isn't a correct answer. There are *obviously* good things beyond direct physical pleasure, and there are *obviously* bad things beyond direct physical pain. If you use wider definitions for \"pleasure\" and \"pain\", you get a philosophy called *utilitarianism*; this is a perfectly reasonable position, and you should be able to Google (or search the ELI5 archives) if you want to read more about it.",
"So, the question about the 'Good' life was asked a lot in the ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome. Many people suggested things like being 'virtuous' and 'pious' as the source of goodness. \n\nOne school, though, claimed that there are no gods, and that nations and states are just as transient as ourselves, and that celestial bodies were made of the same stuff as we were. Ultimately, the existence of anything was basically meaningless, and therefore, the greatest 'good' that we could hope to achieve was pleasure. \n\nAt least some of the original hedonists were over-eating, over-sexed pleasure seekers, but they were in the minority. The most famous hedonist, arguably, is __Epicurus__. He claimed that the best food one could eat was bread and water, because if you're tired and hungry, bread and water would taste better than any fine food that you eat when you were already full.\n\nFollowing the same line of reasoning, he professed simple living, having good friends, and seeking the peace of mind, over the sensual pleasures. \n\nThis approach deeply troubled the Empire, and later the Church, because the school of Epicurus basically denied any inherent worth in the state or the church. They both chose to use the sensual-pleasure-seeker types as the archetype of 'hedonists' and attached that image to the word. \n\n"
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3p5phu | how is genetic code 'written' and 'read'? | I have read and heard genetic code spoken about as a series of letters / words that are written and read by cells but I'm struggling to understand the concept.
How are 'letters' and 'words' comparable to the functions of a cell? How are these 'letters/words' distinguished between?
P.S - I don't know the correct terminology for the organism that 'reads' or 'writes' the code, please correct me where I'm wrong!
Thanks!
Edit: Grammar | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3p5phu/eli5_how_is_genetic_code_written_and_read/ | {
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"The process is not simple as to be explainable here. It is better to research it and ask questions in r/science.\n\nDNA is a double helix. There are two matching components in a long strand. If pulled apart Two new double helixes can be produced by cell structures. They are identical to the original one.\nThis is basically the writing of the genetic code. It is copied over and over.\n\nReading happens because triplet bases, three bases that make up the nucleic acid chain signal responses. They are called codons. There are start codons to start reading, stop codons to stop reading. In between triplet bases code for specific amino acids assembled in a chain. The chain of amino acids are folded to make proteins.\n\nThere are parts of this process such as figuring out how a protein folds which you could help do using a computer at home.\n\nThe whole process is sort of complicated but it can be studied and understood.",
"You can take entire classes in college and graduate school just focusing on this question. However, to answer the question in a ELI5 spirit:\n\n(Note that I'm only focusing on how the cell turns DNA into something useful, rather than how the cell copies the DNA)\n\nDNA is a series of 4 \"letters:\" C,G,T, and A. They are wound up tightly in the cell, and they provide blueprints for EVERYTHING the cell does. \n\nFirst, the cell has to unwind the DNA to expose the area to be transcribed or replicated. Think of this like a book. You could have all the pages laid out side-by-side, but that would take up way too much space, and exposes the pages to damage. Instead, you bind it in a cover, and just open it to whichever page you want. \n\nSecond, the cell would find the area it wants to \"read,\" and it converts it to RNA. There are proteins who scan \"open DNA\" looking for the start site. Think of it as you scanning the book looking for the beginning of a paragraph. \n\nNow, there is RNA floating around. In humans, there is another mechanism to move the RNA to a different area of the cell, where it will be translated. So, the RNA is processed, and shipped to the new area. \n\nNow, there are a lot of proteins that work together to turn RNA into new proteins. Here, each 3 letters of RNA is converted to an Amino Acid. Think of it as a Lego block. There are 20 different types of Amino acids, and each protein is made up of 10s or 1000s of AAs.\n\nThen, there are mechanisms to help each protein \"fold\" correctly. \n\nIf you want me to clarify any part of that, let me know. It's a very sophisticated process, where lots of things can go wrong.\n\nTl;dr: central dogma of biology is DNA -- > RNA -- > protein"
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4dr254 | if we have to use soap to kill the bacteria on our hands, then why is just using water to clean fruit/vegetables enough? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dr254/eli5if_we_have_to_use_soap_to_kill_the_bacteria/ | {
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"The main point of rinsing is getting rid of any dirt on the vegetables. dirt are very good at keeping larger amounts of bacteria alive.",
"Hand soap does not kill bacteria (well, antibacterial soap might kill some), but rather just washes them off (along with oils and dirt from your skin). In fact, you get rid of a good bit of bacteria just by rinsing, the soap just makes it more effective.\n\nWhen you rinse veggies, you are physically removing the dirt, and maybe traces of pesticides (in the US, at least, there are rarely even trace amounts of pesticide; but just in case). Fruits and veggies aren't animals and the bacteria / viruses on them are not generally harmful to people. Even then, water washes much of it off.\n\nThe only time there's really a risk is when manure is when natural fertilizers (like manure) are used. Sometimes that may have harmful bacteria. That's not really a concern unless you buy organic. Even then, rinsing it off will get the majority of anything harmful off.",
"Firstly, water by itself is sufficient to clean produce, provided that the water itself is clean, and that said fruits or vegs are run under/soaked in it.\n\nTests conducted by the Cook's Illustrated magazine, and the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the Tennessee State University found that water and brushing are effective at cleaning produce, and that some commercial vegetable cleaning washes perform not much better than just washing/soaking in clean water.\n\nBut wait, there's more: Commercial produce washes and detergents may end up contaminating fruit and vegs, as the chemicals become trapped in pores on the skin\n\nReasons as to why clean water is so effective is that it is CLEAN; Distilled water, which can and is used to wash produce, is filtered prior to distillation, and provided that it isn't contaminated post-distillation, is free from microbes, chemicals, ect. Tap water is already filtered and chlorinated before use, although it can be contaminated afterwards.\n\nIt also helps that fruits and vegetables are cooked throughly, which will certainly kill microbes, meaning that one might not have to worry about remaining microbes on fruits and vegs.",
"I worked in a fruit and vegetable distribution warehouse for a year. If a 7ft tall pallet of avacados hits the dirty warehouse floor, do you really think we throw the $4000~ of produce away? Fat chance.",
"Soap doesn't kill bacteria generally.\n\nIt breaks the surface tension of the water allowing water to dissolve and rinse more effectively.",
"It probably isn't, especially if the produce came from a place with less strict food standards (Some farms in Mexico were caught fertilizing with human feces among other things for organic produce) leading to the possibility of other contaminants, i.e. Ascariasis \n\nThis is one explaination as to why salad is less popular in non-western countries..",
"Once bacteria adhere to the surface of fruit or vegetables, no cleaner will be able to significantly reduce the quantity of bacteria. Bacteria adhere so well that few are removed when rinsed with water. Water rinses are really just done to remove dirt, not bacteria. Farmers instead focus on making sure that pathogenic bacteria don't get on their crops in the first place, using methods like applying clean irrigation water and keeping animals out of fields. If your lettuce gets E. coli on it 2 days before harvest, no amount of water, water + vinegar, or water + chlorine will be able to remove it. Eating fresh produce is a risk, but the goal of good agricultural practices (GAPS) is to mitigate these risks and make the produce supply overall safer.\n\nI'm writing part of my dissertation on this very subject. Hope this helps!\n\n",
"The point of plain ol' soap is NOT to kill the bacteria on your hands. It acts as a binding agent to help get grime off your hands that water, by itself, cannot. \n\nThere are of course many types of anti-bacterial soap (soap on its own isn't really anti-bacterial so an anti-bacterial agent is added) where killing the bacteria is the point. However, there are quite a lot of health professionals who disagree with use of anti-bacterial soaps outside of a hospital setting. Having healthy bacterial flora on your skin is VERY important for preventing disease and infection and there are concerns (valid ones in my opinion) that anti-bact. soaps and hand sanitizers interrupt healthy skin flora and make you EVEN MORE vulnerable to infection.\n\nAs far as produce is concerned, there IS going to be bacteria on it no matter what. There are billions of bacterial and fungal cells coating every square inch of pretty much everything. And just like on your hands, this is probably a good thing that we don't want to destroy w/anti-bacterials. The microbial communities living on your food (that came from the soil where it was grown) are the same microbes that, when the lettuce or whatever dies, will get to work breaking it down into simpler organic matter. This is important to know because the same microbes that break down dead vegetables in the dirt (think composting) are the SAME ones that help your body break down and digest the vegetables you eat. There have been studies that have found soil-based probiotics (which contain soil microbes--the same ones on your food) to help with digestion problems in humans.\n\nI'm not suggesting we all shit on our food and eat it, just that over-sanitation of our hands and food may cause their own health problems.\n\nTLDR: Regular soap doesn't kill bacteria; antibacterial soap probably causes more health problems than it solves; using anti-bacterials on are food is probably a really bad idea because bacteria is important to digesting our food",
"Most fruits and vegetables have relatively few places on their skin for bacteria to bind to. When you wash them, you are physically removing bacteria.\n\nYour skin, however, has a thin layer of oil among other things that bacteria can bind to. Soap removes that layer of oil, and takes bacteria with that layer of oil",
"FYI: hospital kitchens and some restaurants do use a soap solution to soak and rinse their fresh vegetables before the regular tap water rinse. ",
"Your skin is a living organ that is warm and moist and basically a 5-star resort for bacteria while fruit is cold and hard and doesn't attract that many bugs. You should rinse your fruit to get rid of dirt and pesticides. ",
"I love all these replies saying soap doesn't kill bacteria - They're absolutely untrue. Soap is an interesting substance. It has long chains of hydrocarbons and salts in it. The hydrocarbons won't dissolve in water but will in fats, and the salts will dissolve in water. What you get in the end, is the fat layer in the bacterial wall becoming proud and allowing water, through osmosis, to enter into the bacteria until it goes pop. And that's how soap kills bacteria.\n\nEdit: woops proud should read porous",
"They do make \"veggie wash\" that you spray on the vegetables/fruit, scrub it around with your hands, then rinse it. I think those are more intended for things that the skin will be eaten directly, like a raw apple. But I've also heard lemon juice is a sufficient \"cleaner\" for things like that, too. \n\nBut I always think of the scene in Aeon Flux when she has a little vegetable/fruit bath in her counter that has water in it so they soak for a bit. Thought that was always a cool detail in the movie. ",
"The point of soap isn't to kill bacteria. (I'm ignoring for the moment anti-bacterial soap, which adds chemicals like Triclosan to kill bacteria, and Triclosan is bad enough for you on your skin) The purpose of soap is to remove oil based dirt from your skin (or things that come in contact with your skin, or otherwise covered in oil, like cookware).\n\nThe problem is that oil and water don't mix well, so washing with water alone doesn't solve the problem as the oil doesn't dissolve into the water.\n\nSoap is a surfactant, which means it lowers the surface tension of water (helping it spread more evenly over surfaces and get between oil particles) and makes makes it possible for oil particles to be dissolved into the water.\n\nThis isn't necessary for fruits and vegetables since the goal there to remove dirt rather than oil/grease (skin produces it's own oil where bacteria can live, fruits and vegetables don't so we primarily have to deal with dirt dwelling bacteria).",
"I generally use dishwashing soap to clean vegetables and fruit. Just a little bit, then rinse thoroughly.",
"The difference between sanitization and sterilization is one has regard for human consumption; you're not about to eat your hands.\n\nWater is still lava to bacteria on your hands, soap is used to bind with oily, greasy things, if your vegetables are covered in oil then you're in the wrong store.",
"It's not. If you don't run your vegetables through the dishwasher, you're killing yourself.",
"Uh, I use soap and water on fruits and vegetables. People at the store handle them. It'd be like licking a subway pole to not wash them.",
"Its a surfactant not antibacterial. It just gets the off ur hands and puts em down the drains.",
" > if we have to use soap to kill the bacteria on our hands\n\nthat is a false premise, we use soap because the main ingredient binds oils from our skin to water so we can wash off dirt easier. The whole anti-bacterial thing is a quite recent invention and not necessary (some would even argue harmful) for every day use at all. This is also why your hands feel dry after a long wash with just water or a short one with soap - since they are stripped of oils.\n\nFruit and veggies aren't covered in skin oils so don't really need soap for them.",
"You don't use soap to kill the bacteria unless you're using specifically antibacterial soap.\n\nThe function of soap is to bind with oils and then become water soluble so it can be washed away with water.\n\nfruits and vegetables generally aren't oily, in addition to this you're just removing soil and then the water soluble pesticides they are coated with, some fruits come covered in a wax layer however which makes this more difficult.\n\n"
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cirysw | how do salary caps and computing for future salary and cap space work in team sports like basketball? | It's for this game that im playing. And i dunno a subreddit wherein i can ask this and expect a simple answer aside from this one. Thank you for the kindness | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cirysw/eli5_how_do_salary_caps_and_computing_for_future/ | {
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"Team A has a $50m budget because they have a rich donor. \n\nTeam B has a $10m budget. \n\nTeam A can afford to lure multiple top tier players and therefore always walk all over Team B. Salary caps help to stop teams buying their way to the top of the ladder and even up the playing field.",
"The majority of American sports (NFL NHL NBA) have a salary cap, but NBA has what they call a soft cap. \n\nEssentially the cap is determined by a % of the revenue the whole NBA brings in. This revenue includes ticket sales, tv rights, merchandising etc. \n\nSay for this year the cap might be $100m. NBA teams cannot sign players that will push them over this cap. There are a lot of exceptions to this rule, that I won’t expand on, but they basically relate to keeping your own player (bird rights), certain yearly exceptions, rookie contracts, mid level exception, minimum salary exception and you can trade players that will put you over the cap too. There are more exceptions that I’m not even too familiar with. \n\nThen there is a luxury cap threshold, say for example it’s $120m, owners will have to pay the league a penalty for everY dollar over this luxury cap (this can get ridiculous because it can go to 4-5x the amount you go over the cap. If you go over the cap by $20m, you could pay $40 in taxes). Lastly, there is this tax apron level, it’s about $6m higher than the luxury cap threshold and if you exceed this, you get limited to what exceptions you can use (eg mid level exception)\n\nIn terms of how much players get paid, it generally depends on how long they have been with the league. If you have been 0-6 years in the league, max is 25% of cap, if you have been 7-9 year, you get 30% etc. Again, there are a bunch of exceptions like rookie contracts from draft picks, team loyalty type exceptions (designated player/ Derrick Rose rule), and super max. \n\nIt’s actually quite confusing and I don’t even fully understand it. Hope this helps"
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49822a | how was nancy reagan able to plan presidential events around astrology and still be loved by evangelicals? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49822a/eli5how_was_nancy_reagan_able_to_plan/ | {
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"How is Trump the choice for evangelical Christians?\n\nLook his Howard Stern Interview in 2003 _URL_0_\nTalking about how far the hot intern will go, promoting the premier of The Apprentice, defending Micheal Jackson, getting blow jobs in the hot tub, how sexy his daughter is, and how great unprotected sex was in the 70s.\n\nYou can also look at school programs cutting their subsidized lunches for six year olds. No matter who that child's parents are, in this great Judeo-Christan nation, you have six year olds who will not eat three meals a day, but the biggest issue is stopping abortion, lowering taxes, and keeping guns.\n\nHonestly many people use religion to make themselves seem superior to others similar to many vegans."
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9hoslm | what does it mean to freeze your credit? how is it beneficial to you? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9hoslm/eli5_what_does_it_mean_to_freeze_your_credit_how/ | {
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"When your information is hacked or leaked, or even sold. There's a chance that your name will be used to access money in the form of loans, credit cards, and some other things.\n\nBy freezing your credit, it prevents anyone from taking advantage of your credit score and information by setting up new accounts in your name.\n\nThis Protects you from issues with legally having loaned money that is often unknown about, until after debt collection begins or they pursue legal processes to collect it back.\n\nHere's a quick article on the topic,\n[Credit Report Freeze](_URL_0_)"
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ao3zuq | how are things rated on the scoville scale? | I get that it has to deal with capsaicin concentration, but isn't spiciness subjective? Also how do some hot sauces have a higher rating on the scale than the peppers they make the hot sauce from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ao3zuq/eli5_how_are_things_rated_on_the_scoville_scale/ | {
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"Originally the scale was a measurement of how much sugar water was required to be mixed with the spicy thing before you couldn't detect the spiciness anymore. But, as you said, this doesn't work very well because people have different detection levels. Even the same person will have different reactions over time.\n\nSo, eventually they defined pure capsaicin to be 16 million Scoville units. Now they just measure how much capsaicin is in the pepper or sauce and multiply that by 16 millions. For example, if a hot sauce was 5% capsaicin it would be 16 million x 0.05 = 800,000 scoville units.\n\nHot sauces can be hotter than the pepper they're from if they concentrate the sauce by removing water but leaving the capsaicin."
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a6379p | why does the universe obey the scientific laws? | Furthermore, what "sets" the rules of these scientific laws such as physics, mathematics etc..? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6379p/eli5_why_does_the_universe_obey_the_scientific/ | {
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"It doesn't. Or, to be precise, it (usually) does, but only because *it* determines the laws.\n\nLaws of physics aren't imposed by humans. They're just our observations about how the universe works. We didn't create them, they were always there. We just identified and described them. \n\nOf course, laws of physics can change as our understanding changes.",
"We merely describe the rules, so it cannot be us. What sets the rules is the one question we can possibly never answer. A god? The code of a simulation we live in? Some people believe, the universe came into existence just like that, no strings attached.\n\nThen there is the notion of the \"theory of all\" that physicists are frantically trying to develop. It is supposed to be one simple theory that can perfectly describe anything and everything that is going on in our reality. All laws of nature would be able to be developed from this one godly equation.",
"Let me start by saying that physical laws and universe are equivalent (not equal! Here is a simple explanation of the difference in the terms [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nPhysical laws need a medium in which they could express, and also the laws of physics determine how this medium is. This medium is the universe. A universe needs physical laws in order to be a universe, if a universe doesn't have physical laws then it isn't a universe, it would be nothingness which is different from an empty universe.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThat being said, my interpretation is as board games. There is chess for example, which has its own rules and pieces, and any board game which has the same rules and the same pieces is called chess, but if there is another board game which has different rules or different pieces, that could be anything but not chess. The same with our universe (board game) which has its own physical laws (rules and pieces), if there were even just a single different physical law (rule or piece) then it wouldn't be our universe, you could call it universe 2 if you want but not universe (our universe).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhen you define the physical laws (rules and pieces) your are defining at the same time the universe (board game), the same is for the other way around. When you ask why the universe obey the physical laws it's like asking why chess has 64 squares. In the definition there are the rules and vice versa, if the rules change or aren't followed then the game isn't chess anymore.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhere this rules/board game came front?, that's a more philosophical question that deserves its own section comment. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nAs an extra fact: One of the main open problems in physics is to know why the universal constants (like speed of light *c* or Planck constant *h*) have the value the have and if they were different in the past (which is one of the more solid hypothesis in particle cosmology).\n\n & #x200B;\n\n & #x200B;"
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5zw8ym | why does your bone joints make this clicking noise if you bend/strech them? and is this longtime harmful? | (sorry i am not an naitive speaker) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zw8ym/eli5_why_does_your_bone_joints_make_this_clicking/ | {
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"you mean like [cracking your knuckles](_URL_1_)?\n\nthe leading hypothesis is [cavitation](_URL_0_). essentially, you reduce the pressure in the joint by stretching it, which causes gasses to come out of the fluid in the joint. the bubbles collapse to make the sound.\n\nthere is no evidence that it is harmful. "
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27d7gs | the navajo code: how it worked, what they did and how it helped. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27d7gs/eli5_the_navajo_code_how_it_worked_what_they_did/ | {
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"It translated normal messages into the Navajo language to get it by the Germans without them knowing what was going on due to the fact that nobody knew the Navajo language. ",
"I'm going to build on what /u/blur2010 said by adding this:\n\n1. Because Navajo was spoken natively by members of the forces it was \"encoded\" and \"decoded\" instantly.\n\n2. It could easily be spoken, and therefore transmitted via radio quicker than morse code.\n\n3. It has sounds which don't appear in European / Oriental languages. As such the Japanese (where it was mostly used) and the Germans (I don't know if it was used in Europe, actually...) couldn't even transcribe intercepted communications, much less decrypt them.",
"And adding to what /u/blur2010 and /u/arkadye have already said, they didn't just speak plain Navajo. The code talkers were trained to speak a kind of phonetic alphabet with Navajo words representing the English letters, and they spelled out words letter-by-letter this way. Common military words were given Navajo code names, like tank was a \"turtle\", and grenades were \"potato\" (in Navajo obviously). \n\n\nThis made sure that even if regular Navajo soldiers were captured (which happened, the Japanese caught one), the messages would still sound like total gibberish to them. The combination of really obscure language + coded messages made it basically unbreakable.\n\n\nInterestingly, Hitler predicted that the Americans would do this and he sent a huge team of German linguists to learn Native American languages before the war began. There was so many that they weren't too successful but it did stop the Americans using code talkers on a large scale in Europe."
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5199dr | what is the difference(if any) between matrices and vectors? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5199dr/eli5_what_is_the_differenceif_any_between/ | {
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"Matrices are a grid of vectors. A vector (in the sense I assume you refer to) is a one-dimensional array of values. In fact, in my native language, this is what we call arrays in programming: vectors. So an array (vector) would, for example, look like [10, 5, 31, 42, 99], making it one-dimensional.\n\nA matrix would be:\n\n10, 5, 31, 42, 99\n\n22, 3, 34, 48, 49\n\n35, 8, 22, 92, 44\n\n57, 1, 97, 45, 32\n\n93, 1, 53, 85, 37\n\n\nmaking it two-dimensional. I kept the second column on one-digit numbers to preserve the alignment.\n\nThey simply have different purposes, that's all.\n\nA vector would be used to show, say, a list of temperatures on various occasions, while a matrix would be used to show, for example, the altitude of specific geographical points based on latitude/longitude. Or the colour of a pixel on your display, based on x/y coordinates.\n\nedit: formatting.",
"One explanation can be very simple and deep at the same time:\n\n*A vector is a point in a vector space and a matrix is the representation of a linear transformation between two vector spaces in terms of coordinates from ordered bases of the vector spaces in question.* \n\nThat explanation presupposes you know what a vector space is, what a linear transformation is, what ordered bases are, and what coordinates are. \n\nAt the risk of over simplifying to the point of being unintelligible, a liner transformation is a special type of function L from one vector space, S, to another vector space, T. I think of it as from the Source, S, to the Target, T, and write L:S - > T. \n\nThen, given L, a linear transformation from a source S to target T, L: S - > T, the matrix M representing L with respect to ordered bases for S and T is the array of numbers you get from first applying L to a basis vector s in S, and then writing down the coordinates in T of L(s).\n\nThe first column of M is the first set of coordinates in T from the image of the first basis vector in S under L. The second column is the second set of coordinates and so on.\n\nThis means, for the same L, if you start changing the ordered bases for S and T, you will change the matrix M. If you only change the order that will only move the entries in M around. But you could have completely different bases in which case you would have completely different matrices for L. \n\nThis is really important because it means that any representation of a linear transformation L as a matrix M means the associated ordered bases must be known. You can abstractly talk about L without referring to any particular bases, but once you write down L as a matrix you have necessarily fixed the bases of both the source S and the target T.\n\nSo the short answer is that vectors are points in vector spaces and a matrix is the representation of a linear transformation between vector spaces relative to some fixed ordered bases. \n\n\n",
"Uh not sure if we are talking about different contexts but here is what I know:\n\nA vector is something defined by a direction and magnitude. You'll often see this depicted by an arrow where the length represents the magnitude and the angle/way the arrow is pointing represents the direction. \n\nA matrix is simply an array of numbers, and can be used to represent vectors. \n\nImagine a Cartesian plane. Pick a spot. Say (3,4). You could draw a vector from (0,0) to (3,4). It has a magnitude of 5 (which you can figure out using Pythagoras' theorem) and and direction that's usually measured as the angle between the x-axis and the vector. You could represent that vector in the 2x1 matrix \n\n[3\n\n4]\n\nHope that helps? There's a lot more you could go into it of course - there are lots if ways to use matrices to make your algebra/number crunching look neater, and lots of those have geometric analogues, and can applied for/with vectors....but it's been a while since I've done maths and this is basically what I remember :p"
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38actf | fallout | The game I mean | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38actf/eli5_fallout/ | {
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"They're roleplaying games that take place in an often-tongue in cheek post apocalyptic world. The first two and their spinoffs were top-down, turnbased games, when the series was brought back with Fallout 3 a few years ago they moved to become much more action-y firstperson shooter RPGs.",
"The original Fallout games were top-down, turn-based RPGs that took place in a comical \"1950s\" interpretation of a post-nuclear-war United States. They were famous for their impressive depth, funny dialogue, insane violence, and sex. \n\nPart of what makes it so legendary is that for my generation, Fallout 1 and 2 was a huge deal in my childhood. I was 10 when they first came out and my parents had no idea the crazy shit you can do in that game, like sex with prostitutes and then blowing their heads off. Then the games just VANISHED, and another major release did not come until Fallout 3 in 2008, and I could relive that feeling in a totally different setting of my life."
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cp8qjl | what does cc and horsepower actually mean in cars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cp8qjl/eli5_what_does_cc_and_horsepower_actually_mean_in/ | {
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"CC means cubic centimeters and describes the volume of the engine cylinders.\n\nHorsepower is a measure of the rate which work can be done. 1 horsepower means that you can move 550 lbs 1 foot in 1 second. 2 horsepowers would either be 1100 lbs/1 ft/1 second, 550 lbs/2 ft/1 second, 550 lbs/1 ft/0.5 seconds or any combination thereof.",
"To expand on CCs, when an engine is, say, 2000 cubic centimeters, that means that each piston \"displaces\" 2000 divided by the number of cylinders it has.\n\nSo for a 4 cylinder engine, each cylinder would displace 500cc.\n\nWhat displacement means is the volume of the space within the cylinder that the piston moves through. To get that number, you take the bore of the cylinder (the diameter), then use good old pi to figure out the area, then multiply by the stroke of the piston (how far it moves up and down in the cylinder).\n\nSo each time a piston cycles in our 2000cc four cylinder engine, it displaces 500cc of air, and does this four times a complete engine cycle, for 2000cc of total displacement.",
"Horsepower is a measure of \"power\", which is a term in physics that describes doing one job in a period of time. The shorter the time, the more \"powerful\" that machine is.\n\nFor example, I can carry two buckets of water at the same time, one in each arm. My mom can only carry one bucket, using both hands to hold it. If we need to fill up the same tank with water, I will finish faster because I can carry twice the amount. I will fill up two buckets, and she will only fill up one. After three trips, I filled up 6 buckets, and she was only able to carry 3 buckets in that time.\n\nIf we need to fill up 10 buckets, and each trip takes 1 minute, I will finish in 5 minutes (5 trips), while she will finish in 10 minutes (10 trips). I was able to do the job faster, in a shorter time, therefore, I have more \"power\". If my mom has a 5 HP engine, I have a 10 HP engine.",
"As others have pointed out, CC refers to engine displacement. You also commonly see this measured as cubic inches as well as liters. For example, you might see a 1960's Ford Mustang advertised with a \"289.\" This refers to an engine displacing 289 cubic inches. You might also see a later-model Mustang advertised as a 5.0, referring to 5 liters (more or less) of displacement.\n\nIn short, larger engines displace more volume. As any gear head will tell you, when it comes to performance [there's no replacement for displacement](_URL_0_).",
"Im surprised that nobody has mentioned yet the fact that a power level of 1 **hp** is approximately equivalent to 746 watt (W) or 0.746 kilowatt (kW). If you're into physics, that makes more sense.",
"Others have broken down the technicalities of cc and hp, but if you're around car guys, it's shorthand for \"how powerful is your car?\"\n\nCC (cubic centimeters, or its American cousin, ci, cubic inches) is almost always directly related to power. The bigger the number, the more powerful your engine. Back in the muscle car days of the late 60s and 70s, you could roughly equate one cubic inch with one horsepower, so a \"Chevy big-block 350\" would make roughly 350 HP.\n\nThese days you're more likely to hear displacement referred to in liters instead of cc or ci (smaller engines in ATVs or motorcycles will still use cc). There's not much of a direct one-to-one for liters-to-horsepower as current engine technology is much more advanced than the 70s, but it's not uncommon for a 6-liter V-8 engine to make well over 400 HP if it's naturally aspirated (over 700 if it's boosted with turbo or superchargers like a Dodge Hellcat). A Dodge Viper can make about 650 hp with a naturally aspirated 8.4 liter V-10."
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2ksm3u | why don't people use anaesthetics when getting a tattoo? | It seems like one of the big cons of getting a tattoo is the pain, so why don't they just give you a local anaesthetic so you can't feel it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ksm3u/eli5_why_dont_people_use_anaesthetics_when/ | {
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"Some people do, but for me that would have ruined the experience. I have never met anyone who used it but I know that the artist that I used offered it.",
"Part of getting a tattoo is the pain that you get to experience in getting them. But that is a philosophical debate, that gets away from the point. Good tattoo parlors will not give tattoos to people that are drunk or high. One of the reasons for this is liability. People drunk or high could come back later and say that they were not in able to agree to the tattoo contract that they entered into. On top of that drinking and anesthetic can change the way that your skin reacts to the ink. You can only be tattooed for so long, because over time your skin will swell and the ink absorption changes. The biggest reason, is that I believe you need to be licensed to give anesthetic, which requires medial schooling. It would just be suck a pain in the ass. Plus do we really want people that cant deal with a mild irritation to get tattooed? I have multiple and I would never ever want to be anesthetized for any of them. ",
"True anesthetics require a medical professional and most tattoo parlors don't want to staff for one. The cost of the nurse to do it is in addition to all the licensing and such the parlor would need to keep medical drugs on-site.",
"Also, nobody has said it, but they don't hurt that bad. They hurt a little and on certain areas it's worse than others, but mine felt like someone scratching a sunburn lightly with a fork. Granted mine is on a relatively painless spot, but using an anesthetic for it seems like overkill. You wouldn't take vicodin for a hangnail, why use an anesthetic for a relatively minor irritation. I'd say the first few hours are the worst, but nothing major. The itching was far less pleasant than the pain. ",
"There is a small variety of topical anesthetics on the market that people use for tattoos. Ive tried several of them and had customers use many more. From my experience there are several reasons why they arent used more. Ive used the tattoo industry sprays, Lidocaine, BLT and even a shot of novacaine\n\n1. the good ones are expensive. BLT is my favorite but costs about $60 bucks for 100grams. \n\n2. none of them last very long for large tattoos. At best you'll be numb for an hour, maybe an hour an a half. \n\n3. You're limited on size. Any topical will absorb into the blood thru the skin so too much can kill you. BLT recommends an area about the size of a baseball. \n\n4. All of them lessen the quality of the tattoo, both thru slowing the healing and making the skin cold and clammy and harder to get ink into. \n\n5. No tattoo small enough to use a topical for really needs it in the first place. "
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xvv6f | why are some people so much louder when they eat? | I'm not talking about people who slurp or people who chew with their mouths open. Why is it that two people can be eating the same meal both with their mouths closed, one is near silent and the other is a very loud, wet, and generally unpleasant to hear noise?
Does it have to do with some people producing more saliva or something?
Edit: To clarify I am really curious as to whether this is a physiological reason or a learned behavior. If it is a physiological reason, what is it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xvv6f/eli5_why_are_some_people_so_much_louder_when_they/ | {
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"I think some people are just more self-conscious and/or considerate than others. \n\nThere are people who are always aware of how they are affecting others' observations. And then there are other people who just don't give a fuck.",
"I think it has to do with the structure of their jaw and how the food is broken down between their teeth. I could be 100% wrong though.",
"Growing up and eating breakfast in the mornings with my dad, I apparently ate loud enough for him to tell me to either eat at a different time, use a plastic spoon, or stop being so loud. I eventually learned to be quieter.\n\nI must have gotten those attributes from him because I can't stand loud eaters.\n\nI think it probably has to do with the placement of the tongue really. I usually hold food with my tongue and kinda chew it that may (ridiculously hard to explain now that I try to). Loud eaters probably don't hold it with their tongue and allow it to move around in there."
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1o1ars | how are cnn and other major news networks biased? | I have never watch the news or know anything about politics so please make this simple. I always watch CNN if there is a major event currently happening but don't see how it is biased. Examples of regular reports and how they change them would be great. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1ars/eli5_how_are_cnn_and_other_major_news_networks/ | {
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"Basically, even if you're reporting news there are a lot of things that make it possibly biased: \n\n* what type of news they choose to show\n* how they word the headlines/how the reporters describe the news\n* how long they choose to focus on a certain segment or topic\n\nThese sorts of things.",
"Because big news networks maintain viewers through enticing and sensationalist segments, they're all inherently biased toward the kinds of people who want to hear world is ending news. If you want something far more mellow, occasionally biased, and usually interesting stories, listen to NPR",
"Each news network as an owner and if the owner of a network doesn't want something aired it won't be aired. This can show a bias based on the stories they report/don't report. Some news networks have even lost court cases about reporting false information, like the BBC and world trade center 7.",
"For most advertising-supported channels, you have to understand the market they operate in - they are not selling news to their viewers. The viewers don't pay them anything. They are selling the attention of viewers to advertisers, and using the news to do it. By making their audience pay attention and feel receptive, they can charge businesses for airing commercials between programming. That means news is always going to be biased to avoid offending advertisers excessively, and towards drawing in the largest number of receptive viewers. \n\nLet's take a clip chosen as randomly as I feel like doing since I'm lazy (I googled \"CNN Video clip\" and it was the first one that wasn't overly political) - _URL_0_\n\nSo, what are some of the biases we can see? \n\n1. Picking a topic with an easy sexual/controversial angle (picture of a mom with a bare breast - porn or not, boobs equal eyeballs on the screen) \n\n2. Picking a topic that everyone has a strong opinion on (parenting - means having a dramatic controversy that doesn't upset too many advertisers, and gets people invested)\n\n3. Picking some fringe, relatively unimportant topic and casting it as a \"new trend\" (means people feel they have to pay attention due to anticipated social pressure)\n\n4. Picking a topic that promotes other CNN-friendly brands (TIME magazine - referencing each other means establishing each other as legitimate sources of information, both being Time-Warner owned properties)\n\n5. Formatting choice - bringing one person who is chosen as a spokesman for the entire issue (a spokesman that CNN chooses, influencing how that side of the issue appears to viewers) and one person as a stand-in for many of the \"people say...\" questions that will be thrown at the spokesman for the issue (a stand-in who is also chosen by CNN, defining how people see the objections to this issue). This biases the viewer towards seeing one \"pro\" and one \"anti\" side, rather than a complex spectrum of competing views. It also silences any other critical views and designates them as implicitly less important. This heightens the drama by having two antagonists, neither of which is the network (note how the host refuses to take sides or introduce facts contradicting either guest, and takes on the most naive questions possible to avoid alienating viewers who agree with either guest). Also they make sure to include a clip of a later piece of programming on CNN to encourage repeated viewership. \n\n6. Formatting choice - a 6 minute segment, with barely a dozen questions for both sides in total; how deep is this examination of the topic, and how dense is the information being delivered? How much is an attempt to bring up the topic, hit any controversial points as quickly as possible, and gloss over any more complicated issues?\n\n7. Question choices - does this segment really delve at all into any deeper questions about the subject at hand? Is the host actually introducing any information? Does this segment even reference some kind of external objective reality that has some method of being studied and understood, or is the debate simply competing perspectives?\n\n*A note on the interviewee's responses* - you can see how she understands PR (it seems everyone does these days) - she's emphasizing the non-threatening side first, emphasizing everyone has a choice, all parents want the best for their kids, making up your own mind, reading up as much as you can, etc... in terms undecided viewers would relate to. This would direct viewers towards supportive literature and establish their perspective as legitimate, regardless of what it is. As for the \"anti\" side, he's savvy too, not outright saying it's wrong but highlighting the \"well, let's be realistic\" narrative. Ironically, both of them competing to seem \"the most reasonable\" undermines the jerry-springer style drama being fished for much of the time. \n\n\n",
"CNN: fairly neutral, rather sensationalist, moderate level of celebrity/twitter filler\n\nFox News: Republican News. Except for Sheppard Smith, his show is pretty good in terms of reporting on the news without massive amounts of opinion. This channel is either serving the GOP or runs the GOP, I'm not sure which. Some examples are how they followed the Bush Administration tightly, Benghazi coverage, and how they supported the Tea Party.\n\nMSNBC: Democrat News. It's opinion 24/7. Really gets grating to watch this channel due to the oversimplification of issues into D vs. R.\n\nNPR: Liberal bias. Not in a conspiracy kind of way, but they tend to cater to a liberal audience so they write articles about poverty and city living.\n\nAl-Jazeera: This channel is fairly good about avoiding celebrity gossip and actually covering news from around the world. So viewers can avoid the USA is the only country in the world mentality. But they have some fairly strong pro-Syrian Rebel, pro Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood bias. Also any controversies in Qatar (the home of AJ) are never reported on since the channel is bankrolled and controlled by the government.",
"Look at today's news. Same topic but completely different front page headlines:\n\n\nCNN: Obama: Short-term deal OK\n\n\nFox: Obama wants 'unconditional surrender' in fiscal deal \n"
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4fpfql | what makes male voice sound different from a female's? is it possible to get surgery to sound like someone else? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fpfql/eli5_what_makes_male_voice_sound_different_from_a/ | {
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"Men have a bigger larynx and therefore longer vocal cords.\n\nWhen we speak we open our vocal cords and push air through them and they vibrate. Bigger cords give deeper voice pitch because the cords vibrate slower. \nLonger sound waves produce a lower pitch.\n\nI can not answer the second part of your question. But I don't think so."
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c75huf | why when i'm rubbing my hayfevery/itchy eyes does it feel near orgasmic, but as soon as i stop it's like the very fires of hell are burning my eyeballs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c75huf/eli5_why_when_im_rubbing_my_hayfeveryitchy_eyes/ | {
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"Your brain uses electro-chemistry to cause the rest of your body to do things. \n\nIf your eyes are irritated by pollen the nerves send a signal that they itch. When you rub them your brain experiences reward signals saying, “Good job, you scratched the itch.”\n\nUnfortunately you just irritated or popped thousands of tiny blood vessels by smashing your dirty knuckles into your eyes for five minutes so now they’re even more red and inflamed. This burns."
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9nwlop | why do people go crazy over gas going up by a couple cents | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nwlop/eli5_why_do_people_go_crazy_over_gas_going_up_by/ | {
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"Because a lot of people, in the United States at least, are really poor and depend on their cars for work, getting food, etc.",
"That couple cents per gallon turns into extra dollars that usually have to be spent elsewhere on other needs, so that takes a hit too. \n",
"Fear. They have no control over it and depend heavily on it. When the price of gas goes up the fear is that it won't stop or that it will run out. "
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bxwj5v | do animals in the wild get enough sleep or are they constantly sleep deprived? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bxwj5v/eli5_do_animals_in_the_wild_get_enough_sleep_or/ | {
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"Depending on the current situation of their surroundings and environment (e.g. Mother animal staying awake to protect her offsprings.)\n\nBut on an average rate, animals often has a normal sleep routine due to the fact that they don't do much time-demanding tasks, unlike us humans.\n\nELI5: They often have a normal sleep routine because basically all they do is Consume, Interact, Migrate (For Migratory Animals), Sleep, Repeat",
"Depends on the animal - an animal stressed may not sleep at all. Or the giraffe only sleeps for average 2 hours a day. A Male lion sleeps around 22.",
"Circadian biologist here: many animals sleep in ways that are very different than humans. For example, ducks rest one side of their brain while leaving the other side awake to allow them to literally keep and eye out for predators. Many prey animals, like rats and mice, have very short bouts of sleep over a 24 hour period (from 20 seconds to only a few minutes). Sleep deprivation is usually defined by seeing an increase in slow wave activity during a sleep bout after an extended period of time awake. This has been documented in female frigate birds in the Galapagos which will fly constantly for days at a time while feeding before returning to their nest to feed their young. Since frigate birds cannot take off from water, they must remain in flight the entire time they are foraging. Researchers have shown that during that flight time, the birds do sleep and in fact they will also sleep only one side of their brain while the other keeps that eye open. Then when they return to land, their sleep shows a similar rebound that we see in other sleep deprived organisms.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nTL;DR Animals can get sleep deprived, but it's unlikely they live in a constant state of sleep deprivation\n\nFrigate bird source: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"Horses generally get 20 minutes of REM sleep in a 24 hour period, and only if they feel protected. They generally get their other rest by locking 3 leg joints and relaxing their 4th.",
"I watched joe Rogan podcast with Mathew walker a sleep specialist. Apparently humans are the only animals who deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. Sleep deprivation has some seriously bad consequences, and we are actually ruining our health when we don’t consistently get 7-8 hours of sleep a night\n\nAnimals are smarter than us, they know the importance of sleep"
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7g9846 | did the pentagon actually displace trillions of taxpayer dollars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7g9846/eli5_did_the_pentagon_actually_displace_trillions/ | {
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"The story is false, it is a gross misrepresentation of what has happened. [Here](_URL_0_) is an article explaining it.\n\nEssentially every time you hear a story that sounds to crazy to be true, it is. "
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164l6f | how will the afordable care act make health insurance cheaper in 2014? | I live in NJ and right now the cheapest out of pocket option is around $300 and it's not that great. How is this going to change in 2014? Will there be more cheaper options out there? How is this "universal market" any different than just going on _URL_0_ which you can do right now? Also, Subsidies? Refunds? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/164l6f/how_will_the_afordable_care_act_make_health/ | {
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"I'm a health insurance actuary, and focus exclusively on small business in my current role.\n\nThe biggest changes are basically: (1) removal of underwriting/health status rating (2) removal of case size factors (3) condensation of age/sex factors (4) ACA taxes and fees and (5) mandated benefits. I will try to explain each below. Note that all of the above, except (2), apply to individual insurance as well, except (5) is slightly modified.\n\n(1) Removing underwriting means that no longer can carriers rate by health status. For some small businesses this will be a good thing, in that if you are an extremely sick group, you will now be paying less for your care. Unfortunately, if you are a healthy group or generally \"average\" group, you will be paying substantially more to offset the decreased rates for the sick and receive the \"manual\" rate.\n\nStates currently allow insurers to underwrite business between some band (+/- 10% or 15% or 25% up to 35% in some states). If you are at the bottom of that band, based on this piece alone, you will receive a rate increase equal to the allowable range (i.e. if your state lets insurers underwrite at +/- 15% from manual, and you currently get a 15% discount, when that goes away, you receive a 15% increase). On the other hand, if you are at the top of the range because you are extremely sick, you will receive a 15% (or 10% etc.) decrease.\n\nHowever, because the sickest groups are not currently rated up enough to make them profitable (i.e. rating up a group with a cancer patient or a hemophiliac 15% does not cover their costs) when all those groups come down and lose even more money for the insurer, everyone else's rates will have to increase more than the allowable rate. I.e. that 15% increase described above will actually be passed through closer to 20% to 25% to offset the serious impacts of insuring the sickest groups at the manual rate.\n\nCouple this with insurers no longer being able to deny individuals due to pre-existing conditions, and you have a real mess since rates will have to be pushed upward even further to account for a substantially deteriorated risk mix in the market.\n\n(2) Removing case size factors may be good or bad. If you are a two or three life group, and currently receive an increase for being small, when this is removed, your rates will go down. If you are a 50 life group, and you receive a big discount from the carrier, when this is removed, your rates will go up. This fluctuation will account for around 5% to 10% decreases/increases to your rates.\n\n(3) condensing age sex factors means that older groups cannot be rated up as much as they traditionally have. To offset this, younger groups will be rated up more highly. Again, if you are an extremely old group, your rates will decrease. If on the whole your group is very young, your rates will increase. However, much like the underwriting changes, the older groups are already not profitable for an insurer. When those rates come down, the offset on the younger population will be more than the actual offset that would get you to \"manual\". So, there will be an add on if you are a younger group that you won't just get a delta from condensing the factors, but the youngest will be penalized a bit more to make up for the pushing down of the age sex factors of the oldest groups.\n\n(4) ACA taxes account for about 3.3% of premium. Almost all insurers will pass on that 3.3% to their groups, so this will account for a 3.3% increase in your premium rates flat. Furthermore, there is a 3.5% fee for operating on the exchange which will also be passed on to consumers, so now an extra 7% of your premium will go to the Federal government to pay for their exchanges and rate review programs.\n\n(5) Mandated benefits. Traditionally small business groups and individuals buy down into leaner benefits, and small businesses usually hold leaner benefits than larger groups. You will now be mandated to hold certain levels of coverage (60% actuarial value, $2000 deductible etc.) and that your insurer cover certain things. Due to this, a common method for business to save on premiums will not only disappear, but will actually force you to buy up into new plans in 2014. Depending on your current plan, I know some groups will see upwards of 20% increases from this piece alone. If you are already compliant, this doesn't matter to you at all, except for maybe a small increase to account for things like women's preventive benefits (about 2%) and some of the mental health stuff (negligible, maybe 0.5% increase). On individual, if you are under 30, essentially you can buy a \"catastrophe\" plan which is not subject to some of these requirements.\n\nSo, the way it works out is that if you are an old, unhealthy, tiny group, in 2014 you will actually see huge rate decreases. Projections indicate some will see 40%+ decreases. On the other hand, if you are a young, healthy, larger group you will see huge increases, again, some groups will receive 40%+ increases. It all depends on where you sit currently and the dynamics of the market as of right now, along with your demographics, current plans, etc. etc.\n\nIn individual insurance, projections are showing that the youngest, healthiest risk will potentially see rates which are two times higher than their current rates due to the regulations, and the premium base as a whole is expected to need a 15% -20% increase in order to cover all the mandates (individual rates will see huge swings due to the mandates).\n\nLastly, the main idea behind the ACA is that increased access to benefits creates increased health, creates less claims, which means slowed premium increases. Unfortunately, in the short term we will experience larger than historical increases due to the deterioration of the risk pool by guarantee issue (and a part from community rating, which even with the mandate will drive some \"good\" risk out of the market). Over the long haul, the hope is that if these people use their benefits, there will be realized savings."
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25e2ox | 'could of' versus 'could have' | I am not a native speaker and I see a lot of people using 'could of done something'
we've been taught, and I believe it is logical to use 'could have done something'
which is a correct form and more importantly WHY?
thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25e2ox/eli5_could_of_versus_could_have/ | {
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"\"Could of\" is incorrect. It means nothing at all.\n\nIt comes around because people get used to saying and hearing the contraction \"could have\" - > \"could've\" and screw it up. It sounds like you're saying \"could of\" so that's how they associate it in their memory.\n\nThis is a pretty good run down: _URL_0_",
"\"Could of\" should never be used, as it doesn't make any sense.\n\nWhen people write \"could of\", what they SHOULD be writing is \"could've\", a contraction of could and have. \n\nIf you see could of / should of/ would of, it is never proper. ",
"\"have\" is correct.\n\n\"could of\" is really nonsensical if you consider the meaning of the words.",
"Well done for knowing the right way despite English not being your native tongue. \"Could of\" is one of my pet hates. I have very nearly defriended people on FB because of that. Urgh. So horrible!",
"\"Could of\" is used by semi-illiterates who sound out words in their head when they write. Same deal with incorrect usage of your/you're and there/their/they're. ",
"'Could have' is the correct form. 'Could of' is a corruption of the contraction of 'could have,' 'could've.' Don't use 'could of,' because it'll make you look like a dumbass."
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2p7e7h | why does older music sound so warm and cozy? | Was it something they were doing? Was it vaccum tubes vs. whatever we have today? Listening to "Our House" by CSNY and it makes me warm all over. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p7e7h/eli5why_does_older_music_sound_so_warm_and_cozy/ | {
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"Its a mix of the format, style and nostalgia.\r\rThe format of Analog recording (tape) and analog storage (vinyl) naturally lose a bit of high end during recording, and often industry standard microphones such as the Shure SM57/58 have a slight mid hump, which all add to the warm sound.\rOpposed to this nowadays digital recording is crisp as needed and all sorts of digital jiggery pokery is done to it to make a rather sterile, at times, sound.\r\rThe style which CSNY used for Our House contributes to it too. Using a harpsichord playing a pleasant non-standard chord progression and using vocal harmonies, along with the lyrical themes makes the piece sound homely, which one associates with warmth.\r\rYou can put nostalgia down as an element of the era and what the lyrics makes you think of.\r\rBest answer I can think of.\r\rsource: Studying Music and Music Technology in Tertiary education."
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e6wjte | why sometimes i get small cuts/bruises without noticing getting hurt or any sort of signal from my body? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e6wjte/eli5_why_sometimes_i_get_small_cutsbruises/ | {
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"I often get cuts on my hands and don't notice until I leave a blood trail on something, so I'm looking forward to the explanation as well!",
"I can think of two main factors for this, they may be others I'm not aware of. \n\n\nLet's clarify some things first : the feeling of pain comes (when everything works \"correctly\") from sensor cells on your skins. Those cells can detect when they are compressed too much, heaten, etc. When that happens, they send a signal through the nerve, that can then reach the brain. The brain processes the output from of those thousands of cells, and \"decide\" how to interpret it. You feel pain if the level of alert of the brain goes above a certain threshold, if you will.\n\n \nNow on the first factor: Even though we have a lot of those sensor cells, especially on the skin, they can be everywhere. If you get a very clean cut, with a thin piece of paper, for example, it is possible that this cut doesn't affect any sensor cells, or not enough of them to reach the required alert level. Later, though, the damages of the cut can spread a bit (blood start flooding through it, pushing the cells around, etc), and then you might start feeling the pain.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSecond, the brain can ignore pain signals if you are focused on something else. The requirement for the pain to reach consciousness change a lot depending on situation. If you are very focused on something, your brain might just \"decide \" : *ok, there is some alert signal here, but we have higher priority right now. Better not bother mister big boss consciousness with that*. That is the kind of things at play when people do not feel pain or cold under hypnosis, but it's also quite strong in more casual life. Adrenaline can also play a big part in this. If you are in a rush, because you are in a dangerous situation, pain can easily be dismissed on the moment (and you'll feel it later, when you get more quiet)."
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avkkar | what is an electrolyte and how does adding it to water makes it taste better? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avkkar/eli5_what_is_an_electrolyte_and_how_does_adding/ | {
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" > What is an electrolyte...\n\n[Its what plants crave](_URL_0_).\n\nMore seriously: electrolytes are just simple biologically relevant inorganic salts. Simple biologically relevant inorganic salts generally have flavors – you are certainly familiar with the flavor of table salt (sodium chloride), but there are many others as well with very different tastes. A lot of the magnesium salt based electrolytes have a slightly \"tangy\" flavor to them. They taste good because these ions are necessary for you body to perform vital functions, so we have evolved for them to be tasty to us."
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2slvir | when i see an ad for a tv that has better quality than mine, how does the tv from the ad look like it has better quality than the tv i'm watching it the ad on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2slvir/eli5_when_i_see_an_ad_for_a_tv_that_has_better/ | {
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"I've wondered this before, too. I'm guessing they desaturate and reduce the contrast of the \"real life\" stuff and then crank up the saturation and contrast of the televised stuff (in the advertised television's screen, I mean). Just a guess though.",
"The people who made the ad carefully picked footage which would actually look good on any TV. This makes the TV in the ad look like very good quality, in comparison to the average-looking footage used elsewhere in the rest of the ad.",
"They make bright, rich and colourful adverts and are usually upbeat.\n\nWhenever you go to buy a TV they always do that. They usually have an animation on the TV as well because the comparatively simple designs look good on all TVs and they're always bright and colourful which looks better visually across more TVs than having live action and it covers up screen tearing, motion problems and any other issues the TV has that they don't want you to know.",
"I remember an ad for a TV where they actually pointed out that you can't see how good said TV was with the crappy TV your watching the ad with. ",
"You are right. Your TV can´t show a picture that is better than the picture it is able to show...\n\nIts a bit different for the related topic of HD-TV channels... In germany for example they broadcast ads for the HD-channels in actual HD on non-HD channels, just to seduce you.",
"Well, its a matter of the content itself not always being broadcast at full red (especially live sports), combined with lots and lots of post. Things saved for videogames normally, like antialiasing is applied prebroadcast. Also, most commercials these days are entirely CG, look at some showreels from the mill. Since no physical objects are involves, you cab make it look really nice.",
"Similarly, I had to make ads for a sports network launching HD channels, the ads though would be aired on the standard definition networks. \n\nThrough various informal sample studies, we determined that extreme slow motion footage (shot with a Red at 500fps or 100fps) with saturation and contrast cranked up works best to get the perception of higher quality HD footage across, even on a low res TV.\n",
"When I was a kid, and DVD players were starting to go mainstream, I never understood how they could show a DVD quality preview on my VHS movies.",
"If they showed you a TV that's screen area was 1/4th the area of your 1080p HD screen, they could show you what 4K looked at that screen size. They aren't showing you the entire picture that that TV could reproduce on your entire screen, but rather, a small area of screen.\n\nThat said, it also looks better because of them making the image on that screen look more vivid and striking, among other techniques to make it more visually appealing. Because there is no absolute scale of \"quality\" of a TV, they can use visual tricks and marketing strategies to make you believe the TV looks better.",
"Very simple. They lessen the quality of the rest of commercial in subtle ways to trick your eyes into thinking that the TV is higher quality than what you have now. Watch the commercial on an old CRT television, and it will still only be CRT quality. You can't magically upscale a TV to 1080p.",
"Related question: why do the shows I play through my Chromecast look better than shows from other sources (satellite, computer etc)?",
"If you are seeing 'better' quality on an advertised product, viewed through your television, then you are seeing that picture quality reproduced by your television.\n\nAs others have mentioned, it's just marketing gimmickery, and is likely showing colors that 'pop' on the advertised TV.\n\nThis is similar to the TVs that are on display in stores. They often have picture settings that are meant for the store floor, and these are $#!+ for actually watching TV.\n\nTrue color reproduction, saturation values, and contrast are unfortunately rare to find in people's homes. Most people don't properly calibrate their TVs when they get them home. This is probably only worth it for high-quality video and high-quality equipment (because professional calibration is expensive), but there are tons of resources online where people can share settings for specific TV models to closely achieve results (as much as possible) from professional calibration, or just from trial-and-error that contributors have generously shared."
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a0cf6m | why does the european gdpr mean i'm not allowed to view some american based websites? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a0cf6m/eli5_why_does_the_european_gdpr_mean_im_not/ | {
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"It means that this website is not compliant to the GDPR regulations and choosing to operate in the EU would likely result in a fine for that company.\n\nRather than modify their site to comply with the regulations, or possibly because it's in progress, they've decided to simply disable access to the site from the EU.\n\nSpecifically that website does not have the infrastructure in place to comply with GDPR requirements like the \"right to be forgotten\" (ie they can't go into their database to delete your info on request), the site doesn't have a prompt for cookies, and other requirements.",
"Usually it’s the “right to be forgotten” aspect. It’s a real PITA even for legitimate stuff. It’s raised questions for us in regards to software development as git uses names and email in the history. Not saying it’s the exact same issue for web sites, but that one part is the real core of the difficulty. Basically, America said “fuck it, easier to not deal with Europe.” As an American, I think GPDR has good intent, but a little heavy handed."
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2o75d9 | public domain laws | Everything, and I mean everything, on the internet about this is completely archaic. Thank you for helping!
-When does something enter the public domain?
-Can you then sell it?
-Examples?
*Interested in starting my own brand and would like to know if I can use old pieces of art to highlight on items | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o75d9/eli5_public_domain_laws/ | {
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"I'm not a lawyer but here is my understanding.\n\nIf a piece of intellectual property is in the public domain, no one owns it, and you are free to use it as you please, as if you owned it -- but you cannot stop anyone else from using it as they please. You may copy and reuse it. You may sell copies if people are silly enough to pay you for them. You may modify it."
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4phbij | why is lightning "forked"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4phbij/eli5why_is_lightning_forked/ | {
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"There are several [slow-motion .gifs](_URL_0_) or [collections of youtubes](_URL_1_) of how lightning is formed that help illustrate it, but\n\nTwo objects, often a super-excited cloud and the ground, or two separate parts of a cloud, build up massive differences in electrical potential, with one having a comparatively large \"positive\" charge (not enough electrons) and the other having a comparatively large \"negative\" charge (too many electrons). This can happen in the same way you can create static by scuffing your feet on a carpet, except it's ice or water droplets in the cloud that create the friction.\n\nOpposites attract in both a magnet and in electricity. So in the same way a magnet's north pole will attract another magnet's south pole, the two charged regions will reach out to each other and try to meet to equalize and exchange their electrons.\n\nBut there's a problem: insulation. Air is not a good conductor of electricity. BUT ionized air (air with an electrical charge) IS a good conductor. So one charged region tries to burrow through the air by ionizing it as it reaches out to the other opposite-charge region. This burrowing forms a potential pathway.\n\nBut this path isn't perfect - sometimes it veers in a jerk, and sometimes it splits, or forks. We're not quite sure why, but it does.\n\nBut when that bridge connects to the other charged region, BOOOM. Suddenly you have your bridge and there's a place for all that pent-up electricity to flow and equalize the charge. Naturally it follows the bridge, sometimes including its jags and forks, as it bleeds that charge away from as much of a region as is connected. Sometimes that's a huge fan-shaped flash across a giant portion of the cloud, and sometimes it's just a single nearly-straight bolt that connects to the ground. \n\n(Yes, it's more complex than that and there's a lot more science, but this is ELI5)\n\n"
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fwzdr0 | why is compressed air warm while compressed carbon dioxide is cold? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fwzdr0/eli5_why_is_compressed_air_warm_while_compressed/ | {
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"All gases heat up when you compress them, and cool off when they expand. Your can or bottle of compressed CO2 has had plenty of time to reach room temperature, and cools down whenever you release gas from it. The tank of your air compressor however, is still warm from being compressed to begin with. \n\n_URL_0_"
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5poeby | if our body regenerates itself, why is the condition of our organs, skin, lungs etc accumulative | For example, I read that our lungs are six weeks old at their oldest. Why isn't their condition regenerated as well? I've heard it can take as long as 10 years for your lungs to heal after quitting smoking. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5poeby/eli5_if_our_body_regenerates_itself_why_is_the/ | {
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"I'm not sure where you got this information from, but it's wrong. Your lungs don't heal from smoking. If you quit smoking, your cancer risks and heart disease risk will approach that of a non-smoker, but it won't be the same. Your lung function, however is not going to get better.\n\nAn organ is more than a collection of cells. Some of the cells may regenerate and some may not but there is also a very delicate architecture that enables the cells to function as an organ unit. *One* of the things smoking does is destroy this architecture. The lungs lose their elasticity. The airways can't expel the air out, become distended, further damaged and fall apart. They are no longer as good at getting oxygen. The blood vessels that were in these destroyed parts of the lung are lost. This puts further strain on your heart. It doesn't matter if some of the cells can regenerate. The damage goes well beyond the cells and into extracellular matrix and structure of the organ itself. (If you chop off a leg, the skin cells can regenerate, even bone cells can lay down new bone, but neither of them are going to recreate a whole knee leg feet and toes).\n\nChronic irritation from cigarette smoke also damges the lining of the airways themselves. It destroys the cells that help clean your airway out. It increases the population of mucous cells which clog airways and cause more damage. Etc.\n\nQuitting smoking is not going to reverse much of this damage. If you take a former smoker's lungs out of their chest, it doesn't matter how long ago they quit. They're black and filled with tar."
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1ecgeo | why a company as big and rich as oracle bundle crapware with java | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ecgeo/eli5_why_a_company_as_big_and_rich_as_oracle/ | {
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"Imagine Bill Gates is walking down the road, there's a $10 at his feet. He is exceptionally rich, but he still bends down to pick the money up. Money is still money, and Oracle wants to make as much as possible. \n\n\nNow, as to the crapware: Oracle makes most of its money off support for the products it provides. That support is sold to businesses, not end users (you or I). That means they don't make much money off of end users. So, Ask! (or whatever they're bundling now) says, if you put our software with your software, we'll give you $5 for every 1000 downloads. Oracle now makes money from people that didn't bring them money previously. \n\n\nThe good news is Oracle is reputable and they allow you to not install the bundled stuff. When you opt-out they don't go ahead and install anyway. "
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6071ou | how exactly does mass energy equivalence work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6071ou/eli5_how_exactly_does_mass_energy_equivalence_work/ | {
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"What is mass? To us, it's \"stuff\". But to physicists, mass is just something that has inertia (i.e. it needs a force to get it moving, and a force to make it stop). Turns out that energy has inertia as well. Now granted, you need a TON of energy to start to make it feel like an appreciable amount of mass, but it does happen, and is especially observable on particle level scales."
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1o0p8p | if we were raised being told that flowers and perfume don't smell good and things like poop and trash smell good would that change our sense of smell? | Or would we eventually change our mind and decide farts and poop stink? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o0p8p/eli5_if_we_were_raised_being_told_that_flowers/ | {
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"It may be possible to condition us to enjoy \"bad\" smells, but I'm not sure it would be easy. Our concepts of \"bad smell\" and \"good smell\" aren't social constructs; they're a biological phenomena used to keep us away from toxic, dangerous, or rotting foods, and steer us towards safe stuff",
"Think of it this way. Have you ever encountered a smell that you were not familiar with, nor could you be sure of the origin? When you experienced that odor, I'm sure you either thought it smelled good or bad. So, just by that experience, you should realize that there is a general good or bad smell to objects, regardless of conditioning.",
"no, we are repulsed by the smell of poop and trash as an evolutionary response saying \"dont eat or handle that, you will get sick\""
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31ew4b | if the olympics is known to leave a country/city at a loss financially most of the time, then why does anywhere host the olympics? | I dont understand why anywhere would spend billiins on building the neccessary infrastructure for the Olympics when most of it will have little use after the event and leave then at a huge financial loss. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31ew4b/eli5_if_the_olympics_is_known_to_leave_a/ | {
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"It's prestige and a show of (financial) power. It's a great excuse for any country (or government) to celebrate itself. Additionally, everyone always claims the benefits will outweigh the costs in the end.",
"The infrastructure isn't always unused. Sydney has managed to make use of most of the stuff they built for the 2000 Olympics.\r\rBeyond that, some cities use the Olympics as a chance to advertise themselves. This is the case in Sochi, which is typically considered a summer destination by Russians. China used the Beijing Olympics in a similar way, to promote themselves to the Western world.\r\rThere's also the fact that not everything always goes to plan. The Montreal Olympics famously lost the city a lot of money, they borrowed a lot to build stadiums they couldn't fill after the Olympics left, despite their initial predictions.\r\rBeyond this, many cities are wary of hosting the Olympics due to the potential cost, especially the winter games, where things like the bobsleigh run are expensive to construct and have very little potential for use outside the games.",
"It's a loss for the city / government but it's a massive gain for the International Olympic Comittee, the sponsors and whoever is tasked to build all this infrastructure.\n\nIt's basically public money going down the drain so it can make some private companies richer and ... well, if you're in office, you don't do that kind of thing without expecting some return, do you ? :)",
"See [this](_URL_0_) article by The Economist.\n\n\nIn short hosting the Olympics is popular with voters / the general public (who ultimately foot a lot of the bill) - that is both before, during and after the games. \n\n\nCynics like to put it down to lining the pockets of businessmen and politicians but ultimately public support is generally pretty good for these events (even if there are vocal pockets of people questioning the excessive costs)",
"The ability to show off your city and country to the world is worth the financial loss. It's one giant tourism video.\n\nIt's like the city is selling itself for a loss for the overall gain in image, just like how companies sell things at losses all the time. ",
"Why did Alexander conquer what he conquered? Surely, Macedonia alone was enough of a kingdom for any one man. His family was surely as rich as any, he could have anything, food, wine, women. He could have lived his life as King and been as happy as any man could be. Yet he conquered. He wanted to be MORE powerful, he wanted his nation to be the most powerful the most wealthy, the most opulent. However, in reality wars are expensive, many states are ruined by their pursuit of the goal of being the next Alexander, the next Rome. But when they start out, everything looks good and sunny. \n\nYou are asking why nation states do what they do, why do they wage war, why do they build monuments, why does Dubai constantly build taller and taller buildings? Why did King Louis of France build Versailles? Surely a palace whose FOUNTAINS required the reworking of the entire Paris water infrastructure was overkill, was a bad financial investment, yet he built it. Why? Power, prestige, ego. Pursuit of these things starts out sunshine and lollipops, but the grim reality only becomes clear in hindsight. \n\nThe 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was almost a massive financial bust, it wasn't because the wonders there brought in massive bucks, but it almost flopped, it was barely finished in time. Yet when the idea was pitched the people of Chicago went apeshit, they fought and fought until they beat New York and St. Louis for the honor of hosting an event that could have bankrupted the city. It was the honor, the prestige that drew them to it. Chicago had little man syndrome, New York didn't take them seriously, they wanted to show the world they were a REAL city dammit. \n\nThe nations that fight the hardest for the Olympics nowadays are nations that want SO BADLY to be taken seriously. China, Russia, middle eastern nations like the UAE and Qatar. Sure, the big nations, the REAL nations like the USA throw in their hat as a matter of principle, but they don't really want it. Nations that want to be taken seriously host the Olympics, they sell it to the people as a good investment, but the people at the top just want to be able to stroke their ego and power boner.\n\nTL;DR: The nations that want to host the Olympics want the world to take them seriously, their massive egos can't take that they aren't old money like France, or bigshots like the USA. The political leadership doesn't care about money, they want a legacy, they want to be remembered as being the leaders of REAL countries. ",
"Because it makes a lot of money for the real estate developers and construction moguls that tend to lead the the planning committees that submit the official bids."
]
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[],
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bitpwl | do photons exist in just visible light, or are they part of all the other frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum? | We commonly hear about photons in the context of visible light. For example, here is a photo sensor that can [detect a single photon hitting it](_URL_0_).
& #x200B;
But light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is continuous from low-frequency radio waves to high-frequency gamma waves. So are photons part of *all* of these electromagnetic waves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bitpwl/eli5_do_photons_exist_in_just_visible_light_or/ | {
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"Yes. All electromagnetical radiation are photons. Is is also a force carrier in magnetic or electric fields in the form of a virtual particle.",
"Exactly. Photons have a wavelength, and the wavelength determines what we label that particular part of the electromagnetic spectrum. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nPhotons, electromagnetic waves that we call light have a wavelength between 400 and 700 nanometers. Radio waves have a wavelength of greater than 1 meter. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nCheck out... [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)",
"Yup, photons are the same when they're in radio waves, visible light waves, x-rays. It's all light, we just happen to be able to see some of it.",
"Photons are the electromagnetic field. Everytime something happens with EM, it was photons that were sent out or came in. \n\nImagine the sea. The water is the EM-field, the photons are the drops of water. If you pour water into the sea, or a river flows into it - photons. If the waves knock you over at the beach - photons. \n\n > But light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is continuous from low-frequency radio waves to high-frequency gamma waves. \n\nSome photons have low energy. Those are radio waves of all kinds (and very low frequency waves we did not give an extra name for), then come photons with more energy, those are microwaves. Then photons we call infrared, then red ones, orange ones, green ones, blue. Note the photons have no color but just start to trigger the various receptors in your eyes. Then more energetic photons make up harder and ever harder UV-radiation. Give the photons more energy and you get X-rays, gamma rays and finally very, very seriously super-hard gamma rays. \n\nThe energy of a photon determines how it reacts or not-reacts with different kinds of matter. Some interact a lot with matter (and are absorbed), others react little with matter and go mostly right through some types of matter (for example gamma rays, radio waves).\n\n\"Matter\" here can also react very differently, water for example is relatively good at aborbing all kinds of photons (visible light gets rather well through, radio waves not so much), while your drywall will totally block all kinds of visible light within a very short distance (a millimeter already absorbs a lot) your radio-wave-Wifi or some Alien-Invader's Gamma-Ray-Gun is not that much interested in it."
]
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"https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171218090942.htm"
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2jc32l | what makes people shout when they are angry? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jc32l/eli5_what_makes_people_shout_when_they_are_angry/ | {
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"Anger is stress. Stress tends to trigger your \"fight or flight\" instinct. Verbal fighting, instinctively, is roaring. So, we \"roar\" to gain/show dominance over a threat."
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||
56bdze | how does caste discrimination work? | I've read the other Indian caste eli5, but I'm still kind of stumped on how this caste discrimination thing works. Is it racial? Do different castes have different genetic makeups?
I was also reading some literature from R. Radhakrishnan, and he said India did not have racial lines like in the United States, so I am further confused if it is not racially based. (That is how it worked in Philippine colonial caste systems, at least.)
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56bdze/eli5_how_does_caste_discrimination_work/ | {
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"Casteism is a religious and social phenomenon and in Hinduism it appeared with the advent of vedic period some 3800 years ago. The demographic is divided into 4 main castes known as Brahmins, Kshatriyas, vaishyas, and sudras.\n\nIn Hinduism society is divided into these four groups whose membership is determined by birth. It's a very rigid system and an individual is not allowed to switch caste. The only way to move up and down the ladder of this hierarchy is inter-caste marriages and it is for this exact reason that they are so frowned upon in the Indian society. If someone from your family marries a person of low caste, then your status in your community goes down. Race have absolutely nothing to do with casteism, it's a whole different phenomenon and is widely practiced in India."
]
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4nox4o | why did the snes and ps1 end up with games that had better graphics and performence than the genesis and saturn even though on paper they had less cpu power. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4nox4o/eli5_why_did_the_snes_and_ps1_end_up_with_games/ | {
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"Because they had better designed games. They had games with vision. And it's more about aesthetics than graphics, and knowing how to make something look good and run smooth. \n\nBetter games make better consoles, not power and graphics. ",
"Ingenuity and technical prowess.\n\nSNES in particular had specially designed chips that actually went into the cartridges after the SNES core system was developed that were able to boost the overall capabilites of the system itself and render items that would appear to be 3D even. Games that truly accomplished this and improved upon the system were like Donkey Kong, Yoshi's Island and Starfox, where the abilities created for use were amplified by use of specialized chips and software.\n\nThe SNES and PS1 were technological behemoths in their own right, and even though the Sega models had more power, the developers did less with them and were not using the system to its fullest extent.",
"The Saturn used two CPUs instead of one. Even today, software still has trouble working with more than one CPU (in the case of home users a CPU core). Multi-processor programming was not something many developers could do back then. Sega killed the Saturn the very day it launched by having a surprise launch, so surprising game developers and retailers didn't know the launch was pushed forward. It was supposed to launch in September 1995 but they decided to launch it during E3 in May of that year. Just by doing that they cut the number of developers willing to make games for the Saturn and retailers willing to carry the Saturn.\n\nFor the SNES, while it the clock rate was slower but the graphics hardware was more powerful. It could display more colors and sprites than the Genesis, the sprites could also be bigger. Some later SNES games, like Yoshi's Island and Star Fox, included a extra processing chip on the cartridge. Here's a site that looks like it's from Geocities comparing the specs. _URL_0_",
"so what does it mean to have a faster chip? it mean you can do calculations faster...which if both can refresh at 60 or 30 fps whatever they decide looks best a faster clock speed isn't going to get you better graphics (remember we are working with pixel art here, not vectors or polygons) but some things that will: number of possible colours (SNES had 32,768 (16 bit colour) genesis had 512 (9 bit colour...that's weird...)) this is a much bigger color pallet and allows for more shading giving more depth and vibrance to a sprite. add to that the SNES could have more colours on the screen at one time (8 bits vs 6 or 256 vs 64) as well as more sprites on the screen at once (128 vs 80) larger possible sprites (64x64 vs 32x32) meaning more room for details, higher display resolution (up to 512x224 vs 32x224) and more overall ram (128 KB vs 64 KB) and this isn't including mode 7 for transforming sprites (scaling, rotating, shearing) mostly because it was VERY limited (could only be used on the background layer for instance...did look nice on ALttP's map screen..think it was used for some other games to give a 2.5d...lot of airplane games...)\n\nbasically everything that would make for visuals on the SNES were better than on the genesis. that being said, the genesis still had many visually beautiful games and the SNES had some really horrible looking games. and vice versa. few people would say sonic the hedgehog didn't looks frikken sweet. personally i just view them as different, not one better than the other...just different flavours.",
"Also sega only cared about dumping as many games as possible becuase they were ALWAYS working on a new console. New console drops, boom - no more games for the last console.. Count the platforms they produced.. 90s gamers were kinda suckers, no video reviews besides a handful of mags/tv shows",
"A lot of developers noted that the PS1 was very easy to develop for, but systems like the N64 were very difficult to develop for. So it was easier to optimize a game and get better graphics and performance on the PS1, which led to Sony dominating that generation (continuing into the PS2).\n\nThe PS3 was difficult to develop for, and Sony lost a lot of their market share during the first few years of the PS3 because the 360 was easier to develop for."
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1r3lqm | how organized are traffic lights? | To what extent are traffic lights scrutinized?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r3lqm/eli5_how_organized_are_traffic_lights/ | {
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"It varies quite a lot.\n\nIn some places there are sophisticated computer control systems which measure traffic and adjust timing on lights across the entire network to keep traffic flowing. These systems are configured by urban engineering professionals who are educated by people who make their living studying how these systems behave.\n\nIn other places each intersection is on a fixed timer programmed by the guy who installed it forty years ago based on a drunken guesstimate of how often he would need to make a left-hand turn at this intersection balanced against the likelihood of a politician breathing down his boss's neck because people are unhappy with the wait."
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1oa2oa | how can fast food chains get away with paying staff such a low wage? | I've just always wondered why some fast food chains pay so little compared to other jobs that require little experience as well. Is there any particular reason for this or is just a generalisation? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oa2oa/eli5_how_can_fast_food_chains_get_away_with/ | {
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"The government sets the minimum wage, the fast food chains simply follow this. After that it is about supply and demand. They can pay people so little because people are willing to work for $8 ph. If they couldn't find workers they would have to raise the wage. Similarly if there was no minimum wage and they had loads of applications they would probably lower the wage."
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avah26 | why is k9 pee so yellow even if the k9 has had lots of water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avah26/eli5_why_is_k9_pee_so_yellow_even_if_the_k9_has/ | {
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"So this actually applies to most species as far as i know. \n\n\nUrine is a solution of waste materials such as urea and water from the body, and it just so happens that the amounts of said things are what turn urine yellow. \n\nEven well hydrated our urine is still yellow, just as with pretty much most other species, that's just how urine is. In fact, clear urine is usually an indicator of overhydration and your body is working overtime to get rid of the excess water. Other things can change the color of urine as well, there is a disease that can change urine blue, some infections can turn it green, red if blood is in the urine, and more types of cloudy than I can count. However, healthy urine is still a light yellow color.\n\nI would assume for the most part that outside of major outliers that this would apply to our k9 companions as well."
]
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b4qkn5 | how do we know the what the large scale structures of the universe look like? | Can we see filaments and voids, or are they known through computer modelling? In other words, do we have "pictures" of things like intergalactic filaments? Cluster and super cluster architecture, etc? The scale is so enormous, and the distances so vast, I can't imagine we have anything like a picture of these structures. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b4qkn5/eli5_how_do_we_know_the_what_the_large_scale/ | {
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"Certain telescopes, like the Hubble Telescope, can see them. So they just snap pictures off. \n\nI think I might be confused by the question. I'm sorry. \n\nEdit: Spelling",
"We have pictures, sort of. These things can't be seen in the visible spectrum, they are way too far away and way too faint. but they can be detected. Computers translate the information into a form that is similar to what we would expect to see if it was possible to see it.\n\nThe main method used to find this super faint stuff is radio astronomy, along with other forms of non-visible electromagnetic radiation that holds up far better than the stuff in the visible spectrum.\n\n_URL_0_ This page is pretty basic, but it does have a few good examples of how much more we can see using these methods, compared to more visible forms of radiation.\n\nIf you want much more information than this though, you should ask the r/askscience folks.",
"I once read this article about [galactic supercluster Laniakea](_URL_0_) in Scientific American, and it made me feel so small I had to stop and hang on to the table. The sheer scale of these observations is mind blowing, but they cover some of the methodology in that article. Large scale observations and massive computational modeling are a big part of it.",
"The best way to find these structures are through massive all, or almost all, sky surveys like SDSS, 2MASS etc... You create a catalog of all detected objects in the images. You can estimate distances to them through several different methods, some more precise, some less, some don't even get you an absolute distance just the relative one between the objects. Now you have a 3D map of these objects, plus minus their uncertainties. Then something called [Delaunay tessellation](_URL_1_) is performed. Essentially the goal is to represent all the objects as dots in 3D space and connect all the dots, but(!) in such a way that no closed volume contains a dot. With some math it turns out that the sizes of the sides of the volumes tell you something about the estimated density inside that volume. With some extra approximations, usually linear, you can estimate how the density field looks like. \nNow since this was a bit complicated, here's the gist of it: you saw a bunch of separated points, and you know there are probably more points between them that you can't see, so you do clever math and instead of individual discrete points you try and estimate what the expected density is. This is different because density is telling you something about how many points do you expect to see there, not how many did you actually see, even though the created density distribution was informed by the dots you did observe. \n\n[This](_URL_3_) is full dataset from 2dF spectroscopic survey as shown on wikipedia. Every point is a galaxy. Not really revealing, is it? Then after density estimation its easier to see the objects like [this wiki example](_URL_0_). But if you're careful enough then you can find a slice in the data that looks really similar to the density like [this plot](_URL_2_). So, to answer your question, yes we can see them, but no, most of them are not photographed and then 'visually discovered'. This galaxy 3D distribution is also referred to as the galaxy power spectrum.\n\nYou also have to keep in mind that for the most part these structures are also pretty empty. The distances between galaxies in clusters and inside these structures is still pretty large. Think of it like that comparison of an atom scaled to a football field where the nucleus only turns out to be about the size of a marble at the center, leading many to say that atoms are mostly empty space. If you had a telescope and took a picture in the direction of one of these structures, that picture would look like any other starry picture telescopes take of the sky - dots on a background with maybe some smudges. Smudges would probably be some gas structures in our galaxy, a lot of those dots would be stars in our own galaxy and some dots will be other galaxies. There would be nothing there indicating you're looking at anything special really. So, to answer your question I guess, no - we can't see them. \n\nThere are other ways large scale structures area measured. For example measuring the [2 point correlation function](_URL_4_) but they all mostly boil down to trying to infer, somehow, what is the underlying distribution of galaxies and this ties into how universe began, why and how galaxies formed. "
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/2dfgrs.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_function_(astronomy)"
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btucjo | how can double jeopardy be enforced if you can have a “first” trial multiple times as in the case of curtis flowers? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/btucjo/eli5_how_can_double_jeopardy_be_enforced_if_you/ | {
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"~~The double jeopardy rule only applies when the accused is actually aquitted in trial.~~\n\n > Jeopardy attaches after a conviction, and acquittal, or a dismissal after the trial jury has been sworn (or after the first witness has been sworn in a bench trial).\n\nOJ was found not guilty by the jury hence the rule applies.\n\nCurtis Flowers was found guilty 4 times, three of which were later overturned for misconduct and twice it ended in a mistrial where the jury simply could not agree on a verdict. He was never found 'not guilty' so the rule does not apply."
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1kvd3f | where did the stereotypical image of the halloween witch come from? | I'm curious, as I've no idea how the image of a witch as an ugly crone wearing black with warts on her face, long nose, broom and pointy hat came from.
It must have come from somewhere, surely? :/ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kvd3f/eli5_where_did_the_stereotypical_image_of_the/ | {
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"From the Wicked Witch of the West, from The Wizard of Oz. Seriously. Much like our modern depiction of Santa Claus as a jolly and tubby old white guy with a long white beard and dressed in a night gown (at least in North America) comes from the old Coca-Cola Christmas-themed advertisement. ",
"The idea of witches riding brooms is hundreds of years old. Otherwise, witches in history were depicted as regular looking women (or realistically ugly women, not mnosters).\n\nThe green skin, long pointy nose, and regular witches hat come from ~~Dorothy~~ Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939). \n\nPrior to that film, the Wicked Witch of the West was short, squat, one-eyed and had a big bulbous nose and a either an extremely tall pointy cap covered in decorations (the book's illustrations) or a floppy Papa Smurf stocking cap (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910))."
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2dj3m4 | how is fish oil produced? | It seems strange to me that you can get oil from a fish, consume this oil and benefit healh wise. Obviously baby oil is made from crushed babies but I want to know everything about fish oil.
1) What is it
2) What part of the fish is the oil made from
3) How is it produced
Thanks!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dj3m4/eli5_how_is_fish_oil_produced/ | {
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"Fish remains are pressed until all the juices come out, and then pushed through a sieve to make sure there are no particulates in it. The remaining liquid is an oil and water mix, which is then left to evaporate. Water and oil do not mix, so after all the water has been removed you now have fish oil."
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28pzz6 | why can an animal poop and not wipe and be perfectly fine, but a human must wipe or endure "the rash from hell?" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28pzz6/eli5_why_can_an_animal_poop_and_not_wipe_and_be/ | {
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"Animals squat whilst pooping, which makes the entire process a lot cleaner. \n\nWe prefer the luxury of sitting, but that doesn't nearly spread our cheeks apart as much and makes a mess. ",
"If you get enough fiber and squat when you poop, you can get away without wiping. Or so I've heard.",
"I've done much research on this. 1) Splashback. You must break the surface tension in the water by putting a piece of toilet paper in the toilet before you drop the deuce. [Here is a cool paper clip experiment about surface tension](_URL_2_) 2) As mentioned below, squatting will get your buns son more spread apart where shit doesn't touch them when the [payload is delivered](_URL_0_). 3) We generally eat fucking garbage, mcdonalds, a donut, three candy bars, a cupcake, the 12 beers for lunch I just had yesterday. Our shit is like a great purge of the garbage we're eating. Dogs eat the same dog food every day with high fiber and their body is very used to processing it. You'll notice their shit comes out [nice and solid](_URL_1_). 4) Dogs also poop in allignment with [Earth's magnetic field](_URL_3_) this has nothing to do with the question but it's interesting.",
"Most mammals (for instance, dogs) actually prolapse their anus slightly - they poke the inside part out a bit. \n\nCats, which don't prolapse their anus, have to lick the shit off their butthole.\n\nEdit: More common questions answered here.\n\nA) People didn't lick their buttholes before TP. They wipe with their hands, then lick those clean (or wash them). Some cultures do this in the modern day and age. Hey, at least they're washing their hands after using the bathroom (talking to you, guys in public washrooms). Personally, I consider it barbaric as fuck to use anything except a bidet.\n\nB) Your dog rubbing his butt on the floor is actually a possible sign that he has worms. Take him to the vet, get him to check your dogs butthole. It's what he's paid for.\n\nC) Yes, I watch a lot of animals poop. Like you don't. \n\nD) Yes, you too can learn this skill. Have fun finding out how, though, or start a second thread. Preferably not in ELI5, as I would feel uncomfortable discussing that with a 5 year old.\n\nE) Diet and posture while pooping can help, but let's not pretend you're going to actually change either of those things. Besides, if you DO learn to prolapse, eventually you'll be able to drop your bowels right down to the water and eliminate that nasty backsplash. Win/Win.\n\nF) Pretty sure the cat tongue is sand-papery for multiple grooming purposes. Either that, or they want their oral sex to be like their PIV. Cats - spikes on everything fun. No wonder they're filled with hate.\n\nG) I don't know why cats don't die from eating their own shit. I just assume it's because it's fresh, or that cats die from it all the time and yours just hasn't yet.\n\nH) Yes, your cat is licking your face after licking it's butthole. That's okay, the Toxoplasm Gondii will make you feel alright about this. But seriously, don't let things lick your face, that's a vector for infection and honestly it's own butthole may be the *least* worst thing your cat has had in it's mouth.",
"Not all animals get away without wiping. And they don't wipe with tp either. Let's just say is one reason some wild animals have bad breath.",
"Because we walk on two legs, we have more developed muscles in our legs and ass, so we have more of a 'crack' than other animals. So that, combined with a diet and dgestive system that does not produce as 'solid' shits as other animals, means we have to wipe.",
"It's all about them buttcheeks",
"Split that ass like buttcheeks",
"It's the price you pay for being a biped. Most animals don't have butt cheeks, so even if there are some dingleberrys they dry up and fall off pretty quickly (or the animal cleans up with its tongue). You, by contrast, have a nasty, sweaty, and maybe hairy butt-crack that is a resort for all kinds of bacteria. The price of all your standing and upright walking is you need to be a little more attentive to hygiene. \n ",
"Clothing prevents stool from drying. Moisture promotes bacteria. In addition, clothing with stool on it rubs against the skin as you move.",
"My dog used to wipe his butt on the carpet.",
"All this talk of butt cheeks. I don't think that has anything to do with it. I spread my cheeks plenty prior to sitting, but that doesn't always do the trick. Alas, unfortunately I have been unable to figure out the correlation between food and clean pooping.",
"I didn't know you get the rash from hell.\n\nI've never not wiped.",
"They don't have buttcheeks. That's why. Just except it",
"Because wild animals don't eat shit like \"little Debbies\" ",
"Don't get me started on how coddled the \rmodern anus is.",
"My bro was sharing an apartment with 3 other dudes in college one semester. One of his roomies was good friends with my bro beforehand but the other two guys were new to him. One of the new guys was cool but the other guy was kind of weird.. always kind of smelled funny, dressed funny, probably his mother did all sorts of alarming things to him as a child. Anyway...\n\nOne day they're all sitting around the living room splitting up expenses. Weird dude says he's fine with paying a share of the milk, coke etc but he shouldn't have to pay for a share of the toilet paper.\n\nEveryone stares at him.\n\nHe says \"I don't use any. I'm a clean shitter.\"",
"Also humans have butt cheeks",
"Shoutouts to Huggies' baby wipes. When I poop, that's what I wipe with. Those Charmin bears don't have a thing on me!",
"Butt cheeks. With our ability to walk upright, we evolved massive glutes. As we have all experienced, friction down there is terrible. Combine that with fecal matter, sweat, and warmth, it creates the perfect environment for a rash. Most animals don't have butt cheeks, so even though most of them can slightly prolapse their anus, as previously commented, there really isn't much that is going on down there that would cause the kind of rash we get. ",
"I was thinking of asking reddit this last week. Thank you so much. ",
"Butt Cheek Smear",
"If you go right cheek first on the seat and slide to the left before dropping the left cheek you may be able to get enough spread to get a clean drop. It's an imperfect method but our diets don't help.",
"You dont need toilet paper when you lick your own ass clean.\n\n\n\nPersonally I would still choose toilet paper.",
"Heh..as a guide who works in a remote sometimes \"no trace\" wilderness setting you should see what happens when city folk are without a bathroom or TP. It really is not much of a problem if you are used too it, moss, leaves, grass, etc. Hand-sani, wash up before you cook etc. If near the sea I just poop right into it, tide and critters will clean it up quick and I can just wash up right there too, still use the hand sani though. We set a designated poop beach, and another area up current for washing up. I always have some TP too, we just burn it after if we use it. One outfit I worked with the guy carried a bucket tiolet with him on his kayak which he paddled out and MTed each morning.",
"[dogs wipe also](_URL_0_) \n[and cats](_URL_1_)",
"Isn't wiping wierd when you think about it? If poop landed on a different part of you skin, would you be fine with cleaning it by wiping said part of skin with paper until the paper came back clean(ish)?",
"I already asked this a month ago and it got less than 10 comments.",
"Diet and pants, humans can eat food that make it almost work and if they did not wear pants it would work.",
"My chihuahua shits outside, then always comes inside and scoots on the carpet to wipe her ass, can't seem to get her to stop... not the brightest dog.",
"My bunny licks its butthole clean. So TP = toilet paper/tongue power. All mammalian pets have licked their buttholes thus far. \n\nWhenever they stop cleaning, they can get all kinds of horrible infections, so they do endure the rash from hell if they don't TP.",
"Fiber. If we had a lot more fiber in our diets we wouldn't have to wipe.",
"This is most appropriate post as I'll guarantee the majority of redditors reading this are, in fact at this very moment, pooping... And wishing as an American, I had a bidet for when I finish. ",
"A giraffe in the wild doesn't eat burritos.",
"I've never had the rash from hell.\n\nBut then I always wipe.\n\nWait a minute, why in fuck's name would you not wipe!?",
"Butt cheeks...no animal except humans have butt cheeks...",
"You never met my dog. Baby wipes every time else he uses a blanket.",
"They prolapse their anus but that doesn't always work and they scoot across your carpet or on the grass to clean themselves. Failing that they will lick themselves clean.",
"Because we stand erect, we have butt cheeks. Butt cheeks hold poop. \nWe also eat processed food and sit on a toilet seat instead of squatting. Oh, and the whole anal prolapse thing someone else mentioned. ",
"I've learned that a diet consisting of mostly animals and vegetables makes cleaning extremely easy. Like two wipes and you're clean kind of easy.\n\nThe moment I add in wheat, corn, fruits and other useless \"food\", wiping takes more effort.",
"Improper defecation posture since the advent of the toilet. Pre-toilet, the posture was more of a [squat](_URL_1_). This position allowed the puborectalis muscle to fully relax and not constrict the rectum, which allows feces to pass swiftly and without much of a mess. During an upright sitting position, the pubrectalis muscle is not fully relaxed, resulting in a partially contricted rectum, which resists a smooth passing of the feces. Here's a [video](_URL_0_) illustrating what I've just said.\n\nEdit - I had the wrong item linked for the video. I think Youtube changed how to copy videos at a particular time. Anyways, it should be fixed now. Video should start at 1:20.",
"Because humans are supposed to poop by squatting *and* have a much more fiber-rich diet. Then things would slide out nicely without needing to wipe. ",
"I don't have any personal experience with not wiping, but I've never heard of this \"rash from hell\"...",
"A. animals don't have massive buttcheeks \nB. animals lick their assholes clean",
"In most asian countries where the toilet is literally a hole in the ground (some with a more fancy hole than the others) are for this reason exactly. The \"proper way\" to shit is to squat as it's better for the colon and as your cheeks are spread you don't have to wipe. Apologies if that was worded dreadfully, but I hope it helps.",
"Walk upright = big butt muscles = messy crack",
"Humans possess a proper buttocks unlike most animals. This protuberant buttocks we've evolved is a consequence of upright bipedal locomotion. Our bipedal locomation has caused the gluteus maximus muscles to become more pronounced in humans than other animals. This also causes our defecation to be a less clean process than in most other animals, especially those that walk on four legs.",
"Because we have butts and most animals just have a hole",
"Edit: posted in wrong thread because I'm smart.",
"their anus's are usually exposed to air while ours are trapped between two giant mounds of fat and muscle called butt cheeks and left to fester in a warm often humid environment that is our clothes. ",
"Just remember, a lot of animals lick their own assholes. ",
"I think it has to with hair around your rectum and also with wearing clothes. Hairy guys can back me up on this, but those ass hairs just trap poop like Kanye West loves talking about himself. That's what they exist for. All those trapped poop particles with the extreme amount of bacteria combined with the sweat of your ass along with the constant movement of said ass just lead to the rash from hell. \n\nThe clothes aspect is that no one wants to get nicknamed as skid marks. ",
"Can I hit the \"report\" link for the people posting that they don't wipe? Jesus Christ.",
"Butt cheeks. Ours touch. Other mammals' are open to the air. ",
"Cows solve this problem by not caring that they're covered in shit.",
"Got in touch with my inner self today...not buying cheap toilet paper again.",
"It's not always perfectly fine. You guys heard of [mulesing](_URL_0_)?\n\n\"Merinos have woolly wrinkles and folds in their skin, which, around the tail and breech area, become moist with urine and contaminated with faeces. Particularly in hot and humid conditions, blowflies are attracted to this moist area where they lay eggs. Eventually the eggs hatch and maggots eat away at the flesh of the live animal — this is flystrike.\"",
"Because butt cheeks",
"I work in care and there are a lot of people out there who live perfectly fine without toilet paper or getting a rash from hell.",
"Did cavemen wipe, or was their lives a never-ending endurance of the rash?",
"Because we have butt-cheeks, most animals don't so there's nothing for the poop to stick to. However, there are a lot of advantages to having an ass over just an asshole. Here's a video if you want to learn more: _URL_0_",
"You know what, buttcheeks is a pretty damn funny word ",
"This was the wrong thread to read while eating.",
"This is an area where westerners just have it wrong ... Wiping doesn't even get close to cleaning ur ass u really need to wash it like Muslims do",
"Because we're meant to squat when we shit",
"Don't even get me started on how coddled the modern anus is\n\nEdit: a word",
"It's because our body is so used to our assholes being clean that it doesn't \"build\" up defenses for it. For example, the tribes in Africa dont wipe their asses, and last time i checked, aside from famine and war, their assholes are fine and dandy. If you stop wiping your ass, the first month would be hell, but afterwards it won't and all you'll have is a shit stained buttcheek.\n#NoWipeNovember2014",
"Growing up on a beef ranch I can tell you why cows don't need to wipe.\n\nIt is because they just let the shit get all over their butts and on their legs and form dingleberries. A lot of times they just walk around with it on them and don't care. \n\nWe care, that is why we wipe.",
"Its how we poop. Animals squat allowing for it too easily slide out. Our sitting compresses the colon and cause ot to squeeze out, leaving poop behind",
"well, if you have a really nice shit, there's barely anything left",
"I just use the three seashells",
"I think maybe the modern humans miserable diet also contributes the mess. I was a vegan for a year and during that time I shit river rocks so clean you could skip them across a lake. I don't think I used even one square of toilet paper in a whole year.",
"This is the consequence of a modern diet low in fiber. Add enough psyllium to your diet and you will produce a product that requires no toilet paper. ",
"You've obviously never had a dog that \"scoots\" across the rug after coming back inside from a poop...\n",
"Not an answer but story time. \n\nMy cousin comes to my house one day and sees my dog for the first time. We chat it up about stupid things for a little while then I tell him im going to walk my dog. When I get to the door with the leesh he tells me I forget the toilet paper... Confused I ask him what he means and he says word for word, \"dont you have to wipe its butt when it poops?\" He was 19 years old. The only response I could think was yelling, \"NIGGA WHEN THE FUCK HAVE YOU SEEN ANYONE BEND DOWN AND WIPE THEIR DOGS ASS WHILE THEY'RE WALKING IT?!\" \n\n(Im black not racist)\n\nEdit: Maybe just a little racist ",
"if we squatted when we shit like we're supposed to it would cut down significantly on the need to wipe ",
"What a retarded way to ask such an interesting question.",
"What a timely post. I sit here on the throne with nothing on the roll... shower time.",
"As someone who has had to cut the poop out of a furry dog's rear end, I can tell you that some animals are NOT perfectly fine wiping...not untill you shave their back side to prevent future incidents.",
"Have you considered that many animals lick their own butts? Wanna try that?",
"Well, we have giant but muscles that envelope our anus and rub back and forth against each other (hence the rash), and most animals have an open butthole without an actual \"butt\", so there is no friction and their butt airs out 24/7",
"...this ISNT in r/shittyaskscience ??",
"But cheeks don't help.",
"If you squat poop you barely have to wipe. It's because we sit with our asses half squished together so it just smears on its way out.",
"I don't know how people just wipe with a dry sheet f tp...I don't feel clean till I used soap and water, it has to be an emergency for me to have to poop in a public or friends house...but even like that, I set the paper and use soap ,I feel like my ass is dirty otherwise ",
"Additional question, why is animal shit good for the environment, but human raw sewage is so bad?",
"When our youngest cat was a kitten, she was booping my husband on the eye while he slept.. and he woke up with pink eye ",
"You're nasty if you don't wash your ass after.\n\nDisgusting ",
"Heh...He doesn't know how to use the three sea shells...",
"Obviously, you've not met my cat.",
"Because our buttholes are buried in a deep hairy canyon surrounded by two fleshy ham-like mountains. ",
"Most animals don't have butt cheeks ",
"Do Americans use bidets? i heard they don't... this intrigues me",
"why do think theyre called animals",
"I don't know about you guys, but I wipe my dog's ass after he drops a deuce. If I don't, my carpet gets dark spots where he sits and rubs his ass into the ground like he's scratching an itchy anus.",
"Hi there- I'm a farmers daughter. Have you ever noticed how lambs have long wiggly tails, but sheep don't? It's because the farmer removes the lambs tail - because if they don't, the animal will usually end up suffering from [fly strike](_URL_0_). What happens is that the tail gets covered in shit, which builds up and attracts flies. The flies [lay eggs in the sheep's wool](_URL_1_) and then they hatch - more often than not you end up with lambs / sheep with maggots that burrow down under the skin, where they [eat the flesh of the still alive sheep or lamb](_URL_2_). So - there's at least one animal I know of that can suffer because of their shit.",
"Any thread where the most common response is \"butt cheeks\" is fine by me.",
"i hate poop",
"Humans physiology demands we squat to shit. If you squat, there's almost NOTHING to wipe. It's healthier for your lower gut as well.",
"Have you never seen a dog scoot his butt across the carpet? he isn't just trying to have fun...\n",
"Two factors, really. \n\nFirst, is diet. Most modern american don't eat enough fiber because not only do we focus on meat as an entree but when we eat plants, or more accurately plant products, there's quite a bit of non-nutritious roughage that we discard. Primitive humans would have eaten more leafy stuff just because it's all over the place. There are products like metamucil you can get to supplement your fiber intake, which you really ought to do if you don't prepare your own meals that often. \n\nSecond, pooping posture. The natural position for humans to poop is on their feet, squatting. When you sit down on a toilet with your feet on the floor, your posture makes it so that there's an unnatural bend in your colon. This can make it so that trying to push out your poop is like trying to squeeze play-doh through a mold. There are products you can buy tailor-made to encourage the proper position, but really you just need something you can rest your feet on while you're doing your business. \n\nIf you do both of these, upping your fiber intake and changing your stance, you'll notice you work less at it, evacuate faster, and cleaning up is quicker and more efficient as well. If you're doing it right, you won't even have to wipe but you'll want to out of habit and just to be sure.",
"The answer is: Chipolte",
"/u/Yanks4825 Baby wipes. From Target. The purple container. Buy them, use them, love them.",
"Pretty much the same reason why we have to brush our teeth. \n\nMost people eat really crappy food.\n\nYou should see the face of people when they see what my dinner is, like raw vegetables and a bit of meat. Their expression says it all.\n\nIf your digestion is actually good, you wont actually have to wipe your butt, i do everytime im on the toilet just to check. But there is rarely anything on the paper. because i eat a lot of fiber.",
"Nothing better than using a bidet. I haven't used toilet paper in years. I have the cleanest ass in Ohio.",
"TIL you can get a rash for not wiping your butt. TI also L that there are some disgusting people on reddit.",
"If your in good shape you shouldn't have to wipe....my friend calls it doing a \"ghosty.\" A person with reasonable genetics and good health should be able to have this nice \"clean\" poo daily. Stool is formed from left over food, liquid and some added waist products. \n\nSome important features: the amount of food eaten, fluid intake, fiber content, muscle tone of bowel (strength of peristalsis), nervous system function, gut flora and the movement of water into and out of the large bowel.\n\nTake psylium husk, eat smaller meals, (not you anorexics) do a bunch of exercise and drink water. For most young people this should be enough to attain ghosty status. It will feel great!\n",
"Can't see it mentioned here but another reason is because if we shit on a man made device. If you were to shit out in the wild you would squat either up against a tree or holding onto a tree. This separates your butt cheeks meaning you don't smear poo between them... Meaning you don't need to wipe. Or lick\n\nGive it a go. It's liberating.",
"We've got big old ass flaps to worry about.",
"If we ate like we did millions of years ago, we wouldn't need toilet paper. We've all had a shit that didn't need a wipe. I'm pretty sure that happened 90% of the time for healthy primitive humans eating the diet they were meant to eat. ",
"They have exposed assholes. Yours are covered in muscle and fat. Your ass. I'm talking about your ass. ",
"You could build up your leg strength enough to squat in the bushes and pry your butt-cheeks apart and use all of your colon strength to rocket it out of you in one go so that there isn't any remnants. While also making sure you have a high fiber diet so that it just shoots out.",
"Soooo...I'm 42...and have yet to poop and not wipe....Who is pooping and not wiping?!?",
"It because we poop wrong... Really. Modern toilets have us In a sitting position. Think a hose bent in the middle. We really should be popping a squat. In fact if you squat on the the toilet not only dose it eliminate the need for toilet paper it makes you poop 30% faster. ",
"Ass cheeks mainly",
"People think I'm weird for wiping my dog after he poops. What they don't realize is that there is always some poop on the tissue. That's the shit that will end up on your pillow if you don't wipe it off. ",
"I just asked my GF, she responded: \"Because they don't have thumbs, idiot.\"",
"I just like to take this moment to say that flushable wipes are a game changer.",
"Obviously because humans are perfectly capable of finding 3 sea shells which somehow clean the anus.",
"Does this mean I should be trimming my buttcrack hair? ",
"Everyone should wipe their dog's butt after they take a dump. It'll make them cleaner and the expression they make is hilarious. ",
"They get rashes too. It's why wild animals are mad all the time. ",
"They lick their own asses...that is their wiping...give it a try?!?!",
"Cause the animals have no choice. They definitely aren't using the three shells.",
"BIG ROUND BEAUTIFUL BUTT CHEEKS!!!!!!!!",
"Cause they lick their parts and we don't!",
"Pretty sure it has a lt to do with what people are saying... But also as omnivores (the only ones that truly take this to heart) we like to make toxic waste soup in our guts compared to other animals. This means our shit is full of some bad crap including some nasty bacteria that really likes human flesh. Whereas animals that eat grass shit nice little compost bricks.\n\nIt's why if you eat healthy for a while you're less likely to get one of these rashes.",
"Most if not all animals \"walk\" on four legs so their butts are expose. While humans we walk in only 2, and our butts are hidden. So if there is something in between it will hurt us. ",
"I love how Romans created a \"sponge on a stick\" device to wipe.. Then after Rome fell humanity entered the dark ages, and you had to use ol' lefty again..",
"It is a result of a conspiracy by \"Big TP\". They convince us through the use of hypnosis that if we don't wipe our butts they will become \"stinky\" and \"itchy\". This conspiracy forces us to spend billions on unneeded Toilet Paper every year. Using TP is unnatural and causes us to catch cancer on our colons. Since we are created in God's image we have to consider that God has a big hairy stinkhole and if we want to be like him we must never wipe. The Koran being an infidel book contains instructions on how to do this so it must be wrong for Christians.",
"Walk around on all 4's, put your rear into the air, feel the breeze, and be rash free."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[
"http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/20/161501413/for-best-toilet-health-squat-or-sit",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tka1jPGMyOs",
"http://www.chem.ufl.edu/~saacs/outreach/Break%20the%20Tension_A%20Water%20Experiment.pdf",
"http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/dogs-poop-in-alignment-with-earths-magnetic-field"
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7vprxUyfU",
"https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cats+wiping+bum+"
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYcv6odWfTM#t=80",
"http://robijanezic.blogspot.si/files/2013/02/Vietnam_2011-04-15_06-31-18__JAL9711_JosephLinaschke2011.jpg"
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[
"http://kb.rspca.org.au/What-is-mulesing-and-what-are-the-alternatives_113.html"
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[],
[
"http://youtu.be/xKg9Vl_Wg5U"
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xl3vb | why isn't mitt romney releasing his tax returns? | I just don't understand why they don't release it & call it a day. Can someone explain the motivation behind not releasing them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xl3vb/eli5_why_isnt_mitt_romney_releasing_his_tax/ | {
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"Remember all the shit Kerry caught from the Republicans? I think he's just trying to avoid that, because the economy is a lot worse than it was then, and it's best not to rub people's nose in how differently rich people are treated in terms of tax code. \n\nIn his own words, “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.” It's probably best not to illustrate to people that what living by that dictum means for the 1% is very different from what it is for working people.\n\nThat said, I don't think he's got anything to hide, but I think he's handling it very badly, and it is hurting his campaign right now, and the separate issue of why he's being so deeply intransigent about it, why it seems to be such an *emotional* issue for both him and Mrs. Romney, is a difficult question to answer, especially since-- if he has his way-- we'll never have all the facts.",
"Simple: He's calculated that the political damage of not releasing his tax returns is less than the political damage of releasing them.",
"I wish liberals would stop picking on Romney.\n\nI mean, it's not like republicans ever hounded Obama to release any sorts of things.",
"There's a lot of speculation, but the main reason appears to be that he will be hurt politically when the average person sees how much he makes and how little he actually pays in taxes. At some point he did some research and found that he'd be hurt less politically if he kept them secret and maintained the scandal rather than release them and give his opposition more ammunition.",
"He doesn't want the church to find out he was short on his tithes.\n",
"Son: Dad how much do you pay in taxes? \n\nFather: I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.\n\nSon: But Dad, why do so many people complain about you not releasing your taxes?\n\nFather: Because I don't want them to know how much I am paying, if they know that I paid less than what many Americans are making, then it will make me look bad.\n\nSon: Wouldn't it be easier to just give them your tax returns? They seem like they are getting mad at you ether way.\n\nFather: What they don't know, wont hurt them.\n\nI tried to explain it better."
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296cur | why did the occupy movement lose (or seem to lose) momentum? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/296cur/eli5_why_did_the_occupy_movement_lose_or_seem_to/ | {
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"They didn't really have a SMART goal.\n\n**S**pecific - They lacked a specific thing that everyone was working for. At best, they just had some general ideas.\n\n**M**easureable - They had no milestones or other ways to indicate progress\n\n**A**ssignable - Nobody was really responsible for any task\n\n**R**ealistic - Any stated goals they had were way over-the-top idealistic and were obviously not realistic\n\n**T**ime-related - They didn't have any timeline in place to achieve their goals",
"I saw a good quote by conservative douchebag Tucker Carlson. He said this about the Occupy movement, \"Leaderless groups are like honey bees, they sting once, then they die\". Despite who it came from, I thought the quote was apt.",
"No one had any idea what they were actually protesting against or what their goals or agenda were.\n\n\"We're mad as hell, and we're not really sure why! Yelling about it in front of a stock exchange seemed like a good idea at the time!\"",
"I work as Head of Security for a building in the middle of a major US City...I was \"dealing\" a lot with this movement only in the sense that I had to help access control for protestors arriving on my property. \n\nWith that said, the Occupiers were very active during the summer two years ago. I too have noticed lack of movement from them since. Though their cause is very understandable and I personally support their reasons and causes, I think, at least in my area it was very poorly organized and managed. \n\nA lot of bad riff raff would end up protesting with them or \"infiltrated\" their camps to the point they lost a lot of public support. Rapes, robbery, drugs, etc\n\n*edit: spelling*"
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27vz4p | when someone buys a sports team for hundreds of millions/billions of dollars, how does that transaction actually work? | For instance, take Ballmer buying the Clippers for $2 billion. No one just keeps $2 billion in cash, so I assume he has to sell assets. But he also can't just write a $2 billion dollar check once he's done that, because you can't have that much money in a single bank account; an account can only be federally insured for so much. So how does a huge sale like this go down? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27vz4p/eli5_when_someone_buys_a_sports_team_for_hundreds/ | {
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"I've never been involved in a transaction this size, but...have done corporate acquisitions significantly larger than FDIC limits.\n\nFirstly, the most common form of checking account for a rich person is a zero-balance account. It is backed by a variety of highly liquid assets that are owned by said rich person (things that generate more income than cash, but can also be sold very quickly and purchased very quickly and reliably). The trick of this is that _I own_ the assets, not the bank. So, when the bank goes belly-up, I still own the assets. The mechanics of this are then that I write a check against this zero balance checking account and the bank sells off some of those assets at the end of the day to cover that check and bring the account back to zero. If I deposit money into it, then it they purchase some assets on my behalf. The bank charges a fee, but that fee is less than private insurance would be, and less than the income being made on these liquid investments. This is common even for the medium-rich, way below SB. \n\nSecondly, even with that banking product, SB still doesn't keep $2B around. Even further, it's unlikely (100% unlikely) that it's really SB buying the team, but rather a company that SB owns that is buying the team. I haven't looked into it, but typically this deal would be backed by SB cash, potentially some other investor cash, a bank (investment bank or as debt-financing) etc. What the $2B represents is the valuation of the team being bought, as determined by the proposal. This isn't really the sale amount. All of the elements of the valuation will get a lot more complicated to determine the actual flow of funds - it'll take months and months to figure out all the details. But...at the end of the day, there will be a cash-layer-abstraction that will move from account to account to finalize the deals. "
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9kzd96 | during the age of analog how did they get that stats on viewership of programs to award which ones are most watched ratings-wise? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9kzd96/eli5_during_the_age_of_analog_how_did_they_get/ | {
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"Viewing diaries. Nielsen used them right up until this year.\n\nThey'd select families who would record their viewing habits and calculate ratings from that sample. \n",
"A couple of ways - they asked people who represented different demographics (age, sex, location etc.) to keep diaries of what they watched and later installed boxes in selected people's homes that recorded what the tv was tuned to. They then used that data to estimate what the whole country was watching."
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82qbx6 | why are wall outlets only limited to 2 plugs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/82qbx6/eli5_why_are_wall_outlets_only_limited_to_2_plugs/ | {
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"Part of it is aesthetics, part is cost. Not all wall outlet locations are likely to have multiple devices used and power strips can easily be used where needed.\n\nThe two-outlet configuration allows the same size mounting box/hardware as a switch and any other 2-port outlet, and the small box allows a bit more flexibility in location choice. \n\nDevices that would typically draw more power than a 110v outlet would allow are likely going to be using a dedicated circuit, often on a higher voltage, that can handle that load.",
"They're not limited to just 2, that's just the smallest format box you can install. If you put in a wider box, there's no stopping you from filling it up with outlets if you like.\n\nI think part of the reason there are usually only two is for convenience - it's better to have a lot of different locations to plug in such that you're not stretching cords across the room, rather than to put all the outlets for that room in one big box.",
"The building codes, in the US, require an outlet every 12 feet, to reduce the use of extension cords. Making them all 4 outlet would double the cost and still leave most of them unused. When a location is planned for lots of electronics, like a media space, it's common to see lots. The cost/work to add more is also quite low, as electrical changes go.",
"I think the standard/code is out of date. I think almost every modern living room and office has outlet strips and extension cords. It may just be that when builders build a spec house they want to keep costs down, but outlets are cheap. I would love to see an actual study of what the actual outlet to plug ratio is. If I ever have a house custom built I will specify many extra outlets.",
"Light switches were common in the U.S before outlets. In the old days if you wanted to plug in a say a vacuum cleaner you unscrewed a light bulb and the vacuum cleaner came with a fitting that would screw in in it's place. Eventually they started putting light bulb sockets on the baseboard just for appliances, and then developed regular outlets that were safer and easier- no risk of sticking a finger in. Two outlets happened to be the number that would fit the same electrical boxes that were already in use for light switches. "
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5vvf0o | house bill 610 and if it's good or bad | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vvf0o/eli5_house_bill_610_and_if_its_good_or_bad/ | {
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"_URL_1_\n\nLooking at it in overview, it looks like a proposition to fund schools in general, regardless of the administrative agency overseeing the schools.\n\nThese voucher attempts are usually an effort by religious groups to enable private schools to receive funding from public sources. This is one, but there have been many other attempts at all levels. I'm not sure the precise reason that many conservative \"pro school choice\" advocates push this idea. Their talking points don't seem to have anything supporting them except for appeals to emotion and some points that seem interesting on the surface but that pose real dilemmas if the potential consequences are seriously considered.\n\nWhile I suspect you will find few people who say spending money on schools is a bad thing, but that does not necessarily mean vouchers are widely supported.\n\nVouchers are usually fought for a couple reasons.\n\nPublic money comes with public accountability. School boards have at least some members who are elected by and from among the public at large. Extending public funding to private schools would almost certainly bring on a fight to require any school that accepts those vouchers to also allow public oversight and control. Relinquishing this level of control would be completely antithetical to the reason that [most] such schools are started in the first place--namely, the right to include a specific religious or denominational element in the curriculum and/or selectively staff the school with staff members that hail from a particular religion or denomination.\n\nPrivate schools and homeschools generally have to have their students meet basic state requirements for various topics in order to remain accredited, but they are not usually held to the same type of oversight, accountability, equality/equal access, \"title\" requirements, and so on. This is in large part because they do not accept public (tax) money to fund their operation. \n\nI won't get into the religious and political mix-up behind this as it is long and complicated, though another poster may try.\n\nI'm not sure where the nutrition aspect of that bill comes into play. I don't know of anyone who would suggest we encourage poor nutrition. Even without extensive research the benefits of eating healthy are clear. This could be a cost concern, with advocates suggesting cheaper food would allow schools to put money into something else in which case we have a discussion about how to best spend that money (include food, how much, don't include, etc). On the other hand, it may be a super-conservative effort to blowback against efforts that have been going on for decades regarding nutrition and quality in foods offered by public schools, in which case I would suggest it is political pushback against what they perceive as some sort of liberal special interest effort (Michelle Obama was the most recent advocate, though she was far from the first; and while she was relatively liberal this effort has had much conservative support as well, [despite Reagan's sometimes bizarre efforts otherwise](_URL_0_)). The consequences of healthy (or unhealthy) diets are biology and physiology, not dependent on your political party :S.\n\nEdit: and a similar [2011 incident](_URL_2_) in which some members of congress (and GOP) tried to include pizza sauce as a vegetable.\n\n * It is one thing to debate whether we should offer school lunches as a budget issue. It's another to argue that condiments are a vegetable in terms of nutrition :S."
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bpq72f | if tonal languages use different pitches of the same phoneme to mean different words, how does that affect emotion or other forms of context in speech? | English speakers often use a rising intonation at the end of a sentence to indicate that they're asking a question. In English, tone is also used to convey other emotions or contexts, like sarcasm.
But in tonal languages like Mandarin, tone/pitch often changes the dictionary meaning of a word. Given that, how do speakers of a tonal language indicate emotions in speech if using a different pitch or tone drastically changes what they say? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpq72f/eli5_if_tonal_languages_use_different_pitches_of/ | {
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"The term ‘tone’ is a little misleading- there’s still very much a different tone of voice no matter what you’re saying- watch a movie in Chinese and you’ll be able to tell their emotions based on the tone of their voice.",
"So there's 2 things going on with the voice when talking. The tone of the voice itself and the change of the tone as you say the word. Think of a woman with a high pitched voice and a man with a deeper voice, both of them have to be able to say the same words even though their voices are not the same. That's done by each sound having a tone that is flat, rises, falls, or \"scoops\" if it's Mandarin.\n\nBut each voice can start at different points. So if you imagine that you talk in a higher pitch to start and faster when you're excited. You could still have that be where the voice is starting from and then still carry out the tone shifts. You still hear the change as it's faster and higher pitched than usual, but each sound still has the same change in tone as you say it.",
"only a partial answer, but in mandarin there are certain words you add to the end of a sentence e.g. to indicate if it’s a yes/no question (吗 pronounced ma）or a suggestion (吧, ba）etc",
"Take English:\n\nThe dicitonary's on the table\n\nversus\n\nThe dictionary's on the TABLE.\n\nIn the first, both the first syllable of \"dictionary\" and \"table\" receive word-level stress, but there's also a prosodic/intonational stress that accents \"dictionary\" even further. In the second, they still receive their normal word-level stress, but are overlaid with a different prosody where \"table\" instead receives the sentence-level stress. These two different stresses are distinct to native English speakers.\n\nTonal languages, likewise, allow an overlap of word- or syllable-level tone *and* prosodic intonation. One thing to keep in mind is that word- or syllable-level tone is *relative*, not absolute, so that there may be, say, a falling intonation over the whole phrase, and a high tone at the end of an utterance will be lower than one at the beginning. Different intonation may alter this overall pattern from being falling to rising, or falling until a sharp rise before a particular word, or so on, just like sentence-level stress does in English.",
"I speak Mandarin and Cantonese and have spoken with many other people who do as well. There are several things that people do to express their emotions while they're speaking.\n\n1. To emphasize a word, people may say its tone in a more pronounced and exaggerated way. This is similar to raising the tone to emphasize a word in English.\n\n2. People may raise or lower their pitch range like they do in other languages, and since tones are determined relative to a speaker's pitch range, it's still easy to understand what someone is saying. \n\n3. Just like other languages, people may change the length of words and timbre of their voice. One thing I've noticed in varieties of Chinese is that people constrict their throat so their sound comes out in a less smooth and a more contoured way. I noticed this especially in people from 河南.\n\n4. People add particles to the end of their sentences to add shades of meaning. Cantonese has dozens of these.\n\nOne other thing that I do when I get annoyed is that I start using more regional words that sound more informal and rude. For example, instead of using 什麼 (shén me), I use 啥 (shá); instead of using 怎麼 (zěn me), I use 咋 (zǎ); instead of using 那麼 (nà me), I use 恁 (nèn). So the sentence \"how are you so stupid\" goes from the nice sounding 你怎麼那麼傻 (nǐ zěn me nà me shǎ) to the rude sounding 你咋恁傻 (nǐ zǎ nèn shǎ). I would definitely also constrict my throat to exaggerate the low tone on 傻 (shǎ), which is the word for stupid."
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byv5nq | how come if you hit a fly or insect with something 1000x bigger than it, it still survives ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/byv5nq/eli5_how_come_if_you_hit_a_fly_or_insect_with/ | {
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"A flying insect is light and just gets moved, the relative size has little to do with it. The degree of damage or not depends on the acceleration versus the strength of the structure. Insects have an exoskeleton which will move as a whole rather than a soft body like us where the shock wave of acceleration force has to travel through our organs before the opposite side of the body from the impact starts to move.\n\nA second factor is that as our hand moves through the air to swat the fly it builds up a wave of air in front. That pushes the fly forward somewhat and so lessens the impact. It's part of the reason that the business end of fly swatters are a mesh rather than a solid flap, let's the air through.",
"How large object that hit you is not relevant as long as has enough mass. Getting hit by something is the same as if you would hit is yourself with the same speed.\n\nSo compare running into a cliff face that would be the mass of earth. Then take a wagon that have wheels with very low friction wheels and a flat rigid toward you. If you load it with 100x you mass it would hardly move when you hit is and even at 10x you mass it movement would be minimal but it will more if it has the same mass as you.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo there is a difference when hit with somting that have the same mass as you or lower but when you hits something that start to have multiple times you mass it start be relevant 10x you mass or the whole earth will almost have the same effect.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo the mass of what hit the insect is not important. The important if the speed it has and how it deform.\n\nWhy it can be hit with a faster object then a human without damages because of the Square–cube law. \n\nThe strength of a bone depend on the area of the cross section and the mass of the person depend on the volume. (insect have exoskeleton but the effect is thesame.\n\nThat mean if you would be scale to 2x in all dimension your bones would be 4x as string but your would be 8x as heavy so you would break them al lot easier.\n\nIf you would be half the size the bone would be 1/4 as strong but the mass would be 1/8. So it is harder to break bones now.\n\nTheresult is that the a very small insect can sustan a lot more force before it get damage just because it is small and the exoskeleton is many times stronger compared to is mass then for a human. The force and strengh of soft tissue have the same effect"
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1231oh | how do defense contractors work with the us military abroad? | If they wear the same uniform and their commander in chief is the president of the United States, what is their role, what is the deal reached between the US and it's contractors, what is the difference between a soldier hired by a defense contractor, and why use them in the first place?
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1231oh/eli5_how_do_defense_contractors_work_with_the_us/ | {
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" > If they wear the same uniform and their commander in chief is the president of the United States\n\nNeither of these are true, beyond the fact that a contractor is under a contractual agreement to the US Government to provide some sort of service.\n\nI think the big misconception when you hear the term \"contractor\" is that they are all these highly trained mercs carrying weapons around. Yes, while it's true that many personal security details are contracted out to various firms, the *enormous majority* of contractors are performing extremely mundane work that either:\n\n* is not a part/beyond the scope of regular military expertise, for example, techs from a drone's avionics manufacturer on site to repair any malfunctions too complicated for normal personnel.\n* provides basic support beyond/as a supplement to the military's own capabilities, i.e. the servers at a major base's dining facility\n\nNow, what do the flashy contractors do? The ones you hear about from Blackwater/Xe/whatever et al?\n\nThey are very, very well armed security guards. There's not much more to it. If the DoD wants an installation protected, usually it will be by military personnel. But they can't be everywhere at once, particularly in rather remote areas. So security contractors are paid to keep guard.\n\nSo to answer your question it allows the military to operate and train more efficiently. You pay these companies to provide services, even very simple ones, so that you don't have to pay military personnel to do them *but more importantly* don't have to invest in the training and infrastructure to facilitate it. \n\nA final example of what most contracting is like:\n\n during the first part of flight school I had to go in what's called a \"helo dunker\", basically a huge contraption suspended over a swimming pool that rolls when it hits the water to simulate a crash in order to train Marines/Sailors to escape. It doesn't make any fucking sense to create a military job \"helo dunker operator that works once a week\" so they just pay a civilian company to handle it."
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4gb5uo | what happened at the new york democratic thing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gb5uo/eli5_what_happened_at_the_new_york_democratic/ | {
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"People campaigned, voted, counted the votes. Independent voters didn't get to vote, were unhappy. Check the 538 podcast for a good description of how the primary in NY was set up. _URL_0_"
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5vv3my | why were nuclear physicists in the 50s-60s concerned about lighting the atmosphere on fire when testing nukes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vv3my/eli5_why_were_nuclear_physicists_in_the_50s60s/ | {
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"To clarify, they were worried about igniting a _nuclear_ chain reaction of the atmosphere, not a regular chemical reaction fire. If a regular chemical fire of the atmosphere were thermodynamically favorable, it would have happened long ago (or really, the atmosphere would never have formed in its current state).",
"The concern was if the nuclear bomb had enough energy to cause the nitrogen in the air we breath to start undergoing a nuclear FUSION chain reaction (similar to the sun).\n\nThere were calculations done which determined that while this happened a little bit, there wasn't enough energy to cause it to \"ignite\" and become self sustaining. It would die off very shortly after the bomb blew up.\n\nThe calculation that disproved this was classified at the time, so when it was ruled that the bomb was safe there were a lot of naysayers because they never got to see the calculation.\n\nThe calculations are public now with virtually no redaction. I just can't remember how I found it : )"
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g2sh4o | what’s happening inside a chicken egg that makes it float differently depending on how fresh it is? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g2sh4o/eli5_whats_happening_inside_a_chicken_egg_that/ | {
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"There is an air bubble inside the egg, which is small when the egg is freshly laid. As the egg gets older and starts losing moisture, that air sac inscreases in size, until it is large enough to make the egg buoyant."
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62szri | when people faint, do they wake up refreshed like from a nap, or tired, or something else entirely? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62szri/eli5_when_people_faint_do_they_wake_up_refreshed/ | {
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"text": [
"Speaking from personal experience, fainting is kind of like accidentally falling asleep and then waking up confused, disoriented, unwell, and even more tired than you were before. Also, head injuries are far more likely especially if you faint while standing. \nWhat's interesting is that some people dream while they faint, even if they're only out cold for a few seconds. So, in a way it's a bit like extreme, spontaneous napping. I'm not an expert though, this is just my experience. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
8d7z1j | how was the music video for "virtual insanity" by jamiroquai made? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8d7z1j/eli5_how_was_the_music_video_for_virtual_insanity/ | {
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"text": [
"It was surprisingly low tech \\- basically they built the floor on wheels and would move the floor around with Jamiroquai dancing on it\n\nThis video: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) shows the technique they used but for a different project \\(a beer ad\\)\n\nEdit: Turns out they moved the walls around instead of the floor"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOBBZbyrIU"
]
] |
||
kcdhm | the concept of revenge | My 9 year old brother just asked what "Revenge" was. How can I explain it to him? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kcdhm/eli5_the_concept_of_revenge/ | {
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"You steal my toy, the world isn't fair and balanced again until I do something of equal or greater significance to you.\n\nThat's the easiest way to describe it I'd say. But the reason it's not simply justice is because it's usually blown out of proportion. For more serious examples, let's say you murder my innocent father in cold blood. You get locked up in jail, but I feel like justice hasn't been served. My solution? Kill YOUR innocent father, or another family member. They didn't do anything, but I brought pain to you. So I feel satisfied, but I've not only done something wrong but now YOU feel like you need to settle things with ME again.",
"Imagine that someone stole your cookies. This made you angry. Now what do you do? Well, it seems fair that you should steal *their* cookies.\n\nTL;DR: Revenge is humanity's sense of fairness.",
"Everyone's giving examples, but I don't see anyone commenting on the psychology behind it beyond the superficial.",
"You steal my toy, the world isn't fair and balanced again until I do something of equal or greater significance to you.\n\nThat's the easiest way to describe it I'd say. But the reason it's not simply justice is because it's usually blown out of proportion. For more serious examples, let's say you murder my innocent father in cold blood. You get locked up in jail, but I feel like justice hasn't been served. My solution? Kill YOUR innocent father, or another family member. They didn't do anything, but I brought pain to you. So I feel satisfied, but I've not only done something wrong but now YOU feel like you need to settle things with ME again.",
"Imagine that someone stole your cookies. This made you angry. Now what do you do? Well, it seems fair that you should steal *their* cookies.\n\nTL;DR: Revenge is humanity's sense of fairness.",
"Everyone's giving examples, but I don't see anyone commenting on the psychology behind it beyond the superficial."
]
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|
9tzsou | what repels electrons from the nucleus? | If protons attract electrons what’s stopping the electron from colliding with the proton? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9tzsou/eli5_what_repels_electrons_from_the_nucleus/ | {
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"text": [
"An electron does not crash into the proton because of 1) the very high speed of the electron and 2) the very small mass of the electron. \n\nEdit: also, while it's convenient to imagine a teeny electron orbiting a massive proton like the earth orbiting the sun (and knowing that given the right amount of time, the earth would crash into the sun), that image is not accurate. It's more accurate in this scenario to imagine an electron not as a particle but as a cloud.",
"The electron is definitely pulled toward the nucleus, but the closer it gets the faster it moves. The trick is that the electron gets faster *fast enough* that it doesn't really get a chance to interact with the protons in the nucleus. There's a sweet spot a little ways out where it's *much* more likely to be found.\n\nThat said, the \"classical\" model of the electron as a little planet isn't really useful anymore. It's better to think of a cloud of where the electron *could be*, which is denser where it's more likely to be. The cloud is very very thin inside the nucleus, and very very dense in a ring around the nucleus — that sweet spot. They're isn't really an \"orbit\"; the electron just zooms around inside the cloud.",
"This is actually a tricky question that was unable to be solved until the rise of modern quantum mechanics. First let me pose the problem, then a few of the classical solutions (already posed by other posters here) and why they don't work.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe electrical attraction between a proton and an electron cause them to come together. Due to the electrons low mass and often high speeds it will enter into an orbit around the nucleus, and cease falling in further. This is almost exactly analogous to how planets, asteroids and comets fall around the sun, rather than into it. \n\nThe problem is that there is one thing between the gravitational \"planet\" model and the atom model that differs. When a charged particle (like an electron) changes velocity (speeds up or turns) it gives off an electromagnetic wave. T his carries energy away from the particle, and causes it to slow down. This means an orbiting electron would fairly quickly give off immense amounts of light, and spiral in towards the nucleus. We don't see this happening when an electron orbits a nucleus. We do see it happen when a free, unbound electron is spun around in a cyclotron. This shows that we fully understand how to measure, use and describe this effect.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo the other option posed is that the electron really should be viewed as moving about in a \"probability\" cloud, and just isn't likely to be in the core. The problem here is twofold. First the size of the cloud depends on the energy in the electron, and energy emission problem still exists, and the cloud should shrink, making it more likely for the electron to be in the nucleus. Second, a small chance is not the same as a zero chance, and we should see lots of electrons simply smashing into a nucleus because there are insane numbers of these particles in even a kilogram of material.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBoth of these possibilities only have parts of the true answer.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe true answer lies in the fact that electrons, and all matter, exist as waves as well particles. This means that they follow all the rules waves must follow. When a guitar string is plucked you get the same note, every time. This is because the string vibrates, but due to the way the ends are attached, the strength of the string, it creates a very specific standing wave. this image shows what an animation of a standing wave looks like if viewed by a highspeed camera: [_URL_3_](_URL_0_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nElectrons will continue to slip in towards a nucleus until they are stopped by this standing wave requirement. The electrons can only exist at certain distances where their wave pattern makes a perfect loop around the orbit, without a loose end. THis is called resonance. An image of a circular resonance pattern is shown here: [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThis means that electrons can only exist in a few specific \"layers\" around an atom, details we can now see with modern imaging techniques but were understood around 1900 as a cause for elemental spectra as shown here: [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) In these spectra only very specific energies of light are emitted, rather than the every growing emission of higher energy light predicted by the classic \"planetary\" orbit model. These lines show that electrons are restricted to specific energy levels, and later cacluations of an electrons wavelength by de Broglie confirmed this with great precision.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo what happens is an electron is captured around a nucleus (shedding some light) and falls into one of these resonance orbits, like theone shown above. This case has 8 wave reptitions surounding the nucleus. If the electron sheds a photon of light with just the right energy it can reduce this to 7 wave repetitions, still a standing wave with a proper resonance, and the electron will get closer. This is analogous to how a guitar player can press the string down at *very specific* placements and get variations on a note. If the string is held down at the wrong place, the entire string goes silent, and no note is created. The smallest possible orbit is to have only a single wave cycle osculating around the nucleus, which stops the electron from approaching any closer.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThere is one set of conditions under which electrons are forced to collide with protons despite this, and that is in the core of super massive stars as their central fusion processes fail. The intense gravity and pressure creates a neutron star, where the electrons are forced into the nucleus by external pressure of other atoms. The electrons and protons combine to create neutrons, and drastically alter the entire makeup of the stars core, triggering the star to collapse."
]
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"https://i.stack.imgur.com/xD5lz.gif",
"https://chem.libretexts.org/@api/deki/files/141673/Standing\\_wave.gif?revision=1"
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|
2453f1 | how does tolerance to diphenhydramine's sedation work? | As above. I know how the drug works - please don't go in to that in-depth as I have probably read it 50 times elsewhere (not being rude, genuinely don't want to waste someone's time!). But I still don't understand how tolerance to its sedating effects develops. Everywhere acknowledges the tolerance thing but nowhere explains it.
From my reading, it seems that the diphenhydramine sedates by acting on the central H1 receptors. I get how this works from my psychology quals. But how come after 3 or 4 nights, you become tolerant to this sedation? Does the drug *physically* stop acting on these H1 receptors after a while (maybe as some kind of weird fail-safe method, like your brain assuming you're taking poison/bad drugs - I'm not a neuroscientist, people!) or does it still act on them in exactly the same way physically, but something inside us reacts differently after prolonged exposure? So we need more of it to sedate us, and eventually we take such a high dose of it that we end up tripping instead of being sedated. Also like how if you've never pulled an all nighter before it absolutely kills you the first time/first few times, but after pulling them a few times, you sort of get comfortable with it, and you don't feel as bad after pulling one? Physically you might stay up for 32 hours in every single case, but the way your body feels/reacts to it is different as you get more experienced with it.
Thanks in advance! I am really interested in this! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2453f1/eli5_how_does_tolerance_to_diphenhydramines/ | {
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"Neuroscience grad student here:\n\nThere are a wide variety of mechanisms of tolerance. In some cases, your body detects the drug and increases levels of enzymes that break the drug down, so that when you take another dose later, the drug has less effect because your body breaks it down more quickly.\n\nIn other cases, changes happen at the level of the receptors the drugs bind to. Cells with receptors that are being stimulated more strongly than normal may reduce the number of those receptors that they produce, which decreases the maximum response the drug is capable of evoking, deactivate the receptors, bring the receptors inside the cell where the drug can't reach them, etc.\n\nIn addition to that, there may be processes the body uses to compensate for the drug's effects that aren't directly related to the receptors the drug binds to. The body might cause tolerance by turning up the activity of a brain system that doesn't involve the receptor the drug targets, but has an effect that counteracts the effects of the drug."
]
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|
50unvk | why do large companies sign a 10-20 year building lease when that comes close or exceeds the building value? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50unvk/eli5_why_do_large_companies_sign_a_1020_year/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Often it's a cash-flow decision. Purchasing the building outright costs a lot of upfront money (which either has to come from assets or from a loan... which is basically like a lease but with more terms and conditions) and adds uncertainty to the end of the 10-20 year time frame if the company wants to move somewhere else. They would either be stuck with a building they didn't want, or have to sell at a price they can't predict.\n\nSigning a lease for the building locks in a yearly rate for their office space that they can count on and plan their long-term books around without worrying about risks associated with the property."
]
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[]
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||
4z2wzk | how a smaller .exe can install a much larger, verbose program. | I've noticed from time to time that a .exe file will be, say, 90 MBs. When it installs the program, however, the folder that results from the installation will often be slightly larger, like 120 MBs. I most often noticed this in the 90s and early 00s as an avid gamer. This was before games were largely downloaded via download clients, and patching was a long and arduous process that often resulted in errors.
Any insights? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4z2wzk/eli5how_a_smaller_exe_can_install_a_much_larger/ | {
"a_id": [
"d6skzil"
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"text": [
"Compression.\n\nIt's a pretty complex subject, but basically you can often compress data down quite a bit. For a very obvious example, imagine a text file with \"hello\" (5 characters, approx 5 bytes) repeated 200 million times. It would be about 1GB in size. But you could instead just send \"repeat hello 200 million times\" (30 characters, so about 30 bytes).\n\nIt's more complex of course, but that's the basic idea of it. \n\nOnce the video game is on your computer though, it generally makes sense to unpack it, so that the video game can quickly read the data off the disk without causing a bottleneck. "
]
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|
3ew7m8 | what is physics and why is it so important to study it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ew7m8/eli5what_is_physics_and_why_is_it_so_important_to/ | {
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"text": [
"Physics is the study of objects that move through space and time, as well as the related effects of energy and force. \n\nFrom an economic perspective, physics is responsible for all of our modern technology. It explains how and why everything from a steam engine to a microprocessor works, and allows people to design better engines and microprocessors. \n\nFrom a philosophical perspective, discoveries in physics challenge our understanding of the universe and how we as a society understand who and where we are. For example, Newton struggled for many years to come to grips with God and his discoveries (in fact Newton wrote more books on religion than he did on math and science), and his discoveries helped catapult the enlightenment which is where most of our culture and societal structure from Government to education to our very family structure is derived from. "
]
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[]
] |
||
2q7wnc | why so many people think communism or socialism is evil? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q7wnc/eli5why_so_many_people_think_communism_or/ | {
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"text": [
"That's the power of ~~pinesol~~ propaganda. \n\nThe US was at war with the Soviet Union and pretty much any Communist nation during the Cold War, which was essentially The US (Democracy) VS Them (Communists).",
"Because of the millons of people killed in the name of communism. For instance, we all dislike nazism because of all the people they killed, and the same goes for communism.",
"Aftermath of propaganda and brainwashing. It also involves basing opinion on extremes and over-generalizations.. such as \"everyone\" will just suck out governement aid rather then work because there are no enscentives. This is an extreme view based off the idea that basic needs will be handled by the government in such systems.\n\nEdited for clarity ",
"The West was involved in the Cold War against the soviet USSR. There was no direct fighting between them (unlike in Korea or Vietnam), but there was a lot of propaganda. Since the war only ended a couple decades ago, much of this anti-communism propaganda lingers in the population, or at least in the USA. This is my opinion anyway.",
"Because the USSR, communist China, communist Cuba, communist North Korea, and all other examples of socialist countries that claim communist ideologies have conducted massive programs of killing and slavery of their citizens.\n\nMarxism by nature is a violently revolutionary philosophy and is very opposed to classical liberal principals of individual rights and responsibilities and limited government power.",
"Blaming Communism/Socialism for atrocities caused by the corrupt leaders who ran the countries that had this model is like blaming Capitalism for the death and war unrestrained corporations in capitalist nations cause in other countries for their own gain.\n\nI think both models can work, but both are subject to corruption by their leaders.",
"Propaganda. Hating something gives the patriots something to rally around. Kind of ironic in the USA, since we are pretty socialist. USA! USA!"
]
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1e6v6t | why do dentists and podiatrists have their own degrees (dmd/dds and dpm) distinct from the md, while ents and other specialities don't? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e6v6t/eli5_why_do_dentists_and_podiatrists_have_their/ | {
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"text": [
"Medical specialists get their MD first and then go on to specialize. \n\nDentists and podiatrists skip the MD and go straight to the specialties. ",
"Dentistry itself requires hand skills for a lot of microsurgery that need time to develop. Even after a DDS, a dentist can still go on to other specialties within dentistry (orthodontics, prosthodontics, endodontics, etc). It would be impractical to have to get a MD. By the time you get an orthodontics degree, it would take (5 + 5 + 7 = 17) years to receive a specialist degree. \n\nDentistry is different from medicine that most of the schooling is spent training hands to very small surgeries. Hand skills are more valued in DDS.\n "
]
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[],
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||
dys8ps | why can we let thawed steak rest at room temperature but it’s unsafe to thaw frozen steak at room temp? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dys8ps/eli5_why_can_we_let_thawed_steak_rest_at_room/ | {
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"text": [
"By thawing it at room temperature, you're leaving it exposed to the dangerous temperature zone where bacteria and stuff that wants to kill you can thrive (the fridge is not in that range).\n\nIf you want to thaw the steak faster, you could try a microwave, or maybe even running it under hot water. Basically you don't want it at room temp for more than an hour or two.\n\nThe real pro tip is to move the meat to the fridge the night or morning before.",
"The problem with thawing at room temp, is that portions of the surface will be at room temp much longer than just resting at room temp for awhile. Those warm corners and surfaces could breed bacteria that make you ill. You can speed it up by soaking in cool water. Keeping refrigerated guarantees the safest overall temps. As with everything, your own risk tolerance plays a part, and food poisoning is real.",
"Put steaks in ziploc, place in the sink filled with cold water and check the water temp every our, if it got too warm replace water, mama taught me and haven't been sick yet",
"Everybody freaks out about getting sick from food that's been \"in the danger zone\" for more than a couple of minutes. The whole thing is a product of over-cautious legislation due to litigation. It's not an instant death sentence if you eat something that hasn't adhered strictly to all food safety pamphlets and guidelines.\n\nThe world is crawling with bacteria and as long as you're a hygenic person and not eating rotting carcasses, there's not much more you can do to avoid randomly ingesting bad bugs. That's life.\n\n\nSo leave it out on the counter in a bag for a couple of hours, or put it in a bag in lukewarm water. Do whatever. Seriously it's fine. If the meat doesn't smell bad, go for it.\n\nAnd if you are eating steak for the joy of it, don't try to cook a half thawed steak (it won't work and it will be a bad steak) and for god's sake don't microwave it. It will destroy it. Whoever suggested that hates food."
]
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[],
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