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4i0kog | how are humans so good at throwing things? biologically. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i0kog/eli5_how_are_humans_so_good_at_throwing_things/ | {
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"Evolutionarily? Humans evolved to throw rocks and spears, as the other commenter said. Physiologically? Humans have the right arm muscles and bone stuff to throw things. Animals that walk on four legs can't rotate their arm to lob something because their shoulder blades are in a different position. Humans also have binocular vision and the brainpower to know how hard to throw thing.",
"Also to add to other comments, the way the body and muscles are, humans are better st throwing things than other animals because we are able to contour our body and use joints as a fulcrum and giving us ability to shift momentum. Think of a baseball pitcher, they draw a lot of their power from their legs and hips; they are able to wind up their arm due to our shoulder muscle and joints, power gets shifted from my legs, through the hips and channeled through my arm all the way through the flick of the wrist. If you YouTube \"baseball pitcher slow-mo\" you can visually see how the body is moving to propel leverage throughout the body. "
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csskyf | why can we recreate sounds in our head, but it's impossible to recreate a smell? | Or maybe I'm just special and I can't do that, who knows?
Someone here hopefully! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/csskyf/eli5_why_can_we_recreate_sounds_in_our_head_but/ | {
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"It's not impossible, its just about training and wiring.\n\nVision is the sense we use to navigate the world most of the time. Even when we use other senses, we still use vision alongside them. Because we're constantly looking at things, a huge part of our memory is dedicated to remembering images, and so we're able to conjure images mostly at will (although curiously, we don't have full control of the images we conjure). \n\nThe second most important sense is hearing. We use sound to communicate, and communication is something so vital to the human condition that we gave up part of our working memory and short term memory to do it. Sound is also the next best thing after vision (and the best thing at night) for figuring out what's going on around us. \n\nAfter that, I'm going to rank taste. Taste is a major component of how we determine foods that are good for us and foods that are bad for us, so we have a relatively refined sense of taste. However, we don't spend much of our time actually in the process of tasting things, so it doesn't get honed very much. People who eat quite frequently, like chefs, do develop a good palate though and can conjure tastes at will. I'm not a chef, but I do like meat, and I find that i can recreate the taste of a good steak to a similar level that I can recreate sounds and images. \n\nThen there's smell. Smell is also something we use often to determine toxic materials, including food, but unlike taste, we're always smelling things. So why can't we conjure smells at will? That's because the brain tunes them out. Smells, other than those that are straight up disgusting, are notable at first but then fade out. We stop paying attention to them, and before we know it we can't voluntarily pay attention to them again, even though they're still there. Unlike vision and sound which are always on, smell only cares about *changes* in odour, so even though we're always smelling things, our brain learns to memorise smells only when smell changes. Note that people who work with scents often, like perfumists, can learn to recreate smells in the same way a chef can recreate tastes. \n\nFinally, there's touch, which is a bit of a curious one. We don't bother remembering the sensations of picking objects up, because that's just not important to us - we only need to learn sensations that affect us, not ones that are the byproduct of us doing things. We actually don't get touched that often, at least on average, so its hard to learn what being touched feels like. I have no idea if its true, but I think its possible that people who often get massages or engage in competitive contact sports may develop the ability to recreate certain touch sensations.",
"Brains are weird. \n\nI can't do images or sounds. Apparently some people can do taste and smell. \n\nAphantasia is weird. Nobody knows why."
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63gudz | why is it that smiling, in human body language, is a sign of happiness and acceptance, while in chimpanzee body language, it is a sign of fear and anxiety? | With being so closely related, I'm confused on how we use such a prominent action so differently. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63gudz/eli5_why_is_it_that_smiling_in_human_body/ | {
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"While we are closely related genetically, it's worth noting that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor between 4-13 million years ago. In that time, both branches of the taxon have developed wildly differing tool cultures. Human language and chimpanzee language are tools. There is no inherent genetic component.\n\nAs a matter of fact, humans aren't even of one mind on smiling. [This article](_URL_0_) from Rensselaer Politechnic has an interesting article on differing uses of the smile in non-verbal communication:\n\n > A smile may show affection, convey politeness, or disguise true feelings. For example many people in Russia consider smiling at strangers in public to be unusual and even suspicious behavior. Yet many Americans smile freely at strangers in public places (although this is less common in big cities). Some Russians believe that Americans smile in the wrong places; some Americans believe that Russians don't smile enough. In Southeast Asian cultures, a smile is frequently used to cover emotional pain or embarrassment. Vietnamese people may tell the sad story of how they had to leave their country but end the story with a smile.",
"If I'm not mistaken it actually isn't. It depends on the culture you grew up in. In some countries such as America, Australia, or Brazil it's a happy/good thing. I remember reading that this was not the case in countries such as Russia or Pakistan. Apparently in those countries it's a sign that someone is a con artist or dishonest if I remember correctly?\n\n[Not the article I was looking for, but an interesting read.](_URL_0_)\n\nI'll keep looking for the article I wanted on it.",
"It has some basis in body language development, I believe. For chimps or many animals, 'smiling' is baring the teeth, which is a defensive posture. It's a way of saying 'don't antagonize me'. It is like unsheathing a weapon, in part because they actually do use their teeth as weapons.\n\nHumans, by contrast, do not use our teeth as weapons because they are poorly designed to be used as weapons. Human body language over thousands of years has developed to be concentrated on our highly mobile facial muscles. While we do take some body language cues, most of our expressions are in our faces. While smiles mean different things depending on culture, they are not viewed as a threat because they are not typically used as weapons except in the most dire circumstances ",
"I'd like to point out that while chimpanzees grin to show fear and anxiety, it's not always in response to some negative stimulus. Excitement, both good and bad, can elicit a similar grin, such as when they see a particularly favorite treat. There may be some subtle differences between the types of grins, but a need for understanding the context of the grin is important when determining the \"emotion\" being displayed.",
"I'm actually curious as to why animals don't become defensive when we smile at or around them if it's usually their way of showing aggression",
"The baring of teeth in chimpanzees is a not-so-subtle gesture that says \"if you try and hurt me, it'll cost you\". It's not a threat of murder so much an appeal to a sense of self-preservation in the other. It's a common gesture, too. Nearly every species has a threat response, and a number of them involve the baring of teeth. \n\nWhat does that have to do with human smiles? At some point in our history, the baring of teeth, combined with an upward curl of the mouth's corners began to mean \"I'm not so bad, we could be friends\". We do, however, still retain the baring of teeth in expressions of anger, fear, disgust and joy. The baring of teeth seems to heighten the effect of the expression.\n\nThat might be the key to this question. If baring teeth in human expression is merely an enhancer of the underlying expression, then chimps may be baring their teeth as an enhanced version of an underlying appeasement gesture that has no exact analog in humans."
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1iogue | in a country filled with many different ethnicities, why are african americans the stand out race when it comes to racism? | Is it just me or is the racial conflict found in the US basically only between two races, White Americans and Black Americans? I don't remember the last time another race, other than African Americans, made the news regarding unfair treatment. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iogue/eli5in_a_country_filled_with_many_different/ | {
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"I have two guesses, but I can't say anything for sure.\n\nMy first guess would be that since originally the vast majority of African Americans were slaves, that people considered them inferior. This could have carried over since then, diminishing in scope of how many, and how much, people thought this. At this point it shouldn't still be around but it is.\n\nMy other guess is that since the original Americans (note, I'm talking about the country, and not the land itself) were white, and the majority of Americans, especially in past years, were white, African Americans were simply the most different, in terms of looks. Other ethnicities can have different skin tones, but African Americans are the darkest, and therefore stand out the most from the majority of Americans.\n\nThose are the only reasons I can think of",
"People just don't like anyone that's different from them. \n\nMaybe because the Trayvon stuff you think that they're only racist against black people, but don't forget how much Hispanics are discriminated against, how Asian Americans were put in holding camps during WWII, and how currently, we view anyone who wears a turban as a terrorist.\n\nBlack people can be just as racist towards other races. The same thing goes for Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and everyone else. \n\nThe truth is, there's a handful of people who keep us fighting amongst ourselves. Why should I hate someone because they look different than me, have a different disability than I do, or because they choose to sleep with someone I wouldn't sleep with? \n\nIt's really petty that we're allowing ourselves to be swayed by other people's hates, when we should just mind our own damn business because we really are no better than anyone else we meet. ",
"There's a sociological theory that explains this.\n\nEssentially, people sort ethnic categories based on two criteria. Their status as superior or inferior, and their status as insiders or outsiders. White Anglo-Saxons are, in most of the Anglophone world, Superior Insiders. This means that they are assumed to be good until proven otherwise, and that they generally aren't seen as monolithic group or seen as \"exotic\".\n\nGenerally speaking, East and South Asian migrants are \"Superior Outsiders\" (this varies greatly depending on location. The Vietnamese are generally considered \"inferior\" in Australia, but this distinction often isn't made in other countries). They are acknowledged as *very different*, but as \"good\". This is why they are sometimes called the \"model minority\". Racism against East and South Asian migrants is usually far more subtle and centers around racially-based assumptions rather than racial hatred: it's more based on ignorance than deep-rooted racist attitudes.\n\nMiddle Eastern immigrants are Inferior Outsiders (again, location permitting). Outsiders because they form their own neighborhoods and practice their own customs, inferior because their migration is generally viewed as negative. There are often allegations of racism towards this group, but due to their status as \"outsiders\" these are rarely heard unless they are extreme or violent (i.e. bombing of a mosque or temple)\n\nIn the US, African Americans are Inferior Insiders. They are \"inferior\", and so experience racism, and their voices are often heard because they are a large, \"insider\" group: one that \"belongs\" in the US without any novelty value."
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ukiog | why banks are so eager to have you refinance to a lower interest rate | If I'm paying a bank 5% on my mortgage, what incentive do they have for me to refinance and pay them less? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ukiog/eli5_why_banks_are_so_eager_to_have_you_refinance/ | {
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5xilv4 | how can so many artists now produce incredible photorealism, when even the greatest renaissance artists that saw that as a central aim couldn't come as close? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xilv4/eli5_how_can_so_many_artists_now_produce/ | {
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"You mention simple materials, I would imagine years of development would change how the materials are made and have probably improved the quality of the materials to allow a much more realistic drawing.\n\nAnother factor might be how easy it is to access and share knowledge. You might be naturally a great artist, but it must be a lot easier now to learn new techniques in a short space of time than it was back then which likely used to take many years to master. ",
"The ability to work from a photograph (and to extrapolate the skills learned this way to drawing live models). A lot of renaissance work - particularly in portraits has the hallmarks of using a camera obscura (basically an image projected in a lightbox) which has a few issues in terms of scale (often the person's head is in focus but their shoulders aren't, also head looks giant compared to torso). Don't forget as well that painter in that time was much more of a craft than an art - painters needed to earn enough to eat and sometimes that meant fudging things to suit the vanity of the subject/comissioner which necessarily adds some distortion. ",
"I think it's mainly because the new ones already have a 2D model (from a picture) while back then, they had to use 3D models (real people). Also, cumulative knowledge on perspective and such.",
"It's significantly easier to copy a picture (2D to 2D) than to draw one from a real object (3D to 2D). Still difficult, but easiER. All photorealistic drawings I've seen copy a picture. Also, you're comparing paintings, in which matching the color is waaay more difficult, to black and white pencil drawings, in which your brain does the coloring. ",
"A person will never sit still for days for the artist to be able to paint him/her correctly. Photos have changed things. You can now look up the subject of your art for every detail for as long as you want.",
"Another point is that photorealistic art looks like a photo; we modern people assume a photo is what the thing really looks like. That is a learned response. Yes, photos can be a very accurate representation of a person, but only at an instant in time, and in a particular light, and seen through a lens with a particular focal length. It doesn't completely capture the experience of being in the presence of a living, breathing, moving person.",
"The artists creating photorealistic art in the 18-19th century actually had access to semi advanced camera like devices that allowed them to project right onto the canvas. \n\n[Heres a great documentary about this](_URL_0_)",
"I think your comparison with trompe l'oeil masterpieces is not comparing like for like really. You can't compare a pencil drawing to oil painting as the medium affects the end result and oil paint is quite a thick viscous material that does not really lend itself to fine details in the way that a pencil or ballpoint does.\n\nI also think the increase in realism over the centuries has two causes, one is that as technique improves the next \"great\" artist has to up their technique to be successful in the same way that Olympic records are broken for a more mundane example.\n\nThe second change is technology and scientific discovery, as human knowledge and technology changes human perception changes too. As printing improved and photography appeared peoples perception of realism changed to match the level of detail these new techniques brought with them. For us in the modern age it is for example quite normal to think of a picture being made up of small dots or pixels but if someone were to think in that way in the 17th century would of been quite unique.\n\nOn another level it is debatable if level of detail equates to quality, a high level of detail at worst is only a indication of a certain level of craftsmanship and not a automatic indication of artistic merit.",
"Every artform, skill and technology advances massively over time. If we sent Magnus Carlsen or Floyd Mayweather back in time there is nobody that could defeat them. And it applies to every sport and every dicipline of everything and anything.\n\nSome skills have been lost to time of course, but any skill that still lives has evolved to be better today than ever before.",
"I believe it was also a 'thing' for artists to follow a certain style of depiction that was popular at the time, be it traditional or modern. I remember learning in my art history class that a piece like Siena's Maesta was painted that way not because they couldn't achieve realism, but because it was traditionally 'correct' to depict the Madonna, Christ Child, and Saints that way.",
"I would like pose another version of your question. How did sculptors create such life like images from marble and other stone yet various paintings did not compete? I understand as other have said that the technology for fine point pens vs oil painting is different enough to not portray as good of details. I don't see exactly how that isn't the same for sculpting.",
"Because nobody had a clue what a true photographic images looked like until the invention of the camera. ",
"Very simple answer. In Renaissance, there were no photographs. Its rather easier to make a photorealistic painting if a) you have a photo b) you painting it with tablet and touchpen.\n\nAlso they didnt actually want photorealistic paintings cause a) they didnt know what that means b) portraits and other stuff was ordered usually to be nice, not true to reality.\n\nAnd as far as colors go, some of more recent artists were better than photos.. (early Monet stuff for example).\n\n**TL:DR Most photorealistic things are based on a actual photos. That wasnt a thing in Renaissance. It makes creating them far easier.**",
"I have seen still life paintings in the Rijksmuseum that are photorealistic. Wasn't that the whole point of the art form?",
"The renaissance painters were the pioneers of the technique. Over the ages we've improved on their groundwork. ",
"One of the things you aren't thinking about is how cameras tend to alter values, color and contrast. Artists who simply copy photographs, like the one you showed, are just following what a camera shows. Renaissance artists painted from real life. There is a big difference between how something looks in a photograph and how something looks in real life. Realism painting has been around for a long, long time.",
"I'd point out that many photorealistic paintings, like those by Chuck Close, are gigantic and are only photorealistic when viewed from a distance or in print whereas the Mona Lisa is on a pretty small 30\"x21\" canvas. \n\n_URL_0_",
"Nobody said it yet, but in addition to all the other explanations, there is also the fact that there are just more people doing it. And with more people doing an activity, there will always be more chances of something great happening compared to when only a few people did it.\n\nToday, the human population is something like 7 billion, and there are a lot of people who can practice arts and with tons of information (anybody is just a few clicks away from learning about all the best painting techniques).\n\nBack in renaissance time, human population was just 1 billion, and art wasn't accessible to a lot of people.",
"In short, because the great artists of today have learned from the great artists of the last generation and they learnt from the great artists of the previous generation and so on.\n\nI recently read a great book this discussed this, amongst other things. Civilisation is built on the work of previous discoveries. Someone today gets to learn everything that previous generations didn't know and they get to use technology that previous generations didn't have. They might spend their whole live working or training and discover a better way of doing things which in turn they can teach to younger people who'll take that and everything else and repeat the cycle. The book was Bounce by Matthew Syed.\n\nA great example of this is athletics. If you go back and look at the records for say the marathon over the years it's got quicker and quicker so much so that a world record time 100 years ago would be considered a good time for an average runner. We know humans haven't evolved over such a short time, nor is equipment so different, so what happened? Training got better. Over the years we learnt more and more about training methods and nutrition. The stuff elite athletes were doing filtered down and we all improved and then the elite athletes had to find a new way to get ahead.",
"I think [this](_URL_0_) by Albrecht Durer is pretty close to expert modern standards of realism, with the materials he had available.",
"You do the best you can with the tools and knowledge you have. The Renaissance artists were great because their works were leaps and bounds ahead of those who came before them. They didn't have computers, perfectly categorized pigments, or micro-millimeter paintbrushes to work with, but incredibly crude tools that required an unbelievably fine touch to work with. A good analogy would be a medical genius trying to do brain surgery with a butter knife.\n\nIt's not that modern artists are better or more talented, but they have better tools and more cumulative knowledge than those who came before them.\n\nIt's actually one of the coolest things about human development of *everything* over history: we're just going to get better and better at what we're doing.",
"...because photos weren't invented yet?",
"Modern artists can achieve photorealism because they are copying from photos.\n\nPhotographs are images captured by a device. The capabilities and settings on the device determine how the image will appear - change the settings slightly and you'll get a very different image. Therefore, a photograph is not explicit reality but a version of it captured in a certain moment, under certain conditions, at a certain angle, by a certain device with certain settings (selected by a human, which is why you should reconsider photos/video as a kind of objective reality in the first place - think about this when watching the news or Youtube).\n\nGo outside and take a photo. Now look at the scene with your eye and compare it to the photo. You should be able to notice differences.\n\nNow come back an hour later and look at the same scene with your eye. At minimum the light has changed, objects might have moved, cloud cover changed, etc.\n\nConsider that creating a detailed painting takes many hours. \n\nConsider that while the artist is working, the conditions of the scene will change.\n\nConsider that when working from a photo, nothing changes. Even the conditions under which the artist views the photo itself do not change since we have the luxury of electronic artificial light.\n\nWhen working from a photograph, the artist is copying a vision captured by a machine; when working from reality, the image produced is built directly from the impressions of a human without the mechanical middle-man.\n\nSo: which method represents reality more accurately as a *human perceives it*? Of course, the question itself only leads to more questions ;)\n\nMy background: I have a degree in fine arts and prefer to paint in oils. I use photographs as a reference for anatomy, proportion, colour but build the image according to whatever imagination inspired it.",
"So apart from ease access to knowledge, professors, books and youtube, as well as constant evolution of all these, to me it's being able to pratice and hone your skills. Material for painting was very expensive and limited sale...people mainly strugled to have food.\n\nIt's just like comparing photographs 15 years ago and today, just for your phone to have a camera makes it easier to study and pratice the art.",
"It probably helps that today's artists have seen photos, and are used to seeing exact two-dimensional images of people.",
"The answer is in your question. There were no photos in the Renaissance, so there was no photorealism to speak of.",
"imo none of these answers are actually addressing OP's concern. You don't always need a photograph in order to paint realism per se. You paint what you see. Why weren't most artists during the Renaissance doing this, or at least painting from memory?",
"Some artists of the renaissance used tools to simulate realism, like camera obscura. Photorealistic techniques of today are simply copying a photograph. If you have a static image to copy, it's easier to get everything right.",
"Photorealism didn't exist back then because photography (unless you believe the Leonardo faked the Shrod of Turin theory) didn't exist yet.",
"As an aside, you'd probably be interested in watching [Tim's Vermeer.](_URL_0_) Arguably, one of the first artists to produce \"photorealism\" well before the photograph had been invented. The full documentary attempts to recreate his method and it's super interesting.",
"**short answer:** At the time of the Renaissance in Italy, someone could feed themselves by painting pictures. So you better paint some awesome pictures. \n\nHowever making paintings is both a skill and a technology. Skills and technology can be forgotten and lost if enough people don't use them enough. \n\n**to continue on:**\n\nA thousand years before the Renaissance, there were people who could make and use those tools very very well. The Romans. However their civilization fell apart and that knowledge was lost - those skills no longer fed you. \n\nEventually a new civilization emerged and people began to use those tools again and use those skills again and refine the tools and refine their skills\n \nIt is a pretty cool because two of those guys who were using those skills and tools, Brunelleschi and Donatello, went to the ruins of Rome and rediscovered great works of art. They reverse engineered lost techniques, skills and tools to help make what we call the Renaissance. \n\nIt is interesting to see how in the history of art, you see it go from primitive/simplified to realistic to simplified to realistic. Given enough time of continual development, it even went abstract and beyond. \n\n**To address realism specifically**, Hellenist (Ancient Greek) sculpture is strikingly realistic. Even cooler... hundreds of years later, the Romans found it fashionable to portray the \"Realistic\" image of people - warts, scars and all. \n\nSo yeah, the Renaissance was a time when a stable and wealthy culture arose and there happened to be enough intelligent and curious people to use their knowledge of craft (Brunelleschi was a silversmith) and to be paid well enough (Lorenzo De Medici has been called the father of the Renaissance and all he did was pay for most of it) to pursue their craft to such a degree that it developed into the art we know of today. \n\nAll of that development boils down to the fact that were enough resources to allow for this technological development. ",
"This will probably be burried, but here it is.\nI have a studio art degree from a public university with an emphasis in oils. I was in school just a few years ago.\nWhen we began our photorealism classes, the professors taught us the technique of copying pictures, detail for detail.\nPainting from life and painting from image, are very different. \nNow, I hope this captures the spirit of ELI5, because I havent studied the human eye or how image transfer works in the human brain.\n We see in three dimensions, right? So when we look at a real life model we see every detail of the light against that three dimensional form. But to capture all of that in a TWO dimensional form is rather difficult. So I was taught to \"cheat\" at first. By painting from a photo, technology that didnt exist during the Renaissance, my eye is now translating a two dimensional figure into another two dimensional figure. Why this is easier for the human eye, I don't know. But from experience, it's definitely much easier to paint a convincingly photorealistic image from a picture over doing it from a real life person. \n\nAnd in response to the comment about the paintings not necessarily looking photorealistic, and instead just looking like \"Renaissance\"...you're half right.\n\nThe masters of the Renaissance respected the human form and got as close to life-like as possible. Photorealism (a term coined much later, at the turn of the century) was the holy grail. It meant more money, the more life-like the commissions became. In their minds, there was nothing better than the natural human form, nothing more beautiful, save perhaps their paintings of it. But they also glorified the human form much like the Greeks did before them. So the human figure was made to look much more lavish, much more exquisite, than it really was. (Some masters admittedly added more musculature to their sculptures and paintings than was anatomically correct.) And there were many iterations of this concept, a noteable contributer being Sir Reubens (the one that painted his ladies nice, rosy, robust, and chubby.)\nSo yeah, it was supposed to look even more beautiful than the natural form, but photorealism was absolutely a goal.",
"My knowledge is limited, and mostly about oil painting. I'd also encourage you to rethink the term \"quality\" -- oil paintings from 500 years ago have significant quality, independent of their anatomical accuracy. What we're really talking about is a change in style.\n\nI think a lot of people have answered this, basically it's easier to work from a photograph (steady, unchanging light source, unmoving object etc.) than it is a live object. Not to imply that photo/hyperrealist artists only work from photographs. Alyssa Monks (one of the best hyperrealist painters around) uses photographs, but rather than just copying the photograph she attempts to make the work move beyond looking like a photo... if that makes sense. \n\nWhat a lot of the top comments haven't mentioned is the massive developments of materials that's occurred since way back when.\n\nOil paints were, and still are in general, quite expensive. Rather than use one colour straight on a canvas, artists would often (read: almost always) do a monotone underpainting (grisaille), and use transparent layers of different colours to build values in the painting (like rather than mixing a red and blue to get purple, you'd do a glaze of red, wait for it to dry, then a glaze of blue). Different pigments layered in different ways produce different results in the overall image. These techniques are still used today, but generally not as a monetary necessity.\n\nWorking like this meant months spent on a single painting. That means that a model was sitting for an artwork for a significant amount of time, over different seasons, different times of day etc. And, obvs, they probably weren't sitting there the entire time. Which means the artist was working from memory, as well as their knowledge of anatomy, light, colour, and how they interact to produce a certain effect.\n\nIn the case of producing realistic skin tones, you might also take into account the paint/varnish ageing. Some pigments aren't as lightfast as others, and become faded; others yellow with time. Varnish often becomes yellowed with age. Of course paintings are often restored and maintained nowadays, which helps combat this.\n\n**TL;DR:**\n\n* Digital technology: unchanging reference available whenever needed, don't have to rely on memory/imagination as much\n\n* electiricty: ability to paint in the same light (influences colour choices made by artist)\n\n* pigments are less expensive: techniques aren't as limited by money\n\n* more pigments available: more colours, cheaper colours\n\n* effects of age on painting: older paintings lose some of their lustre, so we don't see what they initially looked like, only the restored versions.",
"Eyeglasses.\n\nWhile eyeglasses are known to exist as early as the 1200's they were very expensive. The invention of the printing press in 1452 and the growing availability of books encouraged the production of inexpensive eyeglasses, but they were still costly.\n\nNot everyone who became a painter had perfect vision, nor did their patrons. Heck, just ask around the people you know, see who's got contacts. There were many people who couldn't recognize someone standing half an acre away. This set the bar for realism very low.",
"One thing I didn't see mention is the pure size of the population, and density of cities.\n\nA medium sized city today could compete against the biggest cities pre industrial revolution. Our biggest cities today could compete against whole countries. The best composer in the world at any given time back then was the best of millions, not billions. It was only the best of multiple generations that we even really remember, and those people we remember are often innovators at a turning point. ",
"You're making one huge, and rather wrong, assumption that photorealism was the aim of such works. \n\nArtists usually follow certain styles, and making something look life life wasn't necessarily the goal. ",
"Because they didn't have cameras to know what a photo looked like. Photos don't look like reality, they look like photos. People like Raphael were pretty on point when it came to like real people. ",
"I think the answer is photography! I´m an illustrator and I have some friends who make photoreal illustration and they use photographs as reference all the time, also, nowadays you have 3d software too, so you can for instance pose a car in perspective and paint on top of it, adding your own details and variations while knowing the perspective is correct and not have to think about it. \n\nPhotoreal illustration is heavily demanded in some areas such as advertising or videogames, so with demand people start figuring out ways of doing it.\n\nI also have to say your example is not the best, see Vermeer for instance, who allegedly used lenses and optical tricks as the \"camera obscura\" to compensate for the lack of actual photographic technology and achieve his own degree of photorealism: _URL_0_",
"I'd never understood the point of striving for photorealistic images as non-photographic forms of art. Why put in so much time, work, and effort to attempt to match a form of art that can do it all so well already?",
"Artists of past generations used to look down on photorealistic artwork. They valued style and the artist adding a their own voice to the artwork. They believed realism was lazy, anyone could copy real life but an artist gave you more than what was there. \n\nIf you look at the artwork of John Singer Sargent, he started in America doing paintings that utilized realism but since the American art scene was scarce he went to study art in France. His style changed work European influence and he shied away from realism and incorporated some impressionist tones. \n\nSource: BFA Degree",
"The method used by Photorealist are technological. They use something called a value mapping to pinpoint exactly where the contours, values and shift of tone occur. This can easily be done with a projector and a pencil with a high clay content a la 7h to trace, and a rigid smooth primed surface a la a board with a gessoed and sanded surface to trace on. The methods of mixing paint today are much easier with formulas available online on how to generate specific chroma. Photorealistic Grisaille, monochomatic studies, are something that complete painting amateurs can do it if they follow a specific protocol. \n\nPhotorealist is a nothing more than a supped up version of paint by numbers.\n\n\n\n",
"Renaissance artists didn't have photographs to work from. The best representation of an image was the image they could themselves create. ",
"When I was 20 I took my first college drawing class. I was amazed at how awesome I was because our early assignments were to take photos and copy them, and I worked hard and did pretty damned well! I was probably in the top couple of my class. Hot shit. Fast forward to the \"real\" drawing classes. 10 minute figure drawing poses in charcoal. Good god did I suck. It took years of life drawing, sometimes 3 hours/day x 5 days a week, and several different teachers and dozens of books, before I would be able to produce anything worth looking at, and anyone with an untrained eye would still prefer the photographic copies of my early days. The reality is that copying from photographs is a much simpler process than observing from reality. The fundamentals of drawing/painting (gesture, form, light, etc etc) simply aren't required to copy from a photograph, although the two aren't mutually exclusive. ",
"Renaissance paintings follow a certain style, they weren't trying to achieve photorealism they were trying to achieve Renaissance. ",
"I think the simplest explanation would be the fact that artists today can base their works on photos instead of live subjects under ever changing natural light. Copying a photo is much easier than depicting a live subject.",
"How could the Renaissance aim for photorealism when photography didn't exist?",
"One thing that a lot of people are missing is a lot of the technology has improved.\n\nWe can make better pigments in more colors than ever before. We are better at making what holds the pigments together. We can choose the viscosity we want from our paints with incredible ease.\n\nWe are better at putting those pigments in containers. A renaissance painter for example had to use an animal bladder to hold the paints that they hand made themselves. If they wanted to put paint on a pallet they had to cut a hole in the bladder and squeeze out the paint. Than they had to seal the hole using glue and a patch. They had to do this to keep their paint fresh and the color strong. Today we have aluminum tubes that we can simply squeeze paint out of. This saves the artist time and gives them the ability to quickly choose between the tons of new pigments we have created.\n\nWe have a better tools for applying paint. Not only have synthetic brushes improved to an amazing point, the average person in a developed nation can easily buy natural fiber brushes from all sorts of animals from all over the world. Additionally we have tools like airbrushes. Our pencils and pens are far better.\n\nWe have better understanding of color. So while it is true that scientist Sir Isaac Newton discovered how light and color are related, it wasn't until much later that we had a deep and sophisticated understanding of how the mind and eye understand color in relationship to each other. This understanding actually came from weaving textiles, and learning how colors next to each other can make each other appear more vibrant or duller.\n\nAll this together plus the invention of photography as other respondents have mentioned, simply let modern artists do things that renaissance artists couldn't even approach.\n\nInterestingly, if it wasn't for that weaving thing I mentioned, coal refinement, and aluminum paint tubes there would never have been impressionism.",
"Pre-photograph = transcription of form and light. \n\nPhotorealism= Methodically copying \n\nPre photography- ideas about ideal form vs gross raw reality\n\nPhotorealism- conceptual-pop art about photography and its impact on how we see the world and view reality.",
"Photographs give us all an agreement on what a 2D representation of 3D space should look like that people never used to have. Our vision is not as straightforward as you would think. Optical illusions, for example, can show us some of the ways our vision is funky.\n\nIt is sort of like how we got used to seeing car tires spinning 'backward' in a movie as 24fps, or the sound of coconuts clapping together for horse hooves. Both of those things are unnatural, but feel right anyway because we've grown used to them.\n\nThere is actually a painter, Vermeer, who likely used a sort of camera obscura 350 years ago. They initially figured this out only because the perspective in the painting was accurate for photography, but wrong for human perspective. Photographic perspective, apparently, would have actually looked very strange to people back then.",
"photographs didn't exist in the renaissance.\n\nThe most realistic paintings possibly used lenses or camera obscura.\n\nPracticing off of photographs is one part of it.\n\nThe materials were not the same quality as today, the tools available not the same. Mixing every pigment and chemical from scratch...\n\nMy aunt could draw photorealistically from a very young age, so something in the brain has also developed over the centuries.\n\nI mean she was 4 or 5 drawing more realistically than \"masters\" of back when.",
"Your answer comes in a few forms.\n\nFirst, copying a photograph is not very difficult to do. It's essentially a half step up from tracing something directly. Most photorealist painters will use a mechanical process, like a grid and measurements, to recreate the photo. You could do this yourself with a little training and practice. Painting from real life, on the other hand, is the most difficult kind of painting you can do. Renaissance painters didn't have any photos to look at.\n\nSecond, Photorealism is just that - reality as seen in a photo. Real life is not photorealistic. Cameras make all kind of lense distortions, blurs, color modifications, etc, that we've come to accept as more realistic because almost all of the pictures we see are photographs. Renaissannce painters were certainly interested in making something dimensional and realistic, but their paintings don't have camera distortions, so you may read it as less realistic when it really isn't.\n\nThird, Renaissance artists, along with most other artists up until the 1850's or so, were interested in idealizing people and landscapes to be as beautiful as possible. They weren't interested in painting pores and wrinkles, nose hairs, sweat, and the other things that make something look completely lifelike.\n\nAll that said, there are a few artists throughout that period who aimed to make their paintings look as real to life as possible - Like Rembrandt: [Link](_URL_0_) and [Link](_URL_1_). It's not photorealism because it doesn't have photographic artifacts, but it's realistic to the point where, standing in front of it, it looks like a real person.\n\nAlso remember that, when you're looking at a painting on a computer screen, you're not looking at the actual painting. It's very difficult to get a good picture of a painting because they have 3-dimensional surfaces and glazing effects that work with the light shining through them.",
"I would assume that the two main contributors are:\n\n1. Being able to have a photo as a reference that is consistent and you can make nots on etc. compared to a live model that moves and changes and would only sit for a few hours. \n\n2. Now artists largely start out with passion and do it as a hobby. They have time to practice and refine their skills and them the money come as a bonus. Back in the renaissance they were doing it as the only source of income so near enough is good enough if you are due to get the money you can move onto the next client. ",
"lower quality tools/pencils/paint ect?"
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7af9dw | how did old guitar effect pedals actually produce effects such as reverb & delay? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7af9dw/eli5_how_did_old_guitar_effect_pedals_actually/ | {
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"I'm not too sure about delay, though there were some 'tape delay' units that worked like cassette tapes, except the tape was in a small loop. It had both a record head and read head running on one tape, so it would record the input from the guitar and play it back after a short delay. You could adjust the delay by adjusting the tape speed. In theory you could adjust the delay by changing the distance between the heads also, but I'm not sure if this was done as it would be more complicated. \n\nFor reverb the old school way (might have been others) was called spring reverb. They stretch a string between two moving coils, which work similar to how a speaker and microphone work (electrodynamic speaker and mic, anyway). One end of the spring is vibrated by applying the input signal to the coil, making it move like a speaker. The waves would run down the spring and go back and forth, and interact, kind of like how sound waves would bounce around a room and interact, and reverberate! At the other end of the spring, that coil would be used as a microphone to pick up the sound and add it back to the signal that's being fed to the amplifier.\n\n"
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5lf6ni | how to type korean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lf6ni/eli5_how_to_type_korean/ | {
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"Korean isn't a logographic language like Chinese. It has an alphabet, just like English, made up of consonants and vowels. The major difference between Korean and English (and other alphabetic languages) is that in Korean, you group the letters of each syllable and write them on top of each other. 사랑해 (\"saranghae\") is just made up of three syllables - 사, 랑, 해 - and each of these is made up of two or three letters: \n\n* 사 = ㅅ + ㅏ\n* 랑 = ㄹ + ㅏ + ㅇ\n* 해 = ㅎ + ㅐ",
"Korean uses an alphabet called hangul. Individual letters are composed into syllables, with each syllable occupying one block. This means that the computer needs to know when you have finished typing one syllable and want to start typing the next: fortunately, the Korean writing system has very strict and simple rules that are quite easy to program into a computer.\n\nA syllable must start with a consonant, and must contain at least one vowel; it can then have another consonant at the end. The consonant letter \"ㅇ\" is \"ng\" at the end of a syllable, but silent at the beginning of a syllable, so this lets you write syllables beginning with a vowel *sound* without breaking the rule that in written Korean, all syllables must begin with a consonant.\n\nIn your example, \"saranghae\" is \"사랑해\", the three blocks representing the syllables \"sa-rang-hae\".\n\nFirst, you type an \"s\", which in Korean is \"ㅅ\". Next comes a vowel, \"ㅏ\"; when you type that, the \"ㅅ\" changes to \"사\", the syllable \"sa\".\n\nThat's fine, but then you type the Korean \"r\", which is \"ㄹ\", but the computer initially thinks that you are typing the syllable \"sar\" or \"sal\", and so it gives you \"살\". At this point you panic, because that's not what you want.\n\nBut don't worry, because the moment you type the next letter -- another \"ㅏ\" -- the software knows that you can't start a Korean syllable with a vowel letter. And so now it knows that the \"ㄹ\" needs to go in the second syllable, changes the \"살\" back to \"사\" and starts a new syllable \"라\".\n\nNow you type \"ㅇ\", and the \"라\" changes to \"랑\", the syllable \"rang\".\n\nNext, type \"ㅎ\". This is a consonant, so the computer knows that it can leave \"랑\" exactly as it is and start a new syllable. Finally, you type \"ㅐ\", the \"ㅎ\" changes to \"해\" and you're done.\n\nSo in fact, if everything is working properly, you should just be able to type the Korean letters \"ㅅ\", \"ㅏ\", \"ㄹ\", \"ㅏ\", \"ㅇ\", \"ㅎ\" and \"ㅐ\", and the software will automatically convert it to \"사랑해\" without you having to do anything else. You do have to make sure you have a Korean keyboard and you have switched it to accept Korean (a Korean keyboard can be toggled between Korean and English input; for example, if you want to type a web address, you normally have to use English input mode)."
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1zbjo4 | common law marriages | I'm not really understanding. What exactly is stopping someone that is having their possessions threatened in a common law relationship trail from just claiming that their ex. S.O was nothing more than a roommate? No arguments against this simple claim is coming to mind. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zbjo4/eli5common_law_marriages/ | {
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"If you claimed tax privileges for common law marriage during the relationship, that's a bit of a give away.",
"The court is going to look at the evidence, not just someone's claim. If you held yourself out to the public as married, claimed tax exemptions as a married couple, combined finances as a married couple, etc. "
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815pu7 | how does mouth numbing gel work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/815pu7/eli5_how_does_mouth_numbing_gel_work/ | {
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"In order to conduct signals, including pain and other sensations, nerve cells need charged ions to be able to move in and out of them using special channels, which creates the electrical currents that transmit the signals.\n\nBenzocaine, which is the main ingredient in Orajel, blocks one type of these channels, keeping the nerve cells from working properly and thus blocking sensation."
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76gw2r | how do animals know the concept of winning and losing? | I was watching Planet Earth II and watched Komodo Dragons fight in order to mate with the female Komodo Dragon. They fought and stopped as soon as one topples the other. How do they know the concept of defeat and not continue on with the fight until death? How did these mating rules even develop?
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/76gw2r/eli5_how_do_animals_know_the_concept_of_winning/ | {
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"They don't \"know\" in a conscious sense, it just follows its instincts.\n\nThe whole point of these competitions is to see who gets to pass the genes down to the next generation. In general, the strongest animal wins, but there is more to it than that. If an animal tries too hard, it might lose and die, and clearly not pass its genes on. Even if it wins, it might suffer serious injury, and be unable to win the next time. Whereas an animal that backs off before it gets hurt will survive to try again another day.\n\nThe animal that is both strong and best able to balance trying too hard and not trying hard enough it the one who is the most likely to pass is genes on. After several generations, this behavior gets more and more refined until it is more of a ritual competition than a battle."
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3zktaj | why are mods on default subreddits deleting all news about the sexual assaults carried out by hundreds of north africans in germany? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zktaj/eli5_why_are_mods_on_default_subreddits_deleting/ | {
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"This is hardly a 'complex concept' that you'd like explained, although one obvious reason might be that you're spamming the same comment & link to dozens of threads and subreddits, labelling it more serious than various things such as terrorism, so maybe you shouldn't be surprised when your activism triggers anti-spam behaviour."
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1r6z4w | - no child left behind...how could anyone have ever thought this idea would work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r6z4w/eli5_no_child_left_behindhow_could_anyone_have/ | {
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"Probably because the people who thought it would work were left behind as kids.",
"It's like everything else with education, it sounds great when the only experience one has is sitting in school as a student 40 years ago. Then the corporate interests go into monetization mode and profit/political motives give a flawed policy tons of momentum.",
"Companies that provide the test grading hardware and companies that produce the textbooks stood to gain a large amount of profit. There's your ELI5 answer. But to generalize further--- all goverment programs that include private contracts function this way-- the data they use to reach conclusions that may benefit the society on social programs are predated by private institutions interested in only one thing- increasing their private wealth. \n\nNo child left behind has been a devastating consequence of the privatization of public education. \n\n"
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18ujob | formula one racing. | Totally new to all things racing.
How do you win a "season"?
Why do "teams" have two racers intstead of one or 10?
How does someone in the US watch races?
Are there any great historical races I should watch?
Just the basics so I can start watching some races and know what all the drama's about! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18ujob/eli5_formula_one_racing/ | {
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"1st : 25 points\n\n2nd : 18 points\n\n3rd : 15 points\n\n4th : 12 points\n\n5th : 10 points\n\n6th : 8 points\n\n7th : 6 points\n\n8th : 4 points\n\n9th : 2 points\n\n10th : 1 point\n\nWhichever driver gets the most points in a season wins. Ditto teams or \"constructors\".\n\nEvery team has to field two cars in every event each weekend and can use a Max of four drivers per season IIRC. \n\nThe rules are changed every few years with more emphasis on safety, normally. In the 1960s you almost expected to die. There are also lots of rules and regulations on maximum spending and technical stuff.\n\nWatch \"Senna\" about one of the greatest drivers ever, Ayrton Senna. The day he died he held a meeting about driver safety after a driver died in a practice or qualifying session, Senna later died after hitting a wall at 130mph.",
" > How do you win a \"season\"? \n\nBy scoring the most points from races (one for the most successful driver and one for the most successful driver). Currently the points are awarded like this: 25 for 1st place, 18 for 2nd, 15 for 3rd, 12 for 4th, 10 for 5th, 8 for 6th, 6 for 7th, 4 for 8th, 2 for 9th and finally 1 for 10th.\n\n > Why do \"teams\" have two racers intstead of one or 10?\n\nTo create a more diverse racing field while the better teams can still show off that they know what they're doing.\n\nThe drama? It's a combaintion of what makes their cars the best. Some drivers are better maintaining the tires so they can run longer stints. Other ones are better at making takeovers. Some cars are just simply better made to help drivers do these thing.\n\nThere's also a lot of strategy going on when you should do a pitstop to change tires (should the driver stay out a bit longer and do a few slower laps or should they come in early and have the advantage of fresh tires?). \n\nEdit: the stratgey bit can bit too much hands on from the team. Favourit segement from the 2012 season when Kimi Räikkönen tells his race engineer that [he knows what he's doing](_URL_0_)."
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2b6je2 | the tickling sensation in lower nuts region when high above ground? | I get a very weird sensation at the bottom of my nutsack when I'm high above ground or look up at something high. I am pretty scared of heights. Why in my nutsack and why he tickling feeling?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b6je2/eli5the_tickling_sensation_in_lower_nuts_region/ | {
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"text": [
"When you are scared, your body reacts. One reaction that evolution has left us part of our flee or fight response is raising your hairs to appear bigger. You can feel your skin contracting and raising your hairs the most in the most sensitive regions, for example, your scrotum."
]
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[]
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|
63h3cq | how does silica gel keep things fresh? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63h3cq/eli5_how_does_silica_gel_keep_things_fresh/ | {
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"It absorbs the water / moisure / humidity. Preventing any damage from water to the boxes / items\n\nSilica get is not deadly. It's like pourous glass, it's non-toxic.\n\nHowever it can irritate your digestive or respiratory system.",
"Silica gel is a desiccant, meaning it absorbs water and keeps the relative humility low in a sealed environment.\n\nSilica gel is used where you don't want moisture building inside a container. Usually this is to keep fungus and bacteria from growing (if the environment is dry they can't grow). This would be the case for your shoes and certain \"dry\" foods (most commonly beef jerky and other 'jerked' meats).\n\nSilica gel is also commonly used in the packaging of electronics. For micro-electronics with exposed leads you don't want any moisture build up that could lead to a short.",
"If it's just silica gel, then it's a desiccant, meaning that it absorbs and holds on to moisture. That's not the only form though, and this is a good explanation of what exactly these things are and how they work: _URL_0_"
]
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[],
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"http://apartmentprepper.com/the-difference-between-oxygen-absorbers-and-silica-gel/"
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||
5al8jf | why do some stores (e.g. gamestop) have multiple stores located in close proximity to each other? | I've also noticed that McDonalds and Starbucks follow this trend, in that there could be three or more Starbucks locations within a mile of each other. In my town, there are two McDonalds located across the street from each other. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5al8jf/eli5_why_do_some_stores_eg_gamestop_have_multiple/ | {
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"in some cases it's just such a busy area that 1 store would be too busy to handle all the business, and thus lose business because some people would not be willing to wait and go elsewhere. this is especially the case with starbucks and probably mcdonalds as well. in the case of gamestop, it's probably a mix of that, as well as the fact that they bought up a bunch of their competitors and made them in to gamestops. anything that used to be a software etc, babbages, or eb games either closed it's doors or became a gamestop (I think some of their stores still operate as eb games though so maybe not ALL of them did this). ",
"The design of a store like Starbucks looks to maximize efficiency. You want to use the space to the greatest effect. In general you don't want to end up with some sort of mega-monstrosity where you have 20 baristas working a 50 foot long counter. Same thing applies to McDonald's; I don't think I've ever seen one where it was more than 3-4 registers.\n\nNow, if business is *really popular* in the area, you might find this efficient store being overloaded by customers. Since, as above, we don't want to just tack on more counter space to our existing design, what we can do instead is build another location pretty close. If you choose the location well you would divert a good portion of the customers from Store A to new Store B.",
"Sometimes something as simple as adding a store to the south bound side of a street even with one on the northbound will create additional business. People feel its less out of the way and will be more inclined to shop there.",
"Sometimes a store is kept just to keep a competitor out of a prime location. If there is a busy mall, busy shopping center, and busy downtown all in close proximity, it's better to operate three stores (even if two really could capture most of the market) when the third store keeps a start up from capturing a prime location. ",
"Franchises operate in a way that can cause this. Say you operate a successful Subway restaurant. You are the franchisee in your town. Business gets really good. Subway corporation decides your town needs two outlets. They split your town in half. You are given right of first refusal on the new location. \nTwo things can happen. You agree to build another location. Your know your town and think another location up at the college would be great. \nOr you refuse and a new franchisee agrees to build a new location, they now lord over that half of town. But they aren't from your town and really need a success at this store so they look at the map and realize Subway corporation drew the dividing line awfully close to the original store. So they locate across the street from you because they know you are busy (why else is corporate adding locations right?) and half of a busy location is better than going into a neighbourhood where no one would want a sub. Or the original owners don't want to give a refusal to allow competition so they agree to take up the new location to protect their monopoly but they realize everyone in that town that is hungry comes downtown to eat so to fulfill their obligations they build the new store down the block. "
]
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3kx9go | how do scientists determine what "reduces the risk of cancer"? | It always says that a new study shows that doing/not doing something will reduce the risk of x cancer by y%. What are they studying? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kx9go/eli5_how_do_scientists_determine_what_reduces_the/ | {
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"They use a group of people and ask them questions. \"How much wine do you drink?\" for example. After some time they get back to those people and ask more questions or check their medical records - how many of those people got cancer? What habits were dominant in the cancer patients? With those questions the scientists try to find correlations.",
"It's called a [longitudinal study](_URL_0_). What you do is take a group of people (usually in the low thousands) and study them for a long time - 10, 20, 30 years. First, you divide them into two groups - in the first group, you do nothing. This is the control group. In the second group, you have them do something - exercise more, or drink a big class of grape juice in the morning, etc. \n\nAt the end of the study, you compare the percentage of people who got cancer in the first group with the percentage in the second group, and see whether it went up or down. \n\n"
]
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[],
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21n78g | why do many pictures taken from astronauts show a black background. | there is no atmosphere so shouldn't distant stars be easy to see.if i can see Orion's belt in a large city should astronauts see nothing but stars and galaxies everywhere | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21n78g/eli5_why_do_many_pictures_taken_from_astronauts/ | {
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"score": [
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"text": [
"You can only have so much contrast in an image. Stars are faint compared to the light illuminating the subjects.\n\nThis is one of the reasons people think we didn't land on the moon."
]
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[]
] |
|
29zsir | how exactly is the distinction between a 'developed' nation and a 'developing' one made? | Basically what constitutes a 'developing' nation, and what needs to happen for it to be considered 'developed'? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29zsir/eli5_how_exactly_is_the_distinction_between_a/ | {
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"There is no universal standard, but the [Human Development Index](_URL_0_) is probably as close as it gets. Even so, there is rarely a single line in the sand that constitutes \"developed.\" Many international organizations, such as the IMF, keep their own lists of which states are considered \"developing\".",
"English is not my first language, so please excuse if it sounds awkward. \n\nThere are many distinctions between the two, but a major one involves population size. Developed countries have either stable or falling population numbers. For example, Japan (a developed nation) is experiencing a falling population because women are deciding to have less children (ie 1 or 2), as well as having children later on in life. Women becoming more involved in the work force takes away time to raise children while they work to support themselves. In the US, the population remains stable because of immigration. Without immigration, the US would be experiencing a similar drop in population, but large numbers of people immigrating in to find better lives keeps the population stable. In developing nations, the population is usually rising. Many poorer families have more children than what would just replace their parents (ie 3 or more). For example, in India, before modern medicine, families had many children. Many young infants would die, so parents would have a lot of kids to ensure that they had some offspring to help with family business, usually involving farm work. Because this has happened for so many years, having large families has become cultural. Now that modern medicine has come into the country, the IMR (infant mortality rate) has decreased, but the number of children families have has not, so the population rises at a rapid rate. \n\nBy this logic, one way a developing nation could become considered developed would be by keeping an eye on the population numbers. But, as stated before, there are many other factors. \n\nHope this helps a little!",
"Developed nations tend to have:\n\n* fully industrialized economies\n* stable gov't with smooth transitions of power\n* effective rule of law within its borders\n* a well developed middle class"
]
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75rck2 | if venus flytraps have chloroplast, why do they have the need to trap insects for food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/75rck2/eli5_if_venus_flytraps_have_chloroplast_why_do/ | {
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"text": [
"Plants need more than sun and water. Nitrogen, Potassium, and phosphorus being the most important. Flytraps and other carnivorous plants have evolved to grow in low nitrogen soil acquiring their nitrogen from the insects they \"eat\" instead. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
bi51nr | how does a baby supply oxygen in the first seconds mid/post childbirth? can babies obtain oxygen from the placenta and the lungs simultaneously ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bi51nr/eli5_how_does_a_baby_supply_oxygen_in_the_first/ | {
"a_id": [
"ely50iw"
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"text": [
"In order for oxygen to pass from the mother's blood across the placenta, the baby's blood has a much much higher binding affinity for oxygen. Because of the higher affinity the amount of oxygen in the babies blood is way higher than adults. This extra oxygen can supply the babies body with sufficient oxygen for 5 or more minutes of not breathing with no problems. Once the first breaths are taken a chain reaction is initiated in the blood that drops the affinity for oxygen in the blood to normal amounts. After that the oxygen the lungs supplies the blood is used and relied on. Hope this helps."
]
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[]
] |
||
1rn8ci | thanksgiving | Non Americans here discussing it tonight. We think it's about thanking Native Americans for saving some early colonials and to help the English stay in the country. It also seems to involve driving large distances to eat meals with family.
Questions! Do you give gifts? Do you wish strangers "happy thanksgiving" (or "happy holidays")? Do you see or call friends, or is it family only? Are there reconciliation type events (thanking Native Americans)? Or is it thanking God? Do Muslim, Atheist and Jewish Americans celebrate it? Is it bigger in white or conservative communities? Or is it more a liberal holiday? Are there anti-thanksgiving views? How many public holidays is it? We had so many things we couldn't answer! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rn8ci/eli5_thanksgiving/ | {
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"cdowsk9"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Gifts are not typically exchanged on Thanksgiving. Strangers do typically wish each other a happy Thanksgiving/holiday. While Thanksgiving is traditionally a family holiday, some people do see/call friends. In particular, if a friend isn't spending Thanksgiving with someone (often due to being separated from their family), it's fairly customary to invite them to spend Thanksgiving with your family. Native Americans rarely get thanked. Religious people often thank God, but the feeling of gratitude generally isn't directed at anything or anyone in particular, unless they're directly involved. It's considered a generally American holiday, so it's celebrated by people regardless of their race, religion, or political affiliations. I wouldn't say there are people who express 'Anti-Thanksgiving' views, but there are some who say the story is watered down, and that the Thanksgiving story everyone knows takes away from the fact that Native Americans were abused by white settlers. Also, the big controversy recently is that a lot of employers, especially in retail, make their employees work on Thanksgiving. This is partly because Black Friday, which is considered one of the busiest shopping days of the year, is tomorrow. Thanksgiving is only one public holiday, but many employers also give employees the following day off so they can have a 4-day weekend, and schools might be closed as early as Tuesday or Wednesday."
]
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|
2rvvzq | how did they connect to the satellites back in the 1950s? | This question might seem very stupid to a lot of people but I'm just that stupid. The first satellite was launched in 1957 and that was way before internet or computers that weren't the size of a wardrobe. So how did they communicate with those satellites to get their data? How did the spy satellites send the reconnaissance photos back to earth? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rvvzq/eli5_how_did_they_connect_to_the_satellites_back/ | {
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"text": [
"Using radio transmitters/receivers. We still use these, by the way. Computers just allow us more options in how to process the data.",
"You don't need any sophisticated radio equipment to send/receive radio signals from orbit. Back in the 60s, the early communication satellites actually broadcast a carrier signal on a certain frequency that school children could pick up on their transistor radios.\n\nThe old communication satellites didn't have much in the way of on-board processing. All they were were analogue repeaters. Signal comes in, signal gets rebroadcast down, maybe on a different channel. Not much more complicated than an old TV. And mostly analogue.\n\nOld spy satellites actually had film canisters (look up the old \"Keyhole\" sats) that would be ejected when the satellite was over friendly territory. It could take 12 hrs or days to get the film back from one of those... thats why the U2 and SR-71 spy planes were such a game changer for reconnaissance.",
"The first satellites, like Sputnik (1957), were just passive radio transmitters - they didn't need to worry about picking up an signals from Earth.\n\n[Early spy satellites](_URL_1_) relied on actually dropping canisters of film back to Earth.\n\nIt wasn't until the 60s that we started putting up communications satellites. [Here's a film that Bell (AT & T) put together about the first Telstar](_URL_0_) satellite which went up in 1962."
]
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[],
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKH-GijnAGk&ab_channel=AT&TTechChannel",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite\\)"
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|
22f8ui | if the risks of superintelligent ai are so drastic (including human extinction), why are so many people trying to build it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22f8ui/eli5_if_the_risks_of_superintelligent_ai_are_so/ | {
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"text": [
"I don't believe that anyone outside the world of science fiction is seriously suggesting that AI would result in human destruction. Do you have any sources that say this?",
"The potential rewards that coincide with the risk are essentially limitless. When we have machines that are smarter than humans, the whole world is going to change very, very dramatically, very, very quickly. That *could* be for the worse, sure, but it could also be ***by far*** the best thing that's ever happened to the world. \n\nImagine a world run by benevolent machines that love us and are literally a trillion times smarter than the wisest, most brilliant human who's ever lived. *Wouldn't it be awesome?*\n\nEvery problem that's plagued us since the dawn of man (war, famine, disease, death, poverty, politics) would be *trivial* before the power of their intellect. ",
"Insufficient data for meaningful answer",
"because we are an intermediate race that is only supposed to last long enough to bring about the rise of the machines",
"The risks are all speculative."
]
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2llbbe | how are websites like fanduel and draftkings legal and pokerstars and fulltilt not? | I guess the real question should be why am I allowed to wager real money on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings, that focus on fantasy sports, and not in online poker matches?
Pokerstars and Fulltilt are/were websites that allowed online poker, where you could wager real or 'play' money. Now websites like FanDuel and DraftKings allow gamblers to wager money on fantasy sports. How is this legal and online poker not? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2llbbe/eli5_how_are_websites_like_fanduel_and_draftkings/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Fantasy sports have been legally defined as games of skill in most states while poker remains a game of chance. "
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|
39mq2p | why did almost all videos on news sites start autoplaying in the last few years? | How did this very annoying trend start? Is it so they can put ads in the video for people who use AdBlock, or do they really think when I click on a news article I want to watch a video first? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39mq2p/eli5_why_did_almost_all_videos_on_news_sites/ | {
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"text": [
"To get your attention.\n\nMedia producers know that you're probably opening several web pages at once, and that your eye may not be drawn to the content they want you to pay attention to.\n\nEven if it's not in the tab you're browsing, the audio from the video alerts you (if you have sound on) and drives your attention to their content; be that advertising or a news story.",
"Professional web developer here.\n\nIt's a grab tactic. Years ago, usage metrics for a lot of sites on the internet were showing that people really weren't engaging with video content, unless they were on a site that provided a video-centric experience (like vimeo, or youtube). It's been a while, so the name of the study escapes me, but, an interesting contrast to the metrics mentioned previously, a study had found that users were more likely to watch and engage with video content if it automatically started playing - it's the same phenomenon that pubs use when they leave their TVs on throughout the day: You went to get a drink or food, but get distracted and end up staying longer than you originally intended to.\n\nThe *reason* they employ the grab tactic is twofold: 1) Someone, somewhere, likely paid a lot of money for that video. If videos aren't being watched, then videos stop being demanded, and it's trickle-down effect for the people involved. So, they *really* want you to watch videos; 2) Ultimately, it will draw in some people that may not have been drawn in before, which is ultimately good for business."
]
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[],
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|
d201ou | why do tv channels that are available for free with an over the air antenna (nbc, abc, etc.) require a paid cable subscription to be watched on their app/website? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d201ou/eli5_why_do_tv_channels_that_are_available_for/ | {
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"Costs way more to store that stuff and deliver it over the Internet than it does to broadcast the content weekly. And you’re paying for the convenience of getting it on demand.\n\nExample - I use a music site called beatport a lot. They recently announced that they’d be deleting any records that sold 0 units in 2019 because the storage and egress bandwidth (the bandwidth used to send content to you from their servers) from cloud service providers is insanely expensive. \n\nFactor in a content delivery network for consistent speed in “any region” and you’ve got some serious overhead.\n\nAlso the paid services are usually ad-free. On the flip side, a TV network is actually profiting from ad revenue on a well established show/program when it’s broadcasted.",
"They give you recent episodes for free but to get all episodes, you need a subscription.\n\nCBS for instance wants that streaming money. Networks want to control their own content."
]
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[],
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||
ayn9pz | why does every interval on a number line contain infinitely many irrational numbers? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayn9pz/eli5_why_does_every_interval_on_a_number_line/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Imagine you take the space between 1 and 2. Now you want a number that’s just slightly smaller than 2, say it’s 1.9 now let’s say that you want a number that’s in between those say it’s 1.95 this can keep going on forever as no matter how small the difference is you can continue to create a number that is slightly larger \nEx: 1.1 1.11 1.111 1.1111 1.11111 1.111111",
"The real number line is continuous. For any two numbers, no matter how close they are, you can find a number between them (e.g. between 1.000000 and 1.000001, there's 1.0000005). But how do we know there are *infinitely* many? Actually if you can accept the first statement as truth, that there is at least one number between any pair of numbers, I can actually prove to you that there must be an infinite amount of numbers between any two numbers on the number line.\n\n**Axiom** (accepted as truth): for all real numbers *a* and *b*, where *a ≠ b*, there exists at least one real number *x* such that *a < x < b*.\n\n**Theorem**: for all real numbers *a* and *b* where *a ≠ b*, there exist infinitely many real numbers *x* such that *a < x < b*.\n\n**Proof** (by contradiction): suppose there are finitely many numbers between *a* and *b*. Since there are finitely many, we can list all the numbers between *a* and *b* in order. Take the number *x* at the beginning of the list - i.e. the number closest to *a*. Now if we consider the pair *a* and *x*, there are no other numbers between them, a violation of the axiom. Therefore, there must be infinitely many numbers between *a* and *b*."
]
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9vopjr | i'm 18 and have no idea how voting or any government positions are obtained. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vopjr/eli5_im_18_and_have_no_idea_how_voting_or_any/ | {
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"text": [
"What country do you live in?",
"First. Acknowledge that our education system has failed you. Not only failed you on teaching the gov and society but also how to acquire knowledge. But it's not a total failure since at least you asked somewhere.\n\nGo learn yourself by going to resources provided like wiki or your government published resources.\n\nFinally near in middle somewhere, you'll realize that it all works, and at same time, it completely doesn't work.",
"Do you want to know how to vote, how votes are counted, how elections work, what government positions are elected, or how government in general works. Or all of the above?"
]
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2ev3zl | in baseball, why do managers get so angry? what's the point? why do the umpires allow them to get right in their face? | Seems a bit silly to me
Edit: EXPLAINED. Thank you | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ev3zl/eli5_in_baseball_why_do_managers_get_so_angry/ | {
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"It's a morale thing. The players get pumped up knowing that their managers and coaches will fight for them, even if it ends up getting them thrown out of the game. The umpires know this and allow this, up to a point.\n\nThere's actually times that managers have gone up to yell at the ump, even though they agree with his decision. They'll just yell random sentences or make pleasant conversation in a loud angry voice so that the players can get the morale boost.",
"Baseball is one of the few games that relies heavily on the decisions of the umpire where a bad call can change the game completely. Every pitch can be called a ball or a strike. Fair or foul can be a judgment call, player interference, ect. Every umpire has a different strike zone and sometimes it changes throughout the game. In stark contrast to something like hockey or basketball, it goes in the net or it doesn't. While the refs can make bad calls, there is a limit to how much the refs can influence the game.\n\nManagers get upset with bad calls or calls that go against their team. They get in the umpires faces to back up their players and maybe influence future decisions. "
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1wqo7q | why haven't humans evolved better eyelashes or just none at all? | I know the purpose of eyelashes, to keep dust out of the eye, but the problem is that they cancel out their purpose when they fall into our eyes. Why haven't we evolved better eyelashes or just lost them entirely if humans have been encountering this problem for the entire time we have existed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wqo7q/eli5_why_havent_humans_evolved_better_eyelashes/ | {
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"text": [
"Because it's such a slight problem compared to the benefits. It's like saying \"why haven't humans lost their legs, if legs can be broken and cause horrible pain?\" Yes, there is a downside of injury/damage to that body part, but the benefits of having that body part far outweigh the pain that is suffered when it goes wrong, which is fairly uncommon.",
"Eyelashes are much better to get in our eyes compared to something like sand, as the eyelash isn't going to scratch your eye's surface. Also they have become a factor in sexual selection.",
"They rarity at which they fall into your eye and the minimal-nonexistent damage they cause is far superior to the near constant barrage of dangerous particulate getting into your eyes. ",
"Better eyelashes would not improve one's odds of reproducing. There's just no pressure selecting for less annoying lashes."
]
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2t9x8l | why do most train stations have no barrier between the platform and train? isn't this a massive liability? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2t9x8l/eli5_why_do_most_train_stations_have_no_barrier/ | {
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"There's also no barrier between the vast majority of roads and sidewalks, just a little strip of something that's a different color.\n\nSometimes not even that.",
"Nothing wrong with allowing natural selection to run its course from time to time.",
"The main problem is how you position the doors in the barrier to let people get on the train. First you need the train to stop in exactly the same place each time to line up with the doors, which really needs an automated system rather than a human driver. Second, you need all trains to be identical with doors in the same place. Many stations need to serve several different types of train on different routes.",
"Because installing platform doors (like all MTR station except for the old KCR) line costs a lot of money. The HK MTR system put I think 20 cents on all fares for a couple years to pay for this upgrade.",
"It is, and it's often accompanied by 'please mind the gap' audio, florescent markings and a general expectation of common sense. There is also the issue of stopping in the right place every time, as well as the cost to implement such a design in existing stations. \n\nA good thing to consider would be the existence of railings on the side of roads, trains tend to slow down dramatically as they reach the stations, even if they are not stopping - this is a requirement in many countries. This is for a similar reason, you'd rarely see a road with 50+ mph traffic without some form of railing or gap/elevation separating the road surface and the pedestrian walkway."
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1jagkg | how/why is over-watering plants bad and eventually kills it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jagkg/eli5_howwhy_is_overwatering_plants_bad_and/ | {
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"Roots need air. When underwater, aerobic bacteria in the soil quickly sucks up all the available oxygen while processing waste. So too much water = no oxygen = dead plant."
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cnnwts | - why do small electrical appliances (beard trimmers, razors, toothbrushes, phones) use so many different types of connectors? | I understand that there are different plugs/transformers to take into account voltages, amps or whatever (I'm bluffing because I don't really understand that either) but surely life would be simpler if I could just use one USB charger for everything? And wouldn't having a simple USB socket on everything work out cheaper for manufacturers? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cnnwts/eli5_why_do_small_electrical_appliances_beard/ | {
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"theyre not bound by the e waste management ruling that forced phones onto the same standard\n\nthe law basically was modified mid 2000 to cut down on miscelaneous chargers as they were causng lrge amounts of ewaste, till then they were even more varied than otherapliances... all the circular charging ones also are generally sized based on voltage to prevent incorecct voltage being used",
"If they used the USB standard for everything, those things would need their transformers to be built into the device. Having the transformer outside the device is a way to reduce size and weight. The proprietary connectors ensure the correct transformer is used.\n\nYou can think of a transformer as a set of gears on a bike. If you have a big gear at the pedals and a small gear on the wheel, the wheel is going to turn much faster than the pedals and need more strength from your legs to do it (this is good if you want to go fast). If we switch the gears, the opposite happens (this is good for going up hills). If you put the wrong set of \"gears\" on an electrical device, you could burn out the device, or it just wouldn't work in the first place.",
"Because before USB, there wasn’t any standarts for ports. If you wanted to use a connector for anything else tough luck you needed to make yourself a new connector. So keyboard, mice, printer, etc. all their own ports. ( Think like how there isn’t a hard drive that plugs in through HDMI )\n\nAfter USB came in, some stayed on prop. connectors because it suited them better ( for example on toothbrush, razor, beard trimmers you set it on some kind of a stand right, now think how inconvinety that’d be if you had to plug that through a USB-C port, or even worse a USB-A )\n\nPhones had the issue of size, even mini-USB were too big when it first came out, so they had to have prop. chargers as well ( though many of them used mini USB B ). Apple also made lightning when USB-C wasn’t mainstream so it made perfect sense. Though now that USB-C is mainstream and the headphone jack is removed it’s almost safe to say they’re milking it for 3rd party licenses.\n\nTLDR: It was too big for those when USB came out, but after mini USB B was out many switched to that, and now you can find almost anything USB-C if you search hard enough, but some stayed because it was more convenient and made sense to stay",
"USB is by definition a 5V supply. Not everything wants to run on 5 V. There are a lot of 12V and higher devices."
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3mg0sm | why are there so many ladyboys in thailand? i find it hard to believe that there are so many mtf trans people. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mg0sm/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_ladyboys_in_thailand_i/ | {
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"I've done some work in Polynesian countries regarding males who dress up as females. \n\nBasically, it comes down to culture. In countries such as Thailand, there's no stigma attached to ladyboys or not 'following' your gender and as a result, more people experiment and eventually elect to undergo surgery. \n\nI would bet that if America also let people be any gender they wanted, we would see similar rates of MtF (or FtM)",
"/u/trakkl has made some great points, but I'll just add on to that. I live in Southeast Asia and I have encountered quite a number of ladyboys before, but I can only speak from experience and I do not know whether my points apply to all ladyboys.\n\n**1. Ladyboys can make more money than manual workers.**\n\nInstead of performing manual tasks such as construction work, field work etc. ladyboys can perform in nightclubs, on the street and make money from tips. Another way of making money is by simply catering to those elderly men who have a preference in ladyboys.\n\n**2. Homosexuality is generally frowned upon in Thailand.**\n\nThere will always be men who identify as females and the other way around. So instead of confronting your family with your same-gender partner, it seems to be a quite common practice in Thailand for one partner to become a ladyboy. This way one partner will still show some female characteristics and apparently this is better than a gay relationship in the eyes of many Thais.",
"Not a full answer, but will just add to what people have said before\n\nBeing a lady boy is also a sign of wealth. Even in Thailand, fake tits cost a lot of money. So if you see a ladyboy who has had surgery, and has spent a lot of money, you can tell that she has some wealth behind her.\n\nThere are also (probably a majority) or non operation lady boys. Which are just men dressed as woman who fuck tourists for money.",
"It's to do with the attitude towards homosexuality amongst conservative thai people. If you're gay, it must be because you want to be a woman (because men can't want to have sex with men right?), so it becomes more acceptable to live as a woman than be out as a gay man. ",
"The darker side of Thailand is that it is a country with a huge problem with sex trafficking and vulnerable kids are a huge commodity for them. _URL_0_\n\nI'm not saying that all mf or fm in Thailand are sexually confused but I think that there has to be some correlation with being exposed to and living a life prostitution at a young age and later in life struggling with self identity. ",
"So there is some interesting research (google Paul Vasey) largely based in American Samoa but also including other cultures that says that there are multiple cultural pathways that natal males who are attracted to natal males can take. So, in some cultures, such as Samoa, natal males who are attracted to men and are more feminine are identified earlier in childhood and labelled as fa'afafine (there is a female equivalent, but I don't remember as much about that). These natal males are then treated as a third gender and they have a place and function in society. They have roles to care for their mothers, sisters, and their sisters' children. Men are allowed to be attracted to fa'afafine and have relationships with them and this does not make them what we would perceive as \"gay\". Vassey proposes that some cultures have what we would call a transgender expression of natal males who are attracted to males, that is, they are given a third gender/feminine place in society and accepted as part of it.\n\nIn our society, we expect natal males who are attracted to males to maintain their gender identity and instead have a variant sexual orientation, so we have a more \"homosexual\" oriented culture. Therefore, it's possible that if these ladyboys had been born in North America, they would be directed along a homosexual pathway and only a small minority would identify as transgender in *our* society (we tend to treat transpeople far worse than gay). Basically, the theory, according to Vasey, is that cultures help shape how a natal male attracted to other natal males will express themselves.\n\nIt's a fascinating body of research that looks at how different societies interpret these sorts of things. But basically, the take home message is that what it means to be transgender/third gender is different for different cultures, and this will affect how visible people are, what options for expression people believe they have, and what places we make in society for people who are different.",
"Just google imaged Fa'afafine and then Ladyboys to see the difference between the two. Should not have done that second one. Especially not at work.",
"According to a local Thai who works for the hospitality industry: Thai men are smaller in build and height than western men and also naturally have low amounts of body hair; its easy for them to seem more of a natural fit as a female. Thailand makes it easy socially by not stigmatizing the practice. I suspect that surgery is more accessible too, without the hoops one needs to jump through in the USA (such as mandatory periods of time living as the other gender). Lastly, there is a huge industry for sex work and lady boys are a large portion of that. ",
"On a similar note. I come from Scotland and have met a few guys with At least one Thai parent. They are often gay. One has become a drag queen and intends to go full op. He won the first miss transgender Scotland's \n\nIs there something going on here? "
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1876kc | how is it that black coloured pixels on a powered monitor can illuminate a room? | I'm not sure why this doesn't make sense to me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1876kc/how_is_it_that_black_coloured_pixels_on_a_powered/ | {
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"There are two ways to think of light when looking at something. It either generates light itself, like a light bulb or the sun, or it's showing reflected light, like when you look at the page on a book. The book doesn't generate any light of its own, you only see what's there because there's other light bouncing off it and into your eyes.\n\nAn LCD display doesn't generate any light by itself, so most have a thing called a \"backlight\", that shines light onto the LCD surface. That's usually from the sides, but some do it differently.\n\nSo when you turn on an LCD display, even when it's showing a blank \"black\" screen, you still see the reflected light from the backlight and it can illuminate part of a dark room, dimly.\n\nActually, the problem of getting \"black\" to be TRULY black is an old one with monitors, televisions and other displays.\n\n"
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6kz1ut | with the human population constantly growing and the need for more money, how much and who decides the amount of money made per year in a country? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kz1ut/eli5_with_the_human_population_constantly_growing/ | {
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"Banks do. To clear up some confusion right from the start, when you think of money being created you probably think of the government printing additional bills. This is but mostly isn't the case. In the US, the US Mint (which is federally owned) does indeed print the bills and mint the coins, but physical currency are only a fraction of all the money circulating in our society, and new physical money is typically only issued to replace already existing money that's been lost or damaged.\n\nThe vast majority of all money is digital and is created by (private) banks through a system called fractional reserve banking. As the name suggests, it means they only need to keep a fraction of what they loan out in reserve. In other words, they're creating more money by giving loans that consist of money that doesn't really exist.\n\nOur fictional, one bank has $100,000 in deposits and are only required to maintain at least 10% of that. They then loan out $90,000 to guy A who buys a car from guy B, who then deposits his new money into the same bank. They can now loan out 90% of their new deposits, new goods and services are bought, new deposits are made, new loans are made, and so on and on.\n\nThat's a very simplified version of how our credit money supply is expanded. In the real world there are thousands of banks and trillions of dollars circulate between them and the people. "
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45wtp4 | why do some people believe vitamins/supplements don't do anything-- wouldn't that be easy to test? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45wtp4/eli5_why_do_some_people_believe/ | {
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"I'm not sure if many people believes that vitamins/supplements don't do anything at all. Just they know/feel that some supplements are pure snake oil and are essentially worthless, and that taking vitamins in excess of what your body needs and are already getting from your regular diet is unnecessary as your body will just expel them as waste.\n",
"From what I understand the average American diet would leave someone highly unlikely to be deficient in anything. All the cereals nutritional labels look like supplements labels. And also the research on supplements doesn't say anything bad about them while some say good and others so they don't matter so your doc may just be going on the err on the side of caution approach.",
"Vitamins/supplements do nothing in a healthy person with a healthy diet. If you eat halfway healthy you will get your vitamins/supplements from that and any supplement is normally pissed out (Note that you can overdose on vitamins, notably fat soluble ones, like vitamin A)\n\nNow if the doctor prescribes them to you, its a different story, maybe your body sucks at absorbing the vitamin, maybe you don't eat or can't eat the food that contains the required vitamins and the supplements solve the deficiency. Alternatively, the doctor is prescribing them as placebo. \n\nThere's a few notable exceptions though. like pregnant women are advised to take supplements for [Folic acid which helps against certain malformations]( _URL_0_)",
"The thing is this. If someone is eating anything close to a balanced diet then they will receive their nutrition through their food. Large portions of the populations are not walking around with vitamin deficiencies because so much of our food supply is fortified with them. Some people will point to a low level of Vit D in lots of people but that is also because the levels were changed as far as what the medical community says is \"low\". \n\nIf you have a deficiency in the vitamin, you should take it. Most people don't have that. Not only that but vitamins and supplements are marketed in large part o health conscious people already. People who eat healthy, people who exercise and all that jazz are who it is marketed to and they already eat healthy so the market is a bit of a scam in that regard. Some studies show some supplements are helpful for some conditions, but it is very convoluted in most circumstances. \n\n",
"It's actually not that easy to test, as there are so many variables. Another thing is that you shouldn't really need supplements, you should get all your vitamins and minerals from your diet. ",
"Hey! Food Scientist here... So there's a lot of things at play so i'll try to explain them.\n\nFirst off, EVERY vitamin/supplement does SOMETHING. Sometimes it will help you with a deficiency, and sometimes they will be really expensive \"urine dye\". What I mean by that is this: if you are deficient in a vitamin (lets use B12 for example), you may be tired, groggy or unable to focus. This deficiency can be \"cured\" by taking pharmaceutical (a very high dose that is usually only partially absorbed by the body, the remaining expelled through urine/waste) thus the product has helped you.\n\nThe next are much MUCH more complex. The vitamin world is VERY loosely regulated and operates more on a \"we say it, it works, trust us\". If caught, they tend to pull the product, change it a little, pay a fee, pay a small class action lawsuit (which is usually only a SMALL part of the money they have taken in) and rinse and repeat. \n\nBut Fearthejet, why can't we test for this? Well, some things you can test for and others are almost impossible. Scientific tests like to reduce things called variables, or things that are changed between subjects. It's very hard to have 2 people who are perfectly similar in genetics, lifestyle choices and day-to-day life. With health supplements the more of these variables that exist, the harder it is to test for.\n\nTL:DR: its very hard to test for things because of variables, some items will help but taking 1 multivitamin a day will probably not cure your cancer or fix all your medical issues.\n\nEdit: Woah. Gold! Thanks! People sure do like hearing about how much money they are wasting!! (JK)",
"Because they are correct?\n\nYour doctor either is ignorant of modern medical research in the area, has found you are actually deficient in one or more areas, or is just humoring you. There are very few situations in a modern western society where you would have any need whatsoever for vitamin supplements. Many doctors \"prescribe\" their patients vitamins only because they think their patients expect it.\n\nThe truth is that in general if you are not deficient, there is no real benefit in taking supplements, and in fact some supplements like anti-oxidants have been show to increase long-term mortality ( i.e. when controlling for other factors, people who take anti-oxidants are more likely to die). The fact is your body has evolved to need and use a certain amount of the various essential vitamins and minerals we need. Taking more seems to have one of two effects: No effect as excess is harmlessly passed through your system, or negative effects as your body tries to use the excess throwing complex biological processes out of whack.\n\nTo give you an example of the second: no one expected anti-oxidants to be bad for you. The basic science research showed that damage caused by free radicals was a big cause of a lot of diseases, as well as aging. The idea then was, if we boost the levels of anti-oxidants our bodies could prevent those diseases, and help reduce the effects of aging. This turned out to be wrong, but why? Because your body *uses* free radicals to do things, like for instance, killing cancer cells. The person supplementing their anti-oxidant intake have inadvertently reduced their body's ability to fight cancer.\n\nThe only vitamin I know that is generally recommended for supplementation is Vitamin D, and that is mainly because most people ARE deficient in Vitamin D, especially in the Winter (we spend to much time indoors, most of our Vitamin D comes from simple sun exposure). Additionally some specific subgroups may need other supplements. For instance, pregnant women are routinely given folic acid supplements, because this has been shown to reduce the incidence of neural tube defects (causing diseases like Spina bifida) in the developing fetus.",
"Every doctor I visit says don't bother. Just eat right. But every now and then my doctor will say to take something specific like iron or D. Based on my blood tests. So yes, they can tell. All the debate comes from people not going to a doctor and saying \"it couldn't hurt\". So lot's of people take all sorts of things needlessly. ",
"Aside from their efficacy, there is a huge variation in potency within the same brand or even the same bottle.\n\nManufacturers may claim that there's 100 units of a vitamin in a pill, but studies have shown that some pills only contain 10 units, others contain 200 units. As such, even if they were effective the average consumer could not reliably try them out and see if they make a difference.\n\nEdit: could not",
"At least some credible testing has revealed that certain supplements have a negative effect on health and lifespan. I believe the current consensus is that only a few vitamins are worth supplementing in certain segments of the population. One of these is vitamin D. Even that requires caution. The largest test to date revealed that optimal levels of D are at the lower end of the normal range. So more is not necessarily better, in fact may be far worse for you. The supplement industry is largely unregulated. A recent bust by the NY Attorney General demonstrated why: 5 of the biggest purveyors of herbal supplements were selling product with no herbal content whatsoever. Some were ordinary houseplants pulverized and sold at an astronomical profit. Buyer beware.",
"I think there is a confusion between vitamins and supplements vs holistic medicine. Vitamins and supplements are things like vitamin C, Iron, Folic Acid, etc. Holistic medicine is stuff like Maca powder, ginseng, gingko biloba, acai, etc.\n\nVitamins and supplements have their share of criticism, in that the body doesn't absorb them very well. We absorb only a fraction of the amount in the pills and piss out the rest. They work, but pills are just not the best form of delivery. Natural foods are the best way to get your vitamins.\n\nHolistic medicine - while some of the ingredients are legitimately healthy ingredients, some people/companies attribute outrageous health benefits to these ingredients. Cure for cancer, stop aging, improve sex, grow hair... There has been outcry to regulate these ridiculous health claims.\n\nAlso, there has been new studies that show some of these holistic medicine pills actually contain only miniscule amounts of the magic ingredient. They're mostly filler material.",
"It is also possible that some of the controversy may come from Linus Pauling's claim that massive doses of vitamins could cure diseases. That was disproven, but he practically started the ~$23B/year vitamin craze. The fact is, we usually get all the vitamins we need from our food, but if your doctor is prescribing them, then he probably has a good reason. \n\nSource: Science and Society by Eric Swanson",
"They can't be tested like drugs are because everybody already has vitamins in their system. With a normal drug you get a bunch of random people, give half the drug and the other half a placebo and then monitor both groups. If you measure a difference between those that got the drug and those that didn't you know the drug had an effect. \n\nYou can definitely devise experiments that eliminate as many variables as possible when talking about vitamin supplements but it's not as easy to do. You'd have to get subjects that all have the same levels of a particular vitamin, monitor not only their supplement intake but their diet to make sure they're not getting higher doses than others etc.\n\nI think for now, barring some new study that changes things drastically, your best best would be to have your blood tested to see what you're deficient in and then address that. If you're already good on vitamin C, for example, then don't supplement. From what I've been able to surmise once you reach an optimal level taking more of a given vitamin is not going to help you. What that optimum level is I don't know. Everyone's different but you can do some googling to get a good estimate. ",
"The supplement industry is entirely un-regulated. They can sell anything they want and make any claim they want. \n\n[This PBS Frontline investigation into the supplement industry pretty much explains why vitamins are useless at best and harmful at worst.](_URL_0_)",
"I always say a multivitamin is like a security blanket. No real proof it's going to make a difference but I use one a day just in case.\n\nHigh dose vitamin supplements have also shown to be more harmful than helpful as well (upsetting natural balances in the body).\n\nWhen in doubt, get your vitamins/mineral from food (better absorbed as well), stay away from high doses unless under a doctor's observation and if you take a low dose multi once a day it's probably not really doing much good or harm...but just in case you don't want scurvy or something after years of piss poor eating or lacking certain vitamins.",
" > my doc still prescribes me them so... What gives?\n\nDoctors may be influenced by a patient's expectation that a prescription will be the outcome of the consultation.\n\nThere may be other motivations or lapses in decision making for your Doctor's prescribing habits other than the benefit of your welfare. \n\nI hope some one more knowledgeable than me will pick this up and either support or refute this speculation.",
"I do a lot of knee/leg movement in my job and I can tell you that I know when I am taking and not taking a glucosamine blend because the soreness in my leg comes right back when I am off it. Within weeks of taking it again the pain goes away. It has happened twice to me over the years. Every time I thought I could quit taking it the pain came back.\n\nThe same goes with vitamin B complex and anxiety/stress. I've also started taking arginine and am noticing a huge difference in my body after only a month. \n\nThere are probably millions of other people who have the same types of stories with different supplements.\n\nBottom line, the best way I've heard it described, is that in order to get the amount of nutrients that our bodies need to function properly, we would need to eat many more times the source food that would be practical or healthy.\n\nI'm pushing 50 years old and am always being told I only look 35.....and it is true IMO",
"Well there is some truth to both sides. First I would like to say that there is nothing special with Vitamins compared to other nutrients or chemicals. They do however contain some very important nutrients for your body which is needed to do certain things and lacking them will cause you trouble.\n\nThe thing is if you eat a \"healthy meal\" that should include all the vitamins and nutrients you need. However some people for whatever reason do not get the required amount either through not consuming enough of the right foods/sunlight or perhaps they got a medical problem preventing them from absorbing. In these cases having additional nutrients and vitamins can help you keep your current lifestyle.\n\nHowever I did say there was some truth that it does not \"do anything\" which is a response to how allot of people have conspired to recommend Vitamin supplements as an essential to your health and life. Basically they are scam artists preying on your fears to get your money or attention.",
"If in doubt.... doubt. A magic pill that keeps you healthy? Snake oil. When things work, we know. Look at creatine. It works, nobody doubts it, and nobody is debating its merits. Look at anything else in GNC and it's mostly garbage, under debate, and producers make dubious claims. \n\nVitamins are the same unfortunately, unless you are deficient in something, there are equal studies showing vitamins hurt you, and help you. Therefore, stay away. \n\nThe man that made flinstones vitamins to sell to children was in marketing (obviously), he also worked with he-man and the sega genesis. Its marketing that matters, not results. \n\nBodybuilder / phd chemist",
"Something I've heard, but do not have a source for, is that most vitamins simply don't get digested, and end up going out with your solid waste.\n\n",
"Supplement quality control chemist here.\n\nHow effective a supplement is is based highly on how well your body absorbs it (bioavailability) and how deficient you are (enzyme kinetics). So, for example, one form of creatine may not be absorbed as well as another form. This requires your own research on the supplement itself to determine what's best. On top of that, creatine is typically found in mammalian muscles. Someone who eats meat probably won't benefit as much as a vegan would from supplementation of any kind of creatine because they won't be as deficient.\n\nAs for the testing angle; kinetics of many supplements aren't fully understood and most studies are fairly anecdotal. It's rather hard to test if milk thistle is good for the liver when you can't cut the person open and take a sample of their liver before and after. Most studies just ask the subjects how they feel (not very scientific).\n\nHowever, for some athletic supplements, CPX and muscle fatigue studies can be done. It's hard to remove the human element though since everyone is affected by everything differently AND rarely ever feel the exact same on a daily basis. Who's to say that a sunny day/good breakfast wasn't responsible for a test subject running a mile with less oxygen used?\n\nDon't really post much on here, but I figured this would help.",
"I've always hated how the anti-vitamin message is somehow propogated.\n\ndisclaimer : I'm not a some big vitamin advocate. I very rarely take them. If you eat reasonably well, I don' think you need to take them either. I have a bottle of generic \"mulit vitamins\" as well as vitamin D and vitamin C at home, and I take them occasionally.\n\nBut what gets me are \"studies\" where the control group is eating a well balanced diet and aren't under any kind of unusual stress. Of course they don't need vitamins. What those studies show is that people that don't need vitamins don't need vitamins. Make the control group a bunch sailors with scurvy, and see how much good vitamin C does them, then tell me vitamins don't \"do anything\".\n\nSometimes it's hard to eat right. In those situations, even if most of it gets peed out, it is still a completely sensible decision to take some vitamins as it's relatively low-risk high-reward.",
"The problem with currently medicine/nutrition is that they see a nutrient as a nutrient. But that's not really how it works. In nature, a nutrient doesn't just exist by itself. For example, eating tomatoes has a better synergistic effect than just taking lycopene supplements.",
"Already studied several times in NIH/pubmed papers. Thus far, the only indications are slightly shortened lifespan for those taking vitamins over those not. As to why, we don't know.\n\n > CONCLUSIONS:\n\n > The majority of supplementation studies indicate no variation of general mortality and of cancer incidence or a detrimental effect on both. Antioxidant supplements so far tested seem to offer no improvement over a well-balanced diet, possibly because of the choice of the substances tested or of an excessive dosage.\n\n\n_URL_0_\n\n",
"Truth is that supplementing with most micronutrients doesn't do shit for you UNLESS you have a legitimate deficiency. \n\nMacrodosing micronutrients does nothing at best, and is harmful at worst.",
"I can't ELI5 but there is an episode of Adam Ruins Everything that covers Vitamin Supplements. One of the points in the episode was that [Linus Pauling](_URL_0_) created this notion that Vitamins are the cure-all of the world. He even claimed that it could cure cancer and ironically despite his claim and usage is what killed him.",
"If you're asking why people think they \"don't work,\" you have to allow for the varying definitions and conditions attached to the word \"work.\" /u/fearthejet already gave you an outstanding answer about testing and such; being a food scientist, he(?) is far more qualified to speak on that subject. On the layperson's assessment of \"they do/don't work\" I am qualified only by 1) being a layperson, 2) parenting a person with an astounding array of documented malabsorption issues, and 3) as a parent of ASD kids, being subjected to a blinding array of uninformed advice from other spectrum parents. \n\nBasically, there's a lot going on, and much of it has to do with people self-diagnosing via the Internet, and/or believing flat-out snake oil. I'll deal with each separately. \n\nFirst of all, from a purely medical standpoint, many others have already commented on the issues with otherwise healthy people eating otherwise healthy diets getting little to no benefit from OTC vitamins and supplements. These may or may not even contain the nutrients on the label, in anywhere near the vicinity of the labeled doses, but that's a separate issue, so for the sake of discussion I'll assume everything is above board in that respect. Assuming a healthy specimen with a healthy diet in an healthy environment, most multivitamins are expensive excess *because* a healthy specimen in a healthy environment is able to extract all needed nutrients from a healthy diet (pretty much by definition). \n\nNow change a variable: Assume that the specimen is for whatever reason unhealthy and exhibiting symptoms of a nutrient deficiency. There's three possible causes here: They're unhealthy because of an idiopathic nutrient deficiency (idiopathic = medical speak for \"we don't know why, it just happened\"), they're unhealthy because of a secondary nutrient deficiency (that is, it's secondary to a primary ailment that is causing the deficiency), or they're unhealthy for some completely unrelated reason. \n\nNow you can see there are a range of possible outcomes: \n\n* You've got a separate illness that is causing, among other things, nutrient deficiency of some sort. You take a multivitamin and maybe you feel somewhat better, but the underlying *cause* of the deficiency remains untreated. The vitamin \"didn't work.\" \n\n* You're totally healthy and you start taking a multivitamin. Nothing really changes. The vitamin \"didn't work.\" \n\n* You have a nutrient deficiency (diagnosed or otherwise) and start taking a completely unrelated supplement, or one below a therapeutic dose. Your symptoms do not change. The vitamin \"didn't work.\" \n\n* You have a nutrient deficiency (diagnosed or otherwise) and start taking a variety of supplements based on Internet advise. One of the supplements happens to be therapeutic for the actual nutrient deficiency. OMG MIRACLE CURE.\n\n* You have a nutrient deficiency diagnosed by a doctor who prescribes a specific nutrient and dosage to combat the deficiency. The nutrient deficiency is resolved and you feel better. Allopathic medicine is vindicated and the vitamin worked. \n\nAs you can see, there are lots of opportunities for people to misunderstand what's going on. B12 is a commonly misunderstood one these days. Yes, if you have a B12 deficiency you may feel sleepy, unfocused, even headachy, etc. But those are incredibly general symptoms. If you take a b12 vitamin it won't treat your symptoms if they're caused by, say, sleep apnea, allergy, depression, etc. etc. etc. And B12 deficiency is apparently very uncommon unless you've got a medical condition that causes it (e.g. IBS, Chron's, colitis, pernicious anemia, etc.) or you're eating a diet that's completely devoid of B12 (very strict vegan). This is especially true because the body stores B12, so even if you go without for a long time it's unlikely you'd develop a true deficiency -- again, absent a true malabsorption condition. \n\nOn the other hand, sometimes people take or give supplements -- sometimes a LOT of different ones -- as a way of addressing real or perceived health issues. If there is any underlying deficiency, they may hit on something quite by accident, and thus believe all of the supplements helped (when in fact only one did). Or they may be a victim of confirmation fallacy and believe the supplements will make them feel better so they look for evidence that demonstrates that they're better -- thus proving the supplements worked. Or they may be subject to the placebo effect and genuinely feel better, even though it had nothing to do with the vitamin. As a side effect observers of these unrelated benefits may decide (unfairly) that all supplements are snake oil and hogwash because Susie down the street has been driving her nuts advertising this stuff for months even though her hair is no shinier and her skin looks exactly the same age that it did (or whatever). \n\nTL;DR: If your doctor told you to take it, there's probably a darn good reason and you should take it, no matter what the naysayers say. If your doctor didn't tell you to take it, or if your doctor is Dr. Oz, you probably can save your money.",
"This is actually unusual in my experience. A doctor (here in the US) will normally only prescribe some sort of vitamin/mineral supplement for a specific reason. Examples might be pregnancy (need for folic acid) or certain digestive abnormalities (body can't absorb enough iron from food). \n\nA typical person without medical complications should be able to get all the nutrition they need from even a fairly imperfect diet. Supplements add no value to that and can in fact have very specific and real hazards.\n\nOn the other hand, they are *wonderfully* profitable and almost entirely unregulated."
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1ynarv | why do criminal records make it difficult, if not impossible for an ex-convict to find a job? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ynarv/eli5_why_do_criminal_records_make_it_difficult_if/ | {
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"Is this serious? all i can think of is no one wants to hire a criminal ",
"It's not difficult to find employees for most jobs, why hire the ex-con when there are 900 other people who aren't ex-cons? ",
"A criminal history establishes a sense of disregard for authority. If a person is willing to break the law why would they recognize company policy? There are too many people without a criminal past looking for a job to take the chance of hiring someone who may go back to their old ways."
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3pb0lz | what do the different timings in music (e.g., 3/4, 2/3) mean, and how do they affect what the listener actually hears? | Been bothering me for a while, and no one's given a good explanation... (probably true of most ELI5s, but still...) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pb0lz/eli5_what_do_the_different_timings_in_music_eg_34/ | {
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"They describe how many beats are in a measure.\n\n4/4 and 3/4 are the most common.\n\nEach 4 is a quarter note, so one beat. 4/4 would be counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4.\n\n3/4 would be counted 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.\n\nThere are others, like 2/4, or 6/8, which may help in organizing a piece, but to an untrained ear almost everything will sound like 4/4 or 3/4, depending on whether it's counted in groups of 2, 4, or 3.",
"The top number says how many beats are in each measure. The bottom number says what type of note counts as a beat. The ones you'll commonly see are 2 for a half note, 4 for a quarter note, and 8 for an eighth note. So 3/4 time means three beats per measure, and a quarter note counts as one beat. \n\nThe difference between, say 4/4 and 3/4, is mainly the rhythm of the stressed beats. There will be one stressed beat every 4 beats in 4/4 time, or one every three beats in 3/4 time. In rock songs, the stressed beat is where you'll hear the snare drum. The vast majority of rock songs are in 4/4 time, so to get an idea of other time signatures, you'll need to listen to other genres. Waltzes are in 3/4 time, for example. And the theme to the Mission Impossible TV show is written in 5/4 time."
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1xd142 | why don't we eat dinner in the morning? | Canadian here wondering about this. Why is it that we don't eat the meal which generally contains the most nutrients in the morning? Wouldn't the energy be more useful throughout the day as opposed to 5pm onwards? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xd142/eli5_why_dont_we_eat_dinner_in_the_morning/ | {
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"You're assuming that people eat the most nutritious meal (which often times it actually isn't) at the end of their day which I would doubt is entirely true. It's been stressed in the medical field that breakfast is the most important meal, some people abide by this, some don't.",
"If you worked on a farm in the old days your breakfast would often be as large as supper. Get up and grab a cup of something hot and head for the barn. 60-90 minutes later, after the first chores are done, you come back in and sit down to a big breakfast prior to going back out and doing the mornings work. Another good sized mid-day meal (dinner) would be had around noon and then supper would be a lighter evening meal. "
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2n3tel | how far into outer space have we gone, and why can't we go farther? | I mean, I assume we have only so many resources (communication capabilities, sustenance, fuel) to go so far...but ELI5, why we can't just keep going and going and going and going....discovering "just how vast the universe actually is"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n3tel/eli5_how_far_into_outer_space_have_we_gone_and/ | {
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"We can, in principle. But it takes a very, *very* long time.\n\nCurrently the furthest man-made objects are the Voyager probes, which have been in space for decades moving at extremely high speeds. They're still much closer to the sun than to any other star, and will take centuries more for that to change.\n\nEven at close to light-speed - which is well beyond our current technological capabilities - a trip to even the closest stars takes years. A trip to the center of our home galaxy would take longer than human civilization has been around.\n\nEDIT: And we know exactly how vast the universe is, or at least the parts of it we could ever access even in principle.",
"Time, fuel, and money are the biggest obstacles to space exploration at this point. Let's ignore the cost aspect for a moment and say that the whole world gets behind space travel. Things in space are still REALLY far apart. If you want to get there using as little fuel as possible, it will take a while. If you want to get there fast, it takes significantly more fuel to both speed up initially and slow back down once you get there. ",
"On [this](_URL_0_) \nwebsite you can see how far the voyagers have travelled. This is still quiet close by in terms how big the universe is. \nThe main problem is that we are not capable of travelling trough space fast enough to travel outside our solar system let alone travel to other stars. Even sending satellites to other planets are very time consuming and very expensive. \n\nAnd we are pretty good at observing the universe from the surface or the space around earth. ",
"If by *we* you mean a human being, then the farthest we have travelled is the Moon, last time with Apollo 17. Round trip lasted 8 days, and it took the Saturn V rocket in all its glory, the largest rocket built by mindkind, to get them there and back. \nThose are the two main problems for interplanetary travel: how humans will survive in close quarters for 600 days, time it takes to make a single trip to Mars? How are we going to lift all the heavy supplies into orbit with the crew?\n\nFor FYI: Mars trip is 600 days, Jupiter trip is 4 years and Saturn trip is 5 years (this is only the time to get there) \n\nTo go to other stars, it's pretty much a fuck it: the closest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light years away (that is, the distance light travels in a year) so even at literally light speed it would take 4 complete years to get there. This is where theorical devices such as the Alcubeirre drive gets into play to wrap space and get faster by basically creating black holes in front of you (yep, only that). \n\nThe further object a human has launched is Voyager 1, which has been launched in 1977. As of today it just got off of the Heliosphere, which is where the Solar wind stops having influence, and the unknown interstellar space starts. It is 0.01 light year away from the sun. If it was even headed in the right direction, Voyager 1 would still have to travel for 1200 years to arrive at Proxima. \n\nTL;DR the main reason is time, the second main reason is lifting power."
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3ue91h | how can people be allergic to things like fish or apples raw but not allergic to their cooked counter parts or vice versa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ue91h/eli5_how_can_people_be_allergic_to_things_like/ | {
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"If you are allergic to something, your body overreacts when detecting certain chemicals. Chemicals such as proteins in food are denatured and change structure when cooked, so the body recognises it as a completely different substance.",
"Allergies are basically your body mistaking a benign substance with something harmful and triggering an immune response to attack it. These immune responses are always triggered by a protein in the substance. When substances are heated, the proteins in them denature, or change shape (This is why egg white turn opaque when they are cooked; a protein called ovalbumin denatures and changes shape). When the protein changes, it no longer triggers the same immune response in your body. Really you are allergic to a certain protein, not a food. When that protein changes, you are no longer allergic to it. This doesn't apply to all foods, but I know it does for Apples and some kinds of seafood. "
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2656g6 | what is a toroidal inductor and how is it used? | Just getting into electronics and I been obtaining used electronics parts. Before I throw these out I want to know what they are and if I can use them so please ELI5 toroidal inductor and how they are used!
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2656g6/eli5what_is_a_toroidal_inductor_and_how_is_it_used/ | {
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"A toroidal inductor is basically a donut with wire wound up around it. When there is current in the wire, it sets up a magnetic field inside the donut. There is a nice little law of electromagnetism called Lenz's law that basically says that magnetic fields resist change. So if there is a glitch in the current, the inductor will try to smooth out that glitch to keep the current going, which sustains the current status quo. This works for both positive and negative glitches, by the way. The energy to drive that current comes from what's stored in the magnetic field."
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4fjuus | how are single gear electric motors efficient? | I know comparing Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) to electric motors is like apples to carrots, but here goes: at high RPMs ICE use more fuel, as it completes rotations faster. Yet, electric cars such as Tesla only use a single gear, which requires it to spin very fast as the car nears highway speeds. Wouldn't this draw more power from the batteries than having a transmission that would allow for lower motor speeds?
EDIT: So, to clarify, I understand why an ICE needs a transmission, and why an electric motor doesn't "need" a transmission. I'm mostly curious about the efficiency of one gear at high RPM vs multiple gears to lower RPM. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4fjuus/eli5_how_are_single_gear_electric_motors_efficient/ | {
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"IC engine have very little torque at low rpms, which makes a gearbox necessary in order to keep the engine in the \"powerband\" for any given speed. An electric motor (at least the ones we use in cars) is able to output all of its torque at any rpm. Electric motors have a much better rate of diminishing returns as the rpm's go up, compared to an ICE. Therefore, the torque of an electric motor can be utilized over a much wider range of rpm's than an ICE, which negates the need for a gearbox",
"Actually, with an electric motor, current goes up as speed is reduced, all else being equal. An electric motor that is clamped in place so it can't spin and then given the beans will pretty much act like a short circuit, drawing the maximum of current and probably about to burn itself out or blow a breaker, while a freewheeling motor given the same amount of voltage will draw very little current. Automotive duty generally fits in between these two extremes, a car launching hard from a stop will draw enormous current (see Model S P90D *Ludicrous Mode*), while one cruising at speed on a highway will draw relatively little. The fact that electric motors make the most torque at a standstill and have generally flat and even power bands means that gears are mostly unnecessary. "
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8m6kjm | as modern medicine continues to advance, and human lifespans increase, why haven't we seen record breaking ages in this millennium yet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8m6kjm/eli5_as_modern_medicine_continues_to_advance_and/ | {
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"Essentially cancer. Studies show that as you age the risk of getting cancer increases significantly which is why you see all sorts of ads telling you to get checked regularly after 50. We have gotten okay at fighting cancer but really when someone gets put on treatment for cancer really they still are just hoping your body responds in a good way. Additionally as we get older our bodies are much worse at battling it and dealing the the aggressive treatments we use. "
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e4mvy5 | scalpers. how does it work for events that don't even get close to selling out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e4mvy5/eli5_scalpers_how_does_it_work_for_events_that/ | {
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"The scalpers standing outside already lost their money, you'll get the most money selling it a couple days before, these guys are either selling fake/used tickets or they bought a bunch at a cheaper rate and are just tryna dump em.",
"People buy tickets they can't use at face value. Maybe they are season ticket holders, maybe a friend canceled at the last minute, whatever. Other people stand outside the stadium, buy those tickets for pennies on the dollar, and resell them for close to face value.",
"So essentially what I am hearing is that their margin is much higher than 100%, which allows them to take 5-10 ticket loses without losing hundreds of dollars. Makes sense.",
"This is why lots of major pro sport stadiums and concert venues are going mobile only tickets that have barcodes that change every minute. Cannot screenshot it and send it to people because it expires. You can send the ticket to another account or sell it on the app’s approved exchange. The hassle to do this while walking into the event will definitely hinder some people from selling their tickets to scalpers.",
"I got in a conversation with a scalper once and he told me he’d buy the minimum number of tickets to get the “group” rate (~10-15 continuous tickets) for games he thought would be popular which were discounted 50-66% depending on the section, then he could sell them at a 0%-50% discount from face value depending on the time before the game and still make some money as long as he sold at least 50% of the tickets he had originally bought.",
"Someone else commented earlier, but a lot of times they just work as a team. They buy unwanted tickets from people just trying to recoop any cost they can, and then hand it to the guy up the street to resell at a higher price, but still lower than face value.\n\nWith coors field especially, the rockpile/bar area tends to be an area they do this for. Those areas actually do sell out because people are buying a bunch of seats at a time hoping their friends will be able to go. Ultimately people bail and they try to resell the ticket.",
"Once when I was young and naive pops and I were walking in to an MLB game past a gauntlet of guys saying “need tickets?” Then we got to a guy saying “got tickets?” So young helpful me says very seriously “no but you should go ask that guy (pointing)” (guy and pops laugh)\n\nI lost a little innocence that day learning a little bit about how the world works",
"All the other points are valid, but theres one thing I don't see mentioned: You have a sampling bias.\n\nAll of the people you see, are the people left from other scalpers. The ones who are sold out don't stand around, they leave. So those you see left may be running a loss (or not, as others have said), but the ones you cannot count are the ones who are making tons of cash.",
"I can't speak for scalpers at sporting events, and the (smaller) venue I work at strictly prohibits reselling tickets in person on-site, but for venues hosting music or comedy shows scalpers rely on visibility and desperate/gullible customers. A surprisingly large number of customers that I work with have no idea how ticket pricing works, or what prices to expect. Many don't even know they can buy tickets from our venue, having always assumed ticketmaster etc. was their only option for purchases. \n\nScalpers rely on this. They sell their tickets online, generally through a 3rd-party website like ticketmaster or stubhub, often at 200%-300% normal cost, and due to ticketmaster's visibility and dear old grandma's trusting nature, they make a sale with alarming regularity.\n\nI've seen tickets for smaller christmas productions, where a family-pack of four tickets typically runs $50-$60 total, get resold for over $400 and the buyer just assumes it's normal.\n\nSo yeah, for online scalpers it's simply just capitalizing on ignorance of the system by being among the first to show up in a google search. Nothing to it at all.\n\n\nEDIT: **Always** buy your tickets directly from the venue hosting the event. Go in-person, or call them to make a purchase. Do not use online portals if you can help it, as many venues have partnerships with ticketmaster or other sites, and will just redirect you to ticketmaster if you try to buy from the venue's site. Ticketmaster and other sites will (generally) always be more expensive than buying them from the venue. The venue (generally) sells tickets to ticketmaster at the standard rate, so ticketmaster *must* charge the buyer more to make their money back.",
"1. Even if the event isn't sold out, the \"good\" seats might be. A nice premium on those can cover losses elsewhere. \n \n2. Many times they get the tickets for a discount. Either from buying onsite or online from fans, or from getting the group/season/etc. rates. Even if they sell them for less than face, they may still be making a profit. \n\n3. The really high demand events can cover losses for the low demand ones. Much like stock trading, poker, or other things where there is the potential for very high returns. Sometimes you bet on an event and lose, other times you make triple or more on your money. \n\n4. Like any business, some people do wind up just losing money and going broke. It can be lucrative, but it's also pretty risky and cyclical.",
"Protip: a lot of fake tickets have gotten really good, holograms, stickers, and even “feel.” \n\nIf you’re clammy like me rub the text with your fingers or gross option saliva. If it runs, it’s probably fake!",
"This was my schtick in college, and I could do pretty well at just about any game, sold out or not.\n\nIt involved finding people with extras who were willing to part with them for cheap (often I would get them free). It wasn't uncommon to buy up extras with 35-50 dollar face value for 5 bucks all day. I could inventory 15 tickets this way in an hour easy. Just had to be willing to listen to 9 out of 10 people call me names and ridicule me when I would offer 5 bucks. But it never failed that there were 1 of 10 who would say fuck it and do the deal.\n\nThen when finding folks who actually needed an extra, I could sell my inventory at less than face value and still turn a healthy profit. And at the venue I would frequent, it wasn't illegal to resell tickets on property as long as it didn't exceed face.\n\nI would average a couple hundred bucks a game when working with a partner (generally one would buy and one would sell). But I've cleared more than a grand a couple times.\n\nAll this talk about needing to buy tickets in groups at face value or at a group discount... Maybe some of the \"pros\" would but I would always just show up at the tailgates a few hours early with no tickets and 50 bucks in singles and 5s and I'd make some cash and see a game."
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7vpptj | why does producing more units of a product cost less than producing a small amount of it? | Today a friend of mine, who wants to publish a book, told me that producing 1000 books is going to cost less than producing let's say 300. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7vpptj/eli5_why_does_producing_more_units_of_a_product/ | {
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"It will cost less per book, not less overall, unless there's something particularly unusual at stake.\n\nBasically, there's some amount of work required to print the first book - design, layout, etc. The cost of that is split among all the books printed, since it only needs to happen once. Then each book has its own costs, paper, ink, etc.\n\nSo the initial costs make up much of the price if the print run is small, but become a smaller and smaller share as it expands.",
"What you're thinking of is the price per unit. Chances are the price is still higher but it's less overall per item. It's less per item the more you get because it's easier to offset the cost of producing these items, allowing them to be sold at a lower price.",
"Each of the units has to pay a smaller amount for the cleaning lady (and other fixed costs like the building). So in general more books should cost less per book. If printing 300 books is really more expensive overall the company probably just dosen't want anyone to print 300 books. \n\n\nThey'll have to set up everything and to tests and they probably don't want to do that.",
"Cost of tooling amortized over a larger volume decreases the piece price. The cost to tool something up is the same but you divide that cost across more units which decreases the cost per piece. ",
"To create a book you have to do the design, work out the printing materials required, inks, machinery, all the necessary prep to print your first book. \n\nIf you're printing one book, that one book is gonna be expensive. \n\nThese prices are complete fiction in the next bit, but it illustrates the point.\n\nIt's not that printing more will cost less overall, but that the more books you print, the more that cost of setting up (and other overheads) will be spread out. So if to actually print, each book costs, say £1, but the setting up costs £500, one book will cost you £501, but 500 books will cost you £1000, 2000 books will cost you £2500, 10,000 books will cost you £10,500 \n\nSo in that case, one book is £501 per book, 500 books will cost you £2 per book, 2000 books will cost you £1.25 per book, 10,000 books will cost you £1.05 per book. \n\nMake sense? The more you order, the cheaper each one becomes, because you still only have to setup once. It'll still cost you more money overall though. ",
"Economies of scale. In the example of the printer, it's not that 1000 costs less, it's that it costs less per unit.\n\nTo print a book, you have to lay it out, program the printing press, and then run a test or two to see if it's working. Then you print the book. You could print another 100 or 1,000 after that, and the setup costs would be the same. Every book you print after that would spread out the setup cost.\n\nNow let's say that you have a printer that can print 300 books in an hour, but you want 1,000. It's a more expensive press, but only 150% more. With the added books, you can print on a larger scale at a smaller per book cost, dropping the marginal price for each book.\n\nSome large scale productions have large economies of scale, like car companies, airlines, retail outlets, etc. This gives larger companies advantages to grow and undercut their smaller competitors who have higher per unit costs.",
"In manufacturing, it is common that the unit price goes down when the number of items go up. There are certain costs associated with making items that are the same if making 1 item, or a 1000 items. For example, the printing press needs to set up the press to print the book, and they need to set up the paper to cut at the right size. Setting up the machines might take half a day of work. So, let's pretend you have to pay the press $500 a day, that's $250 gone without printing a single book. In many cases, the parts are sold in bulk. So, you buy a roll of paper, from which you can make 1000 books. You can't buy a third of a roll of paper to make 300 books, you have to buy the whole roll. The same might apply to the ink. In that case, you basically paid for the material for a 1000 books, so it would be a waster of money to only make 300. Also, labour union laws might mandate minimum hours. The union says that when you hire a crew, they get paid for a minimum of one week, even if they only work a couple of days. So, if it takes 2 days to print 300 books, you are still paying for the workers the other 5 days as well. When you combine all these factors, it makes more sense to print more books since you already paid for them.",
"While everyone is explaining why unit costs go down, it is common for 300 to cost less than 1000 TOTAL when a different process is used for larger batches. Sometimes this is also is compounded by the fact that different companies offer different processes. So the larger company with larger order minimums has an even greater economy of scale.\n\nAmazon was one of the first massive companies to change this dynamic first in publishing and then in technology (AWS) by developing systems to share large scale deployment.",
"No matter how many tacos you make, you have to have a grater to grate the cheese. If the grater is $5 and the taco sells for $2, you can see why the quantity you make matters. If you only make 10 tacos, that grater eats up 25% of the taco revenue. If you make 100 tacos, it only eats up 2.5%. \n\nA lot of production costs don’t have anything to do with each individual item produced. ",
"This is the issue we have in the collecting community. Specifically toys. Kids are not buying them, so the only way to get a hem is limited runs. The amount sold is significantly less than a retail setting, so instead of paying $7, we are consistently paying over $35 a piece. Often over $50-$60 once it hits eBay. ",
"Your friend probably meant that the average cost per book is less if he makes 1,000.\n\nThere are fixed costs, which are the same whether you are producing one book or 1,000; for example, the cost of the computer on which you write the book. Then there are variable costs, which depend on how many units you produce; for example, the cost of the paper and ink for each book.\n\nIf the variable costs are not increasing too fast, then the average cost of producing a book should fall as we make more and more."
]
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2adthw | how do shows like south park and family guy get away with openly making fun of famous people | While often using their names and likenesses. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2adthw/eli5how_do_shows_like_south_park_and_family_guy/ | {
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"text": [
"It's not illegal to make fun of someone.",
"Parodies are legal. One of the religious nuts, Jimmy Swaggart? Sued Hustler for a cartoon of him having sex with his mother. Hustler won, court said parodies are protected under 1st amendment. ",
"People in the public eye (celebrities, politicians) have a higher standard required to sue for libel/slander.\n\nTaken from - _URL_0_\n\n\"Can libel suits be brought by a public figure?\n\nPublic figures have a more difficult time proving defamation. Politicians or celebrities are understood to take some risk in being before the public eye and many of them profit by their public persona. A celebrity must prove that the party defaming them knew the statements were false, made them with actual malice, or was negligent in saying or writing them. Proving these elements can be an uphill battle. However, an outrageously inaccurate statement that’s harmful to one’s career can be grounds for a successful defamation suit, even if the subject is famous. For example, some celebrities have won suits against tabloids for false statements regarding their ability to work, such as an inaccurate statement that the star had a drinking problem.\n\n \n\nDon’t I have a right to express my opinion without fear of being sued for libel or slander?\n\nYes, so long as your statement of opinion is just an opinion, and does not contain specific facts that can be proved untrue. For example, “The waiters and waitresses at Acme Restaurant are too slow and the food is too spicy.” This is a statement of opinion. “I got food poisoning at Acme Restaurant” is potentially a defamatory statement if, in fact, the restaurant can prove that you never contracted food poison.\""
]
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[],
[],
[
"http://libelandslander.uslegal.com/frequently-asked-questions/"
]
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|
2iitwp | why does my hair seem to get oily faster when it's longer but not nearly as much when it's short? | I, like many females, only wash my hair a few times a week instead of every time I take a shower. I recently got my head shaved on the sides and back and it's only about 4 inches on top. Before when my hair was past my shoulders it seemed to get oily a LOT faster than it does now. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iitwp/eli5_why_does_my_hair_seem_to_get_oily_faster/ | {
"a_id": [
"cl2jjhx",
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"score": [
2,
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"text": [
"As a guy, I am also intrigued by this phenomena. my hair oils up WAY faster when its 3-4 inches long, rather than freshly cut",
"I know I touch my hair more when it's longer than when it was shorter which might be a factor. I'm a dry shampoo junkie for greasy hair. My favorite brand is batiste. It eliminates the greasy feeling as well as gives your hair body and just freshens it in general without making it sticky like some brands. "
]
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[],
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3cfalu | wjat are gate attendants so busy doing at the computer before boarding a plane? | They always seem so occupied typing away on their old computers and have very little time for questions.
EDIT: Thanks for all of the detailed responses! I also work in a customer service role and definitely appreciate the insight. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cfalu/eli5_wjat_are_gate_attendants_so_busy_doing_at/ | {
"a_id": [
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"Finally something I have experience in :D\n\nI am a flight dispatcher for a major uk Handling Agent, the gate staff will arrive at the gate approximately 1 hour before departure once they arrive they will log into the relevant system (most airlines have their own system they use for check in and boarding, although in the uk most airlines are slowly moving over to a system called Altea.), the gate agent will then check the flight for any specials, e.g. Unaccompanied minors, wheelchairs, or any other pre board.\n\nThe dispatcher will also use the system prior to boarding and during boarding to manage the load planning and check for any restrictions to the on time departure of the flight e.g. ATC Slots (specific time allocation for departure), then mostly they are just nosey checking later flights for the loads to gauge how busy check in will be.\n\nThen it's mostly a waiting game waiting for the crew to finish their security checks etc, typically we aim to board an standard narrow body aircraft (737, E190, 757) 30 minutes before departure and a wide body(767, 777, A330) flight between 1 hour and 45 minutes before departure.\n\nAs much as it would be nice neither the gate staff nor the dispatcher have the power to cancel a flight, as a dispatcher I have the power to delay the departure if I feel the paperwork is not up to scratch e.g. Incorrect load sheet (piece of paper the flight crew use to configure the aircraft) or the baggage paperwork doesn't tally with what is actually loaded.\n\nMost gate staff like to try to look busy to avoid the inevitable stupid question like is my next flight showing this or that film? To which we have no idea we are not privy to the details of the inflight entertainment nor do we care.\n\nBear in mind that most gate staff are on their 5th shift of 7 and their alarm had been going off at 2am every morning.\n",
"Mainly getting all the lines set up and preparing boarding passes / baggage tags for printing \n\n\nSource: I'm a check in agent"
]
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[],
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2wnxj6 | why is it that when we are born we are pretty much useless and can't do anything for ourselves, yet the majority of other animals can walk and move around from birth? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wnxj6/eli5_why_is_it_that_when_we_are_born_we_are/ | {
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"We humans have huge craniums, so huge that childbirth is very dangerous for the mother as it is (thanks to modern medicine, not so much anymore), if it were allowed to develop any more in the womb, it would be physically impossible to have a vaginal birth.\n\nRoughly, human babies are about halfway done when hey're born, and are pretty much completely helpless for 9 more months after birth.\n\nSince humans are social animals, it wasn't a deal-killer even 100 000 years ago to be born helpless, even if mum died in childbirth, because there was a whole society to take care of babies around it.",
"Narrow hips are favored for upright walking, and a big skull is necessary for a big brain. But the head has to pass through the hips at birth, so humans are born relatively undeveloped."
]
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[],
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||
eca1ai | why don’t other animals have a bacon equivalent? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eca1ai/eli5_why_dont_other_animals_have_a_bacon/ | {
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"text": [
"They do tho? Thin sliced steak is basically bacon and you can get bacon off deer, elk, and moose.",
"FYI, if you're question is about the flavor of bacon, that flavor is put there by curing the meat with sugar, smoke, syrup, etc. That's not what the meat itself actually tastes like.\n\nEdit: downvote - I'm guessing someone is disappointed to learn pigs don't actually taste like hickory smoke and maple syrup."
]
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[],
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23aw5t | why do my forearms get more veiny late at night? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23aw5t/eli5_why_do_my_forearms_get_more_veiny_late_at/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgv8lyf",
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3,
2
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"text": [
"depends on what you're doing",
"Blood flow increases with activity, making your veins bigger, you're beating your meat too much"
]
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[],
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||
bt0xsp | when transferring money from one bank to another digitally, what exactly is being transferred? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bt0xsp/eli5_when_transferring_money_from_one_bank_to/ | {
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"They obviously don’t literally transfer the money, it’s more of like the permission from you to the other bank to let the “certain person” (other accounts) take out money from them. Imagine it’s all borrowed money , the same money you put in your won’t get back , you’ll get back the same amount but Not that EXACT money. If everyone decided to withdraw all their money at once the bank would run out. It’s always borrowed money.",
"Its trading IOUs\n\nAll your bank account really is, is the bank saying they 'owe' you your balance whenever you'd like it. And of course, you trust them to pay you when you want it.\n\nAll this does is shift that. Lets say you transfer $100, the other bank now has an IOU you for $100, and your original bank takes $100 off their IOU to you.",
"The earlier posts are not entirely correct. Money (actual cash) does end up being transferred from one bank to another. However, the two banks will net out all transactions between the two so a lot of them will cancel out and a much smaller amount is actually transferred. And on a bigger scale, the same netting can be applied to all transactions between one bank and all banks it’s connected to, so that even more transactions can be cancelled out and an even smaller amount of physical money needs to be transferred.\n\nThe supply of money is not limitless (in the wider economy And at individual banks) so you can’t simple “trade IOUs” and there needs to be physical cash behind those transfers."
]
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1yohkh | what are free radicals, super foods, antioxidants and probiotics? | In Janurary, I vowed to loose weight. I'm down from 501 to 443 pounds. Whoohoo!
The gym I belong to throw the terms free radicals, super foods, antioxidants and probiotics around like they are Gods greatest gift to Mankind or some shit. Now I am highly educated-I'm not stupid.
I tried to look all that up online but all I seem to get is a ton of "Buy now!!!" "Free trial!!" "Dr. Oz approved!" and "As seen on the Biggest Loser!" ads. By the time I got to any substantial information about these things, my brain was in implode mode.
I tried asking a couple different trainers at the Gym and all they did was hand me some pamphlets and an order form. The pamphlets told me the only way to loose weight "fast" and "now" is to order and take these supplements and eat super foods.
When I couldn't grasp why I wasn't buying their supplements with that stuff in it and taking them on a daily basis, I got a blank stare and heard the sounds of crickets chirping.
It's just that I have a policy of NOT taking any medications, diet aids, supplements or vitamins unless I understand *why* I need to take such things. I don't understand what the hell anyone is talking about.
What the hell are these four things, do I really need to eat super foods and take supplements with antioxidants, free radicals and probiotics in them? Or should I just stick to the nutritionist my dr has me going to? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yohkh/eli5what_are_free_radicals_super_foods/ | {
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"cfmbx27",
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"text": [
"Free radicals and antioxidants are related. A free radical is a molecule which is oxidized, which makes them highly reactive these naturally occur in your body, and are (as far as I know) correlated with various health issues. Antioxidants counter these free radicals (which are *oxidized* molecules). Antioxidants and free radicals are solid science, but as far as I know, supplements of antioxidants aren't a huge deal. Probiotics are foods which supposedly promote growth of helpful gut bacteria. I'm unsure if they are actually helpful. I've yet to encounter convincing research. Superfoods is just a marketing term.",
"Chemically speaking, a free radical is a molecule that is missing a proton and therefore will react quickly. Usually, the reaction involves pulling a proton off of another molecule, which in turn becomes a radical and will react with something else, making a long chain reaction that goes on until a free radical is somehow neutralized. In your body, free radicals are necessary to some degree, but if you have too many of them, they can react with DNA, proteins, or just about anything, and cause damage to your cells.\n\nAntioxidants are molecules that will stop a free radical chain reaction. Vitamins A, C, and E are all antioxidants. So are the anthocyanins that make blueberries one of the popular \"superfoods.\"\n\nProbiotics are in a different category than free radicals and antioxidants. Probiotics are actually friendly bacteria. If you didn't know, you actually have 10 times more bacteria cells in your body than human cells. ([Source](_URL_0_)) The probiotics that they try to sell you are bacteria that will live in your stomach and intestines and help break down food. Edit: You will usually find probiotics in yogurts. Greek yogurt in particular likes to advertise that the bacteria in it is still alive."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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"http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones/"
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ce0krw | does friction lead to entropy? | As the text in the question line asks, does friction lead to entropy? And if so, how?
TIA. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ce0krw/eli5_does_friction_lead_to_entropy/ | {
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"etxiqp1",
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"text": [
"In a tiny way sure, just like everything does to some degree. Friction causes heat, heat radiates out to somewhere else, which then transfers a little bit beyond that next medium. And so ad infinitum",
"There are two kinds of friction: \"kinetic\" friction, and \"static\" friction. Kinetic friction leads to entropy, static friction does not necessarily lead to entropy. Kinetic friction applies to moving objects, like a bicycle.\n\n If you're riding fast, your bike has lots of energy, and you can use that energy to help you up the next hill. \n\nWhen you slow the bike with brakes, you are applying friction to the wheels. This friction converts the energy of the bike into heat energy. (If you stop your bike rapidly and touch the wheel or the brake, you might feel it has gotten hotter.)\n\nThis heat energy is not useful energy, and it simply makes the wheel and the air around the bike a tiny bit warmer. The warmer air is more \"entropic\" because the heat energy just kind of dissipates away.\n\nSo the useful energy--your bike's speed--has been taken away by friction and turned into heat, and therefore kinetic friction leads to entropy."
]
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6dnzr5 | how are lightning strikes detected so that they can be displayed on maps online? | I've seen the UK Met Office display maps showing lightning strikes, and I sometimes use _URL_0_ when there's a thunderstorm nearby. How are the lightning strikes so accurately displayed? It looks like they're tracked by stations around the country, but how do these stations detect lightning strikes, sometimes many many miles away? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dnzr5/eli5_how_are_lightning_strikes_detected_so_that/ | {
"a_id": [
"di41qlq"
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"text": [
"When lightning strikes happen, they emit a radio signature on a predictable set of frequencies. So, it's really a matter of listening to those frequencies from multiple locations, and using triangulation to determine the location.\n\nThis happens very fast. My weather app routinely reports a nearby lightning strike before the thunder gets to me."
]
} | [] | [
"blitzortung.org"
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3t7z9o | how can skyscrapers have full glass windows? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t7z9o/eli5_how_can_skyscrapers_have_full_glass_windows/ | {
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"[Then you'll love this story:](_URL_0_)\n\n > Garry Hoy (1955 – 9 July 1993) was a lawyer for the law firm of Holden Day Wilson in Toronto. He died in an act of accidental autodefenestration.\n\n > In an attempt to prove to a group of prospective articling students that the glass in the Toronto-Dominion Centre was unbreakable, Hoy threw himself through a glass wall on the 24th story and fell to his death after the window frame gave way. He had apparently performed this stunt many times in the past, having previously bounced harmlessly off the glass. The event occurred in a small boardroom adjacent to a boardroom where a reception was being held for new articling students. Hoy was a noted and respected corporate and securities law specialist in Toronto. He was a professional engineer, having completed his engineering degree before studying law. He was a highly respected philanthropic member of the Toronto Asian community.\n\n > Toronto Police Service Detective Mike Stowell reported that:\n\"At this Friday night party, Mr. Hoy did it again and bounced off the glass the first time. However, he did it a second time and this time crashed right through the middle of the glass.\"\n\n > In another interview, the firm's spokesman mentioned that the glass in fact did not break, but popped out of its frame, leading to Hoy's fatal plunge."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Hoy"
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||
1b6w7q | what it's like to be deaf. | I guess I'm having a hard time imagining the feeling of not being able to hear anything. Is it like that ringing in your ears after a big boom. Even in a silent room there is still that weird ringing in my head and the strange sounds my body makes, so I've never felt complete quiet. Just nothing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b6w7q/eli5_what_its_like_to_be_deaf/ | {
"a_id": [
"c945y7g"
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"I once had virus in my ear that rendered me temporarily deaf in the end. It was about a week or so. It was a very weird sensation. \n\nLet me try to describe it:\nFirst I had some flu-like symptoms. Slowly the \"volume\" around starting getting turned down. It was a weird feeling, because it wasn't something that I really noticed. Of course I was aware, that my hearing was worse, but you don't really think about it. \nI remember that I was watching a DVD, when my brother comes up to my room, holding his ears, screaming at me to turn the volume down. The volume was OK to me - I didn't realise I had turned the volume to max.\nIn the end my hearing had completely disappeared. It hard to describe how it feels like, because there really isn't anything to describe. You just don't hear anything. No ringing, no nothing. \nI can tell how I reacted to it: \nI became very secluded (bear in mind it was only going on for about a week). My family wrote on pieces of paper, when they wanted to say something. I could speak perfectly well, but it was like I couldn't. I too resorting to writing notes. It was like my WILL to speak had disappeared too. "
]
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39vaq9 | what's the purpose of the hole in a bagel? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39vaq9/eli5whats_the_purpose_of_the_hole_in_a_bagel/ | {
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"text": [
"To help it cook evenly on all sides. Otherwise the center would bake slowly while the outsides is already cooked.",
"I worked as a bagel cook for a bunch of years - high school into college. I've never eaten so well as at this particular jewish deli!\n\n1. even cooking. this is the vast majority of why it's done this way. \n\n2. rapid cooking. This is actually pretty important. compared to other breads, the post-boiled bagel is cooked very quickly. This is one of the things that gets it be \"chewy\" (the steamed bagels - or \"rolls with holes\" as we called them - don't have this quality thought (for them the hole is just heritage).\n\n3. some bagels - specifically the \"bialy\" (to some this may be actually be a bagel because it is not typically boiled at all) omit the hole. In a bagel shop this means you take a plain bagel dough, smoosh the center together, flatten it a bit and then add some chopped onions and spices to the top and bake. (this is of polish-yiddish origin, if I recall). If you're doing this truly historically, you probably don't start with a plain bagel :)\n\n\n \n",
"The same as the purpose of the whole in a doughnut, to make it cook more evenly. If you did not have the hole it would cook slower in the middle so you would either have raw dough there or the sides burn. ",
"What's the purpose for the hole in my heart? :(",
"Alton Brown discusses this in a good eats episode, although I think he's talking about donuts. Like everyone is saying, it is for even cooking but the reason is that it drastically increases the surface to mass ratio. "
]
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32cy6z | why does sending group texts and pictures use up cellular data, when normal texts do not? and how does a text to an imessage group text compare to a text to a non-imessage group text in terms of how much data it uses? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32cy6z/eli5_why_does_sending_group_texts_and_pictures/ | {
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"When you send a multiple messages in group text it counts as an MMS, depending on your plan and data limits you would be charged outside of that. Most plans cover Text+MMS but some companies do Text only. There is no real way to calculate the exact use beside checking data use tools in the iPhone - sincerely an Ex AT & T Tech agent"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2olvy9 | what is driving the shortage of primary care physicians? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2olvy9/eli5what_is_driving_the_shortage_of_primary_care/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"These are probably not the only reasons but they're definitely major ones.\n\n1. Getting the education you need to become a doctor is crazy expensive and takes a crazy amount of time. You need four years of college followed by four years of medical school. Hardly anyone, even with help from family, can afford that out-of-pocket, so that means student loans, and lots of them. Your eight years of medical education will probably cost $200,000, and if you fail, which is a real possibility, all that money is down the drain. Furthermore, you have to do a couple years of interning after you finish medical school. Not only is it hard work to even apply and get an internship, but you'll be working for crap pay for these first few years, and you'll probably be working in the least glamorous and most difficult area of medicine: hospitals.\n\n2. After you've finally completed all that hard stuff and education, you'll probably specialize, and the best-paying, least difficult specializations are definitely not primary care and internal medicine. The real money is in dermatology, plastic surgery, and psychiatry. (And psychiatry is often not the hard work of doing therapy and working with mentally ill people, psychiatrists are usually just the people who prescribe the medication.)\n\nSo yeah, it takes a lot of money and hard work to even become a doctor, and then once you've done it, the people making the most money are not going into primary care. "
]
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[]
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||
4u0unm | how do our brains know which note to whistle, but guessing a chord on an instrument is more difficult? | I was whistling to a song today, and I realized that I knew the exact shape my mouth had to be in before the note was played. The note that I whistled matched the song for verbatim.
If I attempt to play along with a song on say, guitar, there is a lot more trial and error involved in getting the chords to match with the song.
How do our brains know how to form the mouth shape to produce a note? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4u0unm/eli5_how_do_our_brains_know_which_note_to_whistle/ | {
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"It's really just your muscle memory. You have been using your mouth muscles your entire life so it's like 2nd nature to you. When you add a foreign object (instrument) to the equation it takes a long time and lots of practice to develop that level of muscle memory where you can just play fluently with very little effort.",
" > I was whistling to a song today, and I realized that I knew the exact shape my mouth had to be in before the note was played. \n\nThere was a time when you didn't know that. You had to work it out by trial and error and a lot of practice. Now you know exactly how to position your tongue and lips to get that note because you have learned how to.\n\nEDIT: removed extra word"
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6hzacf | how much do clouds weigh? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6hzacf/eli5_how_much_do_clouds_weigh/ | {
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"**A lot**. \n\nIt obviously depends on the cloud - bigger clouds will weigh more, heavy rain clouds even more than that. But remember that clouds *are* pretty big, and that they're pretty much water, and water isn't exactly light. \n\nIf we're talking about average-sized clouds (if there is such a thing), we are literally talking about *tons* of water. ",
"Clouds weight can vary, but a good sized one can weight 1.1 million pounds.\n\nThere are 2 primary reasons clouds can be thay heavy and still float. First in terms of composition, clouds will be compromised of millions or billions of tiny ice crystals that by themselves dont have much weight for gravity to bring down. Combine with updrafts (either light or heavy) pushing the particles up, which helps negate the downward motion of the particles, and this allows clouds to \"float\".\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nHere is a scientific american article explaining this concept a bit more.",
"They weigh a lot, but yet they float the same way a massive ship floats on water - they are not very dense. ",
"On that note, how much meters squared of it could I lift, if I could fit it into a pressurized tank (that didn't weigh anything)?",
"Sadly I can't back this up as I don't remember what podcast I was listening to at the time (most likely No Such Thing As A Fish) but \"the average cloud weighs as much as twenty elephants. TWENTY elephants! No wonder planes rattle when they fly through them\"."
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6mpxaz | is 1 horse-power the equivalent of the power 1 horse would have when pulling something? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6mpxaz/eli5_is_1_horsepower_the_equivalent_of_the_power/ | {
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"Ideally yes\n\nPractically no\n\nThe guy who defined horsepower did it based off donkeys turning a mill stone and assumed horses were 50% more powerful.\n\nHe was defining horsepower to use it as a way to measure his cool new steam engine against something people knew so it was in his best interest to low-ball the power of a horse to have better numbers\n\nAn individual horse has a peak power of 14.9 horsepower and can sustain a bit over 1 horsepower, but two horses working together can sustain 2.5 horsepower. It doesn't scale linearly with how many horses you have",
"That's how James Watt figured it. 1 hp is meant to be the power (Energy over time) that one horse could continuously do in a quarry. This is 746 Watts.\n\nIn high school, we did a power test - we ran up a staircase of a known height and timed it. Energy = mass * gravity acceleration * change in height. Time = time it takes to run up the staircase.\n\nI could, for a few seconds, put out 1.8 horsepower back in high school. But I could not sustain that.",
"Very roughly, yes.\n\nIt was essentially guesswork used by early steam engine salesmen to let them know how many engines a factory would need to replace its horses.\n\nMost horses can do more in short bursts, but less than a horsepower over time. "
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5oyqrp | why [in the us] is electricity run by private corporations? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5oyqrp/eli5_why_in_the_us_is_electricity_run_by_private/ | {
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"In most cases it only makes sense for one utility provider to exist because of the costs associated with building the infrastructure to deliver the utility. Not only would it be expensive to build a second set of water pipes, sewer pipes, powerlines, etc., but cities would run out of room and it would look awful. This sort of situation is called a \"natural monopoly\" because it naturally lends itself to having one business.\n\nSince most utilities involve cases of natural monopolies they usually either publicly operated or heavily regulated. Take Houston, Texas for example. The electric company here used to be called Houston Lighting & Power and was run by a private entity but was heavily regulated (included the prices). In 2003, Texas deregulated the energy market. HL & P split into different companies, and one was picked as the \"successor\" company that owned all the power lines and was responsible for repairing them. That successor company, CenterPoint Energy, is still regulated more than its competitors for that reason. However, the prices can be set by the utility companies, though there are restrictions on exactly how much they can change the price and charge.\n\nThe tl;dr is that even when utilities are private, they are often still heavily regulated even on pricing so the government still has a say. Even in deregulated markets, there are still more regulations than in other industries, though competition is required to keep prices down to some degree.",
"Lots of states allow for a company to own what is essentially a monopoly on a utility in exchange for the government having tight reins on the prices that the utility can charge.\n\nThe advantage to having a private company running the utility is that they have more incentive than the government to run efficiently. If the management of a utility can cut costs by 5%, the company gets extra profit to invest in new business, and the management personally gets more money. If a government body cut costs by 5%, then that money goes to the government and the organization typically doesn't see any of it. There's less incentive to fire people who do poor work or find new ways to save the customer money because there is no extra profit to be made.\n\nIt's worth mentioning that utility companies typically don't have a lot of margin. They're often considered \"old lady\" stocks because, although they reliably make a return on investment and seldom crash, they're almost never going to see the growth that a non-utility stock can. As a result, the long-term return on investment tends to be a bit low.",
"Let's say you and your school buddies want a new swing set for the playground. But even if all of you saved every penny of your milk money, you'd never be able to afford one.\n\nSo instead, you go to the swingset guy and say \"if you build is a swingset, we'll pay you out of our milk money to use it.\"\n\nWell the swingset guy doesn't think this is a very good deal. After all, if you can't afford to build one yourself, he's not going to make his money back for a very long time. So you make a deal, he'll build the swingset, but no one else is allowed to build any playground equipment until he has made back all of his money. \n\nWell now that's not a very good deal for you. With no other playground equipment, he can charge whatever he likes for access to the swings. So you make the deal, he can only charge a fair price, that you and your friends agree on, and he can have control over all the playground equipment.\n\nThat's how the utilities were built."
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4d3nmv | when i drop a bottle of coke and then open it, it erupts. when a coke machine drops a bottle of coke and then i open it, it's fine. why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d3nmv/eli5_when_i_drop_a_bottle_of_coke_and_then_open/ | {
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"How cold is your can? The colder it is, the less fizz. Also, the drop from the machine is like 3ft, your drop may be more and is also isn't in a containedin a box, it freely voices all over. ",
"Doesn't drop very far, and when it does it goes down a chute that decelerates it.\n\nYou can see it at around 2m30s [in this video](_URL_0_)",
"Because the difference in height would matter greatly, if you were to drop a coke bottle and it lands on the same side from the same height, theoretically it would fizz the same amount that a bottle out of a dispenser would. Plus those vending machines are like 1 degree celsius so they're cold, therefore lessening the impact of fizziness the bottle has. If you dropped a room temp bottle and a cold one, the hot one would fizz more because heat expands the liquids and the gas expands, making it more pressurised. "
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9jsqkw | how does a game know what to load when you select a load to play? | Example: I just started playing the original Borderlands on my computer and noticed I had an old save from years ago, how does it save the entire world I had years ago for me to access at any second? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jsqkw/eli5_how_does_a_game_know_what_to_load_when_you/ | {
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"Game developer here. Games use a lot of variables. They can be compressed and saved using very complicated methods. It’s kind of like writing a story. You can read it again and remember where you were or what happened. Games take that information and save it to be read later. As long as it has the saved game data it can remember what it was doing.",
"You have a library full of books (game files) and you have a notepad that has a record of what books you're currently reading and what page you are at with them (your save). Whenever you want to read them, you go into the library and pick the books and go to the pages according to your notepad (loading the save). \n\nYou don't make copies of books every time you read them (not saving the entire world). You just remember where you were and pick up the books from the library.",
"Your saved game is a file that looks like\n\n > Player location - coordinate (1,2,3)\n\n > Inventory - Shotgun, 26 shells, and a stick of gum\n\n > Enemies - monster126 at coordinate (3,2,1), monster127 at coordinate (2,3,1)\n\nand so on and so forth with all the data about every little thing in the world."
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4dr37d | the biological and physical process that things like fire flies make light? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dr37d/eli5_the_biological_and_physical_process_that/ | {
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"Many chemical reactions give off light of a specific wavelength as a product. Fireflies and other creatures that emit visible light do so by breaking down a chemical called luciferin (light bringer) in a way that emits the characteristic greenish-yellow light of fireflies.",
"It's called bioluminescence. Fireflies have an enzyme named luciferase which reacts with luciferin in the presence of magnesium ions, oxygen and ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) to emit light. Its helpful in keeping the predators away as the chemical has a terrible taste. Also, the male fireflies glow to attract the female fireflies, and sometimes the female glows to call a male, and eat it. Other than that they glow to lure other insects, and they become the prey. "
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567oyd | how do people who film themselves illegally climbing cranes and buildings not get prosecuted even though the video shows them doing it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/567oyd/eli5how_do_people_who_film_themselves_illegally/ | {
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"It's one thing for a police department to arrest someone while they are trespassing. It's quite another for a local police department to turn a video into a full length investigation, spending resources to analyze the video, track down the trespassers, and then charge them for a petty crime. It's a huge waste of resources to stop something so minor from potentially happening again."
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23u27h | why do the negative comments stand out from the compliments the most, even if there are more of the latter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23u27h/eli5_why_do_the_negative_comments_stand_out_from/ | {
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"the majority of people are filled with self doubt \nwe seek compliments from others to drown out the negative thoughts we have about ourselves \nso if negative comments stand out \nif you find yourself putting more stock in them \nif you feel those comments make you question the honesty of the compliments \nthen at some level you are applying confirmation bias \nallowing your own negativity to be validated \n\nor at least thats my armchair psych eval \ncertainly worth 2 cents.... \nfairly worthless in the grand scheme of things\n"
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1onhbd | if dogs can survive on nothing but dog food.. why isnt there human kibble?? | i mean yeah it would be boring eating the same kibble everyday.. but.. why hasn't anyone created human kibble that has all the nutrients and human needs daily?
**edit** the info you guys have given = awesome!!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1onhbd/eli5_if_dogs_can_survive_on_nothing_but_dog_food/ | {
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"Complete meal replacements exist and are are sold at most drug stores and/or hospitals. They are commonly required for patients of some wasting diseases or other conditions. They tend to be liquid though, as it's easier for the digestive system to deal with. \n\nThey aren't cheap though. If most people lived on them, they probably would be though. Economies of scale... ",
"There was a guy on YouTube that tried to live of the pellets they feed gorillas for like a week, he was really miserable at the end of the week so yeah diversity in your diet is important. link to video of day 1 [here](_URL_0_)",
"If I'm not mistaken, in the past couple of years or so, some dude \"engineered\" his own nutritious liquid meal, called it \"Soylent\" in homage of Soylent Green, and has ingested nothing but that since.",
"Just playing around in my fitness pal you could whip up a batch consisting of brown rice, ground turkey, eggs, and oatmeal that would clock in at around 1700 calories, and be like 35% carbs 40% protein 25% fat. Separate each batch into however many portions you want and just adjust volume for caloric intake. Take a multivitamin. I think I am going to try it.",
"Pemmican is about as close as anything I've heard of. Native Americans ate it frequently through winter, and early American explorers headed west often lived on it for months at a time with no ill effects. Here's a link. It's been a while since I read through this, but I believe the author claims that it provides everything a human body needs. _URL_0_",
"There is nutraloaf which is basically the equivalent of kibble that is sometimes used in places like prisons.\n\n_URL_0_",
"They do have it and it comes in many forms (kibble, liquid shake, protein bar, paste, bricks, etc.)\n\nMost common ones are those found in emergency food packages:\n_URL_0_\n\nTastes like ass so nobody buys these to eat on a daily basis. ",
"I make my own \"kibble,\" sort of.\n\nI want to keep calories down, eat a lot of vegetables and fiber, sufficient protein, and so on. You're most hungry when eating a varied diet with many tempting flavors and seasonings. So sometimes I eat an unvarying diet, without much sugar, salt or fat.\n\nI whip up a big batch of stuff that resembles meatloaf. It's about half chopped vegetables, half ground lean turkey, with some oatmeal for fiber and carbs, and to help it stick together, and a few eggs to make it stick together. An alternate similar recipe substitutes beans for about half the ground turkey. Sometimes add brown rice. More fiber that way. It won't stick together in that case. It's just goop. Sometimes I'll eat it twice per day for several days in a row.\n\nNeither recipe tastes bad. It's quite edible when you're hungry. When you've had enough, but not too much, you stop eating. If I had to eat this, and only this, for a year, it would be no problem. I'd probably lose weight. For too many people, eating is their primary form of recreation and source of pleasure. Obesity, poor health and misery ensue.\n\nEither recipe could be dried into some kind of \"kibble\" form, for the sake of longer shelf life, cheaper storage and shipping and so on. But you would have to soak it in water before eating, or drink a lot of water with it.",
"There is human kibble. It's called breast milk.",
"Who wants kibble when you can have a steak or (insert favorite food item)? Dogs prefer real food over kibble, we do too.",
"I saw a programm on dutch TV where they investigate chicken food, they came to realise that this was as nutrient sufficent for human beings as Chickens you only needed a Vitamin C and omega 3 supplement to have a balanced intake of nutrients and stuff.\n\nThis food only cost 0,35 Euro a Kilo which is freaking cheap, they tried making it in the program aswel.\n\nYou only needed 750gram a day to have sufficent intake of food to live, wich came down to 0,27 Euro cents a day.\n\nSource: _URL_0_ \n\nAt around 23:00 they are making a recipe with it.\n",
"If this is something your interested in, I'd recommend taking a look at Ars Technica's article on [Soylent](_URL_1_). One of their editors ate nothing but Soylent for a week and chronicled the experience. \n_URL_2_\n\nThere's also a soylent subreddit /r/soylent \n\nAnd a soylent recipe database _URL_0_",
"They probably have already invented it, just 'eat the same crap everyday forever like a dog' wasn't all that marketable.",
"I thought this is what fast food was? sans nutrients of course.",
"I've always thought of [this](_URL_0_) as human kibble.",
"They kinda do, for large primates. This guy tried it.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Breakfast cereal is surprisingly close to what your talking about. Compare the nutritional facts of [Soylent](_URL_1_) to cereal like [Froot Loops](_URL_2_), [Rice Krispies](_URL_3_), and [Honey Nut Cheerios](_URL_0_). A person can go a very long time on nothing but cereal.\n\nSource: Survived on nothing but cereal and milk for two months. ",
"Check out \"bachelor chow\" on futurama",
"Bachelor Chow! Just gotta wait a thousand years...",
"Bachelor Chow, now with Flavor!",
"I know your question has been answered already, but I just wanted to add that I *am* one of those people who has to survive on an extremely limited diet, and it sucks. Because of a digestive condition, I can eat very few foods; pretty much just white bread, crackers, strawberries, water, soda, coffee, and cheese. So, to offer up some personal experience... because we, as Westerners especially, have been conditioned to expect variety, to constantly search for newer, better things, being limited to such a restrictive diet is VERY frustrating.\n\nI'm sure there are people out there who have the internal fortitude to be able to cope with this type of situation and not be bothered by it, and perhaps a disproportionately large number of them are reddit users, but I think the vast majority of humans would prefer the variety of a \"normal\" diet over something like kibble or energy bars or liquid nutrition. Evolution got us where we are for a reason, and we like to take advantage of that. ;)",
"I saw a youtube film about a guy looking for a \"bachelor chow.\" The closest thing he could find was a kibble for gorillas. The kibble was able to sustain his energy and nutritional demands, however, it appeared that the biggest problem was the huge psychological damage that was caused by eating nothing but awful kibble and water for a sustained period. ",
"There is. We feed it to 3rd world countries. Though its more of a paste. \n\nAlso you said it right. Dogs just survive on dog food. They dont thrive.\n\nIf you feed your dog real food (raw meat/bones/cheese/veggies/fruits/my dog really loves raw eggs - shell and all) they will avoid most health problems... even ones attributed to breed most of the time. \n\nRescued this dog one time with a horrible skin condition.. he had been to 4-5 vets across south Florida and treated with every pill/cream/shampoo they could come up with.\n\nI took the dog for a week and had it clearing right up. Switched him to a diet of cheese/eggs/fish heads/chicken organs (stuff you would normally throw away is great for dogs). Then took him off all his other meds except Amoxicillin (he had open wounds). His wounds were closed and fur started growing back in days.\n\nTLDR: Feed your dog real food and they stay real healthy. ",
"Because it would taste like poo-poo, dear.\n\nIn all seriousness, there was a guy that lived for over a year on nothing but supplements and water..and his own body fat. It's really a matter of taste, not nutrition, since with a proper supplement that has all of the proper balances of fats, irons, fibers, and such, you could survive. But no one likes eating something that tastes like reconstituted cardboard.",
"I'd say Taco Bell is sorta like human kibble.",
"This comment will be buried, but dogs actually need some sort of change-up in their diet in order to remain healthy. While most people just feed their dogs the same kibble their entire lives, it is actually far healthier to mix your dogs diet up. Switching between different types of raw-meat-diets, adding veggies and fruit, feeding some cooked meats (etc) is far healthier for your pets, and I would recommend it over feeding a basic kibble diet any day. Kibble is actually *not* all that good for pets, regardless of how great they claim to be. Feeding a raw diet, or a raw-type diet such as Ziwipeak is a much much healthier alternative.",
"We got potato: _URL_0_\n\nJust add butter and you have human kibble",
"_URL_0_\n\nUnimix. I'e heard it's pretty disgusting, but you could live off it. \n",
"Bachelor Chow in the year 3000",
"[Bachelor Chow.](_URL_0_) Now with Flavor!",
"[Ensure](_URL_0_) nutritional drinks are often sold as a diet sort of thing, but they are notable in that they are a nutritionally complete food. You can eat it every day for every meal and not get sick.\n\nThe same goes for Boost, Jevity, TwoCal, and a bevy of other medical foods."
]
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[],
[],
[
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[
"http://www.costco.com/all-emergency-food.html"
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[],
[],
[],
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"http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2012/afleveringen/31-05-2012"
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"https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body",
"http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/nothing-but-the-soylent-were-trying-1-full-week-of-the-meal-substitute/"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.leanitup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cereal-Boxes.jpg"
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[
"http://www.angryman.ca/monkey.html"
],
[
"http://i.imgur.com/rLNajJY.png",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_%28food_substitute%29#Ingredients",
"http://i.imgur.com/JbVKpoz.jpg",
"http://i.imgur.com/e3KwkYU.jpg"
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[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
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[],
[
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[
"http://ensure.com/"
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|
1sd54l | why don't arvs cure hiv? | If the anti retro virals inhibit HIV from infecting cells, making it impossible to make copies of itself, why does HIV still exist in the system?
(I tried Google searching this, and searched Reddit...wasn't able to find anything) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sd54l/eli5_why_dont_arvs_cure_hiv/ | {
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"Because while haart (highly active antiretroviral therapy) has been able to improve the condition of hiv+ patients and lengthen their lives, it isn't a silver bullet that can eradicate the virus. HIV's replication machinery is error prone so the virus can mutate in the host and enough mutations might make the anti-retroviral drugs useless.\n\nAnother reason is that HIV and other viruses are able to go latent. Latency means the ability of a virus to become dormant within its host cell without replicating, however the viral genome is integrated in the host. At some later time point, the virus-infected cell can become \"re-activated\" and start reproducing and increasing viral load.\n\nHIV can persist in reservoirs, namely the resting cd4 T cells among others. these latently infected cells have a long half life and can also divide. When they divide, the daughter cells will also have the virus genome in them. so [you can't completely get rid of the virus](_URL_1_) even with drugs.\n\nOne way that scientists are trying to approach this problem is to get the latently infected reservoirs to become activated and replicate the virus. This sounds like a terrible idea at first but the trick is to get them to replicate the virus and hit them with the HAART drugs at the same time to prevent the virus from entering new cells. at the same time, the virally infected cells should be recognized and killed of by the immune system. [Purge the reservoirs, purge the virus](_URL_0_)."
]
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"http://positivelyaware.com/2010/10_05/one_on_one.shtml",
"http://www.futurity.org/to-cure-hiv-attack-the-reservoir/"
]
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|
ca5kfa | why some dj's press unnecessary buttons in the mixer while performing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ca5kfa/eli5_why_some_djs_press_unnecessary_buttons_in/ | {
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"There is a high chance that they are getting things ready for something coming up in a few seconds (like transition to a new song etc.)",
"Just because you didn't hear anything doesn't mean it didn't do a thing..\nHe was probably mixing under his headphones, preparing a transition, cue another song up, layer the beats.\nAnd a good dj would do all this in a way that someone who doesn't know the tracks won't notice a hard difference",
"Aside from caparisun and begibey's offering, it's possible your DJ was just pretending in any given moment. DJing is performance art for entertainment, just like a regular band playing live. Artists tend to embellish and exaggerate while performing. It makes it more exciting to watch."
]
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3lvuhk | why don't we use "you're" at the end of sentences? example, "you're funnier than me." versus "i'm funnier than you're.". | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lvuhk/eli5_why_dont_we_use_youre_at_the_end_of/ | {
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"We also wouldn't say, \"You're funnier than I'm.\" It's because in the comparison, we're stressing the people, identified by the pronouns. Therefore the pronouns are stressed, and when they are they're kept separate and not contracted with their following verbs. ",
"Well in your example both are used properly. You could say im not as funny as you're or you're funnier than me. Say thing just switched the context."
]
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[],
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3mqsj6 | if fever raises body temperature and standing naked in snow lowers body temperature; why is it not healthy to stand naked in snow with fever? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mqsj6/eli5_if_fever_raises_body_temperature_and/ | {
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"A fever isn't a bad thing unless it's too high for too long. The elevated temperature creates a less hospitable environment for whatever is making you ill.",
"Firstly fever is believed to have some benefits. Some viruses reproduce less well at higher body temperatures, whereas the rest of your body can cope well enough, if uncomfortably. Sweating a cold out certainly seems to work for me.\n\nSecondly, standing in the snow is a bit extreme - just a shower would do - and not even a cold one. When the kids were younger and had a fever we used to put a teeshirt on them and let them play in the bath. The damp cotton cooled them rapidly, but not dangerously.",
"Standing in snow is too rapid and too extreme of a cooldown to be healthy and may cause body temperatures to cool down too rapidly. A better solution is just to take a lukewarm bath.",
"Your body creates the fever as part of fighting off an illness, not the other way around. You may have to go out in the snow, however, while waiting for paramedics if your fever goes too high, since your body may give you a fever so high it kills you, but that is pretty extreme.",
"Fever is a symptom. It is better to treat the cause if you can. This case shows why treating symptoms is bad. The cold snow could make that chest infection, or whatever else is causing the fever, much worse. It's like when I get constipated. I just eat more and more. You can be constipated, too. \n"
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433lsd | charging time? | Please explain like I'm 5, why charging time for my 250 mAh smartwatch is the same as my 2600 phone..
Both are using the same cable and charger.. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/433lsd/eli5_charging_time/ | {
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"batteries' cells can only accept a certain rate of charge, so even though the same charger is used it can't fill at same rate because there are fewer cells in the smartwatch. Think of using a sink to fill a mixing bowl vs. filling a squirt gun. Same faucet, same potential fill rate, but one requires a much smaller stream to fill than the other.",
"This is a tricky question to answer, because the physics involved with modern Li-ion batteries is complex, but I'll try to make a simple analogy.\n\nWhen you charge a battery, you are applying a voltage across the anode-cathode gap that's causing the Li ions in the medium to migrate back to their starting position. See [here](_URL_0_). This ion migration happens at a fixed rate.\n\nA larger-capacity battery can store more charge because it has more of these layers sandwiched together. But since the distance between the internal electrodes is roughly the same in all modern Li-ion batteries, regardless of capacity, the charge rate (i.e., ion return rate) remains constant.\n\nImagine your cellphone battery is a line of 1,000 people standing shoulder to shoulder. Your smartwatch battery is a line of 5 people standing shoulder to shoulder. In both cases, the people represent the Li ions. When you recharge, you're forcing these people to run a 100m sprint in a straight line. Assuming all the people (ions) are equivalent, the phone and watch people (ions) will get to the finish at the same time on average."
]
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[],
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"http://www.rdmag.com/sites/rdmag.com/files/Figure-1x500.jpg"
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3bd4ij | with the recent decline of an extension what would be the rippling effects to the rest of the world if greece's economy does collapse? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bd4ij/eli5_with_the_recent_decline_of_an_extension_what/ | {
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"It might exacerbate the meltdown currently threatening China's economy because of too much debt, too much lending to people hoping to get rich in an expanding market, and cause a massive crash of stock prices as people sell to avoid losing even more."
]
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[]
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639aj8 | is outsourcing good for anyone besides the stock holders? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/639aj8/eli5is_outsourcing_good_for_anyone_besides_the/ | {
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"It's potentially good for the customers of the company, assuming the cost savings (or at least a portion of them) are passed on to customers.",
"You're assuming that if a product is currently made in the US and then portions or all of the product are then outsourced, the difference in the before and after cost would go straight into profit. If this were the case yes, this would mainly benefit the stockholders and nobody else except possibly employees of the company.\n\nIn the real world, generally most of these savings are passed on to the consumer to keep a product cost-competitive (which benefits both the consumer and the company), whether you're talking assembly, mining, skilled labor such as programming, etc.\n\n_URL_0_\n\ntl;dr: The cost of an iPhone 6s would only cost 5% more if it were simply assembled in the US. However if all of the components were produced in the US (With raw materials still being imported), this would raise the price by around $100. It's impossible for an iPhone's raw materials to all be sourced from within the US so at least some of the mining NEEDS to be outsourced.\n\n",
"I once saw a documentary (forgot which one at this point) which summed up this dilemma:\n\nThe interviewer asked a white lady (possibly middle-lower income?) that if she is against jobs being outsourced overseas. She staunchly says \"It is not right!\" The interviewer then notices the lady has a \"Wal-Mart\" brand DVD player (or at least a DVD player Wal-Mart has a huge hand in selling) and then asks \"But don't you enjoy paying less than $20 for that DVD player?\" The lady began stumbling over herself trying to come up with a rebuttal but couldn't really formulate a sound argument in return.\n\nThe point of the anecdote is this: while it assuredly helps stock/stakeholders of companies to outsource jobs, it has a both positive and negative effects on consumers as a whole. In this case from the documentary, outsourcing the DVD manufacturing to China allows the cost of manufacturing to nose dive so, in return, the manufacturing company can sell this product at a reduced cost to Americans. But at the same time, the actual jobs are funneled away by whatever manufacturing company chose to outsource (why pay Americans minimum wage when you can pay people in China, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc pennies on the dollar?). This is known as a trade-off, we are willing to take the benefits even at the costs of a potential negative. \n\nKeep in mind: I am a biologist, not an economist. These are very general ways to sum up international trade/commerce."
]
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[],
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"https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all-american-iphone/"
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7a2tvy | what kind of debris shielding is on the iss that can stop high energy objects from penetrating the hull? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7a2tvy/eli5_what_kind_of_debris_shielding_is_on_the_iss/ | {
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"The debris shields aren't made from something special, they just have multiple layers with space between them -micrometeors get through the outer layer but shatter in the process, so the inner layer can stop the slower and smaller parts from getting through.",
"Surprisingly, they're made of thin fabrics/foils.\n\nArmour plating the ISS would take lots of mass, and it's expensive to get mass up into space...\n\nBut there's a handy thing about space debris, which is that it's traveling so incredibly fast!\n\nThe ISS is wrapped in a thin layer of flexible material. When a micrometeorite strikes that layer, it punches a hole through... but thanks to the law of relativity, a meteorite smacking into a thin layer of material feels the same as a thin layer of foil being blasted into a micrometeorite. The result is the same: the meteorite gets vaporized by the impact.\n\nThere is a gap between the shield and the hull, and as the jet of hot gas travels over this distance, it spreads out until it's too spread out to penetrate the hull.\n\nThe thin protective layer can be replaced: the hull, and the people inside it cannot be.\n\nAvoiding larger debris that the micrometeorite shield can't stop involves tracking it from the ground and steering the ISS around it.\n\nFor more info: _URL_0_"
]
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fldswu | why is it difficult to find all of the undiscovered species in the ocean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fldswu/eli5_why_is_it_difficult_to_find_all_of_the/ | {
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"I can think of a few reasons. One is that they tend to hang around the deeper parts of the ocean, and we just don't have any super convenient way of exploring that. Another is that different species don't necessarily look very different. They're hiding in plain sight, so to speak.",
"Ocean big. Animals small.\n\nWe are constantly discovering new creatures on land where they are easy to get at. Add a third dimension, the inability to breath, and crushing pressure, and is it surprising we have found as much as we have.",
"1. It's a big ocean. Like 2/3 of the planet, and miles deep.\n2. Most species live below the surface. Unless you're in a submersible you're not going to encounter them.\n3. Many species live far beneath the surface where light doesn't penetrate. It takes extra equipment (lights, sonar, etc) to even detect their presence, but coarse resolution makes it difficult to study their fine details.\n4. Many species live way, way down in the ocean where pressures are extremely dangerous to humans. Going that deep even once is extremely expensive. Going that deep across the entire ocean floor is financially impossible.\n\nIn short, it's relatively easy to discover a species on the surface because we can survive here long enough to encounter them.",
"Another issue I haven't seen mentioned is, we can't just hang out in the middle of the ocean forever like we can live on land for long time. We don't get as much time to look for them sj ce we always have to return to land for resources."
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2z9ymg | do modern day muslims still believe muhammad had a 9 year old bride? how do most muslims respond to it? | I'm just curious about the subject and would like to know as much as possible. I am in no way anti-Muslim. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2z9ymg/eli5_do_modern_day_muslims_still_believe_muhammad/ | {
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"The people who holler about this as a way of convincing you that Muslims are evil child-fuckers conveniently forget (or more likely, didn't know to begin with) that this kind of thing was in no way unusual in the past, and wasn't confined to any religion or ethnicity. Good Christian kings married (and boinked) girls as young as 9-10. None of the Abrahamic religions condemned very young brides in the past.\n\nIn his later voyages, Columbus got into the business of kidnapping Indians to sell as sex toys to the good Jesus-fearing Catholics of Europe. He wrote that 9-12 year-olds were in particularly high demand.\n\nIn Europe and America, as late as the 19th century, having a 12-14 year old bride was entirely unremarkable, and even as late as the 20th century, the age of consent in many US states was as young as 12-13.\n\nIt is always a serious mistake to judge older civilizations by modern morals. It's pretty much 100% guaranteed that stuff YOU do every day will be seen as unspeakably vile and perverted by people at *some* time in the future. So knock it off, ya freaking perv!\n\n\n\n",
"Because it has nothing to do with Islam or Muhammad.... it was pretty common for a 9 10 11 year old girl to get married wayy wayy back then.\n\nAlso people did not live as long as we do now, so consider that also.",
"Interestingly, other sources of the time have her being in her [teens](_URL_0_). Of course, this is a problem for Muslims as then they'd have to admit that the Islamic sources got it wrong."
]
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"http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-david-liepert/islamic-pedophelia_b_814332.html"
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4lcdfw | do most move production companies have back up plans if a main character's actor dies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4lcdfw/eli5_do_most_move_production_companies_have_back/ | {
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"This is something you can easily look back in movie history and see what has been done. Actors don't have to die, they can just *leave*. In the space of a decade we had Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and Geroge Clooney all play Batman. Heck, just recently Batman went from Christian Bale to Ben Affleck. \n\nRobert Downey Jr. has *said* he's going to stop playing Iron Man soon. He will be replaced with a different actor. The internet will go insane for a while and then people will calm down. So it goes. ",
"Productions will usually have an insurance policy on the wellbeing of their actors.\n\nA good example is Paul Walker, who was contracted to complete fast 7 and another 3 films after that. \n\nAfter his death, the insurance company paid out a considerable sum of money, which was used to pay for the CGI and whatnot to allow them to complete the film with stand ins.\n\nAs for the rest of the franchise, they just write themselves out of the corner and move on.",
"It is not something that happens often enough to go to a lot of trouble worrying about.\n\nAlso, audiences are pretty forgiving when an actor dies. If Marvel had a contract dispute with Downey and tried to replace him with Shia LaBeouf, the fans would go apeshit.\n\nBut if he died and they did that, they would go less apeshit.",
"Movie companies usually have to take out insurance policies called \"completion bonds\" that protect the financiers against something drastic like losing a lead actor. That is also (part of) why some actors (RDJ back in the day, Lindsay Lohan, etc) can't get big roles anymore - they are considered so risky the insurance company won't provide a completion bond for the movie."
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k0ild | explain how us military units are numbered. as in the 101st airborne, the 4th army, etc. i'm five. | I have never understood how the numbering of military units works. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/k0ild/explain_how_us_military_units_are_numbered_as_in/ | {
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"[There was a recent ELI5 question on this topic](_URL_0_).",
"[There was a recent ELI5 question on this topic](_URL_0_)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/js20b/eli5_how_military_units_get_their_numbers_like/"
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170b8i | who "owns" the the dvd brand? how about blu-ray? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/170b8i/eli5_who_owns_the_the_dvd_brand_how_about_bluray/ | {
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"text": [
"Dude, google: \n\n > DVD is an optical disc storage format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. \n\nAnd:\n\n > The format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, computer hardware, and motion pictures.\n\n > The \"Blu-ray Disc founder group\" was started on May 20, 2002 by MIT and nine leading electronic companies: Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung."
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d3t49o | why when we are having a stroke it is more noticeable in the left side of our body? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d3t49o/eli5_why_when_we_are_having_a_stroke_it_is_more/ | {
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"I am interpreting your question as asking why right-sided strokes, which affect the left-side of your body, are more noticeable. Whenever you’re showing stroke symptoms on the left side of your body, it means that the stroke occurred in the right hemisphere of the brain. Movement and sensation on each side of your body is controlled by the opposite brain hemisphere, e.g., left side of body is controlled by right side of brain. Usually, strokes that occur in the left side of the brain and affect the right side of the body are more noticeable. This occurs because the left side of the brain is more involved in fine motor skills required to perform actions such as writing and because the left side is also involved in speech."
]
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3lt7rv | how is ryan adams is legally allowed to cover taylor swift's '1989' album in its entirety? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lt7rv/eli5_how_is_ryan_adams_is_legally_allowed_to/ | {
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"There's a compulsory license for covers- the person covering the song has to pay, but the artist can't say no. The Harry Fox Agency handles this type of licensing for most major US songs, so the cover artist would make arrangements with them for payments and they pay the artist.",
"In the US there is what's called a compulsory mechanical license for music that has been published. This allows anyone to get a license to perform a piece of music based on the sheet music and lyrics (but not the actual performance), by paying a standard licensing fee. They can do this even without the artists approval (that's the compulsory party)."
]
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ds00e2 | what is the benefit of having a medical benefit hsa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ds00e2/eli5_what_is_the_benefit_of_having_a_medical/ | {
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"text": [
"You can pay for healthcare with untaxed money. This means you don't have to pay income tax on the money you spend on healthcare.",
"HSA's are actually *triple* tax advantaged if you use them properly.\n\n1. You don't pay federal income tax on money you put into the HSA.\n2. You don't pay federal tax on interest earned on the HSA money.\n3. You don't pay federal income tax on money you withdraw if it's being used for qualified medical expenses.\n\nThese tax advantages along with some other nuances can make HSA's very powerful tools for growing wealth."
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5acjwd | water generally gets colder the deeper it is. why then do only the top of lakes and ponds freeze over? shouldn't it be easier for the cold, deep, calm water to freeze? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5acjwd/eli5_water_generally_gets_colder_the_deeper_it_is/ | {
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"There are two parts to this:\n\n1. Ice floats, so even if ice did form at the bottom, it would immediately float to the top.\n\n2. It is more difficult for water under pressure to freeze. The deeper the water is, the colder it has to be in order to form ice.",
"Your assumption is wrong. Water have the special property that it is denset at 4C. Most liquids will get denser and denser the colder it is. However at 4C water will start to crystallize and at 0C it will fully crystallize thus making it less dense. So where you have water temperatures at above 4C you will find that it gets colder and colder the deeper you go. However if you have cold water it gets hotter the deeper you go. At some point during the spring and autumn the entire lake will be 4C at once. There is also a line in the ocean where the water is 4C though all layers that move north and south depending on the seasons.",
"It gets colder the deeper you go only till it reaches 4 degrees centigrade all deep water is at 4 degrees even if ice forms on top of it. This is due to the unusual way that water changes density with temperature - _URL_0_",
"Water gets denser the colder it gets - until ~4° C. After that, it actually starts expanding again and its density lessens, which means it will start floating back to the top. \n\nWhich is why, when a pond is frozen over, the water on the bottom of the pond is actually warmer than the water on the surface.",
"Water has a relatively High heat capacity. Thus it takes more energy to freeze a whole body of water through, than it does the surface. This property also will tell you that water will equilibrate its cool temperature as you descend. Thus it will be really cold but not freezing. Since the air temperature of a cold winter night may be below freezing (where a lake would maybe freeze), the surface of the lake will not equilibrate fast enough with the rest of the lake, and most of the top of the lake will freeze, but not the bottom due to the heat capacity of water being so high, and this keeping the rest of the lake from solidifying. If a region were extremely cold, the lake would freeze over more and more, causing the surface layer of ice to thicken, until the Ice itself works as an insulator. At this point in order for the lake to fully freeze over, it would require considerable energy (Heat) to be drained from the lake, what I mean here is that it would take an exceptional amount of cold air and surrounding ground layers (which are also insulating) to become well below freezing temperature, in order to freeze the lake.\n\nIt's important to note that while it may feel or seem cold, the lake that is only frozen on top, is only frozen on top because the rest of the lake is insulated from below freezing temperatures by the Ice on top and the ground or bedrock around it.",
"As water freezes, the hydrogen bonds between the water molecules hold them further apart from each other when water is solid than when it is liquid. This gives water its special property of being less dense when it is solid. This is why it floats. The hydrogen bonds also account for the surface tension which allows insects to zip around on a pond surface.",
"Water is most dense at 4C. So the heavy 4C water goes down and the water that is colder goes to the top.\n\nWhen water freezes into ice it is less dense than liquid water so it floats.",
"Around 4 degrees centigrade, the density of water starts to increase to about 1 g/cm^3 (or 1000 kg/m^3). This property of water is called the anomalous expansion of water. Thus, the water starts sinking as it is denser than the water below it until it settles on the river/ocean bed. This process keeps occurring until the whole body of water reaches the temperature of 4 degrees centigrade, at this temperature the top layer starts to freeze as the density of water is highest at 4 degrees centigrade.\n\nIce has a lower density than water, thus it starts to float and also insulates heat. Keeping the water below from loosing heat as fast.This allows some plants and fishes to survive underwater. Also higher pressures cause water to freeze at lower temperatures.\n\n\n_URL_0_",
"I'm no expert, but I took a hydrology course for my undergrad and I do distinctly remember this. Warmer is less dense and rises to the surface. The opposite is true of colder water, but here's where it gets interesting. Water reaches it's peak density at 39 degrees F, after that it becomes less dense as it gets colder. This is why water forms at the surface and not below the surface.\n\nIf I have botched some of the numbers or left out key information, I apologize. I learned this 2 years ago and the fact that I seem to have retained this piece of information is nothing short of astounding.",
"Moving away from physics a little bit my point of view comes from environmental science.\nIn winter ambient temperature tends to vary little from day to night to day, this allows for very little mixing of the water on the lake by wind or waves, compared to spring or autumn for example, and it has \"layers\" of water on a temperature gradient. The earth under the water tends to be at a constant temperature no matter the weather.\nThis way the bottom layers are barely influenced by the atmosphere and even less if theres a cover of ice preventing the mix....\nwater at the bottom at 4 C is correct.",
"Water oddly increases in density when it cools to 4 degrees celsius. The denser water sinks to the bottom, and it's only when all of the water cools to 4 degrees celsius that ice can form on the surface"
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27d9nr | how do people fall for scams like peter popoff's miracle spring water.. | Like for real. Who the hell believes that garbage. He's even been proven a fake via radio transmissions during his performances. Yet he's still rich. I wouldn't mind if this guy just happened to wake up at the wrong end of a train. It just kills me to see people like him play off of people's desperation.
Peter Popoff - Miracle Spring Water: _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27d9nr/eli5_how_do_people_fall_for_scams_like_peter/ | {
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"Misinformation and desperation. It's sad.",
"**People are irrational**\n\nPeople believe what they want to believe; we can fool ourselves really easily. We see what we want to see. We're irrational beings.\n\nAnd, yeah, some people are vulnerable and easily taken advantage of. Naive, ignorant, desperate, good-hearted, trusting, brainwashed, whatever word you want to use. "
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uru1h | how does pi contain all information? | I've seen it mentioned a few times that pi contains all finite information such as every book ever written or the exact details of a person's life. My questions are how does the endless series of numbers found in pi contain all the information in the universe, what exactly does "information" mean, and could it work with any irrational number?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uru1h/eli5_how_does_pi_contain_all_information/ | {
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"As far as we know, pi is an irrational and infinity repeating number. If every number exists within pi, then all information exists within pi.\n\nIts like an infinite amount of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time would produce the entire works of Shakespeare.\n\nIf you still don't understand, search YouTube for \"Karl pilkington Shakespeare monkey\"",
"Like you know, pi is an irrational number, so its decimal representation never repeats. It is *believed* (but not proven) that pi also has a property caled **normality**; this means that every finite sequence of numbers has probability 1 of appearing somewhere in the digits. Since any information can be represented as a finite sequence of numbers, any irrational number which is normal has this property.\n\n",
"Pi, as others have said is an infinitely repeating, and potentially normal number. What this means is that every combination of numbers (say things like \"28591049\" or \"1938\" etc.) can be found in that order, somewhere in the digits of Pi. Information, in this sense, is akin to computer information, which is stored as a finite string of 0s and 1s (binary which can be used to represent numerical strings). All information and software that will ever exist (until the computational paradigm changes from what we know now) will exist in a finite sequence of 0s and 1s. Because all information that we have currently can be defined as a finite sequence of 0s and 1s and, if Pi is normal and infinite (meaning in its length you can find every possible finite combination of 0s and 1s), Pi would contain all information we're able to create.\n\nYes, this does mean that somewhere in Pi is the machine code for Adobe Photoshop. It means that somewhere in Pi is the machine code for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, whatever is coming next. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3s disc image is in there along with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. All database of statistics for the 2015 NFL season is somewhere in there. Granted, for each of these things that you're probably thinking \"That can't be there, we don't know what will be happening in 2015 NFL\" there's an infinite amount of similar things that are completely wrong, nonsensical, and jibberish but, the right answers are still in there somewhere.\n\nLike your 5:\n\nYou have a line of M & Ms that goes on forever. The M & Ms are either red, or blue. You know that your M & M line is a normal line. Your friend Billy asks you to find a smaller line of M & Ms that goes R B B B B B B B B B R. Because his line of M & Ms ends (it is finite), and your M & M line is normal, you can go find a small string of M & Ms that go R B B B B B B B B B R. It exists in your infinite line of M & Ms. Even if your friend gave you a list of Rs and Bs that was 2 trillion lines long. That exact sequence can be found in your normal, infinite line of M & Ms.",
"I'm going to try my best to explain this exactly like your five.\n\n\nSo you know numbers, like 1,2,3,4,5,... ? Well, computers use NUMBERS instead of LETTERS as languages. It's basically their own 'computer language.'\n\nHave you ever opened up Putt Putt goes to the Zoo, or Where's Waldo, the computer games? They're made so that computers can understand them, so they use big, big, big numbers to explain to the computer what to do.\n\n\nNow, lets take a look at pi. A lot of numbers can be expressed as one number divided by another number (like 1/2) or even by decimals (.25), and they don't repeat. Even some numbers can repeat a pattern FOREVER, and can still be expressed as a number over another number (1/3, which can also be expressed as .333333... where ... means the threes go on forever!).\n\n\nBut Pi is strange. pi is what we call irrational, which means that there is no pattern of large numbers that repeats, and it cannot be expressed as one number over another number. I couldn't write out pi completely, because it goes on forever!\n\n\nIf I were to give a machine that randomly spews numbers and letters out -- completely randomly -- how long would you think it would take for the computer to write a letter? a word? a sentence? a phrase? a BOOK? It might take a long time...forever perhaps! -- but given forever as an amount of time, it would happen!\n\n\nNow imagine that the computer is spewing out numbers of pi. How long do you think it would take to spew out a 0? a 1? a 10? a 100? a 10000? It might take forever, but it WOULD happen! What about a big, big, big number? What if this number, or chain of smaller numbers, were to contain the entire game of \"Putt Putt goes to the Zoo?\" Would that happen? Yes! Yes it would! And it would be in a long chain of numbers, so the computer knows how to understand it!\n\n\nBut wait, does that mean that eventually, it would spew out codes for the nuclear launch missile? What about the coordinates of a planet with life thats super close to us (relatively)? Would it spew out THE MEANING OF LIFE? YES! Yes it would! It might take FOREVER, but, it would happen!\n\nAll in a number that's smaller than 4!\n\n\n",
"Also, note that pi is not unique in this aspect, any infinite string of random numbers would also contain all possible numerical combinations and thus all information in the world.\n\nIf you're interested in this idea, Jorge Luis Borges has a very interesting short story about an infinite library that contains all possible books in the world, [The Library of Babel](_URL_0_)",
"There are perfectly good explanations in here and I don't think anything needs to be added to in order to answer your question as posed. I would point out though that it's not like the fact that the decimal expansion of π (maybe, if π is normal) contains all possible information is useful in any way to anyone. Any piece of information you can imagine is like a needle in an infinitely large haystack. Somewhere in the decimal expansion there is (maybe) some sequence of digits that corresponds, under some interpretation that maps sequences of digits to letters, to the paragraph that I am typing right now, as well as duplicates with every possible typo, and every possible way I could have reworded the sentences, and et cetera. Somewhere in the decimal expansion of π (maybe) is every winning lottery number in the history of every lottery, in order, including tomorrow's numbers. Maybe it's right at the start. Maybe it's 10^900 digits in. We have *no way of knowing* where in π these sequences would exist, and calculating enough digits and searching through to find them might take more computing power than there is energy in the universe. And wherever they are , they are flanked on either side by completely meaningless strings of digits. So the fact that all the world's information exists in π is kind of just more of a \"oh, huh. Neato.\" fact rather than anything deep or important. Sometimes people think there's something mystical about π because of this. Maybe there is, but if there is, it's not that."
]
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1loz16 | how are pacs and superpacs legal? what's the difference between what they do and a bribe? | From what I've read, it sounds like individual groups can't give money to a politician, but when they get into a group they can. How does that make sense?
And when you hear about a politician voting this way or that way because they got money from a PAC, how is that different from a bribe? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1loz16/eli5_how_are_pacs_and_superpacs_legal_whats_the/ | {
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"PAC and SuperPAC are completely different.\n\nA PAC is a smaller, more focused group that has quite a few restrictions in what it can and can't do, including donating to a politician's campaign, as well as how much and where they can get money to spend.\n\nA SuperPAC is a larger group, and can NOT give money to a campaign, but can do literally whatever they want with the money otherwise.\n\nIn both cases, they can spend money on support OR opposition to any candidate, or bill or whatever political thing they support/oppose. Some ads, some lobbying... whatever else they want to do.\n\nIn the case of a PAC, there are two kinds, connected and non-connected. The non-connected and the SuperPAC may not have any connections whatsoever to a candidate, whereas as implied, a connected PAC can have a dialog with a candidate, coordinating their efforts.\n\nThey are NOT bribing anyone but a voter, when you get down to it, by trying to convince the voter to vote the way they want the voter to.\n\nAnd there is no reason they should not be able to do this, except people do not like it in many cases. Seems wrong, and yes, there is some wrongness to it IMO. But It is just a part of the political machine, spending money to convince you, the voter, which way to vote.\n\nWhether a voter does that, or goes the other way, is completely dependent on the voter. \n\nSo they may be spending money wisely, or not, but awareness of their campaign to get this or that done (not just the election of some person) is still the overall reason for their existance. They are lobbyists of the PEOPLE. Not the lawmakers.\n\nNow, if it happens the candidate happens to vote their way, and had some money come in from a PAC... well...\n\nLet us not be fooled into thinking interesting accounting doesn't happen with these things... but the Federal Election Commsion is supposed to sniff that out, and does on occasion."
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2fao4w | if a woman is pregnant with twins, does she have to consume twice the amount of food? | Might be thrice actually included the woman herself. So 1x for herself, 1x for baby 1, and 1x for baby 2? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fao4w/eli5_if_a_woman_is_pregnant_with_twins_does_she/ | {
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"One rule of thumb is to add 300 calories a day for each of your babies. So if you're carrying twins, you should add roughly 600 calories to your normal load, which would probably take you to about 2,800 calories a day. If you're carrying triplets, you'd aim for an extra 900 calories a day, pushing your daily total to about 3,100 calories."
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1cc2gq | how nasa could possibly "catch" an asteroid. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cc2gq/eli5_how_nasa_could_possibly_catch_an_asteroid/ | {
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"It's not difficult to alter the course of an asteroid. What you have to do is send up a ship that has some weight about it. You then fly that ship along side the asteroid at a pretty close distance, close enough that the tiny amount of gravity that the ship has is able to pull the asteroid off its original course. If you do this right you can point the asteroid into a new course.\n\nEdit: I accidentally an apostrophe.",
"[This infographic posted to /r/space runs through the details.](_URL_0_)"
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||
1iolus | the difference between .wav, flac and mp3. and what kbs means. | Just curious as to what format is the best listening. Regardless of cost or size
**EDIT:** I meant to type kbps
**EDIT 2:** thanks a heap for all the help guys | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iolus/eli5the_difference_between_wav_flac_and_mp3_and/ | {
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"WAV is uncompressed audio, its the raw data pure and easy, but huge file sizes.\n\nFLAC is a \"lossless codec\", its not raw data, its compressed a litttle to make the file size smaller, but all the data is preserved so it should sound identical to the WAV\n\nMP3 is a very compressed music format, which means the file sizes are very small compared to the others. This comes at a loss in quality, although you can adjust how much quality you are willing to lose by making the file size larger (changing the kpbs), and thus you can get MP3s that sound almost indistinguishable from the two above, while still maintaining rather small file size.\n\nkbps - stands for kilobits per second. That means how much data in (kilobits) the music track has per second of audio. Generally the higher the kbps, the better the quality and the larger the file size.\n\n",
"The bit rate, or kbps, is the amount of data the audio file contains per second. The bit rate of an audio file is calculated as follows:\n\nSample Rate X Bits per Sample X Number of Channels\n\nFor a standard audio CD, it is:\n\n44,100 (Hz) X 16 bit X 2 (stereo), which gives us a bit rate of 1,411,200 bits per second.\n\nDivide that by 8 to get bytes per second (176,400), divide again by 1,024 to get Kilobytes per second (172.265625), divide by 1,024 again to get Megabytes per second (0.1682281494140625). Multiply that by 60 (seconds) and you'll get how many megabytes an audio CD is per minute: 10.09 MB.\n\nEncoding a file to a lossy format (mp3), it's compressed by attempting to toss out data that we can't hear or isn't as important. 128 kbps mp3s used to be considered \"CD quality,\" but it certainly isn't. A good set of headphones and some simple double blind tests, you can hear the difference easy enough. When I encode to mp3, I use 320 kbps (though I prefer OGG vorbis, but iTunes, so whatever...).\n\nEncoding to a lossless format (FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)) is similar to zipping a file. It compresses the audio the best it can without tossing away any data, without any audio quality loss. FLAC files tend to be about 20% smaller than CD audio files (wav)."
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23gans | without structured language, would humans have an inner voice? | ELI5: Without structured language, would humans have an inner voice? As in, the silent voice we use in our heads to count, think critically, solve problems, etc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23gans/eli5_without_structured_language_would_humans/ | {
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"not in the way we do with language, that's why being born deaf can have really bad effects on developing",
"_URL_0_\n\nAccording to very limited studying of people who never learn language during the developmental years tells us that they do not, and think using ideas rather than words. This same principle can be applied to people who are multi-lingual, many of them do not have an internal monologue in one language rather they think in ideas and mentally link the words of various languages that describe the idea for them to choose from. \n\nFor instance, when they think of a tree they do not think of the word \"tree\", they imagine a tree then find the word that is associated with it. People without language would skip the second step. ",
"\"When I learned the meaning of 'I' and 'me' and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me\"\n- Helen Keller\n",
"Well, I'm an artist and when I'm painting or drawing, I'm not thinking in terms of language, but colors, shapes, tone, saturation, and light. I'm able to put those thoughts into language but without language I still think I would have thoughts about color. "
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2znq7l | does milk effectively hydrate you? | I've seen a few different figures for what percent of milk is water (from 50%-98%). Obviously it depends on the type of milk, I usually drink 1% or 2%. I know water is the best choice most of the time, but I love me some milk. Is there anything in milk that keeps my body from absorbing all of the water contained in it? Is that even how hydration works? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2znq7l/eli5_does_milk_effectively_hydrate_you/ | {
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"Yes, yes, no, no.\n\nMilk contains nothing to stop hydration, and though not as effective as plain water it still hydrates very well.\n\nMilk also supplies some nice vitamins n stuff so you got nothing to lose. I love milk and probably go through a gallon every few days.",
"Whole milk has the least water content while skim milk has the most, usually ranging between 85-95%. so if you drink a normal 16oz (~0.5L) glass of milk you are consuming between 13.5 and 15 oz of water. Your body will absorb all of the water from the milk, in theory. There are always random factors which can affect the amount of water absorbed from food. The sugars, proteins and fats in the milk will be broken down and absorbed in the small intestine, while water is mostly absorbed in the large intestine/colon. \n\nYes milk is a good way of hydrating yourself. You will get almost all of the water from it, plus it's a great source of nutrients. If you are watching your caloric intake you wouldn't want to drink milk to hydrate, but if you are highly active milk is great source of hydration."
]
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tu3im | where does the 'cut' material go when you cut something? | Example: Paper. Lets take an 8.5x11" paper and cut it into two 8.5x5.5 pieces. Where does that (microscopic) bit of atoms go? Obviously the atoms don't split as there's no nuclear reaction. Where does it go?
Clarification: Sawed wood becomes sawdust. Where does 'scissordust' go? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tu3im/eli5_where_does_the_cut_material_go_when_you_cut/ | {
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"There is no dust.\n\nA saw blade has width, and as it moves through wood, it cuts a groove. the wood that was in the groove becomes dust.\n\nWith scissors, there is no section cut out, just a clean cut. It's basically tearing the paper, with nothing cut out, just a straight tear.",
"I was going to say on the clipboard."
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