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613ppa | how come it feels much easier to "hit the right high note" when singing loudly than softly? | I've noticed that when singing along with some songs that aren't really in my vocal range, it becomes much easier to hit the notes on the fringe of my range when I put "full power" into the note, but if I try to sing it quietly, I need to go into falsetto to be in tune.
My first question is why this is the case, and my second question is whether or not this is a general thing or if it applies differently to different individuals (i.e. if some people experience the opposite -- that the *higher* notes are easier to hit in tune with a softer voice). | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/613ppa/eli5_how_come_it_feels_much_easier_to_hit_the/ | {
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"The power you get in your voice should actually be pushed out from your stomach. Your lips shouldn't be more then 2-3 fingers apart at any given time. Over time ( because the larynx is a muscle) you will train it to be able to actually project a very loud sound with hardly any effort. For examples of this you need to go and watch opera singers or anyone who is classically trained in voice and singing. You do get louder with more air being forced through.. no doubt but that's not what it should be based on. You have to train it the right way. If you need to scream to get your voice out means you aren't using your stomach to belt it out. You're just doing it by trying to over work your larynx which isn't good since it can lead to nodes and destroy your voice permanently. Good posture is also key in getting your stomach working. "
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p95xy | why people find beer delicious and refreshing. | Honestly I think it's all a conspiracy. I believe every single one of you actually thinks beer tastes disgusting, but since everyone else has a reason to love it, you do too. How do you come up with all these sophistacted adjectives to describe it. I have tried dozens and dozens of different beers. None of them have ever been refreshing or full bodied or "bursting with summer flavors."
Some people tell me "it's an acquired taste." To me, that just means you have to suffer through it until you don't care anymore and I don't really see it as an explanation. But to find delicious and refreshing and decadent flavors in that liquid just doesn't make sense to me.
EDIT: Not trying to say that having a vagina means you don't like beer. I know plenty of females who love it. According to my beer-brewing roommates, however, there's a good chance that that's my problem. xD
TL;DR - What is it about beer that you find so refreshing and yummy? What does it for you?
Maybe it's because I have a vagina. I don't know. Explain this shit.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/p95xy/eli5_why_people_find_beer_delicious_and_refreshing/ | {
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"That's exactly what it means for something to be an acquired taste, actually. When you consume something for long enough, your body's initial disgust reaction goes away, and you're able to pick up on the variations in flavor that your body was hiding behind \"EWWWW GROSS\". This process happens with a lot of things actually; it's called \"acclimation\".",
"It's similar to strong black coffee, protein shakes, liver, and many more bitter or strong tasting foods and liquids, you have to get acclimated to the taste before you can recognize the small subtleties in flavor and texture.",
"My father used to say to me when I was younger that there was nothing more refreshing than an ice cold beer on a hot summers day. I didn't believe him, but now I see the wisdom behind it. It depends really on firstly what drinks you like, I'm not overly fussed on sugary drinks, also if you have the mentality that beer is going to taste awful , you'll never like it.\n\nTry german wheat beers, they are lighter and have a different taste that you may like.",
"In the same boat and I'm a guy; all the wide variety of beer I've been coaxed into trying has ever done is give me a headache, make me feel sick, and make me want to pee.\n\nFine with other alcohols, and some other supposedly acquired tastes, not beer.\n\nIf I want a refreshing drink on a hot day, it'll be a cold glass of water, lemonade or pepsi; beer would do the opposite of refresh me, it makes me feel like shit.",
"I used to be the same way. I recommend that if you haven't had one before, you should try a hefeweizen (German wheat beer). It's the first beer that I, and many other people I know, actually enjoyed. It has very little bitterness and hop flavor, so if those are the flavors you don't like, you may actually enjoy hefeweizen's.\n\nBut yes, a lot of beer styles require some getting used to. If you start with a more approachable style of beer, you may find that you won't suffer through drinking beer too much. I'm sure r/beer would be happy to help you find some more approachable beers or styles to start with if you're interested.",
"Are you really five? Different people have different tastes. ",
"Everyone has a different palate. I love beer, but I don't like cheese. People talk about how much they love cheese, but I just don't get it. Same goes with cilantro, I can't stand the stuff. To each their own. My advice to you would be to find a drink that you do like and enjoy it.",
"You sound so frustrated! Not liking something is OK. You don't like beer, lots of others don't like beer too. ",
"Don't worry I'm exactly the same. And I'm a guy. I can't stand beer. I can stomach the occasional one at social occasions if it's called for, but any more than one and I usually start to feel sick.\n\nMaybe I'm just weird. Maybe it really is just an acquired taste, but I have no compulsion to keep trying. \n\nThing is, I do like coffee, and that's supposedly an acquired taste as well.",
" > *What is it about beer that you find so refreshing and yummy? What does it for you? Maybe it's because I have a vagina. I don't know. Explain this shit.*\n\nI'm male and I want people to explain this shit too.",
"[/r/beer](/r/beer) \n\n[There are so many different styles of beer](_URL_0_) that there is something for virtually everyone. If you don't like \"beer\" there's a good chance you just haven't been introduced to anything up your alley. \n\nNow if you mean you don't like Bud/Miller/Coors well then I completely understand. \n\nPS - I love beer, particularly big, think, black-as-night Imperial stouts. If it's a conspiracy they forgot to tell me.\n\nPSS - I know plenty of people with a vagina who love good beer.",
"Quick story. I grew up Southern Baptist. Not only was beer nasty tasting, you would go to hell if you drank it. IT WAS A SIN!\n\nThen i went to college....\n\nMy roommate was from Wisconsin and she drank beer like i drink sweet tea, so basically with every meal and when thirsty. Naturally, i tried it, and just like you i didn't like it. But i tried it again. And again. And again. It went from something i hated, to something that i disliked, to something i was ok with, and finally something i enjoyed.\n\nOne of the biggest steps was actually trying \"good\" beers. As a broke college kid, you drink shit beer. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE TO LIFE THAN SHIT BEER. I started drinking reds which i liked. Later i picked up a taste for wheats, German and Belgians are very tasty. But everyone's taste is different, my wife wouldn't drink a wheat beer if you paid her; she only drinks IPAs. My best friend only drinks darks. To each his/her own.",
"Think about something that you love to eat, and tell me why you like it?\n\nYou like the things you do because you like them, and I don't think you can really get beyond that ultimately. You like something sweet? Why do you like sweet things? If you take it far enough the answer becomes, \"Because I just do.\"",
"I'm an alcoholic.",
"I used to think pussy tasted terrible too, but now I love it.",
"Why the fuck are you even drinking beer with your vagina? I think if you stopped being such a retard and used your mouth like everyone else you wouldn't have a problem... Jesus...",
"There's a phenomenon called Food Neophobia which is where people approach new foods with caution and distaste. That's why children often say they \"don't like\" things that they haven't even tried yet. Evolutionarily speaking, it's to stop us from eating poison and shit.\n\nAnyway, if you taste a new food/drink (especially one with a strong or unusual flavour) without really wanting to or not \"at your own pace\", then there's a good chance that neophobia will kick in and you won't like it. That's something that can last for a long time. Since beer is such a social thing, it's likely that you (and lots of other people) first drank it under pressure, which is probably why you didn't/don't like it.\n\nIf you drink a new alcoholic drink on your own at your own pace, you'll probably really enjoy it. The first time I tried whisky, I was sniffing it and sipping it and I really enjoyed it, so I like whisky. The first time I tried vodka, however, was as a shot, so I hate it."
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2tp3lr | freud's theory of penis envy. | My friend suggested I check this out and it's really hurting my head. Thank you thank you! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tp3lr/eli5_freuds_theory_of_penis_envy/ | {
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"Almost all of Freud's theories have been disproven.",
"Copy-pasted from Wikipedia:\n\nSoon after the libidinal shift to the penis, the child develops her first sexual impulses towards her mother.\n\nThe girl realizes that she is not physically equipped to have a heterosexual relationship with her mother, since she does not have a penis.\n\nShe desires a penis, and the power that it represents. This is described as penis envy. She sees the solution as obtaining her father's penis.\n\nShe develops a sexual desire for her father.\n\nThe girl blames her mother for her apparent castration (what she sees as punishment by the mother for being attracted to the father) assisting a shift in the focus of her sexual impulses from her mother to her father.\n\nSexual desire for her father leads to the desire to replace and eliminate her mother.\n\nThe girl identifies with her mother so that she might learn to mimic her, and thus replace her.\n\nThe child anticipates that both aforementioned desires will incur punishment (by the principle of lex talionis).\n\nThe girl employs the defence mechanism of displacement to shift the object of her sexual desires from her father to men in general.\n\n\nTL;DR Freud didn't understand women. At all.",
"Freud talked to a number of women with mental illnesses, and learned that many of them described being sexually abused by their fathers. He hypothesized that the sexual abuse was the cause of the mental illness.\n\nBut if that were true, it must mean that truly shocking numbers of respectable Victorian men, people who were successful and respected members of the community, were routinely raping their daughters. And that obviously couldn't be true... right? \n\nSo he revised his ideas, and came up with the idea that girls desire their fathers' penises... and that's why so many of his patients made up such awful stories about their poor innocent fathers.\n\n"
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1yxx7i | is there an objective way to describe "matching" colors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yxx7i/eli5_is_there_an_objective_way_to_describe/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nThe color wheel is the key."
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21ra5q | how can two different cars have the same plates? | I am currently behind 2 cars with the same plate, it is a custom plate, so it isn't random.
A BMW with California plates and a Toyota truck with Nevada plates. I've heard of two exact cars with the same plates.
I have pictures, but on my phone that I can upload if anyone asks.
Sorry for formatting, in on my phone. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21ra5q/eli5_how_can_two_different_cars_have_the_same/ | {
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"Two different states. Still very rare though. You should upload the pics to r/mildlyinteresting. They would like it there.",
"Licence plates are issued by states so each state can issue the same combination of numbers and letters. When the police run a check they run against the originating state's files."
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2sw01k | why are anti-bullying laws necessary in the u.s.? isn't bullying already a form of illegal harassment? | Seems redundant to me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sw01k/eli5_why_are_antibullying_laws_necessary_in_the/ | {
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"It allows them to alter the punishment vs normal harassment. Same way hate-crime legislation works. You are committing a crime, but the added law allows them to convict on extra grounds and punish particularly for the crime",
"Because politicians pass laws that appeal to emotion in order to get votes rather than actually analyze the existing law for necessary changes.\n\nA politician has a hard time running on bills he or she didn't help pass."
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3cox50 | why are austerity measures used to tackle a debt crisis even though it rarely succeeds and often cause more harm? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cox50/eli5_why_are_austerity_measures_used_to_tackle_a/ | {
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"Say I owe you 1,000 and I promised to pay you 100 every month. Now I tell you that if you give me 100 (and another 500 to cover the next 6 months payments) I'll pay you. What do you do?\n\nAusterity is the *result* of bad fiscal management not the *cause*. When you borrow money to spend, you are borrowing future consumption to use in the present. Eventually you have to pay it back, or at the minimum, stop living at the level of the raised consumption.",
"Because the goal of austerity measures is not to solve debt crises, but to put together enough money to pay the lender back quickly. It's not a long term solution, it's a \"where's my money\" type of solution.",
"This is an exponential problem, and people are bad with exponential thinking.\n\nLets say we have Hypotheticatania. There are 10 million people living there, 1 million are unemployed, 1 million are retired and living on pensions. GDP is 10 billion dollars, and we tax 10% of GDP (1 billion dollars a year), and we have a balanced budget. We also have 10 billion dollars of debt that we pay 1% interest on (assuming no inflation).\n\nNow... What happens if we were to suddenly cut spending by 100 million a year (or 10% of the government budget?) Well instead of spending 900 million (we are paying 1% to service our debts remember) on government services we would be spending 800 million. That would reduce GDP to 99.9 Billion (or 1%). It would also let us pay back 1% of out outstanding debts and reduce next years interest payment by 1 million dollars.\n\nNow eventually the people who lost their jobs under this plan would start new businesses, or get work somewhere else (especially if at the same time as the budget cut we repealed some legislation that was slowing business growth down). Things would initially be worse but over a few years get better, and we would have less debt.\n\nFor a government to do this however is almost crazy. Why would a government want to incur the pain and displeasure of cutting its budget. Everything is going fine everyone says. Why did we need to hurt the economy, lay off workers, etc. when there are already a lot of people out of work?\n\nWhat if we kept the budget the same and reformed some laws? Maybe let Uber compete with the local taxi services? Now economics will tell you that as goods become more efficient the price drops, and consumption goes up. Eventually we would probably see some benefits for all of society at having cheaper cabs (more people would use cabs, there would be fewer cars on the road, less drunk driving, etc.) But we would also be taking money out of current cab drivers pockets. They are doing very well under the status quo and the benefits we imagine are still into the future and don't specifically help anyone. The cabbies would hold protests, strike, vote against the government. It isn't good politics.\n\nSo... what about option 3... The government borrows 100 million dollars and uses it to hire 100,000 workers. Well this is a big win-win for the government. They get an extra 100K workers to do social work. 100K people are off the unemployment roll (a 1% decrease), out debt payments only go up a million dollars a year (very minor), and we have increased GDP by 1%. You can see why this is so politically attractive!\n\nBut... in year two what happens? Well you have to borrow another 100 million OR fire those workers and lose the GDP boost, and increase your unemployment. Also you have taken workers out of the real economy and put them in government service. Who knows how many of these people would have started their own business, or invented a better shoe string or some such.\n\nAfter 10 years you have increased your debt to GDP to 110%, and really got nothing to show for it but a ten year artificial bump in your numbers.\n\nAt some point lenders will start to doubt your ability to pay back the loans and your interest rate will rise. If at 110% of GDP you have to pay 3% to borrow money suddenly you are paying 330 million just to service your loan. That is over a third of your government budget just in debt! Our budget is down to just 630 million. This means cuts far worse than we imagined before.\n\nSo now we are forced to open up the economy to the ubers of the world, cut government spending, and perhaps even raise taxes. All of these will have short term pain but we know we can't go on the way we have.\n\nThe tipping point in this isn't at the end, when we are screwed no matter what, it is at the begining when absolutely everything was fine and the government implimented a seemingly affordable yet imprudent spending plan."
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1cmekj | how did the romans successfully cut and paste the greek gods into their own society? | It seems like a rather tricky thing to pull off. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1cmekj/eli5_how_did_the_romans_successfully_cut_and/ | {
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"Romans seem to have had an idea that everyone's gods were just different versions of the same thing. When they found some tribe's war god, they would often say that tribe just had some weird ideas about their own war god Mars. So it's likely they just did the same thing with Greek gods; the Greeks just told good stories, so the Romans used them.",
"Many people in the ancient world had very different ideas about religion than the ones we are accustomed to today. The ancient Romans were *anamists*. This means that they believed everything had an associated spirit. When we read myths today about nymphs or dryads, we tend to think about magical creatures in the wilderness. To a Roman, they might have seemed more like the spiritual nature of a place. Later, they were also taken to be human-like images meant to represent things in nature. \n\nIt's pretty easy to imagine that in this type of an environment, it would be easy to wind up with a **lot** of gods. In Roman households, there were very important household gods or spirits called the *numenes*. Each house would have its own hearth god, doorpost god, etc. You could imagine even a small village having hundreds of these. \n\nOn top of these household and local spirits were the Olympians, the primary gods recognized by everyone. Many of these gods were in roles that were common to societies around the world: a sky god, an ocean god, a god of crops, a god of death, etc. As the Roman world expanded and came into contact with Greek colonies in southern Italy and around the eastern Mediterranean, Romans became more aware of these Greek gods.\n\nWhen Rome gained political and military dominance over the Greeks, elements of Greek society became fashionable. Romans at the time may have had a bit of what today we would think of as an inferiority complex. The Greeks were considered to be cultured and scholarly where the Romans were ascendant politically but still a bit rough around the edges. It's not too surprising that the Greek Pantheon was absorbed into Roman religion (with the principal gods given new Roman names). \n\nSurprisingly, this sort of thing is more common than you might think. Early Christianity borrowed heavily from other religions of the time. Much of the Jesus myth (born from a virgin on Dec 25, came back to life after three days, celebrated with a ceremonial meal of bread and wine, fish symbol, etc) came from the cult of Mithras. Easter comes from pre-Christian fertility festivals and Christmas comes from Winter Solstice celebrations. Just like the Romans, Christians have changed the names of the god(s) and associated festivals. \n\nSometimes the cultural association becomes so strong that people lose track of the initial connotation entirely. Very few English speakers today realize that four of our days of the week are named to honor Viking and Anglo-Saxon gods (who are themselves re-named between societies): Tiu/Tyr, Woden/Odin, Thor, and Freya."
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2a6sq4 | the gaza strip | I don't understand its history, I don't know so many Palestinians concentrated there, and I really don't know what's going on now. I would like to. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a6sq4/eli5_the_gaza_strip/ | {
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"The conflict over there is basically the Palestinians reacting to being forcibly displaced by Israel. Go look up UN resolution 181, which was the last legal addition of Israeli territory in Palestine. Now look up current day Israel / Palestine. You will see that Israel has vastly (and illegally) expanded its territories into Palestine, while forcibly displacing its residents.\n\nGaza is one of the last places in Palestine to not be taken over by Israel, thus having a large Palestinian population, who mostly hate the Israelis (Israel has been cited by the UN as consistently violating basic human rights of and committing war crimes against Palestinians). Also, they have had to resort to extremist (terrorist) groups because of the consistent lack of action taken by the UN. Its basically a recipe for non stop escalating violence. It will get much worse before it starts to get better."
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502ur7 | how do factories make booster packs contain random cards? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/502ur7/eli5_how_do_factories_make_booster_packs_contain/ | {
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"They're not actually random. A lot of cards is stacked in a particular ordered distribution before being packaged. The appearance of randomness is an illusion created by the tiny sample. That's why you'll a) never get a pack full of the same super-common card, and b) always get one somewhat-rare card and never a pack full of 'em.",
"You're right that card games like Magic the Gathering are printed on [card sheets](_URL_0_). Each sheet contains the same number and pattern of cards. However, booster packs aren't truly random. If you open enough boosters from the same set you'll start to notice patterns, like certain cards always appearing in order. Even weirder, sometimes boxes of booster packs have patterns, so a certain rare card will appear in the same location in any given box, e.g. the left side of the box, two packs down, will always contain a certain Planeswalker card.",
"~~One idea I've seen is that while cards can definitely be made by the sheet, I don't always think there is an entire deck printed per sheet. The reason is that the company isn't going to print the same amount of cards equally as that would then negate the definition of how rare a card may be. So sheets of commons can be printed together and then sheets of less common and rare items are printed separately but at a ratio so that matches how many you want to have in circulation.~~\n\n~~So in that case - lets just say that out of 100,000 cards printed, 75,000 of them are commons, 20,000 are less common and 5000 are rare. Then to build a package of cards, they have 2 piles to pick from: commons and then a shuffled combination of the less common and rare cards. To build a pack of 10 cards, it grabs 8 commons and then 2 of the less common/rare pile. Sure its possible (but unlikely) that someone gets 2 rares, but alas luck of the draw depending on how advanced that shuffler is. But ultimately its just 2 piles of cards (or more) depending on your math behind card rarity and stuff like that.~~\n\n~~Do I work for doing this? No but I did find some things here and there for card manufacturers who talk about ways in which they can do this.~~\n\nEdit: Found a video that shows the \"randomization\" of how stacks of cards can be used and not always does each \"stack\" put its card into the pile: _URL_1_ - YouTube has a few of these types of things. Search for \"Trading card manufacturing\" and you'll be surprised what else you find. Here's another: _URL_0_",
"I used to own my own comic and card shop, and one of the things I used to do that would piss off all of the pack hunters was open a brand new box, take all the packs out, and Dr them into a plastic bag, give the bag a really good shake, then put the packs back into the box. I quickly got rid of all the hunters that way, and leveled the playing field for the more casual buyers who actually spent good money with me.",
"Ooh! One I actually know a lot about!!\n\nThe cards in 99.9% of the boosters aren't actually random. They're \"Sorted\". While it *is* possible to pay the printer to hand shuffle the cards, it's CRAZY expensive and no one does it.\n\nCards are printed on a card sheet (most ccg players have seen those), then they're cut and stacked. In that stack, they're in the exact order the cards appear on the sheet. Those stacks are put into hoppers that can drop 1-4 cards into a booster pack as it goes by on the conveyor belt. \n\nNow, the way that the booster packs can be made to APPEAR random, is to use more hoppers and set up different drop patterns into the boosters. \n\nFor example, If you are using 3 hoppers for commons, 1 hopper for uncommons and 1 hopper for rares (the absolute minimum), then you're going to see the patterns across booster packs really easily - if a booster pack contains Rare #27 and Uncommons #13-15, then the next pack is going to contain Rare #28 and Uncommons #16-18.\n\nBut for a little bit of extra money, you can have the printer use additional hoppers, and do some nifty drop patterns that create the illusion of randomness. \n\nFor example, instead of using 1 rare hopper, use 4. Then it becomes much harder to predict patterns of rares from one pack to another (it's only consistent every 4th pack, and there's highly unlikely players will notice that). If you use 4 uncommon hoppers instead of 1, then you can be dropping uncommons into the packs in lots of crazy combinations: AAD, ACD, BBD, BCC... Notice that each hopper was used 3 times, but there's almost no way for players to see any types of patterns in the pack.\n\nSource: I designed and developed 10 CCGs and 100+ expansion sets over 12 years."
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687rcb | why have usually us semi trucks "nose" compared to european flat cabin semis? | It doesn't make sense to me especially considering fuel efficiency, since gas in US is cheaper and those with nose should be more aerodynamic. Or the ones with nose are more dangerous for other cars and US doesn't have so strict safety requirements? Or US has lower requirements on length of truck so they can waste space on nose? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/687rcb/eli5_why_have_usually_us_semi_trucks_nose/ | {
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"European roads were often designed for horse and wagon, not industrial vehicles. That means they are small and hard to maneuver in. As such they have to greatly limit the size of vehicles so they can maneuver. The US does not have this limitation often as we designed most of our cities after the invention of the automobile and our road tend to be wider. Safety requirements are as strict here, but our roads allow for longer vehicles to operate safely. \n\nIn fact it is not uncommon for trucks to carry multiple trailers connected into something that looks somewhat like a train here in the US. ",
" > Or US has lower requirements on length of truck so they can waste space on nose?\n\nThis, most of all. In Europe, the total length of a truck is limited to 18.75 meters, while in the USA, length limits apply only to the trailer, not the tractor unit.\n\nAerodynamics aren't really a factor, the physics are complex and \"blunt\" shapes can actually be quite aerodynamic.\n\n"
]
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[],
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|
c1c8y2 | why do lots of mobile video game advertisers just show random fragments of out of context gameplay, without showing us the name of the game or even trying to make an ad that is nice to watch? does that strategy even work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c1c8y2/eli5_why_do_lots_of_mobile_video_game_advertisers/ | {
"a_id": [
"erc811k",
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"text": [
"ads are designed to capture as much attention in as short a time as possible. and these ads you're talking about do exactly that. after some time you might realize the ad doesn't represent the thing very well, but there're tons of people who haven't seen the ad yet. and the more exposure you're given the more likely hood of you doing it. so even bad ads can be effective.",
"To get you there. It's why false advertising is banned. People are more likely to buy (in this situation download for free) an item if they have already taken the effort to get to the store (in this case browsed to the app store). Sure most users will not download it once they realize what the game is, but most users wouldn't have downloaded it anyways.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False\\_advertising#Bait-and-switch",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Bait-and-switch"
]
] |
||
19ldgu | why a picture that i take with my smart phone or even a decent point-and-shoot camera looks nothing like what i see with my naked eye. | Generally, I don't get nearly as much content in the photo as I'm trying to capture, which I understand is a limitation of the lenses. But why do the pictures always seem to come out so much darker than it actually is? I can see just fine, why can't the camera? And why is it so hard to capture accurate colors? I've tried to take pictures of various colors in clouds and other sources to use as a reference for other projects later, but the colors seem to come out extremely muted and much less subtle and varied than what I can see with my eye. What's going on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19ldgu/eli5_why_a_picture_that_i_take_with_my_smart/ | {
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"text": [
"Regarding the light issues:\nYour eye has a much larger dynamic range than a camera sensor, meaning it can differentiate a much larger range of brightness. Think of it when you walk into a dark room, you can't see anything, the eyes' dynamic range cannot differentiate objects with so little light. Same goes for when you walk out to sunny outdoors. The difference is that our eyes can adapt, shifting to the range of what we see. Cameras do that too, but to a more limited extent, with a smaller range, so when something bright and dark is in the same scene, it makes a decision on what it wants to differentiate. 'Better' cameras have a wider range. \n\nIf you were 10:\nWe actually use similar mechanisms to do so- the iris of the human eye functions as an aperture, opening wider under dark conditions, and smaller when there is a lot of light. This relates to the 'f-stop' on a camera. ",
"Also, cameras require a lot more light than your eyes do. For example here are three shots using [no flash](_URL_2_), the [built in flash](_URL_3_), and a [hot shoe flash](_URL_0_) bounced off the ceiling. \n\n[example](_URL_1_)",
"Also don't underestimate your brain. Our vision is actually kinda so so, you only see color in the center of your vision, your light sensitivity is much strong around the edges. We take a glance around and get a good look at the details and your brain holds the details while you focus on a small bit at a time. We experience scenes in a way that a camera just can't really pull off at least not yet.\n\n ",
"Going to guess that your eyes simply process contrast greater than a digital camera can. If I took a photo with my DSLR, the colors look kind of muted (unless I add some preprocessing, but I don't do that). Whereas, taking the photos and putting them through Photoshop and increasing the contrast will cause the colors to \"pop\" and be more in line with what I might be seeing."
]
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[],
[
"http://www.jay-pix.de/images/nikon_d40x_sb600.png",
"http://i.imgur.com/IZC9NOw.jpg",
"http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40/images/D3S_2078-600.jpg",
"http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40/images/d40-flash.jpg"
],
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8uw36z | what are the philosophies of the different scotus justices? | How does Kagan reach her conclusions compared to Gorsuch, for instance? Why was Scalia such a big deal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8uw36z/eli5_what_are_the_philosophies_of_the_different/ | {
"a_id": [
"e1iogoj",
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"text": [
"I'm a lawyer. \n\nThe thing about SCOTUS decisions is that there are necessarily lots of value judgments that impact the result. If two judges have different values, they'll reach different results, even if they're both trying to follow the law. Lots of legal standards depend on whether this thing \"outweighs\" this other thing, or whether this reason is \"compelling\" or not. Also, sometimes the law isn't very clear about certain points, or it contradicts itself, and so the justices have to use their own reasoning and judgment to fill in the blanks or settle the conflict between two things. Different justices will reason different ways.\n\nKagan, Sotomayor, RBG, and Breyer are the \"liberal\" justices. They tend to find that business, religious, or state/local interests are less important, and the interests of individual people, minorities, and the federal government are more important. Vice versa for the \"conservative\" justices, Alito, Thomas, Roberts, and Gorsuch. (Kennedy is traditionally considered a conservative, but he crosses over to vote with the liberal justices often enough that he's kind of a \"swing\" vote, like Sandra Day O'Connor used to be. Also, he's retiring effective July 31, so I don't include him in that list). These are, of course, very broad strokes. When it comes to criminal law, the liberal justices tend to prioritize what we call \"procedural fairness\" and due process, whereas the conservative justices tend to prioritize judicial economy (efficient running of the court system) and procedural accuracy. The liberal justices also tend to more heavily prioritize the needs of society as a whole, whereas the conservative justices heavily prioritize individual freedoms. Again, broad strokes. So when they're determining f what outweighs what, they'll have different opinions. Since some will find a thing does outweigh another thing, they'll vote one way, and the ones who don't think it does will.vote the other way.\n\nSo let's take a silly example, something super simple. The legal standard for whether a state or federal government can make a law that restricts speech is that the law 1) has to serve a compelling governmental interest, and 2) has to be narrowly tailored so that it restricts only the speech that there is a compelling governmental interest in restricting. Typical examples of speech that has been legally restricted that met these conditions include fraud, blackmail, terroristic threats, counterfeiting, incitement to riot, false advertising, slander, practicing law/medicine without a license, and criminal impersonation. So say the federal government passes a law that says cigarette companies can't advertise in public in any way, and Phillip Morris sues to have it stricken. The first question is whether the government has a compelling interest in preventing cigarette companies from advertising. You'd have to weigh the harm done by smoking, the likelihood that someone will start smoking or continue to smoke because of the ads, and whatever else against the undesirability of limiting speech, the economic harms to the companies, stores, and advertising media, and decide whether that's such a compelling reason that the government should be able to do it. The liberal justices would probably find that yes, that's a compelling reason. The conservative justices would probably find that the government doesn't have enough reason to limit the advertising so as to justify the limitation of speech.\n\nDoes this make sense?\n\nEdit to answer your other question about Scalia, he was the most consistently right-wing, and the furthest right-wing, of the justices. A lot of his opinions were extreme. Lawyers make a big deal out of him because even when he was just wildly wrong, and dissenting to an 8-1 decision, his opinions were very long, he had a very complex writing style, and he would say a bunch of things that you wouldn't expect to hear. Politically, it was a big deal when he died, because it was a 5-4 court in favor of the conservatives, but Obama was president, so it was expected that he'd appoint a liberal justice, to make it 5-4 the other way for the first time in about 50 years, but you remember what happened. McConnell stole the seat, and Trump gave it to Gorsuch.\n\nEdit again for typo",
"This is a rather advanced topic for ELI5.\n\nNo one can definitively say how any judge or justice reaches conclusions. Like everyone, they are influenced by countless internal and external factors, some of which they may not even be aware of.\n\nThat said, there are some generalities that can be drawn.\n\nThe \"liberal\" wing of the Court -- Kagan, Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor -- tends to reach conclusions based on broad principles and practicality. They try to take a holistic view of the law and keep things faithful to the spirit of the Constitution or the law in question.\n\nThe \"conservative\" wing, at least today, is dominated by strict constructionists Thomas, Alito, and especially Gorsuch. Scalia was the foremost proponent of this mode of interpretation, and he cemented its use on the Court for decades to come. They strongly feel that laws and the Constitution mean only and exactly what the people who wrote them intended them to mean. They strongly reject the idea that a law can or should be re-interpreted in light of future developments or unforeseen circumstances; that's what the amendment process (for the Constitution) or the legislative process (for laws) is for.\n\nKennedy and Roberts are firm conservatives, but they are not strict constructionists. For example, Kennedy found that the 15th Amendment's \"equal protection\" clause prohibited states from outlawing sodomy, even though there's no way the people wrote the Amendment had gay people in mind when they wrote it.\n\nOf course, none of this is inviolable. Like any human, the justices have biases that can cloud their judgement. That's probably why *Bush v Gore* split the way it did."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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] |
|
1ila2a | where does hot air go? | Everybody knows hot air rises but the higher you go in the atmosphere the colder it gets, many of the tallest mountains are covered in snow, so where does the hot air that rose go? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ila2a/eli5_where_does_hot_air_go/ | {
"a_id": [
"cb5jzqn"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Air is heated by the surface of the earth (which is heated by the sun), thus as hot air rises away from the surface of the earth, it cools down. The rate at which this parcel (think bubble) of air cools is called the \"lapse rate\". Generally air cools at around 4.5 degrees F (2 deg C) per 1000 feet of altitude, that is called the standard lapse rate, up to the tropopause that is, around 30-50 thousand feet depending on the position on the earth."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2fzzrt | what is credit card laundering? | I think it's also called credit card factoring sometimes. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fzzrt/eli5_what_is_credit_card_laundering/ | {
"a_id": [
"ckeb8q7"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Credit card laundering, sometimes referred to as \"factoring,\" works like this: A company that does not have a credit card merchant account with a bank or credit card company recruits another company (that does have a merchant account) to process credit card transactions through its account. When the processing merchant receives payment for the credit card charges, it turns the money over to the company that doesn't have an account, but it keeps a previously agreed-upon percentage or other fee.\n\nThe reasons why some companies need other companies to process their credit card transactions are most often not the \"hard luck\" stories that the company representatives might tell you. In many cases, these companies need other merchants to process their credit card transactions because investigations and credit checks by banks and/or credit card companies revealed that these companies are bad risks and may end up having excessive charge-backs.\n\nSource: _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.inc.com/articles/2000/07/19681.html"
]
] |
|
8gbfwd | if 1,000,000 calories were compacted into a bite sized piece of food, would eating it make you instantly become huge? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gbfwd/eli5_if_1000000_calories_were_compacted_into_a/ | {
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"text": [
"Your body is limited at the rate at which it can absorb calories. This rate depends on your current activity, which affects metabolism, along with age, sex, etc. You wouldn't instantly become fat because it's not possible to absorb all the calories at once. ",
"The only things that energy dense are radioactive. Uranium is actually a bit over that, at 18 million kcal/gram\n\nEating 1/18 of a gram of uranium would probably increase the likelihood of you getting cancer by a huge amount, but your body needs something to build tissue out of; since uranium doesn't really have any macro-nutrients, it's not going to do a whole lot in terms of bulking you.",
"Assuming it was technically feasible to compress fat to a pill size, you'd die as said pill would weigh over 250 lbs (using canola oil at .93 kg per liter x approximate 125 liters).",
"Disregarding the \"is it possible to make this bite-sized piece of food\" arguments and just assuming that it would be possible...\n\nNo, you would not instantly become huge. It would travel through our digestive system at the same rate as other small morsels, and we'd end up shooting it out as waste before we get anywhere near absorbing all of the calories. It only takes 12-24 hours for most things to go through us, and we just aren't that good at absorbing nutrients that way (which is why our intestines are so long)."
]
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[],
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[],
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||
76ezr3 | the media/internet situation in china. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/76ezr3/eli5_the_mediainternet_situation_in_china/ | {
"a_id": [
"dodg147"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"You remember in Elementary school where sites were blocked? That. But also if you talked shit about your school it would likely come down on you like Jesus' 13th coming.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
2w28jz | how come i'm perfectly healthy even though i drink only 1 glass of water per week(ish), and the healthy amount is 8-12 glasses per day? | ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w28jz/eli5_how_come_im_perfectly_healthy_even_though_i/ | {
"a_id": [
"comxv9x",
"comxvh8",
"comxvu7"
],
"score": [
3,
6,
3
],
"text": [
"Soda, beer, wine, juice, fruit; All contain water. Although its not smart to forgo drinking water, it is possible to get the required amount from other sources. ",
"Water or liquid? Milk, juice, soda, coffee all have water, so you might be getting your liquid needs that way. \n\nIf you only drank 1 glass of liquid every week, you would have died of dehydration long ago. Also look at the color of your urine, it should be almost clear or light yellow, dark yellow usually indicates dehydration.",
"What? 8-12? That's a ludicrous amount of water to be ingesting, especially when combined with the fact that people get a good chunk of their necessary water through the foods they eat (likes fruits and vegetables). I imagine you drink things other than water, so you probably get your necessary intakes of fluids per day through that. "
]
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[],
[],
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|
1rohyr | does "survival of the fittest" no longer apply to human evolution because we have the technology to keep people alive and manage all sorts of ailments? | Genuinely curious to hear others' thoughts. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rohyr/eli5_does_survival_of_the_fittest_no_longer_apply/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdpa3kt",
"cdpafnm",
"cdpce5p"
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"score": [
4,
15,
2
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"text": [
"It will always apply in the generic sense, but the words aren't directly as accurate. It will just take on a more abstract term. Survival of the fittest was used to describe fit specimens survived to pass on their genes. In today's world for human's it isn't so much that fit individuals survive, versus non-fit don't survive, rather those who are best at passing on their genes due to whatever the current constraints are will do better. This will always be the case by definition. Thus it's not of any real practical importance. \n\nTo make it more simple, the literal words 'survival of the fittest\" don't strongly apply to humans, but the concept they were trying to convey still applies and always will.",
"Anything that makes you produce more children means you were more fit. \n\nIf this means better access to medical care then that will make you the \"fittest\". If being too stupid to work out how to practice safe sex means you have more children then that means you're the \"fittest\". \n\nBy the way, most biologists hate the term, \"Survival of the fittest\" because it leads to the sort of confusion you're having. Survival of the fittest never meant the strongest, the fastest, the more intelligent, etc. ",
"\"Fittest\" doesn't mean fit in the modern sense like when you go to the gym. It means \"most suitable\" as in the NYT slogan \"all the news that's fit to print\". \n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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|
48p409 | if we understand corruption in government to be so pervasive, then why does it seem as though no one is truly investigating the matter? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48p409/eli5_if_we_understand_corruption_in_government_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"d0le5yu"
],
"score": [
18
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"text": [
"On the whole, government corruption is not a big problem in the United States. There are countries that are less corrupt, but we score quite well in the global rankings. When people talk about corruption in America, they're usually not talking about nepotism or exchanging money for the use official power, but about campaign contributions and private lobbying expenditures. These are the subject of fair policy debates, and they do affect the public perception of government negatively, but they're not *actually* corruption.\n\nThat said, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates corruption constantly and high-profile figures do get indicted from time to time, when there is actual evidence of illegal acts. Think of Rep. Chaka Fattah, for example."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
93t5d8 | why are some slow-motion videos low pitched and some normal pitched ones that are simply slower? what is the difference between their creation processes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/93t5d8/eli5_why_are_some_slowmotion_videos_low_pitched/ | {
"a_id": [
"e3frizj",
"e3fspvj"
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"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"The ones that are low pitched basically ‘stetch’ the audio file to fit the slowdown, whilst the normal pitched ones basically duplicate the tiny bits of audio to fit the slowdown",
"Most people doing slow mo camera work do not record audio. The audio you are hearing is added after to create more visceral sensations along with what you are watching. If you recorded audio and slowed it down the thousands of times the corresponding video does it would be in audible or just a maybe muddled mess. \n\n[Smarter everyday made this video about how an audio engineer designed sound effects to go along with his video](_URL_0_) "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"https://youtube.com/watch?v=aO7yzmc3ykw"
]
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||
dcat7o | what physically happens if you downshift into a lower gear at a high speed in a car? | I’m trying to picture it in my head. Is the clutch moving too fast for the engine? Or is the engine moving too fast for the clutch? Since the clutch and engine rotate at the same speed it baffles me.
Same thing when you rev the engine really high at a low speed and you upshift , the RPM drops pretty hard, why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dcat7o/eli5_what_physically_happens_if_you_downshift/ | {
"a_id": [
"f26xrqy"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Think of it with a 10 speed bike.\n\nIf you are already at a high speed, and you switch to a higher gear (the kind of gear you'd use to climb a hill) your feet a pedaling like a maniac, but the wheels are already moving way faster than that gear is calibrated to move, and without any resistance in the pedals you throw out your knee.\n\nKind of the same thing with a car, if the vehicle is already at a higher speed, and you shift to a lower gear, in order for the vehicle to be at equilibrium, the engine RPM has to drastically increase to match. Shift TOO low a gear and the RPM goes too high (redlines) and you can blow something."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
5kn52m | how do self-driving cars interact with construction crews / emergency vehicles? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kn52m/eli5_how_do_selfdriving_cars_interact_with/ | {
"a_id": [
"dbp4tsm"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"hopefully minimally. The vehicles are designed to recognize obstacles and the roadway itself through a variety of means, such as cameras, radar, lidar, and the like. So it would, you'd hope, recognize these obstacles the same as you'd hope it would recognize a swerving car or debris in the road, and stop, or otherwise 'not run over the guy.'"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
5bjqvi | considering the 8 characteristics of living things, can a single human cell be considered living? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5bjqvi/eli5_considering_the_8_characteristics_of_living/ | {
"a_id": [
"d9p1301",
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"score": [
10,
4
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"text": [
"You are going to have to list the 8. There is some disagreement on what is needed.\n\nSingle human cells display all characteristics...but sometimes in subtle ways. Like, movement: Intracellular cytoplasmic flow counts. Energy consumption, reproduction, creating waste, cell membrane...they have these things.",
" > Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion and Nutrition.\n\n1. Some cells can move, e.g cilia cells\n\n2. Respiration is confirmed\n\n3. Light receptor cells in the eye\n\n4. Stem cells can 'grow' into other cells\n\n5. Proliferation of cells\n\n6. Excretion by removing toxic substances\n\n7. Nutrition by utilising glucose/amino acids to build molecules required \n\nWhat is 8?"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
3ddysn | why is it possible for plastic stuff to be clear but cloth and other fabrics cannot be transparent unless they are thin or meshed? | For instance, I would really want a transparent cloth backpack that could actually hold weight. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ddysn/eli5_why_is_it_possible_for_plastic_stuff_to_be/ | {
"a_id": [
"ct471me"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"Plastic sheets are a continuous solid, and thus don't distort light too much as it passes through. Fabrics made of fibers, even if the fibers are made of a naturally transparent material, will distort light a lot more, as each fiber distorts light in a different direction and nearly as much as the whole sheet of a solid plastic."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
tm9id | why reddit "fuzzes" the ratio of up/downvotes | You know, like when some post has a large number of upvotes and it has a bunch of downvotes that don't(?) actually count applied to it, in order to obfuscate the exact ratio of upvotes/downvotes given to said post.
I've heard that it's some sort of an anti-advertising thing but have never understood why such an anti-advertising thing is necessary.
Anyone care to break it down barney-style for me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tm9id/eli5_why_reddit_fuzzes_the_ratio_of_updownvotes/ | {
"a_id": [
"c4nuqm7",
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"score": [
35,
2,
2
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"text": [
"Not merely anti-advertising, but anti-spam. Reddit is constantly inundated with spam links being submitted by bots - that is, automated programs. Plus bots exist to go in an upvote those links.\n\nThese bots can be detected and banned. However, if they were simply blocked outright, the creators of those bots would know that they don't work and just write a new one that does. By fuzzing the vote counts, it takes away that piece of information - if you don't know whether your bot's spam vote really counts, you don't know when it needs to be replaced (or really even if it ever worked in the first place).\n\n > [I] have never understood why such an anti-advertising thing is necessary.\n\n It's necessary for the same reason the spam filter in your email is necessary. This isn't the only anti-spam measure on reddit, obviously, but without them the front page would be nothing but ads for penis enlargement pills and get-rich-quick scams.",
" > barney-style\n\n[here ya go](_URL_0_) :)",
"[Spam reasons](_URL_0_).\n\nScroll down that thread, he answers a few other related questions."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://youtu.be/Io3qJtm19Nc"
],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/eaqnf/pardon_me_but_5000_downvotes_wtf_is_worldnews_for/c16omup"
]
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|
2jn7pn | why are almost all mac and cheese boxes blue? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jn7pn/eli5_why_are_almost_all_mac_and_cheese_boxes_blue/ | {
"a_id": [
"cld8me6"
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"score": [
11
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"text": [
"Because the mac-and-cheese inside is orange, and blue and orange are on opposite sides of the color wheel so the orange mac-and-cheese stands out better on the blue packaging than it would on, for example, a red package. \n\nAlthough I would hardly say \"almost all\". Kraft and all the Kraft knockoffs are blue, but Stouffers is red to match the packaging on their other products. A quick search of Amazon Fresh shows a ton of different colors."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
63dtl0 | what's so great about the mona lisa? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63dtl0/eli5_whats_so_great_about_the_mona_lisa/ | {
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"dfteqto",
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"It was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and all of the news coverage made it more enticing. Also, Nat King Cole.",
"It's famous because Leonardo da Vinci is famous. The painting itself is stylistically similar to a lot of late 15th/early 16th century portraits so it's not really an artistic breakthrough, but it is representative of a popular style.\n\nIt didn't really become world famous until 1911 when it was the target of a successful heist and vanished for two years.",
"Its certainly a great painting, but it wasn't very well known until it was stolen from its museum and disappeared. The media (newspapers at the time, ~1910 or sth) hype following this incident made it as known as it is today. \nAlso the many \"conspiracies\" and mysteries (about her smile etc.) might have contributed to that.",
"Few Reasons - Taken from previous [thread](_URL_0_)\n\n \n- Leonardo Da Vinci painted it. He is the foremost Renaissance artist. Artist's credibility adds to the paintings popularity.\n \n- Napoleon Bonaparte hung the painting in his master bedroom in 1800. This - I think - was the first tipping point of making the painting one of the most popular paintings in the world.\n \n- 1804, Mona Lisa is hung in the Louvre - and others can now glimpse at the painting that Napoleon slept with.\n \n- But the real tipping point for the paintings popularity only hit in August of 1911 - when Mona Lisa is stolen. Stolen from heavily secured Louvre which experts said was impossible. No one knows who stole it or how. Conspiracy theories abound. The painting is talked about in every newspaper.\n \n- After 2 weeks of much fan fare, Police arrest Guillaume Apollinaire on suspicion of theft. He is the only person they have arrested. Apollinaire implicates Pablo Picasso. The rumor of Picasso stealing the Mona Lisa adds in a lot more fuel in making Mona Lisa very very popular.\n \n- Picasso is questioned and released. Guillaume Apollinaire himself is released after 5 days. Everyone is still clueless as to who stole the painting. But conspiracy theories abound.\n \n- Two years after the theft, the Mona Lisa is finally found when an employee working at Louvre tries to sell it to an art gallery in Florence for $100,000.\n \n- When the Mona Lisa is returned to the Louvre, it draws massive crowds. People visit the Louvre only to see this one painting.\n \n- And then it hit the Paris Hilton effect. Its popularity added to its popularity. So much so that most people don't know why it is popular in the first place.",
"Most portraiture from the time was lifeless and more of a representational image than a proper portrait that captures life. Her enigmatic smile and the depth and vitality of the painting were truly remarkable and set a new bar for contemporary artists in the early 16th century.",
"Leonardo's border-free painting that achieved depth and shading through many layers upon layers was a revolutionary technique that had previously been unheard of and quickly became used by other artists after the Mona Lisa was finished.\n\nLeonardo's existing fame plus the painting's innovative brilliance made it instantly famous, but it wouldn't become the \"most famous painting in world history\" until the painting's own history made it legendary. The painting was stolen and nobody knows how or by who so the rumors and suspicions around it gave it more and more attention, and then when it was finally recovered people from all over flocked to see it at the Louvre to see what was so special about this painting they'd heard about. \n\nThen people heard about massive crowds at the Louvre and decided they must see for themselves, so on and so forth. Da Vinci himself even continues to gain fame every few years or so when someone tries out one of his centuries-old sketches and makes it actually work, then the internet goes into a frenzy researching the man and inevitably comes across the painting.",
"The art world is famous for it's contradictions and inconsistencies. Vincent Van Gogh couldn't give his paintings away and died penniless. Today his paintings are worth millions. I guess they somehow got better with age.",
"Or you could add that this portrait masterfully employed, amongst many other techniques, a technique known as 'sfumato' which essentially means blending and tricks the eye so you cannot perceive where one carefully layered detail ends and another begins, like how smoky eyeshadow can create visually pleasing and strangely captivating eye-candy.\n\nThe big idea here is that the painting masterfully incorporates and utilizes numerous effects and styles and is representative of pretty much everything a good portrait painting of that period can or should possess. \n\n_URL_0_",
"Lisa, if I can use that name, herself has an inscrutable, lovely expression that captures some of the mystery of women. It is like she is holding in some amusing secret that men will never know.\n\nAlso the eyes follow you around the room.",
"I'm sorry to be a pretentious ass, but I don't like the answers here. Look at it. She seems alive, you want to know her story. This dead woman from hundreds of years ago- she's looking right at you, daring you to guess what she was thinking. It's just a cool, surreal experience. IMO\n",
"I'm sure there are historical reasons, but from an artistic perspective, the Mona Lisa has a tremendous amount of subtle detail, from the hands to the scenic background. \n\nI think it's compelling for people because of her ambiguous expression and the unclear focus of her eyes. It makes you wonder what she was looking at and thinking about. The also looks realistic - her facial features are not drawn to look more beautiful or exaggerated. \n\nHistorically, it's my understanding that the way the portrait is composed (seated; waist-up; folded arms; a window showing an outdoors background) was quite original at the time and tons of people started copying that composition. \n\nAfter that, it kinda snowballs. once something catches on and becomes a seminal work, it keeps getting referenced until it's lodged in our cultural rolodex.",
"Wasn't there a mystery with the women who was painted or if she was smiling or not? \n\nHere's more on her smile and the modal, more reason on why the painting is famous. \n\n\n[mystery smile](_URL_0_) ",
"So if you just look at the Mona Lisa you might not see much beyond a normal painting. If you go into the Louvre you'll see people rushing down a long hallway to get to the painting ignoring everything else on the walls. This is a mistake. What makes the Mona Lisa special is only seen in comparison to the other type of paintings that were being produced at the same time. When you look at the dark, drab expressionless paintings in the hallway and then get to the Mona Lisa with it's hints of color and slight smile you see that it was something different and special.",
"As others have mentioned, and this plays into the larger understanding of why it is popular, it was stolen in the early 1900's. This coincided with the ability to wire photos between locations. That meant that the news of the theft including a photograph of what was stolen was much more widespread than at other times in history. People became much more familiar with the painting as a result of this timing. As we know, people like things they are familiar with and can relate to others on. The more people who see something, the more popular it becomes. The Mona Lisa became a cultural touchstone that transcended countries and cultures. I think that its an interesting painting, but the reasons people see it as \"great\" are subjective (as the variety of answers here demonstrates), but I think it became iconic due to timing of its theft and photographic technology spreading it over the world in a time when there was far less visual content than there is now. \n\nIn my opinion, it's important not to underestimate the extent to which our interests are being lead not by what we want, but by what is offered to us. Few people seek out alternatives to what is at hand and choose a favorite among limited and easily available options. This tends to apply to all things, including art.",
"Only on reddit can you find the most cynical people claiming the Mona Lisa is only considered good art because it was stolen and \"it's like anything, because we randomly assign value to garbage.\" What happened to you people.",
"ELi5: People like it for different reasons. Scholars for it's history, artists for the techniques used, random folk for being the most known painting in the world.\n\nYou won't find a single objective reason why it's so great / popular, and really, there is no need for one.",
"It's literally exactly just like trending videos. Somebody likes something about it. More people do. Someone famous says something about it and people heart that, picquing interest. Other interesting things are said and word catches on. Now you're cashing me ousside.\n\nHowbow dah?",
"There are many reasons, most are stated above which include the theft and Napoleons liking to it.\nFor a purely art historical explanation there were a few important things Leonardo did;\n\n* firstly the rocky background, the first painting to ever contain a background as such.\n\n* Themes cross borders of the painting. For example her half smile is a nod towards the ambiguity of her mind, this is reflected in the background (if you will notice the background on the left is lower than on her right) not a mistake by Leonardo but a subtle reinforcing of his message.\n\n* Leonardo was the first to use colour in a revolutionary way, rather than paint with a blue with white added to it (for example) he created a tonal range for each colour running from white to black. This allowed him to create tone and shadow in a way that can theoretically get closest to the realism he was seeking.\n\n* Finally Leonardo himself, THE Renaissance Man, acknowledged it to be his masterpiece and refused to give it to the client he painted it for. Instead he took it with him wherever he went. Although this may have been because she embodied an ideal of beauty (she was at the time considered to be incredibly beautiful) and Leonardo didn't have access to any Playboy or Penthouse...\n\n",
"Because people think it's great then other people think it's great because people thought it was great and other people think it's great because....",
"Legitimate history and origins aside, the \"aura\" around the Mona Lisa reminds me of this excerpt from DeLillo's *White Noise*:\n\n > Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. \n\n > \"No one sees the barn,\" he said finally. \n\n > A long silence followed. \n\n > \"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.\"\n\n > He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.\n\n > We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.\" \n\n > There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. \n\n > \"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.\" \n\n > Another silence ensued. \n\n > \"They are taking pictures of taking pictures,\" he said. \n\n > He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. \n\n > \"What was the barn like before it was photographed?\" he said.\n\n > \"What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?\"",
"Fuck uh. It's been a while since i took art history but I'll take a crack at this. First it's a renaissance painting, which means it was made durring a time artists were transitioning from blocky 2d figures to anatomically correct 3d ones. So that's pretty neat. it was hardly the first painting to do this but near-photo-realistic was still pretty revolutionary at the time. \n\nThere's also a very romantisized explaination of who the woman in the painting is. Officially no one knows, but many experts think it was a woman Da Vinci loved. (Who's name escapes me) Unfortunately, due to various renaissance taboos and stuff, they couldn't be together. If i remember correctly, Da Vinci would work on this painting till the day he died, making tiny adjustments as he tried to capture her likeness perfectly. It was like a perpetual love letter to this woman he'd never had a chance to love...\n\nOr if you don't buy into that, a lot of people say it could also be Da Vinci in woman's clothing. So... ya... ",
"Fascinating stuff. Would love to learn more. Could anyone recommend a documentary on the painting? Specifically, the mystery surrounding its theft? ",
"I think what made Da Vinci famous was that he was more than an artist, he was a Renaissance man. He was also a great engineer and the Europeans and academics were looking for something to help explain the industrial revolution going on around them. As a result there was a lot of historiography going on at the time. In the 1850s Jules Michelet was the first to really identify the Renaissance movement as a distinct period. Then in the 1860s Jacob Burkhardt identified Italian Renaissance art during the 1400s as the break between the middle ages and modern era. and this is not fully settled scholarship, there are still reasonable counter arguments. It took a while for these ideas to enter the mainstream in an understandable way, especially given all the change people had to deal with at the time. But out of all of that Da Vinci's Mona Lisa emerged as the leading symbol of that period. (Personally I prefer Botticelli's Venus for particular reasons)\n\n[Zoomable Bottiecelli's Venus](_URL_1_)\n\n[Zoomable Mona Lisa, I didn't know Mona Lisa had a veil on until I saw this version](_URL_0_)",
"I love this sub and everything but this sub has gone from explain it like I'm five to \"write a dissertation on this question.\"",
"I've seen the painting. The louvre is an amazing museum and of all the things in there, the painting wasn't the most impressive. I walked in, looked at it and walked out. I made the mistake of saying \"It's just a painting\" to myself a little too loudly, offending some people but I found the other artifacts way more interesting; Especially the easter island head on the bottom floor. Either way, you should visit the Louvre if you ever get the chance, there's something there for everyone, even if you're a supposed \"uncultured swine\" like myself.",
"From NPR: [The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece](_URL_0_)\n\n > * \"The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre,\" Zug says.\n\n\n > * It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks.\n\n\n > * All of a sudden, James Zug says, \"the 'Mona Lisa' becomes this incredibly famous painting — literally overnight.\"\n\n\n > * After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece.\n\n\n > * After a weeklong shutdown, the Louvre re-opened to mobs of people, Franz Kafka among them, all rushing to see the empty spot that had become a \"mark of shame\" for Parisians.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nNobody talked about the Mona Lisa before 1911; it was not popular.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nIt was stolen in 1911, but not noticed the entire day (28 hours). \n\nOnce the theft was reported all over the world (which shows what a big deal it was back then before the Internet or even television), overnight mobs of people became interested and wanted to see it.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nThe heist put it into the public consciousness in a very dramatic way, lifted it out of obscurity and became immediately famous.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**TLDR:** One day nobody knows anything about the Mona Lisa, the next day it's **stolen** and everyone has to see it. Over a hundred years later it's the most famous painting in the world, but nobody remembers why.",
"Part of it is the style. Part the mythos around it. The painting is a perfect example of Da Vincis saturation technique. The color is deep and very pure. Also, there's a reason why smiles in paintings look cartoonish. It's very difficult to paint a smile. That's why most paintings of portraits during that era were stone faced or brooding. Much easier to paint realistically. The small conserved smile is extremely difficult to paint accurately in that style. That's the biggest reason why it's adored by artists. ",
"It's just people hyping it up. It's like money. People believe in it's value and so it becomes valueable.",
"Allow me to offer another perspective - perhaps the Mona Lisa is popular because the Mona Lisa is popular. That is the argument that Duncan Watts makes in his wonderful book [Everything is Obvious](_URL_1_) ([NYT review here](_URL_2_)). The big idea is that you might start out with 100 different paintings that are all of about the same quality, and just by luck one of them becomes more popular than the others. Then, there are positive feedback loops - once something becomes a little bit more popular, then more people hear about it, and so it becomes even more popular, until the difference in popularity is far, far greater than the difference in quality.\n\nWatts's key argument is that popularity is mostly due to luck and feedback effects, and that our explanations (i.e., the reasons given ITT - it was a new technique, it was stolen, etc.) are given after the fact and while they may contribute to popularity, plain dumb luck is most of the reason that it's so famous.\n\nA grad student of Watts's, Matt Salganik, tested this in one of my favorite social science experiments of all time ([paper here](_URL_0_)). They randomly assigned incoming users to one of seven artificial \"worlds\" where participants could see a list of songs, and how many times each song had been downloaded. They could then choose which songs (if any) they wanted to download. They found that in each \"world\", a single song became much, much more popular than all of the rest (like the Mona Lisa), but *which song became most popular was different*, providing evidence that these feedback loops exist, and that popularity is a function of luck.\n\n**TL;DR: It's likely that the Mona Lisa is so well-known mostly due to luck- *some* painting has to be the most famous, and it happens to be this one**",
"Simply because of it's fame. I'll explain myself better: the painting is great for all the reasons the others said but trust me it's almost on the same technical and artistical level as other less known paintings of him. The thing is that a serie of events created a lot of myths about it and gave it a lot of popularity (others will be better than me at recalling which events but whatever), so it became gradually more famous and now is considered a masterpiece.",
"Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the \"keystone,\" an item crucial to the search for the Holy Grail. After Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian Man, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order. Langdon explains to Fache that Saunière was a leading authority on the subject of goddess artwork and that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache thinks.",
"It actually wasn't that popular until it was stolen way back in the day. That shot it into popularity and AFAIK was the original reason behind it getting popular, \"it was stolen so it must be special\". Since then it has become iconic, personifying Da Vinci, and since Da Vinci was an important historic figure, so is Mona Lisa.\n\nThis is probably why so many who have seen it in person think it isn't that big of a deal. It's of course a remarkable painting, but then again, it was painted by a remarkable artist who probably deserves a more equal recognition of his art.",
"I'm no expert, but I think the fact that it is a Renaissance painting that is so intensely focused on the individual is part of its appeal. The cliche about Mona Lisa's gaze being ambiguous making you wonder what she is thinking about is important—a lot of art prior had drawn you in to landscapes, Biblical scenes, or contemplation of the sublime, but here you're really wondering what *this woman* is thinking. When you think about art that came after, like Impressionism and especially Modernism, with the former's depictions of and the latter's deep dive into everyday life and consciousness, this painting was ahead of its time.",
"I've seen it irl\nIt's small\nDull\nPeople don't notice the other beautiful work around them\nThe place is crowded a full of pickpockets\nAnd I am 80% sure it's a fake and they keep the real one hidden somewhere ",
"Also your forgetting the aspect of Freud. He really put the painting in the spotlight. Also the painting in my opinion is nothing special. A cool way to see the change from a pairing to something priceless is to look at google trends and search the title Mona Lisa. \" a bubble that will never pop\"",
"Ive seen it in person, and it is disappointing. You walk down this hallway filled with unbelievable paintings in terms of scope and quality. Then you enter the room with the Mona Lisa and theres this little painting behind a few inches of glass. its about the size of a sheet of paper. It was hard to not be underwhelmed considering the popularity of it. ",
"As Phantom Limb once said:\n\"The Mona Lisa isn't a better painting, it's simply a more famous one. And it was only made famous because it was stolen!\"",
"the painting has some merit in composition and originality but its the provenance of the painting, who owned it, other people have mentioned Napolean, but lets not forget it was Francis I, Leonardo's patron who purchased the painting and he was a true patron of the artists and helped stimulate the French renaissance.\n\nif you are interested in renaissance art, i suggest you look at the work of Michelangol who is the true master of painting Da Vinchi doesnt come close.\n\nalso if you have time, have a look at /r/renaissance, /r/renaissanceart and /r/renaissancehistory",
"I have seen it at Le Musée du Louvre, and I was struck by its size. Its actually quite small its only 30 in × 21 in. I was expecting something much bigger.",
"ELI5 answer - It originally wasn't very important. A guy went to the louvre and wrote on paintings - it was his favourite painting, and wrote very nice things about it. After this, it was stolen, and there were no photos of it. Covered by tons of news agencies, and everybody wanted to know what it looked like. They could only go off the book - it had vivid descriptions, that amazed everybody - they were intrigued... It eventually turned up, and everybody went crazy, and went to the Louvre to see it. That was why it became so famous.",
"It is also one of the earliest uses of atmospheric perspective. DaVinci pioneered this technique of adding the appearance of depth to a painting.",
"Also... art is subjective. You don't have to like or appreciate the Mona Lisa if you choose.",
"Mona Lisa isn't so great? Are you kidding me?? When was the last time you saw a painting with such fame and popularity at the Louvre?? Van Gogh breaks records... Dali breaks records... Da Vinci breaks the rules. You can keep your statistics, I prefer the Leo. ",
"I was taught that, among some of the other reasons explained in the comments here, the main things that make the Mona Lisa so famous is its *provenance*, and its theft in 1911.\n\nProvenance is the history of an artwork's ownership. A timeline. What /u/Sumit316 has illustrated is that you can trace the Mona Lisa from the Louvre (today) all the way back to when DaVinci completed it in 1503. The piece has over 500 years of history under its belt, and you can find out where it was and who owned it for **any** day after 1503. So you know beyond a shadow of doubt that it is in fact genuine. That's provenance.\n\nThere's a movie called \"Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollack?\" about a woman who buys an alleged Pollack piece, which lacks any provenance. So nobody really knows if it's genuine or not. Forensic analysts say it's real, but art historians aren't so sure. If it's real it's worth tens of millions of dollars, but if it's fake it's worthless. This illustrates the vitality and value of provenance.\n\nLong story short, Lisa is famous today because she's *been* in the homes and castles of incredibly influential people throughout history. It's been in their homes and castles because of its provenance, essentially. As long as the Mona Lisa retains its provenance over the next X years, it'll get that much more famous. It's cyclical!",
"Reasons why it has merit as a work of art:\n\n- Imaginary landscape: Most artists at the time painted using real landscapes. The land behind Mona Lisa was not real, Da Vinci painted it from his imagination.\n\n- Contrast: The face and hands of Mona Lisa are bright to an almost glowing ghostly white, contrasted with her dark hair and dark outfit.\n\n- Perspective: Da Vinci was very good at using a pyramid design to make things look almost 3D. If you draw a line from Mona's head, to her right elbow, to her left elbow, to her hands, you can see the lines of the pyramid. Using this design it looks like her hands are in front, and then her left shoulder is forward and her right shoulder is in back.\n\nObviously there are a lot of stories about how it got so famous, but a lot of art through the years was famous because the artist was connected to the right person, or made the news somehow.\n\nOften very famous works of art didn't get recognition until the artist continued to make more artwork and make a name for themselves.\n\nVan Gogh, Monet, Warhol and many others were either not well known or outright rejected by critics until years later.\n\nThen when people go back and examine the artistic qualities of some of their earlier works they become legendary.\n\nWarhol's original soup cans paintings went for $100 each, and they now sell for millions.\n\nMonet's impressionist style was originally a word someone tried to use to insult his works.\n\nVan Gogh created hundreds of paintings and over 2,000 works of art, but it wasn't until after his death that he truly was recognized as a legend.\n",
"I didn't see this mentioned yet but her eyes seem to be looking at you no matter what angle you're looking at her from. ",
"Not adding any explanation but you should check out the song Mona Lisa from the movie Popstar.",
"I don't like it. Though one often says that a woman looks as beautiful as the Mona Lisa, and this is meant as a compliment, I just fail to see how the woman in that painting is beautiful at all.\n\nShe looks quite creepy to me, with her empty-seeming eyes, the lack of eyebrows (but maybe that was the fashion back then?) and her rather big forehead. \n\nIt's well-known, but I would not want to pay money or stand in line to see it. ",
"No one yet seems to have mentioned that the incredibly influential critical theorist Walter Pater wrote a section on her in his treatise on the Renaissance.\n\n*The Renaissance* (London, 1893). Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980, pp. 98-99.\n\n\"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.\"",
"I saw it a couple weeks ago or rather i saw the crowd in front of it a couple weeks ago, it was meh, but the painting across from it is some shit, like holy fuck."
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"https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf",
"http://everythingisobvious.com/",
"http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-everything-is-obvious-once-you-know-the-answer-by-duncan-j-watts.html"
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6v4vv7 | how come your glasses don't focus light and burn your cheek from the sun? | You know how you can fry an ant with a magnifying glass? Is that possible just happening on your face with your glasses standing out in the sun? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6v4vv7/eli5_how_come_your_glasses_dont_focus_light_and/ | {
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"There are 2 general kinds of lens: those that spread light apart (diverging) and those that bend light together (converging). Nearsighted people wear diverging lens glasses, whike farsighted folks wear converging. So, for nearsighted folks, their glasses can't focus light to concentrate the sun's rays. The other folks, yes, if the lenses were strong enough, you could use them to fry ants. When wearing them, they focus light on your retina, not your cheek. Can you burn your retina? Absolutely. But your wink reflex normally makes you look away first."
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acstp6 | why is the united states in afghanistan? is the u.s at war with anyone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acstp6/eli5_why_is_the_united_states_in_afghanistan_is/ | {
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"The US army is at war with the Talibans and the ISIS. So they send troops there to help fight these terrorist groups off ",
"The US and its allies initially sent troops to fight in Afghanistan because they believed that the Taliban government was hiding Osama Bin Laden and supporting Al-Qaeda terrorists. You could also argue that the war was also launched so the US was seen to be doing *something* in response to 9/11, but I do think that belief about OBL was genuine.\n\nAlthough the Taliban governed the country, there was still a civil war going on. The US entered the war on the side of the anti-Taliban forces, primarily the 'Northern Alliance'. They were successful in ending Taliban control over the country, but not successful in ending the civil war, which has continued ever since.\n\nWhy are the US and its allies still fighting in Afghanistan? Well firstly because they believe that without them there's a high chance the Taliban would take power again. In addition there are now even more extreme forces operating in the country.\n\nAfter that, you can take your pick from a range of options. Pulling out would be abandoning an ally. It could be viewed as humiliating, since the US would not have won the war. There are concerns that the country might be used as a base for jihadis and terrorists of various kinds, destabilising neighbours (especially Pakistan) and attacking countries further afield. The current Afghan government is not great, but a Taliban government would likely be even worse for Afghanis (especially women). Afghanistan is a massive producer of poppies, so anti-drug groups and politicians have an interest in the country.\n\nThere are also US rivals or frenemies that might move in to the country. Iran to the West, Pakistan to the East (Pakistani intelligence having long established links with the Taliban). Afghanistan isn't quite the strategic country it was in the 19th century, sat between the British and the Russian Empires, but it still has some importance."
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4id35u | why are top boxing matches held in vegas? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4id35u/eli5_why_are_top_boxing_matches_held_in_vegas/ | {
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"The Mgm grand is an excellent venue to watch a fight. Every seat in the house is decent. Also, there is a culture of betting on boxing that inherently lends itself to a vegas setting.",
"Vegas casinos can often offer the best payouts for the fighters since they can make it back from the attendees in other ways. \n\nAlso critical, Vegas is one of the few cities that has professional quality arenas without a professional team in them. Fighting at Madison Square Garden is great, but you have to schedule around two pro teams and whatever else is coming through. For the moment, T-Mobile arena and the MGM Grand don't have anything other then performances, which are much easier to move then sporting events."
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2dpmei | why do businesses in the us contest ex-employees unemployment? are they liable for some of the payment? and if so, what proportion and for how long? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dpmei/eli5_why_do_businesses_in_the_us_contest/ | {
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"I'm a small business employer in Texas so here's how it works. We pay unemployment for each employee. It's a small percentage that is set by the state based on how many claims you receive. So if you receive lots of claims (that actually get approved) then your rate has a good chance that it will go up (rates are determined annually).\n\nWhen a claim gets submitted by an ex-employee the state then sends it to the employer to get their side of the story. And then from there the state decides whether they will pay the claim or not.\n\nSo let's say I've given an employee ample warnings (In writing) to show that I've tried to get them to fix errors, and then eventually I had to let them go, usually those claims will get denied. It's the onus of the employer to show that they've given the employee warnings and tried to make the situation work.\n\nSo yea, in the end, every claim can be disputed by the employer, but normally they'd have to have signed documents in writing to prove that the employee was fired because they weren't doing their job correctly even after being warned.\n\nIn all honesty I've disputed almost all our claims (and won) because we are firing our employees because we HAVE to, not because we're just evil employers and think it's funny. We employ 10 people so every position is critical and when someone isn't doing their job correctly it really hits us hard. \n\nThe reason I dispute them is because I don't believe that WE should have an increased tax rate because an ex-employee didn't want to do their job right.",
"There's a couple things at play. Why the employee left.\n\n1) Voluntary separation (quit) = No unemployment benefits (many states).\n\n2) Termination for cause (fired for violation of policy) = No unemployment payments (many states)\n\n3) At-Will Termination / End of Contract Termination (lay-off) = Standard Unemployment Benefits.\n\nDepending on why you no longer work there, depends on what benefits you get. \n\nHere's the deal though. The former employee has to file for benefits. A \"shady\" HR person will always contest the benefits and wait for the \"hearing\" because it's a stall tactic. Once the employee has submitted the claim, the burden is on the former employer to show that the termination was \"for cause\" (vice lay-off), basically providing documentation.",
"Keep in mind that in other countries, the system is much different. Employees always get unemployment no matter why they lost there job in many countries. \n\nBecause the employer is at risk of much higher fees in the US, it is important to them not to pay claims that are invalid. If the system was different and employers were not penalized, then many more people would get benefits. The government system of payments is at fault, not the employers."
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4151u1 | why encryption matters if you never do anything illegal? | New York might ban encrypted smartphones, why should the average law-abiding citizen care? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4151u1/eli5_why_encryption_matters_if_you_never_do/ | {
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"You have civil rights. The police needs to justify infringing your privacy.\n\nI'm sure there's nothing illegal in your bedroom, but you still have curtains on your window, right?\n\nJust because you have nothing illegal to hide, doesn't mean the contents of your phone aren't personal. ",
"Encryption keeps your data safe. So if you have important info stored on your phone you want to keep it encrypted. So nobody can break into your phone and understand its contents.",
"For me, it might be the *illusion* of wrong doing. I have searched for things like \"how to get out of the trunk of a car\" , \"how to get out of handcuffs\" and \"what does hashish smell like\" for my novel. Do I want to be put on a watch list because someone freaks out at that? No.",
"Because the \"average law-abiding citizen\" might lose their smart phone some day, and doesn't want \"random, potentially criminal, asshole\" to be able to read all their personal information off it when that happens.",
"I can answer this very easily.\n\nDo me a favor: post all your text messages, emails and browser history into this thread.\n\nNo? Why? You've not been looking at anything illegal, right? If you've not broken the law, why don't you want to share the contents of your phone?\n\nThat's why people care. "
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6empax | is there a difference between pimples on the forehead or chin or cheeks? i mean is there a reason why some people get pimples on the forehead while others get them on other part of their face | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6empax/eli5is_there_a_difference_between_pimples_on_the/ | {
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" > is there a difference between pimples on the forehead or chin or cheeks?\n\nNot really. A pimple is pretty much a pimple, no matter where it is. There are certainly other kinds of skin lesion, to be sure, but those too are what they are no matter where they occur, e.g., blackheads aren't pimples, but a blackhead on your face is not meaningfully different from a blackhead anywhere else on your body. \n\n > i mean is there a reason why some people get pimples on the forehead while others get them on other part of their face\n\nYes. The human skin, as an organ, is not the same on all parts of the body. Some of this you probably already realize without knowing it. It's pretty obvious that the skin on the soles of your feet is different than the skin on your forearm. But the differences can be subtler too. For whatever reason, many people have oilier skin in the \"T-zone\" of the forehead and nose area of the face, with drier skin on their cheeks and chin. \n\n[Read up about skin types.](_URL_0_)"
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2qfnag | why can i carry a concealed gun to protect myself, but i can't carry brass knuckles or a switch blade? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qfnag/eli5why_can_i_carry_a_concealed_gun_to_protect/ | {
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"The second amendment of the United States constitution. (assuming you live in the US). It's easy to ban brass knuckles and knives, not guns. ",
"I live in America. ",
"Has to do with permitting. Conceal carry permits require some training and approval from the sheriffs office once your cleared back ground wise. Also to get a gun also requires some paperwork and maybe a background check as well depending. Brass knucks or switchblades/assisted blades can be bought everywhere and have no paperwork or serials. Plus no screening to carry. Also technically they are deadlier within 20 feet range from being drawn vs drawing a handgun on someone within 20 feet. And depending on the state the blade length is usually 5-6 inch max because a big ass knife is very deadly and scary to handle.",
"Guns are expensive, a high class weapon. Knuckles and knives are low class weapons.",
"Here in Florida our carry permits are for \"weapons\". Guns and knives are legal to carry. Brass knuckles are illegal though.",
"In Kentucky, the permit is called a CCDW for Concealed Carry Deadly Weapons and it covers switchblades and other weapons.",
"I think it varies by state. There is nothing in the Utah criminal code saying you can't carry a knife of any size. It's really the manner in which you use something that alters the definition to a \"weapon\". \n\nFor example: If I decide to rob someone on a whim and I don't have any weapons so I pick up a screw driver and threaten someone with it... it is now defined as a weapon in the legal system and so the robbery becomes an \"aggravated\" robbery. A screw driver is obviously a tool but when used as a weapon, it becomes a weapon. \n\nI would suggest (pulling this part right outta my ass) that the people that wrote the laws in Utah understand that ANYTHING can be used as a weapons so they didn't specifically make it illegal to carry knives or brass knuckles. I've heard brass knuckels are illegal but I can't find anything in the criminal code. It may be there but I can't seem to find it.",
"So, can we wield swords? Can we have a sword revival? ",
"We have a myriad of firearms and weapons laws that make zero reasonable sense. Many are passed to appeal to emotions. Many were attempts to crack down on organized crime in the early 20th century. Many are still lingering from various times of extreme racism such as pre/post Civil War, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, etc. Most are senseless, pointless, completely ineffectual, and were only passed to appeal to the common emotional landscape of the times. The laws against brass knuckles and switch blades likely fit one of those. Of course reason tells us that one who intends to do another criminal harm would have no trouble finding a suitable implement at Wal-Mart, Bed Bath and Beyond or Walgreens. The laws are passed to either keep a certain segment of the population (such as blacks) defenseless, make it easier for police to arrest people, or to just make it seem like the government is \"doing something\".",
"Thought police. Something is scary to them, so they try to ban it. (You can't ban something anyone with a hacksaw and a file can make.)",
"In order to carry a concealed weapon you must complete the appropriate training. (Your local laws may vary)\n\nYou can own firearms (given that you're not a felon) and brass knuckles and switch blades so long as you keep them in your home (your local laws may vary) and don't carry them around with you, but some states/counties will allow open carry with no issues. (Your local laws may- you guessed it: vary.)",
"Could i carry a baseball bat around? Deadly weapon that I'm not even trying to conceal.",
"Actually the real reason has to do with the fact that brass knuckles are actually considered an \"offensive only weapon\". They are illegal because they're a weapon that does not have a justifiable use for self defense. You argument is if you are able to defend yourself with your fist using brass knuckles would cause more damage than necessary therefore making them more of an offensive weapon.\n\nDon't know about knives but they're certainly legal in my state.\n\nThat being said, I don't agree with it. Brass knuckles are a great self defense option in my eyes.",
"Guns have serial numbers that can be tracked through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which is what U.S.A. law enforcement uses when they encounter a suspect's firearm, gun of unknown origin, or when a gun is reported stolen.\n\nMy guess is that knives and brass knuckles are infinitely harder to track, and easier for ner'-do-gooders to acquire. Thus, state legislatures conclude concealed carry permits ought to permit the one thing that (in theory) should only be available to non-felons: handguns.",
"Law in the United States against switch blades originated in the 50's to combat the rise of gang activity.\nSwitch blade were easy to conceal easy to get and more or less silent, so many city gangs used them. Guns were more expensive and were harder to get then. "
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1mvlti | why is it that, despite professional audio setup, concerts never sound as good or as balanced as the recordings on the album? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mvlti/why_is_it_that_despite_professional_audio_setup/ | {
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"Because you can't fit a crowd in a noise cancelling, acoustically sound room. The main issue is the 'space', in most cases the band isn't as good as the records make them sound but in the case that the band actually is good, the sound going to the sound engineers headphones will be quiet good but once the sound leaves the speakers and travels through the open air to reach the audience you get a major loss of quality......\n\nIf you listen to some 'Dire Straits' live you will see it is damn near perfect in a lot of cases.... whereas if you listen to say 'Blink 182' (Which I like) you will see live performances expose them.\n\nBut yeah it is mainly the fact the you can't control the mix as much as you would like once the sound leaves the speakers pointing at the audience, and you can't account for all positions of the audience either.",
"It depends. The Band which performed live in The Last Waltz has many of the songs which were definitely the superior version of the song."
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8z1j8v | does our bladder has air in it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z1j8v/eli5_does_our_bladder_has_air_in_it/ | {
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"Our bladders are usually somewhat filled with urine - we feel that there is \"too much\" once our bladders are stretched, as the muscle fibers that build it contain stretch receptors and this sends information to out brains that we need to urinate. It's a combination of willing and unwilling responses to actually do so, and as we actually release the flow of urine our bladders shrink as they empty. They don't however remain empty, or \"filled with air\", as urine production is somewhat constant, so as soon as it's empty it starts to fill up again. \n\nTL;DR: No, no air. Once it is empty it's a vacuum that starts filling up again."
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1e2ts8 | why males cant lactate when they have the same glands as females. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1e2ts8/eli5_why_males_cant_lactate_when_they_have_the/ | {
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"They can given enough stimulation. There's just no reason for the body to develop the necessary glands enough to make it a normal thing, since there's no huge production of estrogen since men have no uterus :P",
"you can milk anything with nipples.",
"Actually men can: [Strange but True: Males Can Lactate](_URL_0_)"
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1qwzx5 | chemistry behind nuclear bombs | Did some searching myself, the best I could gather was something starts a reaction that splits some molecule apart, and those two halves hit some other atoms that split them apart and so on.
Basically want to know if thats the explanation or is there more to it, and why is it best to detonate them high in the air instead of on the ground? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qwzx5/eli5chemistry_behind_nuclear_bombs/ | {
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"As some others are saying.\n\nChemistry generally looks at the atoms, and the way they interact together. Chemical interactions primarily happen in the electron cloud around the atom.\n\nNuclear interactions are not chemistry. They happen in the nucleus of the atom, and involve either splitting the atom, fusing two atoms together, or certain other interactions (neutron absorption, or some radioactive things)"
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dlefwh | what happens to the bodily systems when you consume too much alcohol? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dlefwh/eli5_what_happens_to_the_bodily_systems_when_you/ | {
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"There are two effects: chronic (things that happen over time) and acute (things that happen right away).\n\nChronic overconsumption of alcohol can lead to liver damage, cancer, and a host of other health problems. \n\nAcute overconsumption typically results in vomiting, as the body attempts to get rid of the poisonous substance. This can lead to vomit inhalation and death from drowning. Furthermore the central nervous system is depressed, leading to coordination problems that can lead to injuries, in some cases fatal. At even higher doses the central nervous system becomes so depressed that some of its functions cease: new memories can not be formed (so called \"blackout\", where the drinker wakes up and can't recall what he or she did the previous night) and at extremely high doses breathing can cease, leading to death."
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a7yzlm | what is hadoop & spark? and how do they stack together? | I have googled it but since i have no background in data science or programming, those things just confuse me more. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a7yzlm/eli5_what_is_hadoop_spark_and_how_do_they_stack/ | {
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"Google published a paper describing a cluster of computers that could be used to search through very, very large amounts of data and quickly return the results found in the data. They called it MapReduce. I won't describe how that works because tldr; and it's not directly relevant to your question.\n\nHadoop started as an open source project to implement the ideas described in Google's paper. One of the creators had a son whose toy elephant was named \"Hadoop\", and they used that name for their project. The Hadoop project started as one of the many software projects under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation.\n\nAfter several years, some limitations in the MapReduce/Hadoop became apparent, and the Spark project was launched at UC Berkeley's AMPLab to create a solution without those limitations. After about a year, the Spark project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, and it's still maintained there.\n\n"
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2lj2vp | how does cantor's diagonal proof proves that real numbers are 'more infinite' than naturals? | I get that one can determine whether an infinite set is bigger, equal or smaller just by 'pairing up' each element of that set (using a bijective function ) with another's, and that in that way one can prove that there are as many Naturals = Integers = Even numbers, etc... All those infinities, while not having the same elements, would have the same cardinality.
It is said that the Diagonal proof shows that, in Real numbers, there would always be an 'odd' (extra number that does not pair up) number that can be construed out of any list of numbers, not matter how long, proving that the R > N. I can't get my head around this. Why couldn't I apply the same method to prove that Z > N or that 'even numbers' > 'odd numbers'?
Edit: phrasing, spelling... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lj2vp/eli5_how_does_cantors_diagonal_proof_proves_that/ | {
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"Any set with the same cardinality as the natural numbers can be written as a list\n\n1.\n\n2.\n\n3.\n\nand so on.\n\nIf you made a list of real numbers\n\n1. 0.435345356346...\n\n2. 0.234345635623...\n\n3. 0.233454565345...\n\n...\n\nI then create a number that is different from the first digit of the first number, the second digit of the second number, the third digit of the third number and so on.\n\nSo 0.111 is not in the list I wrote. I can go to infinite places if my list is infinitely long.\n\n This way I can always create a new real number that is not on your list. This means your list can never be the comprehensive list. Since you can't list all the reals there are more real numbers than natural numbers.\n\n____\n\nHow to list other sets. In the following lists a quick bit of maths would allow you to figure out where any number in the set would be on the list.\n\nEven natural numbers. \n\n2,4,6,8....\n\nIntegers. \n\n0,1,-1,2,-2,3,-3...\n\n",
"One key is that reals all extend to an infinite number of decimal places, even if you're just padding zeros at the end. This allows you to ensure that your constructed element is clearly not a member of the set.\n\nYou can't really do the same thing with integers.",
"What Cantor is really doing is proving that a bijective functions pairing N and R cannot exist.\n\nWhen you pair N and Z, it is easy to prove an iron clad bijector exists. N and Q are a little trickier, but still can be done. It is possible in both cases, because all members of Z and Q can be represented using a finite number of members of N.\n\nDiagonalization works because you need an infinite number of N's to represent some R's. So you can take the nth item on the list, and enforce some arbitrary property on its nth digit. With Z and Q, they might not be anything resembling an nth digit. "
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3fyj56 | why isn't the propellant in canned air, air cartridges, or aerosol cans just air? | It is usually always a flammable gas. Why can't they fill it from an air compressor with normal air? And why aren't pellet guns and paintball guns like this as well instead of using Co2? And according to the can, my shaving cream is using propane as a propellant. Wouldn't it be cheaper and just as affective to use air? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fyj56/eli5_why_isnt_the_propellant_in_canned_air_air/ | {
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"Very simply: water content. Atmospheric air contains a substantial amount of water vapour. Most applications calling for a propellant are used in combination with a product or substance which must be stored in a low or null-water environment, which is why iso-butanes, nitrogene, and tetraflourethan is commonly used.\n\nHope that helped!\n\nSauce: _URL_0_",
"For some applications, like paintball guns, it's useful to have as dense a gas as possible. CO2 is a good choice here, because it's dense and it's cheap. It's the byproduct of various industrial processes, like making cement, and gas suppliers can collect it practically for the price of hauling it away.\n\nWhy butane or propane? Because, under pressure, they become liquids at room temperature. Which means that not only can we pack a canister more densely, but, until the last of the liquid is used up, the pressure inside the can stays more or less constant. That's why spray can pressure doesn't start to drop off the instant you start spraying.",
"A lot of the propellants are liquids in the spray can that generate large volumes of propellant gas when the pressure is released (by spraying). Think of how a butane lighter works - it's liquid in the tank, but it turns to gas when you allow the pressure to drop by pushing the button.\n\nYou can build a spray can that will contain liquid propellant that turns to gas when needed a lot cheaper and lighter than you can build a much stronger spray can that contains the equivalent volume of propellant gas that is stored just as high-pressure gas."
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7eqkke | what stopped isp's from doing what people are saying they'll do now pre-2015 if we repeal nn now? why didn't they do it back then? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7eqkke/eli5_what_stopped_isps_from_doing_what_people_are/ | {
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"Mostly the fact that the markets were still very much in flux, meaning they had more competition and people were more likely to switch to a different ISP if they were to limit their users' access to certain services.\n\nPlus, at the time, ISPs didn't own their own services that provide things like music/movies/whatever and (PROBABLY!) the fact that many internet services didn't make much money yet, so there was less money to ~~extort~~ gain by telling them \"if you don't cooperate with us, we'll make people essentially be unable to access you\".",
"Net neutrality, or rather the things that violate it, also is largely based on something called \"deep packet inspection\" and other methods that snoop out the purpose of your data. These methods were not nearly so sophisticated even just 5 years ago, and AI and machine learning is definitely a part of that massive growth. The more algorithms we create for this purpose, the better technology gets, the easier this type of control gets."
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4sbv5h | how come it's illegal to tweet a threat but allowed in a rap song? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sbv5h/eli5_how_come_its_illegal_to_tweet_a_threat_but/ | {
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"There's a difference between a threat and just \"threatening language\". Threats are *specific*. Rap lyric threats are usually \"I'll crack your fuckin skull and use it as a bowl of cereal\" and shit like that. Rarely is it like \"John Andrews at 381 Boulder Ave, I'm coming to your house to beat you with a baseball bat\". ",
"Threats are illegal when they're considered a \"credible threat\". What that means is that a *reasonable person* would believe that whoever is making the threat has the intention and capability to follow through with the threat. This is not black and white, it's up to the interpretation of authorities. There are things they look for to establish credibility, in particular the specificity of the threat.\n\nSo for instance, saying \"I'm going to kill you and eat your babies and poop on your chest lololol\" a reasonable person would not think that's a credible threat. It's over the top, only the craziest of crazy people would actually eat a baby, etc. It's also very vague. Not illegal.\n\nOn the other hand, saying \"You live at [address] and tomorrow I'm going to get my AR-15 and gun you down on your driveway\" is very specific. It indicates premeditation (because they researched the address), it indicates the specific way they plan to do it, and the place and time. A reasonable person would believe this is credible.\n\nIf I said, \"I'm going to launch an ICBM into your house tomorrow at [time]\" that would not be credible, because although it's specific, no reasonable person would believe I'm capable of launching an ICBM.\n\nAnd of course, context matters. Although what I said above would be a credible threat elsewhere, it's embedded in a conversation and clearly presented as an example and not meant to be taken seriously. Likewise, if you're tweeting song lyrics, it's in a context and no reasonable person would consider it credible because reasonable people know the difference between real threats and song lyrics. \n\nThat said, again, it's up for the authorities to interpret. So you could conceivably tweet song lyrics and really mean it as a threat, which would be illegal. "
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1jlja6 | could somebody explain how irc chat clients work? what is freenode? and how do i search for unlisted channel topics that i'm interested in? | I have been looking for a comprehensive guide for beginners and I have no networking background everything seems to be about server this proxy that. How Do I make IRC easy? Is there a client that's just very minimal opens chat room text in almost a terminal-like minimalism? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jlja6/could_somebody_explain_how_irc_chat_clients_work/ | {
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"What operating system are you running? Something graphical will be much more intuitive if you're just starting out.\n\nFor windows: _URL_3_\nLinux: _URL_1_ (xChat)\nMac: _URL_2_ or Textual (paid)\n\nIf you google a bit you should find good guides but basically.\n\n1. Open your IRC client\n2. Locate server settings.\n3. Enter the IP/Server address - For freenode put _URL_0_ and or the port 6667.\n4. Enter the username you want to use on IRC, probably not something too generic as it could be in use and you would need to find another before connecting.\n5. Connect\n6. You should see a whole bunch of text from the IRC server as you connect. Basically you will want to type /list and you should be shown all the IRC channels that exist on the network. Usually from that list you can double click on the channel to join, or just type /join #channelname from the text box\n\nOh and Freenode is an IRC network that has a whole bunch of channels centred around free and open source software. There are other popular networks that exist although Freenode has a lot of random/offtopic channels which should fit most interests.\n\nSorry not exactly baby steps here but if you don't get the hang of it let me know.",
"So, what is IRC? IRC itself stands for 'Internet Relay Chat', and it's been around for *probably* longer then you've been alive (at least longer then I have, I'm only 19 though). It's a completely text based protocol for online communication (So, basically an instant messaging protocol that's text only).\n\nIt's handy because it's very minimal and fairly easy to use for communication. The basic idea around IRC is that you have IRC servers and IRC clients. The server's themselves make up different IRC 'networks', like _URL_0_. The servers handle distributing messages to everyone, handling accounts on the network, etc.. The basics you could think of. The IRC Client is simply what you run on your computer, and it connects to an IRC network you specify and then communicates with a server to send and receive messages so you can communicate. (It's worth noting, many people -- even me at times -- use the term IRC server when referring to an IRC network. I wouldn't be surprised if you see this, and generally assume it if you do see the term IRC server)\n\nIRC itself is setup is much of a chat-room like fashion. Each room is called a 'channel', and the name usually starts with a '#', such as '#ubuntu', '#archlinux', etc. (They look like Twitter 'hashtags', but IRC's been around and using them for far longer, Twitter stole the idea > . > ) Using the IRC Client you 'join' these channels, and then any messages that are sent to these channels (Along with notifications of when people join or leave the channel) are then sent to your client. Besides channels, you can also message people directly in the same fashion for private two-way conversation.\n\nI communicate on IRC regularly (Under the same name I have here, on _URL_0_), the client I use is 'irssi'. It's a completely terminal based client (I run Linux and like terminal stuff, so it works for it. It has a slightly higher learning curve then normal GUI based clients though). Others that I know which don't like terminal stuff so much use (I believe) HexChat, and other various programs (Just Google IRC Client, you'll see tons of open-source ones). Freenode also has a web interface which you could also use (I use it in environments like at my college where normal IRC is blocked). The web interface is extremely easy and requires no software.\n\nAs for using clients, the only real thing you should keep in mind is that most clients will not send a message starting with '/' as it assumes it's an IRC Client command.\n\nCommon commands include '/join', which when you add a channel name after it makes you join that channel (Ex. '/join #archlinux' makes you join the #archlinux channel). '/query' opens up a private message channel with another user (Ex. If you type '/query dsman195276' while I'm online, it'll open up a new tab/channel with my name which would let you message me directly, though it still goes through the IRC network). '/connect' will connect you to an IRC network, such as '/connect _URL_0_'. This may or may not be necessary\n\nBeyond that, that's really all you need to know to get started. It's not very complicated. I'd personally just jump on and find a channel that interests you, people are generally friendly and open to talk, that's why they're there after all ;) Going off the time when I posted this, if you get on freenode and want a bit more guidance, feel free to message me (assuming I'm on). I'm not sure I'll be on for very long after this post, however I should be on for a while in about 12 hours from now, to give you an idea."
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2q30s4 | that lurching feeling you get going over a bridge in a car? | Why does your stomach make that funny lurching feeling when going over a humpback bridge or riding a rollercoaster? Adrenaline? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q30s4/eli5_that_lurching_feeling_you_get_going_over_a/ | {
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"I assume 'humpback' bridge means that it's something [like this](_URL_0_).\n\nThe answer to that is acceleration. As you drive up the incline you're accelerating up - you're being pushed upward by the car as the car is pushed up by the incline in the road.\n\nAt the peak of the arch, though, this acceleration breaks. Then as you descend the decline you're now slightly falling as you're moving downward relatively quickly. This causes your body and all the fluids within to sort of fly about a little. Go get a water bottle, hold it up then pull it straight down. You'll notice the water floats up and maybe even hits the top if you pull it down fast enough.\n\nThat's happening to you and your senses notice it. "
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7i30vn | why do tea bags say ‘do not microwave’? | Does it have to do with how the tea steeps? Or something with metal staples on the bag? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7i30vn/eli5_why_do_tea_bags_say_do_not_microwave/ | {
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"Because you are doing it wrong!\n\nYou are supposed to put tea into boiling water all at once, not slowly heat it up with the water. It does taste different that way.\n\nEDIT: To be clear, you don't put tea in water while it is still boiling, you bring the water to a boil, let it cool a bit, then put it in.",
"Oy vey. I can't believe so many people are talking about the staples. You can walk over to your microwave right now and prove that wrong. \n\nIt is how the tea steeps: the volatile flavor compounds in the tea come out from the leaves at different rates depending on the water temperature -- some of them are good, some of them are bad. \n\nIt's impossible to control the water temperature in a microwave, so you end up with a strange mix of good and bad flavors, in all the wrong proportions. \n\nThe manufacturers put \"do not microwave\" because they don't want someone tasting their product, having it taste like crap, and never buying that brand again.\n\n[Edit: I've microwaved tea (in times of dire necessity) hundreds of times, and never once seen any evidence of arcing or fire risk. But, to be fair to the folks who have commented, some people have reported that they have seen that.]",
"What a time to see this question, I'm at a tea factory in Kerala right now!\n\nYou're supposed to put the tea in boiling water, not boil tea water. They taste different",
"Because if you microwave the tea bag it will burst into flames. You are supposed to microwave water, and then after microwaving you put the tea bag into the water to steep. They put that warning on because some idiot burnt their house down.",
"It's because the staples may arc and set fire to the teabag if they're exposed/the wrong shape. It's a definite risk. Just because you personally haven't seen it doesn't change anything. Metal particularly if it has sharp edges (like a staple might) can definitely arc in a microwave. In close proximity to a thin paper bag, that's a recipe for a fire. \n\nIt does make me smile a bit that we Brits have the reputation for being obsessed with tea, and yet we're never the ones who get into heated arguments about temperatures, and steeping times, and all that kind of thing, and the benefits of multi stewing and onward ad infinitum. \n\nWith us, the discussion is normally about as far as make sure you put boiling water onto a bare teabag, add the milk afterward. Anyone who puts milk on a teabag or cold water and then microwaves it is a heathen. \n\nThe vast *vast* majority of tea brewed in the UK is done with ordinary teabags. I only know one person who even has the kit to brew loose leaf tea at home. \n\nYet Americans, who are supposed to have coffee as their main brew will debate till the cows come home about the proper way of brewing tea. Is it 90C, is it 85C, is it 95C... I didn't even know until I read this thread that you can get electric kettles that heat to particular temperatures. \n\nNot hating on anyone, just to be clear. I just find it interesting. ",
"When you microwave water, such as in a ceramic coffee mug, it doesn't boil normally at 212 degrees F / 100 C (no bubbles). Because of this, the water can actually reach temperatures *above* the boiling point.\n\nWith super-heated water, introducing turbulence with a teabag, or hot chocolate mix, will cause the water to explosively boil.\n\nCheck out videos of microwaved water for hot chocolate to see what I mean.\n\n",
"It has to do with the metal staples. People would put the bags in water in the microwave and the metal staple would turn red hot, instantly evaporate the water, become molten, melt through the bottom of the microwave, drop through the basement, burrow a flaming hot hole to the center of the center of the earth creating a tunnel for magma to exit the earths mantle and eventually forming a volcano where your house was. ",
"The tea bags, burst open when microwaved because the tea leaves expand a lot. Kind of like how microwaves superheat a portion of water inside the tea bag. The effect is similar to superheating of eggs: _URL_0_\n",
" The trick is to boil the water, add the tea bag, nuke it in the microwave for 30 seconds ay 60% power and bingo! A fantastic cuppa! (Steeps stronger and quicker without the tannin buildup)\n\nTry it, you'll thank me. \n\nEdit: this will get deleted for not being an explaination so I'll add: it's not you do with the staples, my brand has a single staple in the paper tab at the end and it's never been an issue. I would say what others have, doing it from room temprature not only would mess with the steep time, it's really power hungry and kinda irresponsible if you have a kettle that can do it more energy efficiency. "
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3gpppv | california recently released black shade balls to conserve water. how does that work and wouldn't the black absorb the heat causing the water to evaporate faster? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gpppv/eli5_california_recently_released_black_shade/ | {
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"Below the boiling point, water can only evaporate at a boundary between air and water. \n\nThis is because the temperature of a material is just the average temperature of all molecules. Within liquid water, you might have individual molecules cold enough to form ice, and others hot enough to form vapor. They don't because they constantly interact and exchange temperature, a particularly hot one will likely transfer its heat to another.\n\nEvaporation happens when individual molecules become hot enough to become a gas. However, as long as they are surrounded by slower water molecules, they will quickly lose that temperature and become a liquid again. But if they are at the surface to a gas like air or steam, they have a chance of breaking free of the water and keep their energy.\n\nThe reverse will happen with steam: Molecules become cold enough to become liquid, also typically at a boundary between gas and liquid.\n\nSince the balls reduce the surface area where water touches air, there are fewer water molecules that can escape from the water. ",
"The black balls are to prevent UV light from reaching the water, this prevents bromate from being formed.\n\nPictures and a longer explanation [here](_URL_0_)",
"the main function is to prevent a harmful chemical reaction; reducing evaporation is a side effect and so the material is not optimized for that.\n\nas for what it has this side effect: the balls probably absorb a similar amount of heat than the body of water they cover would without the balls - but as plastic doesn't conduct heat well, they can radiate much of it back as infrared before it reaches the lower part that touches the water."
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1r5nsj | why is kennedy such a big deal in the us? | As I understand, he was well liked president, and was then assassinated. But it's been... How long? Why is he still spoken about so much, made movies about, Obama visiting his grave, etc.? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r5nsj/eli5why_is_kennedy_such_a_big_deal_in_the_us/ | {
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"Its a big deal right now because tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of his death. Otherwise its what you said plus its a pretty big deal for conspiracy nuts as well.",
"Assassinations are somewhat of a dark spot in American history.\n\nThis country was based on a concept of freedom that assassinations precludes - the idea that you could be murdered due to a political belief is something that is *fundamentally* un-American.\n\nPlus, Kennedy's presidency was one where there was a clusterfuck of global and domestic events: Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, he started what would be the Space Race (through the Apollo program), he sent the National Guard to deal with George Wallace in Alabama, and he called for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though he did not live to see it passed.\n\nHis views and policies had a significant effect on American politics and culture, so his death was seen as a particularly painful part of our history.",
"A few reasons:\n\n* His family's storybook legacy. His father was a self-made tycoon (during a time when being Irish in America was was still pretty frowned upon, no less). The rumors that this money was ill-gotten, and that his family was/is inextricably tied to the mob, only enhances that background.\n\n* He was the first (and to date, only) Irish Catholic president. This was a huge deal at the time. This happened in the lifetimes of Irish Americans who weren't permitted to use the whites' facilities in many places. And it was widely regarded that no practicing Catholic could be elected President.\n\n* His successfull navigation of the Cuban Missile Crisis was something of a unique achievement. It was probably the closest America got to a nuclear war. Whether a Soviet/Cuban strike would have ever really happened is up for debate, but the prospect certainly seemed real at the time, and he handled it like a pro (which not a lot of people would expect from such a young president).\n\n* He was a war hero. His ship was sunk in the Pacific theater in WWII, and he was at least partially responsible for his crew's survival.\n\n* He was incredibly handsome and a womanizer to boot. He ostensibly had sex with Marilyn Monroe on the reg. And his wife was no slouch either.\n\n* He declared that the U.S. would be on the Moon by the end of the decade (the '60's), and that we'd beat the Soviets doing it. Just declared it. Like some kind of prophet. And in spite of the fact that America was *way* losing the space race, we believed him. *And we did it.*\n\n* The fact that his life was cut tragically short only fortifies his legendary status. He's like the *Firefly* of American leaders.\n\nI could go on, but I from these, I don't think it's hard to see why people looked up to the man. He was a fighter, a lover, and a space nerd.\n\nEverything Reddit could want."
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339vym | why don't teeth grow continuously like nails? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/339vym/eli5_why_dont_teeth_grow_continuously_like_nails/ | {
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"Your teeth are actually bones. Like most bones they do grow, but they fall out because you need bigger ones to grow in, not just expand your guns.",
"The why for most \"why doesn't our body do xyz\" tends to be a disappointing \"because it didn't evolve to do that, it does abc instead.\"\n\nThere's not planning in evolution. Changes happen, and if they work good enough to survive, they persist. "
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4dv2y6 | why can you "hear" a tv when it flickers or the color suddenly switches, like from black to white? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dv2y6/eli5_why_can_you_hear_a_tv_when_it_flickers_or/ | {
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"Do you mean a CRT TV or flatscreen?",
"What you're hearing is coil whine from the steering electromagnets of the CRT. In order to aim the stream of electrons coming off the high voltage cathode, a bunch of magnets are used. However these electromagnets are varied at extremely high speeds in order to draw each line of each frame of video. So what you're hearing is a loud, modulated, high-pitched sound that almost exceeds human hearing. In addition, the electron gun has its own high voltage power supply which is modulated to change the brightness of the scan lines (how pixels are represented). This power supply has its own coils as well. So you have lots of high voltage signals being turned on and off really fast and there is some sound that comes from the components that do this.\n\nCoil whine is caused by a combination of magnetostriction (the change in the shape of a material caused by magnetic fields) and the force of the magnetic field imparted on the coil, jiggling it around.",
"On older CRT tube sets, if you had good hearing or the set was going bad, you could hear it working. I could when I was younger (before I lost my high range hearing). I beleive it was that rapid charge/discharge of the capacitors that direct the electron beam.",
"The \"white whine\" tends to be much worse on whites that are \"too white\"...video is supposed to be between 7.5 and 100 IRE units, with white being the 100 end and blacks the 7.5. Most cameras can capture up to 108 IRE, and then compress it 100...usually...and if not, whiney whites can occur. Also, if the master control op didn't set his video levels for his source properly, or if he got a bad dub that had inaccurate levels, overmodulated video will get through...and make whiney whites. \n\nThis was much more of an issue in the CRT/analog NTSC days...I can't think of a single flatscreen anything that I have ever heard this issue with...mostly because the CRT has more components that are much more inherently likely to cause this than flatscreens.",
"On CRT and plasma, it's the buzz of the power supply. White uses more power. CRT and plasma both use a technology that produces color by stimulating individual phosphors on the screen. You need more energy to illuminate them all (white) than none (black). The buzz is from the transformer in the power supply working at full capacity. "
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2srbmh | why only cheaper phones have dual sim | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2srbmh/eli5_why_only_cheaper_phones_have_dual_sim/ | {
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"Expensive and highend phones are mostly sold by cell service providers on a contract. They don't want that you use the phone you bought from them with the sim card of a different company.",
"Because the majority of more expensive high end phones are marketed and sold in countries with better mobile network infrastructures. I believe one of the selling points for dual sim is the flexibility to use multiple networks to make up for poor coverage "
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2jgcq4 | why do streamed movies cost the same as dvds/blu-rays? | Shouldn't the price of a streamed movie be knocked down by lack of physical packaging such as the disc, shell, and paper insert, even by just a couple dollars? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jgcq4/eli5_why_do_streamed_movies_cost_the_same_as/ | {
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"They charge that amount because people pay it. Yes, it's cheaper to stream than to produce a physical product, but since people will still pay the blu-ray prices for a streamed movie, that's what they charge.",
"It's a convenience fee. I mean, it's really always been like this. You go to a Hotel room and you can order off of the pay-per-view system for $8.00 a pop. Or you could go out to the local rental store and rent a VHS tape.\n\nThe only difference now is that the rental option has mostly vanished off the face of the Earth.",
"Its because people pay it for that price. If everyone stopped paying for digital copies at the same price as DVDs, digital copies will go down in price. Simple supply and demand. \n\nThe corporations argue that the price of the digital copy is the same as the physical copy because a majority of those profits are used to pay the workers and server costs. "
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axjdbk | a vast majority of cords and cables are black. why? | My phone charger cable is black, my aux cable is black, my hard drive cable is black. My coffee machine cord is black, my toaster cord is black. Black, black, black, black. Why is it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/axjdbk/eli5_a_vast_majority_of_cords_and_cables_are/ | {
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"It is not a bright colour and doesnt attract your attention which somewhat increases the aethestics of what ever appliance is in question because you dont notice the cord as much ",
"There are several reasons for this. Black is usually a color that can be hard to spot. So no matter the color of the surrounding area it is safe to use black to hide the cable. The best is of course to have the cable in the same color as the surrounding area. Secondly a lot of plastic include bromide as a fire retardant in order to comply with fire safety guidelines. But bromide tends to turn yellow when it is exposed to light over a long time. But with black you do not see that the plastic changes color. And finally plastic degrades when exposed to strong UV light. However the black color prevents the light from penetrating into the plastic. So any cables that might be exposed to sunlight needs to be black in order to not get damaged."
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3te7e9 | how tyres work | I am at work right now, I have been working here about a month now. I sell tyres online/on phone.
I have no idea what actually makes a tyre good or bad or why certain tyres are better at things. I am good at pretending, but I would like to actually know these things.
Example; what is the physical difference between a sports tyre and a passenger tyre, and why are these differences important? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3te7e9/eli5_how_tyres_work/ | {
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"A tire is just a way for a car to grip the ground, without putting wear on the car's actual structure.\n\nA tyre has to be hard enough to last thousands of miles, but at the same time soft enough that you don't slide on the road as if you were on ice. The type of tyre you buy will be somewhere on this spectrum of durability and grip.\n\nThe tread(groves) in tires are designed so that when you drive over puddles of water, The water goes into the grooves and the rest of the tire can still touch the pavement, preventing aquaplaning.\n\nA sport tyre in general will be made of a stickier/softer compound. This allows the car to grip the road better, allowing tighter,faster turns and better acceleration with less wheelspin. Unfortunately this type of tire wears out much faster, and gets worse gas mileage because it is softer\n\nA passenger tyre (not sure what you mean exactly by this term) will probably be made of a harder compound, so that it will last longer. This tyre may also have more \"flex\" in the sidewall to absorb the road give a vehicle a smoother ride. Because this tyre is harder it will last longer and thus is a more economical choice.\n\nA summer tyre is a tyre with less tread, designed for the dry months and higher temperatures. This works similar to a sport tyre in that it gives the car more grip to, but in this case by having more surface area touching the ground. Conversely a winter tyre will have more tread, designed to displace more water and/or snow while still maintaining control",
"The main trade-off with tires is durability vs grip. The more grip you want a tire to have, the softer the rubber needs to be, and the shorter its life becomes. This is why you see race cars changing tires after maybe 50-100 miles. At the other end of the scale are OEM economy tires, which might last 60,000 miles or more, but don't grip the road all that well because they are hard as rocks. In between those extremes are a tons of different tires to fit different spots on that grip/tread-life continuum. Also just so I mention it, tread patterns are important because they not only influence dry grip, but also how well the tire can push water away (and thus how well they grip in the rain). "
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4r8r54 | why do vegans avoid oils and healthy foods like avocados and nuts? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r8r54/eli5_why_do_vegans_avoid_oils_and_healthy_foods/ | {
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"Not a vegan myself, but there is a huge overlap between modern day vegans and other diet-obsessed people. They may just avoid fat because they believe its also bad for you.\n\nIf you want to do \"the vegan plunge correctly\", I suggest going to a dietician (NOT nutritionist, that is an unofficial title) to ask what your options are and what they recommend, rather than trusting blogs, youtube and random people on reddit. A dietician has had a 3-4 year study and is (depending on where you live) qualified to measure blood sugar levels and whatnot, they will know what is the best path for your new diet choice.",
"I've never met a vegan who didn't eat avocados like all the time. Go to a vegan restaurant, avocados in everything.",
"There is no right path for vegan. Some vegans look down on people that aren't raw vegans, some vegans aren't really eating healthy...they just avoid eating any meat or animal products.\n\nThe best thing is to figure out why you want to go vegan, then figure out the best way to eat within those confines. If it's health reasons, it may be easier to go vegetarian as a stepping stone to get used to whatever \"full vegan\" path you're after."
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8i1g4d | what's the point in signing the credit card receipt after a purchase? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8i1g4d/eli5_whats_the_point_in_signing_the_credit_card/ | {
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"In some places they do actually take your card and match the signature on the back to the signature you write on the receipt.\n\nIt also gives you a vehicle to dispute a charge you didn't make - if someone writes a completely different or obviously fake signature it can be proof that it wasn't you who signed it. \n\nSome places have moved away from that entirely by using Chip-and-PIN cards, but in the US it seems like we forgot about the \"and PIN\" part...",
"Its for verification if you report it as fraud. They can show your signiture as proof you were there and the one that used the card. \n\nMost of the rest of the world just put a pin on the credit card.",
"The vendor is meant to check that the signatures match. If you decide to draw like a kid then that's most likely why they do not bother acknowledging your mountains."
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enjo0h | how are the sequins on those reversible sequined pillows sewn? |
You know those sequined pillows where they're one color first, and then you rub the sequins the other way and it's another color? I couldn't help but wonder how factories manage to get all of those little sequins in an orderly fashion on the fabric for such a cheap price as to be found in Wal Marts everywhere.
Obviously, they're mass-produced, otherwise they'd be a hundred dollars and imperfectly spaced. I just can't think of a machine that can hold all those little discs of shiny plastic, pass through those holes without missing them and making an empty space, pass through the fabric back and forth, AND knot the work as it goes along to prevent mass unraveling. The only results I get on Google are about printing images on the sequins after the sequins are sewn. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/enjo0h/eli5_how_are_the_sequins_on_those_reversible/ | {
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"I know you said you couldn't think of a machine that could do that, but fabric factory owners certainly can!\n\nIt is basically exactly as you'd expect: vast numbers of sequins pour into the machine, which has multiple sewing needles. Each needle is supplied with a specific colour of sequin, and a computer controls which needle fires at any point therefore deciding which colour is placed where.\n\nHere are a couple of short videos that will give you the rough idea: _URL_0_ and _URL_1_ (neither are particularly high quality, unfortunately)",
"Essentially, take a solid, two sided sheet of the sequin material - solid colour or printed patterns; then use a sewing machine like a serger that instead of cutting the material, it holepunches out a piece of sequin and sews it on in one motion, then moves on to the next spot. Repeat.",
"They make some that are a solid color on one side, but when you flip it over, its Nick Cage's face. Its delightful.",
"If you're trying to do one yourself it's really easy ( but a time consuming pain)\n\nJust put a sequin on where you want it, and dont stitch so tight. Give it some slack to roll over"
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5aakgv | what exactly is the correlation between britain and england, and how are their governments structured? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5aakgv/eli5_what_exactly_is_the_correlation_between/ | {
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"Britain- Island\n\nEngland- Country whose borders take up ~62% of the island mentioned above\n\nUnited Kingdom- Sovereign state made of the countries on the island of Britain, along with most of the islands that make up the archipelago that the island of Britain is a part of, several crown dependencies, and several commonwealth states. The government of the UK is a constitutional monarchy, although the commonwealth states have their own governments (Canada, Australia, etc)",
"England is on the island of Great Britain, along with Scotland and Wales. Great Britain together with Northern Ireland make up the UK.\n\n\"Britain\" is slightly ambiguous. Some people think that strictly speaking it means Great Britain only. But people do commonly use it to refer to the entire UK, including Northern Ireland, or even the UK plus all of its dependent territories.\n\nThe UK's structure is somewhat inconsistent. Back in the early 90s the entire thing was ruled directly by the UK parliament in London.\n\nScotland and Northern Ireland have always had their own separate legal systems, and some other institutions of their own, but back then the UK parliament made all those laws. England and Wales share a legal system.\n\nAt the end of the 90s, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland got their own governments. The details of how power is shared between them and the UK government differs in each case. The Welsh Assembly having considerably less power due to sharing a legal system with England.\n\nEngland does not have a government like that. England is ruled directly by the UK parliament. \n\nThis has the weird side effect that the other parts of the UK get a say on things that only affect England, but the reverse is not usually true. But since England has the vast majority of the UK population, not much has been done about this."
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62ibiv | ip addressing and isp's | My question is when you access the internet and you get a new IP frequently what information does the ISP have that allows them to know "Oh Address X is using this IP"
At first I thought it would be the MAC address of the modem that the ISP gave you to get address, but you can buy your own.
So, I guess to summerize, What information allows them to know Address X is using this IP, but Address Y is using another IP? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62ibiv/eli5_ip_addressing_and_isps/ | {
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"You're still plugging the modem into the cable that goes to your ISP. That means they still see your MAC address. \n\nThey can also block all unknown MAC addresses until you call them, but most ISPs don't do that any more. ",
" > At first I thought it would be the MAC address of the modem that the ISP gave you to get address, but you can buy your own.\n\nEven when you buy your own modem, you have to call the ISP and have them bind the MAC address of your modem to your service account."
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f6uhck | when talking about web servers, what is a « cluster » ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f6uhck/eli5_when_talking_about_web_servers_what_is_a/ | {
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"A cluster is multiple computers that work as a unit.\n\nIf your traffic is too large for one computer to handle, you use some sort of load balancing scheme to distribute that traffic amongst multiple computers. A cluster also can act as a failsafe, if one computer goes down, the others stand ready to take on its load.",
"Clustered web hosting is when instead of having just one web server providing the service you have multiple physical machines sharing responsibility for the load. This both ensures your website can handle more requests at once and prevents services taking resources away from each other, but also makes sure that even if a computer goes down the website as a whole still stands strong. \n\nImagine you have 4 computers or nodes serving your website. There might be a fifth computer sitting in front acting as a load balancer: it will grab all the requests coming in, and try to evenly spread them across the 4 computers so that none of them get overloaded and the website can have more clients served at once."
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2ynev1 | i know pi doesn't = 4, but how can you explain this? | _URL_0_
Thanks for all the quick responses! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ynev1/eli5_i_know_pi_doesnt_4_but_how_can_you_explain/ | {
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"The issue here has a similar principle to fractals. The thing to remember to spot the error is that a circle is *not* a polygon with a bunch of sides. As you get larger and larger numbers of sides, it will *appear* to become a continuous circle, but that is only because you are looking at it from farther out. In actuality, if you zoom in, every single corner is still a 90 degree angle. \n\nYou can imagine it like you were trying to walk a diagonal line, from say (0,0) to (10,10) if it were on a regular graph. If you walk the x direction and then the y direction, you will walk 20 total spaces. If you do half the x, then half the y, and repeat that, you still walk the 20 spaces. This will never change as you make more and more turns. It isn't until you walk straight down the diagonal that the Pythagorean theorem comes into play and you get a shorter distance.\n",
"The problem is, you are getting closer and closer to the area without ever getting closer to the perimeter of a circle. Even though a \"squared\" circle would look like a circle, the perimeter would not approach the perimeter of a true circle with d = 1. If you look at the 4th picture, you see that the squared circle is jagged. These \"jags\" account for the extra perimeter. There's a vihart video on youtube about this (look up \"squaring the circle\").",
"Imagine you had to walk along that line. Every time you stop and turn 90 degrees, you'll find you're walking a little bit more than the guy who's able to just walk along the real circle."
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3nade0 | how did galileo observe that earth revolves around the sun? can an average person today convince themselves of that fact with some basic observations and math? | i.e. without any equipment that is super fancy. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nade0/eli5how_did_galileo_observe_that_earth_revolves/ | {
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"He didn't. He observed that Jupiter's moons revolved around Jupiter. The previous position supported by the Church was that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that everything outside it revolved around us. The demonstration that, at least, the four moons he could observe did _not_ revolve around Earth was the final blow to that model. It had already been suggested, long before Galileo, that the planets went around the sun.",
"As to your second question: it depends how hard you are to convince. The fundamental problems is that epicycles (where you have planets on circles, with those circles orbiting on other circles, on other circles, etc.) can explain literally any orbit, if you have enough circles. ",
"suppose the planets revolve around the sun. Look at the trajectory that would result in the earth's sky. It matches observations and follows a rather simple mathematical concept.\n\nSupose its the earth at the center.Your going to want to kill yourself with the physics that could explain the receding and procedings of the planets.",
"hold up your thumb at arms length and look at it with one eye closed. Now look at it with your other eye. Note how your thumb will appear to jump. This is called parallax and was a primary argument for the geocentric model. If the earth did revolve around the sun then you would see a parallax from the stars. Unless they were super far away which was completely absurd to them. \n\nSo while Galileo did put a major nail in the coffin by observing that there are things that didn't revolve around us (heresy!) it is debated that the heliocentric model wasn't 100% proven until the early 1800s when a parallax was observed. \n\nYou technically shoe the parallax of distant stars given enough time and a big enough telescope but would take at least a half a year and a nice chunk of change in equipment to do",
"You can observe with the naked eye (granted that you chart it over an extended period of time) that Mars doesn't revolve around the Earth. Observed from the Earth, Mars sort of swings one way across the sky and then backtracks, which is due to its path being around the Sun and not the Earth. This is probably one of the more rudimentary proofs that the Earth isn't what everything else revolves around. ",
"I just taught this to one of my middle school classes. I am a physics guy and trying to teach them science as well as critical/scientific thinking so perfect timing.\n\nThere were many things GG saw in his self improved telescope that had never been observed and have been mentioned here. Jupiter's four Galilean moons was an observation and it did help, the idea that not everything orbited around the Earth. \n\nThe one that was the strongest evidence by far was the observation of the phases of Venus. Just like the moon Venus has phases. Unlike the moon we can never see a completely full Venus as it is obscured by the sun. Secondly, Venus changed in size dramatically in conjunction with the phase transitions. It was duly noted by GG in his drawing which you can see here. _URL_0_ If there were only a small change in the size of Venus then Venus might orbit the sun whilst the sun orbits the Earth. With the large apparent size change of Venus this cannot be, therefore sun at center. \n\nTo show this to the kids before I tell them what GG saw I give them a flashlight to represent the sun and two balls of equal size to fill in as the Earth and Venus. Then we dim the lights. They use the balls and flashlight to run through the two systems, Earth centered and sun centered, and observe. They realize Venus has phases and the size change. They draw their own pictures. The I tell them about GG and his observations and show them his drawing and theirs and his match. Great lesson and one you can easily do yourself. \n"
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1oafk2 | how does artists like banksy make a living? | Being unknown and apparently making illegal graffiti, how do artists such as Banksy earn money to live and even travel around the world constantly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oafk2/eli5_how_does_artists_like_banksy_make_a_living/ | {
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"I don't know about \"artists like Banksy\", but he (she?) makes a lot of money selling original copies and prints of his work for huge sums, showcasing in galleries as most artists do, and selling several books of pictures of his work. Also I think he does some commissioned works for companies and events. \n\nDespite his reputation as a kid who just goes out, tags stuff entirely for social/political purposes, and runs off into the night, he actually monetizes his talent very well. He has an estimated net worth of $20 million. "
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3ztcog | how are presidential polls considered to be representative of public opinion when i've never met someone who has actually sat through a phone interview for one? | I've never been called for one, but even if I was I would probably think it was a prank or a telemarketer. So when I see poll statistics on TV and they say candidate "A" has 30% support, don't they REALLY mean candidate "A" has 30% support among the kind of people who answer polling calls? And doesn't that color the results? I feel like people who answer these phone calls are likely older, retired, or stay at home spouses. I would love to understand how this works. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ztcog/eli5_how_are_presidential_polls_considered_to_be/ | {
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"Not sure how its done in US, but in Canada when they do poll they alway say somewhere on the bottom how many people they actually asked. And its usually no more than 2000 people. In city with population of 2.5 million what are the chances that somebody out of those 2000 is someone you know? And usually its older demographic who has that extra time to spend on their phones, or being stopped on the street.",
"Your typical professionally-conducted presidential poll talks to around 1000 people; in the presidential election season, there might be two dozen major polls conducted in a month for two years. That's roughly ~576,000 (=24 x 24 x 1000) people polled per presidential election, or about 1 person in 600. \n\nAnd by the way, I am one of those people. (I did a phone poll during the '12 election) ",
"Tl.Dr they aren't good because public opinion sways very quickly and it all is hard to tell until NH primary and Iowa caucus. Butttttt.\n\nThis is all about statistics. Long story short. Sample size is N in the function for the error that the sample represents the population. N is in the denominator (bottom). If the sample size is greater, then the bottom is larger so error approaches 0. 1/4 is smaller than 1/2. So even with a smaller percent of a population of USA. Say 30,000. That is still a huge number to divide a number by so error is small. Hope it helps. ",
"I took one of these once. The girl on the phone seemed really thrilled to get someone who would do it. I was with my husband when he got called, same thing. We're both big on participating in the system. \n\nIt was fun. People shouldn't dodge it. It was cool and I loved that my voice mattered. ",
"I feel as I can answer this question because I work for a research center. We conduct political surveys and some actually last around a year and a half so imagine all those people we call and they do actually take the public opinion survey. We're hired mostly by political campaigns or people associated with the candidates. ",
"Yea, I did a major survey once. I've also taken a few presidential polls of varying length. The major one took an hour or two. The presidential ones weren't that long. Anyway, the polls maybe call around 800-2500 people, so the chances you have met someone might be kinda small. Further, nobody has really ever asked me if I have taken any polls recently, so the assumption that you have never met anyone that has taken one could be wrong simply because you haven't asked everyone you've met if they have ever taken one. Such an error would be a bias in your own survey ;-)",
"You're right that there's a problem with only stay-at-home people being surveyed. Many younger people have no landline. \n\n_URL_0_",
"It's all in the demographic sampling. When you identify yourself as a male, Hispanic, college graduate between the age of 30-35 making between 75k-100k a year you represent that entire population. \n\nThrough statistics if they gather enough of your \"kind\" they can create a trend line that will predict who people like you will vote for. Compare that to the nation and you can begin to make generalizations about the entire nation once they get a large enough sample size. ",
"I have been polled a few times for presidential approval ratings and the like. \n\nWhat they do is collect demographic information about the person being polled so they get a statistical representation of the greater population (statistical sampling). Like, are you a registered voter, your age, race, sex, political party, etc. Sometimes they ask if there's someone aged 18-21 in the house and that sort of thing, if there isn't they thank you for your time and hang up.\n\nI find in a lot of political polls the choices are specific and not really open to nuance. Unless it's a \"push poll,\" done by special interest groups, in which case they try to make whatever they're for sound good and what they're against sound bad, but those aren't research so much as numbers to support propaganda. I had to tell those stupid NOW people I support gay marriage, they acted all shocked because, apparently, children."
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5jctz2 | how come various people from around the country contract meningitis without being in contact with each other? how come one contract meningitis out of nowhere? | Here in Italy we have a little meningitis outbreak but, of the 5-6 people who actually have the illness, only two of them were in contact with each other, the other are in town 200-300km from one another. How come one contract meningitis out of nowhere? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jctz2/eli5_how_come_various_people_from_around_the/ | {
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"Meningitis is not a disease, it's a set of symptoms. It can be caused by a whole bunch of different diseases, some viral, some bacterial, and some neither. There's no way of knowing where exactly it came from, but I doubt all five have it caused by the same thing, and I doubt that the incidents are related at all except for the two you mentioned. In the event that they are linked, it was probably a common source such as food or where they visited recently."
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2wy5rz | how do we know that dolphins rape other dolphins? | Reddit continually likes to describe dolphins as rapey. I've heard it in many nature documentaries and the like too.
But how do we know that dolphins rape? A dolphin has no laws as such, and most likely do not have concepts or social constructs such as consent, age of consent etc. Couldn't it be that what we perceive or label as rape behavior amongst dolphins is in fact normal sexual behavior for them. Is it possible that this just some kind of anthropomorphistic assumption? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wy5rz/eli5_how_do_we_know_that_dolphins_rape_other/ | {
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"They behave in aggressive manners sometimes, but they don't even engage in the scientific animal form of \"rape\", which is called forced copulation. There may be isolated incidents of this occurring for all we know, but it's certainly not a common occurrence. \n\nEDIT: People don't seem to like this response, so I'll elaborate. Some animals engage in forced copulation as part of their mating process. Dolphins do not. Dolphins engage in sexual coercion, in which they jealously guard a mate, attacking other males when they come close. They also engage in sexual play, which can be violent or nonviolent but is usually \"consensual\". There have been cases of dolphins engaging in humping behaviors on humans, which appears to be similar to a dog's version of dry humping. There may be isolated cases of forced copulation, but it is not an inherent part of dolphin mating behavior."
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9fnz29 | why do ups packages seem to take routes that are cover far more distance that what seems logical? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fnz29/eli5_why_do_ups_packages_seem_to_take_routes_that/ | {
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"I've always wondered this too because depending where I order from my packages end up occasionally going from somewhere on the east coast over to Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, etc. before making it back to Florida. Once in Florida they can sometimes go from Jacksonville to Miami before making it back up to me in Orlando. Seems like a lot of extra unnecessary travel, but they almost always get here on time."
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37quax | if sound travels fastest through solids and slowest through gases, why does heat do the opposite? | Aren't they both just the vibration of molecules? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37quax/eli5_if_sound_travels_fastest_through_solids_and/ | {
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"Heat transfer in a gas is primarily through the movement of the gas. As the gas gets stirred up the hot gas can move across its container very quickly.\n\nA hot solid can transfer heat very quickly in the same way. Heat a bucket of ball bearings up. Then through the bucket of bearings across the room. All the heat just moved across the room in a second.",
"What you may be experiencing with feeling heat through gas is that gas tends to move further from the point where it got hot. It can travel. Where as the solid just sits there. You also experience a lot of heat in the form of radiation (light) comming off of something. Gas lets this radiation head straight to you. Solids have to absorb it first and heat up before you feel it. ",
"Heat transfers through convection (moving particles), conduction (particles transferring heat to adjacent particles), and radiation (particles giving off light that is absorbed by other particles). Convection dominates in gas because the gas can move around while conduction is important for solids. ",
"Sound travels faster through solids because there is not much room between molecules, so it doesn't take as long to bump in to the next moluecule, and sound is just the result of molucules bumping in to each other and transfering the energy of the sound to the next molecule in a chain. No molecule is ultimately moved from where it started.\n\nHeat Travels slower because each molecule has to keep moving to be hot, so you it takes a long time for each molecule to get moving and stay moving and get the next molecule to keep moving with it. All the molecules are made to move and keep moving in order to be hot.\n\nThink of it like this: \n\nSound is a letter passed from person to person in a crowd, the closer the crowd, the less each person has to move to pass the letter from one side to the other (turning and passing the letter vs. turning and walking a few feet and then passing it over)\n\nHeat is like a person trying to move across that same field and get everyone dancing. The bigger the crowd, the more people you need to individually get with and motivate to dance.- it's a lot more work."
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9s1auu | if bedbugs are so difficult to kill and control how come they haven’t infested every building and home? | Bedbugs are the one thing that keep me up at night. I can go into a full sweat thinking about them and this was my latest thought. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s1auu/eli5_if_bedbugs_are_so_difficult_to_kill_and/ | {
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"Many businesses and apartment buildings have routine pest control visit their buildings a few times a year and are usually able to keep on top of possible infestations.",
"Ex Rentokil technician here. \n\nBed bugs are difficult to get rid of. One of the most difficult pests I ever had to deal with, and the only one that gave me the creeps and had me worrying I’d take them home with me. \n\nThe issue with bed bugs is that they’re becoming immune to many of the pesticides available today. The one we use to use was not very nice and just the vapour would bring my skin out in rash after I’d sprayed a room down. \n\nSpraying in this manner can only really treat the floors and cracks and crevices. You can’t use it on the bed as obviously people have to sleep in them. \n\nFor clothes and beds we would heat them in a “room within a room” kind of setup for a few hours to kill them all and the eggs.\n\nThey will hide everywhere. Plug sockets, inside TVs, joints between furniture, etc etc. That’s the main issue with treating for them, you only have to miss a couple and the whole life cycle starts over again. \n\nThe other thing is they can go dormant for ages and then the vibrations from your feet and the carbon dioxide you breathe out wakes them up. \n\nAs for why they haven’t just infested every single house, well they’re a living organism and their goal isn’t to dominate the world it’s to survive. \nThey’re quite happy staying in one place for the most part because that’s where their food source goes to sleep, why make it hard on themselves? \n\nThey can and do move from room to room but the only way they can get to another building really is through luggage/clothes being moved or second hand furniture from an infested place.\n\nI’d recommend to always check your hotel room furniture and mattress before you put your bag down just to be safe, and thoroughly check any second hand furniture before buying too. ",
"They aren’t difficult to kill, just the pest prevention industry decided to lobby the government to ban the effective pest control. The substance they used to kill them isn’t illegal, it’s just illegal for them to use now, which they are happy with as a $100 treatment is now a $500 treatment. Farmers are still allowed to use the product. Countries that haven’t banned the product don’t have an issue with bed bugs. \n\nAs far as why they don’t infest everything, they don’t need to, they are happy with finding one food source which is you and they don’t need to go further away.",
"Like the above said. \n\nThey’re not small. They’re bigger than ants and easily visible to the naked eye. \n\nPull the sheets off and check the little folds around the edge of the mattress and any little crevices, also behind the headboard and the side tables. Especially in joints where wood meets wood.\n\nYou’ll either see live bugs or a load of little specks on the sheet or wood. That’s basically the excreted blood of their former hosts... ",
"I live in NYC and I got spooked when one of the ladies on my sales staff got infested.\n\n\nAfter seeing what she went through I got in touch with my insurance agent and he added coverage for a bed bug infestation to my existing policy. \n\n\nThe piece of mind is well worth the extra $30 a year. \n\n\nIf you're going to do it make sure it's thorough coverage. Most policies will only give you a few hundred dollars. ",
"Had the honour of sleeping in a bedbug infested room, pest control guy came weekly still took 2 months to finally stop them. Although the place I was at didnt really hurry with calling him, so it should have taken this long.\nAnd we were told to not move out of there, because then we would just spread it. (Happened before)\nI would honestly been OK with them, if I’ve not seen them all over me and my bed when I woke up at night. \nGood times.",
"Pure hatred. They can be eradicated if you're determined enough to give up everything to destroy them.\n\nAll it takes is an unquenchable smouldering spite that burns in your heart every moment of every day. Then you will find the will to achieve bedroom gentrification.\n\n...That, or exposure to a lingering cloud of pyrethrum. Shit. I'm getting hungry.",
"I lived in NYC for a few years and this quickly became a big concern of mine. There was a Victoria's Secret store on 5th Avenue that got infested and also a Hollister's, so people were being exposed to bed bugs by buying new clothes and simply visiting the stores. I'd read that some of the wood benches in the subway stations had been found to have bedbugs on them and that even brushing against someone on the subway (which is impossible to avoid) could be enough to take some home with you. Definitely not cool."
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4odcjl | is there any reason not to have a dash cam in the united states? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4odcjl/eli5_is_there_any_reason_not_to_have_a_dash_cam/ | {
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"Well, you have to buy it, you have to set it up, and you also have an impartial witness to YOUR behavior, as well as others.\n\nIf there are so many crappy drivers out there, logic suggests that if everyone had a dashcam, the bad drivers would be recording stuff that was their own fault. That doesn't benefit them.",
"the cost is all I can come up with. \n\nit could be used against you if you are at fault and someone see the camera. Not sure if you can be compelled to provide the footage.",
"I got pulled over once for speeding (90 in a 60) in a construction zone. It was Saturday morning and I was late for work, no other cars on the highway.\n\nThat is enough to get arrested for. \n\nThe cop asked if I had any recording equipment turned one, which I did not. \n\nHe gave me a ticket for 40 in a 30. \n\nI am willing to bet things would have been a lot worse and have followed the letter of the law if I was recording. "
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dtfff2 | why do some room temperature food items taste cold? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dtfff2/eli5_why_do_some_room_temperature_food_items/ | {
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"Your body feels temperature by heat loss, it doesn't really know the temperature number per se. That's why a wooden table feels hotter than a metal one, they are both at the same room temperature but you lose more heat by touching the metal one, so your body thinks it's colder",
"All items setting out are essentially the same temperature. What makes one item seem colder is its ability to transfer hear. An item that easily transfers heat seems and feels colder because it is rapidly transferring heat from your mouth and tongue. Similarly you get the same experience walking on a tile floor vs. carpeted floor. Tile transfers heat quickly hence it takes heat away from you feet leaving them feel cold"
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22eunv | how much repulsive force can two or more magnets produce? | I'd like to know if magnets on their own or using some combo can produce repulsive force of order like 1000N or so?
What factors hamper such things, like area, material etc? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22eunv/eli5_how_much_repulsive_force_can_two_or_more/ | {
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"It comes down to their strength, size, shape, and distance between them.\n\nHere is a calculator from a site that sells neodymium magnets, some of the strongest you can find\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nThe strongest I found was around 3000N between two magnets"
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2watkd | how is there more virtual money in the world than real money? | I have tried to understand this so many times but I just can't get my head around it. At what point did this occur?
If 10 people entrust £10 each to a bank, and the bank holds there money and invests it elsewhere, there is still the same amount of money. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2watkd/eli5how_is_there_more_virtual_money_in_the_world/ | {
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"~~Check out fractional reserve.~~ Banks are only required to hold a certain percentage of their claimed balances in real money. They create money by lending out more than they ~~actually have,~~ would be able to distribute in case of a run on the bank and get even more in return as interest. Consumer banks \"print\" far more money than central banks do by lending out money that doesn't actually exist. ",
" > If 10 people entrust £10 each to a bank, and the bank holds there money and invests it elsewhere, there is still the same amount of money.\n\nNo, that isn't true.\n\nSuppose the bank lends £100 to some other guy. That guy receives £100, of course. But the original 10 people still have £10 in their bank accounts. So the total amount of money is now £200.",
"First we have:\n\n > 10 people with £10 each. Total £100\n\nIf 10 people give the bank £10 :\n\n > 10 People with an IOU of £10 each\n\n > Bank with £100\n\n > Total : £100 + IOU of £100\n\nIf the bank loans out £50 to a person, expecting £60 later.\n\n > 10 People with an IOU of £10 each\n\n > 1 Person with £50\n\n > Bank with £50 + IOU of £60\n\n > Total : £100 + IOU of £160\n\nThe £160 being virtual, as he money doesn't exist it is merely a record of an IOU.\n\nIf all 10 people tried to withdraw, then the central bank could loan newly printed money to the bank.\n\n > 10 People with £10 each\n\n > 1 Person with £50\n\n > Bank with £50 + IOU of £60\n\n > Central bank with IOU of £100\n\n > Total : £150 + IOU of £160\n\nFinally, the person who borrowed £50 gets payed by some of the people £60 to pay the debt.\n\n > 4 People with £10 each\n\n > Bank with £110\n\n > Central bank with IOU of £100\n\n > Total : £150 + IOU of £160\n\nThe central bank doesn't want to load too much, or the currency will be devalued too quickly and enter hyper inflation as everyone dumps their worthless Pounds.\n"
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3t5t7n | why is it so easy to take in 10k refugees and house them rather than house homeless veterans? (in america) | I know this question may sound political but when I recently saw this, I thought it was a no brainer (meaning to house veterans rather than refugess).
Therefore, I'm assuming theres more to the story than just the simplistic *refugee vs. homeless veteran* narrative. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t5t7n/eli5_why_is_it_so_easy_to_take_in_10k_refugees/ | {
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"The state-funded resettlement agencies are going to assist them in finding housing and work for 90 days. If they have family, they'll be flown into the nearest resettlement center. After that, AFAIK, they receive no special treatment, but are free to get the same support from Health and Human Services that is already available to the homeless and others in need.\n\nThe fact that the US gov't gets to determine where they go might be a factor too. Homeless are not exactly proportionally spread out across the US, and cities/states can get a lot of flak for trying to move their homeless elsewhere, which wouldn't be an issue for the federal gov't. They can just drop refugees in smallish towns or less expensive cities that are prepared to take them.\n\nAlso a lot of long-term homeless, veterans or otherwise, are mentally ill. This may mean that they are unable/unwilling to ask for help, or that the shelters and such are unequipped to provide it.",
"One reason it is so difficult to find housing for homeless veterans is because of the high rate of mental issues and drug/alcohol addiction. \n\nThe State of Virginia recently announced that they'd effectively ended veteran homelessness in the state. But there are still a lot of homeless veterans, it's just that those veterans have refused help, or possibly can't be located/identified as homeless.",
"If homelessness could be solved by giving people homes we would have done it already.\n\nThe problem is that the homeless are homeless for a reason (and I am NOT saying they deserve it). If I took you today, took away your home, your money, everything you own and dropped you naked on the streets of Orlando within a year you would have a place, a job, and food in the fridge. The difference with the homeless is that there are generally significant addiction / mental health issues (or personality issues bordering on mental health) that prevent them from a) getting the help they need b) making good use of the help they get, and/or c) keeping/forming the kinds of relationships they need to maintain a job.\n\nIf we took all the homeless and put them in a house, and gave them an easy job, half of them would be back on the street within a few months.\n\nWhat the homeless need is a home, a job, AND serious psycological assistance together with social workers and support people. Even then it is going to be a craps shoot as to whether they can recover as our medical skill with mental health issues is very limited. But that is really the difference. It costs X to house, feed, and cloth someone, it costs 10 times X to also provide that person intense psycological, medical, and social intervention.\n\nAs one other side note... After some really horrible treatment we stopped forcing people to receive psychological treatements. That was a social policy decision that was 100% understandable and may or may not have been right.",
"For start, it's not exactly _easy_ to house 10k refugees.\n\nBut more importantly, most of the homeless in the USA (and most homeless veterans) are homeless due to mental and drug problems. It can be difficult to make them not homeless. The root cause is generally not that they don't have or can't afford a house, it's that they lack the ability to hold a job, can't manage to abide by legal rules often required to stay in shelters or rehousing projects, or have a tendency to break ties with and flee people trying to help them (due to, eg, untreated paranoia). It's a bad situation and more really ought to be done, but it probably _is_ rather more difficult than simply rehoming a bunch of refugees.",
"The real reason is that people only care about hot topics. Homeless people are old news and are always around.",
"A handful of things I'm not seeing others mention:\n\n* There are a lot of homeless veterans; estimates [of nearly 50,000](_URL_0_) are common\n* Homelessness is often a transient condition; e.g. there are people who are homeless during a transition (like being kicked out of an apartment but not having found a new one yet). This makes it harder to identify and help them.\n* Lack of political will to address the problem. Any debate about helping homeless people -- including homeless vets -- inevitably gets bogged down in politics centered around a cultural belief that people who are homeless somehow _deserve_ their plight. This is often masked/added to by fears about abuse of any sort of state-run human welfare program, as well as small-government politics that push back against any expansion of government services.\n\nOf course, at the end of it, we should do better by our veterans, and by homeless people in general. And doing it _still_ wouldn't prevent us from helping these 10,000 refugees. We can do both, we're a wealthy, inventive, and capable country.",
"Not answering your questions directly, but I do think it's ironic (read: infuriating) when the people who say \"what about veterans/homeless/hungry children???\" are generally the exact same people who rail against \"welfare\" & \"handouts\".",
"They're different challenges. \n\nTaking in entrepreneurial people and a workforce we lack is arguably a quick investment on the part of the U.S., not a charitable effort. \n\nOur economy is partly dependent on a group of farmers who are already past retirement age. They work such long hours, doing such tiring work that few of our citizens will consider the job, even if they had the knack and the calling. (It's not a desirable job for veterans, particularly not those who need to stay close to medical care in urban areas.)\n\nSyria has an abundance of experienced farm workers. \n\nI expect that we'll have small ethnic neighborhoods that become hotbeds of small business, it's how these things usually work. Many cities have neighborhoods like little Italy and Chinatown where a generation of immigrant neighbors helped each other start restaurants and laundromats and gas stations and schools and learn the language. They often gentrified very poor areas, and made them safe places for tourists and people coming in from suburban neighborhoods for a good meal and a nice night out. \n\n",
"Just as others have mentioned, homeless veterans (as well as other homeless individuals) are plagued with mental issues. This in turn makes homelessness somewhat of a \"choice\". So housing them doesn't really solve the homelessness problem. \n\nJust to explain what I mean by \"choice to become homeless\" imagine you're a person that's compliant with your medication and you are in government housing.... Now that's great but somehow with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia you wake up one day and decide to just not take your meds. This leads you to mania/depression/psychosis....Which in turn makes you end up on the street if you don't have a strong support system. So it's not really your choice to want to be homeless because you know that this situation is not good for you but because of your mental condition you end up making poor choices leading you to living on the streets.\n\nThere are programs and medications trying to solve this like social workers visiting your home or depot shots that are long acting that you get once a month. \n\nTldr; a very simplified explanation. Homes don't solve homelessness, mental issues often rear it's ugly head even if you're compliant with medication.",
"I don't know about the US, but over here the public housing tenants usually have rules and guidelines they need to follow. No drugs/clean drug tests, no parties, etc. The problem is that a lot of the homeless people are either drug addicts, mentally ill, or a mix of both. And most of the time unable to take care of themselves OR their homes.\n\nFrom what I've read, a lot (half) of the US veterans are drug dependent. And I'm guessing that the subset of those again, which make up the homeless veterans, have a MUCH higher concentration of hard drug addicts and mentally ill(severe PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, etc.) people. \n\n\nThis is only a lot of speculation from my side, and from the various papers and articles I've read on the topic. There could of course be a ton of other reasons, but when it comes to public housing and homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness is a HUGE factor. And it's very universal. \n\n",
"These are the kind of arguments ISIS is hoping for. They would love for us to treat these people poorly. It makes their argument for them and also will embitter and solidify hatred for the west in many refugees. It's 10k people in a country of 300 million. \n\nThis Australian reporter nails it. _URL_0_",
"There are already programs in place to house veterans. Programs that pay their rent or provide housing subsidies, programs to furnish the homes, programs for food/power, etc Theoretically, there should be no homeless veterans. The reality is that it is sometimes hard for a mentally ill/addicted person to adhere to basic behaviors that keep their home. Things like paying the rent with your subsidy money rather than spending it on other things or not creating disturbances in your apartment community, etc. The Obama administration hired thousands of social workers specifically to help address these issues when he went into office.\n\n My best friend was one of the social workers hired. It's a real, detailed and implemented initiative, not just lip service.\n_URL_0_\n\nMy contention is not that homelessness is not the main issue here, but having enough mental health beds and a overzealous commitment to community housing of the mentally ill when long term inpatient may make more sense for that individual. \n\nIn terms of refugees, it's always a bit of a crapshoot when you choose to help someone. Whether it's a friend who is struggling or supporting a charity. It's best to do it without expectation of return. \n\nStudies have shown that an influx of immigrants/refugees historically has had no negative impact on jobs as they create jobs/businesses to support the immigrant/refugee community.\n_URL_1_\n\nIt' a complicated issue.\n\n\n",
"I work with people with disabilities and many of them are veterans. Alot of these guys have mental illness of some form or another, many from their service, but the sad thing is some would be \"normal\" people if they had support sooner. I just had a guy who was medically discharged for being diagnosed bipolar. He lost his job, income and sense of self worth all at once and has been in and out of shelters for 10+ yrs where he got into drugs and alcohol. He waited for 2 yrs for the VA to see him and he said he stopped going after a few visits because he didn't see the point. He's been to jail and prison enough and is super jaded at this point that he doesn't seek help from anyone. \nVeterans not getting the care they need is a massive problem in our country, but one that's much more complicated than just giving them resources, jobs and support. The issue is so complicated and so many people think they have a simple answer, when they have no idea that the window to help alot of these guys closes long before they issues even addressed.",
"For fucks sake, why does it have to be one or the other? Refugees and homeless people are both groups of people who are in need of our help. I understand that resources are spread thin, and the growing wealth gap means that more people than ever need more help than ever, but when you have normal families who are putting their children, who don't know how to swim, on fucking rafts, the alternative for them back at home must be terrible. At least the homeless people in the United States don't have a militia that literally wants to murder their families. This doesn't mean that I don't care about the homeless population, especially homeless veterans and the mentally ill. Instead of this thread reading like the comments section on Fox news, I wish people were talking about ways to actually help both of these groups. For example, I know I can donate time/money/food to food banks/shelters/refugee relocation organizations, but how can I help the mentally ill homeless population? Reddit should have a community service day where people actually do stuff rather than just talk about doing stuff on the internet. Anyways, I seem to be getting carried away.... Let the dowvotes rain.",
"Our government (or really, just about any very large, heavily scrutinized organization) isn't flexible enough to adjust resource allocation like this. \n\nThe Departments of State and HHS have authority to deal with refugees and budget authority at their disposal specifically for this task. Those agencies have no authority to decide to re-allocate their funds or staff to deal with homeless veterans. It would probably require legislative action, which is a non-starter given partisan gridlock.",
"A lot of misinformation and assumptions in this thread. People frequently assume that homeless people in the U.S. are homeless because of mental health or drug problems, but this is just not the case. In fact, only 16-20% of people who are homeless suffer from a mental illness, and that includes people who developed a mental illness while living the hard life on the streets ([1](_URL_2_), [2](_URL_0_)). Compare that to the figure they give of 6% in the non-homeless population, which is at any given time; the rate of having any diagnosable mental illness in one's lifetime is much higher. While mental illness and addiction are certainly negative forces that either contribute to someone slipping into homelessness or continue to interfere with people finding and staying in a home, they are just a couple of many other factors. Let alone that homeless people aren't just individuals, but children and families as well.\n\nI was personally involved in a research study looking at risk of death in the homeless population, and I did a documentary project about Dignity Village, an encampment outside of Portland, Oregon. In the research project, neither I nor anyone else on my particular team interviewed anyone who had an obvious mental illness. Many people with mental illnesses can appear normal, but my point is, that the homeless person ranting and raving to themselves is not the norm. We tend to be be biased by the [availability heuristic](_URL_1_) and the experiences we have of seriously ill homeless people may bias our opinions about the population in general.\n\nIn the documentary project, most of the people I interviewed became homeless due to medical expenses. I couldn't find a link, but I heard a story on NPR about how a large percentage of Americans couldn't scrape together $5,000 if they really needed it, not borrowing from friends/family, working another job, selling assets, etc. In other words, there are many hardworking people who are just $5-10k away from losing their home. It's not so hard for an injury, legal expense, etc. to hit $5,000+.\n\nIn answer to OPs question, I think part of it is due to the stigma of homelessness, which we can observe in this thread. Mental illness and drug addictions are seen as deficiencies in the individual. In some way, it assumes homelessness is someone's fault, rather than a collective failure on our part. It's not even about guilt though. Homelessness costs us all, in government services, and lost productivity of what people could have done.",
"The real question is why should the West be forced to take in millions of Muslim refugees when the rich Gulf Arab states refuse to take in any?\n\n\n\n",
"What I don't understand is why we can fly in and house 10K random refugees but can't let the translators from Iraq and Afghanistan who actively helped and supported our operations there into the country.",
"Correct me if I am wrong, but haven't most homeless veterans ended up on the streets after losing the homes they had? \n\nIn many cases these are people that are on the streets through choice AND circumstance. Most of them had homes at one time, but due to any number of issues affecting veterans (PTSD, alcoholism, depression, lack of funds, lack of jobs, etc.), they could not maintain or pay their rent/mortgage.",
"Because in this country there has been an overwhelming sense of white guilt for fucking up a shitty place that was shitty before we got there and will continue to be shitty until somebody does what it takes to end it ",
"Let's be realistic though 10k refugees is hardly a large amount. \n\nThe average city in america has 20k people. Out of all the cities this is the average. \n\nIf anything we aren't doing enough for both refugees and veterans. Me being the latter is considered successful for a veteran and I'm barely above McDonald's fry cook. ",
"Refugees (at least the ones fleeing Daesh/ISIS) generally aren't actually all that poor. They just don't want to go back and get shot. They had to ditch a large number of their possessions to flee, but they have relatives, a community, etc. that they can also ask for support from. (Remember people complaining that the refugees had cell phones? They bought those cell phones in the days before terrorists were trying to kill/subjugate them.) The really poor in the area generally didn't have the resources to flee.\n\nThey may have less money at the time, but they have a large community to help support them and work skills and a work history that help out with the employment thing. \n\nA side note, giving housing to the homeless actually works. [Utah, not a place associated with liberals, is doing this.](_URL_0_) It's cheaper than providing other support services and it actually works.",
"10000??\n\nHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA\n\nSincerely,\n\nSweden",
"Simplistically, it's not easy, and it's not easier. To the greater point, the current administration has made tremendous advances in housing homeless vets. I live in Houston, and as part of the Obama administration initiative we have effectively ended veteran homelessness in our city. We can't *force* anyone to come in off the streets, but any willing vet in Houston can be placed in housing virtually overnight. \n\nEntering the US as a refugee is the most difficult, most heavily screened/scrutinized method of entry. On average it takes approximately 3 years to obtain this status legally. Last year the US made it possible for refugee children at the US/Mexico border eligibile for refugee status, and a year later the number that we have fully processed is zero. \n\n Regarding terrorism, it would be much more expedient for someone to enter the US posing as a student, tourist, or businessperson. ",
"Vets (and other mentally ill people) don't all do well in housing. You can get vets housing and pay for it and many still end up on the streets. Refugees are generally working age people who can hold jobs. The governments also rarely *care* how a refugee is doing more than 2 or 3 years out.\n\nNew Orleans did [end homelessness](_URL_0_) \"functionally\", their biggest hurdle was figuring out where the homeless vets were and getting them to come in.",
"This is not a zero sum situation. We could easily do both. The fact that we don't is another matter.",
"A lot of veterans do not wish to live within rules or around other people who live in low-income housing. Often times due to this they are labeled as mentally ill. This compounds their refusal to deal with \"the system\" because they've known of other veterans who have lost their possession and freedom.\n",
"Homelessness is more than not having a house. It's a complex overlapping set of issues that lead people to be unable to hold down a conventional home and/or lifestyle. It usually isn't their fault that they've ended up in this situation, but there is more to their situation than not having a place to live.\n\nRefugees on the other hand often have no problems other than having been displaced by war or natural disasters. House them, and they are likely to establish normal mainstream lives quickly.\n\nFinally, I don't know why you are asking about veterans in particular. All of this applies equally to anyone who's homeless. Experiencing war as a combatant is only one of many forms of trauma that can lead a person to a place in life where they end up on the street.",
"Theres no reason why the causes of homelessness (substance abuse, lack of education, mental illness, disability) would be present in any great numbers among refugees. Actually my gut tells me that they are probably lower than the societal average. These people tend to get settled and moving forward with their lives pretty quickly.\n",
"I live in San Francisco. One of the problems with the homeless population is that many of them make a choice to stay homeless. In SF there are many shelter's and housing assistance programs for the homeless population that go unused. The reason being is that these facilities are drug, weapon and alcohol free. People who are serious about getting off the streets will use the services but much of the homeless population is either mentally ill or with substance abuse issues. It is very sad.",
"Because the Syrian refugees fit a political narrative. The homeless vets are a little more complicated because of the cases of mental illness and injury but it still could be done. The problem is that the vets can not be used as a political weapon against the apposing party. The narrative will be \"look at these awful republicans who don't want him to be safe (insert picture of a child).\" When you live in the world of identity politics anybody you can pose as a victim you do it. Also there seems to be a rush with this current administration to try and fix any problem except our own. The VA is a perfect example. Veterans died while on secret waiting lists and exactly 1 person lost their job. But that got brushed under the rug with the \"I have launched a full investigation.\" But a chance to bring a bunch of people we have no way of getting into this country that could possibly cause serious harm, let's do it. ",
"One answer that most people wouldn't think of is that the money used to pay for veterans' benefits and the money used to pay for services rendered to refugees are separate allotments of the federal budget. The department of veteran's affairs is funded under the defense department, while refugee services are funded by the Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA) account of the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPs) appropriations subcommittee. Each of these programmatic accounts are beholden to spending limitations established by the previous fiscal year's continuing resolution or budget agreement. \n\nThe MRA account is much more lenient in its spending restrictions due to the inherent unpredictability of refugee needs. Therefore it is easier to reallocate resources in response to a crisis such as Syria. Veteran needs are very accurately tracked over years and even decades and almost every penny is already allocated in one way or another. \n\nThe federal funding for these programs is finite and the buck has to stop somewhere. Unfortunately it frequently stops on the doorstep of those who are least able to advocate for themselves; the homeless and the mentally ill. \n\nSource: working at a major international humanitarian aid organization involved in organizing funding for both these issues. ",
"Because many if not most homeless people, including veterans, are mentally troubled. Whether due to diseases like schizophrenia, PTSD or addiction they are for some reason unable to healthily function in normal society. We house tons of homeless but that won't solve their issue and they tend to end up back on the street. \n\nRefugees on the other hand are otherwise mentally and physically sound, give them an opportunity and most of them will be able to become self-sufficient after a short grace period.\n\nSimply put, it's a lot easier to house someone for 90 days than it is to heal someone with serious problems no matter how deserving they are.",
"We have an economic system that requires some percentage of the population to be unemployed and unpaid. They logic goes \"if people could live a good life without working, then nobody would work\".\n\nSo until something very deep down is changed, we will always have poverty and homeless.",
"Because homeless veterans aren't homeless because they came back from war and got lost on the way to finding a job and home.\n\nThey're homeless because they're mentally ill and/or drug addicted. Just like non-veteran homeless people are usually mentally ill and/or drug addicted.\n\nRefugees are not. They often actually have potential to become productive citizens.",
"I hate saying this, but after being in the military, current and former military members get no sympathy from me unless they were directly involved in combat. Keep in mind A LOT of us will never/have never seen real combat. \n\nIt's not perfect, but the military provides a hell of a lot more transition assistance that private companies that will simply fire you. There's terminal leave, mandatory classes you take before you are allowed to leave. You know well in advance (as in, years) the exact date you will stop getting pay and benefits. If you can't figure your shit out with these advantages, I'm sorry but that's on you. \n\n\nTHAT BEING SAID. The way we treat combat wounded/PTSD soldiers is ATROCIOUS. If Uncle Sam sends you to kill and you get injured that should get you lifetime medical support, whatever it takes to get you fully functional. Can't get fully functional? Well then that's uncle sam's responsibility too, for life. Too expensive? Stop going to fucking war. Take what you want. Pay for it. ",
"the veterans were written off by the government long before they came back from war. expendable fodder for the war machine",
"Hello, immigrant here (well, American citizen now).\n\nWhen we arrived to US, me, my sister, mother, father, 4 of us, right as we landed in DC in late 1990s, we were $2700 in debt to US government for our plane tickets. Our whole wealth included roughly $40 in cash, and whatever cloth we were allowed to bring.\n\nWe were placed in an apartment building in NW DC, our rent was $650 and paid for for the first 2 months by whatever agency/organization oversaw our immigration. We were enrolled in foodstamps program for 3 months, I don't recall how much, but I know we had to be careful and stretch it out (we ate a lot of hot dogs...fucking hot dogs, I hate hot dogs now). We had to start paying back the airplane tickets within 6 months as well.\n\nMe and my sister were both high-school aged, and you can't buy school supplies with food stamps, so that was kind of shitty, but we got some help from the school. Dad got a job as a dishwasher at a hotel within a month, mom followed soon as a housekeeper at a different place. Our plane tickets were paid off within a year, and the rest is history.\n\nUS government spent 3 months worth of food stamps on 4 of us, and that's all, not to mention the debt we had to pay to US government. We pretty much paid $2700 to have a privilege of being homeless in this country, and we were/are grateful. \n\nThis is why it's easier to take in 10K refugees than it is to house the homeless. There seems to be an illusion that immigrants are given massive wealth and money and support to come to the US. Sure the social services are available to us as well, as they are to anybody else, but that's just that, like anybody else, no special treatment, and that's wonderful in more ways than one.",
"Because nobody in this country gives a rat's ass about the working-class poor. Not even themselves.",
"The biggest issue with finding homeless people stable housing is not necessarily actually finding the housing. In many cases, there is often mental illness and/or substance use issues which present huge challenges for individuals who are seeking to live independently.",
"Why is it that I did not hear *anyone* expressing outrage at the deplorable state of need of our veterans until there was talk of bringing in refugees from the general area where the veterans fought? So, I guess there is a finite amount of caring for others we can manage after all, but unfortunately, not enough for both groups.",
"Why not house all homeless? \n\nVeterans are great- but people are people. Most homeless have mental issues. They should be in facilities but Reagan did away with that I believe ",
"The truth of the matter is this is a straw man argument. \n\nNo one that supports the refugees is going to say we shouldn't take care of the vets. In fact personally I think mental health care and rehabilitation needs to be skyrocketed for vets. Many people on this side of the fence are actively fighting for these causes. \n\n\nNow on the flip side, yes some people are going to say support vets and not the refugees. But really, are these people out I their communities advocating for human rights? Or is their idea of \"supporting the troops\" restricted to sending them to fight and letting PTSD and drug addiction destroy their lives when they return stateside",
"Seeing as there are an estimated 18.6 million vacant houses in the US I don't understand why there are any homeless people at all. Empty houses outnumber homeless people about 5 to 1. We could easily house them AND have room for refugees.",
"Politicians don't actually care about veterans, they just lie about it and milk the public's positive emotional response to stay/grow in power. What do most of them do themselves to help? NOTHING. \n\nThe only thing that gets \"done\" is mention it in speeches with everybody watching to gain falsified respect. When has a filthy rich politician ever spent a couple thousand of their own 100+ MILLION to help even one veteran? Never. ",
"Because to too many people that would look like socialism, which from what I understand about the US is scary and bad. But helping foreigners is good and happy because then the US doesn't look selfish.",
"Presumably because when you have 10k refugees queued up and asking you for housing, suddenly, you can task a department or committee with making it happen, give them a budget and a deadline and say \"get it done\". \n\nThe homeless veteran problem is more complicated, first because they're *already* homeless and therefore necessarily difficult to locate and get into contact with. Second, you have to contend with the challenges faced with housing a population that is already homeless, such as possible substance abuse, mental illness, criminal records that might disqualify them from certain housing arrangements and habituation to a homeless lifestyle (a fancy way of saying, they're either conditioned to accept homelessness and will be difficult to get off the street, or they're homeless by choice (or, \"choice\" in the case of the mentally ill). This is a problem that Gov. Macauliffe ran into with his ambitious (and largely successful) project to be the first state to eradicate veteran homelessness: some of them refuse to go inside. \n\nFinally, you have the question of who's to deal with the homeless vets. The DoD? The VA? HUD? Any of the other innumerable alphabet soup agencies dealing with veterans, homelessness, low income housing and every other damn thing. You'll have a bureaucratic pissing match between departments passing the buck (not their problem) and others fighting for a piece of the funding that comes with it. \n\nI could go on. \n\nBasically, it's easier for a government to come up with an ad hoc solution to something like a refugee crisis because it's pressing and there's not likely to be much of an argument over who has to deal with it. Housing an equivalent number of homeless veterans would likely present numerous challenges including the variety of issues endemic to dealing with *any* homeless population, the political football that is how we treat our veterans, and the challenges required of wrangling a bureaucracy in a constructive way and pointing it at the problem. ",
"Most refugees are ready to make a life and desire to do so. They are given really basic training to learn the language, etc. and helped to find work, provided housing and help with other social services, health care and living in our society. The process takes 6 - 18 months usually, and then they move on and become productive or unproductive members of society.\nVeterans have basically the same benefits, and more. They have opportunities for housing, healthcare, education & jobs. The issue, as we all know, is that whatever it is our veterans need, we've done a shit job providing them. If we're talking about homeless veterans, then the biggest issue is mental health. The VA, the gov't, has been reluctant to address mental health issues resulting from war in part because it's a relatively new idea. PTSD was something that the gov't, military and VA - started to CONSIDER after Vietnam, but none of those vets ever received treatment for it, because the higher ups at the time didn't all believe it was a real thing, or a big deal. There is a huge issue as well with general medical care provided to veterans, as we've all heard stories of veterans who have suffered due to long delays for treatment. I think the issue we face is that caring for veterans, is something a lot of people would like to keep \"our dirty little secret.\" Nobody wants to talk about the VA, and what veterans need. The commercials say Join the Army, Navy, Air Force and be super, and defend our country and be a hero. Nobody wants to mention the fact you might not die, but you might get really really jacked up - mentally or physically. Nobody wants to face this. I say, let's face it. Let's be real - war fucks people up - but for those who took the risk, for all of us, they deserve the best, and we should acknowledge their existence every day and know that they are being taken care of.",
"20-25% of homeless people, vets among them, have chronic mental illnesses. about 20% of homeless people have a felony while close to 60% of homeless men have a criminal record. Most of the homeless people have other issues that keep them homeless.",
"why can't it be both? Why are we saying we have to choose?",
"TIL we are getting 10k refugees?",
"The short answer is that it isn't hard to get housing for homeless veterans. The hard part is helping someone overcome the circumstances that led to homelessness in the first place. \"Someone blew up my home\" is a lot easier to fix than \"I struggle each day with crippling depression and PTSD.\"\n\nObviously, not every homeless veteran (or homeless anyone) has massive problems like that. But quite a few do. And some areas have made major strides in solving those problems. But most places don't see it as a priority.",
"Not saying that 10k refugees isn't much, but it isn't much. Even Norway have taken 20-30k last week, and we're tiny, low populated and really *ucking far north country. And that includes houses money and food for free for all accepted. So idon't exactly think the question is relevant.",
"It's trendier to go for the current top hashtags. People genuinely don't give two shits about veterans unless its near a memorial holiday, or John Oliver just mentioned them on his show, they have about a 5 day window on either side of that where they pop up on the news or reddit. After that no one gives a shit.",
"I'm a veteran and have to say for as much crap as the VA gets, there are services provided by the VA (and other agencies) to ensure that no veteran should ever be truly, on the streets homeless. \n\nThe issue as I understand it is that it is very difficult to advertise these services to the truly mentally Ill people who need them the most, much less find them, and more difficult still to convince them to take up the offer. ",
"I've only done work with homeless people once, so my point of view is obviously limited, and I'm also from Chile, not the US, but here it goes:\n\nAlmost all if not all of the homeless people I met, and have met, suffered from various degrees of mental illness. The ones I spoke to didn't even care for getting help, some had family but preferred the streets, etc.\n\nI'm not sure if homeless veterans are similar, but maybe they don't wanna be relocated. That seemed to be the most common gripe, they didn't wanna leave wherever they were, they had their reasons, and that was that.",
"Homeless vet ya say how about helping homeless people in general regardless of their armed service status?",
"This will probably get banned,but I don't care. I have no affiliation with the charity other than donating money,\n\nThere is a charity _URL_0_ that I give to every year. I usually give them $ 5K(in 2012 I gave them$8k). They don't preach to the homeless or force them in to rehab from the first day.\n\nFirst thing they do is house the people,then they start working on the underlying issues that caused the homelessness. \n\nI first was made aware of this program through a local news story that,eventually,led to a 60 minutes piece that was filmed in my hometown,Nashville.\n\nI am begging the mods or other redditors to not report this post in hopes that a few people will help their cause. No amount is too small.",
"It's ironic that the vets/current military personnel are responsible for the flood of refugees in the first place, but then the refugees will be taken better care of than the vets. ",
"Look...I've served for over 12 years now and have seen great and terrible people come in and leave.\n\nThe idea that homeless vets are somehow a special class is a really lazy generalization. Just like anybody else, if they made good decisions they're probably not going to be living on the street. If they made bad ones, be it financial or disciplinary, they may be struggling now. Odds are...they were a shitbag in the military and they're being denied VA befits as a result. They may still be a vet but they're probably also not necessarily a good person.",
"A lot of these homeless vets (like most homeless people) are difficult to employ. And since we don't provide much in the way of welfare for single men in this country they end up homeless. Most of the Syrian refugees on the other hand are employable though the language barrier is something most of them will have to overcome.",
"There is much greater International pressure for the US to take in some immigrants when other industriazed nations are doing their parts. The UN would like the US to take even more refugees.\n\nVeterans are a domestic issue. Any increases in spending for Veterans program would need to be created by Congress. Our Republican run Congress is actually doing the opposite of that, trying to cut spending on Veteran benefits.\n\nCongress is already making a stink about the money that will be spent on Syrian refugees.\n\nThe irony is that the people complaining about refugees getting help and not Veterans by and large voted in the politicians who have tried so hard to cut benefits for combat Veterans. Veterans groups have been condemning The Republican led Congress vote after vote the last few years.\n\nIf you guys want better benefits for Veterans quit voting Republican. ",
"I suspect that it is because refugees do not have the types of problems that cause chronic homelessness such as mental health and addiction issues. Refugees are normal people holding taking care of themselves until they are forced to leave by violence. ",
"For one thing, it isn't true. I am a refugee caseworker. Even for people who assisted US forces in Iraq, resettlement takes years; to say nothing of random people who are fleeing. The US, given its size, the number of refugees, and resources available, takes in very few, even compared to countries in Europe, to say nothing of states in the ME.\n\nAs far as I know, once they are in the US there is really no guarantee of housing after the first 1-2 months.",
"It's an election year and there are much more pandering mileage in refugees than the VA. \nWhy? Vets already know the VA is a total administrative disaster and the politicians know real change takes time. Time to reform isn't sexy and it doesn't make for a powerful slogan or attack ad. Painting others as Racists or xenophobes is quick, painless, usually specious and utterly irrelevant to the issue at hand. ",
"10k is nothing. Germany is much smaller (the size of Idaho) but has 90 million people, and are taking in many many times that much. ",
"I don't care logical reasons any of you put out there. It's all bullshit. Theres no fucking reason in this world that soldiers are good enough to defend their country but not good enough to get proper medical attention, medication, and a home. I'm honestly all for refugees coming to my country (America). Especially women and children. However, our soldiers deserve to be put first. And I believe it's truly a slap in the face to those soldiers. These brave men and women didn't start these wars. They don't necessarily even believe in the reasons that they're in war to begin with. But they bravely volunteer and get treated like shit when they get home. ",
"Simply putting homeless in homes won't solve the homeless issue. You have to remember that most homeless also have mental illnesses that prevent them from getting employment. Or even caring about upkeep of the house and the neighborhood or themselves. ",
"Why not house everyone? \n\nOh right cause there's some part of being assholes we still find intriguing.",
"I'm not even sure why you felt the need to add \"veteran\" to homeless\n\nIsn't \"why can we house refugees but we can house the homeless?\" An interesting enough question?\n\nAs if only homeless VETERANS matter?\n\nI don't like giving special treatment for profession. ",
"You get more karma from helping refugees since they are trendy right now. Homeless veterans are not cool.",
"It's not that taking in refugees is easy but rather housing the vets is difficult. Most often, these vets suffer from disorders that are root cause of why they are homeless in the first place. Be it drug addiction or mental health (PTSD, schizophrenia, etc). Helping this population then becomes extraordinarily difficult and is not an issue that money alone can solve. ",
"What does being a veteran have to do with it?\nAren't most homeless people in need of housing?\n\nThe point you're trying to prove with your question is biased in itself.",
"If they join our military, they, too, will come out neglected with PTSD and have a high chance of becoming homeless. ",
"It's 10,000 refugees. That's nothing.\n\nThere are a minimum of 60,000 homeless people just in NYC. And that's the minimum, taken as a census in CITY shelters(not including privately run shelters or people actually on the street) during the summer months. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me the actual population was 3x that.\n\nIt's easy because 10k people is a drop in the bucket. The population of homeless veterans far outstrips that. Not saying we shouldn't do something about that too. It's not a zero sum game. It's easier with 10k because we both know where they are and it's a hot button issue.",
"I just want to point out that \"refugees or homeless\" is a false dichotomy that anti-immigration / xenophobic entities are using to appeal to emotion in people who normally wouldn't be anti-immigrant or xenophobes. This has been going on for some time in Europe among extreme nationalistic parties and recently also popped up among my American Facebook friends feeds. ",
"I believe it's because the refugees weren't responsible for the situation they are in. The veterans on the other side (all the ones after Vietnam) voluntary enlisted and are therefore responsible for their own situation. ",
"Beyond the logistical and policy aspects, it's because liberal authoritarians that impose their wishes upon others have a mental disorder that causes then to be concerned with everything and everyone else but their own due to a self-loathing complex. It's, ironically, very much narcissistic, i.e., \"see what a good person **I** am because **I** did XYZ because **I** see **myself** as a progressive, which **I** have been trained to believe is of the highest order and shows how much better **I** am\". \n\nAlthough these people may do things with a claim of being out of the goodness of their heart, it's really primarily about making themselves feel better about themselves due to a self-esteem deficiency. It's primarily a manifestation of a rift or shallow parental relationships and the social fabric they exist in. It's very much related to other compulsive behaviors like in situations where parents neglect their kids but are very involved in all other things and people's lives, or even hoarding pets or things. In both cases there is a compulsion to do something so, in their mind, they will be perceived as great, something they have no capacity to generate themselves due to the aforementioned low-self-esteem and to fill that void, but which makes them ignore real priorities around them. It's really pretty classic narcissism. It's the same reason that people are obsessed with the welfare of pets in general or their pet specifically, yet ignore larger issues around them. ",
"The #1 reason homeless people are homeless is because they have bad problems. Whether it's drug abuse, alcoholism, or mental illness... so they really can't take care of themselves.\n\nRefugees, on the other hand, are regular people who are just on the run.",
"We haven't actually taken in 10,000. Only 2,000 so far. 10,000 is a plan over multiple years. By comparison there are 500,000 homeless veterans and like 100,000 are helped by the VA in a given year. So its obviously the numbers. Your question really isn't worded very fairly.",
"Mental illness, many homeless people suffer from it, not just the veterans. Often they are not able to maintain a home or a job even with adequate support. \n\nRefugees on the other hand may be highly motivated to make a new start.",
"In a nutshell, because a large portion of homeless people (both vet and non-vet) have mental health and/or substance abuse issues that end up undermining efforts to help them. Refugees generally don't have those issues.",
"personally i think anyone who has served their country should have the option of free housing for life. "
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[
"http://nchv.org/index.php/news/media/background_and_statistics/#faq"
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[
"http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/tv-shows/walked-aly-hits-out-at-isis-over-paris-attacks-calls-them-weak/news-story/e884afd6dd7781d6f7a105b321ca5d2d"
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[
"http://www.va.gov/homeless/about_the_initiative.asp",
"http://www.factcheck.org/2010/05/does-immigration-cost-jobs/"
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[],
[],
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[
"http://www.portlandrescuemission.org/learn-more/causes-of-homelessness/",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic",
"http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/why.html"
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"https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04/17/the-surprisingly-simple-way-utah-solved-chronic-homelessness-and-saved-millions/"
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qs220 | why war is bad for the economy | I've heard people talk about the "broken window fallacy". What is this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qs220/eli5_why_war_is_bad_for_the_economy/ | {
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"text": [
"War is good if the government buys your stuff. See these charts for [Boeing](_URL_1_), [BAE](_URL_2_), [Lockheed Martin](_URL_0_), all of which get tons of money from the US government to build weapons. The Iraq War kicked off in 2003, you can see that it was very profitable, at least until 2008 when the markets started to realize that the banks had artificially inflated all their numbers.\n\nEvery dollar spent on tanks, bombs and bullets is a dollar that is not spent on health care, bridges, roads, education, parks, or nuclear fusion. \n\nAnd not to mention, every dollar the government spends is supposed to come out of the taxpayers' pockets. When they eventually take your dollars, you can't spend them on beanie babies or pogs or slap bracelets. So the government takes the people's money, uses it to buy bombs, and uses the bombs to kills brown people. God Bless America!"
]
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"https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1331508115777&chddm=991576&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:LMT&&fct=big",
"https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1331508190831&chddm=991576&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:BA&&fct=big",
"https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1331508274332&chddm=1298451&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=LON:BA&&fct=big"
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41f716 | the heisenberg uncertainty principle and how it affects the development of teleportation. | Title | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41f716/eli5_the_heisenberg_uncertainty_principle_and_how/ | {
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"The Uncertainty principle is a principle which states that the velocity and position of a subatomic particle cannot be known at the same time. This is due to properties of wave functions and fourier transformations that is out of scope for ELI5.\n\nIt has nothing to do with the development of teleportation because that is impossible. Nothing can travel faster than light.",
"I don't know what teleportation has to do with this, but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that there is an inverse relationship between your knowledge of an electron's position and its velocity.\n\nIn other words, there are two things you can know about any given electron at any given time; where it is, and how fast its moving. Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that the more confident you are about where it is, the less you know about how fast its moving, and the more you know about how fast its moving, the less you know about where it is. You cannot be absolutely confident of both at the same time. ",
"The connection to sci-fi style teleportation is that in order for a device to \"beam\" you anywhere, it must be able to reconstruct the structures of the body, all the way down to the positions of every atom and even every electron. Misplacing electrons would interrupt existing, ongoing chemical reactions and start unpredictable new ones. That would kill any living thing."
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48p7d5 | why are more area codes introduced to regions? how can they be running out of phone numbers? | Our area is introducing a second area code, for the reason that we are "running out of phone numbers". However by my calculation there are 282,475,249 possible 7 digit phone number combinations (7^10 ) which is close to the population of the United States (~318,900,000 people). How can we be running out of phone numbers in such a small area if the number of possible phone numbers is so close to the population of the ENTIRE U.S.? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48p7d5/eli5why_are_more_area_codes_introduced_to_regions/ | {
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"Your math is wrong it's 10^7, not 7^10.\n\n10^7 is just 10 million. Also, a few of these numbers are not valid - so it's actually several million but not quite 10 million possibilities.\n\nWhen you count home phones, mobile phones, pagers, and business phones, it's easy to see how the number of phone numbers in a region is larger than its population. Also, they like to assign a new area code before they actually run out based on anticipated demand so that there's a long transition period.\n",
"As others have stated, your math is incorrect, there are only 10,000,000 possible numbers. But that gets reduced even further:\n\nPhone numbers can't start with 0 or 1, so there's 2 million numbers right there that are completely invalid. 200-0000 is the first possible valid phone number. Anything beginning with 555 is invalid, so remove 10,000 more numbers from the pool of valid numbers. Now, any x11 prefix is invalid too. Those are reserved for information, 911, etc. 80,000 more numbers out of the pool. So an area code only has fewer than 8 million possible valid numbers.\n\nNow it gets more complicated. Numbers have historically been assigned to carriers in blocks of 10,000 - basically, a telecom company owns a prefix. With number portability, this line has been blurred somewhat, my phone number is an AT & T owned prefix because they were my first cellular carrier, but I'm on T-Mobile. But, nonetheless, a smaller local carrier might own a block of 10,000 numbers, say with the 321 prefix, but only be using 2,000 of them. In the meantime, Verizon is quickly running out of free numbers in the dozens of blocks they own in an area code. They can't assign numbers out of the 321 prefix because they don't own it. So an area code could be running out of numbers when major carriers can't get any more free blocks, even if there are some free numbers in it.\n\nNow, you have landlines, mobile phones, business lines (some offices may have hundreds, if not thousands of incoming numbers in an area code). Tablets and other devices on a cellular network have a phone number assigned too even though the number can't be used for anything. Between my cell phone, LTE iPad, office phone, and home security system which uses the cellular network as a backup, I'm using 4 phone numbers. Suddenly, the 7 million valid numbers in an area code doesn't go very far in a large metro area.",
"\"Area Codes\" used to select the controlling switch group.\n\nSo listen to old movies. \"Operator I'd like Klondike-362.\" That word \"Klondike\" was the name of the telephone office (typically it's street name or neighborhood name).\n\nThe ability to direct-dial the phone was invented by a guy named [Strowger](_URL_0_) a mortitian that was getting robbed blind of business because the wife of his direct competitor was the local telephone operator. Whenever anybody called regarding a pesky corpse and just asked for \"a mortician\" she would route the call to her husband instead of Strowger. And sometimes she'd \"accidentally\" redirect people who were calling Strowger specifically with a corpse in mind.\n\nSo he invented the Strowger Switch, that let the caller dial the number themselves with no nosy operator needed for local phone calls.\n\nAfter that, the system was expanded to let you dial \"other prefixes\". So the telephone system needed to have rules to be able to tell whether you were dialing a local number. So those prefixes got numbers.\n\nThis is why your phone has letters over the numbers. Klondike-394 became \"KL-0394\" and so you needed to have a way to find \"K\" and \"L\" on your phone.\n\nThen the idea of being able to dial \"the city\", e.g. \"the area\" was added when they went from 2+4 dialing to 3+4 for \"local calls\" (e.g. 6-digit to 7-digit dialing) they made some rules.\n\nNo prefix (the 3 in the 3+4) could have a zero or one in the second position. That was reserved for \"area codes\" in the U.S. So by the second digit the telephone system could tell if you were dialing a local number or not. But they added the \"dial 1 for self service, or 0 for operator assisted long distance\" because people were dialing long distance numbers, and getting charged for long distance calls, \"by accident\".\n\nSo 619-555-1234 is area, prefix, and number. And 555 was set aside for testing dialing, as were some other prefixes for things like \"Ring back\".\n\nSo the first two sets of three numbers have a _lot_ of restrictions coded into them because telephone switching was \"very mechanical\". The connection was being set up \"as you dialed\" even as late as the seventies. And you'd get various feedback sounds/events if you farked up. \"Fast Busy\", \"Slow Busy\", \"Denial Tone\". Lots of people didn't know the difference but a skilled operator could know exactly why dialing failed.\n\nThen the rules of information exchange were radically altered. Telephone switches could communicate even when no call was taking place. Suddenly you didn't have to build a whole new building just because you'd already hooked up 9999 phones to the old building. The \"prefix\" stopped being a real number representing a discrete location. So \"3+4 digit dialing\" became \"7 digit dialing\" and you could get any seven digits anywhere in your area code (for full \"3+7\" addressing).\n\nThen AT & T was broken up and MCI came along and tried to undersell AT & T by renting wires from AT & T in bulk and re-selling the time to \"their subscribers\". And then it was wild-west everywhere. Calling cards and service provider prefixes making you dial 800-numbers before you dialed the 3+7 destination number.\n\nBut as technology got even better _lots_ of that stuff became pointless.\n\nSo right now you just have \"10 digit dialing\". And if you are old enough your \"area code\" is \"wherever you lived in about 2005.\"\n\nCell phones and cell phone providers \"opted out\" of the \"long distance\" market. They were making their money by the six-second block of time, far in excess of the money to be gained by charging for long distance calls.\n\nThen \"number portability\" came along, and you didn't have to give up your number to switch providers.\n\nSo now days \"most\" phone numbers are just 10 digits that look up you. And most of those code and prefix bits just go to a provider. And if you first got your number via AT & T, but now use sprint, AT & T gets contacted and the phone is forwarded to Sprint automagically. And the phones call you a lot cause the provider to cache and remember that from last time and don't even have to ask AT & T unless they forget.\n\nSo now days, all those reserved numbers, like 2 through 9 in the second digit of the area code\" are no longer needed and you are starting to see new \"area codes\" that don't match the old dialing plans.\n\nBut even with all that, every phone you have, and tablet... if it has cellular connectivity for any reason (data, voice, sms, etc) it has a phone number.\n\nThere are 250 million people in the U.S. and many of those people have two or more devices. So technically we are getting strapped for numbers.\n\nUnder the old system there was only about 10^^6^^ numbers once you deleted all the illegal combinations.\n\nSo just like IPv4, the old assumptions of size and number of addresses needed were very generous for the age those assumptions were made, but will run out sooner than you think.\n\nIn the not-to distant future we are going to need to add a couple digits somewhere. Likely at about 4th from the right, or all the way at the right. and having two or three zeros there will be an \"old school\" status symbol."
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1wudro | if your mouth has more germs than your anus, why is it easier for you to get sick from putting your mouth on someone's anus rather than kissing them? | Are there germs on the butthole that are just more potent? If so, what are they? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wudro/eli5_if_your_mouth_has_more_germs_than_your_anus/ | {
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"Because \"number of germs\" is not in any way a good indicator of how likely you are to get sick. Your body contains many many billions of bacteria, most of which are actually beneficial to your body. In this specific case, E. coli (a gut bacteria) is responsible for the sickness. Early in your life, one strain of E. coli colonizes your body; your immune system will ignore that strain. But someone *else's* strain will make you sick.",
"Bacteria in your mouth are largely either neutral or beneficial to your health. Probiotic bacteria are helpful in breaking down food. Other bacteria are in there to help protect gum health. The baddies in your mouth typically lead to gum decay, cavities, or bad breath - not things we enjoy, but also not something that will make us sick.\n\nBacteria in your anus are also important. Lots of probiotics there, too. However, there are also bacteria in the gut that are sometimes transported out the bunghole and aren't meant for ingestion. Fecal coliform is the perfect example. Know how sick *E. Coli* usually makes people? This guy is the same family, but it lives in your gut. \n\nThings that live in your gut should usually stay there. "
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91r79p | why does one foot grow smaller than the other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/91r79p/eli5_why_does_one_foot_grow_smaller_than_the_other/ | {
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"Despite the general look of it, the body isn't fully symmetric on the outside. It's also not symmetric on the inside at all."
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5nj5gw | compass/navigation experts | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nj5gw/eli5_compassnavigation_experts/ | {
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"If you are lost a compass will not help you out on its own. A compass will only tell you the direction you are facing and not the direction you should be heading in. To be able to navigate with a compass you also need a map and you need to know your position. On a map you can figure out what direction you want to walk in and follow that direction on the compass. If you place the compass on the map along the path you want to take you can move the inner compass or a marker so it points to North on the map. Then you put away the map and turn around so the needle points towards the marker that you set. Look ahead and pick something in the distance straight ahead. Then put away the compass and walk to it. Get the compass again and find the next marker in the distance to walk towards.\n\nFor the distance you can count your steps or find out how long you need to walk the distance. However both these only give you an estimate. When you plot the course you need to make sure you get to a place you will recognize like a road, a river, a lake, a mountain, etc. When you reach this you know how far you have gone and know where you are on the map.\n\nNavigating to the stars is quite difficult. The basics of it is that you can find the north star or the southern cross. These stars are always in the north or south respectively and you can then use them instead of a compass. The rest of the stars including the Sun are constantly moving in the sky so you can not navigate over long distances using them as a guide.",
"Let's first of all imagine you know where you are.\n\nAs you say, if you just \"head north\", the chances are that your steps won't take you exactly north, and you'll end up a little bit to the left or to the right of where you think you are. Also, you might calculate that it will take an hour to get where you're going, but if you go a little faster or slower than you planned, it might take more or less time.\n\nSo now let's imagine that the place you're going is a village, and the village is on a river. If you're a little left or a little right of where you ought to be, you'll still hit the river. It might take a little more or a little less time than you expected, but it won't take 30 minutes if you planned for it to take 60 minutes. So if you hit a river at around about 60 minutes, you can be pretty sure it's the right river.\n\nBut what if you hit the river and can't see the village - do you turn left or right? Simple - when you're planning, you deliberately head to the left of the village. That way, when you hit the river, you can be pretty certain that turning right and following the river will take you to the village.\n\nSource: these are some of the techniques we use to navigate when flying an aircraft the traditional way (i.e. if you're not using any navigation aids). We don't do it quite this way, because we have a better view from the air than you have from the ground, but many of the techniques I've described here are still useful when navigating an aircraft. I've got lots of experience of navigating aircraft this way, but I've never done any kind of orienteering or navigating on the ground, so I'm assuming that's similar but I may be wrong."
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wznn0 | how do languages without alphabets organize long lists (ex. names)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wznn0/eli5_how_do_languages_without_alphabets_organize/ | {
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"In Chinese, different characters require a different number of strokes to write properly. There is a \"correct\" order to write characters and a set number of lines you can use as a stroke. Think of it as using Tetris blocks to build a single word.\n\nLists are organised according to how many strokes it takes. If there are a same number, then the simpler one goes first usually. Students are taught this notably when learning how to use a dictionary. ",
"should note that some languages that don't use the roman alphabet do still have their own alphabets, with their own alphabetical order.\n\nKorean [Hangul](_URL_1_) and Indian [Devanagari](_URL_0_) are good examples, but a lot of people look at it and assume its hieroglyphic or something."
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6iieee | how do people work on huge programming projects | My first thought would be like a game engine, how does a group of people coordinate that, do they spend hours a day in group meetings?
Also just games in general with pre existing engines, like Blizzard employs like hundreds of programmers and stuff and they all work together to get their respective projects done | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6iieee/eli5how_do_people_work_on_huge_programming/ | {
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"They break the tasks up into chunks which can be manipulated independently. The basic idea is to have \"objects\" that take certain kinds of input and give certain kinds of output, so interacting with it doesn't require knowledge of the internal workings. Then one team can work on an object without meeting with anyone else.",
"They use version control systems like git to track/merge changes (think like Dropbox for code). At large companies there is also usually a system whereby code can be \"checked out\" so more than one person isnt working on the same thing at the same time.",
"When the project is beginning there will be plenty of meetings. The first task is to figure out exactly what it is that we're building. Once we have our grasp on that, we can start to break out the monumental task of \"writing the software\" into much smaller pieces.\n\nLet's go with your example of a game. Some still huge (but still far more granular than \"the game\") tasks might be \"model the characters,\" \"layout the maps,\" and \"build the user interface and overlays\". Each team might be assigned one of these tasks.\n\nDevelopers working on a team will each take an even smaller chunk of work from their team's task. Maybe modeling a single character, building a single map or designing the menu for a specific activity.\n\nThere might be several developers working on some of these smaller tasks at the same time. This is where version control comes in. Basically it's like Dropbox, except it's written to identify differences in code and discern which changes should and shouldn't be made. This allows us to be working in the same file, both save it at the same time, and not worry (usually) about overwriting one another's work.\n\nIn short, it is definitely a lot of planning and coordination, but at the end of the day it's not a whole lot different than a group project in school.",
" > do they spend hours a day in group meetings?\n\nThere are tons of meetings, yes. Usually not every day, but some of the project managers I work with *are* constantly on the phone coordinating with others.\n\nSoftware development is its own huge thing. You have multiple people doing multiple jobs. You have a project manager or architect who divides up the system into smaller chunks. You have business analysts who translate customer specs into actual requirements. You have coders who actually do the coding. And a whole bunch of people in between. \n\nUltimately, though, it boils down to this: there's a big 'ol software blueprint out there that's used for the project. People are assigned individual parts of that blueprint to build, and then get stuck together to make the final product.\n\nIt's a fairly effective system, and it does in fact allow up to hundreds of programmers to work together on a single project."
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777vni | what’s the fundamental difference between a cpu and a npu? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/777vni/eli5_whats_the_fundamental_difference_between_a/ | {
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"Software developer here,\n\nA CPU has a fixed set of operations it can perform - there's physical circuitry for adding integers, for multiplying integers, for loading and storing, for shifting binary bits, etc. Each operation is enumerated, and a sequence of these enumerations is what we call a program. Data is read into and out of the CPU through a physical input/output interface called a register, which the CPU can have many - some serve a specific purpose, some just for instructions, some for different types of data, some are output only. Many CPUs have memory on the chip, what we call cache. And many have multiple \"cores\", or clusters of these circuits, so you effectively get multiple CPUs on a single chip.\n\nAn NPU is *nothing like that*. They *don't have* fixed sets of operations, you don't feed it a sequence of instructions. It doesn't have something like registers, though it does have input and output mechanisms. It doesn't have cache, and it doesn't access memory the same way a CPU does. A CPU and GPU are designed for high levels of precision when it comes to decimal numbers, using 32, 64, 128, and in some cases 256 bits. When simulating neural nets, the notion of *data* or *values* kind of goes out the door; common designs use 16 or 8 bits, and IBM has a prototype that doesn't store numeric values at all - their notion of data are well timed electrical pulses, harkening back to delay-line memory of the 50s and 60s.\n\nProgramming for these things consists of describing how the simulated neurons interconnect to form a network. There may be *some* ability to dictate how they operate, and some ability to observe their state, but really it's just give the network some input and read off the output. The purpose for these new class of processor is that they're really starting to see practical application, and you can run more neurons on one of these dedicated pieces of hardware than you can simulate in software on the worlds most powerful super computers."
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39a2zu | is there any way for super-large companies to actually fail? what would have to happen for google, microsoft, apple and the likes to actually disappear? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39a2zu/eli5_is_there_any_way_for_superlarge_companies_to/ | {
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"Yes. When a large company fails, usually it gets bought cheaply by a bigger company that wants to keep the name, the buildings, the technology, or other parts, but fire most of the staff. ",
"Cook the books. Nortel was \"growing\" for quite some time and then it was revealed they were counting sales today they **might** close next quarter.\n\nNot saying that's happening at them but in theory it could happen. Nobody thought Nortel was a fraud at the time ....",
"Super large companies can definitely fail. It all starts with losing money (versus profit). If they lose money consistently (e.g. quarter after quarter), they burn through any existing cash reserves and need to begin to sell off their assets to raise money to fund continuing operations. They will also borrow money via loans or bonds and seek investment (selling/issuing more stock).\n\nAt some point, the company is saddled with too much debt for continued operations to make sense given perceived market opportunities. The company then either goes bankrupt or sells their operations and assets to another entity.",
"Kodak is a great example. They were not some flash in the pan, and they did not just get folded into another company, they rode the horse straight into hell.\n\nSo this huge company based around film and optics. They were a great employer, did a lot of stuff that sounds like Apple would do it, hired the best talent, thought creatively, etc. etc. etc.\n\nBut then the market changed. At first no one really thought digital cameras would matter much, they were very expensive and had questionable quality. So Kodak ignored them. Then digital got cheaper and better. Kodak ignored it. Then consumers started to realize the crazy benefits of digital over film and started jumping ship in a big way.\n\nKodak tried to change gears. They spent a ton of money trying to make products to print digital photos (in stores, at home, from special digital cameras). They tried to make digital photo frames.\n\nThe problem was that they were a huge company and huge companies need huge products. Its not that any of their ideas were necessarily bad ones, its just the market was shrinking. People were not going to spend hundreds of dollars on film/development any more. Today in your life you might print one or two hundred photos at the total cost of 20 bucks, but no more will you have to drop serious money on photography.\n\nAnd so the layoffs started (and layoffs are expensive because of severance pay laws), and then lawyers got involved, and pretty soon the once cutting edge company was nothing but liabilities and tears.",
"Have you ever owned a Compaq computer? Or heard of E. F. Hutton? caesaroctavion mentions Enron, but there was also Woolworths, Pan Am, Standard Oil, Pullman, and of course, another accounting firm like Enron called Arthur Anderson (85,000 jobs gone overnight!)\n\nSome were bad management, some were bought out, and some, like Enron and Anderson, were because of criminal activity. ",
"If you want some old school examples, Sears Roebuck was arguably the most ubiquitous company in America for many decades. Now they are largely irrelevant. A & P (grocery chain) used to be the biggest by far in the country, now they've gone through multiple bankruptcies. \nCompanies that see massive success tend to hold on to the practices that made them successful, even long after those practices become outmoded. Some companies (Ball aluminum cans) can successfully reinvent themselves, sometimes many times and last over a century, but eventually they place the wrong bet on the future. \nEventually Walmart, Google, and whatever other company you can think of, will become a memory. ",
"For a modern example? Look at Sears. Sears was a huge retailer - the kind of place where you could go to outfit every room of your house. Now? Who the hell goes to Sears. I have friends who've said, \"Oh, are they still a thing?\"\n\n Best Buy (etc.) came and ate up the electronics market. Amazon came and ate up the market for (basically) anything I think I need but don't need it today (or can't be bothered to get off my ass to go get.) Sears stayed out of the online arena. Everything they do and have reeks of a bygone era. If you need a shitty drill, low quality jeans, or want to feel depressed in a sub-par electronics showroom, Sears is your place. They're trying like hell to turn the ship around, but (like was made with the Kodak example) huge companies need huge cash workhorses. I, like so many of my generation, am happy to wait 2 days for my (same price yet higher quality) drill to arrive by UPS instead of driving across town and dumping money in Craftsman nonsense. \n\nTL;DR: Sears (like Kodak already mentioned) is on the way to failure because as the market and consumers changed, they did not. ",
"GM failed. Took a massive government cash injection and legal chicanery to get some liabilities off the books ",
"Probably the most common reason a large company will fail is because they become complacent. As has been mentioned, Kodak is a perfect example of this. They simply failed to adapt to a changing market (film to digital). The company believed film was the ultimate best photography media so strongly because for so long it simply was. This became a cultural belief in Kodak's management and staff and because of this they lagged massively to adapt to a digital medium. \n\nSome other instances exist where directors/managers are a result of the companies failure. This does sound near impossible in companies so large that can simply get 'the best' managers but in reality it is not so clear cut. the effectiveness of a manager is influenced by their company, meaning a good manager leading a company that isn't suited to them can fail. Carly Fiorina's stint at HP is a good example of this. She was considered a highly effective manager at AT & T in their sales department, but when she took over at HP everything turned bad. Her authoritarian management style did not suit the family based business at all. Also, being the first female in upper management did have some resistance from workers (notice this is the fault of the company's culture, not the manager) which lead to conflict. \n\nFailure due to culture such as Kodak will more likely be catastrophic than failure due to management such as HP because culture is much harder to change than simply replacing managers. In the case of HP, they are now a competitive technology company whereas Kodak is struggling to remain afloat",
"Nokia is a good example of a large companie that failed. When it happens it happens fast normally due to changes in trend or technology. ",
"I recommend [this book](_URL_0_). It is basically a list of failures with possible explanations of why they happened.\n\nMicrosoft for instance, the author argues, is the only software company that was in the top 10 software companies 20 years ago as well as today, because they have not made a single catastrophic decision yet. It's quite an interesting book, talks about botched mergers, lack of vision, missed opportunities (e.g. Netscape deciding to rewrite their browser from scratch, thereby losing 2 years in the market place, while Internet Explorer ate their lunch), etc.",
"History says yes - meet the East India Company. It was founded in the early 17th Century to manage trade between Britain and the islands of the Indian Ocean. The British government gave it all sorts of powers to ensure the trade was profitable - including being able to raise its own taxes, mint coins, possess a 200,000 man army and forming governments. In exchange it poured money into the Treasury as well as ensuring an endless supply of cotton, silk, dyes, tea and opium to the growing Empire.\n\nBy the mid 18th Century the EIC was running - you better be sitting down - India. Yep, the country was effectively a private franchise; as was a good part of Imperial China.\n\nThe EIC's mismanagement was directly responsible for a huge famine in Bengal during 1770 that killed about a third of the population, whilst its private armies fuelled a rebellion in the Indian Army in 1857. Elsewhere, its demands to be able to sell opium into the Chinese market - in direct contravention of Imperial Law - meant that Britain ended up in not one, but two Opium Wars during which the greatest military power of the era ransacked large parts of China and expropriated large amounts of property and land. This has poisoned Anglo-Chinese relations for about 150 years.\n\nThe EIC became so much of an embarressment in Britain that it was gradually legislated out of existence during the late 18th and early 19th Century. The Indian Mutiny was the final straw and India was brought directly into the Empire in 1858. With that, the company sort of hung on until 1873 when it was dissolved.\n\nAnd if you thought the EIC was big, its older rival, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) would nowadays be worth in excess of $7 TRILLION.",
"Blockbuster disappeared pretty quickly, at one point a blockbuster card was the second most held card in the US besides you SS card. They had stores all across the country and a massive consumer database, poof! \n\nEdit:good read on the topic if you are interested \n\n_URL_0_",
"To answer the 2nd question, what would happen for Google, Microsoft, Apple actually disappear:\n\nThe reason why they might disappear is because a better product or company comes up and usurps their position. Consumers will simply switch to the new attractive company, and there will be job losses at the old dominant firm and job gains in the new one. Overall, the economy should benefit because the consumers are now using a better quality product (otherwise they wouldn't switch anyway), and hopefully the job lost/gained in between cancels out. ",
"There are three ways for a large company to disappear\n\n- **Fraud** - Someone up there commits a financial or regualtory fraud. e.g. include Enron, Worldcom etc. \n\n- **Decay** - Markets changed and the company couldn't adapt to the change. e.g. Compaq, Wang Labs \n\n- **Risk** - Huge risk a company took backfired. Often banks e.g. Lehman Brothers etc. \n\nDecay is the most common reason and that's why most present day tech companies are paranoid about trying to enter newer markets long before they are viable. ",
"Kodak\n\nGlobal Crossing\n\nStandard Oil\n\nWoolworths\n\nBethlehem Steel\n\nPan Am\n\nTo name a few.\n\nHow dd they fail? Several Ways, mismanagements, monopoly busting, rapid growth assuming too much rish, chsngin tastes/trends are the main causes. tah",
"Usually they just take that 20% that comes out of my paycheck, and use that to stay afloat for a while when times get hard. Must be nice.",
"Here is a story with a bit of a personal note.\n\nI used to work for a company that made industrial fabric products. We eventually got into the business of making those arched fabric over steel buildings (quonset style). \n\nWe did pretty well with them, but our market was just western Canada. \n\nOur biggest competitor was another Canadian company called Cover-All. Their American branch was called Summit Structures.\n\nAt their peak, Cover-All had annual sales over $100 Million. (10-20 times bigger than our building division).\n\nAnyway, one of the buildings that they sold was used as a practice facility for the Dallas Cowboys. [Then one day, it collapsed in a storm and injured some people](_URL_0_). \n\nAfter the investigation, it was ruled that the collapse was due to negligent engineering rather than a flaw in the materials or installation etc. There was talk that a micro-cell created winds that were beyond the design capacity, but the investigation concluded that the wind wasn't that bad and that it was a faulty design.\n\nThis meant that all of the similar Cover-All buildings could potentially be unsafe...which meant that anyone who owned on could sue them.\n\nAfter the verdict, the company went into receivership and was practically shut down within a few months. \n\nAt this point, the company that I worked for, swooped in a 'bought the assets' of what had been Cover-All. They didn't buy the company, because then they would have been liable for all those buildings. The company ceased to exist and we just took over their facilities and inventory etc. \n\nOf course, it was a big undertaking and there were plenty of hurdles to getting the company up and running. We obviously fixed the design issues...and implemented better accounting and control practices etc. \n\nAnd that's how a $100 Million dollar company failed because of a single incident.",
"One word. Motorola. \n\nUltimately, through time and consistently poor management and inability to adapt to new markets, any large company can fail, by first becoming a smaller company.\n\nMotorola was founded in the 30s, and became a large powerhouse in radio and television manufacturing, and branched into communications in a big way - the radios for the moon landings were Motorola transmitters and receivers, for example.\n\nIn the 60s and 70s, through heavy investment in integrated circuits and electronic components, and that branched into a whole new divison of the company, the Semiconductor PRoducts Sector (SPS). \n\nIn the 80s Motorola really invested heavily in cell phone technology and continued to expand their IC business.\n\nBy the 90s, Motorola was the first in a lot of things - Iridium (the first satellite based cell phone network), infrastructure for cell tech in China, hundreds of cell phone patents, the development of the first consumer desktop RISC CPU (the PowerPC era), yadda yadda yadda. I mean, literally, Motorola was the ONLY investor in cell infrastructure in CHINA. HOW CAN YOU FUCK UP SUCH A SWEET DEAL?! 1 billion potential customers, zero competition. Welcome to Motorola.\n\none would THINK that by the turn of the century, Motorola would be the primary controller of the cell phone market. However, with the rise of other phone competitors like Nokia, Samsung, etc. And with Apple entering the market with the iPhone, Motorola got broadsided a LOT, and due to their large size, was unable to really make new changes in their phone lineup fast enough to remain competitive. And since they had spun off or divested the bulk of their government contracted sectors and semi-conductur industries, choosing to focus in on the cell phone industry, they ended up having all their ducks in one row, and then screwing the pooch.\n\nBy the late 2000s, Motorola was a shell of what it had once been, and when Google bought out half of it, it was more of a patent grab than anything. Motorola I think still exists in name, but it is nowhere near the company that had 80% of the cell phone market and over 50K employees, like was in the 90s.\n\nSource: my dad worked at Motorola for 32 years, retiring in 2003.",
"Apple did fail. In the late 90s they were out of cash, having just purchased Next, gambling on something called \"OS X\" for their next computers, but which would be too late to save the company.\n\nWhile we don't know the full details of what happened, Bill Gates, swooped in and decided to save them, by investing $150 million in them. Microsoft needed to make it look like there was competition, and if Apple failed, it would underscore the conclusion that DOJ made that Microsoft was a monopoly, and Apple failing would just prove that they were a destructive monopoly. We also know that Gil Amelio was ousted and Steve Jobs was made the CEO of Apple (even though he was already CEO of Pixar).\n\nAlso the Apple after this point, was a completely different company from the Apple before it. Or at least, the kinds of products they made were completely different. The Apple we know today is a true phoenix rising from the ashes of its previous death; a death that didn't happen only because of a serendipitous side effect of another big companies troubles.",
"Lots of very big companies go belly up. Many are/were even in fields where they should have thrived:\n\nNokia\n \nPalm\n \nBlackberry\n \nAtari\n \nWorldcom\n \nEnron\n \nBear Stearns\n \nLehman Brothers\n\n \nAnd this is just a few recent ones. Hell even General Motors went under a few years ago and would not exist if it weren't for a massive bailout from everyone's favorite uncle."
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9ojdu3 | how is something simply 'deleted' when using something like a camera or phone? | I'm out of the loop with technical computer-y stuff, so I was wondering what happens to the stuff that I stored? Does it all get compressed to a byte? What happens to the video and photo stored? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ojdu3/eli5_how_is_something_simply_deleted_when_using/ | {
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"Basically your computer/device marks that space as unused. When it needs to save something new then it overwrites any space marked that way. So it is still there, a bunch of tiny on or off (1 or 0) switches until they are rearranged for something new.",
"You mean what happens to a video or photo when you hit delete? Your device simply changes the first letter of the file's name to a special character. That makes the file not only disappears from the list, but also tell your camera or phone that it can write over the space currently occupied by that file. That means that after hitting delete, if you don't take a picture or video, you can successfully retrieve back your deleted file. Once you take a new picture or video, there is no guarantee left",
"Building off the other comments. Most of the time, like everyone else said, your device just marks that memory as available, so if it needs more memory it knows it can just write over whatever is there. That's all fine and dandy, but the data is still there, and that can also be a problem. Say you have personal information on a hard drive, and you want to throw it out. You can delete that information, but, even though the hard drive has marked it as open, all that information is still there and someone could recover it fairly easily if they got your hard drive. So there are some more extreme measures you could take. \n\nOne is to just actually go in and overwrite the data, usually as just a bunch of 0s. So instead of just putting a marker that says it doesn't need to preserve data there, it'll actually take the time to go in and change every bit to a 0, so now even if someone got the hard drive there shouldn't be any actual data stored on it at all. \n\nEven this isn't enough sometimes though. Sometimes you wanna be extra careful, like say if you worked in the government or a company that needed to make sure it's files were secure. It's possible after use whatever memory you have doesn't work perfectly anymore. It might not be able to overwrite all of the data itself, but with the right hardware you could still read that information. If you were really concerned about this you could degauss the drive. This basically blasts it with a really strong magnetic field to wipe out the data completely. Or you could just smash it. \n\nThat might sound like overkill, but there are groups that make money by finding old government hard drives that weren't properly wiped and basically blackmailing their old owners for their data."
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2b7okl | what exactly did the early nasa computers, the types used in the apollo missions, do? how did 32k of processing power actually 'send a rocket to the moon'? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2b7okl/eli5_what_exactly_did_the_early_nasa_computers/ | {
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"It doesn't take much processing power to launch a rocket to the moon. The difficulty was the reliability of parts, not how fast it can compute.\n\nThe early computers are essentially just large calculators with built in course calculation programs in them.",
"Guidance:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_",
"They were designed specifically for the task. Your computer has a big bad 3 jiggahertz processor because it needs to so any different kinds of tasks. Today we use ASIC's (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) for things like the \"computer\" in your car or microwave. Instead of software doing much doin much of work, the circuitry of the ASIC does it much faster, but that's all it can do."
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1ts6c1 | what makes mozart arguably mankind's greatest musical mind, and how to someone like jimi hendrix stack up against him? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ts6c1/eli5_what_makes_mozart_arguably_mankinds_greatest/ | {
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"Apart from writting excellent music, what made Mozart unique was his natural aptittude for Music. \n\nHe was a better pianist before 10 than most professionals will ever be, and he could just listen to really long symphonies only once and transcribe them from memory later in his teen years. You can google more information about his life easily if you are interested. \n\nJimi Hendrix was an incredibly skilled musician in general and guittarist in particular. You can't take away anything from his legacy, and there isn't a valid ground on which you could compare the two, or any musicians. Music, and tastes in music are subjective."
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3xtb0q | what does alcohol consumption feels like? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xtb0q/eli5what_does_alcohol_consumption_feels_like/ | {
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"Kinda makes you feel dizzy. Depending on your personality type it can bring out the worst in you. When I'm drunk I get in peoples faces and start fights lol.",
"It burns against your throat and down into your belly. Then it kinda fizzles into a warm happy feeling that spreads through your body. The effects on your brain can be completely unnoticed initially, but continued drinking exacerbates them. For me I smile more, talk more, and become more relaxed. If I get drunk I think everything is funny, I involve myself in every conversation, and I slump or lean on things. I've learned to identify this stage and stop drinking. Because if I continue the silly/happy feeling turns into anger and sadness, I shout a lot, and my arms and legs seem to operate on a delay. ",
"Just warm and happy like you don't have a care in the world. \n\nYou might feel a bit dizzy and stupid, but your ability to notice you feel dizzy and stupid has diminished so you only notice that if you really try to."
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25uxi3 | how can worms still move and be alive when cut in pieces? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/25uxi3/eli5_how_can_worms_still_move_and_be_alive_when/ | {
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"They aren't alive for long. They have compartments, as you can see by the patterns on their bodies that look like rings, these compartments are separate from each other, but their organs are spread throughout the body, while the two halfs will writhe in pain, it is probable that both will die eventually, the same way as if you had been cut in half, your brain would remain lucid up until you died of blood loss, it just takes a bit longer for worms. They also don't use blood, they use hemolymph, which is the insect equivalent of blood.",
"This is a copy/paste that I found.\n\n > Depends what you mean by worm. The word 'worm' actually applies to a number of phyla of invertebrate animals, including the Annelids (earthworms, polychaetes, leeches), Platyhelminthes (flatworms, tapeworms), Nematodes(roundworms) and Nemerteans (ribbon worms).\n\n > The common earthworm, the one you probably find in your garden, is an Annelid worm...and no it won't survive you chopping it, let alone turning into two worms (even though it is made up of repeating segments). Many of the free-living (non-parasitic) flatworms (P: Platyhelminthes, C:Turbellaria) are capable of regenerating wounded tissue and, reproducing asexually by binary fission, so being cut in half can result in two clones. Actually, experiments on Turbellarians involving various incomplete cuts into the worm have resulted in individuals developing two heads, or two tails etc. Some of the parasitic worms are capable of budding off reproductive segments...contributing to their great success as parasites inside the bodies of a variety of host animals. As for the Nemerteans, well I can't quite remember, and my books are too far away from me to check right now, so I might check that up later.\n\nSource:_URL_0_\n",
"I have two axolotl and every day I cut a worm in half to feed them. An earthworm mind. Don't know if it's the same with all worms. Suspect not. \n\nWhat I've found is the front end of the worm will not act any differently than before. The back end will spazz out like no ones business. I have been told by an old boss at an aquarium shop that if you cut below the vent on the worm (the knuckly bit) the front end will live on. \n\nI think the back end reacts more vigourously to attrack the attacker. If a bird cuts a worm in half the back end will be more likely to be eaten allowing the other end to burrow and survive. \n\nI've never cut the worm in to lots of bite size pieces for the amphibians, just one cut. I don't let the front survive becuase I'd rather not continually torture a creature by cutting its ass of and putting it back to allow it to regrow to do the same again. I'd rather just it all got ate. "
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2rtiwm | why do people think older=smarter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rtiwm/eli5why_do_people_think_oldersmarter/ | {
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"I don't know many people who think \"older=smarter\". I know a lot of people who believe that \"older=more experienced\" which is a very different thing indeed.\n\n > Intelligence is the information you carry inside you\n\nNope. Intelligence is the ability to *USE* the information you carry inside you effectively and appropriately based on the situation. I know lots of very unintelligent people who have huge databases of facts in their heads.",
"Because people continue to learn as they get older. ",
"Smart is a generic word. A 12 year old may know a math problem that would stump a 60 year old, does that mean the 12 year old is smarter? Smarter at math maybe but clueless on how to live in the world.\n People will say smart is the stuff you remember....\n\n Others will say Smart is common sense\n\n Personally I say smart is from wisdom and that is what you get from age."
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60gt7e | if the weight loss after gastric bypass is due to severe calorie restriction, why is severe calorie restriction on it's own rarely advised? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60gt7e/eli5if_the_weight_loss_after_gastric_bypass_is/ | {
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"Well, for starters\n\n1. It's hard. If it's you only plan for weight loss, you're going to have a high chance of failing\n\n2. If done incorrectly for too long, you'll miss out on essential micronutrients and end up with some health issues\n\n3. Losing weight needs to be a lifestyle change, not just a temporary diet. Extreme caloric restriction is not a sustainable long-term plan. Better spend the effort on something that'll keep you going for a long time\n\nThat said, versions of it like intermitent fasting have been shown to work well, and are gaining in popularity.",
"PhD working about obesity here. The severe calorie restriction (strong diet, strong exercises, ...) are ALWAYS advised, especially in case of morbidly obese patients (the most relevant patients to get gastric bypass or other bariatric surgeries).\n\nHowever, unfortunately it is very uncommon for a severe calorie restriction to be efficient more than 6 months after the beginning of the diet (because we are all human). So in most case, the patients regain weight, and therefore the bariatric surgery is needed.\n\nIt is easy to understand why the gastric bypass (or other bariatric surgeries) are more efficient in the long term."
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1mla8s | why does beer taste different when i get it at a restaurant, from when i buy it from a store? | Why is it that when I drink beer at a restaurant (tap or bottled) it tastes amazing, but when I buy it at the market it tastes like dump? This happens with the same brand btw example, Heineken from the market and Heineken from a restaurant. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mla8s/eli5why_does_beer_taste_different_when_i_get_it/ | {
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"Do you drink your beer directly from the bottle? If so, that could be a major reason. Smell is an enormous amount of taste, which anyone who has eaten food with a blocked nose can attest to. If you're drinking beer directly from the bottle, you're forming a seal around the bottle with your lips, which means you cannot smell the beer at all before it enters your mouth. An enormous amount of the experience is lost. Instead, try pouring your beer into a pint glass and then drinking it. A good pint glass will have a wide rim that allows the aroma of the beer to be enjoyed while you drink.",
"When it comes to beer on tap a lot is placebo as stated by another poster and yes, the beer itself (to generalize) is often fresher as kegs get used, don't sit on supermarket shelves for months. \n\nBUT... The line plays a huge part too. By this i mean the piping between the beer keg and the pump. In an ideal world these lines should be cleaned roughly fortnightly and kept as clean as clean can be. They should also be of a certain length, not too long but this is dictated by where your beer cellar is.\n\nHowever despite what some people might say this is not an exact science. Some beers and other drinks suffer if the line is too clean. Lagers certainly benefit from super clean lines but some ales seem to like a bit of yeast built up. \n\nThere are a lot of variables here and with taste being such a subjective thing, plus beer a catch all phrase then it's hard to pin it down anymore than this but it's certainly a factor.\n\nTo stick a pin in my own post however i find that a lot of restaurants suffer from slow turnover and poor standards for beer and as such personally i find bottle beer 'better'. The last thing i want is a pint of beer that's been sat in the line (as discussed above) for two days. Horrible. Of course for someone who worked in the booze trade for a long time drinking to me is often a bit of a bus mans holiday and i pick faults like a moaning little bitch.\n\n"
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2fhkbe | why do i see the same thread, posted a few days later all the time? | Like currently one of the top ask reddit threads is what song will you always associate with what movie. I swear I saw this question like a week ago! I mean the exact one, not another variation like what will sometimes happen with a "Men of reddit" question turning into a "Women of reddit". I also even see it with some ELI5 questions. Am I going crazy or are these questions repeated? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fhkbe/eli5_why_do_i_see_the_same_thread_posted_a_few/ | {
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"Countdown until the next person who asks \"ELI5: Why do I like the smell of my own farts?\"\n\nBecause that one seems to be a daily occurrence.",
"Reddit has 114.5 million unique visitors every month. How they get that number, i'm not sure. Do I count 3 times, once for my phone, once for my work computer, and once for home? I don't know, but source: _URL_0_\n\nEven if half that number is real people, that's a ton of people. Not all of them see every post. Many of them think of the same things and post them a few days after someone else did. \n\nSome of them are karma whoring bitches who repost."
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5e0fc0 | why does a hollow cilinder descend faster than a solid one on an inclined plane? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e0fc0/eli5why_does_a_hollow_cilinder_descend_faster/ | {
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"It depends on the moment of inertia's of the two objects. \n\nThis is a pretty classic example in beginning physics classes to \"break\" your intuition, so to say. You have a solid wheel and a hollow ring, both with the same mass and same radius. Which rolls down an incline faster?\n\nThe solid disk does! How? It has a lower moment of inertia. Conceptually, think of it this way. The farther a \"piece\" of mass is away from the axis of rotation, the more difficult it is to rotate. Unlike the ring, who's mass is all as far away as it could be, the wheel is more evenly distributed.\n\nMathematically modeled, you can take an integral to find the moment of inertia's for both. In any case, a ring is simply mr^2 while a disk is mr^2 /2 . \n\nBoth objects have the same gravitational potential energy. As they roll without slipping they have both linear and rotational kinetic energy.\n\nSolving for velocity, the disk has linear velocity equal to sqrt(4gh/3) while the ring has velocity sqrt(gh). As you can see, the disk will always have a higher velocity.\n\nNow why does the ring go faster in your case? Because it has significantly less mass overall. Remember, mass plays a part as well.\n\nAs to why it doesn't accelerate at gsin(theta), because to roll means friction, and friction means there are multiple forces which you need to consider."
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91jf3s | why is it creepy to others if you never smile? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/91jf3s/eli5why_is_it_creepy_to_others_if_you_never_smile/ | {
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"A smile to humans is a \"I'm not a threat\" symbol that has persisted throughout evolution for a long time. Even some animals \"smile\" in a manner of speaking. Its just another form of body language. Someone good at reading body language (truly good. Ur not, I'm not) can read someone like a book.\n\nOf course there is the creepy smile that says something very different, with context. There is the smile that indicates deception, anger, jealousy etc (requires training to recognize accurately)\n\nBut just a normal smile basically says \"I'm not looking to kill you right now\" which back in cave man days was a very serious possibility. They didn't analyze it like we do these days. It was mostly instinctual. \n\nThese days, a stranger is not likely to just kill you and take your shit. But its still in our DNA and the information is used to make other determinations about the person.\n\nIn current times, someone who never smiles is not going to make someone immediately think \"they want to kill me\" but it can make them think you are always angry or have issues etc. The modern brain does, at some level, recognize that as a potential risk.\n\nEdit: To be clear, if someone is giving you shit for not smiling, fuck them. Maybe the non-smiling person is depressed, has had a really shitty life, etc. If they can't see that as a possibility and drop it, fuck them. I will say, as nice as it is to be around someone who NATURALLY smiles easily, making someone smile who doesn't normally is very rewarding.",
"I don't think it is anymore, after having had a Russian girlfriend and spending some time there. There is a cultural difference there where a smile is seen as mocking, as in you think the other person is a joke. At least that is how it was put to me, and you noticed that everyone there had a blank face. It was interesting to me to have to reprogram my brain while I was there to not stand out too much as I am always smiling.\n\nNow I don't assume anything when a person has no smile or a resting bitch face, because they could just be from a different culture!"
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5gbgg6 | why is chinese not pronounced the way it's spelled in english? | There are renderings of other languages to English that do the same but Chinese is most common. Why is Qing pronounced Ching? Why is Peking pronounced Beijing?
Side question: Why is British Worcester pronounced "Wooster"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5gbgg6/eli5_why_is_chinese_not_pronounced_the_way_its/ | {
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"Mainly because the pronunciations are somewhere between the multiple spellings. If you hear a native Chinese speaker say Beijing, you'll hear a subtle mixed 'p' / 'b' sound at the beginning, and a subtle mixed 'k' / 'j' sound at the second syllable.\n\nChinese isn't the only language to suffer this. For example, there are at least 112 ways to spell [Muammar Gaddafi's name](_URL_0_).",
"Languages based on Latin use the same alphabet and the same basic array of sounds. Others do not, and use entirely different sounds. Chinese dialects use a variety of sounds which simply do not exist in European dialects and cannot be spelled with the Roman alphabet. We assign letters to those sounds, but they aren't the same sounds those letters make in our languages.\n\nAs to 'cestor', it appears commonly throughout placenames in England and is always pronounced 'Ester'. Leicester is Lester, Gloucester is Gloster, and so on. There's no real reason for it other than Britons being lazy with pronunciation in the middle ages, the same reason we stopped pronouncing half the letters in knight.\n\nFree Bonus: You're actually living in the middle of a linguistic shift in how a word is pronounced, the cot/caught divide. Half of people you know and most people under 40 pronounce those two words identically. The other half and most people over 40 pronounce them distinctly. Languages shift subtly but inexorably, and Cester has undergone a dozen or so transformations to arrive at what we see today.",
"The Chinese language simply has sounds that aren't present in English. They came up with a system assigning Chinese sounds to specific letters of the Latin alphabet, and in some cases they just had to pick a best fit that wasn't quite right because there wasn't a perfect match available in English. \n\n I had a four-week crash course in Mandarin. No expert, but I had a *little* bit of formal instruction.\n\nWorcester's pronunciation just comes from a thousand years of people getting progressively sloppy with their pronunciation. Remember that British cities are centuries older than US cities. We haven't had nearly as much time for the language and pronunciations to evolve in the US. British English was also influenced and altered by mass migrations from Germany and France over the past 1500 years.",
"There have been quite a few systems for representing Chinese in the alphabet which we use in English. The most recent system is called [Pinyin,](_URL_3_) and can read some more about the history of other systems [here.](_URL_2_)\n\nOne of the reasons that some of the letters in Pinyin don't line up exactly with their English equivalents is that some of the sounds in the Chinese language don't exist in English, so we have to choose something which is close but not perfect. For example there is something which sounds a bit like the *ts* at the end of the word \"cats\" which doesn't have a separate letter in English, but is represented by a C in Pinyin.\n\nAnother reason is that English isn't the only language which uses the Roman alphabet. While it might not make much sense for you as an English speaker for the letter X to make a *sh* sound, it makes perfect sense to Spanish or Portuguese speakers.\n\nBecause of this it's probably better to think of Pinyin as having its own pronunciation rules that are easier to make out in English, rather than as a direct conversion from Chinese to English.\n\n_____________________\n\nAs for Worcester, the town has been around for a very long time. So long in fact that we don't know exactly when it was first inhabited, or much about the [Weorgoran](_URL_0_) - the people who first lived there and gave their name to the settlement of Weorgoran Ceaster. \n\nOver the years the town and the rest of the country were inhabited by different groups of people, and language and pronunciation of things gradually changed. In Worcester's case, the sound in the middle of the word ended up being left out when people said the word. This happens quite a lot, and not only to place names, in a process called [Syncope.][Syncope]\n[Syncope]: _URL_1_\n\nSo in short, it's pronounced that way because people have been saying it like that for a while, and everyone has got used to it being pronounced that way.",
"It is not really spelled in English, it is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, which is usually used to write modern English and a large number of other languages.\n\nThis may sound pedantic, but understanding the distinction is part of the answer to your problem.\n\nYou may speak English or French or Mandarin as the spoken language.\n\nEnglish is written using Latin characters. Other European Languages like French or Spanish or Italian are written with the same characters (and sometimes some added characters like öáñß etc).\n\nThe characters may be the same in English or Italian, but that doesn't mean that a native English speaker can read a foreign language that is written in the language even though it uses familiar letters.\n\nSo far so good. And I have probably not told you anything you didn't know before.\n\nNow here comes the interesting part if you give some random European a text written in the Latin alphabet and ask them to read it out loud they will (absent any other context) pronounce the words quite differently. For example the name of the capital of France is written as \"Paris\" in a number of different languages but it is slightly differently in French than in English for example.\n\nSo what you consider to be \"spelled in English\" is actually written using a character-set that English speakers have no monopoly on and that doesn't really have a common agreed upon pronunciation among the different groups that use it to write down their language.\n\nAsk a German how the letter \"A\" is pronounced and the will make a different sound then an Englishman.\n\nNow there are other languages that use different writing systems. For example the name of the president or Russia is written as Владимир Путин in the Russian alphabet using Cyrillic characters. This is usually transliterated as Vladimir Putin. Or at least for english speaker it is. In Germany where they pronounces Vs and Ws differently they use a slightly different transliteration system and the В becomes a W and the given name comes out as Wladmir and the French write his last name as Poutine for the same reason.\n\nThe English and the Germans and the French use different systems to transliterate Russian names.\n\nThis is mostly because there has been lots of contact among the cultures for a really long time and everyone developed their own system that fits their own pronunciation of the letters best.\n\nWith other languages contact was later and less often and so for example for Japanese everyone basically uses the same transliteration system (actually there are several and there a different variants of the Hepburn that is the standards) So the name comes out more or less the same in Latin characters no matter which country you are in.\n\nWith some names you get so many different transliteration systems being used. For example the former Lybain ruler Mummar Gaddaffi spelled his name in Arabic معمر محمد القذافي but because no standardized system exist how to transliterate Arabic into Latin characters (or maybe to many standards exist) that can comes out as anything (List taken from the straight dope):\n\n > (1) Muammar Qaddafi, (2) Mo'ammar Gadhafi, (3) Muammar Kaddafi, (4) Muammar Qadhafi, (5) Moammar El Kadhafi, (6) Muammar Gadafi, (7) Mu'ammar al-Qadafi, (8) Moamer El Kazzafi, (9) Moamar al-Gaddafi, (10) Mu'ammar Al Qathafi, (11) Muammar Al Qathafi, (12) Mo'ammar el-Gadhafi, (13) Moamar El Kadhafi, (14) Muammar al-Qadhafi, (15) Mu'ammar al-Qadhdhafi, (16) Mu'ammar Qadafi, (17) Moamar Gaddafi, (18) Mu'ammar Qadhdhafi, (19) Muammar Khaddafi, (20) Muammar al-Khaddafi, (21) Mu'amar al-Kadafi, (22) Muammar Ghaddafy, (23) Muammar Ghadafi, (24) Muammar Ghaddafi, (25) Muamar Kaddafi, (26) Muammar Quathafi, (27) Muammar Gheddafi, (28) Muamar Al-Kaddafi, (29) Moammar Khadafy, (30) Moammar Qudhafi, (31) Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, (32) Mulazim Awwal Mu'ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi.\n\nThere is no correct way or maybe they all are sort of correct.\n\nWith transliterating Chinese there is a standard, because the PRC made on. It is called Pinyin it was developed by Chinese and replaced earlier standard like Wade-Giles which were created by foreigners. The switch from one system to another is how the Chinese Capital 北京 turned from Peking into Beijing.\n\nThe way the sounds are transliterated is not specifically meant to imitate how an English speaker would write down what they hear but is a mixture from several different languages. The way the letter \"Q\" is pronounced perhaps comes the closest to the way an Albanian would do it. It is used to write down a sound that an English speaker would write down as \"ch\" rather than \"q\".\n\nSo that should answer you initial question about why Qing is pronounced more like Ching and the whole Peking and Beijing thing.\n\nBut it actually gets a bit more complicated than that, because Chinese is not really a single language. You have Languages like Mandarin (which is spoken in Beijing) and Cantonese (which is spoken in Hong Kong), the two are as different from one another as French and English are if not more so. However they can be written with the same Chinese characters.\n\nWhere a Frenchmen and an Englishmen writing down the the same idea in their own languages using the same script will arrive at different results, A Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker may come out with the same writing, because Chinese writing does not primarily encode sound but ideas.\n\nThe name of the Chinese capital 北京 says nothing about how it is supposed to be spelled it is just the two characters for \"North\" and \"Capital\" for \"Northern Capital\" and the city of 南京 means \"Southern Capital\" is today called Nanjing and used to be called Nanking under the old transliteration system that rendered Beijing as Peking. You can see that the charcter for capital is the same in both.\n\nAnother well known city with that character in it is 東京 it uses the characters for East and Capital again. What would you guess that is pronounced and transliterated in English? Something with jing/king at the end?\n\nYou would think so, but actually that is not a Chinese city at all but the way Japanese write the name of their Capital Tokyo. They borrowed the Chinese characters for their writing system but the language is completely different. The word for capital that comes out as \"jing\" when spoken by Chinese in Beijing comes out as kyo when spoken by Japanese as part of the names of cities like Tokyo or Kyoto.\n\nThe way spoken words their meaning and the way they are written down relate to one another can be extremely complicated.\n\nWhen one only ever has one language and mostly spells words the way they are pronounced except odd ones like Worcester, you usually don't realize how many levels there may be between words meaning and the characters we use to write them down as, but it can get really, really complicated.\n\nIt doesn't help that languages constantly evolve and borrow from one another, making a real mess of things that should in theory be really easy."
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[
"http://www.westword.com/news/top-112-spellings-of-moammar-gadhafi-or-gaddafi-or-qaddafi-or-kadafi-5875642"
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[],
[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weorgoran",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncope_(phonology)",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin"
],
[]
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|
7puh9d | - how do flu strains vs flu shots battle it out? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7puh9d/eli5_how_do_flu_strains_vs_flu_shots_battle_it_out/ | {
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"Most flu strains are related. I would assume that having the antibodies for one might provide some protection until your body is able to produce new antibodies for the new strain.",
"The flu shot, like other vaccines, work by triggering your immune system, causing it to produce antibodies that target the pathogen. This process ordinarily takes time, which is why it takes a while for your body to fight off a infection or virus since this is essentially a tailored response. However once it's done so some of those antibodies essentially stick around for quite some time, and provide a \"memory\" after a fashion; if something trigger the main immune response, your immune system can respond much much quicker, dealing with the pathogen before it can get very far (ie immunity). \n\nThe flu shot doesn't give perfect protection. Instead they try to aim for strains they expect will be more common. Sometimes this is spot on, some times less so. However, even in cases like this there where the prediction is off, yes it can lessen symptoms. A lot of times the antibodies are kind of right and provide an easier starting point for your immune system, allowing it to more effectively fight off the pathogen. It's less effective, not ineffective. \n\n "
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