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7y8mow | how lighting a fire on a candle pulls so much wax out of your ear. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7y8mow/eli5how_lighting_a_fire_on_a_candle_pulls_so_much/ | {
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"The simple answer is that they don't do that. All residue that you can see in them are from the candles themselves.\n\nFor more info read this: _URL_0_\n\nThey don't produce any negative pressure so nothing cat be pulled out and if the did pull things out there would be enough negative pressure to burst your eardrums.\n\nThe candles burn the same regardless if you put them in your ear or not and all residue is from the candles.\n\nThere is a reson that in medicine you done clean ears with a device similar to a vacuum cleaner but instead push in water, with pressure that your eardrum can survive, in a smaller tube so it can dislodge what is in there \n\nThe procurede have a risk and you can get hot melted wax into you ears."
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1l2tfx | what raw materials/ingredients are used to make antidepressants. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l2tfx/eli5what_raw_materialsingredients_are_used_to/ | {
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"The process of synthesizing a medication starts with some commercially available reagent which is acted on in various ways to create the desired molecule.\n\nWhat that initial reagent depends entirely on the drug in question. For example, citalopram, a widely used antidepressant, can be synthesized out of 5-bromopthalide, [which can be purchased from suppliers](_URL_0_). That reagent is combined with others under specific conditions. Chemical reactions occur. At the end of the process, you end up with citalopram.\n\nIt's basically like cooking. You go to the grocery store and buy flour, eggs and sugar, then you come home and combine them in the right way to bake a cake."
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6qvksf | when things are loading on my computer, why does the status bar often jump quickly to 99% and then stay there for a long time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qvksf/eli5_when_things_are_loading_on_my_computer_why/ | {
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"Status bars show how much of a process has been completed, not how long each individual task takes. The increments of a status bar are not based on the time it will take, because figuring that out could be very computationally intensive and drastically slow the very thing it's measuring.",
"The status bar is something that gets updated explicitly. So if the program has to load 100 data files the programmers just map one file to 1% of the loading process. But the 100th file might be way bigger so it may take longer. Or the 99% of the process is the loading of the data (again a linear mapping from data to load to %) and the last % is to unpack them. \n\nSo overall it is bad programming of the developers OR something that just can't be timed. Like a download from a server, a version check etc. where the programmers can't know how long it takes in relation to other operations. ",
"It can depend on what is being loaded. Sometimes, when you file transfer or download something the final step of the process is something called a \"Cyclical Redundancy Check\" or an \"Integrity Check.\" \n\nWhen you download a file or an email, the place you are downloading the data will run what's called a hashing algorithm(SHA/MD5) against the file(s) you are downloading. The hashing algorithm will spit out a series of numbers and letters unique to that specific file or set of data and attach it to that data set or file. Once the step completes the download begins.\n\nSHA - Security Hashing Algorithm\n\nMD5 - Message Digest 5(although there may be more recent versions now.)\n\nAt the 99% on your side of the download, the file has been received and the same algorithm is run again. The resulting series of numbers and letters that the algorithm on your end runs must match the original results that were generated on the other end of the download. This insures that the data has not changed in any way during the download process. \n\nDepending on the program you are using to download, it can also check for known hashes for that match malware.\n\nExample: You want to download a reddit app on your phone. \n\nStep 1. You connect select the app from the app store and tell it to download.\n\nStep 2. The app store accepts you request and runs the hash and spits out 12345 against the app.\n\nStep 3. The download begins\n\nStep 4. Your phone hits 99% and runs the same hashing process on the phone device itself.\n\nStep 5. The hash results show 12345 thus the integrity of the file is intact.\n\nStep 6. Install app",
"The status bar isn't actually really meant to give the user too much useful information. The most basic functionality of the status bar is to convince users that your computer hasn't frozen, and it's still working. Because there are so many variables in computing, it is impossible to give an accurate prediction of a meaningful metric that humans can understand (i.e how long you must wait for the rest of the load to finish)."
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eyh4ri | what is starbucks's value proposition/competitive advantage? and how did that enable it to launch products in stores? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eyh4ri/eli5_what_is_starbuckss_value/ | {
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"Starbucks no longer has to compete as heavily in the value proposition. They exist in a space where they basically promote \"you get what you pay for\" to justify paying more. Additionally, when they first arrived they offered something new and unique and they set the trends and so people believed Starbucks was a leader and now they Excel with brand loyalty. \n\nThe bigger they for the more they could control pricing of the goods they purchased which then enabled them to gain an even bigger share (like Wal-Mart). This allowed them to have additional product that they were able to easily package and sell elsewhere as another revenue stream."
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318tnj | how can getting a vasectomy not be 100% effective birth control? | In the [comments section](_URL_0_) of a post it was pointed out that a paternity test might still be warranted because a vasectomy is not 100% possible. How could a vasectomy (assuming it was done correctly) leave any chance of fathering a child? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/318tnj/eli5_how_can_getting_a_vasectomy_not_be_100/ | {
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"Not all vasectomies succeed. You might even do the after-test and find no viable sperm cells, but what if the doc just missed it?",
"The procedure can either be done improperly, or the two ends of the Vas deferens (the tubes that come out of your testis) can reunite and heal. It's rare, but it does happen.",
"Some vas deferens tubes have grown back over time, resulting in fertility and unexpected births. This according to my urologist when I was snipped. Better wrap that thing up, boys! ",
"If Jurassic Park taught me anything its that nature will find a way.",
"There's a couple routes where a vasectomy can fail, and more recent procedures are intended to fix these.\n\nFirst, a vasectomy can be done incorrectly. Inexperienced doctors can miss one of the vas deferens and still allow sperm to reach the penis, the vas deferen can sometimes not get fully cut (Some part is still connected to the other side), and so it grows back together.\n\nThe other, more common issue is with older vasectomies, or vasectomies done in countries other than the US. One of the methods of doing a vasectomy is to only cauterize one end of the cut vas deferen, and leave the side that produces the sperm open (Been a while since I looked into this, I believe this method helps with sperm absorption after the vasectomy). The route of failure in this instance is the cauterized side opening up somehow, then sperm being able to flow into the other end without them ever actually reconnecting. Vasectomies performed in the US cauterize both sides so this route of failure is either from an old vasectomy or one preformed in another country.\n\nThird is that vasectomies are not effective right away. They become effective anywhere from 30 days to 6 months after the procedure due to stored sperm. This is probably the most common reason you hear of men having children after a vasectomy is they believe the vasectomy is immediately effective, or effective much sooner than it is.",
"Post vasectomy baby here! My dad had had the \"Clip Style\" vasectomy done - where instead of cutting/cauterizing he has small metal clips placed on the vas. He went back for the 3 month test, and the 1 year test, and was negative both times. 4 years later... SUPRISE I showed up! One of the clips had \"migrated.\" As far as I know \"clip style\" V's are no longer done. My husband just had his vasectomy done a few months ago. His was clipped, cut, and cauterized. We were still warned to make sure we get the tests done, as some people can have THREE vas deferens tubes.",
"Piggy back questions here:\n\nFirst, after having a vasectomy, does sperm still come out of your penis when you ejaculate?\n\nSecond, how common is it for men to get vasectomies?"
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5897dq | what allows media outlets to blatantly lie? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5897dq/eli5_what_allows_media_outlets_to_blatantly_lie/ | {
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"To quote Amendment 1 of the Bill of Rights directly:\n**Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.**\n\nIn short, the media (or the press) has the ability to have free speech, whether it is truth or not. There are slander laws in place, but the media has been around long enough to know when it crosses the line."
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bus1tq | how does smoking or drinking coffee affect your digestive system? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bus1tq/eli5_how_does_smoking_or_drinking_coffee_affect/ | {
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"Constricts your blood vessels and causes your heart to pump faster, which speeds everything up",
"I highly recommend against smoking coffee. It's possibly much worse for you than drinking it.",
"Caffeine alerts whole metabolism to work faster depending on the amount taken and body tolerance. It's also diuretic so you'll visit the bathroom for no 1.\n\nSmoking also increases blood pressure among other things. I don't know biological reasons for this but it triggers no 2.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nIf you are indeed smoking coffee, write down everything. I'm curious."
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dj0p0w | how do scientists know exactly what happens inside of our bodies while we’re alive? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dj0p0w/eli5_how_do_scientists_know_exactly_what_happens/ | {
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"Nazi scientists did a lot of very unethical experiments that would never be allowed. Information was still gained. People dont like to talk about that though",
"We don't, that's what makes it hard.\n\nThere are a number of methods: autopsies when people die from various causes and we can take them apart very carefully and look at all the details to know what happens the next time they see a live person with the same issue, then there's animal studies, and tests in the lab using cells and tissues taken from the body.\n\nThere are a lot of imaging techniques which can be safely done on living bodies: x-ray, CAT-scans (which are groups of x-rays put together for 3D image), MRI (good for seeing soft-tissue, unlike x-rays), and ultrasound which bounce high-pitched sound waves off of body tissues. A bit more invasive are some options for putting a camera into the digestive tract, from either end and now including a pill-like thing you can swallow. Then there's endoscopy, a tiny camera on a fiber optic line that can be put into an incision in the body to look at a joint from the inside perhaps, or travel inside a vein right into the heart if needed."
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5fjdkz | why do we have nerves in our teeth? wouldn't a tooth ache that hinders our ability to eat end up being a disadvantage for survival? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fjdkz/eli5_why_do_we_have_nerves_in_our_teeth_wouldnt_a/ | {
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"If you have a tooth ache caused by an infection, how would you know if you didn't feel it? that infection would go untreated and become more dangerous. ",
"Well we kind of don't know. There's really no hard evidence as to why we have nerves in our teeth. Here's a more detailed explanation. _URL_0_",
"Nature doesn't care if a member of a species survives as long as they live long enough to reproduce. Historically, without so much sugar in our diets, tooth decay hasn't been quite as bad of a problem. To the extent that it is, your teeth remained serviceable, for the most part, until you were old enough to have passed on your genes. Past that point, there is no evolutionary pressure for any changes in anatomy/physiology."
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20faum | why does my 4g phone handle the internet better than my damn home connection? | I pay a pretty penny for internet at home. While admittedly the computer in question is picking up on my home wifi signal, I feel like there shouldn't ever be a gif that loads MUCH smoother on my phone than my pc. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20faum/eli5_why_does_my_4g_phone_handle_the_internet/ | {
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"How many MBPS are you paying for? DSL, Cable, Fiber?"
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1jta2d | why don't any auto manufacturers make any "baseline" automobiles, which are only what is necessary to put on the road & sell at an extremely low price? | It seems like an ugly, simplistic, "A-B" car shouldn't be too difficult or expensive to create. I have ridden the bus for a LONG time because I cannot justify paying so much for something so overpriced. What gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jta2d/eli5_why_dont_any_auto_manufacturers_make_any/ | {
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"Because such a company would be instantly priced out of the market by preowned cars. There's already a virtually inexhaustible supply of \"baseline\" cars at every price point imaginable. You can't build new cars for under the two grand you'd pay for a '91 Civic.",
"because they wouldn't be appealing to the public. thus wouldn't sell and thus wouldn't make money for the company. it takes alot to produce a car. more than just the parts for the car. the designers and engineers take years to come up with a new car. the factories take years and millions of dollars to come up with the tooling and manufacturing lines in the factories. a toyota camry line can't produce a toyota celica. every car the company puts to the public to sell is an investment of millions (if not tens of millions) of dollars. if the car doesn't sell well, the company loses all that money.",
"\"Extremely low price\" means extremely low, if any, profit. The auto manufacturers are for profit corporations responsible to their shareholders. Making money is the goal, making cars is the way, although not always. Ford, GM, and Chrysler have historically had best profits on *lending* money to customers, so they would buy their cars.",
"I believe this is the premise behind Scion cars, \n\nWhat kind of features are you thinking they should get rid of?\n\nKeep in mind that car companies work on \"economies of scale,\" meaning that the more they produce, the cheaper they are. If they made a car with, for example, just the driver seat and no passenger seats, it might sell, but only to a very select audience and not enough to justify the cost. This is because car companies have very high sunk costs (building factories, manufacturing the materials, etc.). So it may be that a completely \"bare bones\" car might not sell well enough.",
"The problem is that you can buy a cheap car, and it will be total crap. \nTake the Chevy Aveo. It was a cheap entry level car and you could even get one without air conditioning. That was all fine and well but when it broke down some of the parts were crazy expensive and often there would be a repair on a car that wasn't that old that was just cost prohibitive. \n\nYou get what you pay for. Buy a better car in a base model. ",
"Question is already marked as answered, but I have some more to add. \n\nA \"basic\" car would share the same major components as more expensive cars: tires, engine, transmission, doors, roof, seats, safety features, emissions controls, etc. These parts make up 75% of the cost of the car. Even if you use cheaper versions of these parts, then it will still cost within a few thousand dollars of the cheapest car currently on the road.\n\nBut that is just the material cost. You also have to factor in the fixed costs. The engineering cost to develop a car is pretty much the same, no matter how much it is worth. Car companies have to go through the same emissions tests, fuel economy tests, crash tests, reliability tests, etc. If there are unique parts (smaller engine, cheaper wheels, manual windows, etc.), then it just increases the engineering costs required. You have to spread this cost out over each car.\n\nOther fixed costs will also have to be spread out over each car: Overhead, manufacturing tools, advertising, etc.\n\nSince there would be plenty of used cars available at the same price point, but with more convenience features, demand would be low. That means there will be fewer cars to sell to spread the fixed costs over, making the car that much closer in actual cost to current cars.\n\nBottom line is that you may be able to make a cheaper car, it really won't be that much cheaper and demand would be low because it wouldn't have any of the convenience features that consumers have come to expect.",
"Further to Rlchv70 good answer, there are some practical manufacturing process issues and legal issues.\n\nBut first, it's been done, sort of. Some years ago Acura offered their performance RSX in a stripped down form as it was extremely popular with the tuner crowd, road racing, drifting and serious car audio customizers: your choice of minimal or no interior, some or no body panels. But, this is a very small, very specialized market, and, I am assuming here, Acura could still earn enough profit from these stripped down cars to make it worth their while.\n\nOK, I have worked in automotive design, so here's how most car programs go. Every new vehicle development is a platform project simultaneously developing multiple configurations of one car family. A fairly successful project, from a high-multiple platform delivery, was the Ford Focus. Although the car itself only achieved moderate success, the development program was really quite astonishing. Ford simultaneously developed many well thought out embodiments (hatchback, 2, 4 door, sedan, engines, and permutations of those options). But, all those different vehicle embodiments were developed with a reasonably well described market size. To Ford, your \"baseline\" automobile was pretty much one of their Focus vehicle embodiments.\n\nLegal issues. At one time (1990's) GM published internal newsletter a colleague read that stated they receive approximately 100 lawsuits per day. Many frivolous, but enough to be a serious concern. A Ford engineer friend commented once \"If we didn't have to submit every fabric stitch to 100's of certified tests car prices would drop dramatically\". Of course, he was being facetious, but there's truth in the cost escalation from excessive testing due to both warranted performance checks and cover-their-ass from frivolous lawsuits.\n\nLastly, there's the issue of brand. Occupying the \"lowest possible price\" brand position usually goes together with \"lowest possible quality\", and many will say this is exactly what destroyed GM in the 1970's-1980's.",
"They have. Every heard of the Tata Nano. Its Indian, which means its in the right market for people without a lot of money. Also in India, owning a car is a symbol of wealth. Well, the car didn't really catch on. Who would want to drive a car whos seeking point is it being the cheapest car every. "
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79beyt | ecosystems in biomes | Hi Middle Schooler here
I have this project where I choose and research a biome and choosen ecosystem within it. I am very confused what an ecosystem is, Can reddit help me please?. I also cannot chose a Biome so can anyone help with that aswell? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79beyt/eli5_ecosystems_in_biomes/ | {
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"An ecosystem is a unit comprised of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) parts existing in a particular territory, in an ecosystem it's important to consider the flow or matter and energy, like the cycle of water or cycle of phophorous.\n\nA biome is considered in terms of its geographical position, its climate and the predominant vegetation, rather than the flow of energy and relationships between individuals and their environment. [This map](_URL_0_) summarizes the land biomes.\n\nUsually, an ecosystem is smaller in size and complexity when compared to the biome. For example, inside the tropical rainforest biome you can find the ecosystem of tropical rainforest birds and its relationship with tropical rainforest plants, tropical rainforest insects and other.",
"While u/pelusteriano explained it well, try and save questions that you can find on google, by googling it. There are lots of sources online you could find and use easily.",
"Here are some interactive maps that can help you understand biomes, ecoregions and climate classifications that will enable you to zoom down to the ground and view them in 3D with links to data that support each.\n\n[Terrestrial Biomes and Ecoregions](_URL_2_)\n\n[Geography of the Köppen Climate Classification System](_URL_1_)\n\nTo understand how biomes and ecoregions affect the spread of disease check out (the tree symbols indicate the biomes that both restrict and promote its spread):\n\n[The Spread of Ebola Outbreaks (1976-2015)](_URL_0_)\n\nIf you turn on the 3D terrain, you can even view them with mountains. And you can even merge the maps with the radar maps found in the weather section to see how today's weather effect the biome.\n\n"
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31n8o1 | why, if i hold it long enough, does the urge to use the bathroom sometimes go away? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31n8o1/eli5_why_if_i_hold_it_long_enough_does_the_urge/ | {
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"if you can get your legs higher above your heart (like hanging off your couch) theres some science about your nerves in the bladder deactivating because it isn't detecting the pressure from the urine. \n\n\nI could be wrong (learned this a while back) about the reason this works, so don't take my word exactly for it. ",
"I think this has more to do with mind-over-matter or out-of-sight, out-of-mind. If you're actively doing another activity sometimes you can suppress those urges to pee or even eat for that matter. But eventually it'll catch up with you again and you WILL need to go. It's not healthy to keep yourself from peeing because urination is your body's way of detoxifying (so to speak), and nobody wants toxins, right?",
"Part of what controls your bladder recognizes that you're holding it, so it turns off for a little while as the sensation may be distracting in what could be a dire situation where pissing is really not good for survival. It still makes sure to remind you though, as the bladder continues to inflate. \n\nSource: I actually have no fucking clue. ",
"The urge to go is the stretching taking place. When the stretching stops the urge goes down as long as it's not stretched too large.",
"Do you continue to reabsorb H20 from the urine in your bladder as time goes on without urinating?",
"Probably wrong but AFAIK: With the urge to poop, your intestines/colon push poo towards your anus in waves, it's not, like, a continuous flow. So if you get some stuff that's ready to exit, your colon and whatnot tell your brain, \"Hey, we got business to take care of\"\n\nBut since those muscles are consciously controlled, your brain can be like \"Not now, we're busy\". Eventually the urge will go away until the next \"wave\" comes. ",
"Not qualified to answer, but I assume it has to do with your brain suppressing the feeling so that you aren't constantly bothered in a dangerous situation"
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4e28yi | why do boys and girls mature at different rates? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e28yi/eli5_why_do_boys_and_girls_mature_at_different/ | {
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"males and females have different levels of hormones, which are produced at different times throughout life. Males have much higher levels of testosterone, while females have much higher levels of estrogen and progesterone. These hormones are released at different times, and in varying amounts, and therefore cause different maturation rates."
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1lj690 | why can't companies that post millions (or even billions) of profits pay their staff a little more so there is more money in the economy? | Surely these multinational corporations that calculate their profits in the millions s or even billions can take a small hit on that so their workers have money to reinvest in the economy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lj690/eli5_why_cant_companies_that_post_millions_or/ | {
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"Corporate profits *are* reinvested into the economy. When Apple opens a new store or starts development on new products with their profits, the money starts circulating again. Companies don't just hoard money; they invest it to continue growing their business."
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5symki | why the temperature of air change when it's being moved? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5symki/eli5_why_the_temperature_of_air_change_when_its/ | {
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"It doesn't change temperature when it's moving (like through a fan), but it has a cooling evaporation effect on our skin so we feel that it is cooler but its temperature is the same."
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5rv0lf | why do people say the middle east will go back to nothing once their oil runs out? | Everytime theirs a debate theirs always a point bought up saying once the middle east runs out of oil they'll go back to being or doing nothing, This is where im confused before the middle east discovered Oil they had huge empire some even conquering Europeon contries and half of Africa then those empires collasped and they discovered oil. Where did the assumption come from that the middle eastw as nothing before Oil? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rv0lf/eli5why_do_people_say_the_middle_east_will_go/ | {
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"The reference is to those countries that did *not* have great empires in recent centuries. Saudi Arabia, for example, was just an impoverished desert (and not even a unified country) before petroleum. It has not taken advantage of this burst of wealth to build many other capabilities, so one sees little reason to forecast greatness post-petroleum.\n\nAlso, the climate was different (less dry) in these places 1000+ years ago, so they had a stronger agricultural base.\n\nAlso, world trade used to be slower, so these countries did not have to compete with enormously powerful global players as they may in the future.",
"the \"back to nothing\" part might be true for most of the Arabian peninsula but regions like Turkey, Syria, Egypt have a long history of being \"something\".\n\nThe thing is: there is no other big industry in the region, there are no great universities. No clusters of innovation. And most of the money is or at least used to be spent on luxury items instead of long-term income sources. This has definitely gotten better over the last decade or so (probably longer) but most countries in the region are still highly dependent on oil."
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2dxc8j | my little brothers math homework. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dxc8j/eli5my_little_brothers_math_homework/ | {
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"1. fill the 4L\n\n2. pour the 4L into the 7L\n\n3. fill the 4L\n\n4. Pour the 4L into the 7L, so that you have 1L left in the 4L\n\n5. Empty the 7L\n\n6. Pour the 1L in the 4L-bucket into the 7L\n\n7. Fill the 4L bucket.\n\n8. pour the water from the 4L bucket into the 7L",
"Pour the 4L into 7L twice. This leaves 1L in the 4L and the 7L full. Then empty the 7L and pour the 1L left in the 4L into the 7L. Then fill the 4L again and pour that into the 7L. ",
"Fill up the 4L container, and pour it into the 7L container. 4L = 0, 7L = 4\n\nFill up the 4L container again, and pour as much as you can into the 7L container. You'll have (2 x 4) - 7 = 1 liter remaining in the 4L container, and the 7L container will be full. 4L = 1, 7L = 7\n\nDump out the 7L container, then pour the single liter that's in the 4L container into the empty 7L container. 4L = 0, 7L = 1\n\nFill the 4L container again, and dump into the 7L. 4L = 0, 7L = 5.\n\nYou've got 5 liters, and you only had to pour 12L total and only dumped 7.\n\nI'd still recommend you let him work it out, because this is good for spatial problem solving. Maybe clue him into the fact that you can pour one into the other, and if you fill a container completely, you may have a \"leftover\" in the other container that you can use as a measurement. \n\nIt's always better to give a simple clue, then better and better clues if he needs, so that you can give the student just as much help as he needs, while ensuring he figures out what he can to the best of his ability."
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1z76e3 | can someone give me a summary of all the star wars movies, (and any vital information from the novels.) | I've seen all the movies at different points throughout my life, and I understand the main plot of Star Wars but not much more than that. I know there are plenty of Star Wars buffs out there, so here's your chance to enlighten me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1z76e3/eli5_can_someone_give_me_a_summary_of_all_the/ | {
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"The story of the first 6 Star Wars movies (all made so far) is the story of the rise and fall of a man named Palpatine. He is a Dark Lord of the Sith, named Darth Sidious, and he begins the first movie (Star Wars Episode I) as a Senator in the Galactic Republic.\n\n**Episode I**\n\nSidious' plans to cause chaos for the Republic result in economic warfare between the Trade Federation and the Republic. 2 Jedi Knights are sent to resolve the blockade around planet Naboo. They end up on planet Tatooine where they meet Anakin Skywalker, a precocious child who proves to be strong with the Force. Back on Naboo Obi-Wan Kenobi watches as Darth Maul, Sidious' apprentice, kills his master. The blockade is broken after a space & land battle.\n\n**Episode II**\n\nSidious rises in power in the Senate as the state of emergency with the Trade Federation continues to cause problems. He contracts to have a huge army of clones produced based on the genetic template of Jango Fett, a mercenary. Obi-Wan is promoted to Jedi Master and takes Anakin as his apprentice. The two end up as prisoners along with Princess Amidala of Naboo (and Anakin's secret lover) on planet Genosis. Sidious' new apprentice, Darth Tyranus is working in league with the Trade Federation and the cockroach-like aliens of Genosis to create a droid army to oppose the Republic, and laying plans to make the Death Star - a giant space station capable of destroying a planet. A huge battle ensues and Master Yoda of the Jedi Council declares \"begun they have the clone wars\".\n\n**Episode III**\n\nObi-Wan and Anakin are heroes of the Clone Wars, having fought in battles across the Galaxy. As the movie opens they are engaged in battle over Corsucant the Republic capital world. Anakin kills Darth Tyranus. In secret, he and Amidala have married and she has become pregnant. Anakin is denied promotion to Jedi Master. He grows close to Palpatine who slowly corrupts him, and eventually he turns on the Jedi after his mother is killed by Sandpeople on Tatooine and he takes his vengeance on his mother's killers giving in to the Dark Side of the Force. On his return Sidious names him Darth Vader and sends him to the Jedi temple where he slaughters all the Jedi he can including a number of small children. The Senate elevates Palpatine to the position of Emperor, and he gives an order which converts the Clone Army to his personal military, turning them on the non-clone forces of the Republic. Obi-wan pursues Vader to the world of Mustufar where they duel, and Vader has 3 limbs amputated and is badly burned by the heat of nearby lava. Nearly dead, Sidious finds him and has him encased in metal armor that acts as a permanent life support system. Sidious tells Vader that Amidala has died before giving birth. In truth, she has escaped though she is injured, and gives birth to twins - Luke and Leia, before she dies. Leia will be fostered with the royal family of planet Alderaan, and Luke will be fostered on Tatooine under the watchful eye of Obi-Wan.\n\n**Episode IV**\n\nThe Republic has become an Empire and many systems have refused to convert, becoming the Rebellion. Plans for the Death Star have leaked and Vader is pursuing them when he intercepts a courier ship being used by Leia over Tatooine. Leia puts the Death Star plans into droid R2D2, who abandons the courier ship with protocol droid C-3P0. They land on Tatooine, are captured by Jawa traders, and sold to Owen, Luke's foster father. R2D2 leaves the Owen farm seeking Obi-Wan, forcing Luke and C-3PO to chase him. In the desert they meet Obi-Wan, who calls himself \"Ben Kenobi\". Obi-wan tells Luke a heavy edited version of his family history and the history of the Jedi. Eventually Obi-wan, Luke, the 2 droids, and a smuggler named Han Solo with his first mate Chewbacca leave Tatooine to take R2D2 to Alderaan aboard Solo's ship the Millenium Falcon. They arrive moments after the Death Star has destroyed the planet as way of trying to force Leia to divulge the location of the hidden Rebel base. The Falcon is captured by the Death Star, but the heroes manage to avoid detection, rescue Leia, disable the Death Star's tractor beams, and flee. They go to the Rebel Base where the technicians determine there is a fatal flaw in the Death Star's construction, a flaw exploited by Luke as the Death Star has followed a tracking device hidden on the Falcon by Vader right to the Rebel Base. Luke destroys the Death Star in the nick of time, and Vader narrowly escapes with his life.\n\n**Episode V**\n\nThe Rebels continue to grow in number as word of the destruction of the Death Star spreads. They are hunted with even more vigor by Vader who eventually locates the base on the ice world of Hoth. Vader invades but the Rebels manage to escape. Solo and Leia fall in love. Luke goes to planet Dagobah to meet Yoda and be trained as a Jedi. Sidious orders Vader to try and turn Luke to the Dark Side. Eventually everyone ends up on planet Bespin where Solo is encased in carbonite and sent to Tatooine with Boba Fett, son of Jango, and then Luke and Vader fight, Vader reveals that he is Luke's father, and discovers that Luke & Leia are brother and sister. In the end the heroes escape on the Falcon and reunite aboard the ships of the Rebel Fleet.\n\n**Episode VI**\n\nLuke engineers a complicated plan to spring Solo from capture on Tatooine then returns to Dagobah to complete his training with Yoda. The Rebels discover the Empire has built a 2nd Death Star, and they plan to assault it before it completes construction. The Emperor goes to the Death Star to personally oversee the work. During the Rebel attack, Vader captures Luke and takes him into the presence of Sidious where both try to convert him to the Dark Side, but they fail. As the Rebels succeed in breaking through the Imperial defense around the Death Star and attack it's central reactor core, Vader finds redemption by killing Sidious, and saving Luke's life - but Vader is badly wounded and dies. Luke escapes the Death Star before it is destroyed, and the heroes reunite a final time as the Galaxy celebrates the death of the Emperor.\n\n**Expanded Universe**\n\nThe novels, comic books, videogames, animated TV series, etc. mostly elaborate on these events, narrowing in the focus on a minor character or a barely mentioned moment, or delving into aspects of the backstories of the characters or the galaxy.\n\nA small number of novels were set in the post Episode VI timeline. Solo and Leia marry and have kids. Luke re-founds the Jedi but with more humane principles. Remnants of the Imperial forces continue to struggle against the new Republic founded by Leia and the Rebel leadership. The galaxy is invaded by a hostile race of extremely powerful aliens - and there are hints that Sidious knew of this threat and that in fact all his actions were designed to prepare to fight a war against them, etc.\n\nDisney says that they're prepared to abandon most of what is called the \"Expanded Universe\" - anything that didn't happen in the 6 movies. The people working on the next series of Star Wars movies which will take place in the timeline after Episode VI do not have to follow any of the material others created to fill in that timeline and it's expected that they'll likely create a whole new storyline instead.",
"When you get a chance, Google the \"Machete order\" Its a way to watch the movies that makes them make way more sense and it actually makes it a bit more entertaining. \n\nI'm a huge SW nerd knowing stuff from the make and model of the millenium falcon to what type of blaster rifle Boba Fett used. I highly recommend \"Machette order\""
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djj4eb | why is it that people with alzheimer's can often hold a conversation and their language but can't remember or don't know answers to basic questions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/djj4eb/eli5_why_is_it_that_people_with_alzheimers_can/ | {
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"OP's question rephrased is essentially \"why does brain damage sometimes have an effect on memory and not on cognitive function.\"\n\nWhich I answered before in a previous post.\nSee here:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Early alzheimer affects memories from newest to oldest. So there is a period of time where information is essentially erased, but things like language sometimes goes last.\n\nOther times, they do forget a lot of language, or start substituting words, etc."
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owh4c | what would happen if the apollo rocket missed the moon? | I'm just curious if anyone knows. What was the contingency plan if an Apollo rocket overshot the moon? Was this even a concern? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/owh4c/eli5_what_would_happen_if_the_apollo_rocket/ | {
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"There are other factors that have to be considered. Does the rocket have enough momentum to overcome the moon's gravity? If not then you will likely orbit the moon until you crash from not being able to maneuver, land at an alternate site, or loop around and return to Earth early. \n\nIf the rocket overcomes the moon's gravity and shoots on out to space you may be able to use maneuvering thrusters to turn around, but you'll probably have to scrap the mission and return home.\n\nAnd if you overshoot the moon, and can't maneuver, then you're fucked.",
"Tangentially related: Nixon's speech in case Apollo 11 had died on the moon.\n\n_URL_0_",
"I'm not quite sure how a moonshot could 'miss the moon.' At worst they would have done an engine burn that was either too short or too long and could have corrected it with the CSM engines.\n\nLet's go for the worst-case scenero: The moon suddenly disappears when an Apollo takes off. (entering explain like I'm 5 mode here):\n\nOK, for an apollo spacecraft to go to the moon, it needs to fire a large engine for about 6 minutes. This engine is actually the third stage of Saturn V and is discarded after the spacecraft is on the way to the moon.\n\nThis engine on the third stage of the Saturn V is very powerful - More than 10 times as powerful as the main engine on the Apollo service module. If you lit the engine and went towards the moon (that just disappeared, btw), you would have sufficient velocity to escape earth's gravity, but not enough rocket power to get back.\n\nWhat would eventually happen to you? Well, you'd be stuck in solar orbit, unable to return to earth. This happened to a couple Saturn V third stages - most interestingly the one for [Apollo 12](_URL_0_) which was though to be an asteroid when it was re-discovered a few years back.\n\nSo if you completely miss the moon by pointing your rocket in the wrong direction, you'll end up in an orbit around the sun."
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1a79pg | what has happened to this subreddit? | I apologize for what I'm sure will seem like a whiny, complaining self-post... But this subreddit is named, "Explain like I'm **five**. Lately, all new posts have been treated like 'r/askreddit' posts, with regular explanations *not* geared toward five-year-olds. I want this subreddit to experience a return to form, where responses to questions are genuinely geared toward childlike explanations.
Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope I don't come off as whiny. I just love the concept of this subreddit and hope to see it continued. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a79pg/eli5_what_has_happened_to_this_subreddit/ | {
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"Are you thinking about when people takes their time to explain the universe with a love of language and metaphors and using fruit and footballs (soccer balls if you are American) for comparison? \n\nI love when those comes around. I've noticed that some people have actually burned the poster for such a comment. Saying it is belittling and what not. \n\n\n\n(Maybe it is the people not qualified to answer in /r/askscience that take out their anger on us?)",
"It's not literally five-year-old level understanding. They're supposed to be explanations for a layman as per the guidelines on the right.\n\nIf the explanation is overly complex then a follow up question would be reasonable or even down vote the answer and hope for a better one.",
"It's not literally for five year olds. It's just an expression meaning to explain things in laymen's terms as it says on the sidebar.\n\n",
"Responses to questions genuinely geared toward childlike explanations are much more common on /r/ExplainLikeImHigh",
"This submission is fine, but needs a [META] tag, not [ELI5].\n\nThis subreddit is not meant to be a creative-writing exercise, like /r/explainlikeiama, etc. People come in here with the mindset of this is a game where you pretend you're explaining complex stuff to a small child. That is the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is that you should come in here to *help* other redditors--the vast majority of which are between the ages of 15 and 35, I'd say--understand things that sincerely confound them, and all the sources they're finding really aren't helping them get a decent *grounding* of basic understanding. In other words, this subreddit is for explaining *complex and confusing* things to regular people. That is, without assuming they are particularly more knowledgable in math/science/history/whatever than the regular person, without using undefined jargon, without using highly elevated language and so on. \n\nThe problem with these Dr. Seuss stories is that analogies usually make things *worse* if you stretch too hard to make them. If you are trying to relate every aspect of, say, how the Internet works to a story of kids in treehouses with strings in cups connected between all of them, you are going to lose out a *lot* on understanding. More effort will be spent trying to figure out what represents what and not actually learning anything about what's going on. Analogies should be well-utilized and the person should *leave* the thread with an understanding of the main basics, instead of some contrived bullshit.\n\nI, personally, discourage any explanations to actual five year olds whenever possible. Make it simple, but make it advanced enough to actually address the part the person is confused about. ",
"What has happened to this subreddit is that people seem to refuse to read or understand the sidebar:\n\n > Keep your answers simple! We're shooting for elementary-school level answers. But -- **please, no arguments about what an \"actual five year old\" would know or ask!** We're all about simple answers to complicated questions. Use your best judgment and stay within the spirit of the subreddit.\n\nYou're something like the fifth person to make a self post like this one. The subreddit is not about acting like a child, it's about explaining complex subjects. You don't need to be condescending and use baby talk to explain things. If that's what you want, maybe start a /r/babytalk subreddit.",
"Well little Johnny, adults prefer to communicate - I mean, _talk_ - in an efficient manner - I mean, _in a good way_. When we have to replace - I mean, _use one word for another_ - for the sake of \"explaining like I'm five\", you end up making this more confusing - I mean, _hard to understand_.\n\nThere is nothing wrong with facing the fact that most people are adults here.\n\n**tl;dr** Use simple words no good."
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18q1w0 | from an evolutionary stance, why are humans bereft of basic defenses:claws, canines, thick hide..and instead runs with diverse body types, no fur, and exposed vital organs? | I accept evolution in its basic and complex forms, but how did humans dominate the jungle without even being able to hold their breath for more than two minutes, or getting a cold after every storm? Research tells me that the subconscious invested more time in perfecting precision and problem solving, but I can't help wonder if there are other theories. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18q1w0/eli5_from_an_evolutionary_stance_why_are_humans/ | {
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"A common misconception about evolution is that it should \"improve things\". \n\nIn reality, though, it doesn't care where our organs are, or what defences we have. It simply favours animals that *learn to survive*. We have evolved from an ancestor of the Great Apes, for which this body structure was well-suited.\n\nHumans have since done a remarkably good job of surviving/reproducing in our relatively-frail form, and so those are the genes that get passed on to the next generation.",
"The great apes also lack most of those, relying on strength and a general lack of predators due to their size. Since we diverged from them the body plan will be similar.\n\nWe lost the ape musculature to increase our manual dexterity and devote more energy to the brain.\n\nA well coordinated team of spear-armed human hunters are the deadliest predator on Earth, so much so that we've driven other apex predators into extinction over the years.\n\nThe ability to dive deep underwater and stay warm in the bitter cold weren't needed on the African plains where we evolved.",
"Since humanity knew fire and tools, we had pretty much no predators that were a real threat to us anymore. Also humans always were living in groups and worked together, which made them superior to single hunters like bears. \nWe also never had to rely on claws or superior strength or something for hunting. The human hunting technique was basically to follow the prey long enough to make it too tired to run any further. A human who is at least somewhat in shape today can still outrun pretty much any wild mammal. At first they will run away far too fast for you to keep up, but you just follow them on medium speed and at some point you'll find a completely exhausted animal that you could easily kill with your bare hands. \nThe fur thing came up when we started to live in places that were less exposed. If you don't need fur to keep you warm, it is only another good place for bacteria and vermin to grow. It's harder to keep it clean than plane skin.\n\nEdit because sometimes I'm stupid.",
"because humans never had to rely on these things to survive. What made us survive and reproduce was our ability to think through situations. \n\nManipulating our environments in ways such as making shelters meant that we had no need for thick fur. Even before that, we evolved in a hot climate in Africa, meaning that being furless and sweating allowed us to dissipate body heat better, meaning we could beat out other animals by endurance.\n\nTool and weapon use would have meant that claws would have been selected against as they'd impede dexterity. Long canines were ditched in favour of jaws that could eat many different types of food.\n\nOur vital organs are exposed only because we walk upright, the exposed parts owuld have been much less so if we walked on all fours. This disadvantage would have been negated by the ability to climb, and swim, and the more energy efficient bipedal locomotion, as well as the greater height and the sight advantage it brings.",
"I know it seems like we lack the scary weapons of other animals; the claws and teeth and strength and agility, but as eine_person said elsewhere in this thread, what we do have is the stamina to run down just about any large plains mammal there is. And we have the spring-loaded foot ligaments, the all-over sweat production and hairlessness, the brains to track animals that are miles ahead of us, everything we need to accomplish that.\n\nWhen I think of the method of human hunting compared to other animals, it actually terrifies me. We are the Terminator. I've had nightmares as a child about monsters that don't stop chasing you and always find you wherever you hide, but that's *exactly what humans did*. Imagine you're a human prey animal: You run away. You think you're safe. But then the human shows up again. You run again. It still finds you. It always finds you.\n\nForget about claws, and forget about our later developments of weapons and technology. A human that never stops chasing you, and then simply snaps your neck or beats in your skull with a rock, with seemingly infinite reserves of energy when you can't even stand up anymore - that is truly one of the most terrifying hunters in the animal kingdom.",
"Our vital organs are not as exposed as you think they are. Our brain, lungs, heart and liver are all very well-protected. ",
"Our adaptations are better than armor, claws or fur. Our adaptations are a large brain and thumbs. Our brains allow us to create tools and other things to adapt to our environment as well as change our environment to suit our needs. ",
"why don't you ask the opposite question for a rhino or lions or bears? we evolved to most effectively survive our environment."
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j54sj | even if the us doesn't default on its debt, why can't our credit rating be downgraded anyway for coming so close to default? | I've casually been following the politics of the debt ceiling crisis, and from the latest news reports, it looks like a deal will indeed be struck betweens the Dems and Repubs to avoid default and loss of our top credit rating. But I don't understand why it can't be downgraded anyway (by whoever does the ratings). Isn't just coming this *close* to default enough to knock you down a level?
I know that people and countries are obviously very different, but if I come close to maxing out all of my credit cards, my credit score will still be downgraded even if I continue to make all of my payments on time. Can someone explain how/why this is different for countries? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j54sj/eli5_even_if_the_us_doesnt_default_on_its_debt/ | {
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"I believe that it can be, and it was recently discussed that it may happen from one of the three (?) agencys that controls such things. "
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5zikp5 | what does audio mastering exactly do to make music sound better on every sound system? | How do they know which frequencies they need to boost or cut in order to get a well balanced result? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zikp5/eli5_what_does_audio_mastering_exactly_do_to_make/ | {
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"Audio is first recorded, processed and mixed.\n\nOnce the audio mixer has done her/his job; they will give the mixed audio files to the mastering engineer.\n\nWell mastered audio should sound good on many different systems. So the one doing the mastering will listen on many different systems to see how it sounds. Most humans can tell if a song sounds bad, a mastering engineer needs to know what they can do to make a bad sounding song sound good.\n\nAs an example:\nA band recorded a new song at a home studio. The studio does not absorb some audio frequencies well. These frequencies echo around the room a bit too long (this may be called room reverb).\nEach track (vocals, guitar etc) will have a bit too much of this those frequencies due to the room reverb.\nListening to each track individually, there may be little or no problem. \nThe problem may become more noticeable when all the tracks are mixed together. \nThe engineer may decide that those particular frequencies should be reduced to increase the clarity of the overall mix. \n\nAnother part of the mastering process (particularly pop songs) is to make the music sound loud. People like loud music",
"Better monitors, better gear, a room purpose-built to have superior acoustics, many years of experience, and fresh ears on the track from someone different than who tracked and mixed it."
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ja29w | what does it mean to "re-mortgage" your home? | I thought understanding a mortgage was hard enough... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ja29w/what_does_it_mean_to_remortgage_your_home/ | {
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"\"re-mortgage\" is not a commonly used term. You could be referring to two different things:\n\n** Refinancing**\n\nYears ago I bought a house at 7% interest, with a mortgage from Bank A. Since then, interest rates have gone down, so I went to Bank B and had them loan me enough money to pay off Bank A. So now I owe Bank B, but only at 4% interest. You have to pay fees (~$2000) to get a new loan, but a lower interest rate can make up for that quickly.\n\n**Second Mortgage**\n\nI wanted to pay off my car, but I needed a lot of money to do that. The value of my first house went up a lot since I bought it...this increase in value is called *equity*. I went to Bank C and have them give me a loan, using the equity of my house as collateral. I now have a two loans on my house, the second one at a higher interest rate. ",
"\"re-mortgage\" is not a commonly used term. You could be referring to two different things:\n\n** Refinancing**\n\nYears ago I bought a house at 7% interest, with a mortgage from Bank A. Since then, interest rates have gone down, so I went to Bank B and had them loan me enough money to pay off Bank A. So now I owe Bank B, but only at 4% interest. You have to pay fees (~$2000) to get a new loan, but a lower interest rate can make up for that quickly.\n\n**Second Mortgage**\n\nI wanted to pay off my car, but I needed a lot of money to do that. The value of my first house went up a lot since I bought it...this increase in value is called *equity*. I went to Bank C and have them give me a loan, using the equity of my house as collateral. I now have a two loans on my house, the second one at a higher interest rate. "
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8zxfal | why do vehicles with internal combustion engines have to be turned off when fueling to avoid explosions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zxfal/eli5_why_do_vehicles_with_internal_combustion/ | {
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"I think there have been cases of static sparks from clothing igniting the gas, but it's extremely rare. Chances are that nothing at all will happen if you refuel with your engine running, it's just that gas stations prefer to be cautious; that being said, it's best to just shut it off.",
"When I lived in Alaska it was common for taxi drivers to refuel while the car was running. No one seemed to care, or the risk was worth the warmth...",
"They don't actually have to. This is one of the many situations where people are being overcautious about a scary thing. There's no harm in taking the precaution, even if it doesn't actually provide a benefit. ",
"I fuel up my car while it's still running.\n\nI was under the impression this rule was largely made to stop people from driving away while the pump is still in the car, which happens from time to time. Look up at the top of the hose, you'll see a magnetic quick disconnect so that when people do this it doesn't tear the entire pump down.",
"I work in roadside assistance, and it's not the first time I've followed a car that had a simple flat battery, but little fuel to a petrol station to fill it whilst it runs/charges. Better that than having to jumpstart it again at the pumps.",
"Not an expert but I do know most modern vehicles have a vacuum sealed gas tank and it can cause minor problems if left unsealed, for example if you have ever gotten a check engine light just because your gas cap is loose. Even capless systems have a way to keep vacuum.",
"Almost every single answer in this thread is nothing more than pure guesswork and bullshit.\n\nLets start with some debunking and then move on to the two reasons why turning off the engine is a good idea.\n\n1.) A spark from a running engine or faulty spark plug can ignite gasoline vapours.\n\nGasoline has a flash point of about -43 degrees centigrade. This means that it will form an explosive vapour cloud under all but the most frigid conditions. However, fuel stations are not enclosed spaces and gasoline vapours are heavy compared to the principle components of air. This means that they will collect at ground level where they are carried away. Furthermore, most gas stations are equipped with vapour recovery systems that draw the vapours back into the tank.\n\nEven if gasoline vapours were to rise to both a dangerous concentration and a dangerous elevation, it takes quite a bit of energy to ignite gasoline vapours. A typical spark plug draws about a megawatt of power and discharges anywhere from ~1-30 millijoules of energy per ignition.\n\nA static shock is enough to ignite concentrated fuel vapours (see Apollo 1) but there's a really big problem with this theory: Cars are pretty well grounded. Rubber tires build up static as they move, so they're designed to dissipate that static either through an antenna tread or the use of conductive materials. The rest of the vehicle is mostly metal which is in electrical contact with the wheel rims.\n\nThere are documented cases of fuel canisters sparking when they come into contact with the nozzle. These canisters have often been stored in the carpeted backs of vehicles or inside of the bed of a truck with a plastic liner.\n\n2.) The engine may draw in liquid fuel.\n\nEngines always draw in liquid fuel. Not drawing in liquid fuel would cause the fuel pump to become inoperable.\n\nAnyway, here are the two reasons why turning off your engine at the gas station is a good idea.\n\n1.) Vehicle exhaust is rather disgusting and most people do not want to hang around breathing it in.\n\n2.) Almost all modern vehicles are equipped with an evaporative emissions system.\n\nFuel tanks are air tight and pressure controlled. If this were not the case, unburned fuel would simply evaporate into the atmosphere over time. There are several pressure sensors and air flow sensors in the fuel system that are connected to the Engine Control Unit (ECU). As the fuel pump draws liquid fuel from the tank and pressurises it, a one-way valve permits air at atmospheric pressure to enter the tank. If it could not, the fuel pump would eventually be fighting a vacuum. Naturally, gasoline wants to form a vapour inside of the tank, so it does. As the temperature of the gas tank changes so to does the pressure inside of the tank. If the pressure builds up, as it tends to do, it will need to be vented; however, the gas inside of the tank is full of unburned hydrocarbon vapours; what to do? The evaporative emission system vents the tank pressure through a carbon filter which captures the unburned hydrocarbons. At some point down the road, the system draws air through the filter in the reverse direction and into the intake manifold where they are then burned inside of the engine.\n\nThe evaporative emissions system is periodically tested. Part of this test involves using a leak detection pump to pressurise the fuel system, including the fuel tank, to check for leaks. Naturally, this test runs only when the engine is **on**. If the ECU decides to test the evap system when the driver is refuelling the vehicle, the open gas cap will vent all of the air that the LDP is pumping in. Fuel tank pressure will not rise as expected, and the ECU will detect a leak in the evap system. This triggers a Check Engine Light and a trip to the mechanic. The mechanic will take one look at the code scanner, tell the driver to turn his or her vehicle off at the pump, and bill them an hour for wasting everyone's time."
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28pywp | how do car dealerships make money during "employee pricing sales"? | If they're selling cars at employee pricing, which I'm assuming is at a minimum low markup (if any) how do car dealerships make money during those sales?
Do the salesmen take reduced commissions for those sales, or is "employee pricing sales" just a fancy way of saying "rip off"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28pywp/eli5_how_do_car_dealerships_make_money_during/ | {
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"Not surprisingly its all BS. Not only are there at least 2 sets of numbers for the cost of every car they buy manufacturers pay them what is call \"hold back\". So after the dealer sells a car the company sends them a check for say $500. But it is unlikely the dealer is selling the car for what he paid in any event.\n\nAdd to that there are going to be a few folks that get suckered into paying more or getting those over-priced options added by the dealer. Then there is the finance scam. There have been periods of time I know GM made more profit from their finance division than from the manufacturer of cars.",
"Purchase price; trade in value; monthly payment and down payment. If they take off from one they tack it on another"
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z9ldp | why does this pattern appear when you microwave cd's? image included | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/z9ldp/eli5_why_does_this_pattern_appear_when_you/ | {
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"CDs have an aluminum coating that acts as an antenna for the microwave radiation, ionizing particles around the CD and forming glowing plasma and sparks. The radiation causes a chemical reaction which causes the aluminum to retract. ",
"Why is it safe to microwave a CD? and is it that no matter how long you microwave it for it ends up like that or is there an exact amount of time for the depicted pattern?",
"most important question. why the fuck did you microwave a cd???"
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3uhqfi | why is whole wheat flour considered healthier than enriched flour? | Whole wheat floor is supposedly better for humans compared to enriched flour because in the enriching process, vitamins and minerals are stripped from the flour. The FDA requires companies to supplement those lost resources to a certain level. So if the same amount of vitamins and minerals are returned to the final product (or in some cases more) wouldn't enriched be the better choice? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uhqfi/eli5_why_is_whole_wheat_flour_considered/ | {
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"1.) Whole grain flour has a higher fiber content. It's much denser in nutrition.\n\n2.) It has a much lower glycemic index rating. This means that it doesn't spike your blood sugar the way a white flour does.\n\n3.) Vitamin content is much higher in riboflavin, folate, B-1, B-3, and B-5\n\nThis is a very easy topic to Google and because it's a health question most health websites are written toward the masses. There really is no reason to post this question on Reddit."
]
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9aym0a | where did the misconception that muscle pain after exercise caused by lactic acid originate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9aym0a/eli5_where_did_the_misconception_that_muscle_pain/ | {
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"The whole misunderstanding dates back to a 1922 study by two British scientists, Otto Meyerhoff and Archibald V. Hill. In their Nobel-Prize winning research investigating the energy capabilities of carbohydrate metabolism in skeletal muscle, they suggested that lactic acid is produced in humans as a side reaction to glycolysis (the breakdown of glucose to fuel muscle activity).\n\nAnd that’s essentially how it’s been explained ever since: Lactic acid is a sort of residue from your muscles burning fuel, and its buildup is what causes the burn and ache athletes commonly experience during and after intense effort. Because after all, acid burns, right?\n\nWhat recent studies have found fairly conclusively is that while lactic acid—or more accurately, lactate—coincides with “acidosis” in muscles, it’s not the cause"
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1kjytm | what's the difference between stocks, bonds and mutual funds? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kjytm/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_stocks_bonds/ | {
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"A stock is a share of a company. It changes in value as the company does.\n\nA bond is where someone takes out a loan and promises to pay it back with interest. You buy part of the debt so that you get a share of their payments plus interest.\n\nA mutual fund is where someone buys a bunch of different stocks and then sells shares of the pool. The value of the shares goes up and down with the value of the stocks that make up the fund.",
"First, the most important thing to understand when talking about stocks vs bonds is the accounting equation, which is Assets minus Liabilities equals Owner's Equity. Stocks are equity. Bonds are liabilities.\n\nA **stock** is one share of ownership in a company. Assuming all shares have equal status, it will entitle you to a pro rata share of the earnings and decision making authority within the company. As an example, XYZ Corp has a total of 100 shares of stock. If you own 10 of those shares, you own 10% of the company. You are also entitled to 10% of any profits earned by the company and your vote on any company matters will carry 10% of the total weight of the vote. \n\nFrom an accounting standpoint, your 10 shares represent a claim on the assets of the company (cash, buildings, inventories, patents, etc.) by an owner of the company.\n\nThe repayment of your initial investment (the cost of buying the shares) or the payment to you of any of the company's earnings (dividends) will come after the bondholders are paid. There is a risk/reward trade-off when you make the decision between investing in a company or loaning money to a company. By investing, you have unlimited upside, meaning that your initial investment could appreciate in value to a theoretically unlimited amount. However, if the company suffers financially, your claim on the company's assets is inferior to the bondholder's claims on those same assets. So, in a situation where a company goes down in flames, the bondholders will be repaid before the shareholders can be repaid. And, there is no guarantee that anything will be leftover to pay the shareholders.\n\n**Bonds** are liabilities of a company. From an accounting standpoint, they are claims on the company's assets from outside parties. Bonds are debt instruments and will carry interest rates and will have formalized agreements that give the company explicit instructions on how they must perform while the bonds are still outstanding and how and when they must be repaid. Investing in bonds is obviously a more complicated process than buying shares of stock. Because, in either scenario (investing in stocks or buying bonds) a prudent investor must make a credit decision, meaning they must evaluate the ability of the company to continue to be profitable in its line of business and justify the investment. But, the bondholder must also evaluate the structure of the bonds he is buying, the interest rates of the bonds, the bond collateral, and he also faces interest rate risk (which is the risk that interest rates will rise after he makes his bond purchase, effectively lowering the value of his bond in the open market).\n\nIn addition to corporate bonds, you can also purchase municipal bonds. The principal here is the same, although there is no alternative of actually investing in a city or a public water utility or a university and any interest you earn on these bonds is usually not subject to federal or state income tax. If you want to make money in this sector, bonds (or other forms of debt) are the only option. The evaluation of a municipal bond would be somewhat similar to that of a corporate bond, except municipalities typically have a captive audience (people are unlikely to stop buying water or paying taxes), so there is lower perceived risk in this market. Because of the lower perceived risk, the interest rates paid to bondholders is typically lower than a corporate bond (even when adjusted up for the income tax benefit).\n\nA **mutual fund** allows you to place the burden of selecting investments in the hands of an advisor (i.e. the mutual fund manager). You select a fund based on its historical performance, industries it invests in, nature of growth versus value stocks, etc., and allow someone else to manage the concentrations of particular investments. In theory, and when there are not large macro shifts in the equity markets, the mutual fund option is less risky than investing in a specific stock or bond. As the values of the underlying assets in the fund rise or fall, so will the value of your position in the fund.\n\nHope that helps."
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3xkhrq | how do film cameras work and how do you edit film? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xkhrq/eli5_how_do_film_cameras_work_and_how_do_you_edit/ | {
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"Old school film editing used to involve physical manipulation of the film. Splicing, compositing, overlays; all of these are terms brought over from the days of analogue editing.\n\nUsing the Hateful 8 as a more modern example; they will shoot the whole film with a 70mm camera; get the film digitised into the computer for editing and compositing; then, possibly; print it BACK to 70mm film for the Master print...\n\nI will probably have buggered something up in the process, so feel free to correct me, fellow redditors :)"
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2okptl | why is it difficult for microsoft or other organizations to track down highly wanted hacking groups such as lizard squad, known for turning off the xbox live network and forcing a plane to land? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2okptl/eli5why_is_it_difficult_for_microsoft_or_other/ | {
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"A lot of proxy servers are standing between Microsoft and the hackers. They'd have to gain acces to every single proxy while the hack is going on to figure out where the signal is coming from. By then the hackers have most likely detected there aproach and paused there attack."
]
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1c92wr | how come the price of some items can only be seen in the cart and who thought that was a good idea? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c92wr/how_come_the_price_of_some_items_can_only_be_seen/ | {
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"Some manufacturers limit what a retailer can advertise the price of their product at. Constant advertising too low a price can make consumers feel your product is \"cheap.\" Retailers get around this by requiring you put the product in your cart before telling you how much it costs."
]
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1h803r | how come when you tune to a radio frequency that no station broadcasts at, you get static instead of silence? | If no one's broadcasting anything at that frequency, shouldn't you just get silence instead of static since your car/radio isn't picking anything up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1h803r/eli5_how_come_when_you_tune_to_a_radio_frequency/ | {
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"There is always background noise. Stray radio waves with meaningless signals.",
"It is a combination of ambient radio noise (like from electric motors) and imperfections in the radios' circuitry as it tries too hard to amplify a signal that isn't actually there.",
"Your radio listens to whatever is out there. It's like if you put yourself in an empty quiet room and listen really hard. You will still hear noise. All electronic devices generate a little tiny bit of noise. The big bang generates a bunch too. When a radio broadcasts nearby, it overwhelms this noise and you hear the signal instead.",
"Left over energy from the Big motherfuckin' Bang. How cool is that?!",
"It's the sound of the universe around you. Some is just stray EM from the world and all it's electrical noise but quite a lot is from space the sun and all the other cool stuff that goes on from beyond our atmosphere. ",
"I feel like none of these answer the equation \"why don't I hear this static in addition to station when tuned to one?\" My guess would be that amplification makes every tuning frequencies' absolute volume similar (thus making Big Bang etc. noises loud). ",
"There's a circuit in the radio called the automatic gain control. What it does is turn a second volume control inside the radio up and down so that the same amount of power is coming through, no matter what the signal is out how strong it is. This is important to make sure that the radio doesn't miss signals, and so that you don't surprise yourself with a sudden loud channel and hurt your ears. If there is no signal for the radio to pick up, it will turn up the nothing, until you hear random bits of radiation, electronic noise, and other not-music.",
" Most of what you hear is electronic noise generated within the radio itself while it runs in a maximum amplification mode \"looking\" for a signal. Sure, there's atmospheric and \"big bang\" noise, too, but if you disconnect the antenna you'll notice that the noise doesn't go away. ",
"Radio works by modulating a carrier frequency. The station broadcasts the carrier frequency, and AM stations modulate the amplitude or power of that frequency up and down at the frequency of the sound, while FM stations modulate the frequency back and forth over a small range. \n\nWhat this means is that yes radio can broadcast silence. Just broadcasting the carrier frequency without modulating it is silence. The gaps between stations have no carrier to iron out the static, so the radio amplifies the random static signals it receives and you hear a hiss, except in the case of FM where the static is only at the fringes of a stations band. ",
"Related question: When I plug earbuds into my laptop, even when nothing's playing, I hear static. When I mute my sound, I *still* hear static, although it's a bit quieter. What am I hearing? I suspect it's related to the electrical charge coming down the wires, but I'm not sure.",
"There are amplifiers in your radio that help you pick up weak stations. When you tune to silence those amplifiers 'listen' harder and harder until tiny radio sounds like noisy electronics and other interference become audible.",
"This is something amazing...\n\nYou are hearing... among other things. .. the birth of the universe. The echos of the big bang."
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4gq5dr | why aren't men's testes protected by bone like how the lungs are protected by the ribcage or the brain is protected by the skull? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gq5dr/eli5_why_arent_mens_testes_protected_by_bone_like/ | {
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"They need the freedom to move around to stay the right temperature. A bone protecting them would prevent that",
"sperm production requires a lower body temperature. That's why they hang outside the body. If they were protected by bone, it would increase the temperature and thus reduce sperm production.\n\nAlso, it's just fun having them flop around when it's warm enough."
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1o3qob | why in asian countries people sleep on mattresses on the floor, but western countries sleep on beds well above the ground? | I don't know why I had this pop in to my head last night but yeah, anyone care to explain? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o3qob/eli5why_in_asian_countries_people_sleep_on/ | {
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"I can't answer for 'most Asian countries' but in Japan the Futon (mattress placed on the floor for sleeping) is used because houses and apartments are small. The space a bed takes up can't easily be used for any other purpose while a futon can be put away during non-sleep time. This becomes really important in a tiny [Japanese Apartment](_URL_0_). Be aware that futons in Japan are not those cloth-covered cheap foam-rubber things that American students buy. I purchased one from a specialty futon shop while I lived in Tokyo. It was filled with a careful mix of cotton, wool, feathers, goose down, and no doubt a few weird Japanese things. It was extremely comfortable, but then, for roughly $750, it damn well should have been.",
"Asians don't all sleep on the ground, AFAIK it's mostly Japan that does this.\n\nIn China, people generally sleep on beds. In northern China, people traditionally have really tall fire-heated brick beds.",
"In Korean and many Japanese homes the central heating (water or air) went under the floor, so in order to stay warm your bed had to be on the ground. Instead of having fireplaces where heat is centralized in one area the heat is more evenly distributed in the floor and walls of the home.",
"American here I have my mattress on the floor best sleep ever no squeaking no bed moving no falling off bed"
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68zuid | why are most pills without protective film bitter? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68zuid/eli5why_are_most_pills_without_protective_film/ | {
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"So people (and especially kids) won't put them in their mouth only because they taste good. ",
"Other people are saying its done on purpose for safety reasons. I can't find any evidence of this. The active ingredient and most excipients in a pill already taste really bad. Companies don't care to mask this taste for adults because its not needed to get most adults to take the pills. Also if you take the whole pill and swallow quickly with/without water, you hardly feel the taste. The only time I remember feeling the taste was when I failed to swallow and pill stayed in my mouth until I could get a glass of water to wash it down. "
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1t55ll | why is it not a great idea to buy a house outright if you have the cash? | I was told recently that buying a house outright, even if you have the ability to do so, isn't a great idea WRT tax or some other policy, but I didn't push further as to why/I forgot most of the convo. Can anyone shed light on why it's not a great idea to skip a mortgage and go straight to ownership?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1t55ll/eli5why_is_it_not_a_great_idea_to_buy_a_house/ | {
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"Sounds like a great idea if you ask me. You'd save a ton in interest.\n",
"This is an ongoing debate. Some think that it is wise to hang onto a mortgage, because the interest you pay to the bank is tax deferable in the U.S. (for the time being, there is some talk of eliminating this tax break). This means that if you paid $5K in interest in a year, you write that money off at the end of the year, so if you made 30K, you only get taxed like you made 25K. So to make a long story short, you get taxed less. \n\nNow on the other hand, say you decide to pay for the house out-right and not get a loan. Now you are only paying for the house and not all the interest over the life of the loan (that can be substantial, depending on your interest rate and how long of a loan term you have). This frees up that money that you would have been paying in interest for other things, like say investing in Apple stock or something, which means that money could be making you money instead of going to a fat-cat banker. \n\nAnyway, like I said, it's debatable. I wish I had the luxury of deciding it for myself, but I'm too poor to pay for my house outright, so here I am with a mortgage. I for one would pay my house off tomorrow if I had the cash, just because I don't like borrowing money and living in a house that isn't really mine, it's a security thing for me. If I loose my job it would be nice to know some bank isn't going to kick me out of their house if I don't pay them. \n",
"When you have cash for it, the only two solid financial reasons you don't pay cash and borrow money instead to buy an item are:\n\n* liquidity -- you may need the cash soon *as cash* for, say, emergencies. As you know, sometimes it takes a while to put the item back for sale and find a buyer. \n* when the capital gain plus tax credits will be much (much) more than the borrowing costs -- you are essentially borrowing to invest.\n\n(ELI5 capital gain: it's the profit from the sale of property or of an investment.)\n\nThe item here could be anything: dinner, a TV, a car, a house, a timeshare, stocks, political campaign contributions, the Brooklyn Bridge, etc. You'll see that, since most things lose value and not gain value, as long as you have enough cash for emergencies and daily expenses, you should buy most things with cash, not credit.\n\nBanks want you to get loans, mortgages or credit cards, they will never tell you to buy stuff with cash. Hence you hear the advice that you heard."
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ar7tgg | what is the psychological reason for humans who enjoy trolling or offending people on purpose? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ar7tgg/eli5_what_is_the_psychological_reason_for_humans/ | {
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"I can’t see the other posts either. \n\nI don’t have the answer to this; I suspect no-one will as it will vary by person and won’t have a one size fits all response.\n\nWhat I can give are my suspicions of where this behaviour has its roots:\n\n1) Anonymity. The online community gives you the freedom to state controversial opinions with a large degree of anonymity. This makes people brave and lets them say things they might not want to risk in a more public arena\n\n2) Insecurity. Similar to the above, I suspect these people often have insecurities around their own breadth of knowledge or experiences, and can fear standing up and expressing them in a one-one or group setting. Text based comments can be submitted online without as much context. Therefore they have the defence of “I was only joking/being sarcastic/winding you up/ etc.”\n\n3) Popularity. Controversial statements or opinions get airtime online. People respond, either in support or condemnation. People like or dislike the comments. The responses are a reward even if they aren’t positive. It makes them feel special, listened to, and they enjoy the attention. This feeds back to their insecurities.",
"it's the only way some essentially weak and powerless people can feel a sense of power, by deliberately yanking people's chains and then feeling amused by the chaos and distress they've created.\n\nOnce you see trolls as weak, pathetic, pitiable people, you cease to care what they think, say or do.\n\nUnfortunately, there are always suckers in the world, ready to let a troll yank their chain and give them the attention and power they crave."
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lz42j | what should i know before opening a bank account? | I'm a freshman in college who wants to open a checking account so that I can have a debit card to make purchases. Should I go with a national bank, what policies should I ask about/be aware of, ect.
I went to look at the banks surrounding my college and there's KeyBank, Northeast Bank, and Androscoggin Bank. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lz42j/eli5_what_should_i_know_before_opening_a_bank/ | {
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"The only thing you need to be aware of is that you should NEVER settle for an account that:\n\n* has any sort of minimum balance fee.\n\n* makes you pay money for withdrawing from an ATM\n\n* makes you pay money for using a debit card\n\nMake sure you ask those questions. Apart from that, go nuts!",
"Go for a credit union or a local bank. Credit unions are owned by their members, and both institutions care about their members and actually care about their customers. \n\nAvoid the big banks (Bank of America, Chase, etc). In the last few years, they have crashed the global economy, lied about it, received billions from taxpayers, and responded by raising fees and laying off workers. \n\nWhen you actually go to pick a bank, ask them about what services do they offer. Do they have special deals for students? Do they offer free checking? (there's no reason to pay for checking at your age) What are their interest rates on savings accounts? Can you apply for a student credit card so you can start building credit history?\n\nYou could also go ask [/r/personalfinance](_URL_0_) for other advice. ",
"Couple things:\n\n* Is it free checking?\n* If yes, is there a min balance before they start charging you fees? (is it $5 or $5000)\n* How many ATM/branches are there? Are they convenient located?\n* Can you use your debit card on other banks ATMs for free? If so, how many times before they start charging you?\n* Is there overdraft protection? My old credit union will give me 5 business days to pay them back before charging me interest AND a $50 overdraft fee.\n* Also, is there free checks? If not how much do they cost?\n\nI'll just leave it to you to figure out which of the 3 banks are better.",
"I'm gonna tell you more than you *need* to know, because when it comes to personal banking, the gap between what you *need* to know and what's *good* to know is pretty wide.\n\nFirst thing to know: There are different types of bank accounts.\n\nGenerally speaking, there are two kinds of bank accounts: savings accounts and transaction accounts. The practical distinctions between them have gotten really blurry over the years, but there are still a few that matter.\n\nA transaction account is an account that's set up to give you unrestricted access to your money for the purpose of making transactions — hence the name. Transaction accounts are usually called checking accounts, because historically the way you used your transaction account was to write and hand over a check; a check is a piece of paper that represents a sum of money, and that's backed by the transaction account against which the check is drawn. The person you give the check to can take it to your bank — or another bank; banks work together on this stuff — and deposit it into their own account just like it was money.\n\nOver the years, we've added additional types of transactions to transaction accounts, like offline and online debit transactions at the point of sale, and bill payment services. But we still call 'em \"checking\" accounts, because that name is as good as any.\n\nA savings account, on the other hand, does not give you unlimited access to your money. The precise in and outs of the limitations vary from bank to bank, but as a general rule of thumb, you are *strongly discouraged* — by the imposition of onerous fees — from making too many withdrawals from your savings account in a given period of time.\n\nHistorically, the practical difference between savings and transaction accounts — apart from the fact that you couldn't write a check against your savings account — was that savings accounts paid interest and transaction accounts did not. This was part of banking law, a clause called \"regulation Q\". Bank accounts were *prohibited* from paying interest on transaction accounts. So what everybody did was use two bank accounts: a savings account and a transaction account. All your deposits went into your savings account, then once a month or so you moved the money you intended to spend from your savings account to your transaction account, then you spent it. This gave you the convenience of having a transaction account and all that implies, plus the ability to earn interest on your cash reserves.\n\nBut that got super-complicated over the years, with the advent of the negotiable-order-of-withdrawl account. NOW accounts are transaction accounts, but they're not covered under regulation Q, so banks could pay interest on them. This gave banks that offered NOW accounts a huge competitive advantage for personal banking — because you're getting *interest* where you weren't before! — so everybody adopted them. Finally the Congress threw up its hands and said \"fuck it\", and just this past summer regulation Q finally went the way of the dodo. So now there are NOW accounts which act like transaction accounts but bear interest … and there are also actual transaction accounts which can also bear interest.\n\nIt's still useful to use the two-account system, though, if you're in a positive-cash-flow situation. If you bring in more money than you spend every month, consider depositing it all into a savings account, then moving the part you do want to spend into a checking account. This is a good way to manage your finances and grow your cash reserve, though because it requires extra effort it's also easier to get things screwed up and overdraw your spending account. On the *other* hand, many banks offer a type of overdraft protection that links your spending and cash reserve accounts together, such that any transaction that would overdraw your spending account automatically transfers the necessary funds from your cash reserve account to cover the debit. On the *other other* hand, doing this usually carries a small fee, so you wouldn't want to rely on it.\n\nBeyond those basics — the types of accounts and how to use them — it really comes down to the icing. Different banks offer different interest rates on different types of accounts. They often have minimum balances on interest-bearing transaction accounts which discourage you from filling and draining your account every month. (Another good reason to use the two-account system, keeping your cash reserve earning you a higher level of interest and using an account with no minimum balance as your transaction account.) There are often other fees and things that you need to take into account, but *in general* these are pretty trivial. It may come down to a case where using the bank that's all the way across town and that has no app will only save you 85¢ a month over the bank that's got two branches within a five-block radius of your house and that has an awesome app that lets you do all your banking while standing in line for movie tickets. Or whatever.\n\nSo basically, decide *how* you want to bank — one account, two, linked accounts or unlinked, whatever — and then shop around, weighing fees and such inconveniences against interest rates and little perks that make your banking easier and more convenient.",
"The only thing you need to be aware of is that you should NEVER settle for an account that:\n\n* has any sort of minimum balance fee.\n\n* makes you pay money for withdrawing from an ATM\n\n* makes you pay money for using a debit card\n\nMake sure you ask those questions. Apart from that, go nuts!",
"Go for a credit union or a local bank. Credit unions are owned by their members, and both institutions care about their members and actually care about their customers. \n\nAvoid the big banks (Bank of America, Chase, etc). In the last few years, they have crashed the global economy, lied about it, received billions from taxpayers, and responded by raising fees and laying off workers. \n\nWhen you actually go to pick a bank, ask them about what services do they offer. Do they have special deals for students? Do they offer free checking? (there's no reason to pay for checking at your age) What are their interest rates on savings accounts? Can you apply for a student credit card so you can start building credit history?\n\nYou could also go ask [/r/personalfinance](_URL_0_) for other advice. ",
"Couple things:\n\n* Is it free checking?\n* If yes, is there a min balance before they start charging you fees? (is it $5 or $5000)\n* How many ATM/branches are there? Are they convenient located?\n* Can you use your debit card on other banks ATMs for free? If so, how many times before they start charging you?\n* Is there overdraft protection? My old credit union will give me 5 business days to pay them back before charging me interest AND a $50 overdraft fee.\n* Also, is there free checks? If not how much do they cost?\n\nI'll just leave it to you to figure out which of the 3 banks are better.",
"I'm gonna tell you more than you *need* to know, because when it comes to personal banking, the gap between what you *need* to know and what's *good* to know is pretty wide.\n\nFirst thing to know: There are different types of bank accounts.\n\nGenerally speaking, there are two kinds of bank accounts: savings accounts and transaction accounts. The practical distinctions between them have gotten really blurry over the years, but there are still a few that matter.\n\nA transaction account is an account that's set up to give you unrestricted access to your money for the purpose of making transactions — hence the name. Transaction accounts are usually called checking accounts, because historically the way you used your transaction account was to write and hand over a check; a check is a piece of paper that represents a sum of money, and that's backed by the transaction account against which the check is drawn. The person you give the check to can take it to your bank — or another bank; banks work together on this stuff — and deposit it into their own account just like it was money.\n\nOver the years, we've added additional types of transactions to transaction accounts, like offline and online debit transactions at the point of sale, and bill payment services. But we still call 'em \"checking\" accounts, because that name is as good as any.\n\nA savings account, on the other hand, does not give you unlimited access to your money. The precise in and outs of the limitations vary from bank to bank, but as a general rule of thumb, you are *strongly discouraged* — by the imposition of onerous fees — from making too many withdrawals from your savings account in a given period of time.\n\nHistorically, the practical difference between savings and transaction accounts — apart from the fact that you couldn't write a check against your savings account — was that savings accounts paid interest and transaction accounts did not. This was part of banking law, a clause called \"regulation Q\". Bank accounts were *prohibited* from paying interest on transaction accounts. So what everybody did was use two bank accounts: a savings account and a transaction account. All your deposits went into your savings account, then once a month or so you moved the money you intended to spend from your savings account to your transaction account, then you spent it. This gave you the convenience of having a transaction account and all that implies, plus the ability to earn interest on your cash reserves.\n\nBut that got super-complicated over the years, with the advent of the negotiable-order-of-withdrawl account. NOW accounts are transaction accounts, but they're not covered under regulation Q, so banks could pay interest on them. This gave banks that offered NOW accounts a huge competitive advantage for personal banking — because you're getting *interest* where you weren't before! — so everybody adopted them. Finally the Congress threw up its hands and said \"fuck it\", and just this past summer regulation Q finally went the way of the dodo. So now there are NOW accounts which act like transaction accounts but bear interest … and there are also actual transaction accounts which can also bear interest.\n\nIt's still useful to use the two-account system, though, if you're in a positive-cash-flow situation. If you bring in more money than you spend every month, consider depositing it all into a savings account, then moving the part you do want to spend into a checking account. This is a good way to manage your finances and grow your cash reserve, though because it requires extra effort it's also easier to get things screwed up and overdraw your spending account. On the *other* hand, many banks offer a type of overdraft protection that links your spending and cash reserve accounts together, such that any transaction that would overdraw your spending account automatically transfers the necessary funds from your cash reserve account to cover the debit. On the *other other* hand, doing this usually carries a small fee, so you wouldn't want to rely on it.\n\nBeyond those basics — the types of accounts and how to use them — it really comes down to the icing. Different banks offer different interest rates on different types of accounts. They often have minimum balances on interest-bearing transaction accounts which discourage you from filling and draining your account every month. (Another good reason to use the two-account system, keeping your cash reserve earning you a higher level of interest and using an account with no minimum balance as your transaction account.) There are often other fees and things that you need to take into account, but *in general* these are pretty trivial. It may come down to a case where using the bank that's all the way across town and that has no app will only save you 85¢ a month over the bank that's got two branches within a five-block radius of your house and that has an awesome app that lets you do all your banking while standing in line for movie tickets. Or whatever.\n\nSo basically, decide *how* you want to bank — one account, two, linked accounts or unlinked, whatever — and then shop around, weighing fees and such inconveniences against interest rates and little perks that make your banking easier and more convenient."
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ertczx | if the notion that electrons orbit around a nucleus is a misconception, what type of motion do electrons have? do they just float in one position? | Basically, I’m having trouble understanding electrons’ relations to the nuclei they’re attracted to. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ertczx/eli5_if_the_notion_that_electrons_orbit_around_a/ | {
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"Electrons don't exist in one location until they interact with something. The location they appear at when they do interact is random, with a probablility described by an equation similar to a standing wave (like a plucked guitar string, but in three dimensions instead of one).",
"The probability of an electron being found in a certain point around the nucleus is dependent on the atoms wave function. Based on the wave function you can determine where an electron is likely to be but as /u/marlsfarp said, you cannot know for sure until the electron interacts with something. Until then it exists as a superposition of all the possible states.\n\n[This](_URL_0_) is an example of the wave function for hydrogen at various energy levels, you can see where the electrons are most likely to be found.\n\nI think its important to note that when you get down to quantum scales, nothing truly \"exists\" in a physical sense, it is all just fluctuations of energy and probabilities",
"We have to consider two cases: Before and after we observe the electron. \n\nLet‘s start with before looking: The electron could be literally anywhere in the universe. Sounds stupid, but that‘s the general rule. It‘s just very, very very unlikely to be anywhere but close the the nucleus. (So unlikely that even if you take all electrons in the observable universe, none of them will be anywhere we wouldn’t expect. It’s possible in theory but not feasible in practice) But the probability of it being close to the nucleus (let‘s say at a distance r) doesn‘t depend on what direction of the nucleus it is. So if you look at the atom from the top, the electron can be left or right or anywhere else around the nucleus with equal probability. \n\nNow we observe the electron. At that point, you get to find out where the electron is. You can imagine it like rolling dice: The dice can be any number between 1-6 and only when rolling do you find out, what number it is. Now we know exactly where the electron ist. \n\nNow a few problems because it‘s Quantum Mechanics and nothing is easy in this world: \n\n1) Once you‘ve measured the electrons position, you will have changed it a bit. Meaning that even if you do another measurement 1s later, that measurement will not be the same as it would‘ve been had you *only* measured it for the second time. The first measurement changes the second one\n\n2) You can‘t pinpoint the location exactly. Heisenberg‘s uncertainty principle tells us that the better you know the location, the less you know its impulse (let‘s just say its speed for simplicity). Think of it like a camera with two objects: One mountain and a person standing in front of you. You can set the focus to capture the person very well, but the mountain will be out of focus and blurry. Or the other way round, then the person will look blurry. Or you set the focus somewhere inbetween and both are somewhat blurry but not too bad.",
"I’ll try to make this ELI5ish:\n\nIf I ask you now where the ISS is, can you tell me exactly without checking? Probably not.\n\nYou can however estimate how far from earth it is most likely based on some simple physics calculations and averages. Same thing for how fast it is going. Given that we know a probable speed and location, we can calculate a pretty good approximation of angular momentum (rotation speed of sorts).\n\nThis is what we do for electrons. The difference is that while the ISS is definitely somewhere at space right now, electrons don’t really have a definite location or momentum before we observe them. So it’s kind of hard to say they are moving if they didn’t have a specific location to begin with. So for imagination sake, it is useful to think of them as spinning around the orbit, but in our current understanding, what is spinning is their “probability current”: the “map” that tells us how likely they are to be at a given point in space.",
"The simplest way I imagine it, electrons buzz around around the nucleus, without a specific path or orbit.\n\nWe also don't exactly know where they are, but we can use math to know in what area they most likely are. Visually, this area would look like a \"cloud\" around the nucleus.\n\nYou can google \"probability density cloud\"",
"My teacher always described it as a ‘dance’. It’s random and unpredictable but there is a pattern and there is consistency to it. They sort of bounce around but based on the amount of electrons it will eventually turn into a relatively orderly pattern.",
"In this case, it's better to think of an electron not as a particle, but as a vibration around the nucleus. It's like a vibration (note) in a guitar string, but more spherical (imagine the surface of a water-filled balloon wobbling back and forth after somebody thumps it, for example).\n\nSimilarly to a guitar, you can only make certain \"notes\" with an electron (the different orbitals). Unlike a guitar, there is also a restriction on how loud you can make each note: the amplitudes come in steps rather than being a continuous progression. The electron cloud is then composed of a \"chord\" of different electrons co-existing around the same nucleus.\n\nAsking what vibrates gets you into weird quantum stuff. As others have mentioned, the vibration represents the probability of sensing the electron at any given location (but with complex numbers built in for extra fun).",
"Just a warning for OP: like most questions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, this thread is currently standing at about an even mix of informative and useful info, unhelpful pop-science analogies, and outright wrong answers. I don't teach this branch of physics so I don't have the expertise to fix the situation, but I know it well enough to say \"here there be dragons.\"\n\n\"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.\" -- Richard Feynman",
"Think of looking at an electron on a video recording like a cloud of smoke around the nucleus. Near the middle the cloud is thick but near the edge it’s thinner and easier to see through the smoke. And the smoke is held in place as if it’s caught in a magnetic field around the nucleus, but smoke still escapes all over the place really thin, but like 99% of it is within kind of a magnetic field shape around the atom nucleus. Now if you pause that recording you’ll see that the electron is just a single particle of smoke. When watching the video the particle is changing positions at a rate of trillions per second and on video it appears like a blur of smoke, thicker in the areas where it more commonly reappears, and thinner in areas away from the nucleus where the smoke particle is less likely to appear but still does appear occasionally. when the video is paused you can’t see all that movement, you can’t see the electron teleporting from position to position, because it’s only ever in one position at a time. But when not paused it’s like a blur, it looks more like an energy field, with the electron position relative to the nucleus being a probability function, rather than an orbiting moon.",
"The concept of electrons orbiting the nucleus is a model that made sense a long time ago, but now we know more about electrons and we think that things are more complicated than them orbiting a nucleus the same way the earth rotates around the sun.\n\nInstead, now we know that electrons aren't points in space, but they are waves of energy, like waves on the ocean. But unlike waves on the ocean, they can only have specific heights and the wave can only go from a 5 foot wave to a 10 foot wave when it receives or gives up enough energy to shift from one to the other.\n\nOur new understanding of the structure of atoms is exciting because it seems like nonsense. Atoms, when we get close enough to really look at them, don't act in ways that are similar to our view of the world. But if we sit back and look from afar, they totally do.\n\nWhen we look at them from far away, we call it Classical Mechanics, and when we get up close and look at them very closely we call it Quantum Mechanics.\n\nThe universe is a strange and wonderful place and looking at things in different ways will often give you a whole new outlook on them.",
"I have an answer that might be understood by 5-year olds.\n\nThink of an electron in an atom like a jump rope being swung by two people. The electron is the movement of the rope up and down around the center. It is not the rope itself and it isn't any one position along the rope. *The electron is the wave of the rope.*\n\n---\n\nIf you want to go deeper into the analogy:\n\nLike the rope, the electron waves back and forth. And even though it's always moving, you can say it has a constant shape: the center of the rope is always furthest from the central axis.\n\n---\n\nIf you want to go deeper still:\n\nThe electron can take on more complicated shapes. If you spin the rope with a bit more energy, you can make a wave with two peaks. You can then know that the bits of rope furthest from the central axis is a quarter length from the center point, and the center bit of rope never leaves the axis. This is still a single electron - a single wave - with two lobes and a single anti-node in the middle, waving to and fro.\n\n---\n\nDeeper yet:\n\nYou can't spin the rope in such a way to have one and a half peaks. The shapes are quantized to whole numbers of peaks, and you need more energy to get from one shape to another. Not only that, but the amount of energy between each shape is certain and fixed. This corresponds to electrons having different, discrete energy states that require a precise energy input to transition up.\n\n---\n\nThought experiments for 6-year olds:\n\nA jump rope is one-dimension, but an electron is 3-dimensional. What does a 3-dimensional wave look like? Well, let's start with 2 dimensions. We can imagine them like water ripples in a cup, or vibrations on the skin on a drum. A wave with a single peak is circular. A wave with two peaks? Like a see-saw. Not one see-saw, but two: a see-saw that goes left and right, and another that goes front and back. They are actually two different waves: two different electrons that can co-exist in the same atom while sharing the same energy state. Imagine the other energy states.\n\n---\n\nThought experiments for 7-year olds:\n\nNow try to imagine what a 3-dimensional wave looks like. A wave with 1 peak? It's a sphere, phasing in and out of visibility. Two peaks? Two balloons pointing in opposite directions, where one balloon phases in while the other phases out. And there can be three such waves: balloons going left and right, balloons going back and forth, and balloons going up and down. Imagine the other energy states.\n\n---\n\nCheck out Wikipedia for images of 2D waves: _URL_0_",
"An electron in an orbital is a standing wave in the electric field the way a note on a guitar string is a standing wave when it’s plucked. \n\nAsking “where the electron is” is like asking where the energy is when you hold onto a guitar pick and pluck a guitar string. Sure, it’s all in the momentum of the pick at first. Then it’s all deposited into the string getting stretched. But then when the string vibrates, it’s hard to say where it is at any given moment. \n\nThe string vibrates really fast so the energy could be anywhere around that blurry standing wave in the string. You could slam your finger down to grab the string and there’s some probability that you’d hit it. If you did, well then the energy *was* there. But it isn’t anymore since you’ve now muted the note. \n\nSo while it’s ringing out a note, it’s distributed throughout the string as a wave. Electrons are similar in orbitals but mathematically, they’re even faster and harder to pin down than a guitar string—so hard that it would be literally impossible to say for sure where it is at any given time. And if that’s the case, does it even make sense to say it’s at any given location? The math actually definitively tells us “no”. So we don’t talk in those terms. We talk about waves. Because it really isn’t “matter” like a guitar string or an electron anymore. It’s a standing wave in the electric field.",
"Throw a pebble into a pool.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe wave that comes from the pebble hitting it is the energy associated with the pebble entering the water.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhere is the wave?\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou can point at the highest ripple. But, it's distributed around the pool. After a few moments, it's bumping all around the pool as it collides with the walls. Where is it? Depending on the shape of the pool and how you dropped the pebble, you may be able to write a formula to predict where the highest wave will be found at any given moment.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut, where is the wave? What's it's 'motion' in the pool? In a real sense, it's everywhere in the pool at once.",
"The \"best\" comment uses an example of an orbit to explain why the electrons don't orbit. It might be better to think of the nucleus of the atom as basketball and the electrons as flies tethered to it with rubber bands. The flies will zip and buzz around the ball in a seemingly random manner, but if you took a picture every second for a couple weeks then overlayed all the pictures, you'd see that the flies' positions make a cloud around the ball where they are most likely to be flying at any given time. We do some complicated math to predict where elections might be around the nucleus and those equations give us clouds of possible locations, not an orbiting pattern or a set path.\n\nEdit: fixed typo; am to an",
"Imagine, if you will, waves on the ocean. These waves exist, you can measure them, you could snap a picture of the entire ocean and keep track of all the waves in that moment. However, where will the waves be in an hour? What path will they take to get there? Nobody knows! Waves don't really move in a predictable way. Outside of snapshots they're pretty hard to pin down but; you can make a logical guess that they'll always exist within that ocean, right?\n\nWell, electrons are tiny waves made of energy. They exist in a special ocean called the \"electron cloud\" which surrounds the nucleus of an atom in much the same way that an ocean of water surrounds the Earth. They're constantly moving and they're hard to pin down but; if you could take a picture of one, then you'd definitely be able to see exactly where it was in that moment.",
"Today I learned that people don’t know the difference between the observer effect and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle",
"They’re definitely not staying still. They occupy energy levels of orbit around a nucleus. The misconception is that they orbit a defined path. \n\nHeisenbergs uncertainty means we can only say that they are travelling very quickly around a field or cloud if that’s easier to imagine. We have no ability to see them either seeing as they are smaller than the wavelength of any light we can produce and they literally are the pixels in electron microscopes. \n\nWe can say how much energy they have, which is a total of their electrical potential energy (comparable to gravitational potential energy but measured in volts or electron volts) added to their kinetic energy. \n\nThey’re more like particles of air in the atmosphere if we’re continuing with the gravity comparison. You couldn’t say the air is really orbiting or how all air particles move in the weather. You can just say where the pressure changes. \n\nExcept there only needs to be one electron in an orbital to create the electrical field, but you'll usually find them in pairs, and each level of energy, or electron shell, can only fit 1-4ish pairs (sometimes more for very large atoms at higher energy electron shell levels)",
"Think about the heatmap for a football player in a match. Now imagine you only have this image and no recording of the match itself, and someone asks what was the position of a certain player at a specific time. You can't say where he was because that's impossible to know (you didn't record the game) but you know where he is more likely to be because you have a heatmap that shows where the player spent most of its time.\n\nAs for atoms, imagine the only think we know about them is the heatmap, but instead of a 2d map it is a 3d map, with clouds instead of areas that say where the electron is most likely to be. The shape of this cloud may resemble some regular shape like a sphere, but that doesn't mean that the electron is circling inside this area, just as much as if the player heatmap was a circle it wouldn't mean that he was circling during the game, only that his most probable positions turn out to form a circle.\n\nI think this is the core of the question. Because [atomic orbitals](_URL_0_) may represent regular shapes, it doesn't say anything about how the electron is moving inside it. So thinking that it is regularly circling the nucleus in a constant speed is wrong.",
"We know (and can measure) where the electron *could possibly* be.\n\nIt has a finite amount of energy, a known charge and mass, and we understand the forces being applied to it.\n\nUsing that information, we can surely say \"this electron cannot be farther away than this\".\n\nIf you want a (silly) example, think of a dog leashed to a post in the front yard. It's able to run around within some limits. If you were to ask \"where's the dog?\" I'd say \"on his leash outside\". I know where he could be, and that's about it. He's not always running around in a circle with the leash held taut.\n\nFurthermore, if I wanted to go check on him and give an *exact* answer to where he is (i.e. How many cm he is from the post and in which direction) I wont be able to, because my act of trying to measure is going to impact where he is. If I'm precise I might get a good measurement of where he was, but simply by being there he got excited and ran a different direction. He pounced around, ran to me, away from me, etc.\n\nThere's no way to measure where the dog is at every point in time.\n\nAn electron is similar. The only ways we know how to measure where an electron is, would fundamentally impact the result of our measurement.\n\nSo when you combine the fact that the electron could be anywhere in an area and you can't measure it, we call it an \"electron probability cloud\". We place boundaries on the cloud because we are beginning to understand quantum mechanics (energy is quantized into finite amounts). We know that the electron only has a specific amount of energy.\n\nIf the dog had any more energy, it could break it's leash and be anywhere in the neighborhood. That example is probably crap.\n\nFurthermore, this is only our current approximation of electron behavior and quantum mechanics. We still have a lot to learn.",
"Eli5: imagine that around every nucleus is a storm cloud. In storm clouds lightning happens and in an Instant it's gone as soon as it arrives.\n\nElectrons do their thing in a similar way, but instead of disappearing in an instant , they reappear in another part of the cloud, only to disappear and reappear in another part of the cloud and so on\n\nThis appear/disappear happens so fast the electrons are basically everywhere and \"nowhere\"(you can only see where an electron was or where it's going to be, unless theres been some kind of breakthrough I'm unaware of) in the cloud at the same time(ik not \"technically\" correct but it's an eli5 answer), it's part of the reason we cant move through solid objects.\n\nBut at the same time since these electrons are disappearing every once in a while things can specific things can travel through the cloud(like photons), it's how you get things like the [gold foil experiment](_URL_0_)\n\n\nAny smart people feel free to correct me if I got something wrong",
"The current model of an atom uses some crazy math to predict regions with a high probability of containing an electron. Think, for example, of a bead inside of balloon: if you shake the balloon rapidly and randomly, you wont be able to say exactly where the bead is. But you can say with certainty that the bead is inside the balloon. This roughly demonstrates our current understanding of electron positions, although electrons would be much smaller relative to their space and they sometimes travel outside of their metaphorical balloon (low probability, but still possible). Each atom is surrounded by multiple \"balloons\" (called orbitals), and they can take on a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the energy of the electrons and the distance from the nucleus. If you want to know what they look like, google \"atomic orbital shapes\". \n\ntldr; we actually can't say with certainty where an electron is at any given moment in time, but we can define regions where it's highly likely to find an electron"
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2yeyzy | how do we know nothing can go faster than the speed of light? | Just because light travels 299,792,458 m/s through a vacuum, why do we assume nothing can go faster and the energy needed to do so be infinite? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2yeyzy/eli5_how_do_we_know_nothing_can_go_faster_than/ | {
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"You can answer this with a thought experiment, as Derek does in [this](_URL_1_) Veritassium video. This is the exact same sequence of logic that led Einstein to first propose the speed of light as the \"cosmic speed limit\". If you think you have some super cool method to beat it, watch [this one](_URL_0_)",
"The speed of light is the speed of a particle with no mass in a vacuum. Of course, as soon as you add mass it slows down.\n\nSounds simple enough. Maybe too simple. I hope I got it right.",
"Vsauce Michael actually did an awesome job explaining this, similarly to the over videos users are posting, _URL_0_",
"[Here](_URL_0_) is a comment from /u/Corpuscle634 that I saved a while back. It really changed the way that I think about how light interacts with the universe and how things move through spacetime. ",
"The physics we have developed tells us it is impossible.\n\nNow why, you may ask, do we think this type of physics is correct?\n\nBecause it seems to be. Really, that's it. There were a lot of interesting questions having to do with the speed of light that were proposed towards the end of the 19th century. Some ended up being solved by our existing theory, but some major questions remained. Eventually, Einstein (and others) said: *\"Hey, what if light goes the same speed for everyone, and you could never go faster? That would lead to some pretty crazy physics, huh. Yeah right, no way that crazy stuff would happen.\"*\n\nBut then people did some experiments and said, *\"Holy shit! This crazy stuff does actually happen. Maybe Einstein was right. Maybe you can't ever go faster than light.\"*\n\nNow, a hundred years later, every time we do an experiment we see those crazy things which the theory predicted, and every time someone else proposes a theory wherein you **can** go faster than light, that theory predicts things that we **don't** see. \n\nSo with all that evidence, we just say that the theory that we can't go faster than light must be correct!\n\n\n\nEdit: I'm well aware this isn't historically accurate. Don't really care. It's the point that matters.",
"It's because of Einstein's special theory of relativity.\n\nBasically, he derived an equation (or a set of equations, really) that shows how things like mass and time change as an object goes faster and faster.\n\nThe way these equations turn out, you can mathematically show that as you get close and closer to the speed of light, the mass of the object increases, and therefore it takes more and more energy to accelerate the object even a tiny bit. So, you can show that you can approach the speed of light, your object will become infinitely massive and therefore require infinite energy to accelerate any faster.\n\nThe loophole, is that if your object has 0 mass, then the mass does NOT increase. This is because the mass is multiplied by a number that depends on your speed. Zero times any number is still zero, so massless things like light still get to go the speed of light.\n\nNow, then you might ask why massless particles can't go faster than light. That's a little trickier, but basically the same answer. These equations only really make sense for massless particles if they go exactly c in vacuum- no more, no less.\n\nThat was my best attempt at keeping it at an ELI5 level...",
"Already some really good answers but thought I would throw in my two cents.\n\nWe have actually performed real world experiments showing the problems that occur when trying to do this with our particle accelerators.\n\nAs I understand we have accelerated a single particle as fast as we could and when that single particle started aproaching the speed of light the energy pumped into speeding it up actually increased the mass of the particle instead of speeding it up.\n\nHow about this for a slightly inaccurate but more ELI5 comparison.\n\nFood stores energy and runners eat the food to get the energy to run fast, the more food they eat the faster / longer they can potentially run. If you eat too much food though instead of getting faster you get fatter instead.\n\nnot the best comparison but hope it helps."
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8z043u | how is plasma made/ extracted from blood? | How is blood different from plasma, and why do the needles that are used to draw it different in size from the ones that draw blood? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z043u/eli5_how_is_plasma_made_extracted_from_blood/ | {
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"Plasma is the portion of the blood that is not red blood cells or white blood cells. Think of it as the liquid part of the blood. Plasma is made up of a large number of components, including water, proteins, electrolytes, nutrients, and waste products. \n\nPlasma is extracted from blood cells by putting blood through a centrifuge. The centrifuge organizes the blood into layers based on the components density. Plasma is on top, white blood cells are in the middle, red blood cells are in the bottom. The plasma is then siphoned off the top.\n\nThe reason plasma donation needles are larger than other blood drawing needles is because since plasma needles are in your arm for so long, blood clots may form that could block a smaller needle."
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2cl17z | before diapers and the like, how the heck did early man keep babies from ruining everyone's day with their angry baby excretions? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2cl17z/eli5_before_diapers_and_the_like_how_the_heck_did/ | {
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"This doesn't really answer your question. But in regard to people in poor and remote countries, I saw a documentary about British women going to live with remote tribes for a month. So obviously the topic of periods came up. The british women took pads and tampons with them and showed the tribeswomen. The tribeswomen in one of the places went around pretty much naked constantly. Even at that time of the month. They just let it drip everywhere. One of them had been sat on a bench and when they got up it was dirty and then a small child sat down.",
"Before diapers shit was everywhere. Not just baby shit, everyones shit. There was no central plumbing and people shit in buckets and literally tossed it out the window. Shit used to flow through the gutters of the streets. For frame of reference see modern India.",
"\"Angry baby excretions\"",
"They didn't... you're assuming the world was always this place where people strived to be as clean as possible and dispose of their waste in the most hygienic manner. It wasn't and they didn't. Things smelled like shit, looked like shit; there was shit on the ground, shit on the clothes, and shit on the food. And you know what? Nobody gave a shit. Because they never knew anything better so they dealt with it. So, to answer your question, they might've washed the baby in a river or something and maybe washed whatever they were carrying the baby in but other that that, they just sort of went with the flow.\n\n**TL;DR:** we ain't nuthin but mammals",
"I don't think it's a natural instinct to poop where you sit/sleep and the use of diapers actually 'trains' babies to do this. They can be toilet trained at a much younger age than most people expect, often before 4 months of age.",
"Dogs have been coexisting with humans for a really long time to each other's mutual benefit… if a piece of food hits the floor, every dog owner goes \"don't worry, our furry vacuum will get it\". Anyone who's ever had a dog & Baby in the same house, knows how much dogs love to get into dirty diapers.\n\nThe disgusting math does itself in this puzzle.",
"Human babies are biologically supposed to be carried all the time. This means they are in body contact with their mothers 24/7 and the mother learns to read the babies body language well enough to know when theres a poo or wee on the way. Then she would just hold the child over a bush or ditch or whatever and ... well the child empties itself. A few leaves to clean up the mess and mom could go on with whatever she was doing. Many cultures perform this up to today. ",
"Watch the movie \"Babies\". It is a documentary that shows infants lives in a couple places in the world. One location doesn't use diapers. It seems reasonable and not gross. I think a good diet probably helps the gross factor.",
"I was in rural Southern China about seven years ago while traveling. I don't know if it's universal or maybe it was just this area but The babies were usually just naked from the waist down. It was not unusual to see mothers holding their babies over trash cans as they got the job done. ",
"I lived in China for eight years, and there it's not very common for babies to wear diapers, especially in rural communities. While they are being potty trained, most babies wear pants that have a split in the crotch/butt area so the pants don't have to be taken off every time the kid has to go, and if they have an accident, theoretically it won't get on the pants. The parents/grandparents basically teach them to pee and poop on command with whistling noises while they hold them over the bushes/toilet/trash can. By the time they are two, most Chinese kids have already been potty trained for a while.",
"There's a documentary called 'Babies' and there's a woman in an African tribe, she has two little babies. When her son pooped he did so on her leg, then she just kind of rubbed it away, breaking it down on her leg. I would imagine it would be sum thing similar? ",
"While it is true that the Chinese teach their babies to wee on command in certain places etc. that doesn't necessarily equate to a good thing. Mostly since they train them to wee and defecate 'wherever' all the same as a baby in a diaper - in the middle of the road, at a bust stop, heck even [on an airplane](_URL_0_). And not just when they are babies, but well into toddler-hood. \n\nSo yeah while a Chinese baby might theoretically be able to hold it for a few seconds, they still expect to be able to go when and where they please."
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4yw5u0 | why do european languages generally use the same alphabet, but asia has many alphabets? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4yw5u0/eli5_why_do_european_languages_generally_use_the/ | {
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"The most obvious answer is \"Asia is really big and has lots of people.\" \n\nCivilization in Asia is also older than European civilization. Writing had a chance to evolve in multiple places in Asia independently, while a lot of Europe only became literate in the Middle Ages via the efforts of a couple of established languages and alphabets - the Latin and the Greek (which produced Cyrillic).\n\nThe Roman Empire introduced a continent full of illiterate barbarian tribes to the Latin characters, and their people adapted them to their own languages. The Byzantine Empire (i.e., Eastern Roman Empire) was mainly Greek-speaking, and the efforts of its Orthodox Christian church brought the Greek and Greek-based letters to large parts of Eastern Europe.",
"Most European languages developed from the same root - Proto-Indo-European. You can follow it's study all the way back to early Latin, even before written texts existed, by following words that are very similar in many different Indo-European languages.\n\nMost Asian languages, on the other hand, don't have a familiar root language, which is why they're so very complicated and different."
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wg1eb | james joyce's "finnegan's wake" | I've attempted to read this book several times and have been forced to consult a glossary and reader's guides each time just to interpret the first few pages. I figured this would be a nice little challenge for someone willing to help me break into this seemingly impenetrable tome.
(obviously I don't expect someone to summarize the entire book, just help me understand HOW I should be approaching this) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wg1eb/eli5_james_joyces_finnegans_wake/ | {
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"It's not really a book for reading. It's a lot of stream of consciousness writing, he makes up a lot of words, and just doesn't stick to any conventions of traditional writing.\n\nI would suggest reading a little [on Wikipedia](_URL_0_) ~~and definitely picking up an annotated version of the novel.~~ Edit: It seems as though it's too incomprehensible for an annotated version to exist. Stick with the guide and don't feel bad about it.",
"* Joyce was basically trolling when he wrote it. It's *supposed* to be almost impossible to understand, so don't feel bad. \n* He was a very well-read, intelligent guy, and he spoke a lot of languages, and he used all that knowledge. \n* The basic unit of it is the pun: given a regular word, he would change it into another word with a similar sound, or invent a word halfway between the two. Sometimes there's more than one layer of this. \n* Joyce is all about the sounds and the music. Reading aloud or finding audio recordings may help a little. \n* William York Tindall's book is well respected. You're not going to make much progress without help. "
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4741o5 | george bush's 90% post-9/11 approval rating. | Seems crazy to me, studying that period now. How did he win the approval of a majority of even Democrats? By just merely holding the office? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4741o5/eli5_george_bushs_90_post911_approval_rating/ | {
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"The \"rally round the flag effect.\" Anytime there is a crisis that clearly is not the president's fault, it is common for citizens to band together and support the decisions being made.\n_URL_0_",
"It always happens whenever there's a war or some sort of foreign crisis. We were attacked by \"the terrorists who hate us.\" If you disapprove of our president after that happened, well you just might be a terrorist who hates America too. When the enemy is defined by their opposition to America, *any* opposition to *any* aspect of America becomes suspicious. \n\nNow 15 years later we look back in horror that we ever thought like that, but our emotions got the better of us at the time. (Well not *me* of course. I was 6 when it happened.) ",
"Yup, just by holding office. America was attacked, he was leading America, so we all said \"we stand with America and its leader against our foes. He said we're going to go get them. Damn skippy we are.\" \n\nAnd then he botched that at Tora Bora, instituted torture as a policy, and invaded Iraq, and the moment of unity was gone. ",
"As an adult at the time who was generally opposed to GWB's policies, I was actually impressed with what seemed to be his response in the weeks after 9-11. I fully expected him to immediately respond in full force against who immediately seemed to be the antagonists. Instead, he refrained from casting blame and seemed to be trying to come up with a reasoned response.\n\nLooking at it after the fact, I don't think that's what was going on. But at the time, it seemed like he was being thoughtful about what the US should do, and I think it surprised and impressed his political opposition. It was only significantly later that he went all crazy and started blaming people who were clearly not involved.\n\nThere's obviously the rally-round-the-flag stuff, too, which is probably more significant to the total. But I was before and am now very opposed to his policies, but at the time, I was impressed with the way he seemed to be handling it. And that may be important as to the amazingly high approval ratings at the time."
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8zmpo4 | when you take a shower, why do your nails get soft, making them easier to be cut? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zmpo4/eli5_when_you_take_a_shower_why_do_your_nails_get/ | {
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"The water softens the keratin. Thats about it. What's easier to cut a hard cookie or the same cookie after you soak it in milk."
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2tedyp | how do fiber optics work? why can light enter but not exit? are there any practical applications of this technology? | [gif that made me wonder](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tedyp/eli5how_do_fiber_optics_work_why_can_light_enter/ | {
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"The light does come back out at the other end of the cable. The cable can carry the light over very long distances, requiring fewer repeating stations along the way. \n\nAnd the big practical application is communication. The big Internet lines between cities tend to be fiber.",
"given the shallow angle the light hits the edge, it gets reflected back into the glass, and propogates all the way to the other end of the glass. \n\nthin this rod out to hair thickness and surround it with an insulator and you have a fiber optic cable. shine a light on and off at one end to represent 1s and 0s and the other end will pick up the received data. Fiber optics are the backbone of the modern internet.",
"I work in data storage and a big part of what I do day to day is involving fibre channel, basically the same as fibre optic but for storage devices. It's pretty amazing seeing as currently the data can travel at 16Gb/s with 32Gb/s speeds to be released soon. With low costs and relatively low data loss!",
"It's funny that you ask this question because this is literally what we covered in my physics class this week! So basically if I understand it correctly there is this thing called total internal reflection, which basically means that when light hits the edge of whatever medium it is traveling through at a shallow enough angle, then the edge acts as a perfect mirror and reflects all the light waves back into the medium, this even works with water, I'm sure you can find videos of it on YouTube. Anyways in fiber optics cables they utilize this total internal reflection to get light to travel all the way down the cable without losing any of its energy. ",
"I see nobody explained why the light doesn't 'break out' like you would think it does.\nif you would look at a section of the fibre [(pic)](_URL_0_) you see different parts. \n\nThe inner part (core) is where the light is going through. This has a very constant refraction index which means the light will follow a straight path. Then the next part (cladding) has a different refraction index which means it will bend the light sort of like a mirror does. This means the light will keep reflecting back into the core and will eventually come out the other end at a close enough angle for a detector to see it.\n\nThere are many sorts of fibre, multinode and singlenode with different sizes and all work a little bit different so this really is a very basic explanation. For the guys who know better then me, i'm just a sys admin trying to help so correct me and help explain if i'm wrong.\n\nedit: forgot to mention the other parts, these are mainly for physical protection and to avoid interference",
"A cool practical application that hasn't been mention is the outer segment of the photoreceptors in your eye form a (literal!) tiny fiber optic system. By limiting the angle of light that each receptor will accept, it improves the performance of the retina. "
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8crq38 | why are clothes still made by people? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8crq38/eli5_why_are_clothes_still_made_by_people/ | {
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"Nearly all the work is done by machines. If you buy a shirt or a pair of pants, the total human labor that's gone into it is around two minutes — just the few parts that are hardest to automate. If you buy a pair of socks, the total human labor is under 25 seconds."
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21xt67 | why can machines - like computer processors - process information and do calculations much faster than a human brain? or any animal's brain, for that matter. | Maybe I'm a bit rusty on my Google-fu, but I couldn't find an answer to this.
EDIT: Thanks for all the answers! I appreciate the thought, and it seems that the answer is unanimous. I find it really interesting that the brain computes in trinary. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21xt67/eli5_why_can_machines_like_computer_processors/ | {
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"They're not really comparable. Brains are capable of integrating huge quantities of data on the fly, they can process language, movement, sensory input, thought, and calculations all at once. Computers can do calculations faster because we built them that way. In fact, that's *all* computers can do: perform calculations and produce an output. All the other fancy stuff is just more calculations that interpret the result of previous calculations in to something specific. ",
"They aren't. As the other posters said, the human brain is (estimated, but not really quantifiable ) ridiculously fast. \nJust a quick google for reference..\n\nBrain Speed:\n_URL_0_ \n\nWorld Fastest Supercomputer: \n_URL_2_\n\nEquates to brain = 20x10^15, fastest supercomputer 34x10^15.\nThat brain speed is also explained to have an error within an order of magnitude, so it could be x10^14 or 10^16.\n\nThere's also new research showing that the brain computes in trinary (--1,0,1) not binary (1,0) like computers. \n_URL_1_\n\nThere's so much calculation required in just moving and keeping your balance. Just look at any modern walking robots. There was a robot that could regain balance after being pushed and it was a major accomplishment not too long ago. \n\ntl;dr\nThey aren't, but they are getting close. Binary vs Trinary.\nI'm not an expert\n\n",
"The mechanisms that they use and the total capabilities that they have are quite different, leading to different strengths. And the answer to your question requires that you do a very precise job of defining \"process information\" or \"do calculations\". \n \nA modern microprocessor can contain a few billion transistors, and probably less than 10-20 billion connections between transistors. The transistors can switch on/off very very fast (picoseconds), and signals between transistors also can go rapidly, compared to a human brain. \n \nA human brain has about 100 billion neurons, and about 100 *trillion* connections between those neurons. The computation process requires electrical impulses to travel along neurons (which aren't extremely good conductors) and between neurons using chemical processes involving neurotransmitters, which aren't extremely fast. They are quick, but not as quick as what we do in a microprocessor, by several orders of magnitude. \n \nSo a microprocessor can do its operations very fast, but it is not nearly as complex as a human brain. Even to do simple things, the microprocessor must do a long sequence of steps, but it can still excel at raw speed because it is so fast at doing each individual step. But if you can't find a sequence (an algorithm) that is reasonably sized to carry out your task, even the raw speed of the processor might not be able to overcome the humongous number of things it needs to do. \n \nSo if you want to add 2+7 incredibly fast, use a microprocessor. If you want to recognize the walk of a friend from behind, use a human brain. \n "
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3rzovv | what actually happen when a computer erasing a file 'permanently' and give more space to save another file? | If it's a house, does it mean rearranging stuff, storing it in basement that we will never see again, or what? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rzovv/eli5_what_actually_happen_when_a_computer_erasing/ | {
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"There is a difference between 'deleting' a file and 'permanently erasing' a file.\n\nWhen you simply delete a file, the data contents of the file are actually still stored on the hard drive. Essentially all that happens is the computer's operating system 'forgets' there is a file/data stored at that location (the file catalog index specifying where the file is located gets deleted, but not the actual data contents of the file). \n\nThe location of the data contents of the deleted file is now declared free space. In the future, that location on the hard drive may be reallocated for storing other data, in which case the new data simply overwrites the original / 'deleted' file (causing corruption of the original file and therefore making it more difficult although not always impossible to recover).\n\nWhen you permanently erase a file, the operating system tells the hard drive to overwrite the file (perhaps multiple times) either with all zeros or random data (ones and zeros). Both methods accomplish the task (the original data content cannot be recovered), but the random data overwrite could make it more difficult to detect that a file was previously erased securely using such a method.",
"When you erase a file it becomes marked as re-writeable space. Generally speaking it could be recovered by appropriate software as it's unlikely it'll be written-over for a while (unless you have a huge amount of hard-drive activity).\n\n\nWhen you permanently erase a film the space for your file is overwritten with random/data to ensure that that file cannot be recovered (e.g. writing over the space with all 1s) and the space is marked as re-writeable.\n\n\nThe basic difference is a normal delete can be recovered with recovery software, a permanently deleted file cannot.",
"It means you erase the description of the house from the phone book. The house itself is still there, but common people can't find it anymore, since there's no mention of the house in the phone book. Next time something gets built there, a new house is just built on top of the old one and the phone book is updated. But before a new house is built, you could still go look for the old house if you have an idea where to look for. There are ways to completely demolish the house on delete if you have the need for it, but it's slower and for a typical user it's not needed.",
"The way a file system works, there's the data on the disk itself, and then there's an index at the top that points to it. When you request a file, the operating system consults the index, gets the location of the file, and reads it from the disk. (That's the ELI5 version of a FAT disk, anyway.) \n\nNormally, when you delete a file, only the index entry is deleted, so that the data blocks for that file become \"up for grabs\". They aren't overwritten immediately, which is why it's sometimes possible to \"undelete\" files by reconstructing the index. But the blocks could be overwritten at any time. \n\nIt's like declaring a house \"abandoned\": it could be torn down at any time, but if demand for the space is low, it might not happen for a while. When it does happen, it's permanent: the old data is totally replaced. In our metaphor, a new house got built where the old one once stood. \n\nTo erase a file permanently, before it's eventually overwritten, requires extra steps to wipe over it - like sending in a wrecking crew to demolish the house and leave the site vacant. ",
"To stick with your house metaphor: It's like giving your wife permission to redecorate the walls, the old wallpaper is still there, but at any moment she could decide to \"write\" over it by changing decorations or the wallpaper."
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8mcyp4 | why does a guitar have harmonics only on certain parts of the fretboard/string? | Picking/tapping a string to produce a harmonic note. What is the science behind this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mcyp4/eli5_why_does_a_guitar_have_harmonics_only_on/ | {
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"First you need to understand the concept of overtones.\n\nLet's say you play the open E string. The main and strongest tone you're going to hear is the E note, because that's the main frequency the string is vibrating at. But because the string isn't vibrating at exactly the same speed across the whole string \\(the middle of the string will travel further in the middle of the string than it will closer to the nut or bridge\\) the string will also produce a variety of overtones \\(different frequencies to the main note\\).\n\nThis is what gives instruments \\(and even individual strings on instruments\\) their characteristic sound. If you play the open top E string on a guitar, you can play the same note at the same pitch by playing the B string fretted at the fifth fret...but even though they're the same note at the same frequency, they sound subtly different...and the reason for that because you're 'shortening' the B string, and the B string has a different mass, so it's producing different overtones.\n\nA harmonic is an overtone that is a multiple of the base frequency of the string. For example, if a string vibrates at 100hz, its first harmonic will be 200hz, the next, 300hz and so on.\n\nNow, a guitar string has 'dead spots' where the string doesn't move \\(the nut and the bridge saddle\\), and the area it can move \\(the rest of the string\\). When the string is particular thickness and tension it 'wants' to vibrate at a specific frequency \\(the note you've tuned it to\\).\n\nIf you lightly touch the string at the 12th fret, you're creating a new 'dead spot' on the string, the same as the dead spot at the nut and saddle. Now, because the main frequency, the note you'd get if you played the string open, doesn't have a dead spot at the 12th fret, the main note won't sound. Basically, physics won't allow the string to vibrate at the main frequency... but the harmonic *does* have a dead spot at the 12th fret. In essence, it's like we've moved the nut up to the 12th fret, so while we don't hear the main note, we do hear the harmonic.\n\nBasically, what we're doing is cancelling out the main frequency so we only hear the overtones, and at that spot on the string, the only overtone that can be produced is the harmonic.\n\nSo, the reason we can only produce harmonics at certain parts of the string is because those are the areas where we can create a dead spot that will allow the string to produce an overtone that is a multiple of the base frequency of the string. It's why every string has a harmonic at the 12th fret, because the 12th fret is the halfway point of the string, so by creating a dead spot there, we're halving the length, which doubles the frequency.."
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2ueojo | for 99.5% of humanity's history, a baby that wouldn't breastfeed, would die. simple as that. so, for modern babies, why is a problem with babies not "latching on" such a common post-pregnancy problem? shouldn't natural selection have fixed that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ueojo/eli5_for_995_of_humanitys_history_a_baby_that/ | {
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"Its my understanding that this is most often a problem with first pregnancies, not later pregnancies. And it's actually fairly common that the first offspring of many species die of neglect, because first time animal mothers can't figure out how to/don't bother to feed the infant, or otherwise do something wrong.\n\nThat probably doesn't completely answer your question, since then you could say \"Well, *that* sounds like a bad strategy. To which I can only say... instincts aren't perfect? They get better when experience is added to it. And they only need to be good enough to keep the species going, not perfect. Since until recently people often went on to have five or more kids, losing the first was not the end of the world.",
"Nurses and the formula manufacturers actively discourage breastfeeding.\nI have 4 kids, and watched this happen every time. The first was a \"C\" section, and the nurses flat-out TOLD my wife, you will **not** be able to breastfeed. She persevered, and did.\n\nThe last went into the NICU, where we were \"actively encouraged\" not to breastfeed. The reason? The nurses liked to feed all the babies at the same time, and a baby breastfeeding on demand upset their routine. We were actually told this!\n\nAll the literature endorsing formula, (and when you have a baby in a hospital, you will get **a lot** of this literature), starts with the same mantra: \"Breastfeeding is best, but...\"\n\nThey make it too damned easy to start your kid on formula, and that starts the whole \"I didn't make enough milk\" cycle.\n\nyou think it's a small thing, \"I'll just give the baby a little formula\". A womans breasts produce to meet the demand. If you give the baby formula, the baby nurses less, and the breasts themselves respond by producing that much less milk.\n\nBeastfeeding isn't easy: I helped actively through my wifes 4 courses of it. Each kid has different feeding habits too. \n\nIf it was the only option, it would be a lot more successful.\n\nSorry for the \"rant\" tone of this, but it is a \"hot button\" issue for my wife and I.\n\nWomen are set up for failure, put on a slippery slope to quitting by nurses who want routine at work, and a formula industry who throws RIDICULOUS amounts of \"free\" stuff at new moms, in order to get their brand out there.",
"Breastfeeding got a lot harder to figure out when an alternative was created...ultimately hunger and mother-worry prevail. \"Latching on\" would still be a problem, and babies would died, but...lots of latching on problems would resolve themselves.\n\nAnd...lets not forget that human ingenuity - including the creation of formula - is to be considered, not ignored, in thinking about natural selection."
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2qd0up | why are us street numbers so random? | In most western countries number 10 is next to number 12 which is next to number 14. In the US even a small street can have 22097 next to 22092. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qd0up/eli5_why_are_us_street_numbers_so_random/ | {
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"Many places in the US (though not NYC) houses are numbered by the cross street, so between 6th and 7th avenue (or what would be if they haven't been given other names) the houses go from 600 to 700. So if you're going to use this system it makes a certain amount of sense to space the numbering out so that 650 is in the middle of the block. Armed with an address I can reason out the best way to get there without knowing much about the area (though one way streets can get in the way). \n\n782 3rd st? Take 8th ave down to third!",
"I've lived in probably 11 different houses in the US. they were all numbered in order, with odd and even numbers being on separate sides of the street. The only exceptions are big cities, where buildings are numbered by blocks.",
"I have perhaps and even more puzzling question: Why is it that when I'm looking for an address number, very few-- usually nearly none-- of the buildings have their address numbers displayed?"
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510myc | what is the explanation for one country being on the top economically but still not having good standards of living for it's people? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/510myc/eli5_what_is_the_explanation_for_one_country/ | {
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"From my limited understanding, it's just because the measures used come up with an economic \"rating\" generally have little or nothing directly to do with the living conditions of people in the country. Economic rating considers things like values of imports and exports, GDP, and whatever else, but doesn't consider whether or not the average person is living in substandard conditions. \n\nOr do you mean, how can an economically strong country neglect its people? That's a different question. ",
"China has 1.3 billion people. Sure their GDP is the second highest in the world, but when you divide that over that big a population you wind up with a lot of people living in 3rd world poverty. They would need a GDP 4 times higher than the United States to be able to deliver a similar standard of living for all their people that the United States does.",
"Economic indicators and social indicators are related but not the same. \n\nFor example : China has higher GDP (and economic indicator) than Japan. But per capita Japan is way ahead than China. \nSimilarly many countries in Scandinavia are less wealthy than US but they are perceived to have a better standard of living. \n\nEven more so, Qatar has one of the highest per capita in the world but because of their social structures (mercilessly exploiting immigrants ), censorship they don't count as a top standard of living..\n\nIn short: economic strength is an aggregate strength so if a country is big or resource rich it has some advantages. Standard of living depends in economic strength but also on other factors : economic inequality, social policy, social mobility etc. "
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1jcu9y | why don't the animals of the chernobyl disaster zone die of radiation poisoning? | You see posts like [these](_URL_0_) from time to time. It claims that the animals near the radiation zone and in the zone are thriving because of the lack of human presence.
Humans aren't there because radiation sickness hurts, so why aren't the animals dying as well? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jcu9y/eli5_why_dont_the_animals_of_the_chernobyl/ | {
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"Many probably have. Humans know enough to leave the area if radiation levels are high enough to cause harm. When deer get higher cancer rates over the decades or sicken from acute radiation poisoning, they don't get warned by deer doctors to move elsewhere. They just deal with things as best they can.",
"In order to overdose on tylenol, you have to take a large amount in a short period of time.\n\nSimilarly, \"radiation sickness\" or acute radiation injury requires a large dose of radiation in a short amount of time. The radiation dose rate isn't high enough inside the disaster zone to trigger this effect (with the exception of areas inside the reactor building itself *edit* and a few other localized areas of high contamination). Ionizing radiation damages DNA, and your body has many DNA repair mechanisms. A large dose of radiation in a short period of time can overload those mechanisms, leading to radiation injury.\n\nThe reason humans aren't allowed to live there isn't because of radiation sickness. It is because the elevated amounts of radiation would lead to slightly increased cancer risks. Many people ignore the orders and continue to live there. You can read about them [here](_URL_0_). ",
"I can't give a good, simple explanation, but I'd like to point to [this](_URL_0_) article.",
"Humans would not die there, too. But 20% risk to get cancer in the next 10 years is enough that humans don't want to live there.\nFor certain animals, human presence is worse than radioactivity. The 20% likelihood of getting cancer in 10 years is not that bad. Most animals die young, anyways.",
"IVE BEEN WONDERING THIS FOR AGES",
"Why is this tagged as NSFW?",
"To be all fair, Humans DO live there. Some permanently (the old grandmas who think vodka is a cure for anything) and the permanent research staff and construction workers (which have lots of days off).\nThe people and wildlife are both affected in such an manner where the typical radiation doses do no exceed the \"acute lethal dose\" but are enough to induce longterm effects. The effects of long term radiation on nature is largely unknown. This is why part of Chernobyl is prohibited for persons, to study the effect of long term radiation on animal and plant wildlife. But I can say for sure there are many deformities found in animals and plants, as well as in children in Bellarus (north of Chernobyl). \nWildlife is \"thriving\" due the lack of human intervention. But also suffering from the human errors made in '86.",
"They do die more.\n\nBut the mortality rate of wild animals is so high already that it's a small trade off to make for the lack of human pressure.\n\n\"Wild\" humans likely had a life expectancy in the 20s, with reaching 30 being a real accomplishment. Living in the exclusion zone wouldn't be a big deal for us either if we still held that standard.",
"There is a wonderful documentary about the study of animals surviving inside the evacuation zone. I'll edit this post if I can find it after work.",
"The radiation has not been spread evenly over the territory, most of it is quite ok, but still high at some spots. In short, most of the chernobyl's zone is safe today.",
"Humans are mostly kept away because of fear and liability. Outside of the sarcophagus there just isn't much danger. ",
"I spent 4 days inside the exclusion zone and probably got more radiation from the flight to the Ukraine than I did in Chernobyl. Also, the USSR moved mountains in their clean-up effort of the place, you have to give them credit.",
"Well, some of them are. I'm sure some of their offspring have had terrible deformities. In humans, that's a pretty awful thing to experience.\n\nWith animals, not so much (although I'm sure PETA would pipe up about now). And some offspring make it and survive. And then they pass on genes to the next generation. And that generation has less deformities. Essentially we're breeding radiation resistant animals. Is that a good or bad thing? You tell me.\n\nLife finds a way, given half a chance.",
"they do die and suffer from radiation poisoning. But they can still survive for 15-40 years.",
"Imagine having your head dunked underwater for a few seconds. It's really scary and you can't breathe at all, but after those few seconds are up, you start taking big, deep breaths and you're okay again! \n\nNow imagine getting your head dunked underwater for a really long time. Scary, right? You'd probably drown! By the time you were let go, you'd already be unconscious, maybe too far gone to save. Even if you did survive, there'd be a good chance that you'd suffer permanent brain injury. It's pretty dangerous stuff!\n\nRadiation works a lot like that. The smaller stuff isn't going to hurt you really bad at first, but you'd have to be careful of getting sick from it constantly doing bad stuff to you. The big stuff will get you really sick really fast, and you probably wouldn't live long.\n\n*If I wanted it explained to me like an adult, I'd find another subreddit, goddamnit!*",
"A few things allow the populations to thrive:\n\n1. Natural selection - Some animals will be more adapted to coping with the radiation, they will be more likely to survive, so more likely to reproduce. Ones that aren't adapted and can't cope will die and not reproduce. This leads to the majority of them having the adaptation.\n\n2. Survival of the fittest - Any animal born with a defect (due to damaged DNA from the radiation) will most likely die/be killed by predators and, again, not be able to reproduce or pass on any defect.\n\n3. Life Span - Most animals live a much shorter lifespan in the wild then they are capable of. Radiation causes 'sickness' and defects by damaging DNA, and if too much DNA is damaged cancer can form. However it takes time for the damage to build up enough before there is an effect, so many animals will die from natural causes before any damage from the radiation is noticeable. Also a sick animal is easy prey for predators so even if they lived enough for the damage to be noticeable they will probably be killed before it gets really bad.\n\n4. Range- Many animals will roam large areas, so, just like the humans that visit contaminated areas, they wont be exposed for a continuous period of time.\n\n5. Humans- Now that people don't live there, the threats we pose to wildlife (infrasturcure, hunting, pollution, pets etc) are gone. The benefits of this may outway the chance of the negative effects of radiation\n\n6. And lastly nature will find a way to cope with pretty much anything. There is life in the most extreme places on earth and they are doing just fine.\n\nedit: \n\nAlso animals don't know they are at risk by being there, we do thou. So we choose not to live there but animals don't know any better.\n\nSo basically it is a mixture of these factors/reasons that means animals live in/around areas like this.",
"Most comments seem to have answered your questions, but even though I know a bit about physics I'll say:\n\nThe animals with radiation sickness severe enough to kill are already dead, the rest survived - and just like any normal exposure - this tends to \"heal\" for the exception of mutations etc. ",
"I have no idea. But it's been a while, and I'm still wondering when all the superheroes are going to pop up.",
"This was very interesting to me. _URL_0_",
"The worms adapt. I remember learning this in college",
"Where did this subreddit come from?",
"Just thought I would mention this website for anyone interested in seeing pictures of the Chernobyl area. This woman races through on her motorcycle and stops to explore and take pictures.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDITED TO ADD- Okay so apparently this woman took a government sanctioned car tour and a motorcycle helmet to make it look like she took a lone motorcycle tour. So, the pictures are cool, but the details in the accompanying story are... embellished. A lot.",
"i think its also good to note that any animal that has acquired large amounts of radiation while living there all die out within a generation or 2 which is the reason we dont see mutants walking around \n(by mutants i mean birth defects)",
"They were born in the radiation, shaped by it.",
"A lot of people have given you great answers, but there's one important detail that I didn't see in the other replies.\n\nIn order for a unit of whatever type of radiation to adversely affect you, it has to actually hit a cell nucleus as it passes through your body. That's where the DNA is, and if it hits anything else (or passes straight through without interacting with anything), it'll just do some easily reparable microdamage.\n\nThe odds of a radiation particle hitting any particular nucleus is pretty small, since the nuclei are only small parts of cells. However, humans are pretty big and thick, so the odds get skewed upwards due to the sheer number of potential targets. And even on us, something like 90% of gamma radiation passes straight through without a problem. It requires very specific conditions to actually affect you. Alpha radiation is the hairy beast of the radiation world, but it's also fairly rare.\n\nNow imagine something as small as a mouse or an earthworm. They're going to receive only a tiny fraction of the radiation dose a human does simply because there's so little there for radioactive particles to hit.",
"I think this might be a better question for /r/askscience",
"The animals don't live long enough to develop cancer so they thrive.",
"Fun fact: A nuclear disaster is apparently better for the environment than people just simply living there.",
"Wired did an article related to this a couple years back:\n_URL_0_",
"Because honeybadgers don`t give a fuck.",
"their second heart helps keep them alive",
"In Short: They don't die of radiation poisoning because there is actually very little radiation in the exclusion zone.\n\nPerspective: Background radiation levels:\nJapan Average: 1.5 mSv/year\nWorld Average: 2.4 mSv/year\nUSA Average: 3.5 mSv/year\nChernobyl Exclusion Zone (next to reactor building): 6.4 mSv/year\nFinland Average: 8.0 mSv/year\nSouthwest France: 88.0 mSv/year\nBlack Sand (Basalt) Beaches 120.0 mSv/year\nRamsar Iran: 260.0 mSv/year\n\nThere are many areas in the world with far higher background radiation levels (most naturally occurring). Even in Ramsar Iran which is 40x more radioactive, people do not develop cancer at higher rates (incidence in actually slightly below average). The Chernobyl disaster is greatly overblown (media loves spooking people with radiation, so does Greenpeace). \n\nAt the time of the incident, there WAS a great deal of radiation in the first kilometer or so of the station however (especially at the reactor itself). Fire-fighters who were called to the scene on the first day received lethal doses (4000+ mSv) within a few hours and would die weeks to months later.\n\nThe pine forest next to the station also died where the fallout fell (the red forest it was called). Pine trees have a radiation tolerance comparable to humans; most plants can tolerate far more. It was bulldozed and replanted as a science experiment.\n\nThe fallout wiped out invertebrates (bugs, worms) within the first 5 cm of soil, but left everything underneath was unaffected (beta decay doesn't travel far). Invertebrates populations bounced back within 2.5 years. No birth defects or mutations observed. Cockroaches did not reappear as they are dependant on humans not enough were living there any more.\n\nPlant leaves in the area developed burn spots, but these did not reappear the next year. Some plants in the process of germinating at the time developed strange growth patterns (stunted, disrupted metabolism), but then corrected themselves within months. No plant abnormalities observed after 1.2 years.\n\nFish in the tailing ponds next to the reactor had a 4-fold increase in genetic damage for the first 2 years, accompanied by a 40% increase (yes increase) in female fertility. No other symptoms observed.\n\nGrazing Animals abandoned by their owners accumulated a lot of radioactive iodine from eating grass with fallout. This killed many livestock and hormonal problems in cows persisted until the next generation.\n\nPartial albinism (white spots) on barns swallows is believed to be the only mutation that persists today from the event. It doesn't affect the bird's fitness.\n\nNo effects on animals and plants have been demonstrated outside the exclusion zone, with 80% of the exclusion zone not suffering any symptoms, even in the first 2 years. (Roughly speaking, fallout got exponentially less potent by distance).\n\nIt was initially claimed that the disaster had raised the levels of thyroid cancer and birth defects in local humans (Chernobyl heart). However, when compared to historical records, birth defects and thyroid cancer rates had not increased above baseline. The amount of people claiming compensation for birth defects (as they could now lay blame on the government) did increase, along with the amount of people seeking screening for thyroid cancer (otherwise many cases would have gone unnoticed). Don't think me unsympathetic though. People were evacuated and forced to leave their entire lives behind, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at gunpoint, all without being told what was going on. The event left psychological scars that persist even of the children of the survivors. Fatalism, depression, violence, risk-taking are all human legacies of the event. The sad part is, evacuation was probably not even necessary. But everything is 20-20 in hindsight, and no one knew the actual doses at the time evacuation was ordered.",
"Animals breed faster than radiation sickness can kill them. ",
"Unless you're down by the elephant foot (EG: parts of the Chernobyl nuclear facility that are so badly irradiated that modern camera technology can't even take pictures of it) the background radiation is pretty tame. You can wander around the city and locals in the region even charter tours. I mean, you get checked before and after you go for radiation but otherwise you're not going to be exposed to more than the legal limit. \n\n\nYou'd probably get exposed to more radiation if you spent the next 60 hours in an airplane compared to an hour in most parts of Chernobyl. \n\n\nThe hazards and risks of nuclear meltdowns are massively overblown: the worst consequences are what happens to humans. The earth has been exposed to volumes of radiation that make every nuclear power plant accident *combined* look like child's play. ",
"Such is life in the zone.",
"because mutation is more fun(:",
"Most wild animals don't live long enough to feel the effects of extended radiation positioning (like cancer). Birth defects in wild animals are also less noticeable than birth defects in human children. ",
"Most animals don't live for all that long. There is not total statistical coverage for the area, how long did a squirrel live there before the radiation? How long does it live now? \n\nRadiation is normally not an immediate killer like nerve gas or something so you say 'this much radiation is bad because 40% more people exposed to it over 20 years will die...'"
]
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34rvt5 | what is scandinavian socialism, and why is it so great? | I know that the Scans have got it going on, but I just don't know how or why. Also, if the United States were to implement a similar structure what would have to change..? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34rvt5/eli5_what_is_scandinavian_socialism_and_why_is_it/ | {
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"I'm getting this from Wikipedia so this may be a bit dubious, but I'll my best.\n\nThe thing about Scandinavian Socialism, or the Nordic Model as it's normally called, it's that it's comparatively light on the Socialism part. They're Capitalist free-markets, but with a large public sector (i.e. state-run operations) and high tax rates that result in things such as higher education and healthcare requiring little if any out-of-pocket expenses for citizens. \n\nUnlike comparatively heavy-handed Socialist nations such as the Soviet Union and Mao-era China it has a Capitalist market that promotes innovation and ambition but with no guarantee of employment, opposed to Command economies with guaranteed employment where nobody tries because they don't have to. They do, however, have robust systems that help the unemployed get by and find work.",
"Scandinavians have created an economic/political system that features a lot of social safety at the cost of high taxes. Experience shows that their populations are healthy and prosperous, and that their economies are competitive. I don't understand the magic that makes it work, but look at any metric for quality of life and you will see that it works well in Scandinavia. \n\nIt would not happen in USA. A not-insignificant barrier is that the american electorate has an irrational fear of the word 'socialism' desite the fact that several of our most popular government programs are indeed socialist (ahem, social security). Case in point: how often do you hear *any* us politician say he wants to eliminate social security?"
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4bhba6 | why does facebook censor anything that resembles a nipple but not horrific scenes of violence and/or religious videos inciting violence? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bhba6/eli5why_does_facebook_censor_anything_that/ | {
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"text": [
"Because Facebook is an American company and has the American puritanical idea that sex is bad and violence is good. It's something that is deeply ingrained in our society. "
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1fx1hf | how did the octopus do this? | I saw this gif posted in /r/woahdude
_URL_0_
And was wondering how an octupus can do that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fx1hf/eli5how_did_the_octopus_do_this/ | {
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"They have special pigment cells on their skin called chromatophores. They use muscles to contract and expand the cells which lead to various colors being seen. They can also use the muscles in their skin to contort pieces of their body, making it look jagged like coral.\n\nAlso, they have excellent eyesight, which allows them to get an accurate picture of an object to mimic.",
"Source video, for anyone wondering: _URL_0_"
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feg2ai | why do salted soft pretzels sweat if left out over night? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/feg2ai/eli5_why_do_salted_soft_pretzels_sweat_if_left/ | {
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"Soft pretzel still have a good bit of water in them, and that water along with the gluten is part of what makes them stay soft.\n\nEvaporation will cause it to lose water, and having salt on the surface will also draw out water, so between the two it tends to be pretty noticeable.",
"Nothing to do with the pretzel itself, but the salt on it.\n\nThe air is full of tiny particles of water just floating around, and soft pretzels have a ton of water in them. Water is very \"sticky\" - it easily makes bonds with many types of substances. Substances which very readily make new bonds with the water around them are known as *hygroscopic* (yes, hy**g**ro not hy**d**ro).\n\nSalt is highly hygroscopic, so it basically sucks water out of the air and out of the pretzel and leaves it in droplet form on your pretzel - hence the \"sweat.\""
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cs9wh6 | every month we see studies talking about how they have successfully found a cure for cancer but they just vanish after sometime. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cs9wh6/elif_every_month_we_see_studies_talking_about_how/ | {
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"Cancer isn't just one disease. Many forms of cancer are successfully treated using the findings of the studies you're talking about.",
"One issue is that a lot of treatments show promise in the mouse studies, but don't pan out in clinical trials. Also, the potential cures are usually for very specific types of cancer, and once they become treatments, there's not as much fanfare. So it's just people with X type of cancer that find out their prognosis goes from 5 years to live to 90% of patients go into full remission.",
"Click bait is one of the main things, what sounds better \"Experimental Cancer treatment shown to be 5% more effective than chemotherapy.\"/\"New Cancer research shows promise in mice\" or \"New research finds cure for cancer!\"\n\nAnd as the other poster said many types of cancer."
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8gqpo7 | [religious] if (a)in the begining god created adam and eve but doesn't mention the creation of anyone else, and (b) god commanded noah to save his family and various animals from a flood that was to wipe out the earth.... are we twice inbred as a species? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gqpo7/eli5_religious_if_ain_the_begining_god_created/ | {
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"According to fundamentalist we are, but if you look at the DNA evidence it’s clear this was all non-sense. ",
"The bible isn't really clear on this.\n\nIt mentions the creation of Adam and Eve, and then their two named sons who are presumably the next two people.\n\nHowever, it then suggests that the son Cain located a wife and founded a city in another land. Where the wife came from and who populated this city is not explained.",
"One idea among theological scholars is that God kept making humans, and that Adam and Eve were just the first. Another is that they kept having children after the first 3 including daughters and we were inbred as a species. \n\nAnd yes there was inbreeding among cousins after Noah. So you can interpret the bible as stating that we are twice inbred as a species. \n\nIt is interesting to note that science calculates at least 3 near extinction level periods for humans where populations got so low that we would be considered inbred. ",
"Yup, if the Old Testament is taken to be literally true, this is the case.\n\nNote this is also true for any number of creation myths that have a first man and woman, Abrahamic religions are by no means unique in this regard.",
"Depends on if you consider a lot of catholic\\christian mythos as cannon or not. From what I remember(from many many years ago studying religious mythos) there are a couple of different theories on the rest of the worlds population. One is that lucipher himself tried his hand at creation and thats where all other human beings come from. Another is that after Adam and eve were kicked out of the garden god made a bunch of random humans and sprinkled them around so that the descendants of Adam and eve would have people to rule. They, being gods chosen people, would later be reffered to as Hebrews/Jews(not people who practice Judaism or choose it as a religion but people of actual decent from Adam and eve Jews/Hebrews)\nThen again like a few others have said supposedly Adam lived to be 900 something years old and many of his offspring also lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. But essentially yeah its inbreeding. If you look at it scientifically though this is just a real old religious style explanation for the different type of ancestors human beings have. Neandrathals and what not and how we interbred with them. Which....honestly A lot of old religious origin stories have pretty scientific parallels when you look at them with what we now know....which has always left me wondering what did we breed with to make Nephilim and demi gods?....like where the fuck did that species go?!?! Is it a sasquatch, aliens, 4 or 5 dimensional beings that found a way to mingle with us? I want that answer within the next 20 years. Evolutionary biology is my favorite religion",
"Regardless your religious affiliation, we are incredibly inbred as a species. Mitochondrial Adam and Eve are the terms we give to the most recent male and female all humans on Earth share common ancestry. Mitochondrial Adam is approximately 200,000 years ago, and mitochondrial Eve is approximately 100,000 years ago.\n\nAnd then throughout history, you have isolated populations that merely bred with themselves, and there were several collapses of population where we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today if societies hadn't rebuilt with the gene pool it had left."
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6gyrum | why do video game developers take so long to come out with their game when it seems as though they have a nearly complete product at events such as e3? in essence, what takes them so long to revise that they need months after releasing game play footage? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gyrum/eli5_why_do_video_game_developers_take_so_long_to/ | {
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"Pretty sure DEMOs and such are sectioned off parts of the game they get working just to show it off and hype people. Game itself is no where near complete.",
"Are you talking about a video or a demo?\n\nIt's easy to make the 'in-game' videos look great even with a half finished product, so long as the engine and a couple of major features are ready to run. In a video you won't be running into any bugs and you're not dealing with users who wind up trying things out that aren't fully implemented yet. You just show off exactly what's ready to be shown off and you make it look good. You don't even need any artificial intelligence, as you can simply script everything to play out in an exact way you want it to.\n\nA demo generally requires the game to be much farther into development, because here you'll be dealing with actual users intentionally or (usually) accidentally abusing your game and your system in every way possible. Depending on the demo, you probably want most of your base systems to be in place. For video games this could be a fairly fleshed out combat system, collision detection, artificial intelligence, decent optimization and so forth.\n\nBut even when you have a demo, you might not have implemented most of the content into the game already. Adding new areas or levels to a game isn't as simple as just loading up a level editor and throwing new things down. You often need new scripts, new enemies and encounters to design and balance, play-testing, to debug 428390572409572490472098572094 lines of code for every single new line you actually write and so on. Some of the systems working in a demo's background might also be little more than quickly hacked together code, made solely for the purpose of bringing a demo out in time. So you might not realize just how much of a mess the system really is at that point.\n\nIn closing, I must point out that marketing departments in the video game industry have absolutely no clue what an 'alpha' or a 'pre-alpha' is. -.-",
"I mean, No Man's Sky showed us a lot of things that the game didn't have. As well as the infamous Spore.",
"Because with events like this, if they plan to announce things or have demos available, usually for a month or two prior to the event, that demo is the entire focus of production. They get that 20minute section squeaky clean and bug free, because it offers users a good idea of what the rest of the game is intended to be like. I say intended because production is weird, shit changes, entire content is cut from games as late as two weeks from release. Usually if a game is too different or not up to par with a demo that has been released, there's a good chance it went through some kind of development issues; whether that be time, money, or just idea related is hard to tell from the outside"
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2xiyc4 | is it possible to develop illnesses like ptsd from viewing disturbing images? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xiyc4/eli5_is_it_possible_to_develop_illnesses_like/ | {
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"PTSD is a mental health problem that can occur after someone goes through a traumatic event like war, assault, an accident or disaster.\n\nThat being said, and since suffering is relative to the person, you can have something that triggers and overwhelms their emotional breaking point to get PTSD. Car wreck, divorce, child dying, war, natural disasters, lots of things can trigger it in people."
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b2bdpz | how in the world is formula 1 profitable for the teams? | Teams like Ferrari and Mercedez have a budget of over a billion dollars, what the hell? They're losing money in order to compete in F1, right? I can't fathom they'd make it back... It's not that big of a spectator sport in comparison to other sports and so..so much money goes into it. How does that work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2bdpz/eli5_how_in_the_world_is_formula_1_profitable_for/ | {
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"Winning sells cars. That's why manufactures put money into F1. many common features in modern cars such as ABS and traction control were developed on race circuits. So it gives them publicity and a place to do development.",
"Not that big of a spectator sport? There were 324k across 4 days of the Australian Grand Prix.",
"F1 is actually one of the biggest spectator sports in the world with a viewership of 490 million people. TV channels across the world pay to show the races, and a cut of the money goes to the teams. There’s also a massive amount of ticket sales - 4 million people went to the 21 races last year. \n\nOn top of that, the teams themselves sell merchandise and have sponsorship deals that bring in plenty of money - the cars are covered in logos that get seen by all those people. \n\nFinally, the companies that own the teams often see F1 as advertising for their product - ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’. The classic example of this is that Ferrari don’t run TV/online/print advertising of any kind - their famous F1 team and winning reputation is enough to sell their road cars. ",
"For a team like Mercedes, lets say their budget is £500m.\n\nAdd up every minute that due to F1 - either direct coverage of practices and races, or indirect coverage via news, magazine and chat shows etc - that Mercedes logos are on screen, and/or every time Mercedes name is printed or spoken.\n\nGive an advertising agency £500m to spend buying ads on tv, online, radio, etc. Count how many minutes they can achieve. Is it even as many? Debatable when every F1 weekend generates like 12 hours of direct coverage, vs 30 second ad slots. \n\nBut that's just the start of it. Now count how big an audience is actually reached (in an era of DVRs, adblocks, banner blindness etc, many people ignore ads, whereas they actively fanboy sports teams and will seek out corporate twitter accounts to follow etc). Now count how _relevant_ an audience is reached (F1 reaches an extremely self-selected audience of performance car enthusiasts). Now count how persuaded that audience is by being _told_ \"Mercedes make good cars\" in ad copy, vs being _shown_ they really can and do make multi-championship winning F1 cars.\n\nI admit, the sums are so huge it seems hard to believe, but kinda self-evidently the top brass at these firms must believe even £500m (or whatever it is) equates to net profit in marketing terms, and more specificially than that, they believe the marketing return in F1/motorsport is better than spending the same in traditional advertising. Presumably they even have some evidence to prove it (to their own boards).\n\nThere is of course another alternative explanation which is that it simply isnt profitable, and it's a case of rich people (or companies) luxury spending on what is effectively their hobby. In the motorsport world, (more so the lower formulas, lower classes in GTs etc) there are definitely huge numbers of teams in this category.",
"I think you severely underestimate how popular it is.",
"I assume you live in America, where NASCAR is the “best”racing sport. As an American myself I understand your thought process, but as a true race fan that likes everything from Le Mans to WRC I can appreciate how huge F1 is (if not the biggest). "
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eujsvp | why don’t birds have teeth? | I was in smacked city, heading off to snowboard. Somehow I got into a conversation with my dad and younger sister about dinosaurs and reptiles. Then my dad dropped the bomb on me and told me that chickens and birds came from dinosaurs. That then confused me because birds don’t have teeth. Where did they go? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eujsvp/eli5_why_dont_birds_have_teeth/ | {
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"Most birds are no longer hunting mammals or other animals that are larger than them, birds still have jagged edges inside their beaks if you look closely but they simply don't need large meat cutting teeth anymore",
"Yes, Birds are descended from dinosaurs who had teeth, but teeth and jaws became beaks. Birds lost their teeth because they lost the bone structure needed for chewing. Bones are heavy, and birds have sacrificed a lot of bone strength in order to be able to fly well. If a modern bird had teeth, it would break its jaw if it tried to crush or tear with them. Teeth have been replaced by a variety of specialized beaks, some of which are actually quite sturdy. Others use their beaks for reaching into things, and then swallow their prey whole, which they then crush using muscles in the crop.",
"Firstly, birds don't come from dinosaurs, they *are* dinosaurs. \n\nThe current thinking as to why birds don't have teeth is because it was a side effect of faster incubation. If you're hanging around in an egg for a long time you're vulnerable - you can't move, your parents have to defend you. It's not ideal.\n\nSo there would have been a decent amount of selection pressure in favour of genes that sped up incubation. It would seem that, as teeth take a long time to form, that these speedier incubation genes had the side effect of simply not activating the 'teeth genes' - the embryo never gets to the teeth growing stage.\n\nThe previous thinking was that birds lost teeth to enable flight, but this doesn't explain why numerous non-avian dinosaurs lost their teeth and formed beaks too (eg Oviraptor, 'egg-thief', a good example of why you don't want to hang around in eggs too long).",
"Birds swallow their food whole and it is ground up by the gizzard, a muscular organ in their stomach, so they can digest it. They therefore don't need teeth to chew so teeth would be a waste of resources."
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33yp1h | why is that when i choose random on a playlist of thousands of songs, the same few songs seem to play first every time? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33yp1h/eli5_why_is_that_when_i_choose_random_on_a/ | {
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"The possibilities are:\n\n* Bad luck, but the device does do \"random\" well enough.\n* The device has a poor randomizing algorithm (because nothing in computing actually is random, it just looks that way)\n* Observational bias - you only notice that when you start the playlist, songs X, Y, and Z play first. You don't notice when anything else plays first, or you forget.\n\nTry starting with a different song, or rearranging the playlist first by hand.",
"It is a variation on the birthday problem.\n\n_URL_0_\n\ntl;dr: \"Random chance\" produces duplicates."
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2fyqk3 | what constitutes a draw in chess? why does it seem as though a draw happens when it looks like a normal game going on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fyqk3/eli5_what_constitutes_a_draw_in_chess_why_does_it/ | {
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"There are several situations where a draw may occur, and while it may seem like a \"normal\" game is going on to the average person, a trained eye would identify them pretty easily usually:\n\n* One player requests a draw and it is accepted. This may happen if both players want to play it safe and secure half of a point, or if a forced draw will foreseeably happen in the future. \n \n* The same configuration of pieces comes up for 3 turns (a turn being both White and Black getting to move) ~~in a row~~. (Thank you /u/BallsAndAHalf for the correction) \n \n* No pieces are taken for a whole 50 turns **[and no pawn is moved, corrected as pointed out below]**. This is usually not tracked unless it becomes painfully obvious that nothing is happening anymore or if one of the players may get desperate and try to draw out the game until 50 turns have passed. \n \n* One player is caught in a situation where he cannot legitimately move any pieces, but is also not in check. When this happens, it usually comes to the dismay of the other side, as they would likely have a huge advantage over the opponent and got sloppy enough to let this situation happen. \n\n* Checkmate cannot be achieved. This may happen if neither player owns any extra pieces in addition of the below combinations: \n \nKing, \nKing + Knight, \nKing + 2 Knights, \nKing + Bishop. \n \nContrary to what some may believe, King + Knight + Bishop is enough to checkmate, albeit only a skilled or trained player will accomplish this, since it will take ~30+ moves and making the wrong move at certain points will push you over the 50 move draw limit.\n\nEdit: Added another piece of info \nEdit2: Corrections",
"In high-level chess, almost no games are played all the way to checkmate. Players resign if they get to a position where they know their opponent is going to win without too much difficulty. For example, even players with very basic skills will resign if they lose their queen or a rook, because it's not at all difficult for the other guy to win the game after that. \n\nLikewise, players are allowed to declare a draw by mutual agreement. Often this happens because they reach a position where neither player can win unless the other one makes a big mistake, and neither thinks it's likely that the other one will goof up.\n\nBut sometimes you get what's called a \"grandmaster draw,\" which is that two players agree to a draw shortly after the game starts simply because they don't really want to play.",
"Expanding on /u/sacundim here, when a position is equal to both sides, and neither you nor your opponent has a winning position, *and* the game has been 'played out', where there isn't much opportunity left for either side to make a mistake, then it's considered courteous to offer a draw, or accept an offer.\n\nIn Grandmaster games, about 50% are drawn. Since GM's know the game well, they can select openings which often lead to draws (when they want to avoid risk). If both players select such openings, it can quickly lead to a position where neither player can win. In those cases, you might see a legitimate draw after what looks like a short period of time (15-20 moves).\n\nRemember that GM draws are evaluated based on the experience of the top players playing the games. Even if a position looks complex, and there are many pieces on the board, they can determine, often very quickly, that the game is at a point where neither player can take much of an advantage, and there isn't much of a point in continuing. Normal folks like you and I would have opportunities to make mistakes. This doesn't happen much at the GM level, and to play on assuming that one player will make such a blunder is considered rude - you are calling them 'stupid'.\n\nAnd yes, there is an issue with 'favorable draws' in high-level tournaments. I'm recalling that Bobby Fischer's accusations of Soviets agreeing to quick draws with each other in order to fight hard against others, were at least partially confirmed after many years. This is a big deal: Top level chess requires serious endurance! If you are focusing all your energy for 6-8 hours a day for 10 days in a tournament, but your opponent has had a couple of 'days off' for easy drawn games, you are at an unfair disadvantage."
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22nofe | since saliva starts the digestion of food in our mouths, why is it that neither our tongue or any other parts of our bodies that get saliva on them are dissolved? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22nofe/eli5since_saliva_starts_the_digestion_of_food_in/ | {
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"text": [
"Saliva only contains amylase and lysozymes, which digests complex carbohydrates like that found in bread and carbohydrates found on the surface of bacteria.\n"
]
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1o82bd | why are musical notes the pitches that they are? why not smaller or bigger increments in frequencies? and who decided this? | Just started learning piano and my curious mind can't stop thinking about it:
For example, why not 16 notes in a standard scale,with the difference in pitch cut in half, instead of 8?
Why does a standard major scale go in steps of whole-whole-half-whole whole-whole-half? And why does this sound normal as opposed to 8 notes of all whole steps? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o82bd/eli5_why_are_musical_notes_the_pitches_that_they/ | {
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"Let's start from simple things. If you played 8 whole notes you would arriving at a different note. Tones and half tones are such that after 8 notes you're at the exact double frequency. \nAnd if you play two frequencies an octave apart you can't tell that there is any difference. (this comes mostly from physics, not from your perception/taste. That's why different systems did not develop)\n\nTo understand why the scale is like that... You have to go to mathematics and fourier trasform, which is not really for 5. (this nonetheless implies that notes come from \"nature\" in a way, not from your taste)\nI'll try the simplification but I know I'm terrible at this.\nIt goes, approximately, like this. (to fine tune the approximations took centuries, and each solution has drawbacks, even if today we settled with only one possible solution).\nYou take a note and double its frequency. That's the same note, you hear it. Take three times the frequency. Sounds quite well with the first one, but it's not the first note. That's the second note you fix. Let's say you called the first one \"C\", the second one (three times the frequency) will be \"G\" (which if you take it one octave down, nearest to your starting \"C\", is 3/2 the original frequency). Take four times the frequency, it's again you \"C\", only 2 obtaves higher. Take five times. That's an E. (bring it down 2 obtaves and discover that \"E\" is 5/4 the original frequency). \n\nGo on and on with all the odd numbers and you complete the major natural scale! (hint: it's not a case the the first three note you found on top of C are E and G, those making the major chord!)",
"Let's start with what sound is. Sound waves are compression waves, which means that energy gets transferred from one chunk of matter (air, for our ears) to the neighboring matter in the form of pushing the particles slightly closer together (*compressing* them). If you do this process at certain frequencies, you get sounds of different pitches. That's all speakers do - move a piece of paper back and forth (very quickly) at different speeds to get different pitches. It simply transfers mechanical energy from the speaker cone to the air touching it.\n\nNow on to the musical scale. As /u/lucaxx85 said, it appears to come from nature (it's a discovery, rather than an invention). A pure tone is said to have a \"fundamental frequency\" (its pitch is defined by that frequency). If you double that frequency, you're one octave above the fundamental frequency's pitch. If you triple it, you're a fifth above that. And so, if you go on and keep multiplying the original frequencies by integers, you fill in the scale most commonly used in Western music. \n\nHowever, there are musical scales that do not use the standard solfege scale. On that basis, I argue that the whole-whole-half-etc scale sounds normal simply because it's what we're used to. After 10 years of choir growing up/through university, we sang an Indian raga that used 7 evenly spaced tones to form an octave (the octave was still mathematically the same), and had to spend a couple weeks only singing the scales to get acclimated to singing these \"new\" intervals. But then we were used to them.\n\nI would guess the sound/feeling of resonance/dissonance has to do with how our auditory system works. A quick glance over [wikipedia](_URL_0_) confirms this, but adds that it's culturally conditioned. That is, all people can hear consonance/dissonance, but which intervals are consonant vs dissonant is determined by the musical tradition.\n\nSource: physics bachelor's, many years in choir, and an in-progress master's in systems-level neuroscience\n\n**TL;DR** Octaves/other intervals are mathematically defined, but how normal an interval, chord, or progression sounds is culturally determined",
"Tuning allegedly begins with Pythagoras (the same guy who came up with that theorem about triangles) was walking down the street and heard some blacksmiths. He noted that the blacksmiths' hammers sometimes sounded good when struck at the same time, while sometimes they sounded bad. He noticed that the good-sounding hammer combinations were when the hammers had a simple ratio of mass. This was the foundation of the notion of an interval.\n\nIntervals are ratios of frequencies because we can determine the \"shape\" of the sound wave we are hearing. For instance, check out [this](_URL_3_) graph of an octave (double the frequency) and [this](_URL_1_) graph of a perfect fifth. Any well-tuned fifth will look like this graph.\n\nSo, we get into intervals. If we take a fundamental frequency and double it we get an octave, which we decide ought to be a note. If we take the fundamental pitch and triple it then we get a new tone. We can then take that tone and shift it into the octave range we were working with by dividing its frequency by two--this gives a frequency that is 3/2 (or 1.5) times the fundamental frequency. This interval sounds nice because it has a simple waveform. Similarly, we can take our initial frequency and multiply by 4/3--this also sounds nice because it has [a nice waveform](_URL_2_).\n\nThese intervals are the perfect octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth. They are called perfect since they are such simple ratios. However, we can use these ratios and start building up to a full scale--we can go up a fifth by multiplying the frequency by 3/2 and we can go down a fifth by multiplying the frequency by 2/3; whenever we find ourselves outside of our original octave we simply multiply or divide by 2 to get back inside the range. As we do this we will find that we fill the scale with 12 different notes (plus a 13th for the octave). We find that these 12 notes each have roughly the same interval between them--about a 1.06:1 ratio of frequency between each pair of notes.\n\nThis was how instruments were tuned for a long time. This tuning scheme works quite nicely (provided you've been brought up listening to it--more on that later), but it has an interesting consequence: if you tune your instrument in A then you get one tuning, but when you tune it in, say, C, you get a different tuning. This is because the ratio of frequencies between adjacent notes isn't *quite* the same. In \"just intonation,\" a tuning scheme like the one I described above, the first half step is a ratio of 16:15, or 1.06666:1. If you repeat that interval 12 times then you get that an octave would be 2.17 times the frequency of the fundamental pitch--the first half step is \"too big\"! But it was kept this way because it sounds good. The result of this is that when a piece was written in a specific key it takes on a certain \"mood\" because the size of each interval would change.\n\nThat was all well and good for a long time, but eventually mathematicians got their hands on music and decided that this whole notion of a half step having different values was dumb (even though it sounds nicer). Thus, they took the scale and declared that it shall be divided into 12 parts and that each part will be the exact same interval--a ratio of 2^1/12 :1. This simplified things greatly and made all keys sound the same, but it makes it so that the perfect intervals aren't perfect anymore--the perfect fifth is now a ratio of 1.498307:1. You can see the effect of that on [this](_URL_0_) graph--notice how the graph changes over time. It is impractical to show a full cycle of this graph--it changes so slowly. That slow changing is heard as a wavering of the sound--\"beats.\" If you have grown up listening to western music then that sound has been taught to you as what a perfect 5th ought to sound like, although someone from hundreds of years ago would likely be shocked at how bad we are at tuning our instruments.\n\nThis gets into the final point on instrument tuning: culture. Ultimately, we hear our 12 tone (chromatic) scale as sounding good because we have been brought up in a society where that is all we hear. We hear a major scale as \"happy\" and a minor scale as \"sad\" and a wholetone scale as \"weird\" because that's what culture tells us to hear. If you listen to middle eastern music, for example (I had a class over this in college), you will find that they have an entirely different tuning and scale--they tend to use some notes that are in between our notes. To my western ears this sounded *awful*, but to someone raised in that culture it is the norm. "
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"http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sin%28x%29+%2B+sin%282x%29"
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2464fz | why do certain body parts feel numb while drunk? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2464fz/eli5_why_do_certain_body_parts_feel_numb_while/ | {
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"Alcohol is a depressant. It hinders the brain's ability to function properly and impedes neural messages from reaching the brain."
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2sfq6i | how does closing our eyes signal to the brain that it's time to shut down (sleep)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sfq6i/eli5_how_does_closing_our_eyes_signal_to_the/ | {
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"It's not necessarily so that closing your eyes makes you sleepy. Often it's the other way around: you feel and urge to close your eyes when you are tired and sleepy. Bu in a way it's like two sides to a coin - the two phenomena are interconnected and interdependent on eachother:\n\nWhen you close your eyes very little meaningful information flows from the retinas to the brain. The stream of visual impressions stops. Quite a large part of the brain is at any time occupied with decoding and interpreting visual information. By stopping the flow the activity in the brain is diminished and this gives the brain \"rest\" (couldn't come up with a better word just now).\n\nAlso, as the retinas stop being exposed to light, both by closing the eyes and by the sun going down and darkness falling in the outside world, there is a signal from the retinas of the eyes, through some fibers of the optic nerve, to the pineal gland, a small gland buried deep in the brain. This signal (light has become darkness) gives rise to an increased production and release of the hormone melatonin which makes us sleepy. This is not an instant process, but happens over the course of maybe 15-30 minutes. Interestingly some people who are blind due to injuries or malfunctions in the central nervous system may still have functioning retinas that can give signals to the pineal gland through the optic nerve so that these people, even though they can't tell through sight if it's light or dark can have a circadian rythm (at least partly) that is controlled by the light conditions in the outside world."
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2xkk5h | the railgun | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xkk5h/eli5_the_railgun/ | {
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"There are a couple of different railgun designs, but essentially, a magnetic projectile (like a steel ball) is attracted by a big electromagnet. As the projectile arrives at the magnet, it switches off, and another one, further down the rail, switches on, and the projectile goes zooming off towards it. When it gets there, it switches off, and the next one switches on. \nThis design has some tricky problems. \n\nIn a different design, the projectile itself sits on a pair of electrified rails, and a big current flows through the projectile, turning it into an electromagnet. The rails run through the core of another electromagnet, and the projectile accelerates like crazy under the influence of the external magnetic field. \n\nHope this helps.\n\n",
"The bullet you're trying to fire is a piece of metal, that sits on 2 rails that are charged(like the ends of a battery). When the bullet sits on top, it connects them like a wire, so electrical current flows through. When current flows through a wire, theres a rule about how electromagnetism works where a magnetic field is generated around it, which is how electromagnets function. \n\nSo when the gun is operating, there is a magnetic field pointing up because of the current going through the rails at the same time as an electric current is going through the bullet horizontally(From one rail to the other). When this happens, it takes advantage of something called the \"Lorentz force\" which works like this:\n\nF = qv x B\n\nMeaning that the force thats pushing the bullet is equal to the current(qv) times the magnetic field(B) going in the direction perpindicular to both of those two. That's just how the cross product(x) works. Because 1 is going left and the other is going up, the direction perpindicular to both of those is forward, so thats the direction that the bullet accelerates. As long as the bullet is touching the rails to act as a wire, this force occurs, which pushes it down the rails till it shoots off.",
"A railgun is two pieces of conductive metal and a conductive sleeve that touches both but is free to slide along the length of the barrel.\n\nA very powerful electric current is run through the rails, passing through the sleeve. Electric currents create magnetic fields and a powerful current creates a powerful field. This field pushes against the rails and sleeve which propels the sleeve down the barrel. More power means higher speed when it reaches the end.\n\nIf you want specifics there's really no way to to frame it in a ELI5-friendly manner. The physics behind how the electromagnetic fields interact is not simple.",
"Electricity flowing through a conductor (a wire) creates a magentic field. If you have two parallel conductors and a conductor joining them together at right angles, electricty will flow through and create a magnetic field, which will exert a force on that connector between the two sides.\n\nIf the amount of electricity flowing through the circuit is quite large, you will get a large force.\n\nThis force will rapidly accelerate and propel the conductor down the length of the rails, so if you put your \"bullet\" in front of it, the bullet will get shot out of the rails at very high speed.\n\nYou have basically replaced the explosive charge and expanding gas of a normal gun with electricity and magnetism. This nice part is that you can repeatedly supply electricty and launch bullets provided you have a way to generate it.\n\nHere's a nice article in Wired about it that takes you through the steps at a nice pace: _URL_0_"
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20xpft | how can cosmetic and otc drug companies get away with putting out duplicate products with strikingly similar boxes without getting sued? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20xpft/eli5_how_can_cosmetic_and_otc_drug_companies_get/ | {
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"The rules the FDA makes for drugs are highly complex, but the jist of it is that drug makers only have a certain period of time in which they can hold patents and protect their intellectual property before they effectively become public. Usually 10 years."
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3e2evb | how is thermal sensation measured/estimated? | You know, when you're watching the weather report, and the hot chick goes like "dude, it's 10 Cº, with a thermal sensation of 5 ºC"
How is that measured? People don't perceive temperature all the same, do they? So how is this possible? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3e2evb/eli5_how_is_thermal_sensation_measuredestimated/ | {
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"The feels like takes humidity and windspeed into effect, both testable factors. \n\nGenerally objects heat or cool in an inverse exponential fashion shown [here](_URL_0_). Having humidity or wind will increase or decrease the rate of cooling, but the final temperature has to stay the same, you can't cool something down to 10 degrees using 20 degree air, no matter how hard you try, but you can alter the rate at which it cools.\n\nThe feels-like temperature is the no-humidity no-wind temperature at which a human (typically at 37^o C) would gain or lose heat at the same rate as the actual temperature including wind and humidity effects.\n\nWhy does this work? Humans don't sense an absolute temperature, but rely on the difference in temperature to create the sensation of heat. The reason cold feels cold and hot feels hot is that the body is trying to either lose heat or retain it to stay at 37 degrees. In that picture above you can see that the rate of cooling looks like 1 - the temp difference. So the closer you get to equalizing the temperatures, the slower the change in temperatures. \n\nSo if you find which no wind/humidity temperature gives the same cooling rate as the actual temperature with wind/humidity, you found the thermal sensation, and it works on a scientific basis, not on a \"well it sorta kinda feels like it\" basis. "
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615u2k | is near term extinction really imminent? if so, what can we do as individuals to withstand it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/615u2k/eli5_is_near_term_extinction_really_imminent_if/ | {
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"text": [
"Humanity is a highly intelligent, spread-out and resilient species. Untold millions may die and civilizations crumble, but outright extinction is highly unlikely unless we're talking about truly extraordinary calamities, of which \"just\" climate change is not one."
]
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||
2qfq8p | why do swiss banks seem immune to all foreign legal obligations except for taxes? | Watching Wolf of Wall Street and all the other things I've read/heard, why are the Swiss banks immune to extradition? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qfq8p/eli5_why_do_swiss_banks_seem_immune_to_all/ | {
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"text": [
"Please do a search before you post. I did it for you this time because I'm nice:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThey have softened their stance in recent years, however."
]
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[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ecgsx/eli5_what_makes_swiss_bank_accounts_special/"
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3uw7mv | this statement from the federal reserve | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uw7mv/eli5this_statement_from_the_federal_reserve/ | {
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"We want to keep as many people employed as we can, without jacking with our prices. Right now it looks like we can do that. So far it looks like everything will be fine, but we're watching the global economic and financial indicators to make sure we stay ahead of any problems. Inflation is probably going to stay low for a while, but it won't be too long before it hits 2% with as the labor market gets better and the costs of energy and imports rise. We'll keep an eye on it.",
"Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. *Following its reason for existence, we want to maintain low unemployment and stable prices(money value).*\n\nThe Committee expects that, with appropriate policy accommodation, economic activity will expand at a moderate pace, with labor market indicators continuing to move toward levels the Committee judges consistent with its dual mandate. *We expect to use policy to expand business at a moderate pace, with (un)employment moving to levels that keep people employed and prices stable.*\n\nThe Committee continues to see the risks to the outlook for economic activity and the labor market as nearly balanced but is monitoring global economic and financial developments. *Things seem fine, but we're watching the big picture.*\n\nInflation is anticipated to remain near its recent low level in the near term but the Committee expects inflation to rise gradually toward 2 percent over the medium term as the labor market improves further and the transitory effects of declines in energy and import prices dissipate. The Committee continues to monitor inflation developments closely. *Inflation is currently low, but is expected to slowly rise to 2% a year as employment rises while energy and import sectors improve.*\n\nI tried translating it into ELI5.",
"This group of people is looking to follow the instructions they were given. Those instructions are to keep as many people employed as possible without causing the price of bread to increase or decease over a short period of time.\n\nThis group of people anticipates, as long as the country follows the group’s policy, the country’s economic activity will grow at a steady rate (not too fast and not too slow). In addition, the group sees indications that very close to the right amount of people have a job versus amount of people looking for a job.\n\nAgain, this group of people believes that close to the right amount of people are employed versus looking for employment. Also, this group of people sees some potential for bad things to happen, so we are watching for indicators of any bad things.\n\nThe price of bread is expected to remain the same for the next 6 month, however, this group of people thinks that $1.00’s worth of bread will increase in price by $0.02 per year after 6 months.\n\nThis group of people is continuing to pay attention to the price of the ingredients and wages paid to people who make bread to help anticipate when the bread will cost more.\n"
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2g07f1 | why are people interested in tap-to-pay with cellphones? | I don't get it. What is so difficult with paying with cash or a card that people think something like Apple Pay is a big deal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g07f1/eli5_why_are_people_interested_in_taptopay_with/ | {
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"text": [
"1 thing is more convenient to carry than 2 things. ",
"Laziness breeds innovation. Before all of these iDevices and such people had a wallet they carried around to pay for things. Then they had to carry a wallet AND whatever smart-device they used. And now, because everyone doesn't still wears JNCO's; voila, don't need to carry your wallet anymore."
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6yhuxc | who are these "experts" we always hear about in the news or in sources of information? ex:"experts say..." | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6yhuxc/eli5_who_are_these_experts_we_always_hear_about/ | {
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"text": [
"It depends on what the particular article is about. For example, if you're doing a story involving some computing concept, like a virus, you may ask some folks how viruses work, or what they're used for. Your paper could then say \"Experts say viruses are pieces of code that replicate maliciously and cause harm\".\n\nNo one's doubting that's what viruses do, so it's not super-important to cite precisely what computer dude you talked to, you know? You're just stating that someone did tell you this, and you didn't just pull it out of thin air.",
"Depends on the topic being talked about. In general they are scientists, academic researchers, economists, etc. They are the people who study whatever topic you are talking about and have studied it enough to be an expert in that field. ",
"It depends on the topic as well as the source. For a biased media source pushing an agenda an \"expert\" might be anyone who says what they want, but for a more objective source \"experts\" might be people like researchers who have studies a particular topic. ",
"Usually it is the job of an editor to vet sources and make sure that someone that the writer claims is an expert is actually an expert. So, pretty much an expert is someone who an editor determines is qualified enough to keep that distinction in there. Editor tends to be a highly paid, highly experienced position for a journalism company because of the responsibility that they take on with things like this."
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1yr1te | why do i get emails on my phone before they come through to outlook on my computer? | I get the email notification on my phone, on LTE or 3G, several seconds before it pops up in Outlook, which is connected to the internet either by Wifi or a LAN connection.
Curious if this happens to others / what is the reason for it.
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yr1te/eli5_why_do_i_get_emails_on_my_phone_before_they/ | {
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"text": [
"Without you giving more specifics about your mail server, it is probably because your phone is set to push, or to be immediately notified when mail arrives, while your desktop is set to pull, or to check on a timer or at certain time intervals for new messages."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
63o6np | what toxins do those cleanse diets and pills remove. | I've heard lots of different things online and from other people about how you should do cleanse diets to get rid of toxins in your body. Also it seems like tons of medicines and products claim to flush toxins from your body. Isn't that what your kidneys and liver do? If they're fake, how are they allowed to sell products and diets? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/63o6np/eli5_what_toxins_do_those_cleanse_diets_and_pills/ | {
"a_id": [
"dfvnpfl",
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"dfvnyt6"
],
"score": [
10,
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"text": [
"None. We have organs in our bodies, as you mentioned, to do the job for us. The cleanse diets/pills are just woo.",
"They are classed as supplements and have that little statement at the bottom. *These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.",
" > If they're fake, how are they allowed to sell products and diets?\n\nThey are fake, and they manage to avoid regulation by carefully not making any claims to treat medical conditions. \"Toxins\" isn't a real medical condition so they don't need to worry about actually proving that they treat it. It is like if you tried to sell a spray to clear all the fairies out of people's gardens."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
308r3h | why does food seem to taste different with different consistencies? | Like for example chicken drumsticks - i would never eat the skin when its partially fried, but if it's crispy it taste amazing. Also, even if the food actually tastes good, the consitency can ruin the pleasure if it's not right. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/308r3h/eli5_why_does_food_seem_to_taste_different_with/ | {
"a_id": [
"cpq552k"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"When you prepare and cook food, you are changing, removing, and creating new chemicals in the food. A piece of bread will have certain chemicals in it, but when it is toasted (via the Maillard reaction) you are changing the chemicals within the bread. Taste is based on what chemicals interact with your tastebuds, and then you perceive them however you like.\n\nFeel free to ask any follow-up questions! "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2kn4tv | why don't we ever learn about the 14 presidents before george washington? | I was only very recently told that 14 men served 1 year terms as president before George Washington became president with the ratification of the constitution. Why didn't I learn about this in school? Did I just miss that day, or do people deliberately not talk about this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kn4tv/eli5why_dont_we_ever_learn_about_the_14/ | {
"a_id": [
"clmvzm7",
"clmw6kh"
],
"score": [
18,
5
],
"text": [
"None of them matter. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government only barely existed. Washington was the first President after the adoption of the Constitution, which means he was the first with any actual authority. \n\nIndeed, even calling the other guys \"President\" is kind of misleading. They were presidents of the Continental Congress, not of the United States. It was a mostly ceremonial position without any real power. It certainly wasn't a position of leadership over the country. \n\nA few of these guys actually are important to American history, but due to reasons other than their position as \"president of the Continental Congress\". ",
"They are from a totally different type of government and had totally different powers/responsibilities than the Presidents of the United States.\n\nthey were Presidents of the Continental Congress, not the United States. They were more in charge of running the meetings of the continental congresses while Washington and everyone after him was in charge of running the country."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
2ikq0x | why can't tissue like meniscus that fails or tears be replaced with an artificial substance that works just as well? | It seems like I read weekly about tissue in the body that has been shown to be receptive to synthetic replacement (or regrowth) but not with regard to knee ligaments/cartilage? Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ikq0x/eli5why_cant_tissue_like_meniscus_that_fails_or/ | {
"a_id": [
"cl2z3k3"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"There are lots of materials we can use that the body will accept, and in some cases the material will even be able to encourage the body to heal faster or work in a way to help the intergration.\n\n > an artificial substance that works just as well?\n\nThe working just as well part is the problem. Your body is very well suited to doing what it does at every level, producing a replacement that works in the same way is very hard. This is especially the case in ligaments and cartiliage where gradients of different tissues allow for highly controlled passing of forces without injury.\n\nIf it does not work as well then it might fail either over time or really quickly, it might damage the area if it is too weak or too strong, if it starts to wear and particles are given off that cause inflamation and other problems.\n\nFully synthetic repalcements made out of polymers like goretex as ligament replacements have a very high failure rate.\n\nEngineered ones produced either from decelluarised scaffolds (taking a ligament from elsewhere, kicking the old cells out, and putting the patients ones in) or fully tissue engineered ones (making a template in the lab and adding the patients own cells to it) are in the works and are advancing through animal testing and I think some human testing."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
barmnn | how are we able to send information through the air? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/barmnn/eli5_how_are_we_able_to_send_information_through/ | {
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"text": [
"There are devices that encode and decode on either side of a transmitted signal. The encoder turns the signal in to a wave form, the decoder reassembles that wave form so the device can play it.",
"It's all about electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves include visible light, microwaves, x-rays, radio waves, infrared waves, Etc. The space all around you, including all of the air around you, is filled through and through with all types of electromagnetic waves. We have learned how to transmit and receive specific waves to relay information. These waves propagate at the speed of light, so transmission along the surface of the Earth is nearly instantaneous.",
"You're literally sharing information through the air without wires every time you speak. Doing the same with radio waves instead of pressure waves isn't really all that different. Just shouting AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA is a bit like sending bare carrier wave, by itself it doesn't contain much useful information. What you want to do is modulate your signal to produce patterns that the receiver understands, aka. words.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nUsing wires is also kinda the same, the signal is just electrical now.",
"You know the experiment where you wind a wire around a bolt, connect the wire to a battery and it becomes a magnet? Aside from making non-magnetic metals behave magnetically, connecting the battery also creates an electrical ripple through the surrounding space, which is especially noticeable in metals like another piece of wire. If you were to connect a device to measure the ripple through the wire (a voltmeter), you’ll see a small and short increase in voltage, even though the wire isn’t physically connected to anything. Connect and disconnect the battery in a certain sequence (and with certain timing), and you’re communicating a message that can represent a message, music or images. Connect a bigger battery, and the space in which the ripple can be detected gets bigger"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
32cgiv | why do hangnails hurt so much? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32cgiv/eli5_why_do_hangnails_hurt_so_much/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Here's a picture of a homunculus (a picture of the human body with each body part shrunk or expanded based on how much of the brain serves each area). You can see that the face/lips and hands are very large. This means there are lots of nerves that serve these areas. This makes sense, as you need to have very good control and sensing of these areas in order to speak/eat and manipulate objects with your hands. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nInjuries to your hands or face will hurt more simply because you have more ability to sense those areas in general.",
"I clicked this because I have a really annoying hangnail right now but it's not making it feel any better :(\n",
"TIL that those annoying things on your fingernail have a name.",
"real question, why do I keep getting them and how do I make it stop?",
"How bout the hangnail bastards on your toe? Am I the only one? \n\n---\n[AMA] I grow hangnails on my toes and yang them out without thinking.",
"Be careful if you use your teeth to \"fix\" the hangnail... \n_URL_0_",
"This doesn't exactly answer your question but fun fact: hangnail was originally \"ang-nail,\" which \"ang\" meaning \"pain.\" So it's not a nail that is hanging, it is a nail that is painful. :) "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://workinghandsproject.com/images/demo/Homunculus.jpg"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsZ5MbQgzv4"
],
[]
] |
||
2iq6vk | why opening the task manager almost always seems to fix a non-responsive application | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iq6vk/eli5_why_opening_the_task_manager_almost_always/ | {
"a_id": [
"cl4fq3v"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Because starting the task manager is like an astronaut calling in and saying \"Houston, we have a problem\". You've got your computers attention, it's sort of a \"top level\" instruction, everything else the pc is doing is frozen, and you get the task manager. \n\nOften times that freezing is actually enough to unfreeze things, but if it isn't, it gives you enough control to kill off the offending task."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
1dr7dn | where did the star shape originate? | Stars dont really look like the 5 pointed stars we use today. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dr7dn/where_did_the_star_shape_originate/ | {
"a_id": [
"c9t1zsw"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"It originates far back when we did not have telescopes or anything to see the stars with. When you look at the star, it really looks like the 5 pointy thing we know it as, because of the light beams.\n\nMore info: _URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://www.ehow.com/about_5125294_pointed-star-symbolize.html"
]
] |
|
2mangk | how come junk food tastes so good? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mangk/eli5_how_come_junk_food_tastes_so_good/ | {
"a_id": [
"cm2fcbh"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"High fat, sugar, and sodium content activates dopamine receptors in the brain that promote stimulation which creates the sensation of happiness and satisfaction. This effect is almost immediate, but certainly not lasting. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
1thgnk | i've read when you hit the water after jumping off of a bridge it's the same as concrete, why isn't rain the same as having gravel dropped on you from miles in the air? | I'm sure most of you have read that when you jump off a high bridge you die instantly on impact because the water is basically as hard as concrete when you're going that fast, why isn't rain basically the same as little rocks when it falls? Seems like it's the same deal just in reverse. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1thgnk/eli5_ive_read_when_you_hit_the_water_after/ | {
"a_id": [
"ce7zplt"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"according to sources, terminal velocity of raindrops is about 10m/s, for human body it's 50m/s or so."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2c37os | - what is the difference between the usa supporting "contras" and "mujahideen" and moscow supporting ukrainian separatists? | Serious question. Serious replies welcomed. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c37os/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_the_usa/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are a few gray areas here, but the way I see the differences (and I feel they're minor) are:\n\n* Are the Ukrainian Separatists actually Ukrainian Separatists? (I am under the impression that the Russian military is directly involved, rather than just sending money/arms).\n\n* The US wasn't going to annex Nicaragua had the Contras been successful. I think there's a fine, but real, line behind an assisted regime change and a puppet government. pre-Ayatollah Iran would be assisted regime change.\n\nEdit: removed Iraq example, as it doesn't seem to fit.",
"Your question is the answer. (and...that is a serious answer, for the record)",
"Nothing. There is no difference. The United States was and is an imperialist power, meddling in the affairs of other countries, and Russia was and is an imperialist power, meddling in the affairs of other countries. ",
"As you suspect... absolutely nothing. \"The enemy\" is a matter of perspective.",
"The only difference is who it is that is doing it.",
"You already knew the answers but asked anyway , attention whore."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
5b7rd0 | how can someone survive with just 1/4 of a liver in the case of a transplant? | I heard that you can get a liver transplant with as little as 1/4 of a liver and it will eventually grow to full size. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5b7rd0/eli5_how_can_someone_survive_with_just_14_of_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"d9mfddo"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Simple answer is that the liver regenerates slowly over time. As long as you don't stress it out you could live a fairly healthy life, while you wait for it to grow back. If you ever did you would only be able to drink water and would have to monitor your diet very carefully. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
8z961z | how does micellar water work? | I know it has something called "micelles", hence the name, but that's about it. Its a product I use every day and would like to know how it works | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8z961z/eli5_how_does_micellar_water_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"e2h0bze",
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"text": [
"What does it do and how do you use it? I always see it in pharmacies and supermarkets",
"So imagine a molecule. One end likes water. One end likes oil. Oil and water don't like touching each other so try to touch as little as possible. Micelles are these molecules bunched together. They form spheres so all the oil loving parts are on the inside. Whenever they find something oily like on the skin it goes into the middle of the sphere. This happens with a bunch of oil. Then these spheres can be washed off with water cause the outside of the spheres still like water and move with it easily. ",
"When soap or other detergent dissolves in water, it tends to form \"micelles\", due to the way in which detergent molecules have a fat soluble part and a water soluble part.\n\nIn the case of the cosmetic sold as \"micellar water\", it's just a detergent called Tween 20 dissolved in water, with some perfume and other moisturisers. Tween 20 is a pH neutral detergent, so doesn't irritate the skin or sting if it gets in the eyes. This makes it a good detergent for makeup removal.\n\nBut, in short, micellar water works because it is soapy water."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
yzdrj | iran vs israel | I'm looking for a non-biased simple explanation of why they seem to hate each other. Thank you :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yzdrj/eli5_iran_vs_israel/ | {
"a_id": [
"c607n76",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Back in the early part of the 20th century there was the Zionist movement. This was the idea that the Jews needed a country to call their own. One of the most popular ideas was to create this in the biblical region of Judea, what was then called Palestine and what we now call Israel.\n\nJews starting moving to the area and setting up settlements. After World War II this land was controlled by the British. One of the first things the newly-formed United Nations did was to declare that part of the area of Palestine should be devoted to a new Jewish state. The Arabs that were already living there were not too happy to hear that they were going to be living under Jewish rule.\n\nThe same day that the British gave up rule of the region to the new state, all of Israel's neighbors simultaneously declared war and invaded. Israel was able to hold them off and eventually an uneasy truce was formed.\n\nEver since then the Arab nations in the Middle East have been unhappy with Israel. They believe that the land was taken away from its rightful owners, the Palestinian Arabs. Israel, for the most part, simply wants to exist.\n\nMany Muslim leaders, including the leaders of Iran, use hatred of Israel to redirect their people's focus away from the economic and social problems at home.",
"Its not as black and white as other redditors suggest. \n\nIt has a lot more to do with complex geopolitical issues rather than religious dogma and rhetoric both sides use to push their agendas. \n\nIran (known as Persia until 1935) has been a continuous civilisation on that strip of land since ancient days. Their empire pre-dated that of Greece - the mother of western civilisation. During the three millenia they have been in the neighbourhood they have seen empires rise and fall, officially losing their sovereignty and \"bowing down\" on three occasions: Alexander the Great, Mohammad the Prophet and Ghengis Khan. \n\nThe modern era has blessed them with Russia and England. Throughout the last three hundred years, Russia and England have been competing for the middle east in what most commentators term the great game - with Iran being the biggest loser. \n\nThe present era (wwII onwards) has seen the might of the US (with England now taking more of a consulting role) colonise the middle east for economic gain. The middle east monarchies (read dictatorships) were put in place following the fall of the ottoman empire (following wwI) by the british. In fact britian and france drew the borders of the arab countries on a map (hence the straight lines). These colonies are controlled by the might of the US military. \n\nIran as a rising player in geopolitics is attempting to regain its position as a regional power. It's number one objective is to chase out of its backyard (the middle east) all foreign powers (Russia to the north and north east, England and the US to the West, East and South). \n\nIran views Isreal as a US/UK military base in the middle east with which they can militarily control the poplutation of the middle east and ensure oil profits are pocketed. Isrealis leaders are well aware of the position they have been placed in, and are obviously of the view that its worth the opportunity to play the geopolitical game and govern a country for jewish people. \n\nThats just the tip of the ice-berg. There are a lot of other factors in play. Ironically Isreali and Persian interests in the middle east are intertwined - after all the rhetoric there is a bizarre shady alliance between the two countrie (infact in the 80s, Isreali provided direct support to the Islamic Regime in its bloody war with Saddam's Iraq). The reason for this is that both sides fear the rise of Arab nationals that can engulf and oppress them as they have done in brutal centuries past. \n\nI'd like to make a point that after all that is said about the Israeli Zionist regime by Iran's leaders (again rhetoric for internal and geopolitic propaganda reasons), the overwhelming majority of Persians do not view Jews with hatred, as some people seem to believe. If anything Jews are viewed as an ancient people with culture and manners similar to those of Persians. Ancient Persia was home to many jews (I read somewhere that at one point 20% of the population was Jewish - not sure of authenticity), and even modern Iran is home to a jewish community with a reserved seat in the parliament. However, that is not to say that Persians won't hold negative views with regard to Israel and its geopolitical role. \n\n\nFinally, Persians are not only not Arab but they actually hold a lot of hostility with Arabs which date back only a mere 1000 years - but thats for another thread...\n\nWhat I've written is obviously a Persian view (sorry for the bias). I'm sure Israelis, Arabs, Russian, the English and the Americans will all see things differently. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
6kkzbh | why do human bodies build up tolerance to alcohol/drugs but not daily medications like antidepressants/cardiac/etc meds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6kkzbh/eli5_why_do_human_bodies_build_up_tolerance_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"djmv3gi"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"I can't speak for the other meds, but you absolutely can build up a tolerance to antidepressants and painkillers and the like"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
9fxd69 | what is the psychology behind humans wanting rare/exclusive things so badly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fxd69/eli5_what_is_the_psychology_behind_humans_wanting/ | {
"a_id": [
"e5zzfmp",
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"text": [
"Well, it seems barter system economies predate monetary ones all the way back to the point where chimpanzees have them. Where males have been known to bribe females for sex with fruits and berries that are difficult to get.\n\nIn the case of humans, those who were able to get these things were then later able to trade them for things they needed. Those who did not, were not. Being able to get the things you need because you've accumulated stuff you don't; but that someone else wants/needs, is a solid social tactic.\n\nIt carries on today, say you want to marry a girl. Kind of have to put a ring on it. Basically a boast - \"I'm a good enough provider to get this much bling.\" Of course works the other way too. Oscasio-Cortez' out might cost a ridiculous $3500, but i think mot guys will agree that she does look great in it.",
"Because we love to be special and we love things that are special. I have a row of silver notes and one gold note dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They printed only 2000 of these and most likely not everyone has the full set. So I know no matter what, I am part of a very limited group that has all these special notes. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nOf course I could've also bought a TV for the money, but then I'd just be one of millions with that TV. Also some exclusive things simply look good. ",
"If you own 100 percent of some product, then you get to make the prices and you get to decide who gets it. When you own something rare, you gain with it an innate sense of power that others don't have, because you possess something that people want but don't have. When you have that power, you feel good about yourself, and in some senses you feel like you're better than other people, or better off. \n\nIn this sense it also provides a level of security knowing that in a bind you might be able to offer said rare object to potential threats to keep them from harming you. You might also be able to use the rarity of the object as a means of impressing people of the opposite sex into wanting to have sex with you. If you're well off, or perceived as being well off, then people are attracted to that because it implies the security of being able to have children safely and raise them safely.",
"* owning something special and unique makes us feel special and unique\n* being the sort of person who can \"waste\" money on such things signals your success...both to others and yourself\n* rare things are often associated with famous people or events, and owning one makes us feel a part of that fame\n* collecting things can bring out the OCD in people, especially when trying to obtain the rarest part of a collection",
"Rarity=value. The question then becomes: ‘why do people want valuable things?’",
"An excellent book that talks about this with a variety of examples is “Stoned - Jewelry, Obsession and How Desire Shapes the World” by Aja Raden. It’s a very enjoyable read!",
"The fancy title for it is memesis. It simply means, things only have value when someone else wants it. Rene Girard was the economist who really built on the idea.\n\nI think it occurs because things have no meaning/purpose by themselves.\n\nHuman beings are the part of the universe that ascribes meaning/purpose to things. \n\nBut because we can't figure out the meaning of every single thing individually, we depend on the indication of others for the value of many things. \n\n(Pair memesis up with consumerism (the idea that goodness comes from owning, having, and using material things) and individualism (things belong to only one person) we get a rather destructive capitalism ( where material things are hoarded as a sign of a good life, vs a better type of capitalism where relationships, wisdom, inner strength and peace, and value are treasured instead).",
"There seems to be a value structure that incorporates beliefs about the object's provenance, not just information that you can get from the object itself. You'd probably be interested in the work of Paul Bloom and Ellen Winner, among others, who are interested in people's relationship to art and other sources of pleasure.\n\n[In his very engaging TED talk](_URL_0_), Bloom argues that humans are essentialists: \n > We don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs about what they really *are* -- where they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.\n\n[In a thoughtful New Yorker piece](_URL_1_), Bloom summarizes:\n > Our perception of abstract art is powerfully influenced by our understanding of the performance underlying the work’s creation, and particularly our beliefs about what’s going on in the head of the artist. In my own work with the psychologist Susan Gelman, supported by more recent experiments from Winner’s laboratory, it turns out that even children are sensitive to the intentions of an artist: four-year-olds will see splotches of colored paint as a mess if they believe they were the result of a spill, but if they think the image was the product of intense concentration, they are far more likely to call it “a painting.”\n\n",
"I have to write a 20-30 page term paper on cognitive evolution, this would be a great topic",
"For an individual living among billions, possessing something that few others have, or that no one else has, adds a powerful sense of being exceptional. Any number of fantasy series come to mind."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_bloom_the_origins_of_pleasure?language=en#t-542340",
"https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-we-know-about-art-and-the-mind"
],
[],
[]
] |
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