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Why did it take so long to invent the printing press? | Tske into consideration the literacy rate. Most people could not read and had no reason to. Necessity is the mother of invention, that is a true idiom. There wasn't a need for it. As was stated, the Chinese invented movable type a few centuries before Europe. But we did have related items. The Romans had stamps wood blocks, which it technically the basics of the press. They just didn't need it in mass numbers. |
I've been reading up on nukes. Did the Nevada nuclear tests have nuclear winter? Why or why not? | Nuclear Winter is not a local effect resulting from an atomic blast, but rather a hypothetical effect from lots of nukes going off. The theory is that the nukes would kick a lot of soot and dust up in to the air, blocking out the sun. The blocking out of the sun would result in lower temperatures since the sun can't heat up as much of the Earth anymore. Some of the effects are based on similar effects felt when a large volcano goes off. Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines went off in the early 90's and we only saw a slight drop in temperature .No. The concept of nuclear winter is that if a bunch of nukes all went off in a short period of time the amount of dust put into the air would reduce the global temperature because they would block out sunlight. The reality is if nuclear winter were to happen it would be the least of our worries as full scale nuclear war would have already broken out_URL_0_ Trinity and Beyond movie about early atomic bomb development. Should be interesting to you. While these tests did not create "nuclear winter", the surface tests did create fallout. It was *mostly* localized and largely the reason that testing moved underground in its later stages before it was banned. |
Is it ever possible in the future to have matching finger/thumbprints? | The idea that everyone has a unique fingerprint isnt really scientifically proven. There is a real possibility that you and someone else currently living have identical fingerprints. |
How a military can overthrow a government? | The people with the guns stop doing what the president says, and they use their guns to do what they want. That's basically how it goes.Basically they shoot it. All civilian governments have exactly as much power over their military/police forces as those forces choose to allow them, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.If they stop following orders, those people aren't in control anymore. |
How do we go from binary codes to basic programming languages? | The lowest level instructions in a computer are the instructions of the CPU architecture. This varies between CPUs but there's two main ones currently: x86 used by Intel and AMD processors, and the one used by ARM processors. These instructions usually look something like "MOV 1, 2" which might mean to take the number stored in memory location 1 and copy it to memory location 2. Or you might have "ADD 1, 2, 3" which adds the two numbers at 1, 2 and puts the result in 3. When you hear about binary being the lowest level in a computer, it's just a binary encoding of these CPU instructions. So MOV might be 001 and ADD is 010, then the memory locations are represented as binary numbers after the type of instruction. When you hear about a 32-bit or 64-bit processor, that's how many bits each CPU instruction is. |
why does spicy food stay spicy when it comes out the other end? | Spiciness isn't a flavor, it's a reaction to the chemical capsaicin, which irritates any tissue it contacts, not just your tongue. This is also why the area around your lips gets sore while eating wings.Your digestive system is not %100 efficient. Sometimes raw food makes it all the way though. Spicy is just more noticeable due to the flaming ass pain. |
Why do posts on reddit not start on 0 (what's the purpose of allowing one to vote for oneself)? | To reward you for making a comment even if no one else doesSo you have the satisfaction of having a +1 post and another person has the satisfaction of down voting that satisfaction from you.When your post gets upvoted, its ranking goes up using what's called a [logarithm]. Basically, the more upvotes a post has, the less each new upvote pushes it up a page in proportion to how many points it already has. Going from 1 point to 2 is as helpful as going from 10 points to 20, or 500 to 1000. The thing is, this model breaks down when you get zero points so when Reddit calculates how high up the post should appear, it treats a post with 0 points the same as one with 1 point. If you really started at zero points, then the first upvote your post gets would have no effect, since it has to treat 0 points as 1 point anyway! Reddit's current solution is to have you automatically start at 1 point, so as soon as someone sees your post and likes it, they can make it go higher in the rankings by upvoting it. If there was no automatic self-upvote, then people who don't choose to upvote themselves would be worse off. Another way to fix that would be to just make it so you can't upvote your own posts at all, but then you would need two upvotes before you start going up in the rankings, making it a little harder to sort out the good posts from the bad ones. Edit: I think I read that you don't get karma from your self upvotes anyway, so you can't keep making useless posts to get more karma. |
if you light a lighter in front of a TV, why does the reflection show 4 tiny rainbows around the flame? | This is to do with, not the display itself, but the layers of diffusers that make up the backlight behind the display An LCD TV consists of a backlight and an LCD panel. The backlight's job is to produce an even spread of light across the display. You first have an array of LEDs, but those LEDs are point sources, and you don't want lots of bright dots. So the light has to be spread out. They do this with sheets of plastic etched with fine lines. These lines bend the light and spread it out - but only in one direction. If you only had one of these sheets, you'd have an array of lines, one for each LED. So instead they use many sheets, each sheet with lines at an angle to the one beneath. With enough of them, the light is spread evenly. It is these fine lines etched into plastic that produces those rainbows. Each line reflects the light of your lighter when the angle is right. You get a spot of light from each line, which makes a line of light stretching away from the reflection of the lighter. But the lines are close enough that you get interference - as the angle increases, the distance the light has to travel between scratches increases, and you find places where, for one color of light, the distance the light travels is exactly one-half wavelength, so the peaks of the light waves line up with the troughs, and cancel out. When you cancel out one color of light, then you only see the other colors. This is the same effect that gives CDs and DVDs their rainbow appearance. And this explanation is way too long. |
How does copyright work with references? | US copyright has a Fair Use clause, which a minor reference like the ones you are mentioning fall under. You don't need to pay royalties for something like mentioning "I saw something like this on Star Trek once!" or "This is like Episode 79 of the Original Series, Turnabout Intruder! They got bodyswapped!" As to when you cross the line of fair use, that's subjective and really you have to use your best judgment. _URL_0_ has more info.It depends on how it's done, but most cases of what you describe would fall under fair use. Fair use is a legal right that allows you to use certain parts of a copyrighted work so long as your use meets certain criteria. One of the biggest distinctions is whether or not you're competing with the copyright owner's market share by using the copyrighted work. A reference to a TV show or video game that shows up in a written book isn't going to provide consumers with a substitute for the actual TV show or video game, so that would generally fall under fair use. However, if you reproduced substantial portions of the actual script for the movie in the book, that would probably not be covered by fair use because the copyright owner could argue that reading this script may serve as a substitute for seeing the movie, and therefore threatens to reduce the owner's ability to profit from their copyrighted work. |
Why is the word 'cunt' such a taboo word in the U.S.? | People have made it so. Words can be given such power based on how they're used in the culture. I remember when Austin Powers 2 came out , and that was seen as quite vulgar for British people. In the US, Shagged is a cute word . Just remember that it is how it is taken, not how it is intended. You could be using cunt like the Aussies do in friendly conversation , but someone who isn't used to hearing that can still take offense to it. |
why is it so easy for people to start working out regularly but it’s hard to stop eating certain foods or cutting back? | Human being are designed to eat as much food as they possibly can, because in nature food is a whole lot rarer. We crave salt, fat, and sugar. This is a problem today because we have industrial farming and society. When he had to hunt down all out food ourselves it was a lot harder to eat enough to actually.make us fat. But now that all we have to do is take a trip to the grocery store and pick up a 4 lb bag of M & Ms, it's easy to be fat. We", 'Who do you know that can start working out regularly easily?? Cause I gotta jump on that wave . |
Why is the USA drinking age set at 21 when in most other respects you're an adult at 18. | In the 60s and 70s, the US had a **lot** of fatalities as a result of teenage drunk driving. Waaay more than any other country did. Really, there were two options available to them: raise the drinking age, or raise the driving age. I think they made the right choice.As someone already said it was because of the drunk driving problem. However it's worth noting that that drop it drunk driving was so staggering with the new limit that it'd be political suicide to try and change it back.It was 21 for a long time. Then back in the 1970s, a lot of states lowered it to 18. And the drunk driving deaths immediately shot up. So Congress raised it back upIt is, from wikipedia: > The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 was passed on July 17, 1984 by the United States Congress. It punished every state that allowed persons below 21 years to purchase and publicly possess alcoholic beverages by reducing its annual federal highway apportionment by ten percent.It's a reasonable question. After all, U.S. citizens are deemed adult enough to be licensed to drive a vehicle, to vote, or to join the military anddie for their country at 18. |
Why do I not smell perfume I've sprayed on me but other people do? | Why don't you see your nose? It's within your vision. Your brain filters out your nose, because it's always there, and likewise, it filters out smells that are "always there". The phenomenon is called [sensory adaptation], this is the brain caring less about constant stimuli. Olfactory neurons also fire less frequently.You probably just get used to it, so your brain tunes it out as background noise and then you can't smell it anymore. |
How does a two headed reptile/siamese twins work? How do they move their bodies assuming there are two brains? | Typically each twin controls a different part of the body. Like the twin girls Brittany and Abigail Hensel. They give the appearance of being one body with two heads, though they have two of each organ above the waist. They have two arms, each controlling one. And from the waist down, they have one body, with each controlling one half. So each controls a leg, for example. There doesn't appear to be any part that both of their brains controls. So they coordinate with each other so that they can walk, but they each have their own body parts they use. In some cases of animals with two heads, only one head "works". The other head doesn't seem to have any reactions to stimuli so it's vestigial. |
How do human voices work? What makes our voices seem so unique? | Finally a question that being a voice major has equipped me to answer! : Air passes from your lungs in between your vocal folds . They're quite tiny and produce a tiny sound. Cartilage around them can manipulate/stretch them to make them thinner or thicker . That small bit of sound that they make while vibrating is amplified by the natural cavities in your head: your throat, your mouth, and your sinuses. The way that you manipulate those cavities produces the other qualities to the sound, such as the volume, nasality, and very importantly, sounding like different vowels or voiced consonants. Some consonants are produced with only air . I would assume the reason why everything we say sounds different from other types of sound is that we train ourselves constantly from an early age to pay attention and sort patterns out of speech sounds versus other types of sound. |
why aren't AK47's an "accurate" rifle | 1. AK-47's distance between the sight and post is very short which makes it so that for longer ranges, it is extremely difficult to line up an accurate shot as you are more likely to be misaligned with your eye to the sights. 2. It uses a relatively low velocity round, meaning it arcs more and spends more time to get to the target, making it deviate more from environmental conditions 3. Its feeding mechanism uses very large and heavy moving parts which reduces accuracy dramatically from recoil. 4. It has a more significant recoil upon firing due to its type of ammunition, making subsequent rounds less accurate. 5. It operates on a lot looser tolerances, while making it more reliable, also reduces its overall accuracy. 6. [Its gun barrel flexes more than other guns during recoil.] Compare that with [this], Or [this] 7. The barrel isn't inline with the stock, making recoils want to push the gun upwards.they are ..the round the fire, 7.62x39 is however sometimes called the rainbow round because it takes quite an arc after a few hundred meters. This, however doesnt mean the gun wont shoot straight, or you cant make longer shots, you just have to compensate. It probably gets that rep because its available and cheap so often poorly trained people are using it.US Special Forces soldiers in Vietnam described it like this: The American rifles and ammunition are like supermodels. Pretty, slender and shapely, and great at what they do until you get them wet or dirty. Russian weapons are like Russian women, tough, dependable, and built to work. You can drop an AK47 in the mud, wipe it off, and it's ready to go back to work. |
Why can I not remember what happens when I'm drunk? | Memories enter the brain first as short term memory, that is then transformed into a long-term memory. This is evident because the majority of short-term memories that we experience are lost before they ever make it into what we will call "long-term" storage. When alcohol is consumed it affects your ability to take short-term memories and transform them into long-term memories. This is why you only may remember small bits and pieces of the night, these are the select short-term memories that were allowed to settle into long-term ones without the interruption of alcohol. As the level of alcohol drops, the number of memories that make it into "long-term\' storage increases. |
Isn't the freshwater we have to work with just going in a cycle? How are we losing fresh water? | When the water ends up in the oceans, it slows down the cycling a lot. Water in aquifers and water on Earth's surface are the cheapest to use. We have been either polluting these or using them too fast for new water to filter in. We have also allowed a lot of water to go to the ocean , rather than slowly go into the aquifers through the ground. So the result is we are using aquifer water faster than they are getting refilled. When that water is depleted, all water will become more expensive. We will still have it, but it will either be salty, polluted, or far from where it needs to be, and all of the fixes for this cost money.Sorry if this isn't too coherent, I haven't finished my first cup of coffee for the day. |
Why is there such a large Insane Clown Posse (Juggalo) following? | A lot of it is because the group tries to make its fans into a "community" . Like, fans of a band like, say, the Black Keys, are just people who happen to like the Black Keys. But ICP specifically encourages fans, "Hey, dress up like us, be like us, be part of something," and then the fans encourage each other to do it too. People like that. They like feeling like they're part of a group. It's the same kind of thing with Lady Gaga and her "Little Monsters," just a different type of music.ICP seems to be really popular in weird suburbs where there isn't shit else to do except all the things that a true juggalo does . But Keego Harbor, Pontiac, and Del Ray in Michigan fit that description pretty well.They formed a community for societies rejects. Very little of it actually has to do with their music thoughBecause there are a lot of followers in the world who desperately need something to belong to, no matter how lame.They really play off of kids that don't feel like they belong. Sounds noble, and it might be if they didn't saturate their market with so much merchandise. |
What's the best/safest/quickest way for a relatively skinny but unhealthy guy to get big using weights (w/ or w/o protein powder)? | The gist of it is to lift weights and eat a **lot** of food. A program like Stronglifts is great for beginners. Protein powder isn't magic, it's just a cheap and easy source of protein. Most people find it easier to drink a protein shake than to eat a bunch of steak. It's probably healthier than other sources of protein because of the amino acids it contains, specifically L-cysteine. You should definitely use it.You should read the wiki over at /r/fitness But in short: 1. Lift heavy weights 2. Eat a lot, specifically protein 3. Sleep a lot 4. Get big |
Why metal at room temperature feels cold while, say, fabric at room temperature doesn't | I believe it has something to do with the rate at which heat from your body is transferred to the material. Your body is hotter than both the fabric and the spoon, which are at the same temperature, but the spoon conducts the heat at a faster rate and so you feel it as being colder. Please correct me if I am wrong or missing some details.Metal is a good heat conductor. It is able to suck heat from your fingers very well. Most fabrics are poor heat conductors. They don't do a good job at sucking heat from your fingers. As a side note, this is one reason fabrics are useful in clothing and blankets. |
Why do southern states freak out over a little snow? | There is essentially no infrastructure to deal with snowfall in southern states because it happens so rarely. Roads are not salted or plowed so they are covered in ice, and nobody has snow tires or much experience driving in snow. It is sort of like how everyone up north has trouble with a little heat wave where it gets over 100 F; nobody has A/C and are not acclimated to heat so it is a problemWhy does the Northeast freak out over a category one hurricane?', "People don't have experience driving in snow. Their vehicles are not equipped to safely drive in the snow. The city/state doesn't have plows & gravel/salt to clear the roads and make them safe. |
What are those bastardly little tongue sores you get from eating too much salt or sugar, and how do you get rid of them? | The condition is called aphthous stomatitis, or commonly, canker sores. They are NOT inflamed tastebuds. Rather, they are small ulcers that are characteristically painful and confined to the mucosa of the mouth by definition. There is no cure, but many over-the-counter drugs are sold that can mitigate the pain caused by them. This question is by no means explained . Rather, the pathogenesis of an aphthous sore is still unknown. I couldn't believe it, but apparently this is an area of relatively active research. [This] recent review article provides some nice context. [This question] has been asked many times before. Doing a quick look-over, answers have been repeatedly unscientific and certainly not in any real laymen-speak.In my experience after getting them from eating a lot of Sour Patch Kids, I clean my mouth real well and that helps a bit. |
Why are swearing words related to genitals and/or sexuality? | Swear words come from things we consider taboo or distasteful. In English-speaking society, we have a lot of taboos surrounding sex, even in this day and age. We also put a very high level of importance on hygiene, so words relating to waste and where they come from are also taboo. Certain words automatically make your brain think of a subject in a more intense way than others. A colloquial term vs a scientific one. This is true for pretty much anything, even if it isn't a swearword -- sweat vs perspiration, for example. When it's a topic that's taboo, that word becomes a swear. When it isn't, it moves back into innocuous territory. |
How does a bird know to not sit on its unfertilized eggs? | They don't They will sit on plastic eggs. The hen eventually gives up and deserts the nest and will try again Yeah,the eggs rot if something like a squirrel, or another bird does not eat them before they go bad. _URL_0_ |
Where exactly is a woman's G-spot located, and how do you find it? | Straight in, stick to the top, two o clock until about the second bend in your fingers, if you 've hit your knuckles that's way too far. It all generally feels the same to you but it has sort of an interesting texture. So I know perhaps you 've always been told to do the "Come here" motion but it's actually okay to be a little bit rougher than that, nearly all the nerves are located outside and in the clitoris. So use your dominant hand for entry and place the other hand palm down thumb towards you, gently but firmly across the lower pelvis. Use your two fingers with dominant hand to move entire fore arm in a controlled vibration sort of motion. Check with female on pressure and intensity. Use clitoral stimulation at your discretion. Hope that makes sense! |
Why do we hear static from radios and TV's when there's nothing being broadcast? Shouldn't we just hear silence? | Because there isn't nothing there. Every spectrum is full of random noise from stars, radioactive decay, all sorts of things like that. It's just terrestrial broadcasts are so much stronger that it overwhelms the random noise. This is why when you start reaching the edge of the coverage area for the station you're listening to, it starts getting more and more static-ey and doesn't just go from "fine" to "nothing."much of it is noise left behind from the big bang _URL_0_ |
why you can't put metal in the microwave but nothing happens to the metal that it's built from | You can put metal in microwaves, which is a lot come with racks, you just can't put metal with sharp edges/points such as forks and aluminum foil. As for the interior, most microwaves have their interior painted to prevent these issues. |
How do street lights know when cars are there? | There's a couple ways that traffic lights know there are cars there. The first is sensors under the road. They use coils of wire to detect when something magnetic passes overhead. You can actually usually see them if you look at the lanes, there will sometimes be a 4ish by 6ish square that's visible from the surface. Other traffic lights use cameras to actually detect cars with image recognition, but there are still pretty rare and are generally put in to do double-duty as red-light cameras or traffic monitoring. There's a few around that use infrared motion detectors but I actually haven't seen any in a while, they might be phased out. As far as the boxes on top it may be part of a system emergency vehicles use. In some cities, emergency vehicles emit an infrared signal straight forward when they have their sirens on which will tell the light to turn that way green and all others red.The polygonal markings on the road at the intersection are electromagnets that detect when a car or bike is on them. |
The size of the universe. | There's more than one way to measure cosmological distances. One way is to use what's called the "lookback distance." It's just the distance measured in units of time. If light from an galaxy has been in transit for a billion years, then you can quite accurately say that galaxy is a billion years away. The other way to measure distances is to imagine that you could somehow magically stop time and stretch a very long ruler across the distance you're measuring. This is called the *instantaneous proper distance.* It's used much less often, because it's not a *useful* number to calculate. You *can't* stop time or stretch a ruler across those kinds of distances, so the number you get from that kind of calculation is really only a particularly obscure type of trivia. So the radius of the observable universe is both about 14 billion years and about 46 billion light-years. Both statements are equally true. We know the age of the universe because we can look at the temperature of the sky and see how much it's cooled since the end of the Big Bang, and we can look at the rate of metric expansion and see how it relates to pressure. And you're thinking of metric expansion quite wrongly. It's not that there's a wall out there that's moving away from us. It's that *all distances in the universe* vary with time. Not because things move, but because the *geometry of the universe* is itself a function of time. Right now, it's estimated with quite a high degree of precision that all distances in the universe are increasing at about seventy kilometers per second per megaparsec.I'm sorry that I don't know how to answer your question, but I would like to post this here: _URL_0_ Space Engine, kind of like google Earth, but a map of the entire Universe. I found out about it from r/TIL |
Why do school hours not match working hours? | That means teachers would go home at 7 or 8pm, school buses would have to contend with commuter traffic, and students would be walking home in the dark most of the time.It's because when the times were setup it was to take into account farm jobs, not the modern 9-5 city jobs. That is also why summer vacation in America exists. A lot of the rest of the world does not do this as it is detrimental to learning. |
How did the Romans express numbers in speech and/or calculation? | This is a really good question, you should probably chuck it over onto /r/AskHistorians, they 'd be more likely to have an actual, factual answer. EDIT: Someone has already asked it over there, the best answer last year came from /u/rosemary85 and goes as follows: > No. The Latin words for numbers are fairly similar to those in modern Romance languages .The Latin for 94 is quattuor et nonaginta, literally "four and ninety", or alternatively nonaginta et quattuor.The exceptions are that the Latin for 18 and 19 are duodeviginti and undeviginti, literally "twenty minus two" and "twenty minus one". But as you can see, this has nothing at all to do with how the numerals were written.I should perhaps note that the Romans very often wrote IIII and VIIII rather than IV and IX for "four" and "nine", XXXX rather than XL for "forty", etc. I don't have statistics at my fingertips, but I believe the IIII/XXXX forms were actually more common than the IV/XL forms that are preferred nowadays. [See here for the rest of the comments.] |
What's the difference between Genetic Drift and Natural Selection? | Both of these concepts deal with traits within a population changing over time. With natural selection, one trait is more advantageous, so organisms with that trait survive and reproduce more effectively, resulting in more organisms with that trait. Genetic drift is when a trait becomes more common within a population due to luck. For example, pretend we have a group of humans and some of them possess a genetic code that gives them green hair. If green hair is considered attractive, then those with the trait will be able to mate more and have more children. This is a benefit resulting from the trait being preferred. This means that nature selects positively for this trait and it is supported by natural selection. On the other hand, let's again pretend that there's a trait for green hair but nobody finds it particularly attractive or unattractive. Logically, there's no reason why it should become particularly popular or unpopular. However, one day, a bunch of brown-haired people gather for a meeting in a building that catches on fire and they all die, while the green-haired people outside are unharmed. This event makes green hair more prominent within the population but it wasn't a direct result of any properties related to green hair. Since this was green hair becoming more common as a result of random events, this would be considered an example of genetic drift. TL;DR: Natural selection means the trait itself is beneficial, making it more popular. Genetic drift is when a trait just happens to become more popular, even though there's nothing advantageous about the trait. |
Why do professional athletes have a significantly lower pulse than the average person ? | Because they have increased stroke volume. Their hearts are strengthened so that they are able to move more blood with each pump, so their hearts don't need to pump as many times.You have an empty pool and you need to fill it with water. The bigger the bucket you can carry, the less trips you will need to make to fill it up.You don't even have to be a pro to experience this. I ride my bike a fair amount and have had nurses freak out when they take my pulse. It's always kinda funny but also scary that a health care professional in Colorado isn't more used to seeing this.A couple reasons: * Good cardiovascular conditioning will lower your heart rate as your heart pumps blood more efficiently. I lost weight and took up cycling over the past few years, and my heart rate is down about 15 bpm.* People with exceptional cardiovascular genetics tend to make good athletes. Cyclist Miguel Indurain had a resting heart rate of 28, one of the lowest ever observed in a healthy human. |
How, with the proliferation of free porn websites like youporn, does any porn production make money? | You like pink crayons a lot. There is this place where you can get free pink crayons, but you have to deal with ads and possibly malware. Also the pink crayons are low quality and the place may not have the specific type or model of pink crayon you are looking for. Now there is this other place where if you pay a bit you get the newest, best pink crayons that you choose as soon as they come out without ever dealing with ads or any other hassle. To some its worth paying for, for others the free place works.They've been around for 10 years so it's pretty much impossible that they aren't making money. There are two things to note about their business model * Running sites like that incurs a lot of fixed costs but once you've paid for it, it isn't actually costing you much per user. You have 50 servers and a 10 gigabit internet connection, say, so getting 50,000 free users per hour doesn't really cost you much more than getting 500 paid users.* Therefor, it works a bit like the spam model. Even if only 1% of people will pay for premium access or buy an advertised product or install malware, that's actually fine given that you can reach millions of users. |
How do landlords make money | so essentially making money from letting requires a large amount of time and/or starting capital?', "You're making the assumption that the market price of the house today is the price for which the landlord bought it. As a resident of the UK you're no doubt aware of the fact that in most parts of the country house prices have increased faster than inflation every year for the past two decades or more. In other words, even if your landlord bought the house only five years ago he'd have paid probably only 80% of its current market value. If he bought it ten years or more ago it would have cost him less than half of what it's currently worth. His mortgage would therefore be much much smaller.Why are you assuming your landlord has a mortgage on the property? If he owns it outright, your £750 pounds is a nice income on that property. If not, it cuts the cost of the mortgage in half, and becomes profitable later on.your landlord probably isn't paying anywhere near that or they simply act as a manager for the property to someone who owns many properties |
Why do DVDs in widescreen format play with black bars on top and bottom on my widescreen TV | Just because it's "widescreen" doesn't mean that it's the same exact aspect ratio as your TV. A movie with black bars on the top and bottom was filmed in an aspect ration that's even wider than your widescreen TV. Look [here]. Most widescreen TV's are 16:9 , and many movies are filmed in 2.39:1 . Clearly, you cannot shrink the bottom one to fit on a 16:9 screen without having bars at the top and bottom with no picture. Well, you can if you can tolerate a distorted, squished picture. Another option is to use [Pan and Scan], which gets rid of the black bars at the expense of cutting off the sides of the picture. |
How do spammers spoof a cell phone number to make scam calls? | When you make an outbound call, the calling system gives the phone system the caller ID information. The reason this can be different from the actual call is for example a business that has both direct lines to each extension and a main line. An employee calling out would show up with the main line as their caller ID so that if the person calls back they get the main number . The spammers take advantage of this system to spoof a number in the caller ID. The phone company could counter this by comparing the caller ID info with a number you legitimately own, but they get a lot of money for all these spam calls and they’re not incentivized enough to change how they do things. |
How do we move our body? | Planning and decision making for motor movement happens in the [premotor cortex]. To see where it is, find a spot on the top of your head that's about three inches back from your hairline. This is the section in your brain that makes the decisions about lifting limbs and looking at the ceiling. It takes in information from many parts of the brain including the senses, the emotional centers, and long term planning structures before making a decision. When it decides, it sends a command to the [Motor Cortex] which is just a bit closer to the back of the head. The Motor Cortex is a doer. It takes the big decision made by the Pre-Motor Cortex and figures out how to implement it. "Move your leg!" says the PMC, and the MC calculates what muscles in what order need to be fired. If it's a movement that's been done to the point of being automatic then the MC relies some on the Cerebellum to coordinate, as the Cerebellum stores all those highly practiced movements. |
What is the difference between a CEO and the President of a company? | "President" is a term that is often based on the law of the place where the company is created. For example in the United States, most states require that a corporation have a person with the title President. That title carries with it some legal obligations that tie the individual to the actions of the company. Most jurisdictions don't define or require anyone to hold the title "Chief Executive Officer". Depending on the size of the entity, the President and the CEO may be the same person. Large entities may be comprised of several smaller companies, each with a legally required "President", who may report to the CEO at the top of the organizational structure. Some companies may separate the two titles for internal organizational reasons, for historical reasons, or because someone thinks it's clever. It is rare for a company to have a CEO who reports to a President. CEO has become the de facto title for "the highest level of the executive ladder", but that's arbitrary and fashion could changeCEO is higher. Usually the head of the board of directors. President is often the more hands-on leader of a division or office. As an example the firm I work for has a CEO and a board of directors who are rarely seen, then beneath them are the division presidents - one for each of five state groupings we have. Beneath them are the vice presidents, then the office leaders, then the department managers, then the supervisors and finally the everyday employees. How the leadership is structured will depend on the firm, but the CEO will usually be of a higher rank than the president. In very small firms though, it's not uncommon for the owner to call themselves "CEO and President", which basically means they take on both roles. |
Why does smoking cause some people to lose limbs/develop cancer while there are lifelong smokers who never have these problems? | The short answer is that at the chemical level biology is very complicated. We tend to think of all sickness and injury the same way we think of, say, a bullet wound---a single, distinct harm that directly interferes with how something in the body works in a simple way. But that's not how all harms work. Nicotine and other carcinogens can cause damage in many ways and at many levels. They can harm cells, different parts of DNA, and different things in different parts of the body. And these harms might not happen every time, or from every puff, depending on random chance. And even when they do cause harm, it might not be enough. Maybe person A has a stronger immune system then person B. Or maybe person B happens to be genetically more vulnerable to cancer than person A. Or maybe person A ends up getting cancer in a cell that happens to get killed the next day by a bacteria, while person B gets it in a cell that survives long enough to grow. There are so many variables between exposure to the toxic substance and the expression of some linked disease that even when the negative health effects are clear---as with smoking---it is almost never going to be the case that everyone will get the same injuries, or even any injury at all. |
Why is it, that when I get really tired, everything is so much funnier? | The phenomenon of being more easily amused falls under Emotional Lability which means emotional changeability or instability. You're probably more likely to cry too. In extreme cases, this is a medical condition, see _URL_0_ but in regular life, it's just that the parts of your brain which keep you on an even keel aren't working quite so well. |
Why you need to be grounded to get an electric shock? | Electric currents aren't like Austin from middle school, they don't come out, wander around, bug people, and then go back home. Electricity flows from negatively charged objects, to positively charged objects, until the system is neutral. That's all there is to it. If electricity flows from one location, that means that location has a negative charge, and the electricity *doesn't want to go back*. It wants to find the most positively charged location, and make it balanced. If the most positively charged location available is the ground, then it will happily go through you to the ground. If it is an anode, then it will do that too . |
How do people get infected with plaque? | Plaque isn't just one bactera it is what is known as a biofilm. Layers and layers of diferent bactera and their extracellular matrixs. Pretty much any bactera can eventually form biofilms. Everyone has bactera on and in their bodies called their natural flora. Your natural flora bactera grow into the plaque on your teeth.Bacteria are everywhere. In your mouth, on your skin, inside your body, on your food, in the air everywhere |
Why is it that a hard drive disc can have a capacity of 5TB+ but DVDs can only have a maximum of 9GB? | In addition to what's already been said about the actual technological differences, one major difference is working conditions. Hard Disks are produced and sealed in clean factories to ensure there is no contamination. They are encased in thick unbend-able metal. From the day you start using it, you can't bend it, get it dirty, scratch it, or really abuse it in any way. The parts inside that rigid case are precisely machined to fit together and be aligned perfectly, and because you can't stick your fingers in there, they stay that way. Precision engineering. Meanwhile DVDs and other similar disks are made from cheap soft easily scratched, easily bent plastic. In use they get coated with your filthy greasy fingerprints. They'll get scratched when you handle them, when your kids put them in the player they'll get jam and cat hair over them. You bend and distort them each time you remove them from the case, and you can put them in a huge variety of players of varying quality. So while the hard disk can afford to store one bit of data in an incredibly tiny spot on the disk because it knows it will have the precision to address it exactly, safe from damage, dirt, and distortion, the DVD has to keep its bits of data in larger lumps so it can still be seen through your filthy fingerprints and coffee stains on your bent and scratched disk. It also keeps some parts of the disk to store checksum information to make up for those bits it still can't read.Continued technology improvements. When the DVD was invented it was considered impressively high-capacity. But it's limited by the requirement that discs be reproduced by physically molding plastic -- each "bit" of data is an actual pit in the plastic, detected by a laser shining on it. [Diagram here.] The tiny size of bits on a modern hard drive goes way below what you can reliably make that way. |
How much racism/discrimination do Europeans who live in India or Africa face? | Maybe it's not racism or discrimination in the traditional sense, but I've heard anecdotally that whites in Sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be targeted by robbers because they stand out it's presumed that they have money. |
Why does a company like Boeing need to make a commercial? It's not like anyone watching is going to buy one. | Companies that have to choose between Airbus or Boeing still consist of people , and they can sadly often do so with bias even though they're supposed to run the numbers and make an informed decision.brand recognition. They want you to *value* that your flying on a Boeing airplane, so that name has extra value when they try to sell their planes to the airlineBecause Boeing is a publicly traded company. Marketing affects public opinion and stock pricesThe same reason Coke makes commercials, branding. Even folks that buy planes are susceptible the effects of slick advertising.There's an argument that Coca Cola doesn't need advertisement because it's so popular. But the fact is, it's popular because of the constant advertisement. Imagine advertisements as a reminder - if coca cola didn't advertise, you'd be constantly reminded to drink Pepsi, and in time, the only thing you would hear are reminders about pepsi. Eventually the concept of coca cola will vanish from the collective consciousness. |
How do American football have bruised lungs without also having broken ribs? Isn't that the point of ribs? | This is actually one of the major issues with American football. The padding protects from the blunt hit and spreads out the impact so you aren't taking a lot of force to a particular place on your body, but your body is still being shoved really hard as a whole. This means the force is spread out and absorbed a bit so your skeleton isn't taking such a direct impact, but since a body at rest tends to stay at rest, when you get hit, your organs like to stay where they are as your skeleton is forced to move and they bang around inside their cage.Your ribs are fairly flexible, and that elasticity helps prevent the more serious injuries related to broken ribs . The ribs do protect the major organs in your rib cage, and without those ribs, those bruised lungs would have been far more severe. Bruised lungs are much less severe than broken ribs, so the elasticity helps to protect despite what you might think. |
What are dentists actually doing when they scrape at your teeth with those metal picks? | I think my dentist was counting money while my hygienist was scraping my teethScraping off the plaque build up. And it is usually the dental hygienist not the actual dentist.Most of the time they're looking at how much plaque is on or around your teeth. In other instances they're determining texture of the top layer of enamel. Both of these factor into the health of your teeth and help with diagnosing any problems you may have.They are removing what is called calculus , which is a hardened form of plaque. It's bad for your gums and can cause gum bleedingIf the hygienist is doing it, he/she is removing plaque and tartar buildup. If the dentist is doing it he/she either is not bothered enough to hire a hygienist :p, or is checking for cavities after your cleaning. The metal \'pick" is to explore all the little grooves and surfaces of the teeth to make sure there are no \'holes\' or tiny pits which the instrument sticks into when poked at which could signify decay. |
When did we stop having to type in 'www.'? Why did we have to to begin with? | It's because servers where traditionally named according to the services they provide. So a world wide web server had www., a file transfer protocol server had ftp., et caetera. We stopped having to type it because nowadays, the www._URL_0_ and _URL_0_ URLs both refer to the same server . Some sites don't, and so typing either form might yield different results. Most browsers also add the www. in automatically, to stop any problems that might occur. |
How odds work if everything is random? | Odds basically tell you that if the exact same situation were to occur an infinite number of times, what portion of those times would lead to that specific result. e.g. If you have the Ace of Hearts, King of Hearts, Queen of Hearts and Jack of Hearts in your hand and 48 shuffled cards in front of you, there is a 1 in 48 chance you will end up with a 10 of hearts for a Royal Flush. There is no way of guessing which card will come up next, but if you shuffled that deck drew a card millions of times, you would get the Royal Flush 1/48 of the time. A pro would make that bet if it pays better than 48 times their money. They will only win 1/48 of the time, but if they get the chance to make that bet many many times in their lives, the rare win will make up for the cost of the lossesIf you roll a dice there is a 1/6 chance it will land on any of the given faces even though the act of rolling will produce a "random" result you can still predict that statistically being that it has 6 faces it should have an equal chance of dropping on the 1 vs the rest. The same goes for poker in that there are only so many possible card combos that you can calculate the chances of you getting a royal flush vs a Pair. |
how can i press my stomach out? | The mechanism for inhaling is using your diaphragm to basically pull down, creating negative pressure in your lungs. When you inhale deeply to cause your abdomen to protrude, you relax your abdominal muscles and your diaphragm pushes down slightly on your abdominal organs, mostly your intestines, causing your abdomen to stick out.Edit: accuracy |
What would be the simplest way to "unplug" the internet, causing total shut down by means of disabling hardware? | Like, in your house? Or the whole thing? In your house, just unplug the cable between the router and the modem. The Internet as a whole is so resilient that it would be extraordinarily difficult. Global thermonuclear war might do it. |
The whole Wiki leaks and assange debacle. | Assange made a website that exposed private and sensitive information about important people and events, in particular the government, and they got angry.Well it all started with Wikileaks. Wikileaks is simply a site where classified information is uploaded. Of course, this is not really anything new, News papers have done this for a long time . But Wikileaks manage to do this in a way big way. They have communication between diplomats, secret deals, and some disturbing shots of USA soldiers attacking civilians. The USA didn't like this on bit. They thought it was helping terrorists, and breaking the law . So they started thinking of ways of shutting it down. So the went to VISA, Mastercard and most other payment providers and said: don't give them any more money. So they closed all their accounts, and stopped all new donations. Wikileaks is fighting back, and have recently won a few court cases so they might soon get some money again. The other things is that the USA want Assange, as he started the whole thing. The problem is that he is in England. And England won't send anyone anywhere where they might risk life in jail or a death sentence. Which he might very well get in the USA. Around this time two ex-girlfriends of Assange surfaces in Sweden. They start talking about how Assange raped them, while they were in a relationship. Now, Sweden want Assange to try him for rape. Rape won't give him life in prison in Sweden, so England can send him there. Assange fears that he will be sent from Sweden to the USA. Which would be bad for him. One of the documents Wikileaks published was conversations between Sweden and USA, where USA basically ordered Sweden to shut down the piratebay. |
How my wife and kids would go about inheriting things that are only in my name like bank accounts, house, ect.. | By default, after you die, everything will go to your legal next of kin. That person is defined in this order, and if you don't have a living member of each group, it passes to the next one down: SpouseChildrenParentsSiblings I believe that next comes grandkids, then grandparents, but don't quote me on that. So if you don't have a spouse, but you have 3 kids and 2 parents living, your property would be split between your kids by default. And they 'd inherit debts and things as well. A will exists to change these defaults. Say you have a spouse, but you still want to make sure that certain things go to your kids, your will would enumerate "Hey, my kids get this, this and this, and my spouse gets whatever I didn't list." |
What is my all carbs/protein diet doing for me? | Weight gain is dependent on calories in and calories burned. It doesn't matter where you're getting those calories from, if you burn them all through activity and lifestyle, then you're not going to put on weight. Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps ate somewhere around 2000 Calories for breakfast . My only concern about your diet would be that your lack of fruits and vegetables could mean you're risking various vitamin deficiencies such as Vitamin C, A, B12, K, etc. Not to mention you might not be getting that much fibre and depending on what exactly it is you eat, your cholesterol level could suffer. |
What ultimately stops you from jumping higher on a trampoline? | Diminishing returns. The first time you jump on a trampoline, the only real force pushing you upward is coming from your legs. On the next bounce, the trampoline converts a bunch of your downward momentum into upward momentum and helps push you back up into the air. If you push off again with your legs as that's happening, you will go even higher than you did the first time. That means on the next bounce, you have even more downward momentum that the trampoline will convert into upward momentum for you . This works the first few times, but eventually you hit a point where you're already being pushed up into the air so quickly each time, your legs can't really do anything significant to help. |
What can I do as a single individual to get Gary Johnson in the debates? | You could phone bank, donate to his campaign, that sort of thing. The question you should be asking yourself is why you want Gary Johnson in the debates. His economic policies are frankly terrible. He thinks that socialized medicine is a bad thing, when it's been proven to be the superior system in every measure except 5 year cancer survival rate. He's courted anti-vaxxers, a movement I would like to point out quite literally kills children. Sure, it would be nice to have alternate voices on the campaign trail. But I would prefer to have sane ones rather than crazy ones.If you are polled on who you would vote for in the presidential election, say "Gary Johnson." Once he has 15% or more of polled people giving his name, he can be included in the debates. |
(or 18): Indefinite Detention Act | The portion everyone's worried about basically states that if someone is accused or suspected of being a terrorist the US government can detain them indefinitely regardless of whether or not they are an American citizen. This is a big deal because, in addition to reminding everyone of the Red Scare in the 50s, it is a direct violation of the bill of rights, specifically the fourth amendment. > Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. --Wikipedia Basically without a warrant, they cannot arrest you unless they see you committing the crime. This would remove that protection without modifying the constitution. In any sane environment it would immediately be thrown out by the Supreme Court as a violation of the constitution, but that its gotten this far to being passed is extremely worrying in and of itself. TL;DR: If the government doesn't like what you are saying/doing they can 'suspect' you of terrorism, or of planning terrorism, or having vague ties to terrorism, and detain you indefinitely behind bars. Or at least that's my understanding. Edit: Personally the distinction in the past few years that the constitution only protects American citizens and that for anyone else we can even ignore the Geneva convention if we feel like it is just as, if not more worrisome. Who the hell thinks like that. I don't care if he's British he's still human. |
Why do computer telephone response systems always ask me to type a bunch of info, then transfer me to a human who asks for the exact same info? | I used to work for costumer service and we do this to make it an unpleasant experience for the costumer so that they never call again.It's the same concept as those In-mail rebates that tend to be annoying to complete.That's why I ended up quitting. I didn't like the whole idea of treating the customers bad. |
How bars or clubs charge huge crowds of people randomly ordering drinks. | people either start a tab or they pay up front. it's part of a bartender's job to make sure they get paid for their goods/services. i'm sure some bars and bartenders will allow regulars to get away without paying upfront in certain scenarios, but that really depends on the business and employees. |
What is vanity sizing in clothing? | In fashion, womens' fashions in particular, people want to believe they are thinner than they actually are, and if you get north of a size 6, which is still quit thin, you are often looked down upon for being too fat. Some designers don't even make their clothes in the higher sizes. To make consumers feel better and buy more, some brands cheat a little bit on the size, so what is labelled as a size 6 is closer to a size 8. Other brands, to maintain more exclusivity and to ensure only the thinnest people wear their clothes, cheat the other direction, so a size 6 is more of a size 4. > How do I properly size clothes online that aren't in vanity sizing? * measure yourself and go by inches rather than size* check the return policy a retailer with more friendly online return policy is going to be more confident in their sizing* be honest with yourself vanity sizing works because people want to insist they are a smaller size than the actually are* shop brands with a strong online presence, and be extra careful going through a reseller or a department store that is just carrying the brand* read reviews sizing is one of the first topics people will mention |
Why group mentality is so powerful | Human nature to belong and conform to social groups, empathy, and natural fear of exclusion. It's kind of instinctual, that's why the weak minded are susceptible to group mentality. Case in point: Reddit. |
Why can't horses get rid of flies on their eyes? | They blink, the fly flies off, goes about two feet, pulls a u-turn and goes back to the eye. They can get rid of them, but they can't keep them away. Really, the ancestor to the domestic horse wouldn't have had this problem because they didn't live in stables. It's the domestic horse's enclosure that attracts the flies, gives them a breeding ground, and traps the horse so it can't get away. It wouldn't be a problem if they didn't live in the environment we put them in. |
What is happening after a workout in our body? | As I understand itIn a workout with decent intensity your body releases testosterone and a pulse of growth hormone. After about an hour this pulse gives way to stress hormones like cortisol. During this time you deplete nutrients from the muscles, stress your bones, and usually slightly damage the muscle fibers. All these stimuli lead to your body adapting those systems to tolerate the strain you put on them. So in the days following the workout, your bones would get denser, muscles would be replenished and if you are eating in caloric excess OR you are a beginner, the muscles would grow slightly. I say caloric excess or beginner because at those times your body adapts very quickly to stresses. You will be incredibly sore, but as a novice you might be able to add 30 pounds to your maximum squat in 3 sessions. When just starting out, your body is panicking trying to adjust, so it pulls energy from your fat stores to supply the important tissues, the muscles Also soreness/physical pain is not a sign of an effective workout. |
What is it like playing intense sport (or exercise) in freezing weather? | Down to -5 no major differences, except you can loose heat rapidly if you stop moving, layering your clothing is important to manage your heat/sweat. -5 to -20 your get an iron taste in your throat/mouth when breathing heavily, otherwise same as above. Below -20 breathing becomes painful, your nose can freeze, your sweat freezes before evaporating. Layering changes from important to critical as these are the templates where sweating can lead to death. |
what ever happened to Dane Cook? | Credit to /u/noposters for this answer: What people don't realize about Dane Cook is that he was on a mega run before Harmful if Swallowed blew up. Even before his comedy central half hour, he was the highest paid comedian touring colleges at that time . Once his albums blew up, he played MSG, etc. he tried to make the transition into film. His films flopped, and simultaneously both his parents died and it was discovered that his brother/business manager had stolen 50million dollars from him . With all those things coming together, he took a bunch of time off. When he came back, tastes had changed and he no longer had the traction he'd had years earlier. He tried to make some comeback appearances but wound up generating controversy by trashing the audience at one of his shows at the Laugh Factory . Since then he's appeared here and there in LA and done some voiceover work, but for the most part he keeps a low profile. He's also alienated a lot of people in the NY comedy community for playing up his relationship with Patrice O'Neal in interviews when the two were, in fact, not close |
The Hateful Eight in 70mm, is there no way to replicate so every theatre gets that "visual effect"? | Gonna get a little technical: The movie has a digital equivalence of around 8192x2968 . I don't know of any theater that has a projector above 4K, many are even at 2K . So, seeing it in a theater with 4K projection is the next best thing . Movies like Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Star Wars Ep VII , etc. are even bigger because they are 70mm IMAX, which is around 11800x8192. I saw both Interstellar and Star Wars Ep VII in this format and it what great, Interstellar took the cake though in terms of how amazing it was visually/immersivelyAre you asking how any theater can get the visual effect of a 70mm movie? The method is: show 70mm film on a 70mm projector. Are you asking how they can get the same image quality without using the necessary equipment? Why should that be possible? |
How does a watch know when a month has 30 or 31 days? | I think you have to manually adjust it every time the month changes, but not sure, sure someone will correct me. |
Why does tiredness feel as though it comes in waves? | Biorhythms. Your body has cycles: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, even which nostril you use. Your wakefulness/tiredness is also cyclic.As you get more tired you're body tries harder and harder to send you to sleep. You will then reach an 'optimal' state of tiredness where you will probably be able to sleep within 30 mins. However, if you stay awake past this point your body thinks there is something wrong for you to still be awake, e.g. You're in danger. As a consequence and survival mechanism it gets rid of the drowsiness by releasing adrenaline to increase alertness as well as other mechanisms to make you alert.This state of temporary alertness can't be maintained for long and you still need to sleep eventually so you become tired again.The cycle can repeat but not for too long, maybe around a day or 2 at most. |
how does your brain produce a coloured image through staring at a negative? | These are called afterimages and their existence is covered by something called Opponent Process Theory. Basically, you have 3 types of cells in your eye that detect color. They are called cones. One cone is sensitive to the wavelength of light we associate with "red", another to "green", and another to "blue" light. I put the color names in quotes because you must understand that COLOR DOES NOT EXIST IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD, YOUR BRAIN MAKES IT. This is itself is mindblowing but I promise it is true. Anyway, the cells get tired after looking at the same thing for too long . They are a bit like a rubber band that gets stretched out the more it sees a certain color, and the more it stretches the more it really really wants to snap back. Stretching makes you see one color , while snapping back makes you see another color . The deeper cells in your brain are arranged in 3 opponent pairs: red-green, blue-yellow, and black-white. So, the more of you see of red, the more the opposite wants to come out. Same with the other colors. .Your eye sensors tire after a short while viewing a static image. In this example they're giving you a fixed point to focus on so that the image stays positioned in the same place on your retina. Notice how her lips are green in the negative. Staring at that wears our your green sensor there. Then, when you switch to look at white your eye's red sensors work but the green, temporarily, do not. So you see red lips. |
Why are most passwords hidden on-screen by default when you type them, but WIFI passwords are not? | Most on screen passwords are hidden in-case you have any shoulder surfers. WiFi passwords give you the option to either hide or show, in my opinion as WiFi passwords are normally longer than other account passwords they can be hard to make sure your typing correctly without seeing it', "With WiFi, the typical case is that everyone in the room/floor/building/campus has the password, and people in the next room/floor/building/campus don't. If someone is able to see the password on the screen, they're obviously in the same room/floor/building/campus, and therefore they were supposed to have the password anyway. Of course, that's not always true - and for the times when it's no true, there's usually an option to hide the password on-screen. |
Why does time use the number 60? | 60 is easy to divide cleanly in multiple ways, and a number based on 60, such as the number of degrees in a circle, can be divided yet more ways. 60 can be divided by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30 and itself. This provides many easy-to-reckon, useful fractions. In the days before pocket calculators, slide rules, Napier's Bones, etc. this made life simpler. |
Why does water taste bitter after eating pineapples? | When the water hits your taste buds, they are stimulated a little. The problem is they have been overloaded with sugar and acid, thus they are temporarily unable to *report* sugar and acid at that moment. Therefore they report the only thing left: alkaline taste. Add that to the fact that most water has dissolved minerals in it that make it ever-so-slightly alkaline. |
What does fuel stabilizer do to gasoline? | Gasoline should keep indefinitely if stored properly. However, stabilisers can be useful if fuel is stored incorrectly, for example, in partially full tanks of small equipment. The larger tanks in modern cars are carefully designed to protect fuel from air and evaporation. Gasoline molecules can evaporate if the tank is not securely closed - a stabiliser won't do anything for that. Gasoline molecules can oxidise by exposure to oxygen - a fuel stabiliser can contain an anti-oxidant to absorb the oxygen, and neutralise the free radicals accelerate the oxidation reaction. Gasoline may contain traces of metal from manufacture/processing or from metal storage tanks. Certain metals can act as catalysts and cause the gasoline molecules to polymerise into sludge. Metal deactivator additives can absorb and neutralise the catalytic effect of metal contamination. Gasoline may contain large quantities of ethanol to meet biofuel targets by governments. If stored open to the air, the ethanol can absorb water from the air, and this can cause the water/ethanol mix to separate from the gasoline. By adding a different alcohol , the water/alcohol mix doesn't separate as easily. All these problems can be avoided if gasoline is stored in a tightly sealed plastic tank with only the minimum amount of air for an expansion space, as high quality gasolines will come with metal deactivators already added to neutralised contamination at the refinery. |
Hey Reddit, so what the hell are those squiggly lines I see in my peripheral every once in a while? Don't know why I didn't wonder until now.. | They are called floaters. Mostly they are the shadows cast by bits of the inside of your eye that have broken off and are floating around in the vitreous humor, or eyeball fluid, in your eye. _URL_0_ |
how a drug goes from needing a prescription to being able to buy it without a prescription | Like you're five? Because the grownups who make the drug showed the grownups who regulate the drug that the drug is safe enough to take without needing the advice from a doctor. The drug itself does the same thing only now you don't need a prescription from the doctor. People get easier access the the medicine, the drug company gets to sell a lot more drugs, and pharmacies make more money because they're selling more OTC items. For more see _URL_0_", 'There are different phases of testing. First drugs are tested on bacteria or yeast, then on mice, then perhaps on humans, and if the drug is safe for many years and seems to not be able to be abused, then the company and FDA may want to market it without a prescriptionAlso, OTC does not equal safe for ALL groups of people. Certain medications are not good for those with various conditions like high blood pressure. Always check the drug facts on the box or bottle for information regarding individuals who should not take a given drug. When in doubt, ask the pharmacist if the drug is suitable. Pharmacists do a lot more than put pills in bottles.5 year olds don't have an attention span. In short: - Drug needs to be on the market for a long time - Drug needs to have wide access - Drugs need to be well tolerated - Drug need to be self administered - Drug needs to be able to be self-managed Once the above are met, a prescription drug that already has marketing approval can apply for what's called a Monograph, or what you see on almost any drug product . If a drug is found to be Safe and Effective, it can get OTC status. More [here]. |
Is there a psychological term for when you finish a game/book/series and feel empty inside? | "Ennui" is a pretty close fit. Also, it's French and they're very good at feeling empty and dissatisfied inside. ennui: 1. a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: |
Why is it, that even though I genuinely love Whiskey, I shudder nearly every time I drink some? | Your conscious brain loves it, but your subconscious brain realizes that alcohol is inherently bad for the body, and causes you to shudder. It's a subconscious survival mechanism that you're overriding with your conscious brain. |
Why do our eyes not see color on the edge of our peripheral vision? | The cone cells that detect color aren't very good at low light or motion detection. Since motion detection is more important at the periphery than color we evolved to pack mostly rods and few cones in the corners. Your brain remembers what colors things are and will attempt to color in the peripheral vision so you don't usually notice that it's basically grayscale.We have two kinds of light receptors in our eyes: rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to black and white; cones are more sensitive to colors and have a higher ability to focus. Cones are more concentrated in the centers of our eyes, while rods are more prevalent toward the edges of our eyes. |
Why is it when I drink a glass of liquid I urinate at least twice as much back out? | Your bladder only sends the "time to pee" message to your brain when it reaches a certain level of fullness. So the amount you pee out doesn't just represent the glass of water you just drank, but all of the water you have drank since the last time you peed plus the water your body needed to dissolve the waste products it excretes in urine .Urine isn't just made of water. Your kidneys constantly filter out a lot of salts and wastes from your blood which all contribute to urine. |
What prevents DNA from getting tangled? | Proteins! There are *many, many* proteins in your body that have a specific job of keeping your DNA tangled/condensed the perfect amount. There are topoisomerases, a family of proteins, that specifically twist/untwist your DNA to introduce/remove "supercoils" to condense it or expand it. There are some proteins like histones to which the DNA will almost always be attached. The histones kind of serve as a backbone for the DNA; a place for the DNA to organize itself. Of course, this is just the very basic level of proteins. There are many more proteins and ways to organize DNA. It's always proteins! |
Why does the tray in a microwave rotate? | Because there are hot and cooler spots due to the way the microwaves reflect around inside the oven. Rotating the food attempts to distribute the heat in the food more evenly. |
why child support is based on income rather than what a child would need monthly. | Child support is partially based on income. It is also partially based on the number of children and their age, the cost of basic living expenses and school in that general area, and whether or not any special needs are present. Which sometimes leads to a very high ratio, but that is also something that can happen when both parents live with their children; not all jobs pay a wage that covers a child's reasonable expenses. That doesn't mean those expenses don't occur though. |
How do blankets work? Why do they allow me to become warm even when the outside is cold? | your body makes heat. this warms the air around your skin. the blanket holds that air close to you. |
The different between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. | Shi'ites think that leadership in Islam should be hereditary, and that Imams more or less represent the authority of the founder through his bloodline. Sunnis think that leadership in Islam should be by some sort of democratic process, and you don't need to be a descendant of the founder to hold authority. It started out that way when the movement had to decide on how to continue after the death of its founder. Pretty soon, through in-fighting and because that is the way things go in a closely knit community, everybody and his uncle also had an opinion that would be forced upon the community. There is a Wikipedia article that goes into the various branches of islam in more detail: _URL_0_ |
Why did film become a synonym for movies when photography also used film? | It depends on the context, but I'll stick to your examples. People didn't view still photographs on photographic film. They needed to be printed on photographic paper. Slides are an exception, but they didn't get popular until later. Motion picture film is negative and printed onto another piece of film to make a positive for viewing via a projector. Many people view magnified motion picture film, but most people never view still photo negatives. This is may not be the etymology, but it makes sense, and that's what your looking for. |
The core beliefs of American political parties. | This is a difficult question, America is insanely vast. A Republican in New York is going to be much different from a republican in Texas. A democrat in California will be different from a democrat in Michigan. Any person that wants to run for major office with a likable chance of winning usually has to run under one of these two parties, recent example: Bernie Sanders. The idea is Republican is generally more conservative, pushing for no economic regulation but social restrictions. Democrats are generally more Liberal pushing for zero social regulation but economic and business restrictions.Republicans: Man is the best decider for himself. Society will be much more efficient if it is every man to himself within reason. So the smaller the govt the better, the less control the govt has the more freedom individual man enjoys. The govt is only there to enforce laws so we dont go full anarchy. Republicans also believe in traditionalism; men should be men; women should be women, everyone has a fixed role in society. Democrats: The govt is the parent of its citizen children. As such govt needs to be big, and stuffed with taxes so it can take care of its citizens. No fixed societal roles, people can be whatever they want, do whatever they want . People's needs are fulfilled by govt back institutions; IE Dept of Education, Welfare Dept, Dept of Health, Dept of Security, etc.The simplest I could put it is: Democrats: Government should make adjustments to the distribution of wealth and services for the well-being of the majority. Republicans: Government should do only what is necessary to encourage a fair playing field so individuals can create their own well-being. |
How do broadcasters sell and maximize advertising revenue during live sports when they don't know how many commercial breaks there will be? | For American football games they know within one or two how many breaks there will be. On between possessions they will radio down and stop lay during the break a "TV timeout" and a dude in a bright colored red or yellow jacket will come out and stand with the ref until it is time to resume playThey know roughly how many breaks there will be, and live events aren't ever actually broadcasted "live", there is always a few seconds to a few minutes delay both for purposes of censoring, postprocessing, and for inserting of advertisements. |
Why when we are sick/have an infection does our body temperature go up, as in a fever? | Many infections grow best at particularly precise temperatures. Your body raises your temperature as a defense mechanism, slowing down the reproduction of the infectious agent and giving your own defenses a chance to 'catch up'. At the same time it enhances the ability of some of your body's defenders to move around more actively in their war. |
Why do real almonds not taste like almond paste/flavoring? | The almond flavour you taste in almond paste, marzipan and so forth comes from an aromatic called benzaldehyde. This is found in *bitter* almonds, which also have a fairly hefty amount of cyanide; the latter is removed during the extraction of the benzaldehyde. The almonds you eat in nut form are *sweet* almonds, which contain a much lower level of benzaldehyde, and, luckily enough, cyanide as well. Benzaldehyde is also present in apricots, cherries, and peaches, which is why they all have similar taste profiles. |
Why haven't people as a whole adapted to the cold? We have adpated to the sun by the pigment in our skin changing colour depending on your exposure to sunlight. | Human's primary form of adaptation is the use of technology. So we have adapted to the cold by inventing insulated shelter, controlling fire, and making clothing.We grew intelligent enough to skin other warmer animals and wear their hides over our own.For the same reason we can't fly like a bird. The compromises necessary to adapt to freezing temperatures cost in other areas so much that they are not evolutionary advantages. Cold, like flying, is something humans handle through their giant brains, social cooperation, and most excellent technology. It's a feature. |
When I swallow a pill, why is there sometimes a heavy feeling in the back of my throat? | I used to get that feeling a lot when I first started taking my daily pills. Turns out I wasn't getting the pill "stuck" in my throat exactly, but I was not swallowing them with enough water. When someone swallows pills without proper salivation or lubricant the object can "scrape" itself on the back of your throat, leaving you with that heavy and sometimes painful feeling that doesn't go away for a while. It may feel like it's lodged in there, which could be possible, but it's most likely just pain from the pills contact. Long story short, always drink water before and with pills.I get pills stuck in my esophagus a lot. Could that be what you're experiencing? It kinda feels like what you're describing imo.I don't know if this is it, but I always assumed it was an "afterfeeling" of the pill going down. Similar to if you pinch or flick yourself, you "feel" it for a while[Globus hystericus]? You might have acid reflux. ELI5: Your throat may be inflamed from stomach acid. You are feeling its sensitivity when you swallow. |
Why is Reddit valued at "only" ~$1.8 billion, when less popular sites (e.g. Twitter) are worth many times more? | Reddit isn't publicly traded , so speculation can't inflate the value of the company like Twitter or Tesla. A company is basically worth how much people are willing to pay for shares of it, but you can't buy shares in Reddit yet. It's also not profitable, yet, which doesn't help. |
How can there be a sex wage gap in the US if we've had the Equal Pay Law since 1960? | There's a bit of a misconception about the wage gap. For jobs in the exact same role with the exact same responsibilities, the wages are about the same. However, men tend to be more likely to be promoted to higher-paying positions. Women are also more likely than men to take extended time off or work part time while raising a family, meaning their careers are held back during that time.I read the reason women today get paid less isn't because of gender discrimination, it's because women are less likely to give up other benefits, such as vacation time, and they're more likely to accept or seek part time work instead of fulltime. But when you take those facts out and just look at numbers, you get "women make less than their colleagues" I don't know how true that is, but it sounds plausible to me.Isn't the wage gap mostly a myth? Most women tend to not take dangerous jobs and are more likely to work part time because they want to start families. I work at a hospital, the ceo is very highly paid woman and everyone is paid equally for same work. If this was really true you would see companies with a mostly female workforce and less payroll overhead. But as far as I know that doesn't really exist. Note: there are always exceptions to everything. |
Why are sunglasses universally considered "cool"? | people use their eyes to communicate their level of comfort/aggression/submission with one another. shades will remove this information and allow others to fill in the blanks. for example, you might be avoiding eye contact, but because of your sunglasses this does not register with people and you seem undeservingly "cool" |
How To Turn an Extra Wireless Router into a Wireless Extender | You may be better off in one of the tech subreddits . However, I have done this before with a Linksys router. Find out if one of the popular 3rd party firmwares or [Tomato]) will work on your router. Then find a guide online to help you set it up as a repeater. Make sure you read all instructions carefully, because you can brick your router if you are not careful when updating the firmware. |
What is the difference between quality sushi and regular sushi? | Fresh vs. Frozen - was it alive this morning? The Chef's reputation and experience - you're buying his car! The ambience isn't free, if you're having sushi at a Chinese buffet, it's mostly fake crab and Thai illegal immigrants doing the work. The exact kind of fish! You're not going to find supermarket fish at the Sushi-is-us hole in the wall. If you want the whole range of selection, you need the real Sushi Bar.Related issue is that the terms sushi grade or sashimi grade are a little misleading. They **do not** relate to the freshness of the fish. It just means the fish has been frozen below a specified temperatures for a certain duration to kill parasites. |
Why do American cities often have to take large public transport projects such as light rail and metro system to the voters but don't have to do the same for massive highway and road construction? | Large road projects usually exist to keep the existing road network running, or to improve its relation to the rest of the city. Bridges need to be retrofitted, underpasses capped, tarmac replaced. They may be big projects, but they're really necessary to keep the system functioning like it is. A major public transportation network is an entirely new investment. If you don't do it, you don't it--there's no downside other than that you don't have the network. A comparable project would be the construction of an entirely new highway link , which is rare and nowadays often put to voters as well. Of note is that many major highway projects were initiated in a time when referendums for transportation were not as common. |
How come bluetooth is so much slower than Wi-Fi? | Bluetooth is designed to be short-range very low-power for small portable equipment. Part of the power-savings of Bluetooth come from diminished bandwidth . One could speed up Bluetooth to Wi-Fi speeds, but then it would defeat the purpose of BT's major design feature. If you're looking for something that works like plunging a cable between devices but has Wi-Fi speeds, you might like wireless USB: _URL_0_ |