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{ "a_id": [ "dbwnqt9", "dbwn88b", "dbwst39" ], "text": [ "There were once some smart guys that realized that math problems that can be solved by humans can also be solved by machines if we can come up with some kind of sequence of steps to tell the machine what to do to carry out the computation. This set of instructions is called an algorithm. Church-Turing relates computability (i.e. the potential for a problem to be solved by a machine) to the properties of the machine and the underlying algorithms that the computer is operating on. Specifically the machine must satisfy these conditions: a) it must support abstract assignment of numbers and b) it must support bounded AND potentially unbounded iteration. Basically this means that you can tell the computer what symbols represent what (like saying \"x = 3\") and you can tell it to do something over and over until some condition is met (like saying \"while x is TRUE: do y\"). If a machine supports these physical functions it is called a Turing machine. If a programming language supports programming this kind of behavior, it is called Turing complete. Today, we take it for granted that all computers are basically Turing machines and all languages are Turing complete. I say basically a Turing machine because a Turing machine is a math model for a real computer. A Turing machine is not constrained by run time or memory bounds (which real computers are). Now the deeper, philosophical implications of Church-Turing is that it goes both ways, meaning that not only can any algorithm on the natural numbers be programmed for execution on a Turing machine, but humans *can only discover algorithms that could be executed by a Turing machine*. It makes a lot of sense, because you basically can't describe an algorithm to another person, or even yourself, without assuming some basic formalities on how the steps will be executed. Church-Turing outlines these basic formalities and relates it to the physical properties of a machine that is designed to solve any math problem. Hope this answer is good. My understanding of this thesis comes from my CS minor and the book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglass Hofstadter. I highly recommend that book if you're interested in computation and its relation to human activities and philosophy. It really is a gem of non-fiction. edit: Forgot to mention the Turing test. The test is supposed to be the benchmark for a computer being indistinguishable from a human. However, we have built machines that pass the Turing test (at least on some samples) that are most certainly not intelligent. You can look up the rules for The Turing test, but modern computer scientists don't really take it seriously anymore because we've realized that the rules for the test are much too lenient to really serve as an identifier of an intelligent machine.", "The Church-Turing thesis is a proof of what computability is. It basically says that if you can write a program to do something, that program can be written as a Turing Machine and as the 'Lamda-Calculus'. Both the Turing Machine and the lamda-calculus are not particularly useful for actually computing stuff because they are sort of just mathematical constructs, but it is important to be able to ground computability in math. It also says that there are certain tasks that computers are incapable of solving, but that's a bit more minor. The Turing test is a completely different thing that deals with knowing whether or not an AI is actually intelligent, or, at least how good it is at pretending to be a human. I'm happy to go into more detail about either of those things if you would like.", "The Church-Turing thesis says that if a computer has certain basic properties (defined as Turing machine), it is capable of computing anything that can be computed. Given sufficient time and resources, your phone can do anything a network of supercomputers can. The Turing Test is something completely different. Turing posited that if a computer's responses were indistinguishable from a human's, that could be taken as sign of innate intelligence. Note that the Turing Test is **extremely** misunderstood. It is not some sort of threshold to intelligence. When computers first started to be useful, there was a philosophical question whether or not machines could think. People offered all sort of objections to the notion, computers were not conscious, computers had no souls, computers could not be creative, computers cold not learn, etc. In his landmark 1950 paper, *Computing Machinery and Intelligence*, Turing used the Turing Test as sort of a thought experiment to help dismantle these objections. He never intended it to be any sort of rigorous test of a computers capabilities. In fact, today the test is less about a computer's ability, and more about human psychology." ], "score": [ 21, 20, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwo4bp", "dbwnna1", "dbwnyok" ], "text": [ "They are still a company that sells stuff. Wikipedia shows that in 2013 they have $840.6M in revenue. URL_0 $5,000 a week is only $260,000 a year, which is a tiny amount for them and cheap advertising.", "Do people actually win these? Or do they just fake it for publicity?", "The chances of winning the top sweepstakes with PCH are about 1 and 200,000,000. So the company generally sells merchandise, as well as what people know them for historically, magazines. Only 1 in 200,000,000 applicants will win $5,000 per a week for forever, but enough of the rest of those people purchased things that the profit for PCH is high enough that the single contestant winner means nothing. PCH is \"free to play\" but it relies on people purchasing things, and extremely unlikely winner odds." ], "score": [ 13, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Clearing_House" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwphnr", "dbwpigz" ], "text": [ "Credit cards are like small monthly loans. If you pay off the full balance of the card each month, you do not pay interest at all. This is the \"best\" way to use a credit card. Credit cards hurt you when you do not have the self control to only put on the card what you can afford to pay off at the end of the month. If you carry a balance (only pay some of it off each month), you get charged a VERY high interest rate. This is where people fall in to traps... they put thousands of dollars on the card when they can only afford to pay a few hundred dollars each month. You can easily build credit doing the following: Get a no-yearly-fee credit card and only put a tiny amount of money on it. Maybe 1 tank of gas per month. Pay off the entire credit card each month. Finance a car that you can easily afford; make every payment on time and never miss or be late on one. After a few years, your credit will be respectable.", "Generally if you pay off the full amount you owe, each month when the bill arrives, you won't be charged any interest. It's only when you leave something unpaid on your account until the next month that you start to get charged interest. In case you're wondering how they make any money if you always pay off everything immediately: they charge the seller a fee of 2-4 percent of the transaction when you buy with a credit card." ], "score": [ 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwsdt3" ], "text": [ "This is usually through muscle inflammation; inflammation damages the fibers of a muscle. This causes muscles to be weak by interfering with the ability of the muscles to contract." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwt4wy", "dbwstu6" ], "text": [ "As you know, for mammals in preparation for pregnancy, the womb is covered with a layer of lining. In most mammals, if pregnancy does not happen, this lining is absorbed completely (and thus, most mammals don't have periods). However in humans, while a good portion of it is absorbed, some also gets shed leading to a period. The difference most likely comes down to pregnancy / the behaviour of our embryos. Human embryos are unusually aggressive. In most mammals, the embryo barely attaches to the wall of the uterus / rest against it. In humans however, the embryo actually implants and burrows very deeply into the wall of the uterus, wanting to get as many nutrients as possible. It is thought that humans therefore evolved a thicker lining of the uterus to protect against this behaviour. It's part of the balancing act between mother and unborn child, trying to strike the right balance where the embryo gets enough nutrients to grow, but the woman also can continue to thrive. As a side-effect of having that thicker lining though, it becomes harder for us to completely break it down and reabsorb it. And as such, humans evolved the behaviour to actually shed that which cannot be reabsorbed. Another thing that might play a role is the fact that among the animals that do menstruate (humans and other primates, certain species of bats, elephant shrews) at least for humans and several other primate species, we know that pregnancy often ends in early miscarriages. A huge number of pregnancies actually end before the woman even realises she is pregnant because there is something wrong with the embryo. Now the thought is that the thicker lining of the uterus might also play a role in helping the body get rid of embryos that are incompatible with life. After all, in humans and primate especially, we have very few children and our children have both a long gestation period as well as a long period of parental care. It is in the best interest to birth children that are as healthy as possible.", "There are a few hypotheses about why humans do this more so than any other menstruating mammal. It could be to help flush out any miscarriages that may otherwise get stuck inside the uterus (humans appear to have a very high miscarriage rate compared to other animals due to chromosomal abnormalities), or the result of an arms race between the embryo wanting to burrow into the mother's blood vessels to get more nutrients and her body wanting to keep a distance between the two in case something goes wrong with the pregnancy. The thick uterine lining, in that case, would be a protective barrier between the mother and the embryo. [More info]( URL_0 ), though this source is not very layman friendly" ], "score": [ 9, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3528014/" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx4wcz" ], "text": [ "When we drink alcohol we are pretty much putting a poison inside of our body. So our body will often get rid of that alcohol either by peeing a lot and/or vomiting. This causes a type of dehydration called hypovolemic thirst, which is when our body is not only low in water but also a low sodium count. So after a hard night of drinking, your body is going to be craving salt and water. And fatty foods (bacon, chips etc) typically have high amounts of sodium. That's why bars typically have pretzels or other salty foods available as snacks so that the hangover the next day won't be as harsh. That's also why drinks with electrolytes (Gatorade) are great to cure a hangover." ], "score": [ 15 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwv9yi", "dbwuz0h", "dbwvsz3", "dbwv237" ], "text": [ "The biggest reason is that they were shooting ridiculously huge \"minie-ball\" ammunition that would absolutely destroy bone as it passed through the body. They had no way to repair this damage. On top of it, antiseptics and antibiotics were limited (at best) and the sheer volume of patients meant it was impossible to take the time necessary to meaningful surgery. You can read more here: URL_0", "Because medical technology was not advanced enough to repair shattered bones and shredded blood vessels. The most effective way to save the life was to remove the severely injured limb.", "Not just the civil war, but in the times previous to that -- when you have major damage to a limb, but medical technology hasn't progressed to the point where you can repair an artery, then you have to amputate the limb or else the person will bleed to death.", "This was before antibiotics and germ theory, so the only way to stop gangrene was to cut off the affected limb. A new type of bullet, the Minnie ball, also caused more grievous wound." ], "score": [ 28, 12, 7, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.ncpedia.org/history/cw-1900/amputations" ], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwy36y", "dbwwxk4", "dbx0wb0" ], "text": [ "Falsifiability is a property of a statement about the world. It was proposed by Karl Popper as a way to tell scientific statements from metaphysical statements. If a statement is falsifiable, it is part of science. If it is not, it is not. That doesn't mean it's wrong or stupid, it just means it's not science. So specifically what it means is, if there is no way to tell if a statement is _false_, then it's not part of science. That doesn't mean you have to be able to prove it false, of course — many true things are falsifiable. But it means there must be a way to \"test\" it, and specifically to test it by proving it _wrong_. Let's go with a concrete example. Here is a statement about the world: \"There is an invisible, undetectable unicorn that keeps the Sun shining.\" If this were true, I would note, the Sun would shine. I look into the sky and lo and behold, the Sun is shining! And lo, I can come up with an experiment: if I shout out, \"unicorn O unicorn, make the Sun shine tomorrow!\", you will see the Sun shine tomorrow. Ah, but what if you _don't_ shout that out? Well the unicorn loves us and the Sun so he'll keep shining anyway, but I think he's probably sad to not hear his name. Great, says Popper. That's a statement for why the Sun shines, to be sure. But your only evidence is about proving it _true_. It's not science unless there is something you can do to prove it _false_. In this situation there is no way to disprove the statement — if I call to the unicorn, the Sun shines, if I don't, the Sun shines. This statement cannot really be tested, and the fact that all visible evidence seems to align with the theory does not mean a damned thing, because you can come up with an infinite number of theories that fit the evidence _if_ they are not falsifiable. And so this is why this matters. You can always come up with theories that fit any evidence with exceptions. What matters to Popper are places where you've really put it to the test. So if instead I say, well, my unicorn _requires_ me to sing to it every day... I can test that by not singing to it. \"The Sun only rises because a unicorn gets sun to every day, and wouldn't rise if nobody sang to it\" is a totally falsifiable, and thus scientific, statement. It happens to be testably _wrong_. But that's not what Popper cares about. Let's take a less silly example: \"large amounts of mass can bend the direction that light travels.\" This was a consequence of what Einstein argued with his General Relativity theory. Pretty cool statement. Is it falsifiable? Yes — you can do experiments (the first involved photographing stars near the Sun during a total solar eclipse) to see if it's true. If the stars are where Einstein predicted they'd be — then the statement is judged a true one. If they aren't, then Einstein is wrong. Either way, it's still falsifiable, so it's science. Popper developed this approach because at the time a lot of people thought the key distinguishing factor between science and non-science was that they made statements about evidence (\"verificationism\"). Popper saw a lot of things that made statements about evidence that didn't look to him like science. Freudianism was high on his list: Popper thought they were essentially non-falsifiable. Freudians said their model of the mind was correct because their patients got better. If patients didn't get better, it was the patients' fault, or maybe the analyst, but never the model of the mind. The model could never be tested in a way that the Freudians thought would prove it wrong — so to Popper, whatever its value, it wasn't science. It is worth noting that this isn't a perfect way to distinguish science from non-science, and the usefulness of falsifiability is considered somewhat limited. There are lots of sub-issues that come up if you pry into it, like, what if it's only _hypothetically_ falsifiable (e.g. it requires all of the energy in the universe to test), or what if it's just not _yet_ falsifiable, and so on. The fact that String Theory is not falsifiable (as of yet, anyway) has led a lot of scientists to declare that falsifiability is only partially useful — you can make of that what you will.", "You have to be able to prove something is false to be able to prove it's true. Example A: I say that I can run faster than you. We race. I either beat you, or you beat me in the race. That is falsifiable because you could prove that I cannot run faster than you. Example B: I say that God is real. There is no way for me to prove that is correct. But, there is no way to prove that I'm incorrect. All we can do is debate, but nobody can prove anything.", "Example: I claim that there is always a hitler standing behind you that disappears when observed. Can you disprove this claim? Well, no, I covered my ass by saying that I'm right and that any time you check, it will disappear. Does this mean that my \"Schrodinger's Hitler\" hypothesis should be taken as fact? No, because there's no condition under which it is false and therefore is not falsifiable. Let's try again: I claim that there is a hitler in your bathroom right now. Can you disprove this claim? Yes, you could check your bathroom for Nazi leaders. If you check your bathroom and find a Führer, then we have evaluated the falsifiable parameter and have therefore established that this claim is true. If there is no hitler, then we reject your hypothesis. Falsifiability is so important because it allows us to clearly distinguish between what reality looks like when a claim is true and when a claim is false. If you cannot tell any difference, then your claim is ultimately pointless. Say that there really is a hitler behind you at all times that no one can observe. Why does it matter if it doesn't influence the world? How is it any different from the world without a hitler behind you?" ], "score": [ 8, 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwwyrc", "dbwxglq" ], "text": [ "Trade agreements, negotiation of travel between boarders, military cooperation, cultural study, national security advisory....", "Diplomats are points of contact for official communication between countries, and are of particular importance in making agreements between governments. If you had a king for example the king isn't going to visit a neighboring country in order to discuss trade arrangements. They would send a representative who is well-spoken and delegated a certain amount of authority to negotiate the agreements on behalf of the king. Communication would otherwise have taken far too long. These days diplomats basically do the same sort of thing." ], "score": [ 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwz4pe", "dbwz75n" ], "text": [ "The flavours you mention all have one thing in common: sourness. Ketchup, all dressed and dill pickle are all vinegary flavours and sour/vinegar is not a flavour element that's very popular in American cuisine with a few notable exceptions (certain bbq sauces for example). Salt & vinegar or malt vinegar is extreeeeeeeeeeemely popular in the UK/Ireland, as are all things pickled. The American taste tends to run more towards sweet and salty.", "It all comes down to taste. Those flaming hot cheetos don't do so well in Scandinavia generally, and many Asian countries don't think much of cheese in general. Every country has its own preferred flavor profiles" ], "score": [ 8, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbwzs7l", "dbx000u" ], "text": [ "They would continue in a \"straight\" line from their current trajectory. Away from the former position of the planet.", "THERE'S ONE EVERY SEASON! Anyways. So all the astronauts and the space station are circling earth, because they're moving at some 17000 mph or something ridiculous. At this speed, the earth's gravity is attracting them, curving their travel towards the earth, but at that speed, as fast as the earth's gravity well can accelerate them towards earth, their velocity matches, so objects continue to \"miss\" the earth. aka stable orbit. Now take the earth away. Now the orbiting object/astronauts have a velocity of 17,000 mph in a random direction. Depending on what direction its travelling in when the earth gets zapped to Planet Music, this could be towards the sun, into Jupiter, out of the solar system, who knows*. Long story short they wouldn't immediately die, but they'd be flung so far away from Earth (when it wins Planet Music) that getting them back would be impossible and eventually they'd run out of air, food etc.. \\* should point out that the object would not only have its 17,000 mph vector from its orbit around the earth, but it would also have the Earth's 18.5 mile/s speed around the sun. So.... fast." ], "score": [ 8, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx4vol", "dbx31i7" ], "text": [ "Eggs harden due to proteins. The proteins before heating are folded in the shape of balls, and these balls flow pass each other very easily (thus it can act like a liquid). But once you heat the proteins up, the balls unfold, and these protein strands now entangle one another, thus making the egg act like a solid. Vegetables are hard due to the pectin, starch, and/or hemicellulose (a type of carbohydrate) that's in them. When you heat veggies up, those molecules break down and dissolve into the water, weakening the the cell walls. Chefs can prevent this breakdown by adding acid to the water as hemicellulous can't dissolve in acid as easily. Source: URL_0 URL_1", "Eggs harden because of how the proteins react to heat. I'm sure someone here will give a better explanation, but cooking vegetables breaks down/weakens the cell walls and releases a lot of their liquids, while cooking eggs causes their proteins to change and denature." ], "score": [ 12, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=19991", "http://www.thekitchn.com/food-science-why-vegetables-so-112255" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx2hxp" ], "text": [ "Melons are the cheapest fruits for the same amount of volume. Filling the side of a plate with berries would cost the restaurant around a dollar. Filling it with melon costs them about 10 cents. Fresh pineapple is somewhere in-between." ], "score": [ 41 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx2yp1", "dbx3bpy" ], "text": [ "never seen this in the movies, and this would not be true in real life. think of aloha air flight 243. a huge chunk of the cabin skin peeled off, instantly depresurizng it. it landed safely.", "There is nothing about depressurization itself that would cause a plane to crash. As another commenter noted, planes have landed safely even after violent depressurization. However, there is the possibility that depressurization will cause the plane to crash for a couple reasons. First, if the pilots do not get on supplemental oxygen before losing consciousness, there will be no one to fly the plane and it will eventually crash. See [Helios Flight 522]( URL_0 ). Second, very fast depressurization can be a violent event - it is often called \"explosive decompression\" for a reason. The forces from explosive decompression can damage the plane enough to make it crash. For example, in 1954 this brought down two [de Havilland Comets]( URL_1 ), which had flawed windows." ], "score": [ 10, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx529r", "dbx3emv" ], "text": [ "You are thinking of your operating system being frozen. YOu might have windows. This is a layer of 'computer'. But you can do a fun experiment. Disconnect your hard drive. Turn on your computer. You will then find a whole level of 'computer' that exists beneath your operating system (OS). It is running something called firmware. So from that point it can still do lots of things. One of the things it does when you turn your computer on is to start your OS, if it can find it. So when your OS is frozen, holding down the power button is just sending a message to your BIOS to shut down. That is why you don't usually want to do it when your OS is running. It completely bypasses the OS and doesn't let it do any of the things your OS likes to do when you turn off your computer.", "The hardware power button is probably tied to the system's bios or low-level firmware. This is basically a small separate computer. Tapping the power button passes that event to the main computer's OS, which does whatever it wants to do. But the firmware/BIOS is what's in the position to *actually start or cut the power*, so if you hold the button it's setup to interperet that as a \"pull the plug\" signal." ], "score": [ 12, 9 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx45s4", "dbx3qjg" ], "text": [ "Lego blocks have many different sizes. So let's say the smallest piece the machines can make is a 2x8 brick. You can only fit so many of those on a big flat plate. That's your 500 mb stick. Now technology improves and the machines get better and can now make 2x2 bricks. You can now fit 4 times as many on the same big plate. This would like a 2gb stick. Miniaturization and better computing power to control the machines now allows them to reliably make 1x1 Lego bricks. You can now stick 4 times as many on our big plate. This is a 8 gb USB. Tldr. Better machines that make machines that make smaller machines that make faster machines cause production to be faster, cheaper, and better every generation. When applying this to computers, where every 2 or so years is a generation, everything is obsolete faster and faster.", "There's a few things, but one big change how small we can actually build the parts that sit on that chip. In the 1970s, the transistors on embedded circuits were 10 micrometers across. That's **tiny**. But by 2004, we'd hit 90 nanometers. To save you the conversion that's 9,910 nanometers smaller. In 2016 year Samsung hit 14nm across, and will probably be able to do 10 in 2017. The result is that since we can build stuff even more ridiculously tiny-er-er, we can start to squeeze a lot of the same basic structures that make up memory circuits and the like into smaller spaces, which means we can fit a lot more **of** them onto one chip." ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx6gsy" ], "text": [ "Hunger is caused by a region in your brain called the hypothalamus, which regulates many different types of involuntary activities. The hypothalamus makes you feel full or hungry based on chemical hormone signals, nerve signals, and the type of food we last ate (more or less satiated for longer). Nerve signals from the stomach and small intestine detect pressure changes (distended or empty). Ghrelin stimulates secretion of neuropeptide Y which causes people to feel hungry; gherlin is released two hours after people eat and is associated with insulin levels." ], "score": [ 15 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx4rvo", "dbx5hsk", "dbxvvbl", "dbxq5um", "dbxwp3t", "dbxs7m5", "dby5o3o", "dbxvndq" ], "text": [ "It depends on the 'poison' you're talking about. A lot of toxicity in humans is caused not by the chemical itself, but by what the liver breaks it down into. For example, ethanol(drinking alcohol) is converted to acetaldehyde in the liver while isopropanol(rubbing alcohol) is converted to acetone. One of these(ethanol) is 'relatively' safe for us to consume. The other is fatal in pretty small doses", "I can't seem to find a source for deer being able to consume rodotoxin because they don't have a gall bladder or anything relating toxicity to the gall bladder... But the toxicity is due to \" an inability to inactivate neural sodium ion channels resulting in continuous increased vagal tone\". This mechanism is the same in humans and animals, and since I don't see a relation to the gall bladder I'm going to say yes it would still be toxic.", "Sorry what? A gall bladder has nothing to do with it. The reason why certain animals don't have gall bladders is generally their dietary habits - hind gut fermenting animals that are grazers don't all have a gall bladder (horses for example). The gall bladder stores bile created by the liver and discharges into the small intestine. Animals without a gall bladder (and I assume people too) still create bile it just doesn't get stored - it trickles into the small intestine at a more constant rate. I'm a vet so not 100% on the human aspects.", "Hmm, in the Army I was taught \"if a deer can eat it, so can you,\" as a survival trick. So this is false?", "Due to us being omnivores, we have a gallbladder to store bile. Bile helps to break down fat when we eat meat and other fatty foods. That is its one and only purpose. It doesn't have any relation to poisons or the ability or inability to process chemicals in the body.", "What does that gall bladder have to do with poison? Isn't that the liver?", "Gallbladder has nothing to do with breaking down toxins, it's sole purpose is to store and concentrate bile that was made in the liver (though some waste products are excreted in bile). Toxin management is the liver's job (and to some degree the kidneys). If it's true that deer can eat poisonous plants it's because they have a specific enzyme that is able to break the toxins down. Different animals have adapted to eat different things, e.g. termites can digest cellulose because their gut has cellulase which breaks it into more simple sugars, humans cannot (we just poop it out - which is why fiber is good for constipation - it stays in your gut and pulls water in to keep your stool hydrated/flowing). If you had you're gallbladder out, don't try eating poison...you're gonna have a bad time. Source: I'm a people doctor.", "I just had my gallbladder out; following this thread to discover if I have a new superpower. Pls say yes." ], "score": [ 441, 74, 43, 41, 12, 8, 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx8hha" ], "text": [ "Some people know who he is, it's just not publicly released. Valve employees know his real identity as does his family and close friends, but at Icefrog's request, they don't reveal who he is. Like how White House officials know who the secret service agents are, and their families probably know somewhat, but for obvious reasons, this isn't revealed to the public at large." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx71ib" ], "text": [ "Time division multiple access. Each user gets a time period on that frequency to talk and no one else is allowed to use it during that time period. If you split a second into 100 chunks then each person gets a 10 millisecond window to transmit a second's worth of data for clean audio. There's loads of multiple access techniques. Code division multiple access CDMA, space division SDMA, frequency FDMA and time TDMA :)" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx8glt", "dbxh259", "dbxc1ay" ], "text": [ "There is no one answer. Military strategy changes based on many factors including political strategy, as you noted the environment, and the opponent's strengths and weaknesses. You take all of those into account and develop your strategy for a particular encounter (and by encounter I mean anything from a battle to an entire war). For a layman's perspective on US military, I'd suggest Tom Clancy's postmortems of Gulf War I such as Battle Ready, Into the Storm, and Every Man A Tiger. ( URL_0 ) They are getting a little old, but they do share a lot about the strategy and are easy to read. Then if you want to get into real strategy text (I've tried a couple times to read these, but never gotten through them), the big ones in the field are On War by Clausewitz and The Art of War by Sun Tzu.", "Different militaries have different strategies based on their local culture, size of the armed forces, type of equipment they have, budget and national goals. For example ISIS will have a very different strategy from the US military and from the Ethiopian military. Too vague a question, try to narrow your focus and make a new post.", "As someone earlier said, their is no one size fits all on strategy, on the more basic level as a soldier one important acronym that is used to help decide what course of action to take is METT-TC which stands for Mission, Enemy, Troops, Terrain, Time, and Civilian considerations. These factors, can essentially be used to help formulate most any strategy but, of course, Murphy's law states that what can go wrong will go wrong and this is especially true of military strategy, this is why good leaderships is considered one of the fundamental bedrocks to the military because the expect them to be able to use come up with decisions on the fly without exactly clear and perfect information. This is true from the lowliest of soldiers all the way up to the commander in chief of our military." ], "score": [ 4, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.tomclancy.com/tom_clancy_books_nonfiction.php" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx5pbg", "dbx5u4g" ], "text": [ "You start dying. Your lings fill with fluid without a drug to counteract this which is a major part of the plot of a good movie on HBO. Is it Everest?", "You'll experience hypoxia due to lack of oxygen. You'll become delusional, experience muscle fatigue, difficulty breathing, tingling of extremities, lightheadedness. If you're not acclimated to oxygen levels at high altitudes you'll certainly pass out. After a while you will experience irreversible brain damage due to lack of oxygen reaching the brain. If you aren't treated, and especially in the extreme cold, you will die after some time." ], "score": [ 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx6w1p", "dbx74uk" ], "text": [ "Because we use the decimal system and those numbers are divisible by 10. This creates a regular pattern 2, 4, 6... ...12,14,16 and 5, 10, 15, 20 etc. Counting 7's has a less obvious pattern than that.", "The 2x and 5x series will create a repeating pattern in the ones digit column of any number. i.e. 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 ... (see how 2, 4, 6 repeat) and likewise 10, 15, 20, 25, ... (either 0 or 5 repeating). This repetition does not exist in the 7x and 8x series. They go 14, 21, 28, 35 and 16, 24, 32 (no repetitions in either). Yes the cycle will eventually repeat but it won't happen until 91 for 7x and 56 for 8x. Those patterns are just longer and harder for the brain to do rapid fire." ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxal91", "dbxntm2", "dbxavfy", "dbxineg", "dbxcx1k", "dbxh7lg", "dbxshp4", "dbxacdb" ], "text": [ "Assuming by \"asleep\" you mean the prickly / tingly feeling, that's actually your nerve being cut off and your brain partially losing connection to the nerve endings in that limb. Next time it happens, poke the limb with your hand. You'll notice the sense of touch in the sleeping limb is muted or sometimes even gone entirely. Long term, this isn't very likely to cause any harm - if you've ever woken up in an odd position and lose all feeling and control over one arm or something, it's the same thing, pinching off a nerve, but you held that position possibly for hours because you were asleep. Now as for actually pinching off the flow of blood, that can definitely do damage. I think some cells in your body don't need oxygen, but most of them do, including muscles and skin, which are literally everywhere in or on your body. So if you pinch the blood off of a limb, all the cells that need oxygen would starve and eventually die. I don't know exactly how long it would take but considering it only takes a few minutes of oxygen deprivation for permanent brain damage to be likely, it would probably be measured in minutes.", "Check out \"Saturday Night Palsy\". This can happen if you fall asleep with your arm over a chair and don't move it through the night. So the nerve running down your arm is squeezed for a long time. Imagine a frayed telephone cord- the message isn't traveling from your brain to your hand (muscle control) or from your hand to your brain (sensory) This can cause loss of feeling, loss of movement, or hand deformities from muscle wasting as the nerve can't feel messages from your hand and can't communicate messages to the muscles in your hand. There's a sheath around nerves and then the nerve itself, depending on how damaged the sheath is or if damage is done to the nerve itself you can have different degrees of damage. Recovery time depends on the level of damage. Recovery of 6-8 weeks: neuropraxia. Recovery of several months: axonotmesis. Nope: neurotmesis. Edit: I think the lack of blood flow causes damage from cell death", "Hard to ELI5 this, but here we go: Many things happen when your nerves are starved for oxygen and none of them are good and it gets worse the more starved they are. This happens when their blood flow is interrupted. 'falling asleep' is the lowest thing on this list and is the most neutral for your nerves - its not painful and goes away in seconds to minutes. The nerves recover quickly and go about their business. Basically the signal they send goes all wonky when they are initially starved and then get oxygen again when pressure is released (sensory - signal going up to brain). They are also hard to move (motor - signal going down to limb). more severely, we have [neuropathy]( URL_0 ) which has symptoms similar to 'falling asleep' but can become permanent and hurt more than 'falling asleep'. If starvation is nearly complete and goes for a long time, the nerves can die (actually the starved, and therefore damaged, axons of the neurons degenerate - the neuron cell bodies themselves survive in all but the worst cases) which can take months to repair in a good case or never in a really bad case. This entire process is an active area of research. to answer the second part: hours to days depending on how complete the constriction is", "Fell asleep on my arm on a plane, compressed the nerve and had a floppy wrist for the next 5 months, can confirm 'the stranger' was the most commonly used joke haha.", "Depends on how long the nerve is compressed. For example, Saturday night palsy is from falling asleep with your nerve compressed. Effects can last for weeks to months if you're unlucky. URL_0 has a good article on the issue.", "In limb surgery, the maximum safe tourniquet time is 2 hours. Most surgeons believe anything longer causes some level of permanent tissue damage in the blood-starved tissue.", "it's not from a loss of bloodflow. a limb falling asleep is caused by nerve signals being lost to the affected area. on its own, it's harmless. atrophy would occur if it persisted for a truly absurd length of time. far more likely is that the cause of the limb falling asleep has other effects that are far more dangerous. constant pressure to a small area, a joint held in a stressful position, etc. these things can cause damage on their own if they persist for extended periods, regardless of your limb being asleep or not.", "it's not a lack of blood, it's pinching a nerve and keeping it that way can do permanent harm." ], "score": [ 266, 40, 19, 10, 8, 5, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [ "http://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/neuropathy" ], [], [ "http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=21035" ], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbx8j5f", "dbx8fi2" ], "text": [ "What determines it: Genes. Your blood type is dependent on both parents, although the details get a little weird. Basically, blood types represent little bits of stuff sticking off of your red blood cells, which your immune system can interpret. Think of it like a bunch of ID badges or uniforms. If your immune cells recognize your stuff as friendly, it's all good; if not, your immune system attacks and destroys the cell. The important point is that your immune system is ready to attack whatever you DON'T have on your own cells. There are actually dozens of different things sticking off red blood cells, but the only ones we really care about are the AB system and the Rh system (the positive or negative part.) If you have the A thing only, you're type A. If you have the B thing only, you're type B. If you have both, you're AB; neither, you're O. The Rh system is another thing, and you either have it (positive) or you don't (negative.) Combine this all together, and you can be A+, B-, AB-, O+, whatever. Whatever you DON'T have on your cells, you make antibodies against, because it's foreign and weird. So, if you're A+, you make anti-B antibodies. If you're B-, you make anti-A and anti-Rh antibodies. If you're O-, you make antibodies against everything. If you're AB+, you don't make any antibodies. This gets important for blood transfusions, since you can only get blood you won't destroy. O- blood can be given to anyone since it has nothing offensive on it, while people with AB+ blood can receive any type.", "Blood type is determined by genetics, but is slightly different than dominant/recessive traits because it can be co-dominant (that's how you ended up AB). People that are A would have either AA or Ai (for some reason O is i in Punnett squares). People that are B are either BB or Bi, people that are AB are exactly that- AB, and people that are O are ii. Whatever blood type you are, is the kind of ANTIGEN you express on your red blood cells. You're AB so you express A and B antigens. You also have no antibodies in your plasma (in terms of blood antibodies, not bacteria/viruses). People with A blood type have B antibodies (so they would attack B type blood if they received a transfusion). People with B type blood have A antibodies. People with O blood have A and B antibodies (why O can only receive blood from other O's, and why AB can receive from anyone). As to positive or negative, that again comes down to genetics. It's called rh factor, and it's also an antigen that is expressed on the surface of red blood cells. Your parents are either both positive or one of each, but they absolutely are not both negative. This means your parents could be any multitude of combinations (AA+, AA-, Ai+, Ai-, BB+, BB-, Bi+, Bi- OR both AB+). Positive and negative doesn't really have any impact on you, AB+ is known as the universal receiver, literally anyone in the world can donate blood to you!" ], "score": [ 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxbasj", "dbxdrol" ], "text": [ "Because it's cheap (in that they don't have to maintain this data themselves) and easy (because Facebook and Google made it so), and it means they might get some additional information about you. Facebook and Google, on the other hand, *definitely* get more information about you by letting other sites authenticate through them. It is worth pointing out that there *was* an attempt to make an *open* version of something like this *years* ago, but it never caught on because it was a pain to implement, and nobody was making money off it so nobody really pushed it very hard.", "For the same reason we use banks to handle our money transfers. Getting security right is very difficult and the needs change constantly. What is secure yesterday might be a major vulnerability tomorrow. It's just so much easier to let some giant company that needs to get it right take care of that for me." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxmo38", "dbxhjh4", "dbxqjvl" ], "text": [ "I know exactly what you are talking about! Some people in past posts say its your brain entering [Default Network Mode]( URL_0 ), yes its actually called that. But if we are talking about the same thing, its almost like a trance, where you are staring and your mind is fully operational, but it just feels good to be fixated, and you are aware if you look away, that fleeting feeling will pass. These moments often come when I haven't spoken in awhile, too, if that is any constellation.", "Im no scientist but from what i know your body releases dopamine and activates natural opioid receptors in your brain when you \"zone out\".", "I have a l w a y s questioned why it felt \"good\" to stare at nothing. So glad I found this." ], "score": [ 43, 10, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxl99l" ], "text": [ "Everyone loves a good story. It's entertaining and lets us sort of escape for a little while from the real world. Even if the story is kinda crap we still usually want to know how it ends because we want closure. We want to know why the bad people did the bad things. We want to know how the good people saved the day. If the ending doesn't make sense or is shitty, we feel cheated. As for stopping in the middle of a book...well, aside from what I stated above, I suppose it feels unnatural because we are all essentially in the middle of our own stories. This is a little cheesy, but sod it; we are all part of neverending story, one that began long before we were born and will go on long after we die. Every day is a new page in our own individual story/life and we can't just stop, can we? We have to keep going. We have no choice. So, perhaps that's why we have to keep reading. When we're reading we feel like we're right there with Harry Potter, Bastian Bux, Nancy Drew, Katniss Everdeen, Lionel McGee, Connor Adams, Arthur Dent, etc. So we gotta know what happens next." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxgb0q", "dbxgoi0" ], "text": [ "There are two notes on top of one another. They're both the same note, such as both being a C note, but one is one octave above the other and has a much higher pitch. If you play a scale using notes like these, CDEFGABC with a much higher pitched CDEFGABC playing at the same time, the highest C of the first scale is the same sound as the lowest C of the second scale. So if you play it twice in a row, the low notes will sound like they're just continuing and becoming the high notes. From there, your brain takes over. Your brain is really good at making guesses and filling in for information it doesn't have, and one of the ways it does that is by recognizing patterns and completing them. When it hears this scale, it makes the assumption that it keeps going up forever and tells your ears that's what they're hearing. It doesn't matter that the highest note isn't getting any higher, because your brain has a range of sound it really likes and is already focusing in on the lower notes again, assuming that those high notes are continuing in the pattern it predicted. Try this: listen to a Shepard's Tone (they're all over youtube), and halfway through, take out your headphones or mute your computer for a second. When you turn the sound back on, that tone will have seemingly \"reset\" and sound lower again. That's because your brain is starting over with the pattern it's interpreting, and it always wants to start with that specific middle range of sound it likes.", "URL_0 Explains it better than I ever could." ], "score": [ 8, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwFUwXxfZss&t=96s" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxh0yu" ], "text": [ "What's generally referred to as a feeling of \"impending doom\" is a feeling of certainty that something terrible is going to happen to you or you're going to die, or that something is just off or wrong about your body. People with the \"impending doom\" symptom are convinced that they're dying or will soon die, so it's sort of a \"can't bear the suspense\" type of feeling. It usually happens because of a problem in the sympathetic nervous system. That's what controls your heart and lungs without you having to think about contracting those muscles. Under normal circumstances, our brain ignores the sensation of our lungs expanding or our heart beating, because that would get really distracting. So if something is wrong with the sympathetic nervous system, like an irregular heartbeat from a heart attack, you're probably not going to physically feel that your heartbeat is all out of sync. But you WILL know something is just... \"off\" about your body, even if you can't pin down what. Your sympathetic nervous system is sending SOMETHING IS WRONG signals to your brain, and since your brain is wired not to send you physical sensations from those nerves, it just sends you a general \"wrongness\" vibe instead." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxh4yw", "dby4fw3", "dbxqgs1" ], "text": [ "To fall asleep you need to be both tired and relaxed, as you start to think about falling asleep and it takes too long you become nervous and try to force your body into sleep mode, to which your body senses an imminent danger and responds with fight or flight, releasing adrenaline and making sure you're awake enough to escape the danger that awaits you, even though that's the opposite of what you want.", "There are neurons that release the hormones that provide you with wakefulness, and different hormones that help slow your body down and put you to sleep. It is my understanding that these cells have no concept of days of the week or other arbitrary measurements of time, they are purely operating on your circadian rhythm. They cannot reprogram to make you sleepy at 9PM on Thursday, and keep you wakeful until 11PM on Friday. They need consistency. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every single day, your energy levels will be consistent, and you will get very tired when it's bed time.", "It pretty much boils down to a lack of melatonin. You need melatonin to sleep. Now, there might be a whole list of reasons why your body isn't releasing melatonin at 'a reasonable time'." ], "score": [ 519, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxh6hk", "dbxihke", "dbxh1t5" ], "text": [ "Rhyming is entirely cultural! Some cultures consider it important, and some cultures probably wouldn't even notice if they rhymed by accident. For instance, rhyming really isn't a thing in most east asian languages, but you'll hear it all over the place in Europe.", "You are referring to tail rhyme, which is a late invention even in English. It was borrowed into English from French in the late middle ages (perhaps 12th century.) I recall reading somewhere that it was called French end rhyme for some time. Chaucer was the first major English poet to use rhyming stanzas. Poetry then became synonymous with rhyme until the classicist Milton [protested explicitly]( URL_3 ) in Paradise Lost. Poems rely on vivid images in the first place and alliteration and metre in the second place. Old English poems like Beowulf make heavy use of alliteration and no use of rhyme. You would be hard pressed to find tail rhyme in any language, and even in older English. You can quickly confirm that classical Greek and Latin writers did not use rhyme. For example, you can see that [Horace]( URL_0 ) did not rhyme even a little. Likewise for Sanskrit and classical Chinese. Outside modern English, I can find examples of rhyme only with great difficulty e.g. the modern Hindi poet [Harivansh Rai Bacchan]( URL_1 ) who has an older model in the Persian [rhyming quatrain.]( URL_2 )", "some can, typically speaking though poetry doesn't have to rhyme. foreign language or not." ], "score": [ 5, 5, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$c17398;view=2up;seq=66", "https://www.scoopwhoop.com/10-Harivansh-Rai-Bachchans-Best-Poems/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruba'i", "http://www.bartleby.com/4/400.html" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxm5sm" ], "text": [ "You have an internal temperature that your body has to regulate. Water transfers heat really well and dousing yourself in water that is 20-30 degrees colder than your core temperature your body has to work harder to keep the temperature where it needs to be so it's a little uncomfortable." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxjys4" ], "text": [ "Sea ice is white, so it reflects a lot of radiation back into the atmosphere and into space where it can't be absorbed as heat. If it all melts, greenhouse warming effects can be compounded, resulting in even more CO2 being released by soil and methane clathrates, resulting in more greenhouse warming, resulting in more greenhouse gasses being released... it's a very negative cycle. The world is currently in a stage of the Milankovich cycle (the cycle that determines long-run average temperature, things like ice ages and such) where things *should* be cooling down... but the average global temperature, per-year, is rapidly rising in direct opposition to this. Regular seasonal variations in the amount of sea ice are common (it's winter in the northern hemisphere, so regionally more ice may form) but over time the amount of sea ice present is decreasing, and is currently at dangerously low levels and is continuing to decrease. Now for my personal tinfoil hat part: Some 'researchers' will buy into politicized 'facts' (read: fabrications) that the amount of sea ice is increasing on one particular day, so, to them, obviously climate change can't be real. There's that biased aspect to some 'studies,' (especially corporate-funded ones, don't trust a report on climate change sponsored by Exxon-Mobil) so you should be careful what climate studies you pay attention to." ], "score": [ 5 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxlrxs", "dbxkl6l", "dbxwiz2" ], "text": [ "Many things are difficult to portray on television - like smells as poly brought up. There is no real way to portray smell through pictures so old spice has terry crews screaming to create some sort of memory for their intended audience. Other times the product being sold isn't what the obvious. Nike isnt really selling shoes, a comparable shoe from another manufacturer can cost significantly less. Nike is selling an image and that is what they are portraying in their ads.", "Artificial demand inflation through memorable experience, mainly. Ads that matter-of-fact present a product 'the way it is,' don't really stick with you and make you remember that product the next time you're shopping. Imagine if Old Spice commercials were the Proctor & Gamble CEO sitting down with you and having a deadbeat chat about how Old Spice Odor Blocker Body Wash really does fight BO for 16 hours. It's not quite as memorable as Terry Crews screaming it at you, even if Terry Crews can't give you a reasonable representation of the product's quality.", "ads often dont advertise the product itself, but a feeling they want associated with the product. ever seen an apple ad? they never focus on the product itself, but on things you can do with it. or malboro ads - they dont say that their cigarettes are best. they say that by smoking malboro, you are a cowboy/man." ], "score": [ 8, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxl4ba", "dbxksnd" ], "text": [ "It creates a conflict-of-interest situation, and opens up an enormous potential for abuse. A law like that would put the government as the ultimate decider of what's true or not, because if a news reporter was accused of breaking it, you'd have a trial and trials are run by... the government! The problem? If you're a government official and someone prints some **real** dirt on a stunt you pulled... you are now in a position to really make their life suck. Even if you don't have the power to *directly* shut them down, you can create enormous, expensive, drags-on-forever court cases. That's enough to put random small jobs out of business and even potentially make a big company like CNN's life tough. Other governments that have been granted this privilege have *seriously* abused it. And if you give the government ability to do something, it's **very** hard to take it away. So this situation sucks because bullshit news **suuuuuuuucks**, but putting the government as the decider of truth also has a lot of dangers. There's no good answer yet.", "It's all protected by the first amendment. They can and will say whatever they want as long as the company continues to make money." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxmd3k" ], "text": [ "The [House Ethics Committee]( URL_0 ) still exists. It's made up of members of congress from both parties. If members of congress are accused of ethics violations, they will investigate, call witnesses, and hold votes on whether to censure or even expel members. If ethics violations are found, they usually make recommendations on how to \"right\" the conflict of interests and other ethical violations. At least that's what they are *supposed* to do. That will continue to exist. The [Office of Congressional Ethics]( URL_2 ) is an ostensibly non-partisan, unbiased, committee that is composed of private citizens that are neither members of congress or employees of the Federal government. Congress created it in 2008. This is what current House leadership is seeking to defund. The reason this second, independent ethics committee was originally created is because several prominent members of the Democratic Party, [specifically Charlie Rangel]( URL_1 ), had been accused of some rather serious ethics violations by the press. The House Ethics Committe (which along with the House and Senate, was controlled by Democrats at the time) didn't seem to take the allegations very seriously. Members of congress (mostly Republicans, but Democrats, too) were upset with the way the House and committee leadership were handling the ethics issues, and so they created this committee, specifically to penalize these members of congress and go around party leadership. Now that those members have been censured and the Republicans are in control of congress, many don't see a need for an independent committee anymore. That might change if any prominent Republicans are accused of ethics violations and the current committee leadership refuses to act." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_on_Ethics", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rangel#2008.E2.80.932010:_Ethics_issues_and_censure", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Congressional_Ethics" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxn69r", "dbxnehp", "dbxp2rf", "dbxn1eq" ], "text": [ "If a person commits a crime, it doesn't matter what the victim says. It is the moral duty of law enforcement to arrest the person, and the judicial system to bring that person to justice. It's not only about attempting to provide the victim with justice, it's about punishing the perpetrator for violating societies laws. Take a child, abused by a parent for example. The child may not want to press charges for any number of reasons but, it's the moral duty of society to prosecute the perpetrator.", "If a crime is committed against someone then that person can bring a civil case for compensation for the damages they sustained. But the State Prosecutor brings criminal charges and it only tangentially involves the victim of the crime. Committing a crime is an offense against the state and the state will hold the perpetrator accountable. The victim cannot \"drop charges\" because they didn't bring them.", "In the UK the real victim of a crime is the state. What we consider to be victims are really just witnesses to the crime against the state.", "It depends on what crime it is. Some charges are levied by the state, not the victim. The biggest one of these is domestic related cases. Sure the victim might flip back to his/her abuser, but the state never knows if it's because they are coerced" ], "score": [ 10, 4, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxn9l2" ], "text": [ "The definition of fruit and vegetable are rules with a couple exceptions. The definition that covers most fruits/vegetables is as follows: A fruit is the part of the plant that *develops from a flower*. It's also the section of the plant that contains the seeds. *The other parts of plants are considered vegetables*. These include the stems, leaves and roots — and even the flower bud. We call several (technically) fruits \"vegetable,\" but the main point here is that your premise is wrong - ***both fruits and vegetables have seeds***. [More reading]( URL_0 )" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-blog/fruit-vegetable-difference/bgp-20056141" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxq9wz" ], "text": [ "Guitar strings are tuned to intervals of IV (four) with the exception of the G and B strings (tuned to a III interval). As you said open chords like a C chord (x-3-2-0-1-0) are not only constructed of three notes (in their most common voicing) but often double up on certain notes (eg. ^above example is C-E-G-C-E). In a major chord 1-3-5 only 3 strings are needed to voice the chord. The use of more than three strings isn't necessary but adds to the harmonic quality of the chord because the repeated notes in the voicing are often different octaves. Basically it just sounds nice. Keep in mind there are multiple ways to voice a C chord on a guitar. Open chords are used primarily for their convenience but are quite a limiting way to play guitar, there are better ways to voice chords that don't use open strings. Your last question, how do I know which notes to use when constructing chords. That basically just comes down to learning common chord voicings. There are dozens of ways to voice chords on guitar but many of them are impractical due to the limitations of your biology (dexterity of hand and fingers). For instance, a 13th chord cannot be played on a six-stringed guitar because a 13th chord is comprised of seven notes. Just like how a flute can't play chords, there are limitations to different instruments. Standard tuning is still the best tuning system for guitar. If you don't believe me try and play some jazz in open D tuning. Not an easy task :P" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxp9t6", "dbxr68e" ], "text": [ "They do actually. Over time it starts breaking down the skin cells. You will see redness and inflammation and then tiny scratchy like lesions. This is from the antibacterial agent in soap.", "So first it helps to know how soap works. Normal soap, that doesn't specifically say antibacterial, works by essentially breaking down the cell membrane that surrounds the bacteria and then washes it away as you rinse your hands. Antibacterial soaps work similarly, just have a few more chemicals that really make sure the bacteria are taken care of. So now to how our skin avoids this. The outermost layer of skin, called the epidermis, is composed of multiple layers of cells that form as cells attached to a basement membrane actively divide and push the older cells outward. As the cells get pushed farther away from the basement membrane, they lose blood supply and begin to die and flatten out. At the same time they also undergo a process (keratinization) that makes them pretty resistant to a lot of wear and tear, as well as pretty impermeable to water and other liquids. So this barrier of dead cells (which is multiple cell layers thick) protects the still living and dividing cells underneath. This is why if you get soap in a fresh cut it stings, because you no longer have that protective barrier to shield the living cells underneath." ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxqpk6", "dbxrb8x" ], "text": [ "We have markers on our blood cells and so if we transfer wrong blood, it coagulate inside you and you die", "**Disclaimer: Please note that this is all an ELI5 simplification; it's the basic idea, but in real life it's more complicated, and it's seriously, seriously dangerous. So please don't go making any medical decisions based upon what I've written here.** With that said: Well, your description in your question here is not accurate, so let's back up a bit: Generally speaking, a person can accept blood transfusions from multiple different blood types. The exception is people with O Negative blood; they can only accept O Negative blood. They make up... I dunno, 5% or so of the population. Now, going further: There is a thing called \"A\", and a thing called \"B\", and a thing called \"Positive\". You can have any or all or none of these things in your blood. For example, \"A Positive\" means you have A, and you have Positive, but you don't have B. \"AB Negative\" means you have A, and you have B, but you don't have Positive. Note that \"Negative\" is not a thing - Negative just means you don't have Positive. And \"O\" is also not a thing - O just means you have neither A nor B. If someone with some thing in their blood donates their blood to you, you sure better have that thing in your own blood. Otherwise, your body's immune system will notice that thing, think it's some foreign invader, and try to fight it off. This could kill you. So, for example, if you've got A Positive blood, then you don't have B, so you better not get a transfusion from someone who has B. So you better not get a transfusion from a B Positive, a B Negative, an AB Positive, or an AB Negative. But you can get transfusions from anybody else - O Positive, O Negative, A Positive, A Negative - not just from other A Positives. A couple \"special\" types are therefore O Negative (they can donate to anyone, and are therefore called \"universal donors\") and AB Positive (they can accept from anyone, and are therefore called \"universal recipients\")." ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxt6zx", "dbxttjc", "dby1pwk" ], "text": [ "First off, let me clearly state that there is no \"definitive answer\", there are several theories out there but none has been proven so far. However [this website lists several theories]( URL_0 ) which are quite interesting. Among others it also lists the water claim but explains why crocodiles were less affected than aquatic dinosaurs. Simply put, crocodiles are amphibious creatures who live near land and in fresh water areas (swamps, rivers, lakes, etc.) but not in oceans/salt waters. The KT extinction event might have simply been more devastating to those biotopes than those of crocs. It's easy to imagine environmental factors to influence fish but not frogs, crocs, turtles, etc. The same distinction goes for mosasaurus and a crocodile. The one theory I find most interesting is that dinosaurs, even though they are reptilian in nature, were actually warm-blooded which would explain the devastating effect of climate change on them opposed to the cold-blooded crocodiles. Lastly, maybe crocodiles are not the only species to survive and some crustacean beasts roam the seas looking for about three-fiddy.", "You have to keep in mind that while some 'crocodiles' survived many others did not. Basically all land dwelling animals larger than a certain size became extinct and lots of small animals too. Of the dinosaurs only some birds survived and most other groups related to dinosaurs like the flying reptiles etc died out. The ancestors of our modern crocodiles are one of the exceptions, they were part of a larger group of crocodile like species and most of those died out too. Of the crocodile like species all the larger species and all the species living in the ocean became extinct and only som small freshwater species survived. It is wrong to think that crocodiles survived while dinosaurs didn't. Both groups suffered huge losses and only had some small species survive. The dinos that survived were small birds, the crocs that survived were small freshwater crocs. The crocodilians just evolved into the different large species we have today that look a lot like their ancestors while modern birds large don't resemble their ancestors too much.", "Crocodilians have a few advantages over a lot of other animals, even though some of these advantages are possessed by other animals as well. Look at the way Alligators in North America hibernate, and you'll see how the prehistoric crocodiles survived. Their lungs are a fibrous network in their upper torso that can expand to 2/3 of their torso length, enabling them to hold a larger amount of air than creatures with encapsulated lungs, like people. They can slow their blood flow and metabolism down when times are hard, putting themselves into a semi-hibernative state, torpor. This enables the increased oxygen supply to last longer, as their body requires less resources. Unless they're in a growth period, as a cold blooded creature, they don't need a lot of food for maintenance, and slowing their metabolic state reduces this need further. A big meal can mean that a crocodile doesn't need to eat for days. An 8 foot alligator needs less than 400 calories a day for maintenance, and can sink for nearly a day with a good breath. So something like Saurosuchus Imperator, at 40 feet long, may have been able to get a stomach full of dinosaur, take a good deep breath, and sink for a longer period of time. Occasionally coming up for a breath, or grabbing more food. Source: worked with various crocodilians for 30 years, and on various projects with Paul Sereno, paleontologist." ], "score": [ 27, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurextinction/a/Why-Did-Crocodiles-Survive-The-KT-Extinction.htm" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxs8te", "dbxsbe3", "dbxs7hq" ], "text": [ "Other than with Full HD (1080p/i) or regular HD (720p/i) which describe the amount of vertical pixels, 4K describes the approximate amount of horizontal pixels in the image. There is also another 4K standard that is mostly used in movies and film production called DCI 4K that actually has more than 4k horizontal pixels (4096x2160). In the case of the regular consumer 4K (which is also called UHD-1 or 2160p), it was a marketing choice to call it 4K even though it has less than 4k horizontal pixels. Small fun fact: 4K has exactly 4 times the pixels of FHD. There is also a standard called Quad HD (QHD) that has exactly 4 times the pixels of regular HD (2560x1440).", "\"HD\" can refer to 1280x720 or 1920x1080. 4K is 4x 1080p -- 3840 is twice 1920, and 2160 is twice 1080, twice as wide and twice as tall means four times larger overall. It's actually 9x 720p. (3840*2160)/(1280*720) = 9, or 8.2944 megapixels vs 0.9216 megapixels. Anyway, the terms '2K', '4K' and '8K' come from cinema production. 4K is anything with about 4K vertical lines to the image, and we use this measurement because the exact number can vary according to the 'aspect ratio' or shape of the image (you know how some movies are closer to regular widescreen, while others are in super-widescreen?). 4K can be 3996x2160, 3840x2160, 4096x1714, 3656x2664, 4096x3112, and other similar shapes. The number of horizontal lines varies wildly (1714 vs 3112) so we measure by vertical lines, which are always roughly 4K. 2K can be 1998x1080, 2048x858, 1828x1332, 2048x1556, or 2048x1552.", "Regular HD is 1920x1080. 1080 x 4 is irrelevant, the 4K refers to the fact that 3840 is close to 4000 and is easier to say." ], "score": [ 8, 7, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxslci" ], "text": [ "Your blood vessels react to temperature. When your body is cold, they tighten up and become smaller, in order to retain your body heat. When your body is hot, they relax and open up wide. So when you put heat on a sore area... say, drinking something hot to soothe a sore throat, it's causing the blood vessels in your throat to open up wide and increase blood flow to the painful area. More blood means more oxygen and nutrients, which means your sore throat can heal faster. Hot drinks aren't just dulling your pain, they're helping you heal! Heat also stimulates your nerve ending and sends a signal to the brain: \"hey, we're aware of the problem down here and it's being taken care of!\" Pain is just your body's way of telling you there's a problem, so once your brain knows heat is being applied and the healing process is doing its job, it figures you got the message and stops registering so much pain." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxttt4" ], "text": [ "Your breathing, blinking etc is all controlled by your autonomous nervous system. It's like a brain within your brain that just keeps all this stuff ticking over. However, you can consciously choose to 'override' it and hold your breath, for example... but as bucketdweller points out, there will come a point where you would pass out and lapse into unconsciousness. At that point, your autonomous nervous system kicks back in and you start breathing. Unless you're David Beckham. He has to be reminded by his wife." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxut9e" ], "text": [ "When you look at the activity needed for the brain to study and learn new material, it is a pretty large machine that needs to be running. The core component of the nervous system in general, and the brain in particular, is the neuron or nerve cell, the “brain cells” of popular language. A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electro-chemical signalling. Unlike other cells, neurons never divide, and neither do they die off to be replaced by new ones. By the same token, they usually cannot be replaced after being lost, although there are a few exceptions. The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons (ELI5: nerve cells) and many more neuroglia (ELI5: supporters). Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, equivalent to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor. So - your computer(brain) has a LOT to do while internalizing new information, and this activity - like any other activity - causes fatigue." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxunf5" ], "text": [ "The Honey badger isnt immune to the venom but just has thick skin and fur, and usually the venom doesn't penetrate their skin AKA Honey badger dont give a shit" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxuyqc", "dbxxq12", "dby2gws", "dby3l2g", "dby2uwz", "dbxzalb", "dbxz52n", "dby43ut", "dby3ikl", "dby12hm" ], "text": [ "Arguably there is no interest. The action scenes are *meant* to be loud for the purpose of sensory overload. Such a feature will simply cause a loundness arms race and attempts at trickery.", "A lot of media player softwares have a feature called \"volume normalization\" which tries to make all of the audio played in a media file near the same volume. It's been around a long time, but for some reason you don't see it often on TV's or stereo receivers.", "A HUGE part of this is inadequate (or non-) mix down from 5.1 Surround to Stereo. A typical result is, dialogue is _very quiet._ Then, music or effects BLOW YOUR GODDAMN WALLS OUT. Since most of TV is programmed in Surround, this is not always super easy to fix. Some TV do have a master mix down to Stereo function. But if not... you have to do it outboard.", "In music production lingo, what you're looking for would be called a dynamic range compressor. They're used a lot with popular music to make it sound brighter, crisper, and louder, as well as to make it easier to hear over the din of an automobile or a bar. Dynamic range compression is an unpopular technique with audiophiles since its overuse can take away from the impact and fidelity of a piece of music, and even cause unwanted distortion in extreme cases. I've often wondered why consumer audio systems don't just come with compressors built in, so the users can dial in the amount of compression they want. Personally, I'd end up using it a lot more for movies and television than for music. It is a feature some audio systems have, but my best guess as to why they aren't standard is due to cost reasons, and because the general public doesn't know what it is. Another theory is that the music industry doesn't want people owning their own compressors, so that they can continue waging the loudness war and finding new ways to make their music stand out on the radio.", "The problem only happens for those listening multichannel track on stereo. all BD players I've touched have this option called \"nightmode\" or \"Dynamic Range Control\". Though to have more control I downmix tracks on-the-fly while watching movies with the help of ffmpeg custom downmix matrix. I have two settings, \"normal\" and \"night\", boosting the dialog even further in the latter case. go check the link for starters: URL_0", "THIS. And \"shaky cam\" . And the modern acceptance of \"actors\" who, unlike those on stage, do not project their voices, or attempt to be understood. The hip thing is to speak as fast as possible , and that shit just ain't for the public, who don't know or share your inflection. I admit to hearing loss , but people don't ever seem to grasp that just turning up the volume doesn't work ; then the loud sounds HURT . I have to use subtitles, and they are often a disaster, becsuse they can flash on and off faster than they can be read. The idea that sudden loud noises, recording airplane engines , or high pitched wailing sound tracts, or shacking the camera results in fine art is a lie. It is a way to cover for the LACK of art.", "I use an outboard audio compressor/limiter with heavy compression. It is intended to be used with live sound but works great on dynamic films.", "The worst is when all is quiet... a character will slowly move towards an object, say a door. Ever so gingerly begin easing the door open... suddenly BBBWWWWAAAAAAAAMMM. The Michael Bay foghorn produces so much bass you can hear the dishes rattling. It's not even an action scene, like why in the fuh is there so much bass. Buddy is literally just walking in a straight line... ^^can ^^^you ^^^^hear ^^^^^me. *panting heavily*^^^I ^^^have ^^^something ^^^really ^^^important ^^^to ^^^tell ^^^you *stares at camera*^^BBBBWWAAA AAAAMMMMMMM. *paintings fall of the walls*", "This already exists : It's called [Dynamic range compression]( URL_0 ) If you have a home theater receiver, this may be called different things such as \"Midnight mode\", \"Dynamic Range Compensation\", or \"Adaptive Range Control\" or other buzz phrases. But it's all the same thing. (It makes the loud parts quiet, and the quiet parts loud) EDIT: To answer your second question, it's usually a feature on most receivers, but not all of them. It is also usually disabled by default because people usually want the loud/quiet experience which is true to the source material, and not the compressed experience.", "That would be awesome. I'd really, REALLY like music volumes to be normalized when streaming. And I'd like to personally kill every single sound tech that works in live shows that makes it so you cannot hear the singer over the music." ], "score": [ 83, 43, 30, 13, 7, 7, 6, 5, 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [ "http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-168267.html" ], [], [], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby5m4h" ], "text": [ "Not sure, but I don't think so -- fossilization happens when other minerals get into something that was organic. Usually this has to happen in soil, which has a lot of minerals to replace with. If you're thinking Egyptian mummies, they're so far removed from soil due to the preservation techniques that they couldn't fossilize -- they'd just stay a mummy. But mummies like bog mummies, who were preserved by the peat's specific makeup, might! I don't actually know. There are fossilized bones from regular corpses though!" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxvylu", "dbxx6a3", "dbxwuko" ], "text": [ "Because, interestingly enough, the legality of a product doesn't affect the amount of users much. Switzerland and the Netherlands ran trials for long periods of time, and the amount of users/addicts hardly changed.", "[This kurzgesagt video]( URL_0 ) explains it quite well. What we generally believe about addiction is kinda wrong. People get addicted to drugs because their personal lives are so bad that it is the only thing that makes them feel good.", "Because \"most people\" would have to come in contact with it. In Germany it was sold as a less addictive morphine replacement and as something against coughing. That means that you would have had the need for a pain or cough suppressor. If not then why use it? In addition not everybody has the need to try a drug just because it is legal." ], "score": [ 16, 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxy6q8", "dby5odr", "dbymai2", "dbyadzm", "dbxw3kw", "dbxzi0l", "dbyj1fg", "dbyaz2e", "dbyvlxw", "dbylknk", "dby8bf6", "dbye4ys", "dby3lx2", "dbyihax", "dbyrsnh" ], "text": [ "I just finished up The User Illusion and while the author didn't talk very much about dreams this was my takeaway from it: Your consciousness while dreaming is very different than when you are awake. In dreams, you lose any distinction between yourself and your surroundings, whereas when awake, you seperate yourself from the world and act according to how you could be perceived by others. Dreams don't have that limitation and allow you to simply be (as part of and within the world). In dreams, your mind has no veto power over your body (no ego) and your instincts are the only form of free will.", "From *Leviathan* by Thomas Hobbes: > The imaginations of them that sleep are those we call ‘dreams.’ And these also, as also all other imaginations, have been before, either totally or by parcels, in the sense. And, because in sense, the brain and nerves, which are the necessary organs of sense, are so benumbed in sleep as not easily to be moved by the action of external objects, there can happen in sleep no imagination, and therefore no dream, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of man’s body; which inward parts, for the connection they have with the brain and other organs, when they be distempered, do keep the same in motion; whereby the imaginations there formerly made, appear as if a man were waking; **saving that the organs of sense being now benumbed, so as there is no new object which can master and obscure them with a more vigorous impression, a dream must needs be more clear in this silence of sense than our waking thoughts.** And hence it cometh to pass that it is a hard matter, and by many thought impossible, to distinguish exactly between sense and dreaming. For my part, when I consider that in dreams I do not often nor constantly think of the same persons, places, objects, and actions, that I do waking, nor remember so long a train of coherent thoughts, dreaming, as at other times, and because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdities of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied, that, > being awake, I know I dream not, though when I dream I think myself awake. **Real Eli-5**: When there is an overwhelmingly bright light in your field of vision, this makes other lights appear dimmer. E.g. the sun preventing vision of the stars. Likewise, during the day, your sense impressions of the world (vision, hearing, touch etc.) are quite vigorous and incredibly constant, \"dimming\" the vividness of thought. At night, when the more bodily senses are sleeping, and the only thing you are doing is dreaming, your dreams appear much more vivid, just as the stars appear much brighter. Another way of pointing this out is that there is an inverse relationship between the vividness of a \"day-dream\" and how much attention you're currently investing in the environment around you.", "Every comment here should have a \"hypothetically\" placed in front of it. The reality is that we simply don't know enough about dreams. Why do they exist? What function do they actually serve? What are we remembering when we wake up? What does a dream actually look like? None of this has been scientifically verified because you can't read someone's dreams, and the technology and neuroscience to study this just isn't there yet. Any other answer you've gotten that puts forth their opinion as fact is just being misleading. It's a very interesting question, but unfortunately we don't have an answer yet. Source: Doctoral student in clinical psychology with an emphasis in clinical neuropsychology. Edit: emphasis from clinical psych to clinical neuropsychology (whoopsie on the redundancy)", "Gonna drop a dream related question here too if it's ok: What would cause someone to never achieve their goal in dreams? Is it normal for everyone? As in. If I dream I'm climbing a mountain I never reach the top. If I dream of exploring, I get lost. If I'm close to getting a girl or anything else desirable I never succeed. All my life I've had very vivid dreams and a few occurences of lucid dreaming. I dream a lot and tend to remember many of them. One thing that always struck me as depressing is that in dreams I never make the jump, never reach the goal, in some dreams I die, and in many dreams my teeth get broken. Note that I'm mostly excluding nightmares here. Even in benevolent dreams, I never get what I want.", "Because your brain releases a chemical while you sleep..\"DMT\" which causes you to trip balls, but your body also has things that block the trippy chemicals \"MAO\" (MAO inhibitors) This does not happen when you think or imagine", "Dreaming is characterised by a unique brain activity pattern where dream hallucinations are derived by a diffuse activation in the cerebral cortex. One important note is that some parts of the frontallobe from which our self awereness originates from is inhibited during sleep which is why dreams can be so bizarre and vivid without us reacting to it before we wake up and become concious.", "Strange. I don't find dreams memorable at all. That is, it takes only a few minutes to forget almost everything I've dreamed except vague details.", "Honestly, if you were told you can be put to sleep for 24 hours at a time, would you do it if you knew you would have cool dreams you can create?", "Psychologist here. We don't know. Nobody does. A lot of new age mystics and pop psychology authors will tell you they know, but they don't. We can tell you about the physiology of sleep, how the brain changes function during different stages, how the body reacts, but dreaming? Honestly, your guess is as good as ours. But how awesome is it that we still have so much mystery left in how our brains work?", "I personally don't find my dreams to compare to my thoughts as described. In fact I would more likely ask why they are the exact opposite: dreams not vivid, thoughts (imaginative thought) much more so and far, far more memorable than dreams. Perhaps what you call dreams/thinking isn't the same for me.", "It wasn't that long ago that the results from a trial of mouse experiments got published. Mice got detectors surgically implanted on their brains. Then they go through a maze. The detectors only read if a signal fires over a particular region of the mouse brain. So yes-no, on-off, frontal, parietal, occipital or whatever. Then the pattern of signals over time gets compiled. Mice that run one maze have similar but different patterns as other mice in the same maze, & different patterns for different mazes. But here's the dream part. The mice would reproduce their daily maze pattern as they slept, repeatedly with each circadian rhythm, & faster than in awake time. It's like they were reliving & reinforcing their days memories with the dreams they were having. From these experiments, the research team was trying to link memory & learning with getting sleep afterwards. It looked promising in many ways.", "While you sleep, your body releases a chemical named Dimethyltriptamine (DMT) in very small doses, which is a hallucinogen and that allows for the more vivid feeling.", "More importantly, why can I not remember my dreams except the PTSD related ones? I ONLY remember the dreams I wake up from and the only ones I wake up from are the blow-upy ones or the shooty ones.", "We model the external world in our brains. The level of detail we perceive is governed by the limitations of our brains. The sophisticated processing of stimulus into the representation we recognise whilst awake can run whilst we are asleep. Our conscious thoughts, framed in a consensus language, pale in comparison. Of interest is our ability to model behaviourally unpredictable characters in dreams. Reflecting our ongoing modelling of any social encounter with such same aspects of our brains.", "I'm not 100% sure if this really answers your question all that well but here goes. Dreaming is more vivid and memorable IMO because it is the result of a psychedelic compound your brain releases when you are in REM sleep. The chemical DMT is what causes the phenomenon of dreaming and your brain only releases this during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. DMT is short for Dimethyltryptamine or there is an official term with N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. It is responsible for the act of you dreaming. When you are thinking, it is not a result of a chemical compound but rather ordinary functions of the brain. Thinking processes I believe (when regarding action at least) involves sending electrical impulses through pathways. There is also a drug that is just a high concentration of DMT. When you smoke it when you are sober, what happens is your brain struggles to grasp hold and \"maintain reality.\" As you get high from DMT, a layer of hallucinations take effect but since you are not sleeping, what is going on is your dreams and your perception of reality collide. And since when you are high on DMT, your attentiveness and ability to see and recognize tiny details you wouldn't have noticed (like being able to see every cell of your exterior skin). People always talk about their DMT highs as very vivid and very clearly detailed. Also the type of things you'd see WOULD traumatize you (not in a bad way). I will not condone use of drugs; this is certainly not for everyone. I've seen people try it and come back perfectly fine and I've seen some people go insane. A lot of people claim when high on DMT, they meet God or these extradimensional beings that can radiate psychedelic aura from themselves. The same things that cause you to hallucinate and see these vivid detailed images could be the reason why dreams > thoughts." ], "score": [ 1052, 924, 224, 94, 32, 30, 26, 16, 14, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxxcvl", "dbxxus1" ], "text": [ "They have a profit margin built into their items, and they are willing to decrease the profit margin in order to keep customers. They'd rather make less money on each sale, than annoy customers and stop selling anything at all. Sometimes stores also have loss leaders. For example, supermarkets will often have very cheap milk, and lose money on every liter of milk they sell - but people who come in to buy milk will usually also buy other things. So the store's profit margin is not calculated on each item, but on each customer's total shopping basket, or the average shopping basket across every time that customer comes into the shop. (It's worth losing money a couple of times to generate a habit in the customer of shopping at your store, not your competitor's.) Of course, eventually they do have to raise their prices.", "There was a documentary on Channel 4 answering this question called Secrets of Poundland. Doesn't look like it is legally available online any more but the main point of it was talking about the size if the packets. Just some examples (I am making the numbers up as I can't remember them exactly just to give you an idea): -They used to sell multi-packs of crips with 12 packets in, now they sell them with 8 in -They sell sizes of jars etc. at non-standard sizes, e.g a 100g of Nutella whereas Tesco might be selling 150g for £1.20 -They also have a lot of multipacks with \"free\" items, i.e. they sold 8 packs of kitkats but now sell packs of 6 with 2 extra free" ], "score": [ 12, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxxf05", "dby3bpq" ], "text": [ "Most cameras are set up with three different color sensors because that makes most sense if you are to watch it with your eyes. However the colors the camera sensors detect is not the exact same as the ones humans detect but is close enough. And you have broad spectrum sensors that detect light levels which is something that is missing from cameras so you can see more colors then a camera. However we can make different color filters for the cameras if we want to. You have likely seen infrared cameras that can see the heat from cold things like we can see the red or orange glow from hotter things. For scientific use there can be lots of different color sensors in a camera. I have worked with images with 7 different colors to detect different compositions. It turns out green farmland can be very colorful in different infrared colors which can be useful to see different properties in of the plants and soil. If you ever wondered what the difference in color is between snow and clouds check out the ultraviolet colors and see the huge difference.", "> Can a camera capture ALL colours, some of which we can't see? **Most** cameras capture less colors than our eye can see. For example, violet is not accurately captured by color cameras because it lies outside the [gamut]( URL_1 ) captured by the Red, Green, and Blue filters used in cameras. They cover most of the colors in nature but highly saturated, single-wavelength colors (think lasers) are slightly outside their gamut. A [chromaticity diagram]( URL_0 ) shows the range of colors we can reproduce inside the triangle of the three primary colors. The colors outside it are simulated because your monitor uses the same primary colors as your camera. You can make cameras which capture more colors, but you would also need to make monitors which can display them. The demand for that just isn't great enough to justify the cost." ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut#/media/File:Cie_Chart_with_sRGB_gamut_by_spigget.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxxlb0", "dbxz3x0" ], "text": [ "From my experience it is about retrieving information from a range of sources. Reading and listening widely can vastly improve your understanding of a particular topic or event and broaden your whole approach. News outlets such as [The International New York Times]( URL_1 ) are a great place to start but also match that with outlets from across the world such as [RT]( URL_0 ). Even subreddits on this very site such as r/syriancivilwar can give you perspectives that no outlet can give you. Comments on forums from people living on the ground can also give you insight. It is not necessarily about 'good' versus 'bad' news outlets because every article or opinion piece is essentially a product. Even blatant propaganda can be incredibly useful in understanding how a particular government or organisation *wants* people to think. TL;DR: Read widely. Think. Listen. Debate. Keep your mind open. Edit: Fixed sub name", "Well, neither Facebook nor Reddit are primary news sources. They are aggregators, and you should be careful about trusting them because the companies behind them don't accept responsibility for the news. There are machine algorithms that determine which news submissions are shown to the largest number of people, and these can be manipulated by people with an agenda. (Such as Reddit upvotes; for Facebook it's more complicated, but also doable.) The manipulators might be motivated by money, or they might be motivated by ideology. Not really important. What's important is that neither the Reddit name nor the Facebook name makes anything trustworthy - the companies refuse to make any choices because they want to be seen as neutral platforms, pure technology. For \"real\" news, the first step is to go to a reputable media outlet. On the American-political right wing, this might be the Wall Street Journal, on the left wing it might be something like the Guardian (UK-based, but with a very strong team covering America). The Economist is another good British source - it's actually right-wing by European standards, just not radically so. The New York Times tries to be neutral. The Washington Post is a good one - because it's owned by a billionaire (Jeff Bezos, the guy who started Amazon) and he's made it a public principle that he will give the newspaper money to do its work, even if the revenue from subscriptions and advertisements gets too small. The Washington Post has been doing some really good reporting since that happened. There are also some good \"new media\" sources, purely online ones. I like URL_0 for example. Now, as to how you tell what's a \"real\" news outlet: * It has to take responsibility for what it's saying. If it's a famous long-established media outlet, that's a good start, because if it makes a journalistic mistake, it risks the reputation it's built up, and that reputation is a very specific financial value in terms of being able to charge its advertisers higher prices. * This also applies to bylines. The Economist is the exception - they have a policy of not putting a journalist's name on a story because the entire magazine is responsible for each article. (Even their columnists work under pseudonyms that stay with the column when the author changes.) If you can search the name of the article's author and see that they have been reporting the news for a while previously, it's a good indication that they are a responsible source. It also allows you to check what they've written before and get a good idea of how objective and thorough they are. * It has to attribute things clearly. What is the source of what they're reporting? Is the source anonymous or clearly named? Are there several independent sources? Did they go and ask the other side for a comment, and are they mentioning how the other side defended itself? * Does the writing give you an impression that the author allows for the possibility of being wrong? [This is an important principle in the philosophy of science.]( URL_1 ) Is the author's narrative based on concrete facts and assumptions in such a way that if the facts changed, the author would admit to being wrong? Or is the author starting from an ideological conclusion and selecting only the facts and interpretations that support it? For example, the conclusion is \"the planet is not getting warmer\", based on NASA releasing a satellite image of Arctic sea ice that is larger than it was this time last year. If NASA then releases more images showing this is surface ice, and the previous deep icebergs have melted and are not reforming this winter, then the author will ignore their previous argument about year-on-year comparisons and say that Arctic sea ice is not a relevant measurement of temperature anyway. So you have to be able to assess not just the author's argument, but their way of thinking. Are they thinking in such a way that they could be shown objective evidence of being wrong, and would then admit to being wrong? If so, you should take them seriously, even if you think they are currently wrong. This is a difficult skill to have, which is why people usually go to university to learn it. :) But in modern times, regular people need to have this skill too." ], "score": [ 13, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.rt.com/", "http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html" ], [ "Vox.com", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyabc" ], "text": [ "Better wiring, but also better equipment between the wires. Faster routing, faster decision making. Comes down to both efficiency through iteration (engineers have been thinking about better ways to solve the same problem for twenty years), and technological improvements like smaller and faster chips, etc. Data compression has certainly gotten more efficient as well, both in the encoding algorithms for media and for the transport layer. (Think of implementing torrent-like technology not at the consumer software level, but at the hardware level, etc.) Another big thing is Content Delivery Networks. When YouTube started, they were streaming video to you from their huge central datacenter in California, even if you lived in Melbourne. Now, they just copy an upload to their CDN nodes around the world, and you're watching a stream that comes from Sydney, much closer to you physically." ], "score": [ 8 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyqsb", "dbympia" ], "text": [ "In my opinion, driving requires a lot of resources. As you stated in your post, it is a fairly complex activity. Done properly, that is. When driving is becoming \"second nature\" to you, it's partly because you learn to drive better from experience. The traffic tends to behave more or less consistently, so you learn to anticipate what happens next. Another, more troubling part of this is that you start to be less prudent than before, as you gain your confidence. This is why a lot of accidents is caused by young people who are about a year or so out of driving school. They're already cocky enough to underestimate the risks, yet not experienced enough to make up for it.", "There are several studies with psychophysiological measurements like EDA (electrodermal activity) or HRV (heart rate variability) applied which suggest that driving of course requires a lot more mental workload than resting in a chair. But I don't think it is possible to make a general statement like \"driving is 10 times more stressful than reading a book\" or anything similar. The studies also made clear that the experienced stress depends heavily on the environment you're driving in, e.g. driving towards a toll or inside a city centre is much more demanding than cruising on a highway. I can suggest reading A. Healey's and R. W. Picard's \"Detecting stress during real-world driving tasks using physiological sensors\" from 2005 or similar papers on that subject." ], "score": [ 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxykwp", "dby2oro" ], "text": [ "When you are sick you get increased mucus production. The mucus covers the surfaces inside your throat and is usually not an issue. However if you have too much it can start to flow and clump up. When you cough you push these clumps up the throat and it mixes with the rest of the mucus. This is why there might not come anything out. Making sure to clean out as much mucus as you can will help your breathing and reduce the coughing.", "A couple of points in addition to those mentioned. There is continuous production of mucus in the lungs. There is a ciliary (little hairs on cells) action that moves this up into the throat to be swallowed or expelled. Then there is mucus production in the nose that can drip posteriorly. In addition to mucus, however, remember that when you have a cold or the flu there is usually viral infection and inflammation. This inflammation, the body's response to infection (and other insults), directly irritates the tissues and causes coughing presumably to accelerate expulsion of the insulting agent and mucus. This irritation can persist beyond the initial insult." ], "score": [ 30, 10 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyxul", "dby1bef" ], "text": [ "What happens when you have two different patterns at a very close frequency, is that at some times, they will line up perfectly, but then slowly drift off until they are in opposite phase, and then drift back to lining up, and so on. Now if you had two patterns at exactly the same frequency, and they started in phase with each other, they would stay in phase with each other.", "Source: I am a mechanical engineer. Windshield wipers and turn signals do in fact follow a consistent rhythm. This rhythm is called the frequency, which is a constant (i.e. does not change) pattern of beats. The reason it seems to fall out of sync with the music is because the frequency of both the music and windshield wipers or turn signals are slightly different, and fall out of phase with each other. They will eventually fall out of phase then eventually fall back in phase. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) and if you want something to always be in sync with each other you must need the same amount of frequency. Edit: I did not see the previous post, as that explains it pretty well too." ], "score": [ 12, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbxyuqt", "dbxyv6d" ], "text": [ "Kelvin is just the Celsius scale re-balanced so that 0 is absolute zero. The increment of Celsius is based on the temperatures that water freezes (0 Celsius) and boils (100 Celsius).", "That's the point of the Kelvin scale. Zero is set at the point where all atomic vibration, which we detect as heat, stops. There is no way for a -1 kelvin as it doesn't make sense as a concept." ], "score": [ 7, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby497a", "dbydwlf", "dby1s0y", "dbytfc7" ], "text": [ "Do doctors ask if you've had any feelings of impending doom?", "I don't know that I would call it a \"reliable indicator\". It is, however, often a precursor to something serious going on. There are also people that have panic attacks all the time and will come to the ER dying from the same feeling of doom 4 times a week. For me, this applies more to the older people that generally have no issues and all of sudden being stricken with this feeling and some other suspicious malady. Source; EMT/ER nurse.", "It's a feeling of being kind of disconnected and frightened. Woke up during heart surgery, That's what it was like for me.", "I'd second the EMT/ER RN - in younger patients who are clearly anxious without significant pathology it is likely just a panic attack. I've seen older folks who are quite ill with significant infections / heart failure / pulmonary emboli (blood clots that travel from the legs to the heart) who fairly calmly state \"I think I'm going to die.\" They end up being right a good percentage of the time. I imagine it's got to do with a release of a significant amount of stress signals, and perhaps the person recognizes that there's no way to avoid what's coming. I had a feeling of impending doom about three seconds after jumping into an icy pond while camping in the Sierra. The first thought upon entry was \"hey, this isn't so cold\". Then when it caught up with me there was an internal alarm that let me know my life was at risk. I would imagine if you felt that and could not escape the situation then you would know you're done. Medically speaking I don't think there's any good explanation that you are likely to get, as we are far more interested in treating the patient who says something like that than doing a study on what exactly is making them feel that way. Source: am doctor" ], "score": [ 10, 9, 6, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby1r3b" ], "text": [ "If it from caffeine withdraw. There is a lot of caffeine in pop and when you suddenly remove it from your diet (or reduce it) your body starts having withdraw symptoms. The good news is that these symptoms only last a few days, and that is why they go away." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby2w54", "dbye0dg" ], "text": [ "The Office of Congressional Ethics is the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers after several bribery and corruption scandals sent members to prison. Apparently the crooks have decided the best way to stay out of jail is to fire the police department (or at least take away their powers). URL_0", "The OCE was supposed to be independent. While that may be true they overstepped their bounds and often leaked allegations (which were made anonymously) even before any conclusions were reached. This had some dire consequences for many innocent people. Spurious accusations could be made without any substantiation and these were sometimes leaked. Congress has decided to back to investigating allegations themselves, which is what they did prior to 2008. The difference now is that the Ethics Committee will receive allegations directly and not anonymously. It's important to note that the committee consists of members of both parties and many Democrats are in favor of dissolving the OCE because their members were harmed just as often." ], "score": [ 7, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/house-gop-votes-to-gut-independent-ethics-office/2308207" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyf5mu", "dbydnc3", "dbybzlh", "dbyfmkd", "dbyh2eh" ], "text": [ "Hello! Here is as ELI5 as I can make it: Imagine the spinal cord as a thin wire that branches into smaller wires at body side of things. The tip of each branched portion is responsible for delivering messages corresponding to different kinds of stimuli (touch/pain/temperature etc.). Because the spinal cord is thin (keep in mind this is simplified), different signals compete to travel up the spinal cord and be \"felt.\" To address your question directly, muscle soreness is helped by rubbing because rubbing introduces a new kind of stimuli. Before rubbing, dull pain stimulus from your muscle soreness was moving up the spinal cord uncontested. After rubbing, the dull pain is competing with your new touch input. Thus you \"drown out\" the pain signal with touch signal. Rubbing a cut doesn't work the same way because your input is activating both the touch and the pain receptors in that area. In such regions, pain receptors are often hyperactive, which causes them to outcompete other input. Hope that helps! (Some of the more astute neuroscientists will realize that I left out Lateral Inhibition, but I'll let you Google that on your own) Edit: grammar", "A muscle's natural state is to be relaxed. Contraction causes movement. A \"sore\" muscle is in a contracted state even when it shouldn't be. Massaging it causes the muscle fibers to relax (heat will do the same thing) which can relieve the soreness. An acute injury usually involves injury to nerves. Any pressure on these injured nerves will stimulate the nerve which causes pain.", "All injuries require bloodflow in order to heal. Massaging a muscle will bring more blood there, thereby increasing healing (heatpacks work too for this reason). If you overly touch a cut or something similar, then you will be causing more damage through reopening wound, tearing skin further, or causing infection.", "I have to point out that pain relief comes a while after the actual massage. The act of massaging a sore muscle can be quite painful, much like manipulating a bruised or injured body part.", "Muscles soreness (often called DOMS) occurs when muscles perform eccentric or lengthening contractions such as in your biceps when you lift weights or in your hamstrings when running. These contractions cause microscopic tears which trigger an immune reaction by the body to try and heal itself. This reaction - inflammation - lowers the pain threshold of the nerves so that they are more sensitive to pain. The reason the body responds this way (aka causes pain) is so that we are aware of the injury and more careful when using it. Essentially, sore muscles are caused by micro tears in a muscle and the body responds with inflammation which leads to pain. Massaging sore muscles helps to relieve muscle pain for several reasons: * Massaging helps reduce the production of inflammatory cytokines (proteins that cause inflammation). * Massaging has been shown to increase the production of mitochondria in a cell, which aid in tissue recovery. * Massaging sore muscles also provides some of the same benefits as stretching: namely increasing flexibility and relaxing the contracted muscle. When you have an acute injury such as a cut or burn, your nerves react in a similar way as they do in sore muscles, by becoming inflamed and more sensitive to pain. However, touching an acute injury can be incredibly painful compared to the pain of massaging a sore muscle. The reason for this is twofold. First and most importantly, the nerves in a cut or burn are exposed to the elements. When you touch a cut or burn you are directly touching these nerves, whereas when you massage a sore muscle the nerves are far beneath the surface of your skin. Secondly, there are generally more pain receptor nerve ending on the surface of your skin because that is where the body interacts with the environment. This is especially true for areas like your fingertips or face. TLDR: Massaging sore muscles helps to reduce inflammation and therefore reduce pain and increases the production of microconidia which aid in tissue recovery. When you touch an open wound you are *directly* touching nerves that are already inflamed and overly sensitive due to injury." ], "score": [ 184, 118, 24, 10, 10 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby2jbx" ], "text": [ "Sometimes there is and it's called Thundersnow. Most of the time there isn't because the conditions that cause lighting aren't typically present during a winter snowstorm. Most of the time a snowstorm is just....lots of snow. Sometimes it's snow and really bad winds. But neither of those are the conditions to produce lightning." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby2scb" ], "text": [ "Tired eyes get dry, and rubbing stimulates the glands to produce more fluid. Tiredness also closes your eyes, so you may rub to keep them open. Finally, there's a connection between the muscles that move your eyes around and your heart. When these muscles are stimulated, a reflex slows the heart." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby343g", "dby34nb", "dby4492" ], "text": [ "Athletes have very high aerobic capacity, because they regularly work out at a very high exertion level. As a result, their very fit hearts can pump all the blood their resting body needs at only 40 BPM. It's not a calm/Zen thing, it's a fitness thing.", "Their heart muscle is stronger than mine, so with each pump it pushes blood harder/further than mine does, so while resting, it doesn't need to pump as much. Also, their lungs and blood are more efficient at getting oxygen into the blood cells than I am, so when blood is sent to muscles and organs, it is more oxygen-rich, meaning those tissues need a \"resupply\" less frequently.", "I'm sure this is due to their fitness levels. As an avid cyclist I've read up a bit on this and as your cardiovascular fitness level increases, your resting heart rate decreases. Someone who is extremely unfit would have a resting heart rate much higher than that of your average person and this is what puts them at greater risk of heart disease and stroke." ], "score": [ 34, 11, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby43lk", "dby3z5d", "dby3mad" ], "text": [ "They can do it if they want. However the car companies makes money to train and certify car mechanics and to provide them with the correct codes. Codes can often change between similar cars and be totally different for the same model with different option packs or with different production dates. It also ensures that the owner takes the car to a licensed workshop which helps reduce problems that comes from untrained mechanics or unoriginal parts.", "If I was being cynical it doesn't give information because it wants you to take your car to the dealer for a expensive service. I genuinely don't understand how with modern cars with big LED displays and onboard computers, a car can't give an indication of the nature of the issue.", "The mechanic can get much more data, with a reader, from the car's ODB2 maintenance data port. The car manufacturer only lights the MIL to tell you to take you car to someone who has a reader. There are thousands of codes, and cluttering up the dashboard with space for all the message details would not meet the car company's styling requirements." ], "score": [ 9, 6, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby5oxl", "dby5nvm", "dby5uje", "dby9823", "dbybrpk" ], "text": [ "Because they can point to decades of statistics that a 17 year old male is extremely likely to be a doofus and wreck his car. I'm not sure there's any reason they can't charge you more for being black, too, if there's genuine statistical evidence that you are thus more likely to get in a crash. The whole idea of insurance only works because of correct assessment of risk.", "They don't charge because they're male (i.e. just the gender), they charge more for a variety of reasons based solely on statistics. - males are more likely to drive stupidly/recklessly/cause accidents - young people (young _males_ especially) are more likely to be in accidents - males are more likely to buy faster, more expensive cars; which get in more accidents - aaaand cost more to fix than that Hyundai hatchback. As you get older and maintain a safe driving record, your insurance will decrease. But as a young male, 16-25, this is the worst demographic for auto insurance. Because young dudes get in more accidents because they're _stooopid drivers_. source: was young dude who drove stoopid and paid a fuck-ton for car insurance.", "Interestingly, in the EU, males and females have to pay the same. \"Equality\", so women now pay more.", "When we say discrimination, we usually mean *unfair discrimination*, which is usually illegal. *Fair discrimination*, however, is legal. If I am selling extra strong sunscreen, I don't have to put out a casting call that includes people with dark skin. Age and gender discrimination in insurance is considered fair, as there is are demonstrable links between those qualities and likelihood to be in an accident. If there was similar evidence for race, that too would likely be legal, if wildly unpopular. Also, because fair discrimination can include things like income, credit rating, education, and in particular, where you live, black people as a group often do wind up paying more.", "They use any piece of data that they are legally allowed to, in an effort to gauge how risky a driver you might be, and charge you accordingly. If they could legally use race, religion, and sexual orientation to get a better determination, they'd do that to, but the Government has made that illegal. However, they have not made assessments based on Gender illegal. Why is your personal opinion, but probably because males are charged more. If females were riskier, and subsequently charged more, I believe the Government would ban it like they do with health insurance." ], "score": [ 18, 10, 9, 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby63ts", "dby6ayb" ], "text": [ "Is this something you are considering doing, or something you want to understand better? I ask because this appears to be a flavor of the \"sovereign citizen\" mythology claiming that there's a secret account in your name that you can access if you just say the magic legal words. There's a story to be explained behind that madness, but not one that involves anyone actually getting out of debt.", "It is utter nonsense invented by a mix of idiots and frauds, which has no legal validity and is reasonably likely to end up with the person claiming it spending time in jail for contempt of court. There is no such thing as a \"strawman account,\" and a UCC-1 is a form filed by people who are *actually* owed money (in the real world, not the fantasy land of \"strawman accounts\")." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbybj2p", "dbybp52", "dbydfb9" ], "text": [ "Lots of nerve endings on the lips and tongue, to which you're applying a (relatively) gentle, warm, soft stimulus. So it does feel good on a purely physical level. More than that, though, kissing is extremely gratifying on a psychological/emotional level. The knowledge that someone (whom you presumably like and feel fond of, at least a little) *wants* to be kissing you is a confidence boost and a turn-on in and of itself. So that makes you more engaged and invested in the moment, which makes your partner feel good, so they return that extra attention to you, and so on. It's a positive feedback loop. Edit: Added \"confidence boost\".", "I read that kissing in general is pleasurable because it is similar to kiss-feeding, where parent animals feed their babies pre-chewed or pre-digested food. From an evolutionary perspective. From 1:30 in this video, for a few minutes, it is discussed: URL_0", "I never thought the frenching sensation itself was that pleasurable, but more the promise of what was in store." ], "score": [ 34, 7, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://youtu.be/ixQbCXLUUj8" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby9ls4" ], "text": [ "In the past humans only ever really had the opportunity to view animals in-person as photography and video weren't practical or able to fully represent the animals. There was a demand for the ability to view new things and zoos were a good tourism draw. Also they give the opportunity for specialists to work closely with and observe various animals in ways that simply looking at them in the wild would not." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dby9t7n", "dbyi1bc" ], "text": [ "Well, if there's someone who speaks it, with lots of pointing and experimentation. If it's just written, you use the same process we use today, just by hand. Statistical analysis, educated guessing, checking against other known languages, looking for a Rosetta Stone style cheat sheet.", "Technology, for the most part, basically speeds up certain processes; people used the same techniques they use today, but they took longer. There are very few languages and scripts that are totally unrelated to existing languages and scripts, so linguists usually have some reference to work with. When there isn't one, it's a case of looking for patterns. If you have a nice, large text in an unknown language, you can start looking for how different signs are put together. A Martian trying to decipher English, for example, will notice that there over 50 different signs organized in small groups; some of those signs often appear at the beginning of a group, others only at the end (we're talking about capital letters and punctuation marks); that some groups of signs like \"the\" and \"to\" are very common and probably serve some grammatical purpose; and so on. It's slow, painstaking work that can take decades, and some languages -- even with today's technology -- remain undeciphered. The Rosetta Stone is a famous block of stone that allowed linguists to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics were used by the Egyptians only for very special inscriptions: usually, they used a script called \"Demotic\". But nobody could agree on how to decipher hieroglyphics: did a hieroglyph represent a word or a sound, for example? The breakthrough was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which had three texts inscribed on it: one in hieroglyphs, one in Demotic and one in Greek. Historians were able to read the Greek, which, among other things, said that the stone had the same text in three languages, so now they knew the three texts said the same thing. But still, hieroglyphs were taking a long time to \"crack\". One person noticed that some of the hieroglyphs were grouped together and surrounded by a sort of bubble shape (called a \"cartouche\"), and he guessed that they were names. He found a cartouche which included two signs he already knew represented the sound \"s\", and it also included a sign that looked like a representation of a sun. He knew of another language from the region where the word for \"sun\" is \"ra\", and realized he was looking at the name Ramses -- and *that* was the way in to finally decipher the hieroglyphs. Technology can't actually do the work on its own -- it needs the input of human imagination -- but it does make things like statistical analysis (very useful for deciphering languages) much easier and faster." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbydxc5", "dbyd088", "dbydngf", "dbycx9u", "dbyctmc" ], "text": [ "It is less wrong, and more of an incomplete approximation. For example, you have a farm in Kansas that is 5 miles by 5 miles. You have exactly 25 square miles, right? Area = side * side, after all. That would be wrong. You have slightly more than 25 square miles, because the earth is roughly a sphere. That doesn't mean the formula for area is wrong, it just doesn't take into account spherical surfaces. It is also very accurate over small distances. Newtonian physics is the same way. It isn't wrong, it just doesn't take relativity into account. And for speeds that aren't a significant fraction of the speed of light, it is quite accurate.", "It's not \"wrong\" but it only works for a limited set of conditions, the conditions we're likely to experience on earth. Einstein's relativity theory works for a far larger set of conditions, like the bending of space because of large objects, like planets (also known as \"gravity\"), a concept that was alien to Newton. Newton thought of gravity as an attractive force, but had no clue to its true nature. If you feed the conditions of space with no perceptible curvature into Relativity theory, what you get back out is essentially Newtonian Physics. It's interesting to note that Relativity Theory doesn't work for *all* conditions. For instance, it is incompatible with Quantum Physics. We can gather from this that there must be a larger theory of physics from which both Relativity and Quantum Physics can be derived.", "Newtonian physics is a model to explain and predict the behavior of the natural world. Like any good model, it does some things very good, but it's not perfect. Models tend to break down at the extremes. If I were to drop a baseball from a height of 5 feet and want to know how long it's going to take for the baseball to hit the ground, I could find an answer by solving for t in d=gt^2. But if I had extremely sensitive equipment, I'd probably find that my actual result didn't match up with the real prediction. Maybe I was off by .0000001 seconds. Why would that be? Well, maybe my measurements weren't quite right, and I didn't start at exactly 5 feet, or the value for acceleration due to gravity was only correct to 4 significant figures. But did that small discrepancy matter for what I was trying to do? What if instead of 5 feet, I was dropping a baseball from the stratosphere. Would the same equation give an accurate result? No, because that equation doesn't include the drag that air resistance is going to cause and become a large factor when the ball starts moving at a high enough speed. Or what if I'm dropping the ball into a black hole instead? Newtonian physics aren't a good model there because relativistic effects become important in that extreme scenario. We say that Newtonian physics is a good model because a lot of the time, the model we're using lines up with the real world, because the model accounts for those factors. Some factors (like relativistic effects when things are really heavy or moving really fast) or quantum effects (the behavior of objects that are really small), are not taken into account in Newtonian physics, but for lots of applications, those things don't matter, because their effect on the outcome is negligible.", "It's pretty common for there to be rules of thumb that are simpler than the real system, but hide the complexity of the real system and fail on edge cases. As an example - you could make a rule of thumb that you can never turn right on red. It'll work - you'll never get a ticket for illegally turning right on red, so in that sense it \"works\", but it's hiding the complexity of the real system. Newtonian physics is a model that, in most cases, is accurate, but doesn't capture the underlying causes and thus missed some important complexity.", "It's not wrong, it's just inaccurate. It works well enough as long as your measurements aren't too precise, you aren't going too fast, and probably a few more things that I can't recall off the top of my head. Once you go beyond those constraints, you run into things that Newton wasn't able to test, so you need to modify the equations to account for variables he and his contemporaries weren't able to observe." ], "score": [ 36, 15, 6, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyd9k7", "dbydahd", "dbyd98a" ], "text": [ "Because nobody is seeing the bigger picture in real-time. Each minor incident is a daily occurence that has it's own fail safes. Working through a simple example: You are a construction worker and drop your hammer from a great height. No big deal, since the scaffolding has a curtain to catch stuff. However, the guy that hangs the curtain called in sick the day before and didn't hang it. This is no big deal, because the fail safe is don't let anyone work without the curtain up. But the guy who directs work didn't know the curtain wasn't up and was a little late this morning, so skipped his morning walkaround. Kinda bad, but the site has been safe lately and we really need to get started. So he didn't redirect you away from where you dropped your hammer. As a team, you all worked together to drop a hammer on somebody's head, sending them to the hospital. Each occurrence is a daily event that has natural countermeasures built in, but when piled together, nobody sees how big a hole these little things can make.", "Have you heard of the [Swiss Cheese model]( URL_0 )? It describes how one error can be prevented by other actions or redundancy, like others have pointed out. It is when the other layers start failing that the accident can occur.", "Because people, for the most part try to do their best to avoid major disasters. If a disaster was the result of one giant significant thing it would be pretty obvious and probably very easy to stop. The small things are hard to model in computer models and are hard to keep in mind when 'predicting' the future. Pretend you're on a mountain and you want to have a picnic, you see a nice spot that has a boulder looming over it that looks pretty lose, you're going to just avoid the boulder all together. You go over to a place that has a muddy wall next to it. Unfortunately because a few clumps of mud were just wet enough to fall apart and you die from a landslide. You couldn't inspect the mud well enough, or there was too much of it to inspect, either way it wasn't obvious so you did nothing to avoid it." ], "score": [ 11, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyl3lt", "dbyek16", "dbyw37n", "dbyi49h", "dbyec5l", "dbygtc6", "dbyekvo" ], "text": [ "Everyone else is wrong. Math isn't arbitrary, there are reasons for everything. Let me give a simple example. Lets find out how much money you have. You have a dollar and 3 five dollar bills. A math equation would be 1 + 3 x 5 = If you think about it like money, you know you have $16 and not $20. There is no reason to add the $1 to the number of bills you have. But why? The answer is just to ask, \"What is multiplication?\" Multiplication is just short had for repetitive addition. If we expand the equation we get 1 + 5 + 5 + 5 = Now if we add everything together it's easy to see the correct answer. It's easier to see that adding the one to either the 3 or the 5 completely messes up the short hand. Well what about exponents? Again exponents are just short hand for multiplication. 2^3 2^3 = 8 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8 Because exponents are short hand for multiplication, they must be addressed first or you mess up the original meaning. Multiplication and division come next as they are both the same. Dividing by 2 is the same as multiplying by .5. Then addition and subtraction as they are the same. 5 - 2 is the same as 5 + -2.", "It's not so much as we \"determined\" them so much as \"defined\" them. That is, the system of notation we've come up with to describe mathematics *is* something we've come up with. And part of that is doing things in a particular order. Take these two equations: > (2 + 3) * 4 = 20 and > 2 + (3 * 4) = 14 Two totally different answers. We use the parentheses to override the normal order of operations in the first equation, and I just put them in on the second equation where they're implied to be. Because the two different setups give us two different answers, there *must* be a standard order in which to do them in order to get the same answer. We happened to choose multiplication and division to go before addition and subtraction and to put parentheses when we need to override that, but it would have worked equally well to do it the other way around. There's no firm mathematical reason why it is the way it is, except that it has to be *some* standard way.", "Xeno's post is wrong, not everybody else. We defined it that way and we did so to remove ambiguity. With no convention there is ambiguity if 1+3 x 5 Should be interpreted as (1+3) x 5 or 1 + (3 x 5) or even (1+5) x 3 All the order of operations does is post a convention that removes ambiguity and provides *one* correct way of interpreting it. One of these cases no longer needs brackets because it is the default case. We could chose a different order of operations, making the default case different. Importantly, it's still possible to make all of those expressions because brackets take precedence. Literally all the order of operations does is remove brackets. E.g., 1 + (3 x 5) = 1 + 3 x 5 That's the default case so they are redundant. u/KapteeniJ has some more on the reasoning why the particular convention we have was chosen.", "It is arbitrary, you could have a perfectly valid system with different rules of precedence. But there is a logic behind it. The idea is that operations that are likely to have the greatest impact on the magnitude of the result have the highest precedence. That way the operations are grouped in such a way that partial operations can serve as an estimate of the final results. For example: 5 * 3^4 + 10 The exponentiation clearly has the greatest impact, and that's why it has the highest precedence. Even though 10 is the largest number, it has the least impact on the final value. Because of this, after doing the exponentiation, you can tell this will be a low to mid ranged 3 digit value without fulling doing the rest of the math. If the rules of precedence were reversed, this would be equivalent to: (5*3)^(4+10) In which case how much each number influences the final value is much more confused.", "It's not really a \"this was discovered\" thing, so much as it was a \"this was decided\" thing. The point of the order of operations is more like the rules of grammar in language. It's to make sure that people can say something and be clear that the other person will understand what they mean. So if I say 3*2+5, it's important that you know that I mean 11 instead of 21.", "> Surely it was not some arbritrary decision to make multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction? Actually, it *was* an arbitrary decision. The order of operations could be whatever we want them to be. All that matters is that we're consistent in applying them, so that everyone agrees that the same equation has the same solution.", "Actually, it is completely arbitrary. We just need to decide on one order that everybody uses, so people don't get confused. And we don't even have just one way of doing it. Some programming languages will work on a first-come first serve basis, for them: > 2+3\\*4 is simply calculated from left to right, so 2+3\\*4=20 Another difference is how 4 / 2 \\* 3 is calculated. Some calculators interpret this as (4/2) \\*3 while others interpret it as 4 / (2\\*3), because we didnt agree on a correct order of operations between fractions and multiplication. So in the end, it's all just arbitrary, and we haven't even done a perfect job at it." ], "score": [ 78, 20, 19, 7, 6, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyhqym", "dbygupl" ], "text": [ "Well, first we need to define what a \"high-risk\" investment is. Usually this will mean one of two items: 1. A young company that has created something uniquely valuable 2. A company in financial distress Let's start with number 1: a young company. This is the type of company you'll usually see in Shark Tank/Dragon's Den. Essentially someone thought up a product or idea, and started a business around it. **SOME** sources of risk here are as follows (by no means is this exhaustive): 1. Management. Usually someone at this stage of business is a first-time entrepreneur (or maybe it isn't their first time, but the other attempts did not realize success). They are going to make mistakes, mistakes cost money. 2. The Underlying Product or Service. So the entrepreneur has an idea. Okay. How *big* is the idea *really*? Is this just a gag gift? Is it the next major trend? How big is the market for this idea, and how much would they be willing to pay for it? 3. The Company's Short History. It's very hard to tell if you're improving or not if you've only got a year or two of financial records (which, in many cases, could be incorrect!). 4. Management's Expectations. Usually founders of small businesses are **very** optimistic about what they're going to do and how successful it will be. Everything they say needs to be taken with a grain of salt. 5. **TIME** This one is a big one. An investment in a small start up isn't like putting money in the bank or even investing in the stock market. **You will not be able to access that money for at least a few years, and usually more.** That can be very problematic. 6. Profitability. In order to succeed, your company must generate more cash than it spends. Many start ups **do not generate more cash than spent for several years.** They usually need a lot of capital from investors like you just to survive until they're big enough to gain a profit. If the company isn't structured very well, it could be a long time before profit is recognized. (Also some industries, like a whisky distillery, by the nature of their business take a long time to have a product ready to sell). Why invest amidst all these risks? **Because you're able to get a large portion of the ownership of the company for *relatively* cheap so that if it DOES take off, you can make a TON of money.** Now let's look at Distressed Companies. A distressed company is one that has been operating for a bit, but suddenly now finds itself near or in bankruptcy. Why on Earth would someone want to invest in that? Well, sometimes the company's underlying, normal performance is perfectly fine, but they took on too much debt, or some very unusual thing happened that caused them to get in the mess they're now in. Other times, the way they do business isn't the best, and so they're missing out on great growth opportunities. So, you can either loan them cash or invest in them so they survive, get back on their feet, and then realize a good return (both the company overall and you personally). It all comes down to something called your *risk appetite.* That is, how willing are you to lose for the chance to win? Obviously if you'd lose $100 maximum and gain $1,000,000 maximum, you'd be more likely to take that bet. If the reverse were the case (bettering $1,000,000 for the chance to win $100), you'd avoid that. It comes down to where you draw the line, how negotiations play out, and how the overall deal ends up going before and after.", "Step one is to have a lot of money so you can lose it when you're wrong and not be on the street. Step two is to be an 'expert' in the field the company is in. That doesn't mean you have to actually understand pharmacology to invest in pharmacies but you have to understand the market landscape which would include knowing something about drugs and how regulations work etc. High-risk means high reward, so you only have to be correct once to make it big, however it also means you'll lose more often than you'll win." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyg6ua", "dbyfz7y", "dbyixic", "dbykqqd" ], "text": [ "I would assume dedicated volenteer moderators. Probably also why they have implemented the \"youtube hero\" plan, to use their user base to improve the site for them. On a side note, thank you to the silent moderators for making this site as great as it is and keeping it clean!! Thank you!!", "Because the product YouTube is providing isn't that adversely affected by spam. They are about videos, not discussion, and you'll enjoy the funny cats even if the comments are full of spam. Reddit, on the other hand, is all about discussion, and it is highly motivated to fight spam, on the admin, moderator, and user level. Even spam that makes it through the first two is likely to be downvoted to oblivion.", "I want to also add that there are tons of bots on Reddit. Mainly to manipulate reddit's voting algorithm. Just because they don't act like other bots on social media sites doesn't mean they don't exist here. In the past month someone posted a video on how they could force their content on the front page. Plus then you have the discussion on how The_Donald used many bots to get their content to the front page. Just because you don't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.", "Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and many other sites have an issue with covert advertising. You may think that you can block all ads, but this is false. If the video or post itself is an ad, then you can be marketed to without your knowledge. - [Warner Brothers fined for paying YouTube celebs to promote game without properly disclosing that the videos were paid endorsements.]( URL_6 ) - [USA Today: Lord & Taylor settles FTC charges over paid Instagram posts]( URL_3 ) - [Wired: Microsoft, through an outside agency, paid Machinima to produce positive videos about the Xbox One game machine, and many of the YouTube stars who accepted the deal failed to properly disclose that they were producing paid, sponsored content, not independent analysis.]( URL_5 ) This also works with government propaganda. - [The Guardian: British army creates team of Facebook warriors]( URL_1 ) - [US military studied how to influence Twitter [and Reddit] users in Darpa-funded research]( URL_0 ) - [NY Times- From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.]( URL_2 ) ---------------------------- [More info at the Astroturfing Information Megathread.]( URL_4 )" ], "score": [ 33, 9, 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [ "http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/darpa-social-networks-research-twitter-influence-studies", "http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/31/british-army-facebook-warriors-77th-brigade", "http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?_r=1", "http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/03/15/lord--taylor-settles-ftc-charges-over-paid-instagram-posts/81801972/", "https://np.reddit.com/r/shills/comments/4kdq7n/astroturfing_information_megathread_revision_8/?st=ixhqirhl&sh=617118f1", "http://www.wired.com/2015/09/ftc-machinima-microsoft-youtube/", "https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/12/warner-brothers-fined-for-paying-youtube-celebs-to-promote-game/?ncid=mobilenavtrend" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyhcpi", "dbyhxtj" ], "text": [ "There are no such people. Many people, however, can't remember their dreams. Use the Search function here in ELI5 to see many posts on not remembering dreams.", "> If dreams are brought on from focusing thought while you sleep, They are not. Dreams are a side-effect of your brain processing memories. There's no \"focus\" on anything, nor any direction. Nor are the dreams themselves a benefit, though people tend to make up a meaning for them. That process happens to *everyone* who is not suffering from a severe mental disorder. Not everyone will remember their dreams, though." ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyjev6" ], "text": [ "At the time, the coal mines were all owned by the UK government and ran at a loss overall so tax money covered the shortfall. The government was opposed to paying high subsidies to keep the loss-making coal industry running. Very little mechanisation had been introduced to coal mining in the UK, so was very inefficient and expensive due to the high labour costs. The government wanted to stop subsidising the coal industry by introducing mechanisation to try to reduce costs, closing down any mines that were never going to be profitable, and selling-off the profit-making mines to private buyers. The National Union of Miners (NUM) was very strong politically, many Members of Parliament were chosen and funded by the NUM. Their large numbers meant they were able to co-ordinate strikes to disrupt the running of the country until they got their way. The government was also opposed to this and wanted to reduce the unions' power. Introduction of mechanisation and closure of unprofitable mines was very unpopular with the NUM because it would ultimately lead to miners losing their jobs, the UK needing fewer miners and reducing the NUM's power. This was across a wider backdrop of the government wanting to reduce the number of manufacturing and industry jobs and introducing more office-based (service) jobs that was also unpopular with unions generally and causing large-scale unemployment. As the UK was very reliant of coal for electricity, etc, the NUM thought they could coerce the government into changing their mind by calling a strike that would cause coal shortages. The government had prepared for this so shortages never materialised and the NUM were unsuccessful." ], "score": [ 4 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbykspg" ], "text": [ "Fate/stay night (VN) is the main body and details the 5th holy grail war. It consists of 3 main routes: Fate, Unlimited Blade Works and Heavens Feel. It has 2 anime adaptations and 1 movie: - Fate/Stay Night (2006 anime), which adapts the Fate route, but mixes in things from 2 other routes. - Unlimited Blade Works (2006 Movie), adapts a gutted version of the Unlimited Blade Works route. - Unlimited Blade Works (2014 anime), Adapts the Unlimited Blade Works route. In the coming year there should be a film trilogy of the Heavens Feel route. - Fate/Zero (manga and anime) is a prequel of Fate Stay Night, detailing the events of the 4th Holy Grail War. - Fate/Kaleid liner Prisma Ilya (manga and anime) is an alternate setting where Fate/Zero ended differently. It is cannon, but set in an alternate timeline (this happens a lot with the Type-moon universe) - Fate/Hollow Ataraxia (VN and manga) is a sequel to the original Fate/Stay Night. - Fate/Extra (Game) is an alternate timeline where things went to shit a couple of decades before the events of Fate/Stay Night. Should get an anime adaptation in the coming year. - Fate/Extra CCC (Game) Sequel to the former. - Fate/Apocrypha (LN), again an alternate timeline. - Fate/Grand Order (Game + OVA). Set in a whole series of alternate timelines. Type Moon sure does love their AU's... These are the most important ones from the Fate franchise. If you want to get the full Type Moon universe you'll also need Kara No Kyokay (LN or anime film series) and Tsukihime (VN, *there is no anime, don't listen to their lies*). Once you watched/played both those you can watch the Carnival Phantasm series, which uses characters from all 3 series. Later this year Fate Extella should be out, which is another game sequel in the Fate/Extra series. All in all the type moon universe is a tangled ball of spaghetti timelines and inconsistencies. Don't worry too much about continuity and just enjoy whatever you want to play in whatever order." ], "score": [ 6 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyl7ui" ], "text": [ "Briefly: no. Long-ly: It depends on the person with depression. We know very little about the causes of depression. We've got tons of theories, and many treatments that help some cases, and even some treatments that cause complete remission in rarer cases. But no one treatment has proven 100% effective. SSRIs make some depressed people totally functional, and cause suicidality in others. Non-pharmacological treatments such as ECT, DBS, and TMS have proven pretty effective -- for some people. It's just too varied to really say. Our entire understanding of depression is basically \"Sometimes it's caused by these things. Sometimes even if it's caused by those things, the treatment just doesn't work. We don't really know why most of the time. Just gotta try another thing.\" Source: mental healthcare worker, person with MDD" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbz3luh", "dbym0d1", "dbylmm7", "dbylymm" ], "text": [ "Many of the answers here are very close to being correct. Methamphetamine is (nearly) chemically identical to amphetamine except for an extra methyl group (a carbon atom with hydrogen attached). This addition makes methamphetamine more hydrophobic (ELI5 term: oil-like). This makes a drastic difference in how the drug reaches the brain to do its work. For any chemical to reach the brain from the blood stream, it has to get past the blood brain barrier, which is designed to stop large, hydrophilic (ELI5: water-like, the opposite of hydrophobic) molecules from reaching the brain (such molecules are often toxins enountered in nature, so this barrier is the body's natural way of shielding valuable brain tissue from any mistakes your mouth makes/eats). In general, when it comes to chemicals like psychoactive drugs (chemicals that affect the brain), more hydrophobic molecules cross the blood brain barrier more easily, and are more effective at altering brain function at lower doses. This means its takes a lower dose of methamphetamine to achieve the same effects as a given amount of amphetamine. But this isn't really the reason why meth has a greater stigma and isn't more widely used as a medical treatment. The real reason is more practical, and has to do with how meth is produced in trailer-park kitchens. Now, most people are aware that a type of decongestant (ELI5: stuffy nose medicine), Sudafed, is widely used to produce meth. This use has resulted in stricter control over the sale of pseudoephedrine (the active chemical in Sudafed), much to the annoyance of sick persons everywhere. The reason why meth cooks are so hell bent on getting their hands on pseudoephedrine is that it is VERY similar, chemically to methamphetamine. The only difference between the molecules is--and tell me if this sounds familiar--a methyl group. The difference here is that pseudoephedrine is the molecule with the extra methyl group, and it's attached to a different part of the molecule than in the methamphetamine/amphetamine comparison. Anyways, this similarity makes things easy; all a meth cook needs to do is grind up some Sudafed pills, dissolve the active ingredient to extract it from the powder, and set up a reaction that will take off that methyl group. This reaction is pretty easy, as chemical reactions go, as it doesn't require much in the way of exotic ingredients or lab equipment--just the right conditions to make that methyl group fall off (usually, this involves a very reactive metal, like the lithium found in computer batteries). Put these things together, do some purification, and voila: meth. (BTW: this is a VERY simple reaction familiar to people with more than four weeks of organic chemistry under their belts, which is why I'm not very worried about accidentally teaching any aspiring meth cooks any valuable chemistry lessons. I've left out enough detail that no one without some college chemistry experience would be able to fill in the blanks.) It is the simplicity of this chemical reaction that makes meth a much more common target of backyard/trailer park/Walmart bathroom chemists than amphetamine. There isn't a commonly available chemical out there that would make amphetamine in a similarly easy reaction. Due to the ready availability of products containing pseudoephedrine, meth became the go-to \"amphetamine\" for recreational cooks, giving it the common association with street drugs, rotten teeth, and Bryan Cranston (well, maybe that last one isn't such a stigma). Amphetamine, on the other hand, has most always been primarily a medical drug--often abused, but nearly universally produced by a pharmaceutical company, rather than Jimmy Cooks-A-Lot and his shake n' bake. As someone else mentioned, methamphetamine can and is prescribed medically for the same reasons as amphetamine. Under the name Desoxyn, it is a potent, last-string treatment for stubbonly difficult ADHD cases. In fact, as Desoxyn is pound for pound, milligram for milligram, more potent than amphetamine/adderall, it can accomplish the same therapheutic results with fewer side effects for the rest of the body.", "Pharmaceutical methamphetamine is actually safer and more efficacious then amphetamine salts. It requires a lower dosage and has fewer side effects. It is uncommonly prescribed for ADHD as Desoxyn.", "Amphetamines and methamphetamines are the same chemical structure apart from one methyl group (that's where the meth comes from in methamphetamine). This methyl group allows the chemical to dissolve more easily into the blood stream which in turn makes it more potent and more addictive", "Opinion: Although meth has the label of \"most addicting\" or whatever, I've known many people just as addicted to adderall as meth. As in non-functioning without taking 90-120mg, double or more to get \"high.\" Also remember one is illegal and one is a pharmaceutical. Would a company normally play up or play down the addiction potential of a product? Once you start taking it and it gets you I don't feel one is more \"addictive\" than the other. matej_latte has the answer, I just wanted to disagree with adderall being \"safer,\"" ], "score": [ 11, 7, 7, 6 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbylv8l", "dbylvek" ], "text": [ "Yes, assuming the mirror existed in the past. If it sprang into existence right now, we wouldn't see anything from it for several years (n = 2 * distance in light years). Then, we would start seeing images from n years ago. From that point on, it would \"track\" earth in real time, offset by n years. This leaves out the issue of the size of the mirror, and planetary / galactic orbits and rotation. EDIT: This concept is well understood in astronomy, as it means that a star we see might not actually exist anymore and we just don't know yet. See this post for a simple example: URL_0", "Yes. Of course, in practice it'd be easier said than done, because we currently have no good way of getting a good picture of something light years away. But yeah, assuming we had a good enough telescope and the mirror was big enough and so on, then yes, we'd be looking into our own past. Imagine how useful it would be for solving crimes. *To the bat-telescope-and-mirror!*" ], "score": [ 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/y8qlf/how_many_of_the_stars_we_see_probably_dont_exist/c5thj6l/" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbym7el" ], "text": [ "They're filled with liquid, not gas. In the case of friction blisters, that liquid is usually plasma. Your skin is composed of layers of cells, and when you apply repetitive friction (shear stress) to a particular area, the upper layers are torn away from the lower layers and plasma leaks out from the damaged cells and collects between the layers of skin." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbynixe" ], "text": [ "There is no such thing as \"Electricity on Standby\". Electricity is the flow of electrons, much the same way that water from a faucet flows out. You experience electricity doing work as it flows through your light bulb. Until that flow starts there is no electricity. That flow cannot start until your circuit is completed by turning the light on. Imagine the light as the kitchen sink drain and the electricity as the water flowing into that drain. You are allowing it to flow, thus 'consuming' it." ], "score": [ 12 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyop3h" ], "text": [ "A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced \"snip\") is a difference of a single letter in a DNA sequence. They are mutations that usually arise through errors in DNA replication." ], "score": [ 3 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyoz35", "dbyornm" ], "text": [ "I'm not sure how common they are, but here are some possible reasons why a sports contract would include one: 1) Athletes are notoriously bad with money. Annuities provide a more stable source of income rather than giving it all to the player at once. 2) Because the salary is deferred, the team has more time to acquire income and invest its savings, enabling the team to give the player a larger amount of money. (e.g. You can have $1 million now or you can get $1.05 million if you're willing to get paid over the course of a year.) 3) If the full salary isn't paid right away, it frees up cash for immediate spending on other players. Having a team full of better players is beneficial for both the player and the team since they both have an interest in winning a championship or at least looking like serious contenders for a championship.", "There are a couple of reasons: 1. It allows them to have income after they're retired, saving them from themselves spending it all and retiring broke. 2. It allows for a larger number to be reported publicly for players' egos, but team is OK with it since the future value of the money will be lower than same amount today (and they can set up annuity for less money in today's dollars to pay it out). Let's say a player negotiated a 4 year, $40 million deal with 1/4 deferred... then that last $10 million get paid in the future when it's buying power is less, and the team can put away $5-6 million now to grow into that $10 million in 10 years, vs. paying out the full $10 million in next 4 years. Maybe they'd only have be willing to pay $35 million if all paid out during contract, but by deferring the player can brag about the bigger number while the team spends the same. 3. Tax brackets may be impacted, where the player could be in a lower tax bracket for state taxes, or reside in a lower tax state then. Some states have high tax brackets for 7-figure incomes and players have to pay taxes in some states where they play (work) for amount of games played there vs. an annuity would be all in their state of residence." ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyq7us" ], "text": [ "Sometimes they don't. For instance there was a bourbon whiskey shortage a couple of years ago because the demand skyrocketed [(more info)]( URL_0 ). In general if one winery is running out of supply because of high demand, they will raise their prices and that will shift the demand away from them onto others. There are so many wine and cheese makers that we don't really notice individual source supply issues. And each individual wine maker gets to know their own market over time so they're pretty good at estimating the demand for their own product anyway." ], "score": [ 19 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://marketwatchmag.com/bourbon-september-2016/" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyqr87", "dbyq888", "dbyqq55", "dbyt0rd" ], "text": [ "The cost of crude is only about 65-75% of what goes into the cost of gasoline (in the US). The rest is from refining, transporting, marketing and taxes. Since the rests of those costs haven't changed (much), just decreasing the cost of crude will only decrease the price of gas by about 2/3rd that amount.", "Gasoline is a bit scarcer than wholesale crude oil, because it has to go through refineries, and then get distributed, and then get sold at retail outlets. Even if crude oil is plentiful, any bottleneck in the refining or distribution system can drive up the price of gasoline. And when the price of crude oil falls, it takes some time for competition to force the price of retail gasoline down. Generally no one wants to be the first to slash prices, when everyone's making a nice profit.", "The cost of oil is but one cost of producing gas. The price you pay for gas also covers labor, electricity, distribution, transportation, real estate, marketing, taxes, etc. Even though the cost of oil is a significant portion of the price of gas, it's not the only expense. A percentage reduction in the cost of oil will not produce an equal percentage reduction in the price of gas.", "There are three mostly fixed costs with regard to gasoline: * refining, about 60 cents a gallon * marketing and distribution, about 20 cents a gallon * taxes, up to 50 cents a gallon in the US That gives you floor of about $1.30 a gallon. That means when the price at the pump falls from $3 to $2, the part depending on oil prices is falling from $1.70 to $0.70 in the states with the highest tax rates, more than a 50% reduction." ], "score": [ 40, 13, 10, 7 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyr5rc", "dbyrc33", "dbywo0f", "dbz7bus", "dbyufiu" ], "text": [ "The two-liter bottle was introduced in the USA in 1970 by John Sculley of Pepsi, who later went on to run Apple Computer. URL_0 In the early-mid 1970s the USA was dabbling with adopting the metric system, and Pepsi was trying to be cutting-edge. Even though that adoption still hasn't broadly succeeded. Sculley's brilliant marketing move did succeed, moving just his industry to using liters.", "To add, liquor in the US is almost universally sold in 750 ml bottles, although they are colloquially referred to as fifth gallons (which is 757 ml).", "When bottlers switched from glass (breakable, heavy, needed to have a deposit system to get people to return them) to plastic (unbreakable in daily life, lightweight, no need for returns), they did so during a push for metrication (70s-80s). Once they finished rebuilding all their bottling plants, there was absolutely no incentive to go back and re-tool them all for a slightly smaller size, especially as bulk soda is almost never used in precision applications (like most foods are, in recipes). Bottled water is absolutely available in liter and half-liter sizes. Gallon bottles of water are just repurposed milk bottles. It's a matter of timing.", "It wasn't just the move to the metric system. Scully and Pepsi took advantage of the fact that 2-liters is more than a half-gallon, so consumers were told they were getting 5% more soda for free. It was really a marketing ploy, and other manufacturers had to follow suit for two reasons. First to bring their products to parity, and second to standardize bottle size that in turn standardized inventory, distribution, and shelf space Note that many premium ice cream manufacturers recently did the reverse from a half-gallon to three pints. This was intended to allow stocking space for product varieties, and well as absorb the increased costs of manufacturing", "They don't always. 12 ounce cans are sold. Liter and 2 liter bottles were a later invention and were made in metric sizes for simplicity and it really doesn't matter." ], "score": [ 37, 28, 10, 7, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/43635/he-made-history-with-a-two-liter-bottle" ], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbz6aau", "dbyztz0", "dbz3lk7", "dbz1xxj", "dbz3g0r", "dbzfuox", "dbz8zcl", "dbz1uy1" ], "text": [ "Hey there, pharmacist here. The most general way to understand the skin, drug absorption, lotions, and so forth is to think about how oil and water don't (easily) mix. To cross the skin barrier from outside of your skin to the inside, generally any molecule has to cross an outer lipophilic layer (which likes fat), then through a hydrophilic layer (which likes water), and then through an inner lipophilic layer. Some transdermal (across the skin) delivery systems can even increase the permeability of the skin, making it easier for molecules to get across. To address your initial question with creams and lotions, remember oil and water. The goal is to increase hydration or rather, to avoid moisture loss. So lotions on a basic level restore water. And if you put something occlusive (a lipophilic barrier like a layer of Vaseline, creams which have oils and fats in them to do the same, a bandage, etc.), you basically trap water in your skin. This is why lotions and creams work better if you put them on when your skin is still damp from a shower or bath - you trap more moisture. Hope this helps!", "The main way that it works is that instead of liquid from your skin evaporating, the lotion evaporates instead. There are more factors involved, but they serve mostly as a barrier.", "Bonus eli5, explain how DMSO works. (Dimethyl sulfoxide) is a transport agent not quite approved for human use, but works great in animals for getting medicine through the skin into the muscles and joints. It is so effective that even trace chemicals, like your own hand cream, can make it through during application.", "Your skin isn't a solid barrier. The top most layer allows for substances to move through it and in to the bloodstream. Substances can also enter through hair follicles and pores (though to a lesser extent). URL_0", "Even Garlic and Onions contain chemicals that go through the skin... you don't need to look too far. Put garlic between your toes. In roughly an hour you should develop garlic breath.", "Most creams do not get through the skin. The skin is almost impermeable, and medicines have to be designed especially to penetrate. Things like cocoa butter etc only affect the top layers of skin, and do very little else. This is a good thing. Remember the rhyme: Skin skin It keeps me in. But-is-impermeable-to-most-substances-unless-the-particles-are-sufficiently-low-molecular-weight. Skin.", "I'm assuming that you are asking about how moisturizers work, and not the mechanism whereby how cells in your skin actually pull moisture into your body. There are 2 kinds of moisturizers. The first is occlusive, which is a physical barrier preventing moisture from escaping. (Petroleum jelly, oils, silicones etc.) The second type is humectant, which draws moisture towards itself. (Glycerin, hyaluronic acid etc.) Most moisturizers in the market are composed of a mixture of occlusive and humectant ingredients so that moisture gets actively attracted to the surface of your skin and gets trapped by the occlusive barrier, unable to escape back out into the air.", "Absorbed through your pores. For your face it mostly only needs to affect the fat and skin cells in the immediate area (moisturizer for your face obviously doesn't effect your arms). As for patches and medications they will get into your bloodstream." ], "score": [ 59, 36, 16, 15, 11, 8, 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [], [ "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_(skin)" ], [], [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbysurz", "dbyuamb", "dbz501w", "dbyu2u7", "dbyt5qc" ], "text": [ "since we don't have anywhere near enough knowledge of how the human brain works to be able to make a computer emulate one, the correct answer is: No one has a clue.", "We don't know, but using the deep thinking massive data processing is coming online to simulate a human mind to where, in just a few more years, we'll have computers like Alexa and Google Home that you won't be able to tell if you are talking to a human or not. Or maybe you will, but it won't matter as the device will have it's own place in your life, maybe we won't need it to be indistinguishable from a human. It could be, that we'll see these artificial minds as a really good friend. Just think of a friend who is always there for you, can answer any question rationally and without any type of malice or dishonesty. We already like being on the web more than just about any other activity, I think we'll have new best friends soon.", "Some rough estimations and fun background. [The human brain has been estimated to have a processing power or roughly **38 petaflops and a memory of at least 3.6 petabytes**]( URL_0 ). That's a lot. Our top supercomputer, the Chinese [**Sunway TaihuLight**]( URL_1 ) has a processing power of about 93 petaflops, though it lacks a little memory sitting at 1.31 petabytes. It was just built too (June 2016). It cost over $270 million. The previous top supercomputer - also Chinese, [Tianhe-2]( URL_2 ) only had about 34 petaflops. To give you some contrast, currently the top i7 processor only has about 120 gigaflops (peta = giga * million). The GTX Titan X has about 11 teraflops (tera = giga* thousand). **Can the Sunway TaihuLight emulate the human brain?** *Not really*. Emulation usually requires the emulator to have processing power orders of magnitude larger than the emulated hardware. As a rough example - look at game console emulators (a bit of an ancient example but eh), they require PCs at least 5-6 years youger than the consoles they're emulating. **How much processing power is actually needed to emulate the human brain?** *We likely won't know until we try.* We definitely won't know until we actually fully understand how the brain works. However, I would call it a safe bet to assume that it will take orders of magnitude more than 38 petaflops. Likely X or XX exaflops. My personal, completely biased and unburdened with research or evidence opinion is that by the time we get together to actually write the software, the hardware won't be a problem.", "What is amazing is that the human brain is only powered by about 12 watts of electricity. About as much as a cfl light bulb.", "Deep blue, a super computer took 30 or so minutes to simulate 1 second of average human brain activity." ], "score": [ 41, 10, 9, 6, 4 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [ "https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/computers-have-a-lot-to-learn-from-2009-03-10/", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_TaihuLight", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhe-2" ], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbytch7" ], "text": [ "It thinks it has been poisoned, and is trying to prevent the ingestion of more poison. In general, not being poisoned is more important than being a little hungry and thirsty." ], "score": [ 9 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbytjh6" ], "text": [ "Well it would be easier to pay off your fixed-rate mortgage, assuming the bank didn't go under. Granted your immediate problems, such as securing and affording food and medicine would be much more immediate." ], "score": [ 7 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbytlj5", "dbyuwln", "dbyumty" ], "text": [ "Ergonomics as a science hadn't been invented yet, and guns were mostly handcrafted pieces, so each gunsmith was kind of just doing his own thing. Ergonomics also isn't all that important when you have a gun with no sights and you're only expected to fire a couple rounds a minute at most.", "Because: * you spent a whole lot more time loading the musket than holding it * accuracy was so bad that good design wouldn't really help * recoil was pretty small, a good grip was less important * no one really cared if a soldier got carpal tunnel * they didn't know any better", "These were one shot, smooth-bore weapons that required a lengthy reload between shots. They weren't accurate, and they weren't capable of firing multiple rounds. That means that aiming and recoil damping (what ergonomics helps) weren't important, only production cost and reload speed. That's also why pre and early-civil war battles were fought with large formations. The rows can alternate fire and shoot enough musket balls to actually hit something." ], "score": [ 17, 6, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [], [], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyu1nk", "dbyw661", "dbyvefs" ], "text": [ "URL_0 has a different IP address than URL_1 . When enter that address into your browser, it goes directly there, without every going to URL_1 . The part after the slash is information the website used to figure out what to do with your request. /status tells URL_1 to display a page about status, /products will display a page about products, most likely. Here's the tricky part. The website can be configured to *redirect* you somewhere else. The website that handles URL_0 could just send you to URL_1 /status...and vice versa. What you initially requested might not be where you wind up.", "A long time ago, computers were identified on a network by IP address only. This was easy...as there were only a very small number of computers. When things got a but more busy, the industry came up with a concept called Domain Name System. This was a concept to map the thousands (millions!!) of possible IP addresses to an easy to remember name. DNS has a hierarchy. Initially, there were only a few *top level* domains... like .com and .net and so on. Under these, could be created any number of subdomains... like URL_1 , or even URL_0 . In all these cases, these DNS entries needed to *resolve* to an IP address. The stuff *after* the .com (/status) is information used to find *resources* on available on the IP address in the first part. Put together, this is called URL. So, in brief, the first part identifies the place to look, and the second, the specific stuff to look for. As you might imagine, the DNS part is a bit tougher to change (as it's regulated world wide), and the second part is very easy...developers / web admins /etc can create resources very dynamically.", "To break things down, let's move to an example address: URL_3 This address is broken down I to: Protocol (http://) Subdomain (sub) Domain (example) Top Level Domain (com) Resource (index.html) The way domains work (using your example), is that Apple owns the domain \" URL_1 \". This means they can \"point\" or \"map\" that domain, or any subdomain under that domain ( URL_0 ) to whatever servers/addresses they want. What happens when you go to URL_0 , is that your computer first checks something called a DNS Server, which is essentially an address book for the internet. It sends \" URL_0 \" to a DNS server, and that server says, \"Hey there, the website you're looking for is at 192.168.0.1!\" (Example address). Your computer then goes, \"Okay, I'll look there!\" And sends a message to the computer located at the address 192.168.0.1 saying it's looking for \" URL_0 \". In this case, the computer checks its own records and says, \"Oh yeah, that's me! Go see URL_1 /status!\" What's happened here is that the server has a record saying that URL_0 is just a shortcut so to speak to get to URL_1 /status. Alternatively it could also just have a completely different website instead of a redirect. In this case, your computer ends up sending a request for the resource/file \"status\" on the URL_1 domain." ], "score": [ 8, 5, 5 ], "text_urls": [ [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com", "apple.com/status...and" ], [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com" ], [ "status.apple.com", "apple.com", "apple.com/status", "Http://sub.example.com/index.html" ] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbywjk9", "dbyv9vh" ], "text": [ "See my answer [here]( URL_0 ) and [here]( URL_1 )", "France had prepared for the wrong kind of war. Everyone (except Germany) expected a repeat of world war 1, with trench warfare and lumbering armies that measured gains in meters. France had built massive fortifications along the border with Germany and weaker fortifications along the Belgian border to the north, thinking that a massive buildup would offend the Belgians and that forces in the south could easily move to the north as needed since a WW1 style army would take weeks to fight through that terrain. The German blitzkreig invasion stormed through Belgium and the weaker northern section so quickly with a wave of light vehicles and tanks that the forces in the south were cut off before anyone could really get a grasp on the situation." ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v69of/eli5_how_did_germany_defeat_france_so_quickly_in/cxkpvo0/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4en4fb/how_come_defense_of_france_collapsed_so_quickly/d21pyid/" ], [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbyusps" ], "text": [ "Conifers tend to be triangular because they don't drop their needles and often live in snowy places. The triangle shape holds up best to the added weight. Plus it's efficient in terms of how much energy has be spent on growing a trunk, and again, they live in colder places with less competition. Deciduous trees are rounder because they want to grow up and out to shade out their competition, and they drop leaves so added winter weight is not a problem." ], "score": [ 10 ], "text_urls": [ [] ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbz7x9x", "dbyyc8h", "dbyykqo", "dbz46iq", "dbzc6lm", "dbz2ex9", "dbz7t7d", "dbywrk2", "dbzb3wz", "dbz6b63", "dbzeg2m", "dbz6osz", "dbyylnq", "dbzjc4d", "dbyy5ve", "dbzgicp", "dbzgsgh", "dbz912y", "dbzdvmn", "dbziazj", "dbzck46" ], "text": [ "Imagine taking a chunk of aluminium: it's grey because it reflects all wavelengths equally, but it's not very shiny if it hasn't been polished, because it reflects light in almost random directions. If you polish it up a bit, it's still grey, but now it's shinier, because it reflects light mostly at the same angle that it came in. Keep polishing, and it eventually becomes a mirror. So there's a continuum between a flat grey object and a mirror. I guess when your mind is contemplating the mirror as an object, and not what's reflected in it, it's forced to assign an appearance to it, and that appearance is \"shiny and without a noticeable colour of its own\", and that's basically a description of what we call \"silver coloured\". A side comment on \"silver\": even pure silver is slightly yellow, [as you can see from its spectrum.]( URL_3 ) - see for example [this comparison]( URL_5 ) of stainless steel next to sterling silver ([source]( URL_0 )). Edit - More detail from a reply I gave below: A piece of white paper reflects most of the light that falls on it in pretty much random directions. That means that it does actually take on the colours of things around it. [I just took a picture to demonstrate that.]( URL_2 ) If you have an incandescent lightbulb, so one with a hot filament, the light that it gives off is very yellow, and this is obvious if you take a picture with your camera set to \"sunlight\" white balance. [A piece of white paper will look yellow in that photograph]( URL_4 ), but when you look at it in real life your brain still sees it as white, because it corrects for the ambient light. A chunk of unpolished aluminium also reflects all wavelengths pretty much equally, and in all directions. However, it only reflects a certain fraction of the incoming light. Same if you print \"grey\" on a laser printer. It's like white, only darker. I took another picture to show [what metal looks like compared to paper.]( URL_1 ) You'll see that this metal, which isn't very highly polished, is pretty much grey unless there's something really close to it. But the shades of grey are interesting. Where it's facing incoming light, it reflects it better than the paper, so it's actually a brighter white, and where it's facing off towards the darker areas of the room, it's a darker grey. For this reason, compared to white paper, it appears overall a bit more grey than white. Interestingly, the paper is a bit bluer than the metal.", "Metals don't reflect all wavelengths of light equally. That's what gives them a colour even if they're very reflective. Something like gold will absorb ~~red~~ blue light more than other wavelengths and that gives it its yellowish colour. Silver or aluminum reflect visible wavelengths almost equally so they appear grey. URL_0", "It's the material we use to create mirrors, the backing is silver. On a side note, mosts mirrors are actually green, you can tell they are green because when you put two mirrors facing each other and get that the tunnel effect if fades to green.", "Silver is not a true color (in the sense of a wavelength of light). Silver is the name we have given to the effect we get from reflective surfaces such as mirrors, chrome, and originally, polished silver. EDIT: Fixed the opening parenthesis.", "A mirror emits mostly [*specular reflection* with a small amount of *diffuse reflection*]( URL_0 ). In most cases, there are so many light sources and objects to reflect light that the *specular reflection* dominates most of the light reflected towards our eyes. In this case, the mirror has no color and simply looks like the color of whatever light is being reflected at our eyes. The only time we notice the color of a mirror as silver is when a portion of the mirror doesn't really have an opposing light source or object to reflect light towards our eyes (i.e. that portion of the mirror has very low specular reflection). In those cases, *diffuse reflection* will dominate, and diffuse, uniform reflection looks like a dim or imperfect white, which is silver. The more imperfect a mirror, the more *diffuse reflection* you will get, and the more silver it will look. That's why *shiny* things that aren't necessarily mirrors -- knives, ball bearings, polished aluminum or stainless steel -- are easily recognized as appearing more silver.", "Because mirrors were quite literally silver. They're made of steel or aluminum now, but they were silver colored for the longest time. There's also that mirrors are silver colored when the angle isn't right to reflect anything, just like any other piece of well polished metal.", "I see a lot of explanations here about the materials on the back, manufacturing process and etc, but I believe OP was referring to mirrored surfaces, regardless of the material or process. My guess would be that humans will always assign colors to objects, even if they don't have a detectable color. Because gray is the average of all colors, this is what we assign to an object that seems to reflect the whole visible spectrum equally.", "In a nutshell A mirror is a piece of glass that is coated with a thin price of silver or grey \"metal\". The process of coating the glass is literally called silvering. Then its polished to point of reflection. If you ever look at the back of a mirror most of them are grey.", "That's a terrible video about exactly what the color of a mirror is. I mean, it explains the principles of color and wave length well. But it's not the mirror that's green, it's the cheap glass in front of the mirror that's green! What color is mirror? Well, it's shiny and reflects nearly all light back equally. Generally that means it's in the white to black spectrum. There's some energy loss upon reflection (image gets darker), so that means it's slightly grey. And if you took the raw material used to create the mirror film... it'd be aluminium in most cases, and thus a light-medium grey color!", "If an object... reflects **red** light and absorb others... and has a rough surface It's **red**. and has a smooth surface It's still **red** but looks like a red mirror. Everything in it is red. reflects **blue** light and absorb others... and has a rough surface It's **blue**. and has a smooth surface It's still **blue** but looks like a blue mirror. Everything in it is blue. reflects every light equally and has a rough surface It's **gray**, like stainless steel. and has a smooth surface It's a mirror and we call it **silver**.", "You've copy pasted this from the top all time page of eli5. For pretend internet points. Why?", "we used to make mirrors out of stuff called [quicksilver]( URL_0 ) > (colloquial) An amalgam of mercury and tin applied to the backs of mirrors, quicksilvering.", "Part of it could be a hold-over from back when mirrors were made with silver. A piece of glass would be coated on one side with a thin layer of silver which made it reflect. The association certainly stuck.", "Queen Elizabeth I 's mirrors were coppper-coloured, because she didn't like what she saw. Versailles mirrors used mercury. 'Salon' mirrors are gold-coloured, because they're more flattering. Some instrumentation has 'half-silvered' mirrors - go figure.", "Interestingly, mirrors are actually a shade of green. You can see this when you have two mirrors facing each other causing that tunnel effect", "Slip in language. In the middle of the 1800's they found a way to make one side of the glass reflective by using a liquid that would make silver bond to the glass in a process they call Silvering. Today we use other metals like aluminum since they are cheaper.", "The real question is why do you think of silver as having a color as opposed to just being a reflective metal?", "Mirrors are not silver colored, nor do they reflect light equally. [Most are a light green]( URL_0 ) because of the wave length of light they reflect", "Because silver is not a color. It's a description of reflective qualities. For instance if you take a piece of silver. or something \"silver colored\" into a room with only red light the item willbe reflective red color. Additionally there is no light wavelength that matches \"silver color\".", "Silvering is the chemical process of coating glass with a reflective substance. When glass mirrors first gained widespread usage in Europe during the 16th century, most were silvered with an amalgam of tin and mercury,[1] but by the 19th century mirrors were commonly made through a process by which silver was coated onto a glass surface. Today, sputtering aluminium or other compounds[which?] are more often used for this purpose, although the process may either maintain the name \"silvering\" or be referred to as aluminising. URL_0", "It is because that is the color of light that the mirror subtracts from the light it received. For a real eli5: imagine light is like a baseball pitch. The licht \"particle\" is the baseball. The batter is a surface. The ball is thrown from home plate, just as light is sent from a light bulb. The batter will then hit the baseball. Most of the time, the ball will go forwards, and sometimes it will go to the side, or miss completely. Light Does the exact same thing when it hits normal surfaces. A mirror would be just like thus scenario, except instead of a batter, we have a bouncy net. The net (that i just found) will throw the ball back in the same direction every time, but with less energy. This is what happens to light in a mirror. The light will come be reflected with slightly less energy than what you started, and that's the dullness that we perceive in a mirror image." ], "score": [ 2674, 2214, 468, 331, 111, 75, 61, 40, 28, 24, 14, 9, 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 ], "text_urls": [ [ "https://bridgecitytatting.blogspot.de/2010/05/jons-foldover-bookmark-and-more-maille.html", "http://imgur.com/gallery/mSRbi", "http://imgur.com/gallery/nWYC8", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Metal-reflectance.png", "http://imgur.com/gallery/wLEpS", "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_fMtD30kx1vg/S_yPePP1GbI/AAAAAAAABPU/aPV6LrnEQmU/s1600/Stainless+vs+sterling.jpg" ], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflectance" ], [], [], [ "http://idol.union.edu/malekis/CVision2003/MainPage/Course%20Content/Geometrical%20Optics/reflection2.gif" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quicksilver" ], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=67608" ], [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvering" ], [] ] }

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