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eli5_bm25_top100_kilt

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Why can't members of Congress and the Senate vote remotely?

455162

[{"answer": "Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution specifically allows Congress to compel the attendance of absent members, and to determine the rules for proceedings, which presumably include in-person attendance. As for why they don't expand \"attendance\" to mean teleconferencing, it's probably because of tradition, and because it would look bad for a member of Congress to be able to vote while absent."}, {"answer": "Are you kidding? It seems like they vanish for weekends that last from Thursday to Tuesday. Every month they seem to go on a 6-day or 6- week vacation. And on work days they are never in the chamber... when the camera moves off the podium, most of the time what you see is a sea of empty seats. Why would we let them not even appear for voting, do you want them never to show up to work ever?"}, {"answer": "Several reasons: 1. Tradition 2. Verification/security concerns It's much cheaper and efficient to verify someone voting in person than it is to verify someone voting remotely. It's kind of like college students taking a test online: how do we know people are who they say they are? What about hackers or other attempts to tamper with the voting program(s)? You don't have those issues when conducting an in-person vote."}, {"answer": "I have to say that the early 90s weren't some dark age before telecommunications. We had video conferencing as far back as the 60s. We could have had remote voting by telegraph in the 1800s if we had wanted to."}, {"answer": "Tom Scott's fantastic video of why any form of electronic voting is relevant here. URL_0 "}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "664501", "title": "Colorado Senate", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The Colorado Senate is the upper house of the Colorado General Assembly, the state legislature of the US state of Colorado. It is composed of 35 members elected from single-member districts, with each district having a population of about 123,000 as of the 2000 census. Senators are elected to four-year terms, and are limited to two consecutive terms in office.", "The Colorado Senate is the upper house of the Colorado General Assembly, the state legislature of the US state of Colorado. It is composed of 35 members elected from single-member districts, with each district having a population of about 123,000 as of the 2000 census. Senators are elected to four-year terms, and are limited to two consecutive terms in office."]}}]}]

How did people with celiacs disease survive in the 18th and 19th century? I feel like there weren't that many "gluten free" options..

4agvxg

[{"answer": "True Celiacs make-up a very very small portion of the population. Were talking like 0.5-1% of the population. They wouldn't have even registered on the radar. Plus a true Celiac living back then would have probably died of something else way more prevalent and life threatening (e.g. nutritional deficiencies, infection) before their condition killed them."}, {"answer": "In reality sour dough bread doesn't have a lot gluten. The Lactobacillus breaks down the parts of gluten that people react to. It's faster modern yeast breads that are particularly high in gluten."}, {"answer": "Almost the entire human diet, with the exception of a small family of grains (wheat, barley, rye) native to the Middle East that contain gluten, is naturally gluten free. So celiac disease would have only been an issue in places where wheat, barley or rye was a major part of the diet like Europe (and European colonies around the world), North Africa and the Middle East. By the 18th and 19th century many gluten-free staple crops had been introduced to and were being grown in parts of Europe and North America, like potatoes, corn, millet and rice. Though nobody knew about gluten and its health effects on celiac disease, it's possible that some people noticed they only felt bad when they ate bread or pasta but not if they ate polenta/grits or risotto."}, {"answer": "Keep in mind that much of what you see today advertised as \"Gluten Free\" never had gluten to begin with. Like any newly recognized or popularized health risk, it will spawn much marketing to take advantage of consumers. Can't remember what it was I saw while at the grocery store the other day, but I noticed new packaging saying Now Gluten Free. thought that it was so stupid because it was something that never would have had gluten to begin with!"}, {"answer": " > I feel like there weren't that many \"gluten free\" options.. You might be surprised. Grains were often grown as cash crops controlled by a landlord, while the peasants subsisted on perishable vegetables that could only be eaten locally. That was the whole basis for the Great Potato Famine in Ireland."}, {"answer": "Simple answer: They probably didn't. A lot of the things that people have now that are cured by modern medicine or have work-arounds thanks to science weren't survivable in past eras, and people with those problems pretty much just died"}, {"answer": "The connection between celiac disease and gluten was only established in the aftermath of WWII. Thanks to a German blockade the Netherlands had a severe famine towards the end of WWII. Doctor Wilhelm Karol Dicke was in charge of a celiac ward at this point and noticed that the mortality rate of his patients actually went *down* during the famine and *up* after normal rations were restored. From this observation Dr. Dicke figured out the connection between gluten and celiac and developed a gluten free diet for people suffering from this disease. Prior to this there were a bunch of what were basically \"folk remedies\" available for celiac sufferers, some of which worked okay but many of which were basically voodoo. The general state of medicine was pretty poor prior to the last half of the 20th century, so the situation that people with celiac disease found themselves in would not be so different from many other people who suffered from diseases that are easily treatable in modern times."}, {"answer": "What changed in the 1960's. What we consider now as wheat is really \"dwarf wheat.\" On the initiative to cure world hunger, the plant was modified to have double the kernels of wheat to double the produced output. Unfortunately, a problem happened. If you have ever seen a movie from the 50's based in farm country during harvest, you would notice bunches of 6 ft tall wheat stalks grouped together. When the kernels would double, the stalk was too weak and it would tip over, this is called rowing. The plant was altered again to make the stalk shorter and more rigid, around 12-16 inches. The two alterations of the plant quadrupled the amount gluten proteins in the wheat which, I believe, is exacerbating the celiac disease issue."}, {"answer": "From personal experience I'd just like to add, some undiagnosed celiacs don't experience severe symptoms or noticeable symptoms at all. It is often when you remove gluten from a celiac's diet, their gut is given time to heal, and they are exposed to gluten again that the most severe reactions occur. Even though some celiacs may not be aware of their disease, due to the lack of symptoms prior to diagnosis, they are still at a much greater risk to develop severe illnesses at a younger age than a non-celiac. I'm not certain how widespread celiac was during the past centuries, but people who may have had it may not have noticed many of the symptoms and may have simply gotten ill and died younger than was to be expected for that time period."}, {"answer": "They didn't. The keen ones noticed the foods that made them ill but coeliac disease has a very wide presentation. So unless they associated gluten with a certain symptom, they were bound to die from the complications on it. To grasp the idea, Insulin wasn't used formally until half of the 20th century. Prior to that, you just slowly died over weeks or months from high blood sugar"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "40956516", "title": "Non-celiac gluten sensitivity", "section": "Section::::Treatment.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 58, "end_paragraph_id": 58, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["also be due to a non-specific, placebo response. The recovery of the nervous system is slow and sometimes incomplete. Recommendations may resemble those for celiac disease, for the diet to be strict and maintained, with no transgression. The degree of gluten cross contamination tolerated by people with NCGS is not clear but there is some evidence that they can present with symptoms even after consumption of small amounts. Sporadic accidental contaminations with gluten can reactivate movement disorders. A part of people with gluten-related neuropathy or ataxia appears not to be able to tolerate even the traces of gluten allowed in most foods labeled as \"gluten-free\".", "improve or resolve completely. This may occur within days to weeks of starting a GFD, but improvement may also be due to a non-specific, placebo response. The recovery of the nervous system is slow and sometimes incomplete. Recommendations may resemble those for celiac disease, for the diet to be strict and maintained, with no transgression. The degree of gluten cross contamination tolerated by people with NCGS is not clear but there is some evidence that they can present with symptoms even after consumption of small amounts. Sporadic accidental contaminations with gluten can reactivate movement disorders. A part of people with gluten-related neuropathy or ataxia appears not to be able to tolerate even the traces of gluten allowed in most foods labeled as \"gluten-free\"."]}}]}]

How did Switzerland stay out of WWII?

3veqe4

[{"answer": "First realize Switzerland had no specific resources needed by anyone. They are resource poor. They also have a history of having a strong self defense ability. Every man was a trained soldier with a rifle stored in his home. Those mountains are honeycombed with tunnels and defensive firing positions. They had no great strategic value and were literally to tough to be worth a symbolic conquest."}, {"answer": "Switzerland: * had a strong defensive capability * is largely mountains * had few strategic resources * was easy enough to go around Perhaps more importantly, invading a declared neutral state would have concerned and frightened other neutral states, like Sweden, Spain, or Portugal, and caused them to be more sympathetic to the other side."}, {"answer": "The Germans had a plan for invading Switzerland, but never followed through. The Wikipedia article provides some insight into why they would want to invade and what Switzerland had done to make it difficult: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "History, Tax evasion/money laundering, and compliance. Anyone telling you 'switzerland has a history of well armed defence' hasn't paid much attention to swiss history. The last major war they were involved in, the napoleonic wars, both sides over the course of 7 wars moved armies back and forth through switzlerland without much thought. Yet Switzerland remained independent after. The Swiss could have maybe mustered half a million soldiers to defend themselves in WW2, even in mountain passes they would have been doomed, out numberd 4 or 5 to one from all sides, and they had no capacity to produce their own air power or defences, so the Axis powers could have simply bombed them into starvation (eventually) if they couldn't be bothered mopping up. Switzerland produces no fuel of it's own, and only about half of it's own food. Who needs to invade when you can simply cut them off and wait for them to surrender? Sweden remained neutral as well, and they were equally encircled by nazi forces. They had iron, the nazi's wanted iron, the swedes sold it to them. Switzerland though has a history of being an independent entity within the holy roman empire (as all of the various principalities and kingdoms were). The Nazi's felt as the new Holy Roman Empire that they'd force them into the fold eventually, but that it wasn't pressing to do so immediately. During the unification of germany a number of southern german states remained separate from the main prussian confederation that went on to form germany about 5 years later. So this independence wasn't unprecedented, and many in the axis hierarchy anticipated another anchaluss like happened to austria, there were after all lots of nazi sympathizers in the swiss ranks. Which then leads us back to the two key factors. Tax evasion and compliance. Switzerland has historically been surrounded by 4 (later 3) great powers. Rich influential and important people in all of those places use Switzerland as a method to evade taxes in their own country, and the Nazi state used Switzerland as a place to basically launder looted gold. Lots of important people were quite happy to maintain the status quo because they got something they wanted from the Swiss for the time being. That flow of money allowed, for example, the germans to get access to money to buy things from Portugal, who would otherwise not have had much use for German Reich Marks was important to the Axis. Lastly - compliance. Switzerland played an important role in the war both for intelligence and as a meeting place between both sides. The allies and axis could (secretly of course) negotiate various agreements, about prisoners, bombings etc. Basically if I have a million of your prisoners and you have a million of mine, we need a neutral party to make sure those people are being treated fairly and to send them mail etc. (Hence the Red Cross based on the swiss flag). And lets not forget, lots of important Nazi's fled after the war. In part using their swiss bank accounts. Once there was a hint this whole taking over europe plan was going to go tits up they wanted a backup plan. And that backup plan needed to be hidden from the Gestapo."}, {"answer": "They were literally the bankers of the war. The Nazis and the allies both kept their assets there. This is how they stayed neutral, because if either side invaded, that side's assets would either be seized by the other side, or seized by the Swiss. You don't fuck with the banker."}, {"answer": "My Grandfather helped build some of the bunkers with his father during WWII. We were ready for the probability of an invasion. Bunkers were stocked, everyone was a part of the army, in my grandma's home town some parts still don't have road signs as they were taken down so an invading force would have troubles locating where their were. Tank buster columns (cement pillers in the middle of roads) were put up. Being surrounded by mountains makes the entire country very defensible, and the fact that the locals know all the mountain routes very very well. So if the Swiss were invaded they would have fought for every inch of land, and the Nazis would pay for it. On the other hand, the Nazis had plans to invaded Switzerland, but besides land rights there wasn't much to be gained, and the cost of taking it would very costly. Supply routes already went around the mountainous Swiss region and wouldn't benefit them. There were a few Swiss casualties in WWII, my Grandma told me a story of a Swiss ammunition factory on the German border was 'accidentally' rocketed and killed a few, and there was a few pot shots over the border between the Germans and Swiss patrols. TL:DR - don't fuck with the Swiss, they were ready and the Nazis had nothing to gain"}, {"answer": "We are proud of our tunnels and I've barely seen mention of them! Switzerland, onced dubbed \"das Stachelschwein\" (the porcupine), by Hitler, has always held enormous import to european markets because of its tunnels and railway systems. If Hitler had tried to invade, our means of destroying his access to the country would have ruined important trade routes. Switzerland's main exports have always been service. But that doesn't mean Fridu W\u00e4uts-cheib* with his K31 Schmidt-Rubin standing at the border spooked anyone away, even though selling highly trained warriors has been a very lucrative market for CH (since we're neutral). No, sadly, Fridu isn't what gave us the nickname \"Stachelschwein\", but rather the idea that if we were disturbed we would huddle up and make ourselves incredibly inaccessible with our pokey mountains. Also, we have tons of these bunkers that look like regular houses. But if you open the shutters [there's just cannons looking back at you]( URL_0 ). You can believe me when I say our mountains are peppered with fun surprises like this. Lots look like chalets too. *This is a fake name, like Fritz Superstar"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1120468", "title": "Switzerland during the World Wars", "section": "Section::::World War II.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 22, "end_paragraph_id": 22, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["support services, 10,000 of whom were women, had been mobilized, though most of these were sent home during the Phoney War. At its highest point, 850,000 soldiers were mobilized. During the war, detailed invasion plans were drawn up by the German military command, such as Operation Tannenbaum, but Switzerland was never attacked. Switzerland was able to remain independent through a combination of military deterrence, economic concessions to Germany and good fortune as larger events during the war delayed an invasion. Attempts by the Swiss Nazi party to effect an Anschluss with Germany failed, largely as a result of Switzerland's sense of national identity and tradition of democracy and civil liberties. The Swiss press criticized the Third Reich, often infuriating its leadership. In turn, Berlin denounced Switzerland as a medieval remnant and its people renegade Germans. Swiss military strategy was changed from one of static defence at the borders to a strategy of attrition and withdrawal to strong, well-stockpiled positions high in the Alps known as the National Redoubt. This controversial strategy was essentially one of deterrence. The idea was to render the cost of invading too high. During an invasion, the Swiss Army would cede control of the economic heartland and population centres but retain control of crucial rail links and passes in the National Redoubt.", "The Swiss press criticized the Third Reich, often infuriating its leadership. In turn, Berlin denounced Switzerland as a medieval remnant and its people renegade Germans. Swiss military strategy was changed from one of static defence at the borders to a strategy of attrition and withdrawal to strong, well-stockpiled positions high in the Alps known as the National Redoubt. This controversial strategy was essentially one of deterrence. The idea was to render the cost of invading too high. During an invasion, the Swiss Army would cede control of the economic heartland and population centres but retain control of crucial rail links and passes in the National Redoubt."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1120467", "title": "Switzerland as a federal state", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The rise of Switzerland as a federal state began on 12 September 1848, with the creation of a federal constitution in response to a 27-day civil war in Switzerland, the \"Sonderbundskrieg\". The constitution, which was heavily influenced by the United States Constitution and the ideas of the French Revolution, was modified several times during the following decades and wholly replaced in 1999. The constitution represents the first time that the Swiss were governed by a strong central government instead of being simply a collection of independent cantons bound by treaties.", "The rise of Switzerland as a federal state began on 12 September 1848, with the creation of a federal constitution in response to a 27-day civil war in Switzerland, the \"Sonderbundskrieg\". The constitution, which was heavily influenced by the United States Constitution and the ideas of the French Revolution, was modified several times during the following decades and wholly replaced in 1999. The constitution represents the first time that the Swiss were governed by a strong central government instead of being simply a collection of independent cantons bound by treaties."]}}]}]

The "crack epidemic" of the 80s/90s and the alleged CIA or US government involvement.

1trusk

[{"answer": "The Reagan Adiministration wanted the CIA to back the Contras in Nicaragua, but due to laws passed by the congress, they were unable to. Congress didn't want to fund the CIA, but the CIA was sought funding elsewhere. So, the story goes that they had someone smuggle cocaine into the United States to be sold, and they would take their cut of the profit to in turn fund the Contras. Here are some wikipedia links about the event and some of the main players: URL_3 URL_2 URL_4 URL_1 URL_0 Also, the book \"Dark Alliance\" by the late Gary Webb is a collection of articles that Webb wrote and were published in the San Jose Mercury News. Edit: Changed context and added link. Edit II: I seem to have struck gold. A special thanks to my anonymous benefactor."}, {"answer": "\"During the Iran-Contra hearings the two protesters who stood up and unfurled a flag and said, \u201cask about the cocaine!\u201d received more jail time than all the Iran-Contra criminals who were exposed\""}, {"answer": "Here's an ex LA cop that was in the CIA talking about it. (CIA embeds agents in major police departments) URL_0 Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadventures that brought the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing? Well, if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central America since the Second World War. I mean, the Agency was down there, even before it was CIA, with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown by the Sandino movement--the Sandinistas. They were a \"Marxist\" movement, and Ronald Reagan mobilised the country to stave off this alleged threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. It was a whole lot of rubric and Congress didn't really want to get involved in it deeply. Congress passed some amendments to the Military Appropriations Act. They were known as the Boland Amendments, and were passed first I think in 1981 and again in 1984; they were Boland 1 and 2, which limited direct military aid to the Contras, the people fighting the Sandinistas. And so the CIA and Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey and George Bush (Vice President George Bush) were running the whole operation; we know that now. They circumvented the will of Congress and there was this explosion of drug trafficking all throughout Central America, coordinated by the CIA. And we now have the CIA's own documents, and I can show you one later. It's the CIA's Volume 2 of their own Inspector-General's Report from 1998 where, in its own words, the Agency admits that of the 58 known Contra groups, 58 were involved with drugs. And that the Agency dealt with them; it protected six traffickers, kept them out of jail. One guy moving four tons of cocaine a month was using a bank account opened by White House staffer Oliver North. Other CIA assets were caught moving 200 kilos at a time--200 kilos is not personal use--and he was saying, \"Well, I can't tell you what I'm doing because I'm doing it for the National Security Council\"--that's the White House organ that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. So we saw this huge explosion. The point I make in my lectures is that in the mid- to late '70s, we in America--those of us who are old enough to remember--dealt with cartels but we didn't deal with drug cartels, we dealt with oil cartels. We had an oil crisis and it almost crippled the American economy. We had been subsidised by very cheap oil that we acquired by, in a sense, exploiting other countries. Well, then we had cartels of cocaine and we went from 40 to 50 metric tons a year to 600 metric tons a year. And that money was moved through Wall Street and became, in effect, the capital that replaced oil in the US economy."}, {"answer": "Let this be a lesson for those who think defunding the NSA is the answer"}, {"answer": "The bizarre thing is listening to people sneer \"conspiracy theorist\" towards anyone discussing the activities of an agency that is expressly charged with conducting black ops. As if the CIA should be expected to be baking apple pies instead of spying, overthrowing governments, and in the case of Air America running cocaine to fund itself."}, {"answer": "Can of woms, meet the can opener. This is gonna be *good*."}, {"answer": "Your friends may be obsessed with conspiracy theories, but even some of the crazy sounding theories about the CIA are pretty soundly backed. We've done some really, really questionable shit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they also had something to do with the blood diamond trade in Sierra Leone."}, {"answer": "Check out the movie American Drug War. There are parts of it on Youtube. While they cover a lot of different angles, the do a go job on the Oliver North and Contra scandal. It's really so much more insane than you can imagine. Next time someone tells you Reagan was a great president, just bring up the Iran/Contra scandal."}, {"answer": "[Gary Webb, Video AMA, C-Span live recording, 1998. 80 Minutes]( URL_0 ) I've skipped ahead 17 minutes to the Dark Alliance bit. However the first 17 minutes are good and strange. At about 7 minutes the reporter pronounces Osama Bin Laden as \"Osammy Ben Layden\" with the newspaper right in front of him. It's surreal."}, {"answer": "I've seen a couple docs on this, some good, some bad. The CIA model seems to be this: -set up rebels (contras) with guns. They pay the CIA with drugs. -CIA ships drugs to US(because what the fuck is anyone going to do about it?) -drugs are distributed to top level dealers in inner-cities. -crime rate skyrockets with drugs arrests -DEA and FBI get boosts in funding, as well as local police, and prison industry gets more money and tax dollars to \"fix the problem\". The primary reason the government doesn't want you to have drugs is because you can then get cash off the books. They don't like it when you play their game. At all. This model has worked in South America with all sorts of drugs. Mexico is shifting to meth, and heroin is produced in Afghanistan and then shipped to Spain/Portugal after US tomfuckery in Afghanistan."}, {"answer": "Not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere. I'm not sure what the rules are for plugging things, but the \"Stuff You Should Know\" podcast had an episode \"How Crack Works\" that touched on this. That might be a good overall lesson for you. It would be like having somebody give you a summary of the wikipedia links posted in this thread."}, {"answer": "My favorite part of this whole affair? While the government was selling m illegal drugs on their own streets, they were passing laws that gave harsher punishment to people convicted of having crack, not *cocaine*, crack. There was no other to say that this law literally targeted minorities, especially African-Americans."}, {"answer": "Stuff You Should Know did a pretty good podcast on How Crack Works that touches on this and other facts around crack cocaine. It's kinda like ELI5 in podcast-y form. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "There was nothing conspiratorial about the Contra war and the CIA and the executive branch, Reagan, illegally circumventing Congresses authority to control the \"purse strings\" of the US government. In many historians view these actions far more alarming than the Watergate incident 15 years earlier, yet it is rarely even discussed today and many Americans who weren't alive during the hearings have little knowledge of it. I could rant for a while, I'll control my self though. Here are a couple other articles. URL_1 URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Simple fact of the matter is they are still doing it. A few years back the media was talking about a \"dirty bomb\" being smuggled across one of our borders, they didn't beat that drum for to long because obviously with tons of coke and heroin crossing the borders we can't keep anything out, unless\u2026\u2026."}, {"answer": "Summed up, some of the money that Freeway Rick Ross used to buy his crack cocaine with, was later traced back to Iran Contra Funds."}, {"answer": "the best contra is possible CONTRA III: THE ALIEN WARS for the super nintendo."}, {"answer": "This guy was a CIA whistle blower back when he was doing drug runs in Honduras to fund CIA operations & goes into details on what happend. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "The most important thing to take away is that this is not an isolated incident. I think many Americans would be surprised how much of a common practice it is for these agencies. They even have internal wars over the resources. It's fucked up."}, {"answer": "[American Dad]( URL_0 ) had a good skit on it."}, {"answer": "When reagan got into office, they started supporting every right wing tyrant in latin america they could find. And if none existed in a perticular oil or resource rich area, then they invented one. The operations needed cash, and since we still had some semblance of an actual government back then, they wouldn't just shovel the hawks all the cash they asked for. So they started selling drugs, or rather, invited their central american buddies up to sell their drugs so they could fund their fights against the actual legitimate governments of whichever country they were from."}, {"answer": "Not sure if anyone has said this yet, but check out [Ricky \"freeway\" Ross's]( URL_1 ) (The original Rick Ross, not the prison guard who became the rapper) story. He was part of the distribution side of the Iran Contra fiasco. Also worth noting in more modern time, the CIA had the President of Afghanistan's brother on their payroll for 8 years and was known to be a larger player in the trafficking of Heroin. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "[This]( URL_0 ) is a good read on the subject. Did the CIA run cocaine in into the US? Yes. Were they targeting specifically blacks in ghettos? Probably not."}, {"answer": "Coke went really well with the glamour of the late 60s and 70s. The disco scene really pushed it as well as the [early hip hop of the 80s]( URL_0 ). But it was a little pricey so allot of the upper class used it more often which meant it was seen as a \"white man's drug\". People started to smoke it too. When the poorer communities wanted to get involved, smoking it was seen as the thing to do but it was still too pricey. I think it was \"Freeway Ricky Ross\" who was the first but, not to cut it with baking soda but definitely the first to sell it big time, and essentially cutting it with baking soda and using a certain chemical method turned it into crack, which was A LOT more addictive. This made it cheaper so the poorer communities could get it more often. This occurred throughout the 70s but all the bad log term effects of crack use only surfaced after a while in the early 80s where long term users became zombified. Competition on the streets between dealers lead to the formation of gang warfare, rappers emulated the big time crack/coke dealers and they emulated the rappers in style and way of life. Thus birthed modern gangster rap music which spread through the ghettos along with crack. There is a really good documentary on the subject and the beginning of hip hop called [Planet Rock: The story of Hip hop and the crack generation]( URL_1 )."}, {"answer": "this is not a question you can explain to a five-yr old. one of the issues, aside from covert involvement in the drug market, is the way crack was used to jail a large section of the black male population. although it is basically the same as cocaine the sentences are about 100 times more strict. some theorize that cocaine was made into crack and introduced into ghettos by counter-intelligence operations in conjunction with for-profit drug runners in order to destroy the urban blacks. another reason that crack is prevalent among poor people is that it's harder to cut than coke, something the rich don't have to worry about. either way the end result has been a targeting of black males and a degradation of black culture. in nicaragua the target of destruction was (and maybe still is) the sandinistas who rebelled against the dictator somoza, a friend of washington and related business groups. once the sandinista government took power the contras were set-up as a proxy army from bases in the mountains and honduras. the situation is often misunderstood since it's an unusual case of the u.s. backing a rebel group in latin america. check out noam chomsky's \"turning the tide\" for a detailed and gruesome analysis of the contra war and similar atrocities throughout the region. to learn more about the c.i.a. and drug running go to URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Look up the real Rick Ross. He sold a couple million in crack everyday, only to find out in the end he was getting his coke from the CIA all along. Also Geraldo Rivera even admitted on television the troops in Aphganistan are not only there to guard opium, but they're helping to grow it. and personally I don't see why this is considered a theory, its a fact U.S Government ships in drugs while keeping them illegal to drive up the price on the black market and to keep for-profit prisons filled and to get people in the \"ju$tice\" system. Sorry people, your Government doesn't love you."}, {"answer": "Here's a great documentary, Planet Rock, narrated by Ice-T on the epidemic and the USG's role in it: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "They didn't sell crack, they sold cocaine, but there you have it. The war ~~with~~ on drugs"}, {"answer": "So rappers could make and sell records about it"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5033735", "title": "Crack epidemic in the United States", "section": "Section::::History.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 4, "end_paragraph_id": 4, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["owder cocaine, which had been widely criticized as discriminatory against minorities, mostly blacks, who were more likely to use crack than powder cocaine. The name \"crack\" first appeared in the \"New York Times\" on November 17, 1985. Within a year more than a thousand press stories had been released about the drug. In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in the Bahamas and Dominican Republic. Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent. Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to \"crack\", a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop. As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.", "Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent. Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to \"crack\", a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people. It was cheap, simple to produce, ready to use, and highly profitable for dealers to develop. As early as 1981, reports of crack were appearing in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Miami, Houston, and in the Caribbean.", "powder cocaine, which had been widely criticized as discriminatory against minorities, mostly blacks, who were more likely to use crack than powder cocaine. The name \"crack\" first appeared in the \"New York Times\" on November 17, 1985. Within a year more than a thousand press stories had been released about the drug. In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in the Bahamas and Dominican Republic. Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percent. Faced with dropping prices for their illegal product, drug dealers made a decision to convert the powder to \"crack\", a solid smokeable form of cocaine, that could be sold in smaller quantities, to more people"]}}]}]

How did Detroit become the undesirable city that it is now?

33q9n5

[{"answer": "The city was built and supported by the growing auto industry. In the 70's and 80's a lot of external factors (rising prices, competition, new labor laws etc) forced most of the car companies to change their business models/move somewhere else. This means a lot of the manufacturing plants in Detroit were shut down and all of a sudden you had a large percentage of the population unemployed with nowhere to go. The cities economy started to suffer and has never fully recovered back to the state it was in in it's glory days. There's a lot more to it than that, people have written entire books on the decline of Detroit. There's a lot of socioeconomic analysis that can be put into it, but that's the basics."}, {"answer": "This has been answered, quite well, previously here so I will repost /u/iheartbbq's comment seen [here]( URL_1 ). From their post: I keep this around for just such an occasion: * Detroit is founded in 1701 as a trading outpost on the edge of the Detroit River, first main terminus on the westward expansion. * Detroit rises in power as a logging hub, the vast deciduous and northern coniferous forest are leveled and shipped by boat back east, creating the original fortunes of the city. * The late 1800s saw a growing city often called the Paris of the West. Major building projects began in the city's hub and rail lines were routed to Detroit from the east through Canada and out to Chicago. The lumber barons were investing in real estate and the architecture of the time reflects magnificently. The hub and spoke road system is adopted, but crucially is not rigidly adhered to. Main line roads radiate from the downtown hub, but secondary roundabouts and opposite diagonals are not constructed. * At the turn of the century, the auto industry explodes. Albert Kahn creates an architectural model still in use today that allows for rapid construction of space-efficient factories. Factories are built almost as fast as they can be. At this point, Detroit begins installing a street car system on its main line roads. Henry Ford establishes the $5 day. Ford is viciously anti-union and rumblings of union formation at the time are knocked down by Ford's generous pay levels. Word spreads and poor black southerners begin moving to Detroit in droves. The city housing stock explodes to accommodate this new population and vast tracts of land become identical row houses all built in the 1910-20 era. * The first section of roadway is paved with concrete in Detroit on the Woodward corridor. As poorly maintained and expensive brick and dirt roads give way to durable concrete roads, more people begin using cars and the auto industry continues expansion. * Prohibition hits Detroit hard. The city's proximity to Canada encourages illicit importation of alcohol and a vast underground of speakeasies. Organized crime takes hold in Detroit and the City government becomes corrupted. Government culture shifts towards bribery and intimidation. * By the start of WWII, Detroit is economically the most powerful city in the country. Its companies are making money on both cars and foreign military equipment contracts. When the US enters the war, all manufacturers are retasked to produce \"the arsenal of Democracy\" tanks, planes, military trucks, etc roll out of Detroit's factories and while many other cities suffer under rations, Detroit profits. Due to the draft, many of the factory workers are at war and although 2.5M African Americans registered for the draft, a maximum of 700,000 were declared fit and served at any given time. Due to the economic opportunity in the factories, even more African Americans moved to Detroit. Following the war, the imbalance in certain government contracts meant some companies had advanced technology relevant to consumer markets while others did not. Ford and General Motors benefited greatly with technologies applicable to passenger cars while Packard and Chrysler struggled after receiving mostly airplane-related contracts. Returning GIs found a city with an increasingly black racial makeup and racial tensions began escalating. * By the 1950s Detroit was at the height of its population with 1.8M, but violence became endemic owing to racism and government corruption. By this time the Teamsters, UAW and various Gangsters had staggering political influence and were bending the laws to the benefit of labor and detriment of business. The Eisenhower Freeway System comes to Detroit and slices the city to shreds. The highly inefficient hub-and-spoke road system means regular cross-city transit is very slow. The freeway system is routed indiscriminately through poor and immigrant neighborhoods. Whole neighborhoods are demolished or cut in two, fragmenting the entrenched communities. It is very obvious that rich cities are carefully routed around. This sows deep seeds of resentment amongst poorer Detroiters. The completed freeway system allows for living in outlying towns formerly too far for a practical commute. Automobile ownership soars and ridership on the street cars plummets, by 1956 the street car lines are closed. 180,000 Detroiters have left by 1960. Chrysler issues major layoffs in 1961. Packard goes out of business and the mile long Packard Plant closes. * It's a hot summer day in 1967. A police raid on an illegal bar escalates to police brutality and African American retaliation. The incident was the match that lit the fuse on a powder keg. Five days of rioting left the city decimated. 43 dead, 1189 injured, more than 7000 arrests, and more than 2000 buildings destroyed. The riots were viewed by whites as a sign of things to come and what had been a slow stream of whites leaving the city for the suburbs exploded to a flood. White flight was in full effect. By 1980 470,000 Detroiters have left. * The Coleman Young era is a city descending into madness. Rapid depletion of the city population, an incredibly inept and corrupt government, and the rise of crack cocaine as the street drug of choice lead to extreme violence. Although the police force is up, the police are not much better than the criminals. Young is known to have had shady dealings with a great number of organizations, but no police organization will investigate him. It is during this era that massive projects are undertaken to attempt city revitalization. The Renaissance Center, People Mover and Joe Louis Arena included. One of the most controversial was the completion of the Poletown Plant, a GM plant built after the mayor evicted a large portion of neighborhood and razed it. Considerable city funds were directed away from fundamentals and towards these ends. The effects of these large projects were fragmentation of neighborhoods and bad blood between residents and the government-business partnerships. In 1989, the iconic Michigan Central Station closes. A city income tax on residents, workers, and businesses is established to supplement dropping property tax revenues. * 1994, the North American Free Trade Act passes. Ross Perot's prediction is correct and the biggest [sucking sound]( URL_0 ) in the country is centered right over Detroit. The auto industry races to set up \"maquiladora\" along the border of Mexico. These towns are little more than dusty villages but in five years they'd be filled with factories churning out subassemblies with zero value added tax or tariffs imposed. Local suppliers and large specialized sub-assembly plants in Detroit begin closing, labor rates in Mexico under $2 an hour which puts American workers out of competition. The same model will be applied when China woos manufacturers in the 2000s, but their ~75 cent labor rates are even more enticing. (*thanks for the section suggestion [u/y2knole]( URL_2 )*) * By the late 90s projects to restore downtown begin. Massive sporting arenas (Ford Field and Comerica park) are constructed while neighborhoods continue being hollowed out. The renovation of downtown continues through the early 2000s and defunct neighborhoods such as Brush Park and Corktown are being purchased by speculators. The city government is heavily in debt, however in 2003 it's not running deficits. As the city enters the new millennium, its population is below 1M for the first time since the 1920s * The housing and banking crisis cripples the city. Rising property values plummet and speculators and developers pull out. The city pushes on with ambitious riverfront projects hoping to lure citizens downtown. Automakers and suppliers lay off thousands and the city's revenue disintegrates. Jefferson North plant closes. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is indicted on corruption charges. The police force is sliced down and police respond primarily to violent crime calls only. A series of police commissioners are fired following corruption investigations. * Mayor Dave Bing is elected and his straight-talking, no baloney style chafes city council. The new mayor proposes bold plans to bring the city finances in line with its receipts, including closing down sections of the city and relocating population, selling or leasing Belle Isle, and restructuring the city charter. All are shot down following political infighting. Downtown development has been successful and the downtown district is now a major entertainment location. Investors are buying and renovating major downtown structures formerly vacant. Some downtown neighborhoods are at 100% occupancy, however this effect is concentrated and vast stretches remain vacant and essentially urban prairie. Jefferson North plant re-opens and GM invests heavily in the nearby Hamtramck plant. Special economic zones such as TechTown are centers of innovation. Outlying neighborhoods slowly disintegrate and scrapping rages out of control. Vacant homes in these areas are stripped of plumbing, HVAC, and wiring within days of becoming empty, rendering them essentially useless for market sale. The population is below 700,000 in spite of urban renewal in concentrated areas. * The Governor of the state declares the city in a financial emergency and appoints Kevyn Orr as emergency financial manager, effectively rendering Detroit's elected government impotent. Orr analyzes the city finances and offers a 10 year budget plan the council accepts (although primarily a ceremonial vote). Orr files bankruptcy proceedings, which are currently being adjudicated."}, {"answer": "The Detroit Free Press ran a pretty good in-depth [explanation]( URL_0 ). TL;DR Suburbanization, Deindustrialization, Taxes, Legacy Costs, Kwame and several inept city councils"}, {"answer": "Detroit is basically what NYC would be if wall street left, and there was a better port a few hundred miles away. The auto industry declined and Chicago is a better shipping destination in modern times."}, {"answer": "To be slightly pedantic, when you use the superlative \"most\" you can only have one of whatever you are discussing. There are actually /lots/ of big cities that have experienced all of the problems of that Detroit has. After all, right now not many people are saying nice things about Gary, Indiana (it's population is 1/2 what it used to be!). It also isn't new, in the 70's there was a pamphlet called Welcome to Fear City that was about what a craphole NYC was. Detroit stands out because of the huge contrast between what it is now compared to what it used to be, but it isn't unique except in its scope: it lost more people in absolute numbers than any other major american city. 1.1 million fewer people live there now. It also comes in second in terms of percentage loss at 61.4%. One of the other issues that hasn't been brought up is the role of redlining. Racist housing policy created large swaths of slums and blighted ghettos where poverty, crime, lack of education, and chaos were endemic. People who could afford to move away from inner city slums did so, which deprived the city of taxes and worsened the condition of the city, which prompted more people to leave, creating a vicious cycle of poverty - > white flight - > more poverty. This got even worse with the decline of US manufacturing. The book \"The Origins of the Urban Crisis\" covers this process is great detail."}, {"answer": "1. Detroit isn't the only city with negative stereotypes, just the largest one, and the one with the most black people. I'd be willing to bet that those two factors contribute to its reputation. 2. The sharp decline of the population has decimated the tax base, and the residents who do live here can't afford the taxes either. Taxes are the lifeblood of city income. 3. Terrible mismanagement, from the Mayor's office down. This is turning around with the current mayor. 4. The decline of the auto industry dealt a huge blow to the city, as it was built by the automobile, and the automobile by it. Crime, high cost of living, and the city's reputation are three main factors that slow and deter the city's comeback. This is turning around though, starting from downtown and (hopefully) spreading to the residential areas. My source? Lifelong Detroiter."}, {"answer": "Lots of other cities are like Detroit. All over the Rust Belt there's cities just like Detroit where half of the population has left since their populations peaked in the 1950's. Workers leave the city, taking with them large amounts of tax money, but for people on public assistance there isn't that financial pressure to move."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "38983196", "title": "Decline of Detroit", "section": "Section::::Contributors to decline.:1950s job losses.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 28, "end_paragraph_id": 28, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In the postwar period, the city had lost nearly 150,000 jobs to the suburbs. Factors were a combination of changes in technology, increased automation, consolidation of the auto industry, taxation policies, the need for different kinds of manufacturing space, and the construction of the highway system that eased transportation for commuters. Major companies like Packard, Hudson, and Studebaker, as well as hundreds of smaller companies, declined significantly or went out of business entirely. In the 1950s, the unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent. In the 1950s and 1960s, freeway construction, as part of urban renewal, cut", "In the postwar period, the city had lost nearly 150,000 jobs to the suburbs. Factors were a combination of changes in technology, increased automation, consolidation of the auto industry, taxation policies, the need for different kinds of manufacturing space, and the construction of the highway system that eased transportation for commuters. Major companies like Packard, Hudson, and Studebaker, as well as hundreds of smaller companies, declined significantly or went out of business entirely. In the 1950s, the unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent. In the 1950s and 1960s, freeway construction, as part of urban renewal, cut\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}]

Why does the feeling of 'love' quite literally feel so heavy in your chest?

motdk

[{"answer": "The feeling of love is something that is pleasing to the mind psychologically (obviously). It is one of the most potent stimulator for the release of certain chemicals stored in the body into the bloodstream. The body releases a cocktail of chemicals into your blood every time the mind is filled with love that act directly on your heart to make it beat faster, among other things. The heaviness you feel is literally your heart squeezing more blood and beating faster. Not the most comprehensive explanation, but hope this helps."}, {"answer": "The feeling of \"love\" is your body's response to hormones (serotonin/dopamine) when forging a connection with someone (strongest when it's a new someone). Because each person's body can be slightly different, each person will experience something slightly different. And however their body feels when their brain tells them they're \"in love\" is the feeling they'll associate with \"love.\" For me? My hands get swollen and my chest explodes. Not unlike an alien infestation."}, {"answer": "Love is actually something like a drug, you actually get high around the person that you love, and you can suffer withdrawal symptoms, most of which can be remedied by seeing a loved one. If you are reffering to the \"butterflies in your stomach\" feeling, its actually a combination of fear, anxiety, and nervousness, you can achieve this same feeling by doing things like going down a drop in a roller coaster and such. Hope this helps."}, {"answer": "It's supposed to feel heavy? Shit. I better let my gf know this."}, {"answer": "I'm quite sure that i've never had a \"Heavy\" feeling while in love... The feelings you have can vary from person to person. Heaviness is usually caused by anxiety, or over-excitement for me. I guess I generally feel excited when feeling that whole lovey dovey feeling. Hopefully i can have those kinds of feelings again soon :)! All i've been feeling is a tight stabbing feeling around my heart every time someone mentions my ex-girlfriend. It's kinda painful."}, {"answer": "I'm not sure if there's really a LI5 answer to this, the whole concept of emotion is a bit murky in psychology. I'd look up the James-Lange theory of emotion to learn more."}, {"answer": "Adrenaline due to nervousness and excitement causing your muscles to contract?"}, {"answer": "Good question. And, nobody really knows \"the answer\" to this question, but it's one of those things that *is*. However, the best explanation I can think of is related to the [chakras]( URL_0 ). I like to view emotion as a type of \"e-motion, electric-motion\". When you feel love, or heartbreak, you feel it in your chest. When you feel that someone is lying to you, or that something is amiss you feel it in your \"gut\" mostly. And, when you feel repressed in your ability to express yourself, you feel it as a \"frog in your throat\" and your throat tightens up etc."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2488021", "title": "Lovestruck", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Being lovestruck means having mental and physical symptoms associated with falling in love: 'Love-struck...means to be hit by love...you are hit in your heart by the emotion of love'.", "Being lovestruck means having mental and physical symptoms associated with falling in love: 'Love-struck...means to be hit by love...you are hit in your heart by the emotion of love'."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2925885", "title": "Lovesickness", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Lovesickness refers to an informal affliction that describes negative feelings associated with ongoing relationships, or the absence of a loved one.", "Lovesickness refers to an informal affliction that describes negative feelings associated with ongoing relationships, or the absence of a loved one. It can manifest as physical as well as mental symptoms. It is not to be confused with the condition of being in love, which refers to the physical and mental symptoms associated with falling in love. The term \"lovesickness\" is rarely used in medical or psychological fields.", "Lovesickness refers to an informal affliction that describes negative feelings associated with ongoing relationships, or the absence of a loved one. It can manifest as physical as well as mental symptoms. It is not to be confused with the condition of being in love, which refers to the physical and mental symptoms associated with falling in love."]}}]}]

why are train tracks filled with stones?

4o0ls1

[{"answer": "Those stones (called track ballast) serve four primary purposes: - Load-bearing (it distributes and bears the weight of the railroad ties) - Facilitation of water drainage away from the ties - Keeps out vegetation that could interfere with the structure of the track - Helps keep the ties in place"}, {"answer": "Trains can be extremely heavy, this weight is focused upon the fairly small area of their wheels. The stones are actually called *track ballast* and help to spread the huge force from the train's wheels out over a larger area of ground. Without this ballast the ground underneath might sink unevenly. The sleepers (*cross ties*) of the tracks are not directly attached to the ballast which allows the track to have a little movement (e.g. as the track expands and contracts due to changes in temperature). Stones are a good choice for this role because: 1. They are cheap. 2. They can resist compressive loads well. 3. Relatively low maintenance. Also of note: ballast is itself built upon a foundation of earth (the *subgrade*) that helps to raise the track and further distribute load. Other functions: stops plants growing around the tracks, allows water to drain away. Are rocks a significant derailment hazard? Not really -- trains are massive and move quickly -- this enormous momentum means they smash right through most anything in their path. Rocks are typically turned to dust by the wheels of the train or thrown out of the way by the tremendous pressure of the wheels against the track."}, {"answer": "I am an engineer working on the Hudson yard project in Manhattan for the LIRR and I've worked on many other jobs with the Long Island rail road. The stone is actually a very good bearing material and is very carefully specified for carrying the weight of the train and providing good drainage for the ties beneath the rails. Now about the whole stone on the track thing. Trains don't give a single fuck about pretty much anything on the tracks. Stones are reduced to dust. Coins are reminted. People and animals are exploded like meat filled balloons. Don't fuck with trains. They don't care."}, {"answer": "Why are train tracks filled with stones? So [they can do this]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "Train driver here. Slab track (or ballastless track) would be preferable over ballast any day. It is basically track fixed directly to reinforced concrete slabs and has the advantage of increased stability and lower maintenance costs. It is however expensive, so sleepers and ballast are used instead. In some countries, slab track is used extensively on high speed, high frequency lines, such as Japan or around some areas where the track must be stable such as in tunnels or around stations. This is of course dependant on the amount of investment in rail infrastructure!"}, {"answer": "I build trains cars for a living. Due to sheer weight it hard to derail them, but remember this when parked next to a track waiting to cross as a train is coming through. They are not bolted or attached to the wheels at all. They sit on a 7 to 10 inch king pin, and the weight is all that keeps them on. Empty rail cars are very very easy to derail. Back up a few feet from the cross guards and give the tracks some space."}, {"answer": "These stones are called ballast, and their job is to provide a sort of 'bed' or base for the track to sit on top of (hence why it's sometimes called the 'trackbed'). Basically, it allows water to drain through, and the stones can shift slightly to evenly distribute the weight of the train into the ground as the train goes over it. If the ballast wasn't there, the weight of the trains going over, combined with a build up of water, would cause ground subsidence under the track - the track would be pushed into the dirt by the weight of the trains. On some modern rail lines they instead use concrete slab track like [this]( URL_0 ), where the rail sits on top of sprung 'chairs', which distribute the weight into the track. This system is low maintenance and allows higher speeds, but is also much more expensive to build. As for your second question, this poses absolutely no harm to the train at all. Only a very small section of the wheel is in contact with the track, and it has the entire weight of the train on top of it, so it ploughs through everything. When my grandma was little in 1950s Britain, she used to put pennies (a type of coin equivalent to a cent for you US folks) on the tracks near their house, and they would be flattened by the trains as they passed over them. Source: Major railway enthusiast (railfan in the US??), and thinking of doing an engineering degree at university. [](/GNU Terry Pratchett)"}, {"answer": "The crushed stones are what is known as ballast. Their purpose is to hold the wooden cross ties in place, which in turn hold the rails in place. You start with the bare ground, and then build up a foundation to raise the track high enough so it won't get flooded. On top of the foundation, you deposit a load of crushed stone (the ballast). On top of the stone, you lay down (perpendicular to the direction of the track) a line of wooden beams on 19.5 inch centers, 8 1/2 feet long, 9 inches wide and 7 inches thick, weighing about 200 pounds...3,249 of them per mile. You then continue to dump crushed stone all around the beams. The sharp edges of the stone make it difficult for them to slide over each other (in the way that smooth, round pebbles would), thus effectively locking them in place. This is all necessary because a train (depending on size) moving across the tracks can exert up to 1,000,000 pounds of moving pressure on the tracks"}, {"answer": "Stones in this case are called **ballast**. They ensure the properly drainage of the laying terrain, and, also, serves as a blocking device for the sleepers and as a weight-distribution over the soil. Imagine if you lay the rails and sleepers right over the terrain, without laying the geotextile and the ballast bed: if the soil contains clays, the rain will not drain properly, thus creating an unstable condition (twisted rails, misalignments, deflections). The ballast helps to maintain the soil properly drained (keeping in mind that, below the crushed rocks, there is a geotextile). Also, it bears the loads on the sleepers (or ties), distributing the weight uniformly on the terrain. And, of course, holds the ties and rails in place."}, {"answer": "Trains are not able to handle deformation of their tracks anyway near the extent of say a car can a drive safely over a bad road. This is a much bigger risk to derailment than a stone on the track. The ballast (stones) and subgrade (material between the ballast and natural earth) is built as an elevated trapezoidal shape that distributes the load at the top of the trapezoid (train) over a larger area at the base so that the natural soil it is built on will not sink, in much the same way snow shoes stop you from falling through soft snow. The elevation of the trapezoid also stops water run off/small amounts of flooding moving/washing the tracks away. The reason stones are an ideal ballast material is more complicated, the simple explanation being that stones are a granular material that allows water to drain through the ballast area. Because water is not retained the ballast will not have a long term settlement (sink further over time) so the tracks stay in the same place in the long term. Source: Civil Engineer."}, {"answer": "I always find humor when people ask \"wont a penny or stone derail the train\"....... to which i show them a video of a train blowing through a fully loaded semi trailer without slowing down one bit. I then let them decide for themselves."}, {"answer": "I doubt a stone the size they use would be dangerous to a train it would just turn it to dust .any way the reasons they use ballast (stones)is because it is usually a cheap and readily available material in the quantities they need .secondly they use different grades and sizes to build a very solid foundation ,they kind of bind together with friction. And lastly it is an easy material to work with so repairs and reshaping aren't as technical or costly to compete"}, {"answer": "Railway engineer for a major class 1 (US) railroad here. Track maintenance is an every day fixture, especially on the heavily trafficked corridor in which I work. This includes the dropping and leveling of new ballast. Companies like Herzog use specially designed rail cars on work trains that can drop ballast while the train is moving at about 30 MPH. It's a pretty neat deal that's all controlled by satellite. Sometimes, however, a lot of stray rocks will stay on the rails after a ballast train has dropped its load. Being the first train to hit rails covered with ballast is always a fun/uncomfortable experience. You feel every. Single. Rock. Even though the train is very heavy and the rocks pose no threat, due to the small contact area between the locomotive wheels and the rails, it makes for a helluva bumpy ride!"}, {"answer": "It's also important to keep the track clean. A double broom is designed to clean ties between and outside of the rails. This helps to remove dirt, foreign material, and excess ballast. It moves at about 1 MPH and consists of two, separate hydraulically powered rotary brooms which sweep a width of 9 feet or so, which completely cleans finished track during a single pass. An undercutter is use for re-ballasting road crossings, improving track conditions, roadbed prep, etc. It moves about 600 ft per hour. It can trench depths up to 34 inches below the top of the rail. A ballast compactor restores the bed, ballast, and track geometry. Moves at about 2-4 miles per hour. A ballast regulator moves at about 3-5 miles per hour, and transfers ballast from the field side of one rail to the field side of another, and the same for the gauge side of the rail. The shoulder ballast cleaner - picks up the ballast off the end of the ties and moves the ballast and mud into a shaker box that separates the two. The dirt is moved to the side of the track, and the cleaned ballast is dumped back onto the shoulder. A track geometry car identifies and records track defects and can travel any of the speeds posted in a specific division. It identifies defects by mechanically measuring track parameters while under heavy loads. The measurements are recorded electronically and compares them to normal track standards. The Jordan spreader is cool, too. It's used to spread ballast and dirt for widening embankments, and cleans ditches, level sub-grade, spreading fouled ballast, food clean up, and clearing snow drifts. .... These are just a few. Everything you didn't know you didn't want to know about maintenance of way."}, {"answer": "As opposed to what else? If the tracks just rest on dirt or sand, then they sink and warp with the first storm that turns it to mud. If the tracks rest on/in concrete or cement, the vibrations of the train will just break it apart into gravel and sand. Not to mention the huge upkeep costs. If a stone somehow gets in a track, it's because a human put it there. Which happens with the alternatives as well. Gravel is cheap, it's steady and it drains well. And if a stone is put on the track, it gets turned into dust. It won't derail the train and I doubt it would be pushed out like some sort of cartoon."}, {"answer": "When I was young and took a road trip with my parents, my dad put a quarter on rail road tracks. The train hauled ass by and flattened the coin and looked awesome. I was terrified it was gonna derail the train the whole time..."}, {"answer": "Nop. When i was a kid, my brother and me used to lay like fifty of them on the tracks. We then waited for the TGV to pass. Free firecrackers ! Deafening shit PS: i know it is stupid, but we were 10 years old"}, {"answer": "Not a specific answer to your question, but I was involved in emergency response for train derails in Eastern and Atlantic Canada up until last year. The vast majority of derailments happen due to trains taking turns too fast. A very small percentage (maybe < 3%) happen due to a failure of the rail, tie, or ballast. An extremely small percentage happen due to tampering. I probably responded to 5-8 derailments per year. Usually 1 or 2 per year would come from rail fatigue (rotten tie or loosened ballast). I never once saw a train derail from tampering. But just a few weeks ago I received a call to assist with an investigation where the rail had actually been cut! Unfortunately I was on vacation in California and couldn't make it out to see."}, {"answer": "I don't really have anything to contribute other than when I was a kid we had train tracks behind our house and I would place rocks (by rocks I mean like driveway stones, so - small) and quarters on the tracks and wait for a train. I had so many smashed quarters as a kid, it was awesome. The rocks would just disintegrate but it was still fun to do. Then one day someone told me a train could derail if it ran over a rock and it freaked me out and I never did it again."}, {"answer": "I didn't see it mentioned here, but apologies if I missed it. The rocks are also erosion resistant. The wear on the over time is very small since the only thing that can cause it is rain, and the water doesn't even have a constant flow. If dirt or sand were used, then you would see some of it washing away after the first small rainfall. You see this is also in effect in the drainage pipe mouths, they use rocks since they don't wash away easily."}, {"answer": "Laying down Gravel/loose bedding is an ancient roman invention and it's why their roads lasted so long. Think about all the sidewalks you've seen and how most of them are cracked and sometimes those cracks get angled so you trip. Gravel bedding allows the ground beneath the road to contort, compress, and bend without the road itself from warping."}, {"answer": "If it was built on dirt, over the years there'd be a number of dangerous ground/maintenance/foliage issues. Stones are the most sterdy and most efficient material to use"}, {"answer": "It was also explained to me that it's much cheaper than asphalt or concrete. And more stable under heavy loads"}, {"answer": "What are the chances that a stone gets kicked up and gets shot at somebody on the platform?"}, {"answer": "When I was a kid me and a friend used to make the Train gates come down setting the signals off. Cars would start backing up and wonder why no train was crossing and then the gates would just go back up. Edit: Got a few pm's on how. Pretty simple actually and clearly I don't recommend because it is illegal. We found a stop sign on the train tracks and placed it over the tracks and pressed down and begin walking and after I am guessing 10-20ft or so the gates came down. We thought an actual train was coming and got the hell out of the way. We did not realize at first that it was us. We were just messing around."}, {"answer": "Those stones are not at all dangerous if it gets on the tracks, or atleast in my experiences. When I was in middle school id always put stones on tracks to see what happened (not proud of it but I was a foolish kid) sometimes id put many stones in a sequence to make almost a melody. The weight and force of a train is tremendous and crushs the stones like a soda can. The real danger is metal on the tracks for they don't explode in a dust cloud like a rock would, but rather shootout projectiles. I have damaged nerve tissue in my leg because of that. Be careful around tracks"}, {"answer": "For the second part of your question: when me and my friends were dumb kids we thought it would be funny to load snow and sticks on the track to see if we could derail it (I know we were fucking retarded). Anyways, our 2 hours of work were for nothing. Train blasted through that shit like it was air. The \"cow catcher\" blasted most of it away and the rest was laughable. Guy driving didn't try to stop or speed up or anything, just kept cruisin."}, {"answer": "The stones are called 'ballast'. The tracks need to be very very straight and very very level. With so many tons rolling over them they tend to shift and move, and need to be periodically realigned. Also the wooden ties need to be replaced occasionally. If they were set in asphalt or concrete this task would be made much more difficult. No it's not dangerous. The train pulverizes those rocks like a game of Candy Crush when they get atop the rail."}, {"answer": "Can confirm that putting those rocks on the tracks does nothing to the train but makes for a heck of a good time when your a bored kid. Used to live beside some when I was a kid and we would always put stuff on the tracks to watch it either a) explode or b) get squished. FYI rocks explode, coins squish."}, {"answer": "I grew up with a train track in my backyard. We put everything on the tracks as kids. Pennies, rocks, sticks....etc. The rocks were cool because it made sparks when the wheels hit them. Cool as a kid....I often think back and wonder how we never derailed a train, or received a visit from the railroad commission."}, {"answer": "I remember reading a long time ago that avoiding resonance was one of the reasons for stones being used. Left to themselves, the tracks might vibrate hard enough to deform (thereby causing a derailment) or cause the ties and bolts to loosen. Having the stones next to them vibrating at a different frequency avoids this."}, {"answer": "When I was a kid we used to put a bunch of those rocks on the train tracks then hide behind a nearby wall and watch as the train passed. It exploded each rock with ease"}, {"answer": "Here's a stab in the dark, without reading. The stones may act as sound deadening, drainage, and instead of paving it which would crack due to vibrations."}, {"answer": "How are you supposed to take part in the Christmas Day tradition of throwing rocks at trains if there are no rocks by the train tracks?"}, {"answer": "I was literally thinking of asking g this question yesterday. Thank you OP for reading minds xD"}, {"answer": "How come the subway trains don't have stones on the tracks?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "321365", "title": "Track (rail transport)", "section": "Section::::Structure.:Traditional track structure.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 9, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 9, "end_character": 173, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

why won't any country grant Snowden asylum?

1hkonu

[{"answer": "Assange went to Ecuadorian territory (an embassy is their territory, ~~technically~~ basically), so he followed their rules on granting Diplomatic Asylum. For Snowden he's probably be granted the same if he went to Ecuador's embassy, but he'd have to go into Moscow for that, which wouldn't happen. Regarding \"what is the **real** reason\" the best we can tell you is what those countries say, everything else is just useless speculation."}, {"answer": "There will be severe economic and political consequences for anyone who grants Snowden asylum. The US is like the schoolyard bully, anyone who crosses him will get knocked around a bit."}, {"answer": "He's basically the equivalent of playing nuclear hot potato. Nobody really wants to fuck with a wanted criminal with his kind of infamy. Regardless of whether or not you agree with his actions, you have to see that he's become a bit of a worldwide pariah."}, {"answer": "No country has anything to gain by letting Snowden in. They all have a lot to lose (pissing off the US.)"}, {"answer": "There are probably several countries who would grant him asylum, but he has to be in that country or at the very least in their embassy when he applies. Russia have already offered him asylum, but on the condition that he stop sharing US secrets. He refused the condition and the offer of asylum was withdrawn."}, {"answer": "Because they weights the pros and cons. And Snowden is not worth it. That's the sad truth, there's a price for everything in this world."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "39626432", "title": "Edward Snowden", "section": "Section::::Flight from the United States.:Russia.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 73, "end_paragraph_id": 73, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Four countries offered Snowden permanent asylum: Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. No direct flights between Moscow and Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua existed, however, and the U.S. pressured countries along his route to hand him over. Snowden said in July 2013 that he decided to bid for asylum in Russia because he felt there was no safe way to reach Latin America. Snowden said he remained in Russia because \"when we were talking about possibilities for asylum in Latin America, the United States forced down the Bolivian President's plane\", citing the Morales plane incident. On the issue, he said \"some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.\" He said that he would travel from Russia if there was no interference from the U.S. government.", "Four countries offered Snowden permanent asylum: Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Venezuela. No direct flights between Moscow and Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua existed, however, and the U.S. pressured countries along his route to hand him over. Snowden said in July 2013 that he decided to bid for asylum in Russia because he felt there was no safe way to reach Latin America. Snowden said he remained in Russia because \"when we were talking about possibilities for asylum in Latin America, the United States forced down the Bolivian President's plane\", citing the Morales plane incident. On the issue, he said \"some governments in Western European and North American states have demonstrated a willingness to act outside the law, and this behavior persists today. This unlawful threat makes it impossible for me to travel to Latin America and enjoy the asylum granted there in accordance with our shared rights.\" He said that he would travel from Russia if there was no interference from the U.S. government.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "39626432", "title": "Edward Snowden", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month", "On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. As of 2017, he was living in an undisclosed location in Moscow. Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983", "On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. As of 2017, he was living in an undisclosed location in Moscow. Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983"]}}]}]

If Times New Roman ft. size 12 is so commonly used, why isn't it the factory default setting for word documents?

3i5txi

[{"answer": "I believe once upon a time Times New Roman font size 12 was the default size and then to signify the changing of times from the printed to electronic age Microsoft changed it to what it is now. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Honest question, because I'm curious: how old are you OP? Do you not remember when TNR was the default? It was default for like 15 years."}, {"answer": "Times new roman is the text for printed documents. It has serifs, and that's for making reading easier on paper. However, on a computer screen you should use a non serif font like Ariel (the most common default) because it is easier to read on screen."}, {"answer": "Up until Office 2007, the default font in Microsoft Word used the Times New Roman typeface. It has since been replaced by Calibri. You do have the ability to customize the default themes and styles that are included with Office, if you should choose to do so. If you asked Microsoft why it doesn't update those themes automatically, they would probably tell you that it's to avoid surprising users and maintain consistency. The users who want to change the default themes can, and the users who don't care won't be impacted by unexpected changes."}, {"answer": "Finally something I might be able to explain. Times New Roman size 12 is the easiest font to read on paper, but slightly harder to read on a computerscreen. This is because it is a fontstyle called serif. Now the default is Calibri which is easier to read on computerscreens, but slightly harder on paper. This is a fontstyle called sans serif. Since most of all reading is on a screen nowdays it made sense to change the default font. Before people would print out most documents, and thats why it was default."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "25739", "title": "Rich Text Format", "section": "Section::::Character encoding.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 23, "end_paragraph_id": 23, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["do not specify the substitution character. Until RTF specification version 1.5 release in 1997, RTF has only handled 7-bit characters directly and 8-bit characters encoded as hexadecimal (using codice_5). RTF control words (since RTF 1.5) generally accept signed 16-bit numbers as arguments. Unicode values greater than 32767 must be expressed as negative numbers. If a Unicode character is outside BMP, it is encoded with a surrogate pair. Support for Unicode was made due to text handling changes in Microsoft Word Microsoft Word 97 is a partially Unicode-enabled application and it handles text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme. Microsoft Word 2000 and later versions are Unicode-enabled applications that handle text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme.", "do not specify the substitution character. Until RTF specification version 1.5 release in 1997, RTF has only handled 7-bit characters directly and 8-bit characters encoded as hexadecimal (using codice_5). RTF control words (since RTF 1.5) generally accept signed 16-bit numbers as arguments. Unicode values greater than 32767 must be expressed as negative numbers. If a Unicode character is outside BMP, it is encoded with a surrogate pair. Support for Unicode was made due to text handling changes in Microsoft Word Microsoft Word 97 is a partially Unicode-enabled application and it handles text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme. Microsoft Word 2000 and later versions are Unicode-enabled applications that handle text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme."]}}]}]

Why do we like boobs?

oricp

[{"answer": "I'm sure there will be a far more technical answer written soon, but I'll just say: have you SEEN them, man? They're brilliant!"}, {"answer": "If you look at cultures that encourage nudity, such as places in Africa, those kids/men don't flock around the women with their breasts hanging out. Basically because we hide them in our society, men want what they can't have. If every woman walked around with their tits out a lot less men would be interested in them. TL;DR We want what we can't have. edit: For clarification, I'm not trying to say we would lose interest entirely, but that our interest would not be nearly as high."}, {"answer": "Relevant: [Did you just look at my chest?]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "Because we're biologically attracted to traits of the opposite sex which encourages us to reproduce."}, {"answer": "Cleavage looks similar to buttocks. There are theories that say we evolved larger-than-required breasts as another means to increase sexual attraction and reproduction. Incidentally, there are similar theories on the existence of pubic hair, and now it is common to shave it off. Because eff Mother Nature, that's why. EDIT: FWIW, I'm not sure that I believe these theories either. Maybe we needed these visual clues long, long ago, and maybe we didn't. But boobies (any size) are awesome and I'm a firm believer in not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Oh gawd, somebody give me a better analogy."}, {"answer": "From the movie \"100 Girls\": Matthew: [Looking at Cynthia] How can a guy have a real conversation with a girl like this when we're made so helpless? In the animal kingdom, when two members of a pack stare at each other, it is a test of dominance. The first one to look away is considered the weaker. When this happens between a man and a woman, the cards are stacked against a man. 'Cause, let's face it, every time a guy meets a girl, he wants to check out her breasts. A man must summon all of his will not to look down at those golden orbs, whose wonderous tips are upturned, aimed right at his eyes. [after staring at each other for a long time, Matt finally gives in and looks down at Cynthia's breasts] Matthew: Once a man loses his test of nerves, a woman knows she has a great secret power over him, and she can get him do anything she wants. Like a sexual sorceress, Cynthia had several men under her spell."}, {"answer": "So you're born, right? And not 30 minutes after you take that first breath of fresh air and monster piss you've been holding in for 9 months, you get this warm, round thing shoved in your face that is full of food and is tailor made for someone your current size and shape to be able to use without any instruction. For the next year, all you need to do is yell out, and these perfect globes of engineering appear to appease you. Quite literally EVERYTHING you need to survive is provided by 2 godlike melons that are at your beck and call. Suddenly, and quite arbitrarily, the greatest thing in the world is taken away. It becomes \"uncouth\" to cry and reach for breasts at the mall. From 3 until whenever-you-find-a-girlfriend, the world is full of your favorite things, heaving up and down like schooner rounding Cape Horn, and you are 100% powerless to do anything about it. Worse still, around 10, still YEARS away from touching one yourself, you aren't even allowed to look at the jiggly goodness without fear of getting labeled a pervert. This is why men don't cry and are emotionally distant. Having the only thing you want taken away, hidden, then brought back into your life with hundreds of rules and social mores governing your behavior around them is maddening. tl;dr More boobs, less psychological damage. [Original comment here.]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "I thought it was an evolutionary thing. We're attracted to boobs because it represents the ability to nurse our offspring."}, {"answer": "Evolutionary processes have hardwired a certain behavior in men (and in lesbians too, I guess, but I don't know for sure). Bigger, fuller breasts are attractive because they are an indicator of good health and hold the promise of successful child-rearing. Same thing goes for wide hips. Wider hips indicate that a woman can successfully bear a child."}, {"answer": "There was a study done recently that suggests the reason men love breasts is because ancient man... loved breasts."}, {"answer": "Nice boobs > > healthy > > able to nurture and feed baby. Nature and shit man"}, {"answer": "They're soft; They're squishy; They're bouncy; They're like toys! Who doesn't like toys? I like toys."}, {"answer": "In most other primates, the buttocks are the female body part that the males are attracted to\u2014in many primates the buttocks even swell or change color during ovulation to show that the females are fertile. Some scientists postulate that when humans became bi-pedal, and our butts were no longer eye-level, females evolved swollen breasts to mimic the curve of the butt, since that was more visible as we stood upright. However, since we no longer have visible oestrus (ovulation) the breasts are always enlarged, which the male brain perceives as a sign of fertility. It\u2019s also interesting to note that in other cultures, however, the breasts are far less eroticised than in Western culture. There are many parts of the world where it is still considered perfectly fine for women to bare their breasts to nurse their babies in any public space; in the United States, this would still result in some raised eyebrows, since breasts are considered erotic. In other countries (brasil, for example) a woman\u2019s large butt and hips are still considered as sexy or even sexier than breasts."}, {"answer": "They're awesome, soft, bouncy, and jiggly. How is that wrong?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1890951", "title": "Cleavage (breasts)", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In some cultures, display of cleavage is considered aesthetic or erotic, and may be associated with garments with low necklines that expose or highlight cleavage, such as ball gowns, evening gowns, lingerie, and swimwear. In these cultures women have, throughout history, sought to enhance their physical attractiveness and femininity, within the context of changing fashions and cultural-specific norms of modesty of the time and place.", "Cleavage is the exposed area between a woman's breasts lying over the sternum, and refers \"only\" to what is visible with clothing (or dense, nontransparent body art) that includes a low-cut neckline. In some cultures, display of cleavage is considered aesthetic or erotic, and may be associated with garments with low necklines that expose or highlight cleavage, such as ball gowns, evening gowns, lingerie, and swimwear. In these cultures women have, throughout history, sought to enhance their physical attractiveness and femininity, within the context of changing fashions and cultural-specific norms of modesty of the time and place. The methods practised in appropriate contexts have included the accentuation and partial display of breasts,"]}}]}]

Why did Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac hate each other

25exdz

[{"answer": "In the 80s the Bronx, NY basically created rap. However by the early 90s South Central LA dominated the music scene with a new sound called gangsta rap. In response to frustration over not getting airplay, someone wrote a song called \"Fuck Compton\" and just dissed everyone at NWA. Eventually it fell to the two biggest artists, BIG and 2pac, to be the champions of each side. Because some people don't understand a marketing gimmick when they see one, both men were killed by people who took the rivalry way too seriously. After that, it stopped being fun."}, {"answer": "They actually started out as great friends. Tupac was already big in the scene and Big was an up and comer learning a few things from Pac. Big invited Pac to a recording session while Pac was in NYC. Pac ended up getting jumped in the lobby and blamed Biggie for it. After that it just escalated."}, {"answer": "so far the posts here gloss over how involved the story is, particularly with regards to tupac, who was not killed due to a music rivalry. tupac came from a family of political dissidents. he spent much of his childhood on the run from the FBI, his god-mother is currently Wanted by the FBI for domestic terrorism. she was broken out of prison by tupac's step father and she now lives in exil in Cuba. tupac was the youngest chairman of the New African Panthers, he was \"befriended\" by an FBI informant who introduced him to a woman you falsely accused him of rape. tupac shot two drunk policemen who were beating a black motorist, the drunken officers tried to shoot tupac first with pistols stolen from the evidence locker. he had tons of enemies, and a little music rivalry is not why he was murdered. [this redditor gives a much more in-depth and cited explanation]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "Tupac became paranoid after he was shot five times and survived. He thought Biggie had something to do with it because everyone was avoiding eye contact with him, so he made Hit 'Em Up, then people spun it out of control. Personally I think Suge Knight had more to do with it, but that's just me."}, {"answer": "This is half remembered from a movie but I think it broke down like this: They were friends for the longest time. Then someone tried to kill Tupac. Tupac, becoming paranoid, eventually thought that his friend Biggie was the one trying to kill him. Biggie tried to prove otherwise but eventually gave in and just embraced the rivalry, he got tired of Tupac bad mouthing him and returned fire. Then Tupac was murdered... and Biggie murdered shortly there after. Now we're left wondering what might have been from two rappers who died young and had so much left in their careers."}, {"answer": "Here's the story from 2Pac's mouth: URL_0 Pac didn't think that Big shot him, he just thought that he probably knew who did, being that Big talked so much about being King of New York on Ready To Die. He also thought that Ready To Die jacked its style from the album that 2Pac was recording at the time, which became Me Against The World, but he said he had to go back to the studio to change it up a bunch after he heard Ready To Die. He was also pissed because they had been pretty good friends and Big didn't visit him in the hospital, I think. Maybe there's a song that has all this on it, I can't remember. But basically Pac thought that he'd been good to Biggie when he was more famous than Biggie, and that Biggie had sort of abandoned him. The West Coast/East Coast thing was there, sure, but Pac and Biggie had a history that didn't really have anything to do with that shit."}, {"answer": "The amount of misinformation in this thread is horrific. [This man]( URL_0 ) is correct."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5076339", "title": "East Coast\u2013West Coast hip hop rivalry", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 659, "bleu_score": 0.7716834944244706}]}]

Why does 100% humidity not mean water everywhere?

47ukj3

[{"answer": "Atmosphere, which is a collection of gasses (including water vapor), has physical properties (temperature, pressure, etc) that let it hold a certain amount of moisture. Anything past that limit, and you can't add more moisture to the air. It's holding as much moisture as possible. So 100% doesn't mean you're walking around underwater, it just means the air is fully saturated with moisture."}, {"answer": "It's kinda like dissolving sugar in water. 100% means that the maximum of sugar is dissolved, so the rest will stay in it as leftover crystals. So you could say that clouds are \"over 100%\" humidity."}, {"answer": "Because there are two humidity scales. The humidity scale you are talking about is \"Relative Humidity\".. Relative Humidity is the percentage of moisture content in the air expressed as a percentage of the maximum amount of moisture the air can hold before saturation (the point at which the moisture will condense out as rain). \" Absolute Humidity \" ( or\" total humidity \") if the amount of moisture in the air expressed as a percentage of total air composition. A relative humidity of 100% is about 3% absolute humidity. The actual amount of water that can be held in air us very subject to temperature and pressure"}, {"answer": "100% humidity is the point where the air is fully saturated with moisture, it can't physically suspend any more water vapor in the air."}, {"answer": "When water condenses, it releases vast amounts of energy. Over 2MJ per kilo. Now, obviously, you don't get that kind of heat released when water is condensing on the side of your glass of cold soda, because the amounts involved are tiny, but they are there. If all the water tried to come out of vapour and into liquid all at once there would be a sudden and large rise in temperature - which of course would evaporate all the water again. And this is why it doesn't happen. There's a continual balance of water molecules arriving and leaving a surface, and if the temperature and humidity are stable, in a closed system, the number arriving will equal the number leaving. That, and of course, there's not actually all that much water in the air even at 100% humidity."}, {"answer": "100% humidity is not 100% water. Air can contain water, in the same sense that water can contain sugar. You can add lots of sugar and it will dissolve. Until a certain point, past which all newly added sugar will stay in crystalline form. Something similar happens with water in air. Air can carry a bit of water, and the maximum amount of water it can keep until the water becomes condense is 100% humidity. This value is dependent on temperature. The colder, the less water the air can contain."}, {"answer": "Humidity is the percent of water in the air. The reason that 100% humidity would not mean water everywhere is due to the fact that the percentage you are referring to only suggests the amount of water the air can hold. For example, when it's hot outside air expands meaning their is more room between air particles which means more water can fill into the gaps. However when it is cold outside the air particles are very condensed which means there is not much room for water to build up. That's why you get dry skin in the winter. To sum it up: The humidity percentage only refers to the amount of water the air can hold. When there is 100 percent humidity it doesn't mean that the air has suddenly been replaced with water it just means the the air is holding more water. Hope this helps. I know it's kinda confusing I'm learning this in school rn."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "9947225", "title": "Pan evaporation", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Pan evaporation is a measurement that combines or integrates the effects of several climate elements: temperature, humidity, rain fall, drought dispersion, solar radiation, and wind. Evaporation is greatest on hot, windy, dry, sunny days; and is greatly reduced when clouds block the sun and when air is cool, calm, and humid. Pan evaporation measurements enable farmers and ranchers to understand how much water their crops will need.", "Pan evaporation is a measurement that combines or integrates the effects of several climate elements: temperature, humidity, rain fall, drought dispersion, solar radiation, and wind. Evaporation is greatest on hot, windy, dry, sunny days; and is greatly reduced when clouds block the sun and when air is cool, calm, and humid", "Pan evaporation is a measurement that combines or integrates the effects of several climate elements: temperature, humidity, rain fall, drought dispersion, solar radiation, and wind. Evaporation is greatest on hot, windy, dry, sunny days; and is greatly reduced when clouds block the sun and when air is cool, calm, and humid. Pan evaporation measurements enable farmers and ranchers to understand how much water their crops will need."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "24027000", "title": "Properties of water", "section": "Section::::Physical properties.:Water, ice, and vapor.:Miscibility and condensation.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 29, "end_paragraph_id": 29, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A saturated gas or one with 100% relative humidity is when the vapor pressure of water in the air is at equilibrium with vapor pressure due to (liquid) water; water (or ice, if cool enough) will fail to lose mass through evaporation when exposed to saturated air. Because the amount of water vapor in air is small, relative humidity, the ratio of the partial pressure due to the water vapor to the saturated partial vapor pressure, is much more useful.", "A saturated gas or one with 100% relative humidity is when the vapor pressure of water in the air is at equilibrium with vapor pressure due to (liquid) water; water (or ice, if cool enough) will fail to lose mass through evaporation when exposed to saturated air. Because the amount of water vapor in air is small, relative humidity, the ratio of the partial pressure due to the water vapor to the saturated partial vapor pressure, is much more useful."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "53727266", "title": "Nonresidential water use in the U.S.", "section": "Section::::Water use in major CII categories.:Restaurants.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 37, "end_paragraph_id": 37, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The largest uses of water in restaurants result from kitchen activities such as washing dishes, making ice, and preparing food. A significant amount of water is also used for restrooms. The proxy metrics data show WUIs in restaurants ranging from 474 to 578 g/ksf/d in selected Colorado utilities, an average of 589 g/ksf/d in Austin, Texas, and 670 g/ksf/d in Florida. Somewhat wider range of 356 to 907 g/ksf", "Restaurants (and fast food places) account for about 3 percent of total CII use in Austin, Texas and 5 percent in Oakland, California (EBMUD) and up to 8 percent in the State of Florida. The largest uses of water in restaurants result from kitchen activities such as washing dishes, making ice, and preparing food. A significant amount of water is also used for restrooms. The proxy metrics data show WUIs in restaurants ranging from 474 to 578 g/ksf/d in selected Colorado utilities, an average of 589 g/ksf/d in Austin, Texas, and 670 g/ksf/d in Florida. Somewhat wider range of 356 to 907 g/ksf"]}}]}]

Do people with Alzheimers know they don't remember anything, or do they just not question it?

325fy9

[{"answer": "They don't, no. They slowly forget the world around them, to the point where it's not like a vague memory, or they know something happened but they don't know exactly, it's like it never happened at all. To look at it another way - reincarnation is real. Can you remember anything about your previous life? Would you recognise the faces if you met them in this life?"}, {"answer": "It's a very, very gradual downward slope, and it's difficult for the person to notice it. It starts with a few minor things here and there, but if the person falls into a routine, everything else tends to fade away. They aren't dealing with it anymore, so they have no need to recall it, and they don't even know it's gone. In the beginning they may notice a few things, but they usually think they're completely fine, because they *feel* fine. If I asked you, \"What is something you don't remember?\" you wouldn't be able to answer, because you don't remember it. It's the same with them, but the things they don't remember eventually outnumber the things they do. Source: grandmother had it for the last ~15 years of her life, like watching a train wreck in slow motion."}, {"answer": "Alzheimer's is not simply about forgetting things. It's a degenerative brain disease, and it affects the mind as a whole, not just memories. So yes, you forget things. You also have a harder time learning new things, paying attention to things for extended periods, making decisions, engaging in abstract thinking and planning, etc. People experience a reduced ability to properly process sensory information in general, and a growing inability to even move their bodies correctly. If it was just losing memories, Alzheimer's would be terrible enough. But it's a slow slide into death as you gradually lose the ability to function as a person *at all*."}, {"answer": "Years ago I saw a documentary a woman made about her mother having Alzheimers (I'm sorry I don't remember enough details to find it for you). At one point she described how her mother would get upset and depressed looking at the family photos on her dresser, because she knew she was supposed to know who those people were, but did not. They took the photos away, stopped trying to 'make' the mother remember, and she was then happy as can be. Edit: found it! [Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, by Deborah Hoffman]( URL_0 )."}, {"answer": "My grandmother has been diagnosed and is at a point where she knows something is going on. She said to my aunt (her daughter) \"Why am I like this? What's wrong with me?\" and began to cry. It hurt my heart."}, {"answer": "Have you ever awoken and not remembered a dream? You know you had a dream and you know it made you happy but you can't remember the details or even why you were happy? Have you ever been somewhere and seen someone you vaguely recognize but don't know why or from where? They approach, so very glad to have run into you and you smile and nod politely but you can't remember a them. You're talking to a friend and telling them a funny story but you can't remember someone's name, every detail crystal clear except a name. These are similar to what can happen to people with various forms of dementia, and/or Alzheimer's. Sometimes the issues include depression and instead of remembering happy \"dreams\" it's like you have a nightmare and all you can focus on is scary, negative things. Early on, you know things aren't right. But you're old and forgetfulness is ok because people expect it. As it progresses, you are aware you are missing periods of time. It's like you had a daydream but don't remember your thoughts. Sometimes it lasts for a couple of minutes. With my grandmother it would last days. And it terrified her. She'd get mad about it. If you tried to finish a story for her because she clearly was \"stuck\" she'd get pissed. Embarrassed. She knew she was declining. She was pissed we put morning checklist in the bathroom. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Lotion on your skin. If we didn't, she'd forget. Eventually she forgot the list was for her. She'd forget to groom. She knew she was supposed to go to the bathroom but not what to do. She'd shit on the floor next to the toilet. Then she forgot the bathroom was a thing and she'd piss off the side of the bed. By then she was \"gone\" and didn't know she was missing a thing."}, {"answer": "Nurse here. The brain is literally wasting away which means that those areas that they rely on to process information not only don't work anymore but are no longer there. A couple of my patients have realized that they are losing their minds. It's heart breaking when this happens."}, {"answer": "Toward the end with my Grandma when I would visit she would get very excited because she recognized me and knew I was important to her but, she just didn't know from *where*. Sometimes she would either remember after a while or she would ask and I just told her that I was her granddaughter. It always seemed to me it was like a frustration of seeing someone you met at a party but forgetting their name, but my Grandma clearly knew that I was an important person to her and she should know who I am and what my name is but just couldn't do it. Sometimes it would upset her to tears, which sucked fucking dick. She was a very nice lady too so other times she would make conversation with me and ask how I was and chat away so I would think \"oh today is a good day she knows who I am\" then she would ask something like \"did you ever meet my husband?\" or tell me stories about my family that I was there for or experienced, so she thought I was just an friendly face over for a visit. So in my experience it was different day to day, Alzheimers sucks I wouldn't wish it on any one."}, {"answer": "In short, No. There are stages of progression in the level of dementia and unfortunately, they're permanent. However, this might be a good time to contrast a similar disease presentation. For Example, a 65 year old who wishes to see their doctor because their memory has been failing them, they constantly misplace things, and find themselves in rooms of their house without rhyme or reason as to why they went in there. Sounds like Alzheimers right??? Classically though, a patient with Alzheimers is brought to the physician by a family member who says their (mom/dad/grandma/etc.) has been exhibiting these strange behaviors; lacking insight into their neurological disease. A patient who has insight into their \"Alzheimers\" symptoms more than likely has PSEUDOdementia - typically caused by hypothyroidism in the elderly. Its important to recognize the difference because this condition is totally treatable and reversible. Sorry, that was a bit off topic, but I thought the community might find the contrast interesting."}, {"answer": "Depends on how far along they are. My grandma got diagnosed fairly early. In the beginning she'd joke around and say things like, \"Oh don't worry, you can tell me. I'll forget about it later anyway\" and \"It's not so bad, I get to meet new people every day\". Over the years, she became less and less aware of her actual condition, and her mental faculties degraded to the point where she was going to the bathroom in the driveway, wandering off at night, forgetting her family members, etc, etc. We eventually had her admitted to a care home where she could be adequately monitored (for her own safety). It's now about 10 years later, and we're lucky when she's awake. She sleeps most of the day, and it's a struggle to get her active in any sort of conversation. We've figured out that if we bring her something sweet or a coffee and help feed it to her (she's no longer able to do it herself), that after about 30-45 minutes, she's stimulated enough to interact with people. She has no idea what's going on in her world anymore. We dig deep into our memory banks to pull out things that are near-impossible to forget -- funny family things -- and sometimes we'll get a chuckle out of her. I'm not sure if she laughs because she remembers... or if it's just because she's laughing along with us. It's sad to see her like that. She was an active, sharp and incredibly witty woman in her younger years... now it's like she's gone and just left her shell behind. Alzheimers is truly a bitch."}, {"answer": "I don't think they don't know that they don't know. While running early one morning, we found an elderly woman standing in a drainage ditch. She had been there all night. Once we were able to help her from the ditch and sit her on a bench, we attempted to get contact information from her so we could call someone. She knew she had children, but didn't remember how many. She knew she lived nearby, but didn't know where. She knew that she should know the answers, but didn't. It stressed her that she knew she was supposed to know. Soooo, what I'm saying is that I do believe that they realize they can't remember, at least that was very clear with this lovely woman."}, {"answer": "They don't realise that they are forgetting things. If you keep pointing it out, they become very upset, stressed, and confused about everything. You have to just repeat yourself when they say they can't remember, without pointing out the condition."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5721", "title": "Coma", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened; fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound; lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle; and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhibit a complete absence of wakefulness and are unable to consciously feel, speak or move. Comas can be derived by natural causes, or can be medically induced.", "A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened; fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound; lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle; and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhibit a complete absence of wakefulness and are unable to consciously feel, speak or move. Comas can be derived by natural causes, or can be medically induced."]}}]}]

Why do Depression and Anxiety often occur together?

4l34di

[{"answer": "There is indeed a substantial co-occurrence of major depression and various anxiety disorders; while it's inevitably difficult to get accurate numbers, some estimates put it above 50%, with GAD and panic disorder leading. In one of the largest antidepressant trials which didn't try to select for \"pure\" depression, anxious depression was the norm. Why is a much more difficult question, because the root causes of major depression and anxiety disorders are fundamentally not known. Every serious source in the psychiatric literature stresses what we don't know; while there's always someone out there who will give you a clean and intuitive answer about magic brain chemicals, they really shouldn't. Besides, these are clinical diagnoses, which makes it hard to know whether what we're seeing on the surface correlates with one or more underlying issues; imagine trying to figure out the cause of pneumonia without microscopes or the concept of germs. That said, as I once heard it explained, \"we now know a lot more about what we don't know.\" One simple explanation is that they share many risk factors, both genetic and environmental. Another line of research concerns the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is tremendously important in the stress response, and implicated to some extent in most psychiatric problems. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "For me, for example, anxiety affected major aspects of my life like university, relationships with girlfriend and friends, my job and that, with the help from my pessimistic nature led to depression"}, {"answer": "this is off topic, but I've been struggling with both depression and anxiety for a little over 2 years now. i know i need help very badly but dont know where to begin. I dont even know of anyone to talk to and say i have a problem. Any help would be much appreciated"}, {"answer": "Dunno about the biological stuff, but rumination (revisiting thoughts that agitate/worry you) is often something anxiety sufferers engage in compulsively. This might then lead to symptoms of depression as you keep ruminating. Or vice versa. I know some people are too willing to blame chemical imbalances on depression/anxiety, so they might not give things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy much of chance. I was in that camp too. For anyone suffering from either, attacking the tendency to ruminate might be very helpful. Doing some mindfulness meditation will make you aware of how incessant your internal dialogue is. Keeping at it will also enhance your ability to focus when you'd normally go daydreaming (documented physiological changes in the brain in regular meditators). For practical advice on how to view life (and things), I'd look into to Stoicism (which CBT is largely based on). Just these two have practically wiped out my recurring depression by lessening my anxiety (through cessation of rumination and \"reprogramming\" my world-view). Sry if it seems like a sales pitch/rant. Just thought it might help someone."}, {"answer": "In my experience, anxiety pulled up on you until there's so many small things it's overwhelming, or you've been so afraid to be around people for so long that you become incredibly isolated. Living in a country where the only way to really get help is to have insurance and the only way to get insurance is to maintain until you're in a situation in which you become eligible for insurance doesn't help."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "23337", "title": "Phobia", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. The phobia typically results in a rapid onset of fear and is present for more than six months. The affected person goes to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the feared object or situation cannot be avoided, the affected person experiences significant distress. With blood or injury phobia, fainting may occur. Agoraphobia is often associated with panic attacks. Usually a person has phobias to a number of objects or situations.", "A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, defined by a persistent and excessive fear of an object or situation. The phobia typically results in a rapid onset of fear and is present for more than six months. The affected person goes to great lengths to avoid the situation or object, to a degree greater than the actual danger posed. If the feared object or situation cannot be avoided, the affected person experiences significant distress. With blood or injury phobia, fainting may occur. Agoraphobia is often associated with panic attacks. Usually a person has phobias to a number of objects or situations."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "50256023", "title": "Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Watson and Clark (1991) proposed the Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression to help explain the comorbidity between anxious and depressive symptoms and disorders. This model divides the symptoms of anxiety and depression into three groups: negative affect, positive affect and physiological hyperarousal. These three sets of symptoms help explain common and distinct aspects of depression and anxiety. The ability to distinguish between anxiety and depression with this model may help increase diagnostic accuracy and help eliminate the complications that occur with comorbidity. According to Clark, depressed patients have a comorbidity", "Watson and Clark (1991) proposed the Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression to help explain the comorbidity between anxious and depressive symptoms and disorders. This model divides the symptoms of anxiety and depression into three groups: negative affect, positive affect and physiological hyperarousal. These three sets of symptoms help explain common and distinct aspects of depression and anxiety. The ability to distinguish between anxiety and depression with this model may help increase diagnostic accuracy and help eliminate the complications that occur with comorbidity. According to Clark, depressed patients have a comorbidity", "Watson and Clark (1991) proposed the Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression to help explain the comorbidity between anxious and depressive symptoms and disorders. This model divides the symptoms of anxiety and depression into three groups: negative affect, positive affect and physiological hyperarousal. These three sets of symptoms help explain common and distinct aspects of depression and anxiety. The ability to distinguish between anxiety and depression with this model may help increase diagnostic accuracy and help eliminate the complications that occur with comorbidity. According to Clark, depressed patients have a comorbidity"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "20448627", "title": "Mixed anxietydepressive disorder", "section": "Section::::Causes.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 23, "end_paragraph_id": 23, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["mixed anxiety-depressive disorder. Further treatment may point to symptoms that require a diagnosis of either an anxiety disorder and a depressive disorder. Throughout studies of anxiety and depressive disorders, scientists have been unable to locate a singular cause. The possible causes of anxiety and depression are often similar to one another and the comorbidity of the two disorders is quite high, with 60% of those with depression also having some form of anxiety disorder. There are multiple possible causes for mixed anxiety-depressive disorder, but they can be separated\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "mixed anxiety-depressive disorder. Further treatment may point to symptoms that require a diagnosis of either an anxiety disorder and a depressive disorder. Throughout studies of anxiety and depressive disorders, scientists have been unable to locate a singular cause. The possible causes of anxiety and depression are often similar to one another and the comorbidity of the two disorders is quite high, with 60% of those with depression also having some form of anxiety disorder. There are multiple possible causes for mixed anxiety-depressive disorder, but they can be separated"]}}]}]

Why do artists wear an earpiece when performing a concert?

6a4tto

[{"answer": "These are in ear monitors. If they do not have them they usually have speakers on stage directed at them. The problem with performing a music piece is that you do not hear how the music sounds when you are in the middle of it. The normal speakers are pointed towards the public and sound moves quite slow though the air. So you might perform a guitar solo on one side of the stage and hit every beat as you hear the bass guitar on the other side of the stage and it sounds perfect to you. However to the public it sounds like you are too slow and quiet because the sounds takes some time to go from the bass guitar across the stage to you. So to make sure you hear the beat and the music as the public hear it you need to monitor the sound coming though the sound system. Before sound systems small bands used to stand much closer together on the stage and look at each other rather then out to the public. Bigger orchestra would have a director in front or even among the public who could direct them using movement."}, {"answer": "Other replies are spot on. A little addition... Many times an unheard backing track is running that will give certain parts a 1..2..3..4.. count in to start playing. Often the drummer will hear a 'click track' to make sure they keep the correct tempo. All of this is essential when a band is performing to a background video in order to keep the two in sync."}, {"answer": "It's a monitor. They hear themselves through it. It's easier to sing in key if you can hear your own voice above all the other noise on stage and in the crowd."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "6764624", "title": "Microphone gaffe", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A microphone gaffe, sometimes referred to as an open microphone (in aviation, a stuck mic) or a hot mic, is an apparent error whereby a microphone is switched on in proximity of a subject who is unaware that their remarks are being recorded. The error allows unintended listeners to hear parts of private conversations.", "A microphone gaffe, sometimes referred to as an open microphone (in aviation, a stuck mic) or a hot mic, is an apparent error whereby a microphone is switched on in proximity of a subject who is unaware that their remarks are being recorded. The error allows unintended listeners to hear parts of private conversations. Errors usually involve live broadcasting in radio or television, and sometimes material is recorded and played back via media outlets. Such events can cause embarrassment for the person or organization involved, sometimes resulting in serious confrontations and employment termination."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "764380", "title": "Sound reinforcement system", "section": "Section::::System components.:Output transducers.:Monitor loudspeakers.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 55, "end_paragraph_id": 55, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["These loudspeakers typically require less power and volume than the main loudspeaker system, as they only need to provide sound for a few people who are in relatively close proximity to the loudspeaker. Some manufacturers have designed loudspeakers for use either as a component of a small PA system or as a monitor loudspeaker. In the 2000s, a number of manufacturers produced powered monitor speakers, which contain an integrated amplifier.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence,", "a single amplifier for the entire sound spectrum, the power-hungry low-frequency sounds can take a disproportionate amount of the sound system's power. Professional sound reinforcement speaker systems often include dedicated hardware for safely \"flying\" them above the stage area, to provide more even sound coverage and to maximize sight lines within performance venues. Monitor loudspeakers, also called \"foldback\" loudspeakers, are speaker cabinets which are used onstage to help performers to hear their singing or playing. As such, monitor speakers are pointed towards a performer or a section of the stage. They are generally sent a different mix of vocals or instruments than the mix that is sent to the main loudspeaker system. Monitor loudspeaker cabinets are often a wedge shape, directing their output upwards towards the performer when set on the floor of the stage. Two-way, dual driver designs with a speaker cone and a horn are common, as monitor loudspeakers need to be smaller to save space on the stage. These loudspeakers typically require less power and volume than the main loudspeaker system, as they only need to provide sound for a few people who are in relatively close proximity to the loudspeaker. Some manufacturers have designed loudspeakers for use either as a component of a small PA system or as a monitor loudspeaker. In the 2000s, a number of manufacturers produced powered monitor speakers, which contain an integrated amplifier."]}}]}]

Are bugs capable of conceptualizing their dead brethren as a warning of danger? Are most animals capable of this?

3tyq0y

[{"answer": "Insects don't have the complex brain structure to form concepts. But what can happen is that when some insects die, they release a pheromone that is detected by the rest of their comrade, and they'll come to defend against whatever killed one of their own. Individually they are stupid but as a colony insects are very clever. TL;DR he's a lazy bitch tell him to clean it up"}, {"answer": "So, funny story. When I was a kid, I lived on a farm. We had a couple dozen peach trees and we had a minor invasion of a green - lady bug looking insect. They covered the damn trees like a moving green quilt. Dad tried everything he could think of to get rid of them, to no avail. Finally, he scooped a couple thousand up in a net and took them inside. Step two was grabbing mom's blender and dumping the bugs inside. Step three was... yes... blending the bugs into a horrible greenish brown milkshake, which he then dumped into a sprayer and proceeded to stink up the entire farm with by spraying them on the trees. It didn't work and mom was pissed. She got a new blender though."}, {"answer": "By sight? No. But some insects release certain pheromones when they die violently that are interpreted by their fellow insect species as a warning of danger. Many ants do this, but the effect is the opposite of what your friend would hope for: it calls ants to come fight a perceived enemy. Then there are bugs that scavenge, or are otherwise attracted to death scents. Your friend is probably inviting a lot more insects to come check out a tasty meal than he is warning any away."}, {"answer": "All I know i that it doesn't work that way with people. If you kill one, many more will come to find out why you did that."}, {"answer": "There's an anecdote about a killer whale that killed a shark in such a way as to make all the other sharks in the area leave despite being in food-filled waters. Other than that I got nothing. He should probably clean it up and stop being such a shit roommate. Alternatively, you could run your own experiment and see if it discourages mailmen."}, {"answer": "Tell your roommate Vlad the Roach Impaler that they will just eat the carcass and multiply. Clean it up."}, {"answer": "100% false. Dead roaches bring more roaches to cannibalize the brethren corpse. Source: dumb little brother did the same, ended up waking up to a huge tribe feeding on their fallen."}, {"answer": "I can offer some anecdotal evidence as a hunter. I've seen white tail deer, Canadian geese, and ducks of many types come right up to a recently killed animal of the same species and go about their day as normal. Death is commonplace in the wilderness."}, {"answer": "Some birds recognize and avoid area's where their dead kin are. Source: Hang a dead crow from a pipe in your garden and the other crows won't fuck you with your plants/seeds/feeders."}, {"answer": "Crows show aversion to other dead crows. Humans wearing masks have been able to illicit a negative response after holding a dead crow around a flock."}, {"answer": "Cockroaches are avid cannibals, and when they have no food they start nibbling on each other even when they are alive. So in the case of cockroaches, a dead roach will not deter other roaches at all."}, {"answer": "Not pertaining to OPs question but still a bit on topic... If insects can't comprehend danger, what makes ants go into a frenzy when they run into a dead ant?"}, {"answer": "I think in this particular case, roaches will come and eat up the leftover dead roach. So if thats the case, he should really get rid of it and wipe down where it was killed, lest he wishes to attract the roach's hungry brethren."}, {"answer": "I have heard this is true for coyotes. If you kill one and leave it near your property or wherever, the others will stay away"}, {"answer": "I don't know about insects but I know that sharks can smell their own sharks blood and it repels them."}, {"answer": "When you poison roaches with boric acid when the others eat the dead they die, too. Your roommate is confused."}, {"answer": "I can tell you with 100% certainty that its bullshit. Source: Had roaches. Killed hundreds with blowtorch. Still had roaches. I did trap one under a glass and left it to die. Always thought it prolly fucked with their psyche."}, {"answer": "I used to leave out a dead cockroach at my store cause the others would come and eat the corpse Don't think they got the hint..."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "207874", "title": "Swarm behaviour", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving \"en masse\" or migrating in some direction. It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. As a term, \"swarming\" is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other entity or animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term \"flocking\" or \"murmuration\" can refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, \"herding\" to refer to swarm behaviour in tetrapods, and \"shoaling\" or \"schooling\" to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called \"blooms\", although these organisms are algae and are not self-propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term swarm is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by entities, particularly animals, of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving \"en masse\" or migrating in some direction. It is a highly interdisciplinary topic. As a term, \"swarming\" is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other entity or animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term \"flocking\" or \"murmuration\" can refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, \"herding\" to refer to swarm behaviour in tetrapods, and \"shoaling\" or \"schooling\" to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called \"blooms\", although these organisms are algae and are not self-propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term swarm is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars."]}}]}]

Why are there typical breakfast foods and dinner foods? Is there a biological reason where we want certain nutrients at different points in the day or is it just a social construct?

3eq5s3

[{"answer": "Imagine you are are a preindustrial farmer. You get up before dawn, toil in the field all day, then go back home when it gets dark. For breakfast, you want something hot that will give you a lot of energy, but can be prepared quickly. For lunch, you want a cold meal you can take with you and eat when you get hungry. For dinner, you have time between sunset and bedtime, so you can take a little longer, and have something nice while socializing with friends and family. The pattern of necessity has become ingrained in our culture, so we consider certain foods to be appropriate for certain meal, long after the original reasons were forgotten."}, {"answer": "Anything can be a dinner food. But almost all breakfast foods have one thing in common: they can be made quickly with little preparation."}, {"answer": "It's entirely a social construct. Outside of the West, people eat all kinds of things for breakfast."}, {"answer": "It really is more of a social construct, it's just a commonly held social construct. There are some biological/ psychological factors that come into play. The first being habit/ routine. During a work day, people typically prefer something easy, and quick to make, such as toast. But on there off days, they still eat toast, not because it's quick and easy, but because it's a routine. The second factor being dependence. A lot of people drink coffee or tea every morning, as the caffeine helps them through the day, but as their body builds a dependency on caffeine, it becomes more biological and less practical."}, {"answer": "breafast food is quick and easy, but its mostly arbitrary. by todays standards, hashbrowns, pancakes, bacon require a lot of dicking around, but compared to standard dinner fare of the farm days (think pot roast, turkey dinners, etc.) they are much quicker and easier. In south america, eggs are common any time of day. One of my favorites is steak, french fries, fried onions, and fried eggs. Another one is mashed potatoes (or rice), hotdogs (no bread, just the dogs) and fried eggs. Or spaghetti with tomato sauce and eggs as the protein."}, {"answer": "Nutritional requirements don't have a significant impact because what you crave depends almost entirely upon where you were brought up. What might seem like a normal breakfast in the US would seem rather strange in other parts of the world, and vice versa. The first point in this cracked article offers a very relevant example about the history of bacon as a breakfast food in America -- URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I think it's social construct. I say this because Japanese omelettes aren't really breakfast foods in Japan, while in the west, eggs/omelettes are a staple breakfast item. I mean, they do sometimes, but egg is more like a side-dish and decoration type thing in a lot of recipes. However, things like Miso soup, natto, pickled plums, etc. are part of Japanese breakfast. They kind of mix and match everything throughout the day, really. Pretty much, /u/kouhoutek nailed it though. Quick food typically for breakfast, food that can last a while and stuff for lunch, and then dinner usually takes the longest to cook."}, {"answer": "It's mostly a social construct. There is some evidence to indicate that your body wants particularly to digest sugars in the morning since it goes straight to the brain and makes it more active and awake, but different cultures approach breakfast different than others. My experience in Japan (where I've worked once) and Korea (where my wife's family lives) where there are no specifically observed breakfast foods changed my perspective on eating and made me more open not only to different kinds of foods at different times of the day--but just flat out to be more open to food in general."}, {"answer": "From a nutritional perspective there's little benefit to eating certain nutritional groups at specific times. But, the (now considered wrong) scientific beliefs of the 80s and 90s were that carbohydrates should be mostly eaten earlier in the day. The main reasons for eating specific foods at specific times relate to how long you have to prepare things. I love frozen lasagna in the morning as it's quick and easy to prepare, but prior to microwaves becoming common in the early 90s, you wouldn't have considered eating that at breakfast."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "97112", "title": "Primary nutritional groups", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Primary nutritional groups are groups of organisms, divided in relation to the nutrition mode according to the sources of energy and carbon, needed for living, growth and reproduction. The sources of energy can be light and organic or inorganic compounds; the sources of carbon can be of organic or inorganic origin.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "Primary nutritional groups are groups of organisms, divided in relation to the nutrition mode according to the sources of energy and carbon, needed for living, growth and reproduction. The sources of energy can be light and organic or inorganic compounds; the sources of carbon can be of organic or inorganic origin."]}}]}]

Is Susan G. Komen as bad as I've heard?

3qtysp

[{"answer": "SGK died in the 80s. The charity that has her name is run and was founded by, her younger sister Nancy Brinker. Nancy drew a salary of $684,000 last year. I'll leave that up to you to decide if it's fair or not. The main issue that people have with the SGK foundation is that they don't actually seem to be after a cure for cancer. For example, if I make a cancer fun run and decide to call it a \"run for the cure\". The SGK foundation is going to sue me for using their trademark. From Wikipedia > Komen has come under fire for legal action against other non-profits or organizations using the phrase \"for the cure\" within their names. An August 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal detailed a case in which the organization Uniting Against Lung Cancer was told in a letter from Komen that they should no longer use the name \"Kites for the Cure\" for their annual fund-raising event. Komen also wrote to the organization to warn them \"against any use of pink in conjunction with 'cure.'\"[80] More than 100 small charities have received legal opposition from Komen regarding various uses of the words \"for the cure\" in their names.[81] Among the offending charitable organizations and events were \"Par for the Cure\", \"Surfing for a Cure\", \"Cupcakes for a Cure\" and \"Mush for the Cure\". URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I was turned off by the organization when my mom got sick in the 90s. I wanted to run the event in her honor and was denied. Women only at that time. Mom died Christmas morning 1998 and it was very painful to me. Since then my money has gone to other cancer charities."}, {"answer": "The last thing the SGK foundation wants is a cure for cancer. It would be devastating to their bottom line."}, {"answer": "It's pretty bad. SGK is pretty much a for-profit business hiding under the veneer of being a charity: it's just all the profits go to the people running the business instead of any to stockholders. They aggressively monetize every aspect of a public campaign to \"cure cancer,\" and then they have to pay out less money for actual research than a \"real\" corporation would have to do in taxes."}, {"answer": "It isn't super terrible, but its focus seems to be the brand, not the result. There are much better places to put money aimed at cancer research and treatment."}, {"answer": "It's not a great charity, but it isn't as bad as many would have you believe. The first thing to realize is that the charity is all about \"raising awareness.\" Breast Cancer is already very treatable, so simply detecting it early is an important part of helping minimize the effect of the disease. The organization gets flack for not putting most of their budget towards finding a cure but that's because highly effective treatments already exist. The organization does pay its executives an abnormally high salary. The organization is remarkably corporate\u2014they're well known for their \"for the cure\" and pink ribbon trademarks and they defend those trademarks with the full force of the law. They make a lot of their money off of letting other big corporations use these trademarks to look more charitable\u2014you get brands like Yoplait painting their products pink as a marketing strategy, encouraging people to buy those products over their competitors with the justification that some amount of the purchase price goes to help fight breast cancer (which is true, but it's typically only a few cents per product). As with all organizations some of the money they receive goes towards raising more money. It's easy to knee-jerk react to this that they are evil for doing this, but if you take in $1,000,000 and can spend $200,000 of that in advertising to bring in $400,000 then you can then use that $1,200,000 on research, awareness, etc. Presumably the organization wouldn't be spending so much on fund raising if it wasn't showing a positive return. Charity Navigator, which is usually pretty fair about these things, [gives SKG For The Cure a high 2-star rating out of four]( URL_0 ). They score very well on their transparency and accountability, while they score pretty mediocre on their use of funds. They do note that 80.4% of the funds are used for \"program expenses\" (i.e. the things that the charity is supposed to support); this is pretty reasonable, all told. There are plenty of better charities out there and SGK is far from perfect, but they're also far from evil."}, {"answer": "The premise of the organization was good; Nancy Brinker's promise to her dying sister that she would do everything she could to end breast cancer. The reality is, SGK is a now a huge money maker. They can defend suing other organizations that use a \"*blank* for the cure\" slogan as trying to reduce donor confusion, but it comes down to they want to make sure they get as much money as possible. I think there's been a shift in the organization's goal - they spend more on making people \"aware\" of breast cancer than they do actually trying to find a cure, which isn't what Nancy promised her sister back in 1982. The fact is, as long as there is breast cancer, there's money to be made from it. Also, [read this]( URL_0 ) about the \"feel good\" war against breast cancer, from the perspective of a woman diagnosed twice with it."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "3927116", "title": "G Men", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["G Men is a 1935 Warner Bros. crime film starring James Cagney, Ann Dvorak, Margaret Lindsay and Lloyd Nolan in his film debut. According to \"Variety,\" the movie was one of the top-grossing films of 1935. The supporting cast features Robert Armstrong and Barton MacLane.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "G Men is a 1935 Warner Bros. crime film starring James Cagney, Ann Dvorak, Margaret Lindsay and Lloyd Nolan in his film debut. According to \"Variety,\" the movie was one of the top-grossing films of 1935. The supporting cast features Robert Armstrong and Barton MacLane."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2742905", "title": "Susan G. Komen for the Cure", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "end_character": 789, "bleu_score": 0.8502139246662334}]}]

"Television static is radiation left over from the big bang"

1iy6fe

[{"answer": "To understand this properly, we need to break down what exactly we're talking about. The \"big bang\" is the name given to our theory about how the universe evolved in its early development. The name is very misleading - it was not really a big explosion like a bomb or a supernova. The early universe was extremely hot and incredibly energy-dense. As you may be aware, hot things give off radiation in the form of photons. The early universe was pretty much uniformly filled with a very hot plasma that emitted and absorbed radiation. But this emitted radiation could not travel very far before being absorbed - the universe was still an opaque \"fog\". During this early period, space expanded very rapidly (which is what most people confuse for the \"explosion\"). This expansion happened *everywhere*, causing the universe to cool down. Eventually (and I'm summarizing here), the universe cooled down enough that atoms could form. Soon, there were many more atoms than just raw protons and electrons. These atoms could not absorb the radiation the way charged particles could, so the universe became *transparent*. The photons could travel much longer distances without encountering something that could absorb them. Remember how this expansion of space was happening everywhere? That means that these ancient photons are still around, hurtling through the universe. The only difference is, they don't look like photons to us any more. Over the ages, their wavelengths have expanded along with the expansion of space. In fact, in the late 1940s, scientists predicted that we should still be receiving this radiation. The only difference is, it would appear to us as microwave radiation, which has longer wavelengths than visible light. In the 1960s, two scientists at Bell Labs stumbled upon this radiation by accident. They were testing a very sensitive antenna and they noticed that it would pick up a constant \"background\" signal. Eventually, they realized they had stumbled upon this relic of the early universe. Today, we call this the \"Cosmic Microwave Background\" and it provides some very valuable insights into the early universe."}, {"answer": "it's actually only 1% or less. Look it up. Oh and Neil de Grasse Tyson said so too."}, {"answer": "Alright well, in relation to your original topic, I haven't really seen anyone describe how the television static relates back to the radiation. So everyone has described how the big bang caused photons to be flung throughout the universe in every direction etc. etc. Now, your old school TV set uses whats called a \"Cathode Ray Tube\" to project your wonderful TV pictures to a screen. It is built up using an electron gun on the inside of a big glass tube that is void of air. These Cathode Ray Tubes, use an electron gun to fire electrons to a large flat side of the glass tube that (usually) is coated with a very thin layer of Phosphorus. When these electrons impact with the atoms of the Phosphorus layer, a change happens called the Photoelectric Effect. The Photoelectric Effect describes how an electron when impacting an atom of large enough mass will transfer its kinetic energy and release a photon from the atom with a very specific wavelength. Now, your eyes are essentially photon detectors that only allow specific wavelengths of these photons to be processed, we call these wavelengths the \"visible light\" spectrum because, obviously, they are the wavelengths we are able to see and our brain happens to translate them into the ROYGBIV color spectrum. So to combine all of this, when you're seeing static on a TV set, what you're actually seeing are electrons and photons of insufficient energy impacting the same Phosphorus atoms and being redirected into your eyes. I specify \"insufficient energy\" because there is a reverse process to the photoelectric effect where a photon of sufficient energy can impact an atom of large mass and release an electron with a specific kinetic energy. However, the leftover photons from the Big Bang have wavelengths in the microwave range which doesn't have the energy to knock an electron off of the Phosphorus screen, so in turn some of the energy is transferred and the photon is deflected off with a wavelength that falls in our visible spectrum. BAM! You see a wonderful static pattern on your TV! Now, this isn't the MAIN cause of the static on your TV, most of it is actually just interference and electronic noise from all of our wonderful large appliances and satellites etc. But, every once and a while, you can be sure that one of those little specs on your screen is a relic from our Universe's past! Edit: I accidentally a word..."}, {"answer": "Back when the universe was first born, it was like a hot, stretchy sticky goo (like the stuff you get to throw at windows and stuff). Somewhere in that blob of goo was the starting point of the energy that would make the solar system. The blob expanded, stretching the goo in all directions. As it stretched thinner, pieces began to clump together into smaller particles, and these particles clumped together into stars and dust and and eventually the solar system formed and, some time later, human life evolved on Earth. Now go back in time to that initial ball of goo and imagine another point at some distance away from the future-Earth point. As the goo stretched from the size of a singularity to the size it is now, that point became further and further away from us, so that some of the stuff might have been stretched so far away that the light travelling from it towards us may not even have reached us yet. Your TV aerial works by picking up light - albeit invisible light (also called Electromagnetic radiation). Your TV is designed to read electromagnetic signals that are arranged in a certain way so that they can be understood as pictures and sound by the TV. Imagine that the radiation from the distant point in space we were just talking about finally hits your TV aerial. The TV does its job to convert it back into sounds and pictures, but because that ancient radiation was not designed to be understandable by a TV, it makes no sense and the TV shows a blip of colour and a dash of noise. Now imagine instead of just one point in that original ball of goo, we were able to pick up radiation from every point in that ball of goo. The radiation would all be arriving at your TV aerial at different times, because of the different points in the goo-ball getting stretched apart from each other. The result is a constant stream of blips of colour and noise. Scientists have sent special satellites into space to go around the sun just like Earth does. These satellites are a long way away from Earth so that they aren't around TV stations, satellites and mobile phones, which all make lots of radiation. Because it is so quiet where they are, the scientists can use lots of aerials together as a special kind of telescope - a radio telescope - which is able to tell them the direction and energy level of each background radiation particle they detect. In doing this, scientists are able to make a map of space that is almost like viewing the early ball of goo from inside a time machine. This helps us better understand where people and planets and stars came from, as well as making white noise on our TV's."}, {"answer": "TV static is [thermal noise]( URL_3 ) generated by the electronics of the receiver being at room temperature (about 300K). The resistors, the transistors, etc.. all make noise and the only way to get rid of the noise is to super cool the parts to absolute zero. Not possible. The [background noise]( URL_0 ) of the universe is also thermal noise, about 2.7K. Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias accidentally discovered this when they were working on improving microwave reception of signals reflecting off the [Echo]( URL_2 ) satellites for Bell Telephone Labs by investigating an improved antenna design, (the [Holmdel Horn]( URL_1 )). This antenna and the receiver design were sensitive enough to detect the residual temperature of the Universe, they estimated it to be 3K. A TV antenna and receiver is nowhere close to being good enough to pickup this noise. The screen noise is just heat noise from the electronics."}, {"answer": "Everything is something left over from the big bang. Did I just blow your mind son?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "4882", "title": "Background radiation", "section": "Section::::Natural background radiation.:Neutron background.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 39, "end_paragraph_id": 39, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Most of the natural neutron background is a product of cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere. The neutron energy peaks at around 1\u00a0MeV and rapidly drops above. At sea level, the production of neutrons is about 20 neutrons per second per kilogram of material interacting with the cosmic rays (or, about 100300 neutrons per square meter per second). The flux is dependent on geomagnetic latitude, with a maximum near the magnetic poles. At solar minimums, due to lower solar magnetic field shielding, the flux is about twice as high vs the solar maximum. It also dramatically increases during solar flares. In the vicinity of larger heavier objects, e.g. buildings or ships, the neutron flux measures higher; this is known as \"cosmic ray induced neutron signature\", or \"ship effect\" as it was first detected with ships at sea. Frequent above-ground nuclear explosions between the 1940s and 1960s scattered a substantial amount of radioactive contamination. Some of this", "Most of the natural neutron background is a product of cosmic rays interacting with the atmosphere. The neutron energy peaks at around 1\u00a0MeV and rapidly drops above. At sea level, the production of neutrons is about 20 neutrons per second per kilogram of material interacting with the cosmic rays (or, about 100300 neutrons per square meter per second). The flux is dependent on geomagnetic latitude, with a maximum near the magnetic poles. At solar minimums, due to lower solar magnetic field shielding, the flux is about twice as high vs the solar maximum. It also dramatically increases during solar flares. In the vicinity of larger heavier objects, e.g. buildings or ships, the neutron flux measures higher; this is known as \"cosmic ray induced neutron signature\", or \"ship effect\" as it was first detected with ships at sea. Frequent above-ground nuclear explosions between the 1940s and 1960s scattered a substantial amount of radioactive contamination. Some of this\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}]

Why is almost every country in debt?

7j0waf

[{"answer": "They owe money to other countries, civilians, companies, retirement funds and investment institutions that buy treasury bonds or government debt. Every country is in debt because it makes financial and economic sense. The interest rate charged to countries on loans are typically low and thus in almost all cases the benefit their able to gain from investing/spending that loaned money is greater than the downside of having to make interest payments."}, {"answer": "Countries go into debt by investing in themselves. Building infrastructure, building the economy, building militaries, supporting the citizens that cannot support themselves, supplying benefits such as education/healthcare/police/fire/etc to citizens. A country that is not at least slightly in debt is not investing in itself, or is not doing so quickly which means it is dying."}, {"answer": "National debt is what is termed 'sovereign debt'. It's very different than say, your credit card debt in that the 'sovereign' is also the one who prints the currency. Let's say your weekly paycheck is $500. You only spend $400 this week. No big deal - you just leave it in the bank. However, if you're a 'sovereign' issuing currency, you can't just leave it in the bank - that would cause currency-crushing deflation. You *have* to spend that money somehow. Unfortunately, there's no direct link between revenues and expenditures. There's no way to predict when you collect the revenues how much you'll spend. Given that you'll crush your economy if you spend too little, you have to set revenue far enough below tax receipts that you never risk spending too little. The solution is sovereign debt - borrowing against future tax receipts to bridge the gap between revenue and expenditures. A side benefit of this system is that it gives investors a place to park their money. Without sovereign debt, you'd need to put your money in private securities - which are much, much riskier."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "33689865", "title": "Debt crisis", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Debt crisis is the general term for a proliferation of massive public debt relative to tax revenues, especially in reference to", "Debt crisis is a situation in which a country is without the ability of paying back its government debt. When the expenditures of its government are more than its tax revenues for a prolonged period, a country may enter into a debt crisis .In any country,the government finances its expenditures primarily by raising money through taxation. When tax revenues are insufficient, the government can make up the difference by issuing debt. Debt crisis is the general term for a proliferation of massive public debt relative to tax revenues, especially in reference to\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}]

How exactly does our body inform us that we need to pee?

4bwl0x

[{"answer": "Nurse here. Imagine your bladder being a balloon. The balloon gets filled (with urine) and when it's about half way full, stretch receptors in the wall of the balloon starts sending signals to your brain that you need to pee. When you pee the balloon empties itself, and kinda deflates, meaning the stretch receptors are no longer sending signals to the brain about you needing to pee. Bonus info: the body produces on average 1ml/kg body weight urine per hour meaning if you weigh 80 kg you produce about 80 ml of urine per hour. You start to feel the urge to pee when the bladder contains 300-400ml of urine. Bonus info 2: don't keep your bladder full too often, because the stretch receptors in the bladder tissue might get stretched too much, and get damaged, which can lead to incontinence."}, {"answer": "What about when you're dehydrated? I've had times where I've been dehydrated, or even when I take some vitamins, where I'll get the urge to pee, but will have a lot less volume than an average urination. Are there receptors that just say \"get this nasty shit out of here\"?"}, {"answer": "the nurse has done a pretty good job. here's me eli18 your bladder has an inner lining and on that inner lining there's a area of tissue that is in the shape of a triangle 2 kidneys feed into the bladder, one hole goes out. these 3 points from a triangle called a trigone. the tissue has mechanoreceptors which detect that theres a high volume - this causes to stretch and tells the brain yeah ok need to pee, then you can voluntarily release and pee (this is your brain override so you dont pee all over the place) ."}, {"answer": "On this topic I have had an really overactive bladder for years. I have had the interstim surgery. Been on multiple types of pills. They performed a cytoscopy. To no avail with everything. I am desperate, it is making like miserable. I literally get up 10 sometimes more a night and sleep in 30-1hr intervals and have to get up to pee. It makes work a nightmare, relationships hard and life hard. Has anybody had an similar experience and do you have anything that worked for you?"}, {"answer": "When drinking alcohol, why does it seem (women especially) \"break the seal\"? I swear once I start, it seems I have to pee every hour"}, {"answer": "There's a water heater in your gullet, and it gradually fills up with hot urine, building pressure, which is measured by gauges and regulated with pressure relief valves."}, {"answer": "Since this hasn't been described yet: continence and voiding are dictated by the autonomic nervous system. The bladder has stretch receptors (mechanoreceptors) that give input to the autonomic system. The dominant autonomic tone is a result of the amount of stretch input (little stretch of bladder - > sympathetic tone, detrusor muscle and internal sphincter are inhibited, bladder is allowed to fill; more stretch - > parasympathetic tone, detrusor and internal sphincter stimulated, voiding occurs). In infants and some people with spinal cord injury, this is the only control of the bladder. This is refered to as \"neurogenic\" - voiding occurs upon sufficient stretch. Beginning in childhood, the central nervous system is involved to allow for conscious control of voiding. The urge to pee comes from afferent input to the pontine micturition center."}, {"answer": "Can you want to go pee from smelling something? Or from a odour? also why is it we want to go pee when we hear running water?"}, {"answer": "I have pararesuis. My body says I need to pee but won't let me until I squat and force it out. (I'm a guy)"}, {"answer": "Our bladder sends us a little signal to our brain saying that we need to go urinate, that's what my 5th grade teacher said!"}, {"answer": "Life long pee'er. Your bladder fills and the nerves around it feel the increase in the pressure as the organ expands. This triggers the one response. If you have nerve damage to this area, you won't feel the need to pee, instead it will just happen (like when drunk people pee themselves )"}, {"answer": "When I need to pee and I'm asleep, I start dreaming about bathrooms that have like 30 urinals of all different shapes and sizes."}, {"answer": "Think of your body as a team. Each part is coordinating to do tasks while you are doing complex actions. Our brain does so many things behind the scenes as the team leader such as growing our skin, regulating our temperature, and keeping our body safe from viruses and toxins. Try this breathe in and out. Next start blinking your eyes. Notice that your tongue is in your mouth. The game is still going."}, {"answer": "what happens in the case of urinary tract infections, where you have to urinate every so often when your body dictates you should?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "159421", "title": "Urination", "section": "Section::::Anatomy and physiology.:Physiology.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 10, "start_character": 222, "end_paragraph_id": 10, "end_character": 375, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

Why do download websites allow fake download buttons/viruses to be on their website?

6mnweq

[{"answer": "They're ads that the companies with the downloads are paying for. Many sites with the fake download buttons are either illegal or not the main route of downloading things so they see less traffic and have to find alternate methods of financial gain."}, {"answer": "Because download sites aren't making any money from you downloading free stuff from them. They make money with advertising, and that's what those fake download buttons are."}, {"answer": "Cost per Click and Cost per Impression are two very important elements when determining pricing for advertising. Given that the website is for downloading, it's actually more profitable for the webmaster to use dubious ad placement to get higher click rate on ads. The website is likely more or less bullshit and the majority of the money comes from ad revenue from those very ads that you are talking about."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "3094956", "title": "Internet Privacy Act", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The Internet Privacy Act is a non-existent and fictitious law cited by websites that conduct illegal activities in order to deter organizations that look to prosecute such activities. Networks which share music, films and software, for example, often display the fictitious act in an attempt to protect themselves from arrest by being able to claim entrapment in court. In the statement, websites claim that it prevents organizations which may be associated with anti-P2P or government organizations from entering the site or network as it would breach the terms of the act.", "The Internet Privacy Act is a non-existent and fictitious law cited by websites that conduct illegal activities in order to deter organizations that look to prosecute such activities. Networks which share music, films and software, for example, often display the fictitious act in an attempt to protect themselves from arrest by being able to claim entrapment in court. In the statement, websites claim that it prevents organizations which may be associated with anti-P2P or government organizations from entering the site or network as it would breach the terms of the act."]}}]}]

Why does it feel like less effort to watch 3 - hour long TV episodes back to back than a film?

2gbxv3

[{"answer": "Doing a lot of small task is usually easier than doing one big task. For example nobody has any problem reading reddit all day, but reading a full book is hard and daunting. Every time you finish doing something, you get some kind of satisfaction, and we like to get that often."}, {"answer": "TV scripts are written with the aim of retaining viewers through commercial breaks, so they have to contain a steady stream of compelling dramatic or comedic cliffhanger scenarios. Films are made with the expectation that the audience will watch them uninterrupted from start to finish, so they can take more time with plot exposition, setting up the mood and style etc."}, {"answer": "Lots of good answers in here. One I'd like to add is that when you're watching TV episodes back-to-back like that, you're most likely already invested in it. You know the characters, you know the plot, so you can just jump right in and enjoy the show. No set-up is necessary. Plus there's that motivation of wanting to know what happens next. With a movie, you're going to have to meet the characters, learn about their situations and their motivations, and possibly learn about their world too. And since you don't know the characters yet, you don't really yearn to see them again and see what's going to happen to them next. And you're just comparing movies to television. If you get more specific and compare watching a tv show you're already sucked into, and watching a tv show you haven't started yet, the difference becomes more clear. I know I have plenty of tv shows I haven't started waiting in my Netflix and HBOGo queues. The way I put off *starting* a tv show is similar to the way I put off watching a movie."}, {"answer": "Probably because it's episodic in nature and can usually be paced better to be continued next time. (also they tend to use hooks to keep you enticed for another episode) This is why it's easy for marathon junkies to zip through 6 seasons of enjoyable content but trudge through 1.5-2hrs of hollywood averageness. (first time answering in here, hope I could help!)"}, {"answer": "For me, it's because I get a kind of mini-break every 22 or 44 minutes (depending on how long each episode is). When the credits roll, it feels like the end of something short, so we can justify the idea of watching another episode, because it didn't feel that long."}, {"answer": "I feel like you get a little more attached to the show. With multiple episodes I can keep looking into that world for another hour here and there. A movie has an end which you know is near IMO. I like getting invested in the universe of a show"}, {"answer": "Much like sex, the basic point of a story is for the satisfaction of the climax and resolution. Usually, every episode of a television show has its own mini climax and resolution (even if that resolution is a clif-hanger.) This means that the payoff is at least more frequent, if not greater, when you watch three episodes of a television show rather than watch one long movie."}, {"answer": "People might start watching the series half way through on TV so they need to constantly make it interesting or risk loosing potential viewers in *looooooooong* boring parts."}, {"answer": "I had the opposite experience. I used to do quality control for DVDs (checking for hits, drop frames, etc.), and watching 3 hours for the same TV show was painful. Watching an old movie became like taking a little break. Granted, I rarely got to pick what I was watching, and most of the stuff came from the '60s or '70s, but watching more than 1 or 2 episodes of anything in a row makes me want to scream."}, {"answer": "Because with 3 episodes of TV you likely go through three 3-act structures of setups, problems and resolutions - usually with some sort of cliffhanger at the end, with less time having to be spent on exposition as its not a standalone movie, which probably makes the pacing much better/faster giving such an effect."}, {"answer": "I get what OP is saying... I can not stay awake through most movies when I watch them at home but I can watch a whole season of Weeds or Dexter in one sitting."}, {"answer": "Also, TV is the new movies. TV was crap quality stories. Movies were where the great stories were. Roles are reversed now. House Of Cards is a great example."}, {"answer": "less stuff to keep in your memory. each tv episode is mostly self-contained, so most of the information can be downgraded in memory or dumped when you're done watching it. TV shows also draw from a repeating base of information (people, places, events), so there's much less learning to do when watching the same show. with a movie, you have to learn a bunch of new information. then you have to retain everything for the full 2-3 hours, and continue to parse new events in the context of a larger pile of information. that translates into increased glucose consumption in your brain, which is, in fact, genuine effort."}, {"answer": "In between the episodes you will move around or do things. Change and activity can keep you awake and alert. You can also stop watching TV episodes at any point when the shows end. You'll feel like you've been able to complete something before you got too tired. If you get too tired at any point into a really long film you may not think of it as completing the same amount of watching time, you'll probably just think you couldn't finish the whole thing. And of course that particular TV show could just be more interesting too you than that particular film."}, {"answer": "Movies and tv shows are, essentially, structured the same way. There is the introduction, a problem, a solution to aforementioned problem, then a major problem and then the major resolution (normally). In watching a movie you follow the one storyline. In watching the 3, smaller episodes, you are still watching the one storyline (depending on the show) but you are going through the structures much quicker so it's easier to keep interested etc."}, {"answer": "TV episodes are made so you want to watch the next one. Their plot is built so there is something to look forward to. In the case with movies (which don't have obvious sequels), they are made so they have a finite ending. i.e. Having something to look forward to in the next episode make you want to watch more."}, {"answer": "I think for me it is because there is a lot of effort involved in immersing myself in something new. When you watch a show, you're usually already familiar with a continuing plot, characters, setting, etc. Whereas a movie (or a show's pilot, for that matter) involves learning something completely new."}, {"answer": "Not only does each episode have a beginning, middle, and end, giving it a faster pace, you can always get up and use the bathroom or do something else at the end of an episode; there aren't as many good times to pause usually during a movie."}, {"answer": "I was thinking this. I almost always get bored half way through a film, but I watched 7 episodes of homeland back to back, and then the other 5 the day after. Time to start season 2! Then probably get a job or something..."}, {"answer": "As someone who spent yesterday watching season 2 of House of Cards, I'd say it's easier to process smaller chunks of information that are presented as small tasks."}, {"answer": "I would much rather watch a film that a TV show anytime. But I'm just not a TV person."}, {"answer": "because, like snacks, TV episodes are comparatively bite-sized and therefore \"easier\" to consume"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "31586093", "title": "Multi-channel transition", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": [". Producers adjusted to the government regulations and networks were forced to give up some of the control they had over program creation. Subscription channels emerged with no advertisements and the method for measuring audiences grew with the Nielsen People Meter.", "According to Amanda D. Lotz, the multi-channel transition began in the early 1980s and lasted about 20 years. Many changes happened during this transition such as the invention of the remote control, the video cassette player, and analog cable systems expanded viewer's choice and control. This era gave viewers more choice and control over what and when they wanted to view a program. Viewers were able to defy the networks' schedules, because they could record the program and watch it whenever they wanted, using the VCR and later the DVR. Producers adjusted to the government regulations and networks were forced to give up some of the control they had over program creation. Subscription channels emerged with no advertisements and the method for measuring audiences grew with the Nielsen People Meter."]}}]}]

Why is the age of sexual consent 16 but the legal age to watch porn 18?

1oqt78

[{"answer": "The age of consent varies widely across state lines, however there is still a charge referred to as \"corrupting a minor\". This makes it a crime to provide certain things to those under the age of majority. As such, you cannot provide pornography to a minor, in the same way that a minor can't be in a pornographic film. That said, the Internet has made it pretty easy to obtain."}, {"answer": "They are both chosen arbitrarily and vary between states and countries, so the why is basically: because the law maker says so. In my country it's 16 for both I believe."}, {"answer": "Because you can't watch yourself having sex...unless you film it, but you can't watch that film until you are 18...:P"}, {"answer": "Because pornography is an art form, it's better appreciated by more developed minds"}, {"answer": "Because different laws are made by different groups of people at different times. They aren't based on any kind of consistent logic but rather gut instinct and politics."}, {"answer": "Because if boys could legally get porn at 16, they may never get laid ever."}, {"answer": "Because nobody is really sure where to draw the line between \"child\" and \"adult\", and because thinking about the question makes people uncomfortable."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "20921374", "title": "Ages of consent in the United States", "section": "Section::::District of Columbia.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 20, "end_paragraph_id": 20, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["off-post. The age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. However, sexual relations between people 18 or older and people under 18 are illegal if they are in a \"significant relationship\". According to the Code of the District of Columbia, a relationship is considered \"significant\" if one of the partners is: Each U.S. state has its own general age of consent. As of August 1, 2018, the age\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "The age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. However, sexual relations between people 18 or older and people under 18 are illegal if they are in a \"significant relationship", "off-post. The age of consent in the District of Columbia is 16 with a close-in-age exemption for those within four years of age. However, sexual relations between people 18 or older and people under 18 are illegal if they are in a \"significant relationship\". According to the Code of the District of Columbia, a relationship is considered \"significant\" if one of the partners is: Each U.S. state has its own general age of consent. As of August 1, 2018, the age"]}}]}]

Why do humans have fetishes?

54wbpn

[{"answer": "A lot of the answers in this thread are trying to explain or rationalize *specific* fetishes, but I think OP's question is more general in nature. First, a point of clarification: the word \"fetish\" in common language essentially means \"a sexual attraction or fixation on body parts, objects, or activities not normally associated with sex.\" It's essentially when a person can be particularly sexually aroused by something that isn't typically considered to be arousing. Psychologists have not yet agreed upon a single explanation for why people form fetishes in the first place, but a common explanation involves (accidental) positive feedback loop of classical conditioning on the part of the fetishist. Under the right conditions, somebody who might *weakly* associate a non-sexual stimulus with sex will be able to get arousal out of it, which only further strengthens the association and the arousal that can be gained. Let's say that you're a straight guy with pretty vanilla sexual tastes. You're browsing porn on the internet, when all of a sudden you come across a video featuring a girl wearing a cat ear headband. At this point, you don't have a particular fixation with this sort of thing, but it doesn't turn you off either, and the girl is cute, so you like the video anyway. Meanwhile, your brain is picking up on the cat ears as something \"new,\" and novelty is a *big* factor in your brain's reward system, so when you finish, you've formed a slight association between \"girl wearing cat ears\" and \"getting your rocks off.\" Fast forward in time a bit to another porn session, and you come across *another* video with a girl wearing cat ears. The reward center in your brain remembers the last one, and is going \"yeah, this was good last time, I like this one too.\" The situation repeats, and strengthens the association between catgirls and sexual pleasure. Repeat this process enough times, and you'll get to the point where you *actively seek* porn with catgirls in it, and maybe you even *require* it to get it up. There won't be a rational reason for you to like this sort of thing, you just *do*, because you've inadvertently trained yourself to like it. EDIT: Alright, a lot of you are asking the same questions, and I don't have the time to respond to all of you, so I'm just going to put this shit up top. * The core thing to keep in mind is that this is all about *arousal*, which is distinct from *pleasure*. Yes, they often go hand-in-hand, but \"arousal\" is basically another word for \"excitement,\" and has meanings that go beyond *sexual* arousal. Anything that excites you, that gets your blood pumping, that gives you a tiny rush of adrenaline and endorphins, can be be considered \"arousing.\" Yes, a lap dance can do that, but so can being threatened with a knife, or being tied down, or being humiliated, or whatever. The associations we make with arousing stimuli depend enormously on the context and timing that we experience them with. If a nonsexual-but-still-arousing stimulus is presented with a sexual stimulus or context, then sexual association can begin to form around that nonsexual cue. * It's *entirely* possible that fetishes might have their origins before somebody reaches puberty. Like I said, \"arousal\" is just \"excitement,\" and is hard-wired into us even more deeply than sex. Understanding of sex and sexual maturity are not requirements for people to be influenced by outside sources. The example I cited with porn is just an *example*, and there's no reason why the same mechanism can't happen earlier in life, and completely by accident. Just because you recognized something as a childhood fetish in retrospect doesn't mean that it didn't form similarly to how I described. I'm betting that, whether you realized it was sexual or not, you sought out *more* of that thing because it made you feel good, and fell into the same cycle of reinforcement that I've described. Mind you, I'm not judging here, just explaining. * Homosexuality is *not* considered to be a fetish by the mainstream psychological community, so stop citing it as examples of an \"innate fetish\" or whatnot. It doesn't disprove anything, because you're comparing apples and oranges. However, if you want to talk about *transgenderism*, the field is much less settled on this matter, despite what people on tumblr might say. I'd recommend reading [The Man Who Would be Queen]( URL_0 ), which is a book that ignores all of the politically-correct bullshit around identity politics and actually examines it as a scientific phenomenon without trying to judge the fuck out of everybody involved. I had the good fortune to take a course taught by the author, and I swear to god I have never met a person who was as committed to taking an *objective* look at human sexuality as he is."}, {"answer": "I imagine a lot of it has to do psychologically with things that we normally can't or don't get in our day-to-day lives that are considered socially unacceptable, so they have to be done in private. Years ago I saw a video clip on an S & M documentary where a dominatrix was describing one of her usual clients. Guy was apparently head of cardiology or neurosurgery or something like that at a major hospital. Lives on the line, he asks people to jump and they ask yes-sir-how-high-sir, that sort of thing. All day every day. So for entertainment, he liked to come and be treated like a dog for an hour. Some Yin for his Yang."}, {"answer": " > dominating, being dominated have nothing to do with reproduction This has plenty to do with reproduction. Animals want their offspring to be the the best they can be; this increases the chances of them surviving and having offspring of their own. So, to have strong offspring, you need a strong mate. The dom/sub dynamic is all about this. In regards to feet and other fetishes that seem unrelated to reproduction: sex is intimate. Activities and body parts that are usually overlooked or hidden from sight are seen as 'wrong'. These 'wrong' things are a cause of anxiety and shame. For example, feet are mostly hidden from view and treated as dirty or foul smelling. Wouldn't it be nice to find a partner who embraces your dirty secrets? This is why a repressed culture like Japan is simultaneously known for sexual fetish."}, {"answer": "Foot fetishism is proposed to be due to the fact that [somatosensory cortical representation for genitals and feet being adjacent to each other, and there is perhaps extra cross wiring that can link the two areas.]( URL_0 ). In fact, if your genitals get amputated, you will continue to have \"phantom genitals\" where it will feel like they are still there. You can then stimulate your phantom genitals by touching your feet. When your genitals are amputated, that area of the brain isn't needed anymore. But the brain is very efficient and it rewires it to adjacent areas for it to represent those areas instead. It's hypothesized that people with foot fetishes have excessive cross wiring between that area."}, {"answer": "/u/ponieslovekittens posted something about that in a discussion about a virtual reality \"waifu simulator\". From URL_0 > Have you ever wondered where fetishes come from? Simple: Associative conditioning. When people grow up and first realize that sexual feelings are a thing they can have, whatever stimuli are available at the time tend to get thrown in with it. Pick any fetish you want, and I'll explain where it comes from. > Furries? Want to know where furries come from? Ever watch Thundercats? Cheetara is responsible for furries. Maybe you're more a Disney kind of guy? Ok, try Disney's Maid Marion. I bet she created a bunch of furries too. > People grow up, they see this stuff, their developing minds are trying to figure out what's going on and why their body feels new and strange but exciting is feeling the way it does...wires get crossed, and their brains start to associate the stimuli with the feeling. They try masturbating to it, positive reinforcement occurs and just like Pavlov's Dog and the bell, the brain comes to associate these two things as being related. > What else? > Fecal fetishists? Easy to explain: people with siblings who never had any privacy in their bedrooms, and ended up masturbating while sitting on the toilet because it was the only place they could have any privacy. Wires get crossed, the scent ends up associated with sex. > Guys who enjoy crossdressing? Simple: they had a sister, and she and her hot friends dressed them up when they were a kid, resultin in a bunch of girls are paying attention to them and touching them, it turned them on...wires got crossed, they associated crossdressing with sex. > Stuff in the OP? Simple: they watched anime when they were kids instead of Disney and Thundercats. Wires got crossed, they learned to associate small, asian body types drawn in the anime style with sex. That's all that's going on here."}, {"answer": "When you get turned on, you biologically have to suspend your disgust response for the purposes of getting down and dirty. A lot of sex involves mixing fluids and doing things that your not turned on self might not engage in. The disgust response is a very strong thing in humans, and its very important. It keeps us away from rotten food that could make us ill, or things which could be poisonous, part of the reason so many people are literally disgusted by things like bugs. However, if we were experiencing this strong disgust response we would procreate a lot less, therefore, having the ability to suspend this response is biologically advantageous trait, so from an evolutionary standpoint, makes sense. Now what does all this have to do with fetishes, well, things like licking feet, armpits, sniffing underwear and many others, all have an element of taboo to them, such that people who dont have these fetishes are disgusted by them. Our complex brains remember stimuli that feels good and rewarding, and its very easy to form an association that when you are engaging in 'dirty' behaviour, your getting ready to engage in sex, which we all want to do more of. So you directly associate your dirty secret with a state of arousal, you've 'made yourself ready' for sex by taking part in the fetish, because you've successfully suspended your disgust response to the activity. These associations are unique to everyone, depending on what you engage in, try, and start to think that your fetish =sexy time. That's why some people can have one specific fetish, but not the other, even if that other person is into an equally 'disgusting' fetish. one likes feet, the other armpits etc. This still holds true for other fetishes you might not think immediately have a 'dirty' component to them, like being dominated, but a big part of that is turning over control, willing to accept anything that other person wants to do with you, you have to be in this 'ready for sex' altered state to be titlized by the idea that they can treat you as degrading as they like and there is nothing you can do about it."}, {"answer": "Throwaway because short personal story about myself and my girlfriend (and we are MUCH more out there than the average normal person's fetishes): No idea how accurate this is, but we've theorized that fetishes can possibly result from one mistaking something for sex when they are younger. In my own childhood, when I was 3-5 years old, I loved the movie \"The Jungle Book\". Like, I watched it almost daily. In one of the opening scenes (so when my attention span was still fresh), there's a snake that has an oddly seductive voice who tries to eat the main character. He seduces him and tries to get him to go to sleep. Look up \"Kaa\" on Youtube to see what I mean. As a kid, I loved that scene, and it always made me feel funny. I believe some instinct in me had an idea what sex was, and hearing this snake speak like this confused me. I ended up thinking this was sex. Flash forwards a few years, I'm in middle school. We are reading \"The Jungle Book\", and someone in the class mentions the snake. I suddenly am flooded with memories, and feel compelled to look up the snake online, and find tons of fanart, and many, many similar pictures, with different creatures eating women. Turns out, I'm into vorarephillia, sexual arousal by people being eaten. My girlfriend has a similar story. As a kid, she played a pet-raising simulator, and used to love feeding the pets too much. She liked the way they rubbed their bellies, and she said their groans always made her laugh. She then developed a love of seeing similar things in cartoons, when people would eat too much and groan. She said she always loved the noises, and believes her mind interpreted those groans as sexual moans. Like me, she outgrows this as she gets older, until middle school, when one of her friends on DeviantArt starts uploading pictures with the feeding/stuffing fetish. Suddenly, she finds herself sexually attracted to the idea of people eating and gaining weight (luckily for me, she doesn't want herself to gain weight and she can keep her perfect body :P ). Both of us developed bizarre fetishes as young children by things we incorrectly believed to be sexual. I stand by that as my theory. Also, from what I can see, not a lot of people have mentioned any fetishes quite as out there as these. Boring normal fetishes! :P If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask. I'm an open book here :P"}, {"answer": "I'm no expert so this is just speculation but I imagine the answer to this derives from a different question: \"Why do humans have shame?\" The concept of treating sex as something to keep private isn't common among animals. Perhaps humans are even unique in the way that we treat it - as something to hide away and share with only a selective audience. Accordingly we have all sorts of cultural motivators towards sex in private, monogamy (albeit some animals are monogamous), we cover up our sex organs with clothing, and so on. This behaviour probably has some good Darwinian basis around mate selection, limiting sexual violence within the species (males killing each other in competition etc) and so on, and these in turn lead to fetishes. Where we have shame and an expected set of behaviours, so we also have transgression and deviance from those behaviours. tl:dr I suspect fetishes are a sort of psychological byproduct of shame rather than a primary evolutionary behaviour in their own right."}, {"answer": "I took a psychology of sex class last semester and the way they explained it is that the reasons vary, but often it is accidental. people have a positive sexual experience around those things and begin to associate them with pleasure. they gave an example of a guy who masturbated when he was young to a video of people having sex, but in the video the people were barefoot. He subconsciously looked for feet in the next video he watched because he had an enjoyable orgasm before while looking at feet, though not actually BECAUSE of the feet."}, {"answer": "This post is super late to the party and no one will see it but I just wanted to put my self out there kind of. I've had a diaper fetish since I was at least 5 years old, for my entire life I've been trying to figure out why. What happened in my life that caused this? It couldn't be the positive sexual feedback loop because I didn't masturbate for the for the till I was like 12. It wasn't the internet because the internet didn't exist until I was like 13. So why do I have such a fixation on diapers and women losing/having no bladder control and having the wear diapers. I don't think I'll ever figure out why."}, {"answer": "Some fetishes have roots in advertising desirability as a mate. It's not hard to imagine fixating on a particular body part as an outsized emphasis on a feature that indicates a potential mate's general fitness (which can include things like social status). E.g: \"pretty feet\" can be a sign of high social status (people who do things for you) as well as health. Dominance demonstrates strength; submissiveness advertises availability. It's a fetish when those things become valued unusually highly. Some fetishes have roots in fear/taboo. This is probably because what happens in your brain when you're afraid is quite similar to what happens in your brain when you're horny. It's easy for your brain to interpret \"afraid\" as \"turned on\", so long as the fear isn't too intense. What things are taboo\u2014and therefore able to trigger that sensation of mild fear\u2014are heavily social, and evolutionary explanations for those tend to be quite a stretch (at least, anything beyond \"cooperating and forming societies helps humans survive and breed\")."}, {"answer": "We don't know. At least we don't know well enough to do anything about them. Lots of people have all kinds of speculation, and things they feel like should be true or makes sense to them, but there is no strong consensus explanation."}, {"answer": "I've read a lot on this kind of stuff and it's always amazing what I find. A lot of fetishes have a great deal to do with psychological trauma or some kind of abuse. Your humiliation, degradation, physically abusive or mentally abusive fantasies come from. While others have to do with overwhelming feelings that you just can't put your finger on and control, so you need objectify this emotion. This is where mostly fetishes of praise and idilization occur. Your feet fetishes, boob, ass, toys, etc etc You also have the ones where you seek to escape reality, be someone you're not, change your role in life, etc. People who are dominant want to be dominated, costumes, characters, personality traits changes, etc etc What's so amazing to me is that while all of these things are harmless on their own, or if mildly played out - say you are flexible on certain choices but not on others. You have a day dream while sitting at work where you're the character from your favorite movie or whatever, you want to see your girlfriend in kinky lingerie depicting her as a slut or school girl etc etc - this is all fine and dandy...but if you're a bit over the fence, or you have certain combinations of these then you've got a psychological problem. This obviously is mild and like I said, for the average Joe. When you're fantasizing about rape, killing your boss, blowing a building up, killing yourself, etc etc...you gotta talk to someone... In my opinion, I think fetishes have been around forever... society has dictated how we should behave, and that the smallest thing out of the ordinary can have a massive impact in our lives...as fetishes have become a byproduct of our attempts at controlling everything and maintaining this acceptable but fake image of ourselves. So we create these unordinary ways of releasing all this creative energy... The human brain is amaaaaazing...."}, {"answer": "Something I have found interesting as a psychology student is an area of the brain called the somatosensory cortex that processes sensory information from all different parts of the body. Take a look at the human homunculus : URL_0 If you notice, the area of the brain that processes sensations of the genitals is right next to that of toes and feet. I think that that is too much of a coincidence. I feel that an overlap between those two areas (and sometimes there is overlap) could associate feet with sexual pleasure. Just my personal theory about possible biological basis of certain fetishes!! Foot fetishes just seem so pervasive (I mean have you seen that guy on True Life???) that I am inclined to believe that certain fetishes could be at least partially explained by this."}, {"answer": "First its important to note we find mates based on secondary sexual characteristics (clothing, hair, makeup, height, eye color, facial expressions, personality, lifestyle, wealth, power) the things that aren't inherent to our gender but that we exemplify to show our gender and how we wish to display ourselves for mate selection. The reason fetishes are taboo is purely due to society saying it is so. Our society has accepted fetishes of many things (men over 6ft, woman with large chests, blondes, redheads, ethnicities, muscle, fat) and other cultures have fetishes we may see as taboo (elongated necks, perceived effeminate males, bestiality). Its important to note, mate selection based off our fetishes is not done so entirely for reproductive reasons. Producing offspring with a person based off a physical trait may - or may not - help with natural survival but could provide a social advantage, as people are predisposed to make opinions based off of physical features. Being able to thrive in society is important to humans survival as we are a group animal. Society in humans is deep and complex but less so in say birds, who commonly choose mates based off 'displays'. A bird choosing another bird based off a trinket or plumage could be considered a fetish. We are not so different."}, {"answer": "We all want to feel a little good once in a while. But always the same is always the same. So just sex is not the experience they are looking for. Maybe it is somebody who has had 'just sex' for over 30 years and it feels too much the same. Trying new things out is a way to get past this. Sometimes these new things give us such a good feeling that we want more of them. The normal sex makes us feel less good then the super hot kinky fetish stuff. If this keeps happening a while, you would call it a fetish instead of a couple trying something out. The better we feel hormones such as Oxytocin get released. Our brain knows from which activity we will get those lovely hormones and thus will prefer them. A fetish pumps all the lovely hormones in the brain that we all look for."}, {"answer": "What u/Br0metheus said is an excellent ELI5 response! To anyone wanting a little more detailed information, here's what one of the leading Clinical Sexologists says about Sexual Template, which helps to further explain fetishes. Link too:( URL_0 ) At the root of human sexual desire is the \u201ccore erotic personality\u201d\u2013a.k.a. \u201csexual template\u201d\u2013which, in a nutshell, is whatever gets you off. \u201cEveryone has in their mind an image of someone or thing they find sexually desirous,\u201d explains Dr. William Granzig William Granzig , dean of clinical sexology at Maimonides University in North Miami Beach and president of the American Board of Sexology. That image might be a person of specific age, race or hair color, or it might be every person. It could be a fondness for a particular style of dress, objects such as women\u2019s shoes or fur-lined handcuffs, or behavior such as cross-dressing or exhibitionism. Whatever it is in particular, the sexual template is believed to develop early on during a childhood erotic experience\u2013perhaps as early as age three or four\u2013and it sticks with you for life. The difficulty of maintaining sexual desire over the long term, of course, is that if your partner falls outside of your sexual template\u2013or you fall outside theirs\u2013sooner or later one of you is going to lose interest. \u201cMany people whose template is not, say, age-specific can have great sex throughout their lives,\u201d notes Granzig. \u201cBut if you\u2019re only attracted to 20-year-olds, once your partner hits 30, your desire will decrease. Unless, of course, you can figure out some ways to spice things up.\""}, {"answer": "A lot of people are citing the cross-wiring of nerves connected to feet/genitals as a possible explanation for a foot fetish. But wouldn't this only account for people who are sexually stimulated by having their feet touched, massaged etc.? Not people who are sexually aroused by others' feet?"}, {"answer": "I don't remember where I heard it, and I don't have any sources, but I remember once hearing that it was possible that fetishes developed during adolescences based on some of peoples first sexual experiences."}, {"answer": "There are several different cognitive mechanisms so it might make sense to actually use different words rather than calling them all \"fetishes\". But simply, the most basic is based on brain wiring -you're born with them- the most common being neural crosstalk between areas mapping genitalia and those of the feet. The second is positive reinforcement, which associates particular objects or concepts with a positive sexual reward. These can develop over time. And then there is the most difficult to understand mechanism, known as aversion suppression. Because it is in your biological interest to have sex, the brain will counter aversive stimuli by pumping up your sex drive; if there is something a little bit icky going on, you will end up being _more_ sexually engaged because your brain is compensating for the ickiness. These fetishes are also built up over time. A simple example is french kissing (ordinarily aversive thing -mouth to mouth is gross in other circumstances- increases sexual engagement because of the aversion-suppression response), but via the same mechanism people can develop positive responses to different aversive stimuli, explaining, for example, shit fetishes (not to put too fine a point on it). Generally speaking, if there is something that should not be sexually stimulating, it is for that exact reason likely to be someone's fetish, due to the aversion suppression response. There is also an empathic aversion suppression -if we see someone engaged in sex while also doing something gross, we subconsciously/intuitively infer that they must be _really_ turned on."}, {"answer": "\u201cPersons have to keep from going mad by biting off small pieces of reality which they can get some command over and some satisfaction from. This means that their noblest passions are played out in the narrowest and most unreflective ways, and this is what undoes them. From this point of view the main problem for human beings has to be expressed in the following paradox; Men and women must have a fetish in order to survive and to have \u2018normal mental health.\u2019 But this shrinkage of vision that permits them to survive also at the same time prevents them from having the overall understanding they need to plan for and control the effects of their shrinkage of experience. A paradox this bitter sends a chill through all reflective people.\u201d Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil -Chapter Ten \u2013 Retrospect and Conclusion: What is the Heroic Society? \u2013 Page 153."}, {"answer": "My hypothesis about the prevalence of foot fetish is [this:]( URL_0 ) Your sensation for feet and genitals is literally touching in the brain making it very easy for potential crossfires. If a nerve isn't as insulated as it should be or just built wrong at birth. People could have actual genital stimulation from having their feet touched or thinking about feet."}, {"answer": "I wrote a scientific paper in college regarding broad sexual attraction and preferences and why they tend to differ among cultures and generations within a culture. I specifically examined specific body type preferences by generation in the United States, with a few asides to other cultures. If you look at the female body type most preferred by men by decade, you see a huge range of sizes and shapes. They range from the curvy days of Madonna, to the athletic beach bodies of the 80's, and lets not forget the thin and frail androgynous waif of the 90's. Generally, sexual attraction has influences which are biological, societal, and derived from personal experience. They reflect what we find biologically appealing, socially appealing (physical indicators of upper class are ++) and personally appealing. Someone's body shape preference, for example, can be driven by biology. People tend to prefer characteristics that are directly or indirectly associated with health and fertility. There can also be societal influences- what has society concluded is important? What celebrities are popular at the time and what are their physical characteristics? What body types are selected for advertisements, movies, and media that's shown to young people? Often times societal preferences act as a pendulum. After so many years of one \"ideal\", people push against it. Different body types have novelty and people get tired of looking at the same shapes. And of course, there are preferences and fetishes derived from personal experiences. General attraction is more influenced by biology and society, but specific fetishes draw a lot on personal experiences and the arbitrary details that we associated with sexual attraction. We collect a lot of these during our developing years and early sexual experiences. Perhaps the first time you had a crush on an adult woman was an elementary school teacher who wore glasses, and later in life you find glasses to be sexy and mysterious. A lot of people have preferences that are associated with power and control, whether it's relinquishing it or taking it. These can be hugely influenced by a person's personality as an adult or by their experiences growing up. So basically, a lot can contribute so someone's fetishes or sexual attractions. Looking at an individual you could probably get to the bottom of their personal fetishes. It's harder to draw conclusions about society as a whole."}, {"answer": "Yeah, I don't think I see the answer. Let me give that a shot: * **Foot Fetish**: Imagine being a cave man living before there is language or even fire. You want to find a mate. What do you look at? Well, feet are a very good candidate because nobody is wearing shoes. Humans feet are the only part that constantly touch the ground. They get scared from the terrain and as the scars are exposed to the soil, they grow infections. SO, you look at a potential mate's feet. If it's clean, it shows they have a good immune system or they don't need to walk far away for food. Eventually, humans start to find feet a key factor in sexual stuff. * **Dominance**: This has to do with social hierarchy. In every tribe there have been the alphas and betas. Enjoying receiving orders from someone is great to keep the tribe going. * **HotWife/Rape Fetish**: It's not only humans. Birds have this as an example. It helps the animal receive genes that will not normally end up in their genetic tree so that they will use the diversity and better immune system. Basically, you should keep in mind that for the most part humans have not been civilized so they developed all these fetishes to survive. Some fetishes happened to be actually quite useful in helping you and your children survive so they remained even though they are strange."}, {"answer": "Combinations of positive reinforcement, taboo, and some huge black box of personal developments and brain chemistry. Fun fact I blame much of the foot fetish on shoes - if feet were all over and everywhere, they probably wouldn't be the driving kink they are for some people. Many sexual fetishes have roots in childhood. Sexuality isn't a precise or pure thing, it's a set of physiological motivations the body provides to vaguely hope to motivate the human toward reproduction. It can rope in any number of things and be like 'oh yeah, we like this' and boom. People like the taste of things that are plenty unhealthy. To shut down the avenues your body provides you for experiencing and appreciating things sexually is alot like ignoring any personal preferences for what food you may like or love to eat in favor of always consuming solely optimal nutrition at all times, hypothetically; it can kind of be neglecting your own human experience."}, {"answer": "I read about something like this once, if someone knows more than me on this feel free to correct me. (Boys specifically) Some instances of boys developing fetishes can be traced back to when the boy is going through puberty and developing that initial attraction to females. The idea was that some guys chose specific things that women had that men generally didn't, the example in the book was high heels or long hair. These boys would initially get attracted those things and normally the boy would develop and start being attracted to the female themselves rather than their hair or high heels BUT in some cases boys don't develop any further than that, and remain attracted to only the hair or heels. Then the fetish is born TLDR: HAIR AND HIGH HEELS"}, {"answer": "Have you ever tried one of those games for toddlers, the ones with the shapes that fit through matching holes? You know what I'm talking about at least. For the average adult that would be boring as hell, no challenge, nothing unexpected, just matching the right shape in the right hole. My point being, one can only match the shape and the hole so many times, before it starts to get boring."}, {"answer": "A fetish isn't necessarily sexual - in psychoanalysis there's an anecdote of a traumatized guy who's a jittery wreck unless he has a hamster to hold. Once he has his hamster he becomes calm and can lucidly recall his traumatic event clearly, but take the hamster away and he goes back to being dysfunctional. The hamster is his '(non-sexual) fetish' - what allows him to function optimally."}, {"answer": "Porn is probably a huge factor. Just like hard drug users, people who watch a lot of porn need more and more intense videos to get off. Over time they switch around to different categories and I'm sure some but not all fetishes develop because of that. Some of it may have to do with upbringing and psychological things that people dealt with growing up."}, {"answer": "This is my own theory, based on people I know. In the modern age, especially developed countries with readily available internet, people are exposed to a lot of porn and other sexual content on a daily basis. This has pretty much made vanilla sex ordinary, or boring. So people try to add something 'new' or 'extreme' to try and make it more interesting."}, {"answer": "My guess has always been that the human reward system can basically connect pleasure/discomfort to almost anything. Like people can develop phobias, fetishism, addictions. The upside to this is that this makes us very adaptable animals. We learn to like/avoid things based on emotional positive/negative feedback. Even if it sometimes end up making little logical sense."}, {"answer": "Apes are obsessed with novelty, and humans the most so. In our ancient past, we probably even sexually selected for those who are weird, because social diversity allowed us to pull through many tough survival situations. In a nutshell, intelligence/novel thought has always been sexy."}, {"answer": "I can understand most fetishes, but feet. I just dont get it! It seems like its a higher form of perversion because....well you can't put your penis in a foot, so how does someone sexualize that?"}, {"answer": "Pavlov's dogs had a fetish for bells. Association between a desirable thing and an unrelated thing. Now substitute sex for food, and black-rimmed glasses for bells."}, {"answer": "All animals have fetishes. Your cat likes his neck scratched Your dog likes his belly rubbed Etc"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "156115", "title": "Sexual fetishism", "section": "Section::::Cause.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 17, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 17, "end_character": 464, "bleu_score": 0.9625248317849852}]}]

Why are dangerous items like laptop batteries allowed on planes, but not toothpaste or water?

4ism5h

[{"answer": "Well, a lot of the security measures are just theatre. The truth is, someone who is truly determined to do harm on board an airplane will be able to do so unless they don't allow you to bring anything (I can think of loads of ways...like stabbing someone with a metal knitting needle, which is allowed...seriously). But in order to convince the public that it is safe and that the government will prevent future incidents they choose to ban things that may be severe inconveniences, but that won't stop people from flying. People can always buy new toothpaste or a bottle of overpriced water inside the airport. They cannot, however, replace all their electronics or travel without them in many cases (for example, a business traveller)."}, {"answer": "Because of security theater, and because people who fly on airlines are more likely to give up toothpaste and water, than their laptops. The backlash would be huge. Also, the TSA is concerned less with protecting you as it is about increasing their budgets. Ticking off 99% of congressmen and their staffs, as well as the wealthier chunk of the electorate is not a good way to do that, especially because it would draw attention to how inept they are, especially considering the massive amount of money they and homeland security get."}, {"answer": "Banning electronic devices such as laptops tablets and phones would make flights a bit safer, but there would be so much consumer backlash that doing so might put an airline out of business. While restricting products such as toothpaste and bottled water is inconvenient, consumers are not so attached to those products that they will make a major issue over them."}, {"answer": "The liquids people are worried about are probably acetone and peroxide. They both look like water and can be mixed to produce the explosive acetone peroxide. However, you need concentrated peroxide, not the weak stuff you get from the drug store. But if you're insane, you can concentrate the 3% to much higher concentrations. The reason laptop batteries are allowed on planes is probably because no one has used one to attack a plane yet. Guy tries to hide bombs in his shoes, now they make you take off your shoes. Guy tries to hide bomb in underwear, now you have to go through a machine that sees through your clothes. The TSA responds to specific threats, no matter how unlikely they are to occur again. God help us when some terrorist jams a bomb up his rectum."}, {"answer": "It's called security theater. It's the illusion of security provided by things like banning normal items in an attempt to show control and security protocols. In actuality things like toothpaste and water as you pointed out are not dangerous but things like lipo batteries and aerosol cans can be. These practices have been shown in many studies to do little to prevent or deter terrorism or mishaps but they give people the impression that they are safe, which is the real benefit of programs like the TSA. Whether it is an actual benefit or not is mostly a matter of interpretation and opinion."}, {"answer": "Last time I got on a plane they let me take a lighter but not a bottle of water in my carry on..."}, {"answer": "Anecdotal story: I'm a HAM radio guy and was traveling to Hawaii. Packed all kinds of QRP gear (small, portable, low watt transceiver) - wires, batteries, coax, etc. in my carry-on. They didn't say a word about all that suspicious stuff but busted me for the full size shaving cream can I'd forgotten about. And if those fluids are so dangerous, why is there a 50-gallon trash can full of it at the TSA checkpoint?"}, {"answer": "1. You can't just carry on as many lithium ion batteries as you like. Extras are required to have their leads taped closed to prevent accidental discharge by rubbing against each other. Batteries are \"prefered\" to be kept in-device. 2. There is a very big push for heavier restrictions on transportation of lithium-ion batteries in cargo planes. Transportation of bulk lithium-ion batteries is [already prohibited in passenger aircraft]( URL_0 ). There was a big push for this legislation from pilot unions and the FAA in cargo aircraft as well after the [first fatal air crash for UPS]( URL_1 ). 3. Banning lithium batteries entirely within the cabin of an aircraft *altogether* would bring the economy to a halt. Just imagine the millions of people who would be required to leave their cellphone or laptop at home if they wanted to travel anywhere. Some risks you just have to take."}, {"answer": "Because they are not interested in actual safety. This is all about security theater, where the appearance of safety is what counts. No one wants to be caught \u201cnot having done something\u201d if and when the next plane goes down due to terrorist activity. This is all about CYA at every level."}, {"answer": "There is a greater chance of a liquid or fluid, with its chemical composition changed, remaining undetected when passing through airport security. Because it is so concealable it was easier for airport security to ban moderate volumes of liquids altogether."}, {"answer": "Security theatre and passenger convenience explains some of the discrepancy, but not all. Lithium ion batteries are classified as dangerous goods (UN Class 9) and so are [identified as dangerous air cargo (DAC) by the International Air Transport Authority (IATA)]( URL_1 ), but they are most safe when attached to the piece of equipment they are designed for. Transporting lithium batteries as freight requires them to be packed in a specific way to reduce the risk of fire or explosion (terminals taped, double bagged and in a tri-wall box IIRC). Basic information on DAC is also provided by airlines when you make your booking and you will see signs at check-in desks to remind you not to put DAC in your luggage. Restrictions on liquids stem directly from a plot to attack [trans-Atlantic flights with liquid explosives in 2006]( URL_0 ). At the time I was working at an airfield in Iraq and had to deal with the kerfuffle as security regulations were rapidly adapted to cope with an unforeseen threat. The 100ml limit is a compromise between the quantity of explosives required for a viable IED and the need for passengers to carry something on the flight. Finally adaptations to electronics can be detected by the x-ray machines you put your carry on luggage through or which scan your hold luggage. There is a reason why you put laptops, tablets etc through the scanner on their own: so that the machine and operator can get an unobstructed view of the insides in order to spot any anomalies. Finally swabs can be taken (and are taken at random) to detect for traces of explosives which is why it is unwise for military personnel to use their bergens or kit bags for travelling! Detectors are also used to screen hold luggage. Ultimately aviation security is a balancing act between efficacy and safety. There is no point running a perfectly safe system if it is unusable, but you cannot be unsafe. **TL;DR: the security measures are not a sham, nor are they exclusively designed to fuck you about and over-charge you for toiletries and water. All of the checks carried out at airports are done for a purpose and are based on a careful assessment of the risk.**"}, {"answer": "Because most of these so-called security/anti-terrorism measures are just for the show, for the purposes of \"mass-reassurance\", a \"media-op\" more than anything.. In the same line, you could ask why, because of anti-terrorism financing laws, they're making it harder (as if it weren't already) for the Somali/Nigerian immigrants to send money around, as if the same immigrant, who mostly can't even pay his rent, would finance terrorism even if he wanted to. Same state is ignoring shell companies/wealthy individuals in the UAE, Kuwait from where actual terror financing comes...Or why do they impose all of the KYC, credit card, digital currency hindrance supposedly to fight crime/money laundering whereas actual anonymity and zero traceability is achieved with good old paper cash which no sane person is thinking of banning in order to fight crime It is actually much easier to shoot down a civilian plane in its take-off/landing phase using simple RPGs or even advanced anti-aircraft MANPAS (which thanks to the US/France/UK/Qatar are now in the hands of al-Qaeda in Syria), than to try and carry a bomb with you inside the plane. Al-Qaeda now has thousands of TOW missiles to destroy armoured tanks and we're worrying about someone carrying a bottle of water into a plane, what a comedy this world has become"}, {"answer": "Laptop batteries can burp fire, but they're not really that dangerous. Nitrogen based explosives are easy to detect, but non-nitrogen based explosives like TATP can look like a bottle of water. A plane interior can take an explosion 100ml or less of TATP. This happened recently in Africa I believe. A guy detonated a small explosive, putting a small hole in the fuselage. Which he got sucked out of, everyone else was fine."}, {"answer": "As for water, it's linked to a plot in the past to smuggle liquid explosives abroad a flight. Wikipedia has a good page on it [here]( URL_0 ) Terrorists tried to smuggle DIY liquid explosives abroad a flight. Airports all over the world panicked, and put a ban on liquids to prevent such an occurrence from happening."}, {"answer": "As far as shipping them on commercial flights, they are limited and regulated. They allow batteries to fly in cabins with passengers because if the battery ignites they will be able to put the fire out as to it spreading uncontrollably in cargo. FYI the most common battery to ignite on commercial flight are in E-Cigs."}, {"answer": "You're right, if someone took a laptop battery or any lithium ion type of battery they could probably take out a plane. Puncturing a hole into a lithium ion battery causes a thermite like effect. URL_0 Also I can see people sneaking explosives into batteries like C4, or thermate."}, {"answer": "I believe is that because it's very easy to make small uncheckable by rays liquid bomb. You battery won't explode to hurt a plane, but some liquid explosive in your toothpaste tube will. Or liquid deadly gas."}, {"answer": "I used to think it's because to make it harder for someone to construct a bowl of water to waterboard someone onboard an airplane. odd liquids could be constructed as some form of bomb?"}, {"answer": "The drink / liquid restrictions were put in place after themlucozade bomber's failed plot. URL_0 "}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "7058407", "title": "2006 transatlantic aircraft plot security reaction", "section": "Section::::Hand luggage restrictions.:United States.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 34, "end_paragraph_id": 34, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Similar emergency restrictions were placed on airline passengers traveling within and from the United States. Initially, all liquids were forbidden, including beverages, hair gels, toothpaste, lipstick, sunscreen, and hand lotions, due to the suspicion that liquid chemicals were planned to be used in the attacks. Electronic devices (iPods, laptops, etc.) were still allowed for domestic flights. As of 26 September 2006, the Transportation Security Administration adjusted the ban on liquids, aerosols and gels. Travellers are permitted to carry liquids through security", "Similar emergency restrictions were placed on airline passengers traveling within and from the United States. Initially, all liquids were forbidden, including beverages, hair gels, toothpaste, lipstick, sunscreen, and hand lotions, due to the suspicion that liquid chemicals were planned to be used in the attacks. Electronic devices (iPods, laptops, etc.) were still allowed for domestic flights. As of 26 September 2006, the Transportation Security Administration adjusted the ban on liquids, aerosols and gels. Travellers are permitted to carry liquids through security", "Similar emergency restrictions were placed on airline passengers traveling within and from the United States. Initially, all liquids were forbidden, including beverages, hair gels, toothpaste, lipstick, sunscreen, and hand lotions, due to the suspicion that liquid chemicals were planned to be used in the attacks. Electronic devices (iPods, laptops, etc.) were still allowed for domestic flights. As of 26 September 2006, the Transportation Security Administration adjusted the ban on liquids, aerosols and gels. Travellers are permitted to carry liquids through security"]}}]}]

Why are booze and cigarettes so expensive in Canada as opposed to the states?

13b3zz

[{"answer": "Taxes, lots and lots of taxes. Its called sin tax, my girlfriend did her masters paper on it. URL_0 from the wiki page on canada taxation: Both the federal and provincial governments impose excise taxes on inelastic goods such as cigarettes, gasoline, alcohol, and for vehicle air conditioners. A great bulk of the retail price of cigarettes and alcohol are excise taxes. The vehicle air conditioner tax is currently set at $100 per air conditioning unit. Canada has some of the highest rates of taxes on cigarettes and alcohol in the world. These are sometimes referred to as sin taxes. It is generally accepted that higher prices deter consumption of these items which have been deemed to increase health care costs stemming from those who use them."}, {"answer": "We pay much higher taxes on these items for one. I don't know how Liquor is controlled in NS but in Ontario, liquor is sold only through a provincial monopoly or by institutions with a liquor license. I do know we pay high taxes on ciggarettes. ELI5: Do you know how Mommy and Daddy sometimes don't let you have candy because it's bad for you? The government does the same thing with adult candies, and not just because they are bad for you. When you want candy, sometimes mommy and daddy will let you have some if you clean your room. The government does the same thing with ciggarettes-because they are bad for people, the government makes you pay more. The U.S. is like your uncle-he just lets you have candy, because he doesn't see the point in babying you! But mommy and Daddy know they can get you to clean your room this way and they make sure you can't have too much candy. Well that was my best attempt for now, even though I know it's not perfect."}, {"answer": "It's terrible in England too! The government will say it's to discourage people from smoking. Smokers will say it because the government knows it can tax whatever it wants on cigarettes, and their addiction will force people to pay whatever price the government wants to extort them for. Hospitals will say its to balance the cost that smokers take to treat their smoking-related illnesses. In countries other than the US healthcare is often publicly funded, so this might be why the US is cheaper overall. Also, America is much bigger on the whole freedom thing whereas the UK government will be criticised if it doesn't show enough incentive to improve public health."}, {"answer": "FYI - EVERYTHING is more expensive in Nova Scotia. Went there for vacation over the summer Milk - Maryland = $3.50 / NS = ~$6 Ice Cream - Maryland = $4 / NS = ~$7 Eggs - Maryland $3 / NS = ~$5"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "24810047", "title": "Alcohol law", "section": "Section::::Restrictions on sale and possession.:North America.:Canada.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 181, "end_paragraph_id": 181, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In most Canadian provinces, there is a very tightly held government monopoly on the sale of alcohol. Two examples of this are the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and the Liquor Distribution Branch of British Columbia.", "In most Canadian provinces, there is a very tightly held government monopoly on the sale of alcohol. Two examples of this are the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and the Liquor Distribution Branch of British Columbia. Government control and supervision of the sale of alcohol was a compromise devised in the 1920s between \"drys\" and \"wets\" for the purpose of ending Prohibition in Canada. Some provinces have moved away from government monopoly. In Alberta, privately owned liquor stores exist, and in Quebec a limited number of wines and liquors can be purchased at \"d\u00e9panneurs\" and grocery stores. Canada has some of the highest excise taxes on alcohol in the world. These taxes are a source of income for governments and are also meant to discourage drinking. (See Taxation in Canada.) The province of Quebec has the lowest overall prices of alcohol in Canada."]}}]}]

If humans were to colonize a new planet and could only send "X" number of people. What is the minimum number of people we would need to send in order to create a genetically diverse population?

5x6a5r

[{"answer": "I actually discussed this with my fianc\u00e9e the other day. Realistically we would only send women and carry stored semen for the men. This is because in order to grow the numbers as quickly as possible we would want as many wombs at the start as possible, and men would be too much of a life support and weight burden for the population benefit. Also in the event that some of the crew is lost it would be a terrible thing if by happenstance all the women were killed. Considering we currently lack the ability to develop a child in an artificial womb that would mean the failure of the mission, so to maximize the allowable loss of crew every crew member should have a womb. Considering varied semen is much more compact than taking male colonists it shouldn't be any trouble at all to send excess genetic diversity for any proposed colony. Of course this implies that every colony would by its nature develop a matriarchal society as the founding members who are the most educated and skilled would all be women, and the first few generations would likely be purely women as well. By the time men are even allowed to come to term there would be far more women than men."}, {"answer": "According to a Portland State University professor, you could do it with 10,000 people on a strict breeding program, or 40,000 people allowing for more natural pairings and attrition. [Source]( URL_0 ) EDIT: As shown in the article (but summarized here for simplicity), his program runs a 300-year simulation. Significantly fewer than 10,000 people would result in reduced genetic variation over that much time. As few as 150 people could last a few generations, but then all the permutations of pairings would effectively be used up."}, {"answer": "While not an actual scientist, I'm an undergraduate student of genetics and I don't think it's an issue. By the time were ready to send an interstellar colony ship, we'll have such an advanced understanding (the rate of gain of knowledge in the field of genetics is really really really fast) that low diversity won't be an issue. Maybe not a complete understanding but it wouldn't surprise me. Everyone in the population is a carrier of this gene and were at risk of massive portions of the next generation being born with a degenerative condition? That's ok, we'll cure it in zygotes and adults alike using this diversity library we bought? Oh no there are no extra alleles for this locus? That's fine we'll simulate a protein that can do the job better and add the code for that into the genome. Seems farfetched at the moment, but considering how far the field has come since its inception and even in the last 5 years it's not unlikely that 100 years from now we'll wield these abilities."}, {"answer": "[Seems like]( URL_0 ) if we wanted people to be happy and allowed to date, 160. But we could get that down to about 80 if we screened out groups genetics very carefully."}, {"answer": "Ultimately it doesn't matter as the new population's genetic diversity will develop differently to the originals due to the founder effect (newly established populations are less genetically diverse then those they came from)."}, {"answer": "Everyone's doing this the hard way: All you need is 1,000 women and a sperm bank with 10,000 samples."}, {"answer": "The best estimates can be found by looking at population bottlenecks. The population bottleneck caused by the Toba catastrophe 70,000 years ago reduced human population to an estimated 3,000 breeding pairs. Possibly as low as 1,000 breeding pairs. [This]( URL_1 ) study says that the native population of the Americas are descended from about 70 people. Not necessarily that there were only 70 individuals at any one time - in the same way [mitochondrial eve]( URL_0 ) wasn't the only woman alive at the time, but we're all related to her. But seeing as we would be able to select a genetically diverse group to begin with, use genetic screening, keep frozen sperm samples etc - I'd say less than 70 is viable."}, {"answer": "I'd have to find the article, but just a few weeks ago I was reading that it could be done with as few as 160 people, but it would include a very strict breeding program. You'd be told who you have to have children with, and your children would be told who to have kids with and so on until you have a sustainable population. Edit: I was wrong, /u/lukimcsod links the article I'm talking about. 80 people with a strict breeding program but 160 of you want to let people choose who they have kids with."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "6578398", "title": "Human evolutionary genetics", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Human evolutionary genetics studies how one human genome differs from another human genome, the evolutionary past that gave rise to the human genome, and its current effects. Differences between genomes have anthropological, medical, historical and forensic implications and applications. Genetic data can provide important insights into human evolution.", "Human evolutionary genetics studies how one human genome differs from another human genome, the evolutionary past that gave rise to the human genome, and its current effects. Differences between genomes have anthropological, medical, historical and forensic implications and applications. Genetic data can provide important insights into human evolution."]}}]}]

Why does Apple keep changing their ports?

2zv8sq

[{"answer": "If you're referring to the new Macbook, that port is a USB type-C port, it's an international standard, and you're going to start seeing that port on pretty much everything. Google has already announced that the new Chromebook Pixel is using it. The port is reversible (which is always nice), is faster, and lets you draw more power (useful for charging) than other ports."}, {"answer": "There is a reason: whenever there's a change, there's almost always a significant improvement. Lightning port is much, much faster than the old 30-pin connector (which dates back to 2000, by the way). USB3.1 is better than even that, and it's not Apple's invention, it's an international standard, announced last year, and it'll soon be on everything. It's a replacement for the USB2.0 ports that you use for everything now, with much better speeds, and able to carry enough power to charge a laptop."}, {"answer": "They are improvements over their old ports, in terms of speed generally. The real question isn't why they keep changing their ports, the international standard changes, to improve as well. Its why they don't use the standard ports everyone else uses. Both in phones and in laptop power supplies. They had a perfect chance to switch to the standard when they changed the Iphone adapter, they just didn't."}, {"answer": "I'm surprised no one brought up the obvious - why iphones use (two) different connectors when the rest of the world uses the same standard. Maybe that's not what OP was asking, but I think it's a good example."}, {"answer": "When the original iMac only had USB/Firewire (and also no floppy drive) people were losing their shit about that too. \"NO SCSI??? NO COM?? NO ADB??? WTF APPLE!\" Fact is USB (and optical drives) wouldn't have caught on for a much longer time if Apple hadn't said \"fuck you, no\" and let people continue to use their outdated shit. Someone's got to push the industry forward. That being said, it wouldn't have killed them to put at least 2 USB-C ports on the new macbook so you can charge it while using a peripheral without an adapter. That is a legitimate complaint."}, {"answer": "They hardly ever change their ports. Compare them to other manufacturers, they change their ports every laptop version."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "856", "title": "Apple Inc.", "section": "Section::::Criticism and controversies.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 275, "end_paragraph_id": 275, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["It has been criticized for its alleged collaboration with the U.S. surveillance program PRISM. Apple's issues regarding music over the years include those with the European Union regarding iTunes, trouble over updating the Spotify app on Apple devices and collusion with record labels. Apple has faced scrutiny for its tax practices, including using a Double Irish Arrangement to reduce the amount of taxes it pays. A 2013 US Senate report claimed that Apple hadn't paid corporate taxes for five years due to its deals with the Irish government. In 2016, the European Union ordered Apple to pay a fine for its actions.", ". It has been criticized for its alleged collaboration with the U.S. surveillance program PRISM. Apple's issues regarding music over the years include those with the European Union regarding iTunes, trouble over updating the Spotify app on Apple devices and collusion with record labels. Apple has faced scrutiny for its tax practices, including using a Double Irish Arrangement to reduce the amount of taxes it pays. A 2013 US Senate report claimed that Apple hadn't paid corporate taxes for five years due to its deals with the Irish government. In 2016, the European Union ordered Apple to pay a fine for its actions.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", ". It has been criticized for its alleged collaboration with the U.S. surveillance program PRISM. Apple's issues regarding music over the years include those with the European Union regarding iTunes, trouble over updating the Spotify app on Apple devices and collusion with record labels. Apple has faced scrutiny for its tax practices, including using a Double Irish Arrangement to reduce the amount of taxes it pays. A 2013 US Senate report claimed that Apple hadn't paid corporate taxes for five years due to its deals with the Irish government. In 2016, the European Union ordered Apple to pay a fine for its actions."]}}]}]

Why do we sleep on bed frames, and not just a mattress on the floor?

2svt5o

[{"answer": "Temperature and bugs It's warmer up higher off of the floor, less dusty and bugs and snakes have a harder time getting up there."}, {"answer": "Wait until you're in your 50's... It gets harder and harder pulling yourself up and on to your feet...especially first thing in the morning. Being able to slide your legs over, push off and stand up -- it's not a luxury it's almost essential. Hey, I'm an active guy, running, biking, swimming or playing soccer nearly every day. But my body hurts. You'll see..."}, {"answer": "Surprised no one has mentioned that a lot of countries do just sleep on a bedroom in the floor. I've slept on just a mattress in China, Vietnam, and Korea. While not everyone does it, it's certainly not uncommon."}, {"answer": "If you have any damp issues in your home and you put a mattress directly on the floor it will start to rot. Beds need ventilation."}, {"answer": "A mattress left on the floor will collect moisture and then mold will form."}, {"answer": "Bugs. I had a three inch spider run his ass across my floor. I blasted him with bug spray. Right in his stupid little eyes. Guess what happened? He ran away and didn't die. I went to Lowe's THAT DAY and built a 2x4 bed frame a good 3 feet off the ground. Fuck bugs. Seriously."}, {"answer": "Ooh I can answer this one! Years ago I slept on a mattress on the floor. Then one night I climbed into bed and suddenly my body sort of folded so that I went flying up to land about five feet away with my entire nervous system screaming GETITOFFMEGETITOFFMEGETITOFFMEEEE, a feat of acrobatics I could not in a million years perform at will. The trigger for this bit of atavistic levitation was revealed when I turned on the bedroom lights. A small (but big enough) California Kingsnake (a beneficial predator) was hiding out in my bed. The next day I built a frame to get the mattress off the floor. I haven't had any (actual) snakes in my bed since then so it must have worked (in case of failure to snort in dry amusement, adjust irony detector). Whether it works or not I can tell you that in my case it was 100% that I wanted the wild snakes to hang out *under* the bed, not up on top with me."}, {"answer": "I would say for these 2 simple reasons. * easier to get in / out of bed from a higher matress. * more storage area underneath."}, {"answer": "I don't use bed frames. Boxed springs on floor with mattress on top. I've never liked the shakiness of most frames and also the monsters can't reach my feet when they hang off."}, {"answer": "I believe it has something to do with airing out the mattress since our body heat and sweat on a daily basis can attract mold and bugs and such."}, {"answer": "Stops those spider bastards from chilling on your face in the night"}, {"answer": "waiiit wait wait hold the fucking phone...my mattress is on the floor are you telling my this isn't a natural thing also if I hear one pun about \"nothing really mattress\" or anything like that I'm going to lose it"}, {"answer": "Go back 200 years. No heating. Floor... Cold. Cold floor."}, {"answer": "Fuck all that, when are we going to get mattresses that are just fuckin hovering in the air and shit, with a retractable fuckin screen that is only opened for you to enter/exit said bed, so that there are no bugs and or mosquitos capable of touching your bed EVER Read the other comments, they got to me."}, {"answer": "Height. It is so that the bed is of proper height to sit on the edge of."}, {"answer": "Dust. Sleeping close to the ground means I get all congested from the dust that lives around there. I actually put my bed on risers (like, 6 inches, I think, maybe more) to get more underbed storage space, but the real reason that beds are raised is to prevent dust from making you extremely uncomfortable while you sleep."}, {"answer": "Comments are TL;DR Here's the break down: 1) Keep mattress from getting wet/moldy 2)Keeps bugs off of bed 3)Allows for storage underneath 4) Dust/dog hair etc 5) Getting out of bed when you're older is hard on the ground"}, {"answer": "Japanese people use futons (not the american \"futons\" that are pull out couch beds, just google image Japanese futon) I'm American but ethnicity is Japanese and currently laying on the ground/bed(futon). I don't have a preference but I do have to say it keeps my back straight. My old soft mattress use to give me back pain because it would curl my back while I slept"}, {"answer": "Further, the body heat and moisture would seep into the mattress and it would get mouldy pretty quickly underneath without some sort of circulation. Ruined carpet and ruined mattress. Unless...your house happens to be pretty dry and free of drafts. In the UK that's a pretty hard combination to find it seems."}, {"answer": "A lot of these comments reference the aversion of bugs and cold, but what about Japanese tatami mats? If what I see in foreign Japanese flicks, most beds are set on the ground, and that society is as modern as can be now!"}, {"answer": "I heard that it started to become a thing during the Black Plague where it would keep you away from the rats."}, {"answer": "If you put a foam mattress directly on the carpet it gets mouldy underneath. Source: I grew up in a poor family and they couldn't afford a proper bed for me, so I slept on this thick two-layer foam mattress. Years later (even before I was a teenager) I discovered it was cemented to the floor with copious green mould. It was really disgusting. I'm not sure if I was getting a new bed, and moved the old one to discover it... or I moved the old one and this discovery prompted a new bed. But either way I got a new bed (a futon) and although I don't like futons anymore I'm still using the frame 20 years later."}, {"answer": "For the guys out there, having the top of your mattress line up with the top of your inseam (bottom of your sack for the younger crowd) seems to line things up quite nicely during sexy time for positions where the guy is standing."}, {"answer": "Probably bed bugs. They are disgusting evil creatures. And were once ubiquitous. One trick to prevent is put the legs of a bed in buckets with water or oil in them. So a big advantage having legs on your bed."}, {"answer": "Cold air gathers from the ground up. Elevating your place of rest lets you rest in warmer air. It also makes it easier to stand up from your bed if it is at knee height."}, {"answer": "Japanese sleep on the floor on mattresses (futons, technically). Reason? Space. They roll them up and put them away during the day. Source: japanese (okinawan, technically) grandparents and mom"}, {"answer": "I'm pretty sure that the correct answer is that your mattress needs air circulation underneath it. otherwise you might get fungi on it."}, {"answer": "Because there are small dangerous monsters that eat people's faces at night. They usually can't climb bed frames."}, {"answer": "Because we have to store the Christmas decorations somewhere..."}, {"answer": "You need a bed frame to create a space underneath that will become a place for dust bunnies and cats to hide in. It is also a good place for wayward socks to migrate to...a place to throw your book that you are reading before sleep...a hide out for the monsters of your mind. People. Do yourselves a favor. When buying a mattress, buy the best one you can afford. The quality of sleep is far superior and a good mattress will last a very long time. Just do not invest in the beds that sport a 2 foot box spring and a 2 foot mattress. Man oh man, those things require a ladder to get into and a parachute to get out of safely."}, {"answer": "I learned the hard way... mold. I put my new memory foam mattress on the floor and after two months I decided it I should do as suggested when breaking a mattress in and spin it around but i was greeted with green crap all over the bottom. not fun"}, {"answer": "When people had iron beds, they used to put the legs in a can of Kerosene in order to keep bed bugs out. This going back to the 1940's and 1950's before the widespread use of Pyrethreans."}, {"answer": "We used to sleep on frames, but then we got rid of them, as they were getting pretty old, and money was and still is tight. I sleep on one mattress on the floor. It's great."}, {"answer": "As a Senior Citizen, I can guarantee you that getting into and out of a bed that's raised some distance from the floor is a whole lot easier, especially if/when arthritis kicks in."}, {"answer": "You've clearly never lived in a big city, mice are always a risk and you don't want those things on your bed."}, {"answer": "Sex while standing at the edge of the bed is much better with a bed at the proper height."}, {"answer": "To keep the mattress away from any spills or anything on the floor that could ruin it."}, {"answer": "When the modern bed was designed it was comments for vermin to crawl about at night."}, {"answer": "I prefer my boxspring and mattress on the floor better support and nothing sinks"}, {"answer": "Wait, I'm supposed to have something besides a mattress on the floor?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "883640", "title": "Bed size", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Standard bed sizes are based on standard mattress sizes, which vary from country to country. Bed sizes also vary according", "Standard bed sizes are based on standard mattress sizes, which vary from country to country. Bed sizes also vary according"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "826952", "title": "Bunk bed", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A bunk bed is a type of bed in which one bed frame is stacked on top of another, allowing two or more beds to occupy the floor space usually required by just one. They are commonly seen on ships, in the military, and in hostels, dormitories, summer camps, prisons, and the like. Bunk beds are normally supported by four poles or pillars, one at each corner of the bed. A ladder is used to get to the upper bed, which is normally surrounded by a railing to", "A bunk bed is a type of bed in which one bed frame is stacked on top of another, allowing two or more beds to occupy the floor space usually required by just one. They are commonly seen on ships, in the military, and in hostels, dormitories, summer camps, prisons, and the like. Bunk beds are normally supported by four poles or pillars, one at each corner of the bed. A ladder is used to get to the upper bed, which is normally surrounded by a railing to"]}}]}]

In ancient and medieval times, how did soldiers distinguish friend from foe in battle?

7sx7eq

[{"answer": "Sometimes they didn't. However for the most part it involved big flags and designs on the shields. Some armies were equipped totally different but others where similarly equipped there were special people called heralds who could tell whose design on a flag or shield were who and which side they were supposed to be on."}, {"answer": "1) Even though there were no \"standard\" uniforms, armies would often have their soldiers marked with a specific symbol on their clothing, like a big cross or X or something. You can see an example [in this old painting]( URL_0 ). 2) Battles didn't descend into disorderly chaos very frequently. Armies survive on discipline and cohesion, more than any other factor. So for the most part, you would stick in a tight group with the rest of your unit, and it would be pretty obvious who was in your unit and who wasn't. 3) Simply yelling. If a unit got separated, an officer might try to re-group it by yelling for his men to get back into formation. The average soldier would also be yelling a battle cry, partly to induce fear in the enemy and partly as a unit identifier. Language and accent would help identify who was who."}, {"answer": " > When I look at movies that have vikings etc in them, they have no regulation uniforms whatsoever and their enemies wear roughly the same looking gear. How did the soldiers know, who were the enemies? A couple of things could make this easier. If you for example are fighting a different cultural group they likely look different enough to distinguish at a glance, even though movies these days are generally going to be pulling extras from the same general ethnic group. Another aspect is that soldiers are going into battle with their own unit. If you live with a group of people 24/7 you are going to start to be able to recognize them fairly easily, so when in battle you aren't going to suddenly forget who they are. At that point it is just up to the unit commanders not marching their troops on a different unit from the same army, which can be achieved simply by carrying a standard with the right colors."}, {"answer": "Battles used to be quite smaller in medieval times. Smaller units like viking raiders were small enough that everyone knew the face of everyone else on their side. These are people who travel together and live in the same camp together so they would be able to recognize each other, even if they did not remember everyones name. Just remember back to when you went to school with 3-400 other kids and would still be able to recognize people from your school if for example two schools were at the same sports event. This is the scale of most battles. Bigger battles were fought between mostly between different empires. So you would be able to tell people apart based on their gear. A polish knight would have a different style of armor then a french knight. There were times throughout history when you would be able to gather enough men from similar regions to have a big battle. But this does require a lot of organization as you need to convince people though money or politics to take part in your war. It is easy to get people to the battlefield when the mongols or the crusades comes and invade your country, however it is much harder to summon people to the battlefield when the neighboring town stole your bucket. When you have an organized wealthy society that can manage such armies you would be able to equip your soldiers with some sort of uniform. Not all soldiers in an army would get the same uniform as they were often belonging to different mercenaries or independent lords. However remembering a few banners is much easier then a few thousand faces. The people under each banner were also kept away from each other for the most part. But there are a lot of stories of friendly fires in medieval battles. Soldiers had a hard time recognizing allies in big battles and sometimes mistook their uniforms or banners. One such famous example happened in one of the battles in the war of the roses when a cavalry flanking charge were successful at driving an enemy to panic into opposing infantry forces. But this maneuver send the cavalry charging head on into friendly forces who did not recognize their banners. It was also not that uncommon for soldiers to stop and see if someone they did not know were a friend or foe would attack or not, sometimes even asking them directly. The movie Braveheart uses this as an element a few times and demonstrates how such confusion can happen in the heat of battle and how it can be resolved."}, {"answer": "Most battles didn't decend into madness. Even Vikings and other raiders, when not looting, organized into tight shield walls Of course there are mistakes made. The Austrians once killed thousands of their own men mistaking them for Ottoman regiments and a battle between the two sides ensued. This was a minority though, as most armies evolved banners, uniforms, and other communication methods to reduce friendly fire. But there were occasional mistakes, especislly at night."}, {"answer": "Common lore that the leek became a symbol because during a rebellion, I wanna say owain maybe Llewelyn, maybe a story figure, realised both English and Welsh were killing one another, so he called a retreat, went to a nearby field and placed leeks on his men. Thus, a leek would mark a Welshman"}, {"answer": "Uniform/Armor Style (colors worn, kind of gear, cloaks, tabards, etc), Ethnicity, Shield decoration, flags being flown, personally knowing each other, etc. But it was common for mistakes to be made."}, {"answer": "A lot of armies fought in formations which helped since everyone who was a good guy was over HERE while everyone who was a bad guy was over THERE. Before the era of formations, when skirmish warfare (people just running around bonking each other) prevailed, the fact that the basic social unit was probably a village, etc. may have helped since everyone would've been speaking the same language and the same dialect of the language (kill everyone with a funny accent!!!!). Still, even in the era of formations, accidents can and did happen - during the Peloponnesian War, there were \"friendly stabbing\" incidents during night time battles, some of which were catalyzed by people hearing other people speaking with a funny accent and not realizing that they were allies and not the bad guys."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "60237971", "title": "Warfare in the ancient Iberian peninsula", "section": "Section::::Military organization.:Infantry.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 10, "end_paragraph_id": 10, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["longshield, whose carriers would be called \"scutarii\". Balearic slingers would use hardened leather shields tied to an arm in order to leave both hands free to use their slings. Despite their light armor, which should force them to trust on strategy over all out assault, Hispanic infantry is also described as fearsome even in the front lines. Iberians and Celtiberians occupied comfortably the vanguard of Hannibal's army at the Battle of Cannae, divided in \"speirai\" (units similar to Roman maniples) and side to side to his Gaulish contingent, while Balearic slingers supported them from behind. Even Lusitanians, commonly known as ambushers and riders, are quoted to stand out for their ferocity and battle skill. This is attributed not only to the experience of their warring culture, but also to the quality of their weapons, particularly their swords.", "longshield, whose carriers would be called \"scutarii\". Balearic slingers would use hardened leather shields tied to an arm in order to leave both hands free to use their slings. Despite their light armor, which should force them to trust on strategy over all out assault, Hispanic infantry is also described as fearsome even in the front lines. Iberians and Celtiberians occupied comfortably the vanguard of Hannibal's army at the Battle of Cannae, divided in \"speirai\" (units similar to Roman maniples) and side to side to his Gaulish contingent, while Balearic slingers supported them from behind. Even Lusitanians, commonly known as ambushers and riders, are quoted to stand out for their ferocity and battle skill. This is attributed not only to the experience of their warring culture, but also to the quality of their weapons, particularly their swords.", "longshield, whose carriers would be called \"scutarii\". Balearic slingers would use hardened leather shields tied to an arm in order to leave both hands free to use their slings. Despite their light armor, which should force them to trust on strategy over all out assault, Hispanic infantry is also described as fearsome even in the front lines. Iberians and Celtiberians occupied comfortably the vanguard of Hannibal's army at the Battle of Cannae, divided in \"speirai\" (units similar to Roman maniples) and side to side to his Gaulish contingent, while Balearic slingers supported them from behind. Even Lusitanians, commonly known as ambushers and riders, are quoted to stand out for their ferocity and battle skill. This is attributed not only to the experience of their warring culture, but also to the quality of their weapons, particularly their swords."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "52211626", "title": "Delphic ambiguity", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Delphic ambiguity is forecasting which is heavily qualified or subject to misinterpretationa practice attributed to a oracle of Delphi, who answered a question by saying that a great empire would fall if Croesus crossed the River Halys, which was a logical step in his plan to attack the Persian Empire. Such ambiguities are often presumed intentional in their superficial appearance of providing more information than critical examination of their content would supportfor example, that famous prophecy might be expected to \"come true\" \"whichever\" of those two respective kingdoms' armies was defeated in detail at the battle which in due course took place beyond that river.", "Delphic ambiguity is forecasting which is heavily qualified or subject to misinterpretationa practice attributed to a oracle of Delphi, who answered a question by saying that a great empire would fall if Croesus crossed the River Halys, which was a logical step in his plan to attack the Persian Empire. Such ambiguities are often presumed intentional in their superficial appearance of providing more information than critical examination of their content would supportfor example, that famous prophecy might be expected to \"come true\" \"whichever\" of those two respective kingdoms' armies was defeated in detail at the battle which in due course took place beyond that river."]}}]}]

The different subgroups of Catholicism (Jesuit, Franciscan etc)

5k8xqe

[{"answer": "As mentioned by another poster, they're not subgroups of Catholicism in the sense of denominations if that is what you were thinking. Rather, there are different types of religious \"orders\". As the previous poster also mentioned, each order has a different way of serving and worshipping God. It's not to say that they believe any particular way is \"more correct\" than another way, but that it is simply the way they feel is best for *themselves* to glorify God. Some find that through prayer, others through education, others through prayer and reflection. Now, the origin of each of these orders comes from various groups of monastic priests (monks/brothers), and the rituals they would follow under their leader (an abbot). & nbsp; Whoever founded the order would have several monastic priests under him, and would often form several monasteries in his lifetime. It's not always founded under one specific leader, but to keep the explanation simple we'll treat it that way. Especially when the founder of an order passed away, others would often form new monasteries teaching in the same principles. This is why they are often named after a specific individual. There exist two main \"divisions\" when it comes to these orders: active and contemplative. & nbsp; Active would be those such as the Franciscans (St. Francis of Assisi), the Jesuits (St. Francis Xavier, after whom Pope Francis took his Papal name), and the Dominicans (St. Dominic). These \"active\" orders are the ones often going out and preaching, serving the poor, etc. Unless you visit a monastery, these are the ones you would be more likely to run into somewhere. The \"contemplative\" are more of the typical image of what a monk/brother is, living in the monastery with other monks, spending most of the day in prayer, reading Scripture, etc. As their name would imply, these are the ones spending most of their time in solitude, dedicating their lives to God in this manner. & nbsp; If you would like an overview of the most-popular orders, [this webpage]( URL_0 ) does a good job of explaining what each one specifically dedicates themselves too."}, {"answer": "TL;DR - All these different groups were founded in the Middle Ages to be a place to throw your 'extra' kid, to do different kinds of work for the Church. In the middle ages in Europe, life was hard. If you and your wife were commoners, it was very likely that more than half of any kids you brought into the world would die before giving you grandchildren. But what happens when you're 'lucky' and have five sons survive to adulthood, and the family farm can only support one or two of them? One path was apprenticeship, essentially selling the kid into indentured servitude in exchange for them having a paying trade at the end. Okay, that gets rid of one or two of them. But now you have Fred over here who has no talent in farming or a trade. You've spent a bunch of money to get him to breeding age and you're not going to get anything back from this. If you were a noble or something, you could send your kid into religious 'officer's school' to be a priest or bishop or something, but that option isn't open for poor Fred, either. Enter: monasticism. Basically, you can sell your kid to the Catholic Church, not for money, but for Heaven Credits (tm). We send useless Fred off to go be a monk at a monastery somewhere where he can earn money for the Church by toiling in some way or another (or providing some sort of administrative role) and spend the rest of the time praying for you and your wife's immortal soul. He doesn't get the prestige of being a priest who gets up in front of people and runs church, but there is at least a little status bump for having a kid be a monk, and you don't have to look at all those pox scars on his face all the time to remind you of all the food you could have saved if you had drowned him in the bathtub. But not all monasteries could sit off in the mountains and make beer for the Church to sell, or the bottom would just fall out of the market. So they diversified into doing shit that Church leaders really didn't want to do themselves. Some became those guys you can pay to sit in line for you on Black Friday, like the Carmelites squatting in what's now Israel so all those other filthy groups who wanted Israel couldn't live there. But it's kind of sandy and boring there, so nobody else wanted that job. Some became actual soldiers for god, like the Dominicans, who were brought together because the Cathars were Catholic'ing wrong and needed to have their heads rearranged by sharp bits of metal. Some went on biohazard duty, like the Franciscans tending to lepers. I mean sure, Jesus mentioned being nice to lepers, but those fuckers had communicable diseases! Some went out to be salespeople of Catholicism to the heathens like the Jesuits, because who really wants to go to foreign lands where they don't even have half-decent liquor and convince all these idiots to give your church their allegiance? That's not to say that's what all these groups do today. Today, the vast majority of religious orders do some great work for mankind. But you'd be surprised how many of them started with some priestly noble fuck not wanting to learn Native American languages or leave behind his comfy life in his family castle."}, {"answer": "Those two examples are not subgroups of catholics, they are different orders of priests. Different orders of priests focus on different facets of the ideas of the church, some on education, some one caring for the sick, others meditation and prayer."}, {"answer": "This isn't the most important thing, but it's good to know that the monastic orders operate independent of the local diocese. They are accountable to the leaders of their order, the College of Cardinals and the Pope, but they aren't under the authority of the local bishop."}, {"answer": "The different groups you're thinking of are different religious institutes. A religious institute is basically a society where members take public vows and live as brothers and sisters in common. There are a lot of different institutes and they all function a bit differently. In general, though, each institute focuses on a particular area or areas of church life. Some are contemplative, some serve in parishes, some have schools, some are separated from the world, some are active in the world, etc. In addition, each institute usually follows a specific set of rules about communal life. The Benedictines, for example, are monks who follow the rule of St. Benedict. The Franciscans are mendicants (meaning they live off alms, travel, serve the poor, etc.), who follow the teachings and practices of St. Francis. The Jesuits are clerics regular (a kind of broad category for priests) who work in all sorts of fields including parish life, education, scientific research, cultural pursuits, etc."}, {"answer": "They all believe more or less the same thing and have no impact on the laypeople at all. It's more like different clubs for the clergy. If you're gonna be a monk, that's great more power to you. But you know what's better than being a self proclaimed monk? Being part of an official monk club! And you have so many options. Benedictine, Franciscan, all sorts. Some like to sing. Some don't. They all like to read."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "64176", "title": "Franciscans", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 448, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

what happens when a happy person takes antidepressants

1tclod

[{"answer": "Nausea Insomnia Anxiety Restlessness Decreased sex drive Dizziness Weight gain Tremors Sweating Sleepiness or fatigue Dry mouth Diarrhea Constipation Headaches"}, {"answer": "Depends on the kind of antidepressant, of which there are many. SNRIs and SSRIs are probably the most common. They behave by inhibiting SERT, which is a membrane-bound protein which transports serotonin out of the synapse. In layman's terms, the drug increases levels of serotonin and, in the case of SNRIs, norepinephrine in the brain. Recent studies show the monoamine model of depression (i.e., that reduced serotonin levels cause depression) is wrong or unsupported, so no one knows *exactly* why these drugs work. The general theory these days is that they promote growth of new neurons in certain brain regions, which leads to a lessening of depressive symptoms. When a happy person takes these drugs, they may not experience any overt changes in their mood. They will likely just experience the side effects associated with elevated serotonin levels, including things like nausea, weight gain, dizziness, anorgasmia/sexual dysfunction, a \"flattening\" of mood or affect, etc. Other drugs will cause other effects. MAOIs work by inhibiting the enzymes that break down serotonin and other monoamines -- melatonin and other endogenous tryptamines. When a happy person takes MAOIs, they will have similar effects to SSRIs/SNRIs with the added side-effect profiles of having the *entire* spectrum of monoamines increased in their brains and bodies. Unique drugs like Mirtazapine are direct agonists/antagonists of certain serotonin, dopamine, and alpha-adrenergic receptors, meaning they don't necessarily derive their primary mode of action by increasing serotonin levels, but work by directly interacting with the receptors themselves in the brain. From experience, these kinds of drugs have more direct side effects, if that makes sense, including somnolence (mirtazapine and trazodone are used as sleep aids for this reason), increased appetite, strange/vivid dreams, and even odd things like increased erections in the case of trazodone. Basically, you will get the side effects of the drugs without the therapeutic benefit."}, {"answer": "I am not a Doctor but I have been on antidepressants before. It was a bad year and things looked pretty bad. Girlfriend cheated on me, dog died, lost a friend to cheating girl friend, Grandma died, and I was a poor college student on academic probation barely passing. The ones I was on took a long time to take effect first of all. So I am pretty sure if you took a couple doses nothing would happen. After I got a better hold on my life and things were going well the doctor kept me on them for a few more months. When I got off them I didn't really feel different. Going forward I just felt normal with or without them. Only other effects I had by taking them was sleeping longer and a major reduction in my sexual drive. So from my experience longer sleep with reduced sexual drive."}, {"answer": "I think it would depend on the drug, but antidepressants tend to make brain neurotransmitters (the chemicals nerve cells use to talk to each other) more available, either by increasing their production, reducing their removal, or preventing them breaking down. This is because neurotransmitter imbalances are one theory of depression Your brain can only use so much of these chemicals. It's like dissolving sugar in water - you can add more and more sugar until eventually, the water just can't take any more so it ignores it. The same would happen in your brain and you wouldn't feel any different. You may however, get the side effects."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5649035", "title": "Drug intolerance", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Drug intolerance or drug sensitivity refers to an inability to tolerate the adverse effects of a medication, generally at therapeutic or subtherapeutic doses. Conversely, a patient is said to be \"tolerating\" a drug when they can tolerate its adverse effects. It is not to be confused with a drug allergy, which is a form of drug intolerance, but requires an immune-mediated component. It is also not to be confused with drug tolerance (\"drug resistance,\" or tachyphylaxis) which refers to a \"lack\" of adverse effects even at higher than average doses. Some instances of drug intolerance are known to result from genetic variations in drug metabolism.", "Drug intolerance or drug sensitivity refers to an inability to tolerate the adverse effects of a medication, generally at therapeutic or subtherapeutic doses. Conversely, a patient is said to be \"tolerating\" a drug when they can tolerate its adverse effects. It is not to be confused with a drug allergy, which is a form of drug intolerance, but requires an immune-mediated component. It is also not to be confused with drug tolerance (\"drug resistance,\" or tachyphylaxis) which refers to a \"lack\" of adverse effects even at higher than average doses. Some instances of drug intolerance are known to result from genetic variations in drug metabolism."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "419447", "title": "Drug withdrawal", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 4, "end_paragraph_id": 4, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The route of administration, whether intravenous, intramuscular, oral or otherwise, can also play a role in determining the severity of withdrawal symptoms. There are different stages of withdrawal as well; generally, a person will start to feel bad (crash or come down), progress to feeling worse, hit a plateau, and then the symptoms begin to dissipate. However, withdrawal from certain drugs (barbiturates, benzodiazepines, alcohol, glucocorticoids) can be fatal. While it is seldom fatal to the user, withdrawal from opiates (and some other drugs) can cause miscarriage, due to fetal withdrawal. The term \"cold turkey\" is used to describe the sudden cessation use of a substance and the ensuing physiologic manifestations.", "The route of administration, whether intravenous, intramuscular, oral or otherwise, can also play a role in determining the severity of withdrawal symptoms. There are different stages of withdrawal as well; generally, a person will start to feel bad (crash or come down), progress to feeling worse, hit a plateau, and then the symptoms begin to dissipate. However, withdrawal from certain drugs (barbiturates, benzodiazepines, alcohol, glucocorticoids) can be fatal. While it is seldom fatal to the user, withdrawal from opiates (and some other drugs) can cause miscarriage, due to fetal withdrawal. The term \"cold turkey\" is used to describe the sudden cessation use of a substance and the ensuing physiologic manifestations.", "The route of administration, whether intravenous, intramuscular, oral or otherwise, can also play a role in determining the severity of withdrawal symptoms. There are different stages of withdrawal as well; generally, a person will start to feel bad (crash or come down), progress to feeling worse, hit a plateau, and then the symptoms begin to dissipate. However, withdrawal from certain drugs (barbiturates, benzodiazepines, alcohol, glucocorticoids) can be fatal. While it is seldom fatal to the user, withdrawal from opiates (and some other drugs) can cause miscarriage, due to fetal withdrawal. The term \"cold turkey\" is used to describe the sudden cessation use of a substance and the ensuing physiologic manifestations."]}}]}]

Is vaping unhealthy? Ive read different articles, some that says it might be bad, and some that says its harmless.

6zyeor

[{"answer": "The issue with vaping is that it is a relatively new way to use nicotine. It took decades of research and observation to identify the adverse health effects to chronic users of other tobacco products, and it will likely take a similar amount of time to confidently identify any problems that arise with e-cigarette use. That said, e-cigarettes do not contain the same harmful ingredients as cigarettes, which probably makes them safer, although I can't say how much. There have been some studies that show using e-cigarettes increases your risk of developing respiratory symptoms such as coughing or increased phlegm production. It is possible that it could increase your risk for heart disease, although that risk seems to be hypothetical at the moment. As far as cancer goes, while many of the carcinogens found in cigarettes are much lower in e-cigarettes, propylene glycol and glycerol (the main components in the liquid cartridge) both break down into several potential carcinogens. I can't say whether this makes lung cancer/disease more or less likely, however. And of course, nicotine abuse is bad for your cardiovascular system. That has not changed. TLDR; it's up in the air. The general consensus seems to be it is likely safer than cigarettes, however it's possible that there could be some bad stuff in the vapor. If there are negative health consequences, we won't really find out until people start getting sick, unfortunately."}, {"answer": "If we don't read into your question at all, the answer is of course, vaping is unhealthy. Inhaling any foreign substance is generally going to be unhealthy. If you're vaping or thinking about vaping just to vape, and not as a smoking cessation method, please don't, it's pretty dumb. If you insist, at least use zero nicotine juice. All that said, if you're using vaping to quit smoking cigarettes, that's a different conversation. I smoked for 25 years and quit the day I got a vape setup. I vaped for 2 years, slowly lowering my nicotine intake, and then I quit the vape, about a year ago. It was pretty effortless, although I'll stress that using a vape to quit smoking requires 1) a good investment in a quality kit 2) another investment in a quality BACKUP kit and accessories so when your batteries are dead or you're out of coils or juice, you're not forced to go buy cigarettes. 3) the right amount of nicotine in your juice. If you're still feeling the need to smoke a cigarette, increase your nicotine. I started with 18mg/ml, you may need 24mg/ml, or 9mg/ml might sate your craving. It depends on the person. I felt respiratory improvement after 2 weeks of not smoking. I certainly felt it in my wallet (vaping is ridiculously cheap compared to smoking), and I even felt it in my personal life, my wife really liked that I didn't smell like smoke."}, {"answer": "It's not harmless. It's significantly *less* harmful than smoking, but most e-liquids contain nicotine, which has harmful effects of its own, and many contain at least some carcinogens (that's \"things that cause cancer\", this being ELI5). That's just to *start* with; there are other reasons it's not good for your health. The long-term effects are unknown, so no major effects have been established, but that's not the same thing as an *absence* of major effects having been established."}, {"answer": "Source: Former smoker who now vapes, have read some news coverage and some actual scientific coverage. Nicotine by itself is not actually all that harmful, its similar to caffeine. No reasonable person will argue that it is not addictive, it clearly is. However, it is well understood that people get addicted to cigarettes because it is a highly efficient nicotine delivery system, but they are killed by the other components in the cigarette. Many of the chemicals in smoke which are known to be harmful come specifically from the combustion. If you were to dry out some lettuce and smoke it, you would inhale many of the same carcinogens. Used properly, vaping does not burn anything - i.e. there is no combustion. However, it is possible to 'dry hit' a vape - such as when you forget to refill the tank. This causes the cotton to burn and therefore creates the same types of carcinogens to be produced as in cigarettes. Some studies of vape technology have reported very high levels of formaldehyde, specifically, but examining the materials and methods of these studies shows that they were almost certainly burning the cotton. Therefore, high levels of formaldehyde actually are a good litmus test for the validity of a study. If the levels are too high, they are likely studying older technology and using it improperly. This is not to say the scientists involved are incompetent or doing this deliberately, the technology has improved very significantly in the last few years. Public Health England [has concluded through scientific study]( URL_0 ) that vaping is about 95% less harmful than smoking. This does not mean that vaping is harmless, simply less harmful. What is **not** yet known is the long-term effects of vaping. The first e-cig was invented in 2003. There were only a handful of products on the market before the last few years. We have about a century of data on smoking and its long term effects. Is it possible that in fifty years we will learn that vaping was in fact more harmful in the long term? We cannot rule that out, but we have no reason to believe it will happen. However it is known that continuing to smoke will be harmful, so for people like me who have had no success quitting without vaping it is worth a try. We have a choice between something that will definitely kill us, or something that might but more likely won't. **TL,DR:** If you've never smoked, its probably not a good idea to start vaping. If you can quit smoking without vaping, quit smoking. However, many people have been unable to quit smoking without vaping, and reducing harm is better than continuing to smoke."}, {"answer": "I used to work for an e-cig company working for a friend. He made millions when it first became a big hit (here in Canada) 6-8 years ago. My job was to make the juices, i.e. liquids that go into the devices. I was labels as an \"E-Liquid Engineer\". It kind of made me laugh, and it was then I realised sometimes the words \"professional\" and \"highly trained\" gets thrown around more often then it should. Essentially, what I was tasked with doing was mixing the core ingredients of the chemicals. There are two main ingredients, PG (Propylene Glycol) and VG (Vegetable Glycerine). Depending on the type of vape you want, be it more cloud, or smoother vape, etc. you would change how much of each of those main parts go into the mixture. People normally want a flavour to go along with the vape. I would add from a variety of flavours to the concoction. These flavours would range from something sweet, to fruity, to ones that taste like normal cigarettes. Most of the flavourings were harmless in their own, with most being simple flavour shots you could get at grocery stores or bulk barns. Others were concentrates mixed with a few other harmless ingredients. The last ingredient was the nicotine. It wasn't mandatory to have nicotine added to the bottle. There are many different \"strengths\" you can purchase, ranging from zero nicotine, to an extremely large amount (sometimes more then a regular cigarette). As others have mentioned, the nicotine is certainly a harmful chemical, and the vapes with in included should not be deemed \"healthy\". However, without that included, most vapes are relatively harmless. Of course what's even healthier then ingesting the PG and VG would be not vaping at all. I worked there for a couple of years, and I never vaped. I never smoked, so I felt no need to. It was a little odd being the only non-vaper, because vaping becomes a lifestyle of sorts. It's something a lot of people who begin vaping reaaaally get into. Bottom line though, the nicotine in the is essentially the worst part of vaping. Without that, it's truly not that bad. I mean, eating a Big Mac could probably prove to be worse for you then vaping without nicotine."}, {"answer": "Vaping is unhealthy compared to breathing in fresh air. It's healthy compared to breathing in cigarette smoke. It's healthy compared to inhaling aeresolized fat molecules from a deep fryer. It's all relative OP. The ELI5 answer is that vaping has not shown any long term health problems for users yet, but that this is still being studied closely. Vaping can help cigarette users quit smoking and it has none of the negative health effects that inhaling cigarette smoke does. People that switch to vaping to quit cigarettes can look forward to similar health levels as non smokers. While all of the ingredients in e-juice are approved for human consumption, there may be different health effects inhaling an aerosol of flavorings versus swallowing them. For example soda pop is okay to drink, but if you inhaled it, you would not find it agreeable and it could damage the lining of your lungs. While eating flavorings is healthy, the jury is out on effects of different flavorings on the lungs. A cigarette is consumed by burning it and inhaling the combusted gases, tars, ash, and chemicals released from combustion. Combustion isn't perfect and so a wide range of chemical compounds, many of which cause health problems are released. Vaping is not burning something, it is converting a liquid into an aerosol and inhaling it. This does not significantly change the chemical makeup of the aerosol versus the liquid juice. More details: The main materials are vegetable glycerin and polypropylene glycol. Both of these are FDA approved and safe for consumption and have no known health problems inhaling. The nicotine content varies from 0mg (none) to 24mg (around a cigarette strength). Nicotine is a drug, and in high concentrations it's a poison. This is mainly a concern for people handling 60-100mg/ml laboratory grade nicotine for mixing their own juice, but you wouldn't want a child to get a hold of a bottle of e-juice, or spill it on your shirt and ignore it. The main point of contention are the flavorings used to make the juice taste good to the user. The majority of these flavorings are USDA approved for human consumption, but the long term study of inhaling them is on-going. Most of the dangers you hear about from vaping products are a class of flavorings known to cause popcorn lung in high concentrations and prolonged exposures. To date there have been no instances of this occurring in any vaper, and the evidence of this occurring outside of factory conditions where workers spent hours a day breathing concentrated diacetyl in are anecdotal. Still though, better safe than sorry, and most vaporizer juice companies avoid these flavorings and volunteer laboratory results of their juice tests."}, {"answer": "[Serious]: So how does that work for cannabis which is vaporized fresh using convection heat?"}, {"answer": "I'm not going to say it's healthy. Vaping is definitely healiER than smoking a traditional cigarette. Compared to the thousand of chemicals in cigarettes, vape juice has only 4 or 5 (vegetable glycerin; propylene glycol; artificial flavoring; nicotine, if you choose; and some add artificial sweeteners). Not to mention that the wires that are used (kanthol) is the same wire that are used in your toaster. While the PG is one of the ingredients that are found in medical IV's, asthma inhalers, shampoo (a lot of day to day uses). You don't have all the carcinogens because you aren't actually burning anything. Believe it or not, vaping has been around since the 60s, but because of technology only being available to those who had the money to afford it. It's more readily available today because technology is in general. Just keep in mind that anything you put into your body is potentially harmful to you. The biggest point that I always made to people was that vaping is a healthier alternative to smoking."}, {"answer": "It probably isn't great. It is likely worse than not smoking anything, but is much better than smoking actual smoke. Unfortunately it hasn't been around long enough for there to be enough evidence to be definitive."}, {"answer": "I feel 100x better vaping than smoking cigs. Im not dead yet, and we are all but a blip in the universe..Have some fun while youre here. Take a chance-Colombus did!"}, {"answer": "There haven't been many studies on vaping since it's relatively new. A few weeks ago, Vice featured vaping (in a different context), but cited a federal study which found vaping to be 95% safer than smoking cigarettes. I vape myself. I know it can't be as harmless as breathing fresh air, but it's a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes. My doctor told me he looks at this way: cigarettes are known to have thousands of different chemicals in them, vaping e-liquid has 3 (glycerin, nicotine, natural/artificial flavors). So, I view it as the *much* lesser of two evils. Edit: here's a [study]( URL_1 ) conducted by the U.K.'s health department on vaping. And a [PDF]( URL_0 ) from the Royal College of Physicians, going into detail about the benefits to vaping over cigarettes."}, {"answer": "Please understand that nicotine is not bad for you unless you take in too much -it can actually kill you. ....kind of like caffeine. Too many energy drinks and you're a gonner. Nicotine is actually used as a stimulant (medication) for certain human diseases. It's also used as a primary ingredient in termite eradication liquids. It frustrates me when people think that Nicotine is the agenda that kills....usually it is NOT the catalyst."}, {"answer": "The truth is that we don't really know. People are just now starting to hit the 10 year mark with vaping, so it might be 20 more years before we have a definitive answer. That being said, it almost certainly has to be better than smoking. You'll be hard pressed to find any knowledgeable vaper who will say that vaping is completely harmless. For most of us it's about harm reduction. The good news is that the legitimate studies support this assumption. Nicotine has passed the AMES test, which looks to see if a substance causes DNA mutations in bacteria, which points to it being a carcinogen. There are also a few more studies that show that it's 95% less harmful than smoking. The only real big unknown out there is the flavorings, but unflavored is an option. There are a lot of bogus studies out there, though. I remember the big formaldehyde study a few years back had taken the crappy CE4 tanks and fired them at over 5V for 90 seconds. I've built some stupid big coils and I've never gone above 4.3V, plus no human is going to inhale for 90 seconds. Using those test parameters there's no doubt a bunch of garbage was produced (probably from the tank melting). At the end of the day you have to ask yourself if you're willing to take a risk that some unforseen major illness could be caused by vaping, or are you willing to stay with something that you know is going to kill you. I know the choice was easy for me."}, {"answer": "Well, since there is a lot of misinformation being spread here, let me clear the air. Vaping is not harmful, despite the false positive studies. There are 3 main ingredients in the liquid used for vaping. All three are used in your day to day life whether you vape or not. Propylene Glycol, Vegetable Glycerin, and just about any flavoring. Nicotine, being the fourth ingredient, is optional. Now, with vaping, nothing is burning, so let's get that ignorance out of the way. The liquid is atomizing, not burning. Think of it as the same way a dog machine works. Heated coil, liquid atomizes in to a vapor. With actual studies form credible sources done, vaping has been proven to be 99% safer than smoking and has been 95% effective is smoking cessation and harm reduction. Who is said this, American Lung Association, Royal College of Physicians, American Heart Association, and now even the CDC. The scare tactic of vaping being harmful was a hype train implemented by the tobacco companies who are losing money and are so far behind the market when t comes to vaping that they are scurrying for a way to regain their losses. Now, to anyone that wants to claim otherwise, throw your questions at me and I can easily answer them. I have experience in the vaping industry and the medical field, so unlike the majority of people buying in to the \"Vaping is as bad as smoking\" hype, I know the reality and the truth behind it."}, {"answer": "The honest truth is that we don't know. As someone else mentioned, it took years to measure and prove the negative effects of tobacco smoke (all smoke is carcinogenic) and although it seems that most ingredients in e-liquid and vapor (e-vapor is not smoke) are probably not carcinogenic its still not know if they could be harmful in the long term, as vaping is relatively new. As a best guess it's probably much less harmful than smoking and not likely to cause cancer but might cause other lung/respiratory issues, especially if you're sensitive to that sort of thing. The dangers of nicotine are also not well know, it seems that nicotine itself is not carcinogenic, but like most drugs it is indeed a poison, but only in very large amounts. It also might promote the growth of tumors but not enough is known to confirm this either. Its addictive effects are well know and because if this it is probably best avoided, although nicotine itself is not the most dangerous part of smoking. Much like smoking, its probably not to start of you can avoid it. However if you're curious its most likely a much better alternative than the proven dangers of smoking."}, {"answer": "Source disclaimer: Extensive conversations with my mother-in-law, who is a 30-year Mayo Clinic nurse. Not published science. Personal experience. So, according to my source, while vaping definitely doesn't share the same chemical hazards as cigs, the medical community has most definitely seen an uptick in health related issues that happen to correlate with the newfound popularity of vaping. She says that almost daily..DAILY..they are admitting people with extreme shortness of breath and early signs of COPD. Almost every patient admitted with these symptoms have self identified as habitual vapors. After tests, they have consistently found residual fluid in the lungs of the patients. She described it as slowly but surely giving yourself \"Pulmonary Edema\" which will eventually lead to chronic COPD. Basically, you are slowly drowning yourself. As I said, this isn't published science yet, but she says she wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years you START to see published science on the negative health effects of vaping."}, {"answer": "There's great documentary by BBC Horizon \u2013 \"E-Cigarettes: Miracle or Menace?\". I urge everyone to watch it. Vaping is MUCH healthier than smoking. There's almost immediate health improvement as you switch and it's pretty much no-brainer. BUT you tend to vape more often then you smoke as vaping is easier and more socially acceptable. And nobody really knows about all the flavouring side effect could have. If you're smoker, switch to vaping as it will improve your health immensely. If you don't smoke - don't touch any of it."}, {"answer": "For what it's worth, I smoked cigs for about 8 years then switched to vaping for two and a half years. I was diagnosed with cancer on my tongue in june, and had to have half of my tongue cut out and replaced with flesh from my wrist. I used a small pen style vape for about half a year and used a big sub ohm box mod for 2 years."}, {"answer": "[This]( URL_0 ) is worth a watch. Not the whole picture, but definitely some good basic science here, and just a straightforward display of how some information is getting skewed when it comes to vaping."}, {"answer": "Is popcorn lung a real thing or did Facebook make that up? Because that sounded pretty not good."}, {"answer": "Nobody ever talks about teeth in the middle of all this? Is vaping better for my teeth?"}, {"answer": "The short answer is we don't really know yet. The longer answer is it's question that many people care about significantly from either side, so they really want their conclusion to be upheld. As a result, many of the \"studies\" cited are biased one way or another. It's difficult to determine the longterm effects of something like vaping without, well, long enough time to test it. Once we have better quality tests over longer durations (and done by impartial bodies), we will have a definitive answer to it."}, {"answer": "In terms of healthiness? Smoking < Vaping < Neither"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "57552333", "title": "BPA controversy", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Bisphenol A controversy centers on concerns and debates about the biomedical significance of bisphenol A (BPA), which is a precursor to polymers that are used in some consumer products, including some food containers.", "Bisphenol A controversy centers on concerns and debates about the biomedical significance of bisphenol A (BPA), which is a precursor to polymers that are used in some consumer products, including some food containers. The concerns began with the hypothesis that BPA is an endocrine disruptor, i.e. it mimics endocrine hormones and thus has the unintended and possibly far-reaching effects on people in physical contact with the chemical."]}}]}]

Why are salespeople so adamant about getting you to sign up for their store's rewards card?

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[{"answer": "The cards allow them to track what you specifically are buying. It also allows them to more easily do direct marketing to you. That all together will be very valuable to the store... and others they may sell that data too. In addition, it may give you additional incentive to come into their store and shop to get their member deals and buy other stuff as well. There is fierce competition for your dollar, and getting you in their store is the only way they are getting any of it. And if you're going to their store, you may not be going to others. You and your money very valuable. Edit: To add on to this, some store associates are required or get bonuses to get you to sign up for their store cards, although usually this is more in the realm of clothing and home furnishing stores -- not grocery stores etc."}, {"answer": "Most sales people are \"graded\" by their superiors on how many customers they get to sign up for the store card. Generally the sales person hates pushing the card onto you just as much as you hate them pushing the card onto yourself. But, if they don't, they could potentially be reprimanded for not getting enough customers to sign up."}, {"answer": "The salespeople make a big deal out of it because it's a crucial part of how they get promoted, if they aren't getting paid commission. At many stores the rest of what you do isn't even that big of a deal, it's credit cards and rewards cards that let you climb the ladder. For credit cards, the store is paid by the bank that issues the card, and rewards cards are a cheap way to get personal information and purchasing data for targeted advertising."}, {"answer": "From a meeting my old company's CEO held for all employees for our huge C-store chain: > \"You have a guy who comes in and buys a coffee every day. It would make sense to run a coffee promotion or maybe give him points to get a free coffee. However he'll still buy the coffee regardless. Give him a free donut, now maybe once or twice a week he'll pick a donut up with his coffee\""}, {"answer": "It's because the managers make all the employees hit a certain number of sign ups each day. Source: I've worked a few retail jobs."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "665239", "title": "Direct marketing", "section": "Section::::Channels.:Couponing.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 59, "end_paragraph_id": 59, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["opt-outs at any time of the day. Roughly 2% of direct marketers use fax, mostly for business-to-business marketing campaigns. Couponing is used in print and digital media to elicit a response from the reader. An example is a coupon which the reader receives through the mail and takes to a store's check-out counter to receive a discount. \"Digital Coupons:\" Manufacturers and retailers make coupons available online for electronic orders that can be downloaded and printed. Digital coupons are available on company", "opt-outs at any time of the day. Roughly 2% of direct marketers use fax, mostly for business-to-business marketing campaigns. Couponing is used in print and digital media to elicit a response from the reader. An example is a coupon which the reader receives through the mail and takes to a store's check-out counter to receive a discount. \"Digital Coupons:\" Manufacturers and retailers make coupons available online for electronic orders that can be downloaded and printed. Digital coupons are available on company"]}}]}]

Why are galaxies relatively flat as opposed to being spherical?

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[{"answer": "From [Previous thread]( URL_0 ) - Here is a great ELI5 explanation. > Have you ever seen pizza made from scratch? The dough begins as a ball. It is then thrown in the air and spun. As it spins, the dough flattens and moves outwards into a disc shape. Solar systems and galaxies form like that. > Because they spin. When you have loosely connected matter, like the dust from which galaxies are formed--or, say, pizza dough--as it rotates, it tends to push material away from the axis of rotation. Thus, gravity can compress the matter into a disc-like shape, but the faster it rotates, the harder it is for it to compress into a spherical shape. > This applies to the formation of many objects in astrophysics--it's why solar systems tend to have a 'plane' much like galaxies, and even stars are originally formed from a collapsing disk. > It's also worth noting that there are more spherical galaxies, as well as a large central bulge in otherwise 'flat' galaxies. There's quite a lot of variance."}, {"answer": "As kind of an addendum to this question, is it possible for a disc shaped planet or star to exist? Or is it not possible for one to spin fast enough to achieve the effect? Is a pulsar the closest you can get to this?"}, {"answer": "If you have a large clump of particles swirling around randomly, there is generally a direction of rotation that the whole clump is spinning in. As for why its flat; generally, while the whole is spinning, the up and down motion tends to cancel out as particles crash into each other with the spin persisting. The result is a spinning flat disk that many galaxies this video describes it better than i ever could URL_0 "}, {"answer": "So the main thing at work here is conservation of angular momentum, which is a fancy way of saying that the total amount of rotation in a closed (isolated, not connected to some other source or sink of energy) system has to stay the same. So say you have a huge cloud of dust that will one day be a galaxy. At the moment it's a huge blob with particles flying in all directions and bumping into each other. If you add up the trajectories of all of the particles in that cloud, you will end up with a net amount of rotation on one axis (in 3D space), which means that the whole cloud is rotating in some direction on some 2D plane. Since the total amount of angular momentum in an isolated system has to stay the same, that means that the cloud must rotate no matter how the forces inside it end up balancing out. Particles that aren't rotating in that direction continue to bump into each other, as well as rotating particles, and over time, all of those opposing directional forces cancel out, leaving the cloud more or less all rotating in the same direction, on that same flat plane. The reason the disc doesn't collapse into a sphere is because the particles are individually too light relative to their distance between each other to overcome the centripetal forces keeping them locked in their orbits. Planets form spheres rather than discs because the particles that make them up, while starting as a cloud and collapsing into a disc, are able to pull together into clumps gravitationally. They still keep rotating in the same direction, but they all become larger chunks with enough mass to maintain a 3D shape against the speed of their rotation. This is also why all of the planets in most solar systems orbit in the same direction, because all of the particles that made them did so as well, and had nowhere to dump that rotation."}, {"answer": "Actually most galaxies aren't flat. The ones you know like andromeda and our own milky way, have a disk where most of the stars, planets, dust etc is but theres also a halo or sphere/oval shaped area around these galaxies which have less tightly packed dust, stars, star clusters, and planets. Theres also alot of rogue objects which arent really bound to anything gravitationally and are just drifting. The halo isn't really visible but there are objects that are a part of the galaxy out there. Then there are other types of galaxies which some don't even have a defined shape. Source: studied astronomy in college"}, {"answer": "If you have a lot of stuff rotating in random directions, then they tend to bump into each other a lot. The result is that stuff is either ejected or gets a change to its direction. Now, if you were to sum up all the stuff, *some* direction is going to have more stuff moving along it than the rest. The other directions will tend to cancel each other out, leaving you with the direction with the *most* stuff to be the remaining one."}, {"answer": "Actually, there are several types of galaxies- Elliptical (Round), Spiral (The flat one in question), and undefined (no specified shape). The reason why spiral ones are flat are because systems of stars are an orbit, and therefore are going on usually the same path, which cannot happen in a spiral galaxy."}, {"answer": "Try spinning a mop around its axis, and see what the treads do. If a group of (celestial) bodies move in a way that implies a center of gravity between them, centripetal force will flatten the spinning collective. Minutephysics has a great vid on it. Don't have the link now. Anyone?"}, {"answer": "I've heard the term \"conservation of angular momentum.\" Can someone explain that? Or is that wrong?"}, {"answer": "Additional question: Our solar system is usually represented in the popular media as flat, i.e. all planets (excluding Pluto) orbiting in the same plane. The exception is Pluto, which orbits in an angle (and having more of an elliptical than a near-circular orbit). Is that truthful? And if so, is that because of the same reason (i.e. like a pizza)?"}, {"answer": "Rotating things spread out. But also, there are lots of round and roundish galaxies. Ie: these are close neighbors to the Milky Way [Magellanic Clouds]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "Same reason pizza dough flattens out when they smash and spin it in the air! Centrifugal force from the spinning brings an outward force while spinning. It's a similar reason as to why a bicycle gets more stable the faster the wheels turn!"}, {"answer": "Any dust cloud in space has some kind of overall angular momentum about its centre of mass. This means that it has one \"amount of going-around-ness\" that it prefers. This is a conserved quantity, so no matter what happens inside the cloud the end result will have the same amount of going-round-ness Imagine that the final galaxy lies on a sheet of paper. Any vertical motion, through the page, starts off essentially random, but because of this lack of preference friction will eventually even it out. Think if two dust particles approach from above and below the page, their collision will nullify a lot of each particle's vertical motion but their motion around the surface of the page will be unaffected. Particles that are already moving in the on the surface of the page experience less bumps from other particles, so eventually it ends up where all the dust particles are going in a circle in the same direction around the surface of the page. Take away the page metaphor and you have a galaxy. This is also why our solar system is really flat, the same friction effects caused our primordial dust cloud to collapse into a ring around the sun from which our planets formed, that's why the planets all line up and orbit in the same direction."}, {"answer": "short answer because you cant spin in every direction at once. long answer, You can only spin in a single direction at a time, even if you add other rotation vectors to the spin all that does is transform the original rotation vector (it changes the direction of the spin), this is why galaxies are planar disks instead of a spheroid blob"}, {"answer": "Things start spherical, rotating in all directions. Over astronomical timescales, things collide with eachother until they start to look flat. At this point, collisions are quite rare, so things continue to rotate in a relatively stable, flat shape."}, {"answer": "The easiest way to understand this is to take a ball and spin it while it's wet. The patterns you get will show you what happens to small particles when they get spun from a central location. If you slowed it down, you'd see how the water breaks up and begins to form into clumps, similar to how stars and planets formed. I find it to be a more accurate display than a solid~ish object like a pizza."}, {"answer": "In a super simplified explanation: as planets and stars and other solar body's pass each other they're gravities pull on each other, slowing them down, and making it hard for them to move in different directions. Eventualy it gets to a point where only the biggest body's are still moving and their gravity is pulling along all the smaller body's in one uniform motion."}, {"answer": "Gravity makes things spin in a linear vector. Galaxies are formed in the shape of a ball at the beginning and eventually are pushed outward around the axis of the center. Have you ever been on a merry go round in the park? It works a lot like that."}, {"answer": "They're flat because they're spinning. They're spinning because random perturbations/collisions can cause things to move but, they almost *never* cause things to stop moving. Once things are moving, they tend to stay moving and, as the object gains mass, it's going to spin faster."}, {"answer": "Think of tides, the oceans move around to make the earth flatter when the moon moves around. Now imagine the \"oceans\" further out, feeling less of gravity, and centrifugal force, instead of the moons gravity, acting to stretch out the galaxy's \"ocean\""}, {"answer": "I always thought the same. When you see pictures of space it's something like Sun mars earth moon etc etc. In that line. But where will you end up if you go up from the north pole. Or South and down."}, {"answer": "Centrifugal forge. Gases (from which the galaxies are initially formed) take on rotational velocity as they form and coalesce. This rotation results in centrifugal force"}, {"answer": "I would like to know why they spin along generally the same axis instead of each the particles having their own individual orbit"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "420275", "title": "Bulge (astronomy)", "section": "Section::::Classical bulges.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["ellipticals and bulges that are like spiral galaxies. Bulges that have properties similar to those of elliptical galaxies are often called \"classical bulges\" due to their similarity to the historic view of bulges. These bulges are composed primarily of stars that are older, Population II stars, and hence have a reddish hue (see stellar evolution). These stars are also in orbits that are essentially random compared to the plane of the galaxy, giving the bulge a distinct spherical form. Due to the lack of dust and gases, bulges tend to have almost no star formation. The distribution of light is described by a Sersic profile.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "ellipticals and bulges that are like spiral galaxies. Bulges that have properties similar to those of elliptical galaxies are often called \"classical bulges\" due to their similarity to the historic view of bulges. These bulges are composed primarily of stars that are older, Population II stars, and hence have a reddish hue (see stellar evolution). These stars are also in orbits that are essentially random compared to the plane of the galaxy, giving the bulge a distinct spherical form. Due to the lack of dust and gases, bulges tend to have almost no star formation. The distribution of light is described by a Sersic profile."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "22577530", "title": "Flatness (cosmology)", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 2, "end_paragraph_id": 2, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The concept of \"curvature of space\" is fundamental to cosmology. A space without curvature is called a \"flat space\" or Euclidean space. Whether the universe is flat could determine its ultimate fate; whether it will expand forever, or ultimately collapse back into itself. The geometry of spacetime has been measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to be nearly flat. According to the WMAP 5-year results and analysis, WMAP determined that the universe is flat, from which it follows that the mean energy density in the universe is equal to the critical density (within a 1% margin of error). This is equivalent to a mass density of 9.9 \u00d7 10 g/cm, which is equivalent to only 5.9 protons per cubic meter. The WMAP data are consistent with a flat geometry, with \u03a9 = 1.02 +/- 0.02.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "The concept of \"curvature of space\" is fundamental to cosmology. A space without curvature is called a \"flat space\" or Euclidean space. Whether the universe is flat could determine its ultimate fate; whether it will expand forever, or ultimately collapse back into itself. The geometry of spacetime has been measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to be nearly flat. According to the WMAP 5-year results and analysis, WMAP determined that the universe is flat, from which it follows that the mean energy density in the universe is equal to the critical density (within a 1% margin of error). This is equivalent to a mass density of 9.9 \u00d7 10 g/cm, which is equivalent to only 5.9 protons per cubic meter. The WMAP data are consistent with a flat geometry, with \u03a9 = 1.02 +/- 0.02.", "The geometry of spacetime has been measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to be nearly flat. According to the WMAP 5-year results and analysis, WMAP determined that the universe is flat"]}}]}]

Why German Engineering Is spoken of as being superior to many other countries?

2mgx7d

[{"answer": "I'm going to explain this like I explained it to my actual five-year-old: Germany came late to the industrial revolution. They were able to build on the technological advances of the earlier factories and machines in other countries. Secondly Industries were set up as cartels. So the steel industry was a cartel for example. This led to uniform standards of production and quality. So eventually people noticed that products and materials from Germany were usually \"premium\" when compared to the average in the market. Tl;dr: they got the best factory equipment, and set up their industry in a very logical way. Cooperation rather than competition"}, {"answer": "I'm German so i can tell you some things i noticed when going to foreign countries. I don't really know much about college/university curriculum outside of my field. But the only thing i could say about mine is that it was extremely theoretical. Lots of math, lots of physics. When i finished university i couldn't do one thing right. But apparently companies don't expect you too. I've learned just as much in my first two years at work as i did at university. But i think lot's of it has to do with German work ethics. Get up early and work hard, you usually don't take many breaks just for a coffee, to small talk, or anything like it. We're usually very focused. I don't say other countries are lazy or something like that, it's just a bit more. And another really big thing i noticed (and other people i met agreed) is that especially in america people have the tendency to deny if somethings not working. Or just say i'm working on it, and it's ok. And people are even offended when you ask why their work doesn't work. Here in Germany we're usually very straight forward, if somethings wrong we say it just like that. And i think that prevents many bigger mistakes and enables people to give each other good advice or help if necessary."}, {"answer": "Also relevant: The term ['Made in Germany]( URL_0 )/(any other foreign country)' was supposed to corrupt imports for the UK in end of 19th century. Ironically the german 'rip-offs' labeled as such were actually pretty good or even of higher value, so 'Made in Germany' became eventually a certification mark."}, {"answer": "Back when American cars were extremely lucky to make it to 100k miles, German cars could do that and still drive like new, while the American cars drove like a floating cloud with no brakes. I think we've all pretty much evened up these days though."}, {"answer": "In the US I think alot of it comes from the legacy of the volkwagen beetle and bus. For decades these things were pretty much bullet proof. You could keep them running with a pair of vice grips and a match book. As the years went on they became known for very complex designs utilizing high quality materials. However, I've spent the last fifteen years fixing things. I've worked in auto repair, tool repair, and gun repair. Now I fix planes. German engineering sucks. It seems like there are two competing schools of thought. It's going to break, so we should keep that it mind while designing it. Somebody is going to have to take this apart to fix it, because it's awesome and people will want to repair it. It's perfect. It will never break. It will last forever. Its just that good. So lets make it ultra super complex, damn near next to impossible to take apart, and then lets put the most crucial parts in the very center! This is the German way of doing things. Their designs tend to focus on a few key features. Vibration reduction, noise reduction, and user comfort. Problem is these things add so extra parts into the mix that they break more often than other choices. So when you first get a German made item, its super awesome for the first phase of use. It will be better than your other options. Then it breaks and the nightmare begins. It will cost twice as much and three times more longer to get it back into operational shape."}, {"answer": "German engineer here: There are other countries well renowned for their engineering, like Switzerland, Japan, Russia and the USA. Russian products were made to last and work in all conditions. So the engineers had to make them simple and easy to repair. German companies usually have to look for small markets and design their products to fulfill the highest demands because the wages are relatively high and thus the products are expensive. With Switzerland, USA, Japan and similar rich countries this is true, too. For consumer markets, price is usually more important than quality, so countries with lower production costs make compromises with quality to compete in this price sensitive market. Look at solar panels: when efficiency mattered most, Germany was leading, now that it is a mass market, China took over, because production is much cheaper (which may have to do with lower environmental standards beside wages). The production machines often still are german though. Cameras: the only german manufacturer left follows a very special concept, aiming for a few enthusiasts. Countries with high GNI can afford better education. Compared to other countries, the german system focuses on more theoretical work in universities, and on more industry oriented education in the former FHs (now called university, too). Our students don't have to pay tuition fees. The universities cope with the lack of money by working together with companies, which is easy in the engineering field, but difficult in some other."}, {"answer": "I agree with many of the other points made in this thread, but I also think that there are a couple of other points. Firstly Germany is a Rhine economy which means that the Government takes a more active role in the economy - supporting, investing in, and subsidising key industries as they see fit and in accordance with a wider economic strategy. Anglo-saxon economies also pay out a lot in subsidy (more that their reputation for 'laissez-faire' might imply!) but it's more of a free-for-all. The advantage of the Rhine model for large industrial companies is that it creates economic stability so that they can invest and develop themselves long-term, and it reduces risk because they know that if there is trouble, the government will help them (and in many instances the government owns a big chunk of the business, so it's in their interest to step in, not only to protect the economy from lots of job-losses and additional benefits claims, but to protect the long-term revenues of the nation via dividends as well as taxes). Because they operate in a more stable, conservatively-run economy, instead of an extreme boom-and-bust cycle, and because they have the additional security of support from the government, these industrial companies can invest in R & D and the latest production methods and technology more easily - they may feel that they can afford to think long-term about expensive projects. Another issue is that historically many countries had similar reputations for excellence in engineering and manufacturing. Even the reputation of the British was once very good (and in some specialist areas such as space technology, it still is). However the British had a problem, and that problem was called oil. The discovery of oil in the North Sea forced the price of the pound up, because everyone wanted to buy oil from us, and needed to buy pounds in order to do so. This meant that the UK currency got relatively expensive, which meant that companies exporting goods from the UK found that their products were immediately more expensive than those of their international peers. The automotive industry, for instance, was destroyed, when previously we had exported respectable numbers of cars such as the Morris Minor to other countries."}, {"answer": " > Why [is] German Engineering Is spoken of as being superior to many other countries? Better branding? While Germany does some excellent engineering, the idea that they're head and shoulders above everyone else is seriously overblown. As /u/pharmaceus put it: > The Netherlands or the Swiss have comparable quality of industry and yet nobody thinks \"Dutch engineering\" or \"Swiss engineering\" as their first thought. And they are definitely the places to go in my field (construction & engineering) - not Germany. I think that part of the reason for Germany's reputation is that they make some good expensive cars, like Mercedes, BMW and Porsche. Cars are the highest visibility product you can make, so those brands boost the German image. As an American I *hated* the American car industry for the garbage it produced, because it gave American products in general a bad reputation (including amongst Americans). Actually the opposite was true, back in the days when the US actually manufactured things, and even now with engineering done here, there are many excellent American products. Want to try American electronic engineering? Back before the Japanese destroyed it with price dumping, the US also had an excellent machine tools industry. The US had a host of other quality products too, like major appliances. We have an excellent and deserved reputation for aircraft (and will keep it if the brilliant management at Boeing realize when they design the 797 that Boeing has the best staff of airliner engineers in the world)."}, {"answer": "Precision. They don't know what it means to say, \"That's *good enough*.\" That attitude tends to be a precursor to quality."}, {"answer": "At this stage of the game, it's pretty much a marketing gimmick."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "4337123", "title": "Economic history of Germany", "section": "Section::::Industrial Revolution.:Railways.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 40, "end_paragraph_id": 40, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways. In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by 1850, Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry. Observers found that even as late as 1890, their engineering was inferior to Britains. However, German unification in 1870 stimulated consolidation, nationalisation into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth. Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialisation, and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts, and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen. By 1880, Germany had 9,400 locomotives pulling 43,000 passengers and 30,000 tons of freight, and pulled ahead of France.", "Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways. In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by 1850, Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry. Observers found that even as late as 1890, their engineering was inferior to Britains. However, German unification in 1870 stimulated consolidation, nationalisation into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth. Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialisation, and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts, and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen. By 1880, Germany had 9,400 locomotives pulling 43,000 passengers and 30,000 tons of freight, and pulled ahead of France."]}}]}]

Why do people on online communities help out so much, what is the incentive?

jaflu

[{"answer": "People get bored of looking at pornography and funny cat images eventually."}, {"answer": "The act of helping someone is its own reward. I come on here as a psychologist in his free time just to help others, to reward curiosity with knowledge."}, {"answer": "Isn't that really the only purpose for life? To lend a hand to help out your fellow man?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "212192", "title": "Online community", "section": "Section::::Classification.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 33, "end_paragraph_id": 33, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Some research has looked at the users of online communities. Amy Jo Kim has classified the rituals and stages of online community interaction and called it the 'Membership life cycle'. Clay Shirky talks about community of practice whose members collaborate and help each other in order to make something better or improve a certain skill. What makes these communities bond is \"love\" of something as demonstrated by members who go out of their way to help without any financial interest. Campbell et al. developed a character theory for analyzing online communities, based on tribal typologies. In the communities they investigated they identified three character types:", "Some research has looked at the users of online communities. Amy Jo Kim has classified the rituals and stages of online community interaction and called it the 'Membership life cycle'. Clay Shirky talks about community of practice whose members collaborate and help each other in order to make something better or improve a certain skill. What makes these communities bond is \"love\" of something as demonstrated by members who go out of their way to help without any financial interest. Campbell et al. developed a character theory for analyzing online communities, based on tribal typologies. In the communities they investigated they identified three character types"]}}]}]

What's the noise we hear in our head when we stretch?

5a6ilw

[{"answer": "Previous answer from /u/toasterkid \"What you are hearing is the tensor tympani muscle. This is a small muscle in your ear that acts as a dampener of external sound. It attaches to a small bone in the ear and prevents it from oscillating, particularly when chewing. This is why you can also hear it if you move your jaw in certain positions, it also tends to contract when you close your eyes tightly and quickly. You'll notice the sound will only last briefly. This is because the initial contraction of the muscle causes the bone to move creating a rumbling sound. Interestingly, some people have the ability to contract this muscle voluntarily.\" Also, check out /r/earrumblersassemble :D"}, {"answer": "You're probably an ear rumbler and you're flexing your tensor timpani muscle when you yawn or stretch. /r/earrumblersassemble"}, {"answer": "I can do it voluntarily, although I'd describe it more like a wind sound. The sound is more intense when I close my eyes tightly."}, {"answer": "I've never heard any noises, I don't know what is every talking about, can someone explain like i'm two or three?"}, {"answer": "I get it while yawning. I'm thinking that maybe it could be blood flow increasing temporarily in that area since yawns happen in much the same area as the ears Edit: too comment says it's a muscle and bone. How cool!"}, {"answer": "Do you mean the sound from contracting the muscles in your ears?"}, {"answer": "I used to to do this when I was younger as a means to dampen loud external noises. Now, I do it to help block out spoilers from sports broadcasts when I'm in public."}, {"answer": "I'm not familiar with this sound, unfortunately. I'm more concerned about the crunchy, creaking sound in the back of my head when I lift my head up. Doesn't sound quite right to me - anyone know what this is?"}, {"answer": "Aghhh finally I know what that noise is. I can make it voluntarily as well. Good to know."}, {"answer": "Wait wait hold up am I the only one who doesn't get this??"}, {"answer": "I would always ask the adult figures in my life what caused that but they never had an answer for me. They didn't have many answers in general... But I digress. TIL I have a rare ability. XD"}, {"answer": "What? I've never experience this or heard of this."}, {"answer": "That is the exact sound of my tinnitus. Only I hear that x 1000 louder 24/7. I don't really notice it though, it's amazing how the body and mind can adapt... until I hear a tinnitus commercial where they replicate the sound. Seriously, those people need to be punched in the face."}, {"answer": "Holy crap I've been doing this for 40 years and I finally understand what it is. I stopped asking other people about it when I was 10 since no one ever said 'oh yeah I can do that too'"}, {"answer": "I've been able to contract the muscle all my life and noticed it to be a sound dampener. I've always wondered if it really was a set of natural ear protection but now I know. Comes in handy when you work at a gun range."}, {"answer": "Does it sound like pop rocks? Or like a very muted thunder?"}, {"answer": "I can make an internal WHHMM like noise in my ears when I make my mouth into a yawn like shape and move my inner throat back and forth and I can make it do it over and over again. it also makes this noise when I crack my neck (only when I bend it to the right though) is this the noise you're talking about? cuz I was wondering if there was something wrong with me but this is really interesting to learn"}, {"answer": "I have always wondered what that was. I can tell alcohol is starting to hit me when that sound is more pronounced when I close my eyes. Any pills do that too. It's like my own personal indicator that a drug is now in my system."}, {"answer": "Is it the noise that sounds kind like a strong breeze outside, also kind of like somebody sliding a couch along on the floor above you? I can make that noise voluntarily in my head but I have no idea where it comes from!"}, {"answer": "If I tighten my jaw muscles or some around my ear I don't hear a rumbling noise but a kind of high pitched a squeak/squeal."}, {"answer": "These same muscles are irritated the day after I miss my Paxil dose. Also referred to as \"head zaps\". Very interesting."}, {"answer": "You hear a noise when you stretch??? Woah. Now I have to see."}, {"answer": "You mean the one where you close your eyes really hard?"}, {"answer": "Previous answer from /u/toasterkid \"Interestingly, some people have the ability to contract this muscle voluntarily.\" It's nice to know, after all this time, that I'm not a (total) freak and that this has a name."}, {"answer": "I've been wondering about this. I hear it when I yawn, chew, anytime I hear something loud and if anything touches my ear. Basically I hear it almost all the time."}, {"answer": "My other half has Tourette's syndrome and can't make that sound happen at all, he has no idea what I'm talking about. Wonder if there's a link?"}, {"answer": "I always assumed everyone could do this. This explains a lot as to why when I tell people to do it they act like I'm crazy!"}, {"answer": "I know what you mean, I hear that sounds too. Can't describe it, or answer your question though. Just thought I would validate you."}, {"answer": "I can do this voluntarily, and I can also wiggle my ears, does anyone know if the two are connected?"}, {"answer": "Wait I can hear that noice voluntarily, you're telling me other people can't?"}, {"answer": "How about the squishing sound i hear when i get really angry?"}, {"answer": "So you're saying I don't have the force when I yawn?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2186011", "title": "Tensor tympani muscle", "section": "Section::::Function.:Voluntary control.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 12, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 12, "end_character": 522, "bleu_score": 0.6248888124043928}]}]

Why are people against mandatory background checks before buying a gun?

6lzqth

[{"answer": "In the US, there's already a [mandatory background check]( URL_1 ) to buy a gun in a retail setting (if you buy a new or used gun from a store, you will have a background check). Further, because the federal government can regulate sales of things that cross state lines, it's illegal for two people to sell a gun privately without involving a retail store (and thus a background check) if they don't reside in the same state. There isn't a background check on private sales within most states. So when someone says, we want mandatory background checks on all gun sales, they mean they want them on private, in state gun sales. The opposition points out that we enforce the background checks on retail sales by [very strictly controlling the inventory of retailers]( URL_0 ) (they must keep a log book of every single gun that goes through their store). Gun owners are exceedingly concerned that a similar registration of the guns they own gives the state a tool that's much too useful should it ever wish to seize the guns (since it would know where every single gun in the nation is). This is why there's opposition, the current background checks cover almost all gun sales, and there's too little trust that the means of enforcing private background checks would eventually be the means to facilitate a seizure of private guns."}, {"answer": "Most people that are against them aren't against them entirely for the most part people are ok with the current system of if you buy a gun at a store you get a background check. The debate is usually around whether or not the should be required for personal gun sales/transfers. So if i sell you a gun that i own I would be responsible for making sure you are legally able to own a gun. People dont want that responsibility placed on them they feel it could end up hurting them"}, {"answer": "Many people see it as a slippery slope situation, and they are not wrong, either. There is an element of the gun control crowd that wants to ban all guns. That's not politically tenable right now, so they want to do it in little steps. First background checks, then broaden the prohibited categories until the background check becomes prove to us you really need a gun. So even when a gun control proposal seems reasonable, the pro-gun people will oppose it, because they have no faith it will stop at \"reasonable\"."}, {"answer": "Personally I can agree with having background checks in private sales in theory. However were ultimately talking about a mountain out of a molehill argument. So few gun sales would be affected by a law of this nature that it appears to me and many others to be nothing more than a power grab. As it stands you can't legally buy a firearm in any store or gunshow without a background check. I encourage you to YouTube any of the videos of ppl going undercover to try and get a gun at gun show without a check(this is where supporters of laws like to act like a loophole exists. Hint: it doesn't exist). The only firearm sales that would be affected would be private sales or transfers between citizens who are not dealers which makes up a very very small minority of gun sales. Because of how little a law mandating universal checks would actually change things, it is better to oppose what amounts to be a power grab, to prevent further grabs, than to allow the law to go through. It would be a lot better to come up with ways to help treat and prevent a mentally ill person from obtaining a firearm, or to end the root causes of most gun crime aka the war on drugs. As far as the mentally ill are concerned, no background check in the world will ever screen them out because of our medical privacy laws. There are a lot of effective ideas that can be attempted if common ground could be found but it's not likely to happen any time soon. BTW the same amount of ppl are killed yearly from drunk drivers when compared to homicides. That's not including just regular old traffic accident fatalities. And yet we give 16yo kids the ability to drive alone in most states after barely needing to prove any proficiency behind the wheel. Even ISIS has begun to realize that all they need is an automobile to inflict a mass casualty incident. That should scare everyone whole lot more. You will get into a car accident in your life, most will never hear a gun shot fired in anger and many more will never hear a gun shot at all in their lives. Let's solve problems that are real threats to the majority of ppls lives instead of focusing on red herrings given to us by those in political parties. That's just my 2cents on the matter."}, {"answer": "Some see it as an infringement, and thus unconstitutional. Some say the constitution entitles all citizens to guns, not just those who can pass some kind of background check. Some feel if you give an inch on the gun issue, even a reasonable inch, the people they feel are \"anti-gun\" will push the issue down the slippery slope towards total gun confiscation."}, {"answer": "We already *have* background checks for purchasing guns. The issue surrounds private sales between individual citizens. You'll also notice that most gun owners have no issue with said background checks, but they'd like to do it themselves and have access to NICS (which is the system used to perform the background check). If individual citizens can get access to NICS, there's no record of the sale, which is what we're interested in; having a third party (which would invariably have to be the government) do it means there *is* a record of the sale, which would invariably have to involve the name of the buyer and the seller. That is, essentially, a gun registry, which is a big concern among gun owners."}, {"answer": "The background check system in Australia varies a little from state to state. But **ALL** states check for *criminal history, mental health and domestic violence*. Some also have *other* listed, as well as *addiction, residential and physical*. What they mean by those last ones, I don't know. I believe the first two are the most important. But we also have tighter laws here than the USA. For instance, even if you are fully licenced for a particular gun, you **CAN NOT** just sell that gun to another fully licenced person privately. **ALL** transactions **MUST** be done through a licenced dealer. **ALL firearms MUST be registered**, and the dealer is the one that supplies and files the paperwork with the government body."}, {"answer": "They are mandatory when buying from a retailer. Private sales in some states require background checks on private sales as well The big argument is that it will lead to a national gun registry, making future gun bans a possibility. They'll know who has what, and how many. The problem with increased regulations, is that they never know when to stop."}, {"answer": "You have a few assumptions that are erroneous: * **People are against background checks that stop mentally unstable people from purchasing a gun** - That's not true. We already have mandatory checks in place for retail purchases that include, despite claims to the contrary from gun control people, purchases over the internet and gun shows. As it's been pointed out in the other comments, people are against the requirement to conduct a background check if you have a gun of your own that you'd like to sell. * **Including personal transfers in the background check requirement would stop more gun crimes** - The majority of gun crimes are committed either by people who have *illegally* obtained a gun by theft or by people who had a legal right to purchase a firearm, in which case, why would extending the reach of current checks to include personal sales have any impact on those legal purchases? * **Current background checks don't bar mentally unstable people from buying guns** (based on your comment) - Mentally unstable people are already barred from purchasing firearms. California is a prime example of what happens when you allow gun control politicians to have an unfettered ability to enact the gun control they desire. CA counties require you to [*prove* you have a pressing need for a concealed carry license]( URL_3 ). At one time, they required gun merchants to send a list of all gun purchasers to the state every month. [They imposed heavy restrictions on the purchase of ammunition]( URL_0 ). CA bans the sale of certain rifles that [use special features on magazines]( URL_2 ). The point is, the gun control politicians know they can't outrightly ban firearms so instead they make it as onerous as possible to own or obtain firearms, accessories, and ammunition. The rifle most gun control groups want to ban is the AR-15 even though handguns are the weapon of choice for mass shooters. Their reason for attacking the AR-15 seems to be that it *looks* military or scary, not that it's any more lethal than a handgun. Many groups even intentionally or unintentionally misstate that an AR-15 is capable of fully automatic fire. The accessories they try to ban have nothing to do with the lethality of the AR-15 ([barrel shrouds]( URL_1 ), pistol grips, and flash suppressors. So the argument that there's a \"gun show loophole\" is false. The argument that the majority of mass shootings occur because there is some flaw in the background check system is false. It's not that people are against mandatory checks, which is why there are in fact mandatory checks. Rather, it's that people object to gun control politicians from trying to make it onerous for legal purchasers to purchase or own something that they have a constitutional right to own."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "7800201", "title": "Gun violence in the United States", "section": "Section::::Public policy.:Access to firearms.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 82, "end_paragraph_id": 82, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["he National Safety Council released a state ranking on firearms access indicators such as background checks, waiting periods", "In 2017, the National Safety Council released a state ranking on firearms access indicators such as background checks, waiting periods, safe storage, training, and sharing of mental health records with the NICS database to restrict firearm access", "U.S. policy aims to maintain the right of most people to own most types of firearms, while restricting access to firearms by people considered to present a higher risk of misuse. Gun dealers in the U.S. are prohibited from selling handguns to those under the age of 21, and long guns to those under the age of 18. In 2017, the National Safety Council released a state ranking on firearms access indicators such as background checks, waiting periods, safe storage, training, and sharing of mental health records with the NICS database to restrict firearm access. Assuming access to guns, the top ten guns involved in crime in the U.S. show a definite tendency to favor"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "43159487", "title": "Universal background check", "section": "Section::::Background.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Proposals for universal background checks would require almost all firearms transactions in the United States to be recorded and go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), closing what is sometimes called the private sale exemption. Currently, federal law requires background checks (through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System) only for guns sold through licensed firearm dealers, which account for 78% of all gun sales in the United States.", "Proposals for universal background checks would require almost all firearms transactions in the United States to be recorded and go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), closing what is sometimes called the private sale exemption. Currently, federal law requires background checks (through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System) only for guns sold through licensed firearm dealers, which account for 78% of all gun sales in the United States. This figure was published in a 2017 study by the Annals of Internal Medicine which compared data from 1994, indicating 40% of recent gun acquisitions were completed without a background check, to a 2015 survey which found that 22% of recent gun transfers (purchased and nonpurchased) were completed without a background check. The current federal law allows people not \"engaged in the business\" of selling firearms to sell firearms without a license or records. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) states that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System has prevented over two million felons and other prohibited persons from purchasing firearms. According to the CSGV, the law also has a prohibitive effect, that deters illegal purchases."]}}]}]

Why can't surgeons simply cut out the fat and excess skin or perform extreme liposuction to people that weigh 500+lbs?

3v8g5x

[{"answer": "It's not always just fat \"under the skin\". A lot of fat is interstitial or spread throughout muscles and in between organs. Think of a nice fatty marbled kobe/wagyu ribeye steak. The fat is all interleaved between muscle fibers. Now there is a lot of subcutaneous fat, but removing it also damages all the connective tissues between the skin and your body, its not as simple as \"vacuuming out the fat\". Google for a cross section/MRI of an obese body and it'll show you where the fat deposits are spread around. Edit: here's a link to an photo that shows the difference between where the fat is located on an obese vs regular profile. It's also visceral (inside your body cavity) fat that isn't something you can vacuum out either. URL_0 edit2: there are quite a few people who are disturbingly interested in \"dat thigh gap\" on the slimmer cross section.. edit3: and for a very medically compelling answer to people asking \"Well why can't you just remove the stuff under the skin that you can get to easily\", taken from a comment below by /u/huphelmeyer: > \"When more than 5,000 cc's of fatty aspirate are removed, the complication rate rises dramatically. Under these circumstances, massive fluid shifts can occur, which increase the potential for cardiac and pulmonary complications.\" edit4: there are some very good more detailed answers in some of the other comments. my comment here is mostly focused around helping people realize that body fat is more complicated than just being \"under your skin\" and there's no easy way to *safely* remove it via surgery."}, {"answer": "When more than 5,000 cc's of fatty aspirate are removed, the complication rate rises dramatically. Under these circumstances, massive fluid shifts can occur, which increase the potential for cardiac and pulmonary complications."}, {"answer": "Because this is an ELI5 and not a personal request for medical advice (one reason I think many doctors who see these threads and don't reply are concerned about) there are really four main factors, which some commenters have already mentioned. But if you want the real answer you're gonna have to put up with the TL version without DR. 1) Anaesthetic risk is even more risky. Sedating/paralysing/analgesing someone is a balance of many factors. Forgive the pun but obesity puts the balance out of whack. The easiest part of that to understand is that you physically have to keep the airway open against a person's body weight when they are entering/coming out of sedation(the machine does that in the middle), let alone the chemical/neurological aspects of keeping them safely \"under\". 2) Fat is a difficult tissue to work with. It is intricately connected to all its surrounding tissue, so even though you can separate it from the skin, it's something like how when you peel an orange the white pith always comes away with the segments. Plus fat is not even deposited in neat segments, it just looks that way because a lot of it will make up a layer, and, as others have mentioned, it also coats our internal organs for protection. There are blood vessels all through our fat. Even moreso than that, fat has an important hormonal role in the body, it is also a small source of stem cells, and performs other homeostatic functions (it's a buffer for chemicals and other nutrients we eat/store/release). 3) Big surgery is a big deal, like running a marathon on no training. Literally the most invasive intervention we have in medicine. Even small wounds cause lots of inflammation, and when you divert fluid en masse from one part of the body to another (wound) site, you get the fluid shifts everyone keeps mentioning. \"Lasering\" off the fat (cauterising, more like) still leaves charred unhappy tissue behind. And afterward, any surgery creates scar tissue - in a joint, in the abdominal cavity (sticky adhesions that can cause your bowels to twist on themselves and even cut circulation off) and yes, even track marks in fat. Any doctor will tell you the principles of treatment start with conservative (e.g. quitting smoking, dieting), then medical (nonsurgical interventions like medications or CPAP snoring machines) before surgical, with few exceptions such as broken bones. The media does not acurately reflect this decisionmaking process, which is done through talking WITH the patient, at all. But it is a cornerstone of good practice, one which makeover reality shows can decieve you does not exist. 4) Then, you have to recover from it. Some commenters have mentioned the psychological aspects of dramatic weight loss. It's more like, how would you deal with the probably dramatic body adaptations to sudden massive weight loss? People do not realise that plastic surgeons have a responsibility to leave a safe amount of fat on the body so that it continues to function as expected for the patient. Unlike amputation, which is obviously, very traumatic, and unlike small volume liposucton, the tissue loss you are asking about is not isolated. Plus the skin is our number 1 defensive barrier against infection, and now you go and compromise it all over. As I mentioned earlier, adipose (fat) plays a buffering role in the body, and the body continues to support the growth of adipose as well as form scar tissue wherever normal tissue integrity has been physically interrupted. The effect of sudden massive adipose loss has not been well studied, and in my honest medical opinion, it is not ethical to begin to do so at this time in history, despite those who I imagine will reply to tell me otherwise. A myriad of terrible complications are all theoretically probable from the surgery you are thinking of. So, it isn't a thing. Edit: paragraphs as requested - sorry I wrote it in my phone and didn't double-enter."}, {"answer": "The body will react adversely to a sudden change. It's for this reason too that people who are fasting never go for a buffet on finishing it. Instead they start slowly with liquids then light food before they can return to their normal diets. The human body needs to get conditioned. A sudden loss of fat might end up killing the person."}, {"answer": "Kind of a tangent; but can anyone explain why liposuctions seem so violent!? There is a shit load of bruising and watching a surgery was like watching a doctor murder fat with a tube!"}, {"answer": "I'm not a doctor or expert on the matter. However I could tell you that I got an abdominoplasty and liposuction on my sides when I was 24. I was 240 at the time and 5 foot 9 inches. I'm also a male, where a lot of the patients in this particular area are male. The procedures were expensive and pretty invasive in my eyes. However, I was dealing with really emotional stuff after a huge breakup after a long relationship so I was pretty vulnerable. I ended up getting the procedure done by the same doctor whome I paid to perform breast enlargement on the same girlfriend who just left me. I had to get the approval of both my psychiatrist and therapist who said I was of sound emotional mind to get the procedure. Now, I'm getting my masters in mental health therapy and I know what to say and I realize now it was a mistake. Anyways, sorry for getting offtrack. The after procedure healing for me, even for someone who isn't 500+ pounds, was very painful and taxing. I had to get two pumps on either side of my abdomen to suck out blood, make sure sites were clean, not to mention not being able to move and risk of infection. Luckily this didn't happen to me but I imagine these are big concerns with people very obese. The other main issue is that this doesn't teach the patients anything. These people who would get liposuction will likely just regain the weight if they don't show their doctor they can lose the weight and keep it off for a period of time. I'm an anecdotal account of this. I ended up regaining all the weight and undoing every procedure I had done within a year and a half. I'm embarrassed of myself. Basically I have a scar larger and thicker than a c section scar going across the whole front of my waist and on top of that I'm a male, so I get lots of questions whenever my shirt lifts up accidentally and reveals it. I'm ashamed of the decision I made, not being dedicated to weight loss and choosing a shortcut where I ended up worse then before. Anyways, I know this is a more personal account and may not answer your question completely, but maybe it can give you some first person insight in what can happen when someone like me makes a stupid decision and isn't ready for the responsibility of what these types of surgeries entail. Have a great day."}, {"answer": "Fat is all over the body, and each chunk of fat has access to blood. It would be like performing 100's of amputations at once. And each of these amputations has a ton of risks. Patient won't survive that."}, {"answer": "Surgeon's Assistant here, with experience in Plastics and Massive Weight loss: The quick answer is fluid / electrolyte balance. When you remove a ton of fat at once, you seriously upset their fluid & electrolyte levels, and if you take too much (the total amount you can take at once varies by state, but is measured in liters), they can go into \"bounce\" where the bodies chemical levels do not balance out, resulting in patient death. This has happened many times before, and is why there is now a state mandated limit to how much adipose tissue can be removed in a single go."}, {"answer": "The other problem is that adipose tissue is also highly vascular. Fat is actually stored inside vacoule compartments in cells, its not like it is free floating in your body. All of this fat is still in cells,which is in tissues which are highly vascularized, and that bleed like hell. What surgeons do to mitigate this when they are doing a lipo is to use some sort of local alpha adrenergic drug (ie: epinephrine) to vasoconstrict the little artieries and also alot of cauterization to burn them shut but you can only do so much of that before you are dealing with a patient bleeding out on the table. And the kicker to all of this is that although liposuction brings about an aesthetic improvement, on average it does nothing to modify obese patients insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease risk. So the cost benefit is quite shit, especially when you compare it to something like bariatric surgery. EDIT: I realize now that my explanation may have been less than accessible so I'm more than willing to clarify anything"}, {"answer": "You have to look at it from a psychological view. Being 500+ lbs is not normal for a human to maintain and live. If doctors just cut out 250 of those lbs nothing is stopping the person from still consuming just as much to get back up to 500+ lbs. So mentally a healthier way to approach the problem is introducing the person to self control, food management, and exercise. Extreme changes for humans does not usually pan out well, mentally and/or physically. Taking a step by step approach will teach the person to become more focused, disciplined, and determined. This is mostly a psychological issue, but there is a biological reason as well. I am no expert by no means and you would need someone who knows something about anatomy to tell you the side effects of removing fat cells and how fat cells grow at extreme levels."}, {"answer": "Skin has limited elasticity. What happens when they balloon up again?"}, {"answer": "Fat cells grow large with the accumulation of more fat, but they don't divide and make more cells. If you remove the cells, fat can't be stored in that place as well. There is more risk associated with fat around the organs than in fat under the skin, but the organ fat is more difficult to remove. Remove the fat under the skin, and then all of the excess energy needs to get stored around the organs - not safe. Fat storage problems are then coupled with the difficulty of anesthesia on an obese person due to a difficult airway, excess pressure on the chest due to weight, and the cardiovascular complications of obesity."}, {"answer": "That would kill the patient. All that fat has blood vessels running through it, they would lose too much fluid and have a heart attack"}, {"answer": "2 big simple problems to consider. 1. If you've ever gone to the dentist, after the novacane wears off, you know how much it hurts? Now imagine that 90% of your skin feels that way. 2. The skin is the strongest barrier preventing you from getting an infection. By doing it all at once, you're creating a separation between a large amount of surface area that can get infected. Another easy analogy. Try tinting your entire car without getting a single air bubble or piece of dust on the first shot. If you don't get it right on the first shot, your car is at risk of dying and never running again."}, {"answer": "There are two main ways fat is stored in the body: subcutaneously (just beneath the skin), and viscerally (in the cavity surrounding the organs). Liposuction can only remove subcutaneous fat, but in morbidly obese individuals a large portion of this fat is stored viscerally. Even if one *could* remove all of the fat surgically, that would be an extremely complex and invasive procedure, and it could put the patient at greater risk (as others have said)."}, {"answer": "Not the main reason, but another contributing factor that I've yet to see mentioned is that people who are extremely obese are tricky to operate on. Putting them under with anesthesia is extremely risky, and there's an incredibly high chance of them dying on the table. Therefore, it's better to have them lose weight via diet changes, and then do surgery to deal with the flabby skin."}, {"answer": "On a similar note, why can't there be a service to lock up obese people (with their consent) and give them water and vitamin supplements and let them starve away the fat? It could even be labelled as a medical procedure since it might be necessary for their own health, thereby allowing them enough medical leave from their jobs to attempt it."}, {"answer": "Also there are a ton of blood vessels that run all through there. You gotta be careful what you suck out cause you could rupture them all and kill the patient; especially one so big"}, {"answer": "Even if it were physically possible to remove the fat via surgery that wouldn't be necessary if the person is going to follow up with bypass surgery and an improved diet. Morbidly obese people who have a successful surgery and stick to the diet lose weight very quickly. Putting them through both gastric bypass and fat trimming surgery at the same time could make their recovery more difficult rather than speed things along."}, {"answer": "Fat is a collection of living cells, blood, and water. If you remove a lot of fat, you lose all the blood and water with it. Thinking about this another way, if you stand up too fast after not drinking a lot of water, you feel dizzy, and might even pass out. That's because your heart (your engine) isn't getting enough blood to keep your neck arteries full. Your arteries send distress signals to your nervous system, which tell your brain to shut down. This causes you to automatically lie flat and gravity gets blood to your head. Similarly, if you remove a lot of fat all at once, you are effectively creating a dangerous shift in the blood, water, nutrient balance. Your total body volume shifts dangerously away from what it can cope with. In fact, after any large surgery, the body loses a lot of water and nutrients from the stress of the operation, sweating, and incidental bleeding. That's why you usually get fluids before, during, and/or after surgery. In California, you may only take 10 pounds of fat at a given liposuction appointment. This is to protect patients and doctors from taking too much fat, shifting the blood/water balance, and thus, putting a life in jeopardy."}, {"answer": "In addition to what everyone else is saying, fat also acts as an endocrine organ, and secretes a surprising number of hormones. Removing too much could cause a pretty major shock and increase the likelihood of complications post-surgery."}, {"answer": "Because it's not just fat, there's other stuff as well - like muscle and veins. Other things to consider is how the body will react and if it can handle having that sudden fat being gone."}, {"answer": "Don't know if anyone answered OP about this yet, but fat or adipose tissue as it's known as has a lot of vascularisation. That means in order to keep the fat cells alive they have to be fed with oxygen and nutrients and have waste products taken away like any other cells in the human body, which means that they need blood vessels running through them as well (up to seven miles of blood vessels for every pound of fat!). If you just cut open an obese person and started removing that fat tissue, that also would cause a lot of bleeding as well. Remove too much tissue, and you could have major problems with their blood pressure, or they could simply bleed out, or go into cardiac arrest. Bottom line, the risks associated with just physically removing the fat are too great in comparison to the benefits."}, {"answer": "it's likely that they would die on the operating table, because it'd mean removing the mayority of the body mass all at once, when anesthesia alone is likely enough to kill someone of that size, that's why most doctors won't operate on someone who's 500 pounds, even if that means that they might die, because the risk of them dying is WAY too big from the anesthesia alone, let alone the stress you'd be putting on the body with that operation"}, {"answer": "Just because you remove the fat from the excessive areas, you still caused significant damage to your organs by gaining all that weight. I watched a CABG (coronary artery bypass graft) and this fella was obese and his heart had so much fat on it, so enlarged and just excessively huge. The surgeon was telling me how he loves his job but he always fears that something as excessive as heart surgery doesn't even motivate people to change."}, {"answer": "I have a friend who is 500+ pounds and the reason a doctor can't just go nuts and start cutting out the fat is because the amount of anesthesia it takes someone that size could end up killing them. It's a risk that doctors will not take. My friend ended up getting surgery but she had to lose over 100 pounds first"}, {"answer": "OR Nurse here: Trying to sedate and keeping a person alive of that size is a hell of a task. In fact, the hospital I work at has criteria that excludes morbidly obese people from non-essential surgery."}, {"answer": "like the expensive cuts of meat, the fat isnt draped over a morbidly obese person like a coat, its marbled in their tissue. You can't just cut it off because its between everything and in everything."}, {"answer": "I don't know. Why can't fat people just cut out fat and extra calories from their diet?"}, {"answer": "Man, why were you even watching that crap?"}, {"answer": "Fats, especially saturated and trans fatty acids, take very long for your body to metabolize vs unsaturated/omerga-3 fats (that is because the altter has alkenyl bonds, which are more readily oxidized, whereas saturated fats are all alkyl chains, which take much longer to metabolize). Because of the accumulation of \"bad\" fats (they're not necessarily bad, just worse for you in general than unsaturated/cis fats), they can absorb readily into various parts of the body. It was mentioned the comparison of a marble steak, where fat is layered in between muscle tissue, but it can also build up in heart valves, inside of blood vessels/arteries to form blockage, and also inside of organs. The liver has a very fibrous sponge-like texture that can asborb a lot of fat. Fatty liver occurs when too much fat is consumed, or something else is consumed that damages the liver's ability to metabolize things (such as in long term alcohol abuse). The treatment of the severely obese needs to be gradual and can't be done in a drastic surgery like that, which will only get the \"surface fat\" and not the buildup of cholesterol and various fatty acids inside of organs and arteries. I'm not sure exactly how approved it is, but I heard for the severely obese, it can be treated using IV administration of pharmaceutical drugs. I heard that currently, trials are going underway for the IV administration of fucoxanthin with piperine to selectively induce apoptosis of lipocytes (fat cells--that is, cells which accumulate all those fatty acids mentioned above). One could always even make the semisynthetic analogue O,O-diacetyl-fucoxanthin to increase fat solubility and bioavailability, and it should not only increase potency but molecular mass, so it'd not only be more potent by dose, but making it from fucoxanthin would actually add mass to your final product. So you'd get a more potent drug for an overall cheaper cost by weight. (same pattern seen in morphine vs heroin, THC vs THC-O-acetate, etc). It would release two molecules of acetic acid and one molecule of fucotxanthin. Even better, O,O-dipropanoyl-fucoxanthin should increase potency even more, similar in Dipropanoylmorphine vs heroin. O,O-diaminoacetyl (glycinoyl prodrugs) would be even better because glycine is highly fat soluble (much more than proanoic acid or acetic acid), and on top of that, the nitrogen amine on glycine would be protonated, and so the glycinoyl ester should bond more strongly to the oxgyen molecule on fucoxanthin, whreas in acetyl/propanoyl groups they are all O-acyl carbon chains, which has a like charge to the O- and would repel more (thus cleaving off faster and absorbing less into the system). If you wanted to be extra fancy you could use the fatty acids in fish oil as a prodrug group, and make O,O-di-eicosapentaenoyl-fucoxanthin. This would release a molecule of fucoxanthin for every two molecules of Eicosapentaenoic acid. Being actual lipids, the EPA prodrug chain obviously would increase bioavailability a really significant amount. At that point due to all the extra bulk it'd be probably less potent by dose, but manufacturing fucoxanthin into Di-EPA-fucoxanthin could be done with nearly 100% conversion, so the conversion would add a massive increase of mass in the final product, which would even out decreased potency."}, {"answer": "They don't do it for people who are extremely overfat because those people have to learn what a healthy lifestyle means for them and also build the discipline to maintain that. The vast majority of people in that position simply don't understand diet/exercise and/or don't have the discipline to eat healthy and move. Simply cutting off the fat and skin will see them in the same position again in a short while. Also, whether you cut someone with a rusty dagger or a super high tech laserbeam, damage (trauma) is damage. Obviously one is worse than the other, but its a matter of degree. In general one should try to limit the amount of damage they sustain. Also people who are overfat don't exactly tend to be the healthiest, and may have trouble recovering from so much damage all at once. There is an inherent risk involved in surgery, having to cut out the fat is addition surgery and being relatively unhealthy simply makes it worse. Finally fat is a hormone producing organ. We need it to live. Cutting hundreds of pounds of it all at once will cause a significant shift in the body's overall chemistry which could cause fatal complications. Combine this with the above factors and you have a very dangerous situation with perhaps very little long term benefit."}, {"answer": "I wish it was this easy. I've been overweight since elementary school. I'm not morbidly obese or anything, but I'm a 5'7\" female and am at about 200 lbs right now. I was pretty consistent around 165 while working in fast food for 4 years but i ballooned after getting my degree and getting a desk job. I have tried numerous diets and work out routines with varying degrees of success and nothing lasting long term. It is really depressing when you diet and exercise really well for a month, hop on the scale to see your progress and haven't lost any weight at all. I found out as an adult I have hypothyroidism, pernicious anemia and non-alcholic fatty liver disease. My job stresses me out alot and I used to come home and drink a beer because I LOVE beer, but my ability to enjoy alcohol was taken from me at 22 T_T I know i need to try to lose weight in order to improve my health, but its like when you have tried so many things and none of them work you kind of just give up inside. If it was this easy people would be lined up around the block, but that wont remove the fat from my liver"}, {"answer": "There was a woman that worked at a company I delivered to years ago. She looked like Jabba the Hutt. Suddenly she quit her job. About a year later, a new girl starts working there. I ask about her and found out it was Jabba, hundreds of pounds lighter, she looked much happier, younger, and unrecognizable to the old person. She had some sort of surgeries done but I don't know which type. Anyway, the point is that the miracles of modern medicine can turn Jabba the Hutt into a beautiful woman."}, {"answer": "You don't get obese without eating your way there. Cutting it off of people wouldn't result in a permanent solution, they'd be right back to gaining weight."}, {"answer": "OR maybe they could eat less,work out little more?"}, {"answer": "If you remove \"a lot\" of fat all at once the odds of pulmonary issues are pretty high. Exactly how much is \"a lot\" most would say over 5,000cc's or basically much more than say 10pounds and you are getting into risky territory and when you are suggesting removing HUNDREDS of pounds of fat you are now talking beyond risky to downright lethal to the patient. Why is it so risky/lethal? Fat has a purpose, its not just trash in the body making you look bad. To that end it will cause massive fluid imbalance issues which will almost assuredly cause various systems within your body to have much more fluid than normal in them after serious fat removal like you are suggesting. Is it possible to survive such a surgery? While we don't have hard proof either way I'd say its \"probably\" likely assuming the patient was otherwise healthy and you had cardio-pulmonary specialists on hand to IMMEDIATELY start treatment of the issues that arise. Though this would in a realistic setting NEVER happen simply because the odds of this failing and killing the patient are exceedingly high and this is not it will kill you at somepoint in the future from a heart attack like obesity, this is literally kill you within hours or minutes of the surgery kinda thing... likely before the surgery is even complete. Its also important to realize that fat people don't have a lot of extra fat cells, instead there fat cells are simply larger. When using surgical removal your body will regrow (or atleast attempt to) those fat cells since to be completely blunt your body 100% needs fat cells to function and be health BUT obviously too much/too big and its clearly an issue. To this end excess skin removal has to wait until after the patient has recovered AND stabilized there weight to some degree. TL;DR, serious fat removal of more than just a handful of pounds of fat will cause serious medical issues realistically including death. Full disclosure, some of my statements are overt simplifications for the sake of explaining things and not 100% scientifically accurate nor should they be treated as such. Further the topic at hand is discussing theoretical procedures nobody has real data on besides \"if its bad at this amount, its probably much worse at higher amounts\"."}, {"answer": "Individuals who are obese have two types of fat: subcutaneous (under the skin) and visceral (inside the abdominal cavity). Liposuction involves removal of fat that is under the skin, but does nothing to address fat that lies underneath the muscles. To remove fat in the abdominal cavity, it would be nesecarry to cut through muslce and work around the internal organs. Removal of fat from other areas of the body(arms, legs) also includes bleeding and infection risks as skin and vessels are severed. So could a surgeon remove both types of fat if they really wanted to? Probably, but it would be very risky."}, {"answer": "TL;DR: core fat and lasting effects. The reason is lifestyle and core fat. Sure, you could cut off the fat BUT you couldn't do that to the fat in the heart and liver etc.. ONLY exercise can get rid of that hence the lifestyle change. If you cut off that fat then fatties like me would just get op after op. The lifestyle change KEEPS the fat off and rids it from the core. Meaning overall health is achieved rather than aesthetic happiness."}, {"answer": "The fat itself is not the problem, it is a symptom of the problem which is an unhealthy lifestyle, whether that is based on complicating health conditions, poor decision-making, or psychological and emotional issues. So apart from the risks of such a surgery, simply removing a lot of fat would not be a permanent fix. It's analogous to cleaning out a hoarded house-- all that excess got there for reasons and the reasons have to be addressed for a true recovery."}, {"answer": "Several reasons: - very difficult to put under anesthesia, with their weight causing breathing problems. - there is more than surface fat causing the person to be large, but fat on the orgins. - fat contains lots of small blood vessels, so lots of bleeding in surgery - skin itself has terrible blood supply so huge risk of infection."}, {"answer": "Fat has a lot of capillaries. A large blood supply. When a person has maxi liposuction the fluid imbalance can cause heart failure. Also the disruption to the tissue causes more swelling. As for just cutting it out I think long incisions have more chance of complications."}, {"answer": "There's also if I remember correctly a lot of capillaries and other small blood vessels in the fat section that makes it even harder to operate and more at risk of bleeding."}, {"answer": "Because their hearts will be so efficient that they will literally turn into superman/superwoman."}, {"answer": "Why can't people eat a healthy diet and exercise and not ask for miracles?"}, {"answer": "Liposuction is a safe, **optional**, cosmetic procedure. It can not, and is not, best practice to treat obesity for a number of reasons. The most common technique, tumescent liposuction, uses several liters of water pumped just under the skin, with a mixture of lidocaine (a numbing agent) and epinephrine (basically adrenaline). The fat is then sucked out through long, narrow, tubes. If you've ever seen it on TV-you know the doctor uses a series of strong and quick strafing motions to essentially 'rip' the available fat away. The danger comes from a few key effects that *can* happen, but very rarely do. (Less then 10 reported deaths from 1993-2008 per the FDA). These are: blot clot, bradycardia (very slow heartbeat), hypotension (very low blood pressure) and pulmonary edema. That's fluid collection in the lungs; nasty way to go. Most of these deaths are due to drug interactions in the body. Too much fluid around your chest and you form an edema, too much around your legs and you throw a clot. Too much lidocaine and your heart stops or your pressure bottoms out. Then there is the normal surgery risks: infection, adverse effects to general anesthesia, narcotic drug overdose, as well as certain age/health related effects. Like poor Donda West who bled out and arrested because of poor health mixed with lack of proper after-care monitoring. So, for a 600lb person, who is presumably in terrible cardiovascular health, trying to suck **all** the fat away via TL would be incredibly dangerous- if not outright fatal."}, {"answer": "I'm speaking from a strictly functional observation here, but I imagine that finding a home for all of the stuff in between is a part of it. It's not just a matter of cutting out the fat and excess skin, you also need to remember that the body was that previous size. Think about a limousine; they don't come out of the factory that way. Somebody has to take a car, cut it in half, add in some material to fill the gap, and lengthen the parts that run the distance (I.E. - Fuel lines, exhaust, driveshaft, etc.) To perform a massive \"fat-ectomy\", to cut out excess fat and skin, would be like making a limousine in reverse. Blood vessels, nerve endings, organ placement, all of that needs to be adjusted to accommodate the changes. The problem is finding the room in the skinnier body for the heavier parts. That's just one issue, there are many more. The massive shock to the body from such a massive surgery could easily be lethal. The necessary blood volume in the body would change drastically, and I imagine anemia, or even it's opposite condition, would be massively exacerbated. Infection, in my mind, would probably be the biggest issue. You're talking about long, deep incisions that run from the skins surface deep into the body, creating, not just avenues, but nice, clear, superhighways for infection. That's why it's Lipo-\"suction\"; they emulsify the fat into a more liquid state and suck it out in a far less invasive process."}, {"answer": "Another factor I haven't seen mentioned (albeit, its not the most important) is the endocrine disruption after a massive removal of fat tissue. Leptin is secreted from fat cells and suppresses hunger in healthy individuals. It is meant to encourage those with more energy stored in their thighs and around their guts to eat less in order to maintain optimal body weight. I think the malfunction of this pathway is also believed by some to be a key factor in obesity, but someone will have to fact check me on that. I'm assuming that the reduction of a strong signal of appetite suppression to a much smaller one would lead to feelings of extreme hunger, severe overeating, and possible increased fat storage until the body adjusts. This can actually be observed in some rapid weight loss diets. The dieter initially loses a ton of weight but gains it all back and sometimes a little bit more as the body attempts to bring body weight back up to what it believes is homeostasis (equilibrium/balance) I guess there could be hormone treatment available for postop therapy. I don't know- Just googled it and it exists. Guess it's still relevant to the discussion though"}, {"answer": "I find anytime the question includes the word \"simply\", e.g. \"why can't they simply...\", or \"it should be simple to...\" *that's* the reason why. It's because the asker has glossed over the part that answers their question with the assumption that that thing is *simple*. You have connective tissues that need to be taken care of, new blood vessels that are now bleeding, massive shifts in weight, mass, and fluid distribution that the body now has to re-jig itself to make use of, and so on. Generally, the more drastic the thing you're doing, the less you can do it, or the less time you have to be doing it. Removing entire parts of the inside of your body is a pretty big modification not just on the table, but for the person's body afterward. Better to lose the weight naturally and in a healthy way than risk an unnecessary death or complications."}, {"answer": "The real answer is that no surgery comes without risks. When you perform these surgeries you're removing heavily vascularised tissue which can result in a lot of blood loss and adverse events. Secondly obese people are generally very unhealthy to begin with, attempting to operate on them when they are at the peak of their unhealthy life style is asking for complications including infections, inability to fight infections, inability to heal properly and sometimes even Inabiltiy to come off the ventilator. The process of getting a 600 lb patient down in weight is caloric restriction, and if that fails some sort of restrictive gastric surgery which carries much less complications than Lipo or panniculectomies. If the patient has chronic infections from pendulous fat then we can wntertain removing the tissue."}, {"answer": "I haven't seen anyone mention this: liposuction patients almost always gain all the weight back. The body has decided it needs 400 lbs of fat, after the surgery it notices it is short and will rapidly expand what fat that remains to get back to its \"goal\" level leaving you hideously perportioned. They do perform gastric bypass on people that size. The operation was originally intended to make it hard to eat large amounts. But determined people can stretch out their stomach and stay fat. Lap band works bc the stomach itself produces one of the hormones involved in deciding your \"goal\" body fat. Less hormone. Less fat."}, {"answer": "An issue people haven't touched on is > The person would still have to get bypass and watch their diet of course I know this is a somewhat controversial subject. But the fact is that someone isn't gettiing up to that weight unless they have severe psychological issues. The weight is a symptom and one which will just rebound if the underlying cause isn't properly addressed. It shouldn't be done with surgery until someone has demonstrated that they're able to relate to food in a more psychologically healthy way. Otherwise the combination of overeating and the surgery would be decreasing their heatlh."}, {"answer": "The main reason is that fat is vascular. To supply blood to all that extra tissue the body increases the total volume of blood that specific body contains. The amount of fat taken out during each procedure, which is determined by each State's medical board and probably no more than 10% of body weight or so, is determined so as not to risk taking away too much blood from the system at one time. Edit: basically for the same reason you can only give so much blood or serum per visit to the blood bank."}, {"answer": "Humans are not designed in layers. Our fat is weaved within and around our muscle fibers as well as surrounded by nerves various cartilage tendons veins and bones. What you are suggesting would cause the person to bleed out or die from infection from having full open body wounds. Once you're that fat, it is not easy to go back. Tl;dr once you go fat you never go back"}, {"answer": "So, what we take out by liposuction, we measure in liters. Max. we take out is 10 L. 20 to 25% of that liquid is blood. 2 to 2.5 L of blood. Average human has up to 6 L of the precious liquid, so... You do the math. Its bad. Besides, large ones have all sorts of problems with anaesthesia, healing, infections, chronic diseases as well, so..."}, {"answer": "You'd have to consider the over all blood volume and pressure. You can't just remove a large chunk of person and expect the organs to cope with a sudden change like that. It certainly isn't a trivial procedure anyway, and the risk to life - especially given the patient's bad general health and the difficulty of safely anaesthetising them - would be pretty high."}, {"answer": "You have to lose a certain amount of weight first so you have less of a risk of stroke or heart attack. The fat would also grow back without any modification to the digestive system/eating habits, necessitating dangerous repeat surgeries. I'm sure there are more reasons - I'm just thinking of what I've seen on My 600 Lb Life."}, {"answer": "I've seen a lot of good reasons but this hasnt been mentioned. Fat cells in subcutaneous fat tissue is not as endocrinally active as fat cells in/in between organs. A lot of the health effects of obesity comes from visceral fat that induces insulin resistance, increased blood fat levels and inflammation. - > cardiovascular disease"}, {"answer": "Assuming they could do that, would it really solve the obesity of the person? If someone manages to get to 600 pounds its their unhealthy lifestyle that needs corrected, not surgery. I imagine they would just gain it right back if they didn't decide to change for good."}, {"answer": "Because they'd die, homes! But really, the fat in our body acts as a protective element for our organs. However, when an individual is obese, that fat just excessively accumulates around organs and becomes interwoven with capillaries, muscles, portions of the organs, etc."}, {"answer": "This doesn't address any of the root causes of people being 500 lbs. If this procedure was technically possible, people who do not address their over eating life style will just put all the weight right back on, making it utterly pointless."}, {"answer": "Looks like the top commenters covered the important points. You might be interested to know, however, that this is *sort of* done for people with extreme amounts of belly fat. Panniculectomy. The panniculus is the bulk of fat on the belly. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "The same reason why liposuctions can't be performed \"at once\", the body needs time to adjust to it, essentially, missing part of itself. Also, general anesthesia is pretty ruthless towards the body(been there, done that)."}, {"answer": "In general you should always remember that in medical science there is very little things that can be summarized as \"just do this\". Everything is complicated in it."}, {"answer": "I think one reason is that they are not healthy enough to survive the anesthesia required for surgery. Their hearts are under enormous stress"}, {"answer": "I always wondered why they don't just wire their jaws shut. It would seem to accomplish the same effect"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "249962", "title": "Lipodystrophy", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Lipodystrophy syndromes are a group of genetic or acquired disorders in which the body is unable to produce and maintain healthy fat tissue. The medical condition is characterized by abnormal or degenerative conditions of the body's adipose tissue. (\"Lipo\" is Greek for \"fat\", and \"dystrophy\" is Greek for \"abnormal or degenerative condition\".) A more specific term, \"lipoatrophy\", is used when describing the loss of fat from one area (usually the face). This condition is also characterized by a lack of circulating leptin which may lead to osteosclerosis. The absence of fat tissue is associated with insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and metabolic syndrome.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "more specific term, \"lipoatrophy\", is used when describing the loss of fat from one area (usually the face). This condition is also characterized by a lack of circulating leptin which may lead to osteosclerosis. The absence of fat tissue is associated with insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and metabolic syndrome.", "Lipodystrophy syndromes are a group of genetic or acquired disorders in which the body is unable to produce and maintain healthy fat tissue. The medical condition is characterized by abnormal or degenerative conditions of the body's adipose tissue. (\"Lipo\" is Greek for \"fat\", and \"dystrophy\" is Greek for \"abnormal or degenerative condition\".) A more specific term, \"lipoatrophy\", is used when describing the loss of fat from one area (usually the face). This condition is also characterized by a lack of circulating leptin which may lead to osteosclerosis. The absence of fat tissue is associated with insulin resistance, hypertriglyceridemia, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and metabolic syndrome."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "21346404", "title": "Liposuction", "section": "Section::::Techniques.:Ultrasound-assisted.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 33, "end_paragraph_id": 33, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Ultrasound-assisted liposuction techniques used in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with cases of tissue damage, usually from excessive exposure to ultrasound energy. Third-generation UAL devices address this problem by using pulsed energy delivery and a specialized probe that allows physicians to safely remove excess fat. UAL is beneficial in people with a particular skin tone, in liposuction of areas that are more difficult to remove fat, that include treatment of gynecomastia, or areas where secondary liposuction is being performed. Doctors disagree on the issues of scarring with not suturing versus resolution of the swelling allowed by\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "UAL is beneficial in people with a particular skin tone, in liposuction of areas that are more difficult to remove fat, that include treatment of gynecomastia, or areas where secondary liposuction is being performed. Doctors disagree on the issues of scarring with not suturing versus resolution of the swelling allowed by\rhighlight sentence(s) containing", "Ultrasound-assisted liposuction techniques used in the 1980s and 1990s were associated with cases of tissue damage, usually from excessive exposure to ultrasound energy. Third-generation UAL devices address this problem by using pulsed energy delivery and a specialized probe that allows physicians to safely remove excess fat. UAL is beneficial in people with a particular skin tone, in liposuction of areas that are more difficult to remove fat, that include treatment of gynecomastia, or areas where secondary liposuction is being performed. Doctors disagree on the issues of scarring with not suturing versus resolution of the swelling allowed by"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "11249433", "title": "Bariatric surgery", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Bariatric surgery (or weight loss surgery) includes a variety of procedures performed on people who have obesity. Weight loss is achieved by reducing the size of the stomach with a gastric band or through removal of a portion of the stomach (sleeve gastrectomy or biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch) or by resecting and re-routing the small intestine to a small stomach pouch (gastric bypass surgery). Long-term studies show the procedures cause significant long-term loss of weight, recovery from diabetes, improvement in cardiovascular risk factors\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "Bariatric surgery (or weight loss surgery) includes a variety of procedures performed on people who have obesity. Weight loss is achieved by reducing the size of the stomach with a gastric band or through removal of a portion of the stomach (sleeve gastrectomy or biliopancreatic diversion with duodenal switch) or by resecting and re-routing the small intestine to a small stomach pouch (gastric bypass surgery). Long-term studies show the procedures cause significant long-term loss of weight, recovery from diabetes, improvement in cardiovascular risk factors"]}}]}]

errr (ELI25): My math major roommate had an entire chapter on counting, senior year. I have a math minor. What did he learn about counting and fundamentals that I take for granted?

45pa17

[{"answer": "As is so typical in math, [counting can indeed be generalized.]( URL_0 ) Roughly, counting means establishing a clear one-to-one relationship between the members of one set and the members of another set. Since sets are an extremely elaborate and well-developed topic in abstract math, there is a lot of meat here."}, {"answer": "Google Cantor set theory. Basically this dude, George Cantor, comes up with the idea that counting numbers aren't good enough... so he figures out how to prove that counting numbers exist. In order to do this, he starts with nothing. A null set. Then he takes the set containing the null set (the powerset... I think), and the cardinality of this superset is two - the set contains both the null set and the set containing the null set. Then he takes the powerset of this... the null set, the set containing it, and the set containing everything, as having cardinality 3 and so on. In such a way, he creates the natural set (the counting numbers) from this. If he defines the numbers in such a way, in what others ways does he do crazy stuff with everything else? I did a course on it, and I'm still confused."}, {"answer": "Others here are suggesting set theory, but It's possible he was doing Combinatorics, which can be understood as a collection of methods for counting (possibly very abstract) objects. Sometimes it is referred to (almost ironically) as the theory of counting (for instance, the title of this book: URL_0 ) but you are not learning new ways to count a collection of objects sitting in front of you. What you are counting tends to be a collection of objects that have an abstract definition, so you cannot tell immediately how many objects satisfy the definition. The basic combinatorial problem is: How many ways are there to arrange n distinct objects in a line? You could, for each n, simply try out all the possibilities and hope you don't mess up, but you'll find that for larger and larger n this method would take forever. In combinatorics you hope to use reason to establish a clever way to count these things, or at least establish that their number will be the same as the number of objects satisfying some other abstract definition. Edit: For an example of a combinatorial problem simple to state but still unsolved: suppose you have n equal sized squares; how many distinct flat shapes can you make by gluing the sides of the squares together? There is still no exact formula known: URL_1 "}, {"answer": "Well you are probably capable of understanding the number theory he's learning. You should probably just ask him for the broad strokes and if it catches your interest just pick up his text for a few chapters. I feel like if you are looking for an applicational use to that then you're kind of going to run into a wall, it's probably something in his book that's there as filler. Like when you learn about economic modeling in linear algebra, yeah you're seeing applications but they're just filler, not the main theory. Hell my calc 2 book had a whole thing on pursuit curves, just a side note tucked in non euclidien studies."}, {"answer": "Their is a lot of bad information being given here. It's hard to tell from your description \"an entire chapter on counting\" what exactly your roommate is studying. Most likely your roommate is studying something called combinatorics which is a branch of math concerned with problems like \"How many objects of form X do we have with property Y?\" very often these objects are not numbers but other mathematical objects like graphs (( URL_0 ) or functions ( URL_1 ) and counting them is not as simple as \"adding them up\" like you would do with numbers. Counting in combinatorics is often the process of creating a function that generates one object for each possible object and then checking to see how many objects you can create with that function this is often the best approach to use even when working with objects that you might feasibly be able to count. For example a basic counting problem assigned to a first year student might looks something like \"How many four digit even numbers are there?\". You are more than welcome to go ahead and start writing them down by hand but I think that you would find the process more than a bit tedious. A better way to approach the problem might be see if there is some way to make a recipe to cook up four digit even numbers. First start with four blanks (one for each digit in out number) and try and see how many possibilities we have for each blank (_) (_) (_) (_). How many numbers can we have in the first blank? 9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2 and 1 work but if we put a 0 in that place we have a three digit number so 0 is out but we have the numbers 1-9 so that's 9 possibilities (9) (_) (_) (_). How many possibility's for the second number do we have? Well 1-9 are still good and now zero is good because we ave something ahead of it so 10 same with the third digit. (9) (10) (10) (_). Well a number is even if and only if its last digit is a multiple of two so we get 0,2,4,6,8 which is 5 options so we get that to make a four digit even number. You first pick an integer between 1-9 and write that down in the first place then, you pick an integer between 0-9 and write that down in the second place, then you do the same for the first place, and for the last number you pick one of 0,2,4,6, or 8 and write that down in the last place for a total of 9x10x10x5= 4500 different combinations of numbers that make for a valid 4 digit even number. Alternatively you might recognize that their are 9x10x10x10 = 9000 four digit numbers and since half of them must be even 9000/2=4500 even 4 digit numbers. Obviously these problem get harder the more abstract the object that you are trying to count is or the weirder the restriction."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1066030", "title": "Eleventh grade", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Eleventh grade, junior year, or grade 11 (called Year 12 in England) is the eleventh, and for some countries final, grade of secondary schools. Students are typically 1617 years of age, depending on the country and the students' birthdays.", "r grade 11 (called Year 12 in England) is the eleventh, and for some countries final, grade of secondary schools. Students are typically 1617 years of age, depending on the country and the students' birthdays."]}}]}]

How does a painting like "When Will You Marry" sell for $300 million dollars when it doesn't look like anything spectacular

2vg7jt

[{"answer": "When it comes to a lot of art, context is more important than the actual material. Rarity, historical context etc. make a thing more valuable than its actual aesthetic properties. For example, some shitty buggy SNES or N64 games will sell for huge amounts if they are well preserved and in the original packaging etc, even when any high school student nowadays could write a better game in a week."}, {"answer": "The rarity of Gaugin paintings coupled with very rich people willing to pay 9-figures for a painting account for the sale price of that painting. Those factors ignore the inherent artistic beauty of the painting -- *which remember is in the eye of the beholder* -- which also contributes to the price. Artistic scholars also confirmed the artistic value of the painting. Lastly, historically, art has been seen as a relatively safe investment as paintings tend to hold their value over time."}, {"answer": "Another reason, believe it or not, is branding. Media whoring. Showing off. ePeen. The buyer is largely believed to be the government of Qatar; a tiny country in the middle east (about the size of New Jersey with less than 300,000 citizens) that sits on one of the worlds largest natural gas and oil reserves. Hence they have a massive amount of wealth concentrated to relatively few people, most of whom belong to the Al-Thani family. And, they like to splash that wealth in ways to bring attention to the country and increase their international influence and reputation. They have made several record-breaking art purchases over the past decade, but without any consistency. It's mostly haphazard without following any real theme. As some media have insinuated, they'll buy whatever's so expensive that it gets noticed. They also sponsor several museums around the world, art shows, prizes etc -- all while there are museums in Doha (the capital city) closing down due to the lack of funds. It's not just art, Qatar is throwing money at anything that will bring media coverage to the country. The football World Cup in 2022 is being held there despite a lack of football history, venues or a suitable climate, and the bidding process is largely suspected to have involved bribery. The 2019 World Athletics Championships are being held there. They bid for the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on sports teams (Paris St Germain) and sponsorship (Barcelona), media (Al Jazeera), airlines (Qatar Air) -- anything to increase their presence on the international stage. So whether this artwork was really something that the Al-Thani family considered so beautiful they had to pay 300m for, or whether they paid 300m to have Qatar on everyone's lips in the western media... That's anyone's guess."}, {"answer": "Disclaimer: I don't know shit about visual art, but I'm a musician, so this goes for art in general. A different way to look at it is to focus on the intent and the name. What seems like bad technique could actually be surprisingly complicated, or extremely fitting for the time. For instance, a lot of people hated Skrillex's \"Fuck That,\" because it wasn't his usual hyper-loud brostep, and seemed jarringly simple for him. However, deep house has gotten really really popular lately, so he was just hopping on the bandwagon with that track (in his own way). In terms of the name, if some random no name producer sent that track to a label, it'd probably get thrown out. Having Skrillex's name on it gives it validity; *the track isn't bad, it sounds like that because he wanted it to*, is the subconscious thought attached. Of course, \"Fuck That\" is a terrible brostep track, because it's not a brostep track, nor was it intended to be. This painting wasn't at all intended to be realism, so to judge it through the lens of any genre other than the one it is would be erroneous. TL;DR: Given that Gaugin had been doing art for a while, it can be assumed he knew what he was doing, even if it doesn't seem like it. Edit: I still hate that painting though Edit edit: All this nonsense is just about Gaugin's intentions with that painting, not why it's selling for so much (I'll never be able to wrap my head around having that much disposable income)"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "44661257", "title": "Art market", "section": "Section::::The art market economic model.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "end_character": 297, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

Why do most anorexics cut their hair really short?

2e8v5y

[{"answer": "Anorexia causes hair loss. They are trying to hide that symptom."}, {"answer": "I was anorexic for quite a time, and kept my hair short as I disliked any expression of femininity.Hated boobage beyond a nipple, was thrilled when a woman in the supermarket told her son to queue \"behind this boy\" as I lived in jeans or shorts. Heaps of make up, though.Have since had three kids and sorted my shit out.,"}, {"answer": "Because starvation causes your hair to get limp and fall out, and many anorexics cut their hair to hide the fact."}, {"answer": "I believe a lot of it has to do with malnutrition, which in turn makes the hair unhealthy, brittle and needs to be cut to remove the damaged hair"}, {"answer": "Also something that hasn't yet been mentioned is that very short hair(pixie cuts) thins your face out. Putting it in a ponytail has the same effect.."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "56825", "title": "Eating disorder", "section": "Section::::Outcomes.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 147, "start_character": 171, "end_paragraph_id": 147, "end_character": 259, "bleu_score": 0.6177035901883539}]}]

If my eye pops out of the socket, will I still be able to see? How would it affect my vision and vision field?

6l7f1r

[{"answer": "Just the eye being out of the socket won't stop you seeing, assuming the optic nerve is attached and the eye is relatively undamaged from whatever removed it. The field of view won't really be that much expanded by being outside the socket, but the lack of muscles and support may allow the eye to deform enough that focus could be thrown off. Stretching the optic nerve is also likely to result in visual disturbance (and emotional)."}, {"answer": "Five years ago, I had orbital decompressions for Graves Eye Disease, which causes eyes to swell and be pushed out of their sockets. The surgery allows them to resume a normal position. URL_0 Obviously, my eyes were taken out of my eye sockets and replaced gently and carefully by an expert team of surgeons with assistance from amazing anesthesiologists. The visual side effects of this surgery took about four months to go away, but it was well worth the hassle, because my vision is now perfect, and the only maintenance I need is a few eye drops morning and night. Among the side effects that came and went and were most disconcerting--double vision, which was most difficult when I was lap-swimming, because it was hard to tell where I was in relation to other swimmers and the lane markers; driving was impossible, because the road would randomly rise to the sky or the lanes would split apart so that a two lane road would look like it was taking five or six lanes. There is technical terminology for these effects, but the main point I am trying to make here is that even in the best of conditions, with the best medical care on the planet, this was not something anyone would willingly do."}, {"answer": "1. Would you be able to see: technically if your optic nerve remains intact, yes you could still \"see\". The issue would be related to how your brain processes the new visual inputs that don't have a common bearing and are not focused together. Currently, assuming both your eyes are in their respective sockets your brain can piece together all the \"images\" coming in from the eyes as they are focused on the same thing at any given time. 2. How would it affect your vision: I'm not sure. Sorry. But my assumption is that since one eye can't focus (lack of muscle control once the eye pops out) you lose depth perception at the minimum. 3. How would it affect your vision field: you would not be able to see a majority of things on the side of your popped out eye."}, {"answer": "If your eye pops out of the socket, you've got much bigger problems than wondering if you'll see from the eye when it pops out. There are a crazy amount of connective tissues around the eye holding it in. However, I can attest to how delicate the optic nerve is. Any damage to it and the vision in that eye is gone. Unless it's like the delicate surgery others have mentioned for Graves disease, if your eye comes out, it's done for. Source: was shot in the eye with a bb gun. No actual damage to the nerve from the bb but the impact in the tissue behind my eye put some pressure on the nerve for a split second and it was gone forever."}, {"answer": "As long as optical nerves are still intact, yes. Obviously you'll want to get it back in your head but like a lazy eye, your dominant eye will take over. You can't just have your brain looking every which way possible. Dominance is why we exist. You currently have a dominant hand, leg, eye and more."}, {"answer": "your eye is physically anchored where it is in multiple places to muscle, so you would be in a world of hurt. but you would also be functionally blind. while the optic nerve could, hypothetically, still send information, the only reason you can understand what you're looking at is because your brain does an enormous amount of work putting it all together. physically moving the positions of your eyeball out of place would dramatically disrupt that process. assuming you closed the undamaged eye, the now-dislocated one wouldn't be able to change its focus. your eye uses muscles to change the shape of the lens and alter your focal distance (which is why the background looks blurry when you stare at your fingers)."}, {"answer": "God this thread is oddly relevant to me as I was at the eye doctor yesterday and I thought she was going to pop my eyeball out. She was checking for a retinal tear and used something to push on my eyeball as she shined an incredibly bright light in my eye and had me look in different directions. I developed a raging headache and was physically ill the rest of the night. I've never had such an uncomfortable eye exam and I'm supposed to go back in 4 weeks and I'm terrified. I remember watching some kind of vet show where a dog had gotten hit in the head by a slamming screen door and its eye popped out. It showed how they put it back in. That's all I could think of when my eyeball was being assaulted yesterday."}, {"answer": "Yes, it will be extremely confusing as your brain tries go make sense of what its receiving, you will most likely fall over"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "895033", "title": "Macular degeneration", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Macular degeneration, also known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD or ARMD), is a medical condition which may result in blurred or no vision in the center of the visual field. Early on there are often no symptoms. Over time, however, some people experience a gradual worsening of vision that may affect one or both eyes. While it does not result in complete blindness, loss of central vision can make it hard to recognize faces, drive, read, or perform other activities of daily life. Visual hallucinations may also occur but these do not represent a mental illness.", "Macular degeneration, also known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD or ARMD), is a medical condition which may result in blurred or no vision in the center of the visual field. Early on there are often no symptoms. Over time, however, some people experience a gradual worsening of vision that may affect one or both eyes. While it does not result in complete blindness, loss of central vision can make it hard to recognize faces, drive, read, or perform other activities of daily life. Visual hallucinations may also occur but these do not represent a mental illness."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "88042", "title": "Near-sightedness", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 4, "end_paragraph_id": 4, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Uncorrected near-sightedness is one of the most common causes of vision impairment globally along with cataracts, macular degeneration, and vitamin A deficiency.", "or surgery. Eyeglasses are the easiest and safest method of correction. Contact lenses can provide a wider field of vision, but are associated with a risk of infection. Refractive surgery permanently changes the shape of the cornea. Near-sightedness is the most common eye problem and is estimated to affect 1.5 billion people (22% of the population). Rates vary significantly in different areas of the world. Rates among adults are between 15 and 49%. Rates are similar in females and males. Among children, it affects 1% of rural Nepalese, 4% of South Africans, 12% of Americans, and 37% in some large Chinese cities. Rates have increased since the 1950s. Uncorrected near-sightedness is one of the most common causes of vision impairment globally along with cataracts, macular degeneration, and vitamin A deficiency."]}}]}]

Why do governments and companies keep building luxury apartment skyscrapers in cities where the majority of the population can't even afford the rent?

7xjnk2

[{"answer": "It's because the demand is still much, much higher than the supply. Part of this is because real estate in American cities is a pretty good place to store a lot of wealth if you live overseas. It can't be confiscated easily by whatever your local government is, and you can be pretty sure the value will stay high. Add those types to the massive number of people who want to live in big cities and will find a way to make it pay, and there's enough demand to keep costs high."}, {"answer": "Cost does not decrease just because the supply increases. Since the demand is great, and so disproportionately higher than the supply, whenever there exists apartments on the market they still fetch a premium. Even if a whole new building is made which might seem like a lot of new supply, it is not enough to saturate the market, which is what would have to happen to lower the price. Everyone who wanted an apartment would have to already have one, then any newer ones made could be more affordable since the market is not in high demand anymore."}, {"answer": " > \"Supply and demand states that when supply increases, cost should decrease.\" It's true that when 5,000 brand new buildings are built across the US with higher rent, 5,000 older buildings may decrease in rent because there has been an increase in the supply of apartments **in the whole market**. The other apartments that now need to decrease their price are older, and possibly not even in the same city. Individual city governments and businesses want to offer nice apartments to attract wealthier residents that pay more taxes and stimulate the local economy with more spending. tl;dr: A supply increase generally causes a cost decrease **as a whole** across the entire market, but not on a **micro** scale for an individual apartment complex."}, {"answer": "The fact that you cannot afford living in these apartments doesn\u2019t mean others cannot. There is a lot of demand, more than there is supply, hence why the price is increasing."}, {"answer": "Land is of high value and there are more than enough citizens that can afford that rent so that is the building that is made. Because there are still people able and willing to pay that price supply and demand actually dictates a price increase."}, {"answer": "Because they're not selling them to the majority of the population -- they only need to sell them to the tiny fraction who can afford them. Any while there is a need for lower price point housing, it's just not economically feasible to build that given the costs of materials, contruction labor, etc. So what instead happens is that those who can afford the higher end housing move into that, which creates less demand for the housing they vacated and that becomes more affordable to those with lesser means. And then the housing those people vacate becomes more affordable, and so on eventually creating more housing supply at the bottom of the housing market."}, {"answer": "Supply and demand as others have said\u2014NYC has attracted a lot of wealthy residents and foreigners as it has been remade in the last few decades after the decay of the 70s and 80s. Worth noting that NYC has built so many luxury units in recent years that it's actually putting a downward pressure on mid-range units (lower rent, free months, upgraded amenities, etc) for the first time in over a decade and rents are going down\u2014slightly\u2014overall. I recently moved into a mid-range 2-bedroom in Harlem (~$2500) and it included a W/D, free month of rent, no fee, and up to a $1000 credit on my rent to buy furniture. \"Luxury\" buildings I consider like $3500, at a minimum, in Manhattan from what I've seen."}, {"answer": "Because there is a demand and they don't need a \"majority\" of people to be able to afford them, they just need enough to fill those spaces and currently there ARE enough people. If/When there aren't enough people to fill those buildings, they're stop building them. Demand in NYC in particular is nearly unquenchable. It's a small area in high demand and that demand has been constant for decades."}, {"answer": "One reason is to look at the legal requirements for building apartments. Some cities require so many expensive add-ons, that it's only profitable to create luxury or otherwise high rent apartments. Things such as rent control or very tenant friendly laws, also tip the balance in favor of more expensive apartments."}, {"answer": "I can't speak for NYC, but Seoul, (with a metropolitan population of 30+ million, including visitors/tourists it could be very well over 40 million), is way more populated than NYC and therefore has more apartments and buildings for people to live in. I think a skyscraper needs to have 40-50 floors, many apartments in Seoul have 25-30 floors so they're not \"technically\" skyscrapers, and more are constantly being built and under construction. The majority of the population in Seoul lives in these kind of apartments, even if they can't afford it traditionally. Most large companies in Korea (especially a company like Samsung) own several skyscrapers and these large apartment buildings, and they usually allow their employees to live there for free, or for a much cheaper price. Also, the Korean system of rent payment is much different. Basically, the more money you deposit, the cheaper the rent is. If you deposit, let's say, $100k (it might be more), you could live in one of these skyscrapers rent-free. When/if you move out, you get the money back. That $100k was taken by the company that owns the building and is invested. Since average people don't have $100k cash, they loan it from a bank, and then the bank gives it to the owner's of the building, and the tenants only have to pay small interest to the bank, it's like a mortgage, but better. When they move out, the bank gets their money back from the building; and the owner's of the building got their profit from the bank's investment. It's like a win-win-win, the owners of the building made a profit from the bank's deposit, the bank got interest from the tenant, and the tenant got to live in a skyscraper for dirt cheap. This is why average working class people *can* live in relatively luxurious skyscrapers in Korea, and that's why more are being built. In NYC, I have no idea. I assume people with careers can make enough to pay $3k rent, and most people living in cities like to live in nice places."}, {"answer": "When I lived in Brooklyn, I was working in Manhattan commuting everyday. My rent was about $800 for a two bedroom apartment. I had a roommate so everything was really cheap. We had a girl from Texas that started working with us and few nights a week we would go out for drinks. I found out that she lived in the city with astronomical rent. I think her entire salary went to her rent/utilities and parents back home helped her with groceries. When I asked her why doesn't she move to surrounding boroughs she said that if you are going to live in NYC than you have to live in Manhattan and not Brooklyn or Queens which she considered suburbs. Over the years I've encountered numerous people who had similar opinion. I guess as long as others will keep coming for live in NYC demand will increase and so will the prices. Over the years I think it changed a bit and now people want to live in good neighborhoods outside Manhattan still paying unbelievable rents. The real estate market in NYC is unaffordable to regular middle income workers. You either get caught in the rent game or get stuck in a crappy neighborhood with house that is falling apart. I moved to NJ in 2011 and for the price of my rent at that time ($1300) I own the house. Yes there are taxes and commuting costs but I own a property. Just for comparison a condo at that time that we were looking at in Brooklyn would have been around $2900 a month plus $600 in fees a month. I don't foresee any changes to any of it anytime soon."}, {"answer": "ROI - developers want a return on their investment, and they get more by building nicer things. Also, the majority of the population can afford rent, or the majority of the population would be homeless. There is a price on living in NYC (especially Manhattan), and that is high rent. Long Island and New Jersey beckon to those who wish to pay less, as do the vast, vast swathes of land that exist outside of NYC where rent is actually quite cheap."}, {"answer": "If I own one apartment, I don't need the majority of the population to rent my apartment. I just need one person to. > Supply and demand states that when supply increases, cost should decrease. Only if the demand curve stays the same, which is an absurd assumption to make about the real world."}, {"answer": "Most likely bankrolled by mob money, government officials taking backhanders and any celeb using a charity bank account to buy or rent these properties, most of London\u2019s property prices were hiked because of this. Not forgetting to mention half of those properties will be bought as assets."}, {"answer": "There are still a huge amount of wealthy foreigners buying flats for as investmentbanken for example. In london i see a lot of korean students living in expensive flats for example."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "20929142", "title": "Skyscraper Index", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The Skyscraper Index is a whimsical concept put forward by Andrew Lawrence, a property analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, in January 1999, which showed that the world's tallest buildings have risen on the eve of economic downturns. Business cycles and skyscraper construction correlate in such a way that investment in skyscrapers peaks when cyclical growth is exhausted and the economy is ready for recession. Mark Thornton's Skyscraper Index Model successfully sent a signal of the late-2000s financial crisis at the beginning of August 2007.", "The Skyscraper Index is a whimsical concept put forward by Andrew Lawrence, a property analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, in January 1999, which showed that the world's tallest buildings have risen on the eve of economic downturns. Business cycles and skyscraper construction correlate in such a way that investment in skyscrapers peaks when cyclical growth is exhausted and the economy is ready for recession. Mark Thornton's Skyscraper Index Model successfully sent a signal of the late-2000s financial crisis at the beginning of August 200"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "209424", "title": "Newly industrialized country", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The category of newly-industrialized country (NIC) is a socioeconomic classification applied to several countries around the world by political scientists and economists. They represent a subset of developing countries whose economic growth is much higher than other developing countries; and where the social consequences of industrialization, such as urbanization, are reorganizing society.", "The category of newly-industrialized country (NIC) is a socioeconomic classification applied to several countries around the world by political scientists and economists. They represent a subset of developing countries whose economic growth is much higher than other developing countries; and where the social consequences of industrialization, such as urbanization, are reorganizing society."]}}]}]

Why does it feel so much better when someone else plays with my hair rather than when I play with my hair?

2e8ujh

[{"answer": "Same reason you can't tickle yourself, if your brain expects stimuli then the sensation is dulled."}, {"answer": "Nobody else wants to make the comparison? Why is a good handjob better than masturbating?"}, {"answer": "Because it's someone else touching you. That feeling of closeness makes it feel good."}, {"answer": "As humans are social animals, we have a tendency to greatly enjoy physical contact between each other when we trust the person giving it. Cultural barriers can interfere in this enjoyment (i.e in the West it's not considered normal for two heterosexual men to stroke or massage one-another), but it's fairly innate. Notice that not only does someone playing with your hair feel good, but someone gently touching you pretty much anywhere does; legs, arms, neck, etc. The scalp, ears and thighs tend to be areas with the greatest nerve density and thus the most sensitive to this experience."}, {"answer": "Sort of guessing, but... your fingers have incredibly high nerve density, relative to your scalp, so when you run your hands through your own hair, the sensations in your fingers dominate your experience of the contact, and the scalp sensations are sort of marginalized. When someone else does it, you just have the scalp sensations, which are awesome in their own right."}, {"answer": "This event and others like it have a whole section on YouTube. It is called ASMR (Automerdian... Something something Response)."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "24282148", "title": "Dry shampoo", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 2, "end_paragraph_id": 2, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The user may need to wash their hair with traditional shampoos to formally remove the oils and dry shampoo powder in order for the scalp and hair to feel and appear clean. Though dry shampoo is a modern invention, many people throughout history have used powder-based products similar to dry shampoo to cleanse and improve the appearance of hair. Evidence", "The powders within dry shampoo are meant to absorb the sebum in hair, which is excreted from sebaceous glands and can give hair a greasy appearance when the oil is overproduced. By absorbing the oils, the greasy appearance of the hair is improved; however, the absorbed oils and powders remain in the scalp, so the hair may appear clean but feel unclean to the user. The user may need to wash their hair with traditional shampoos to formally remove the oils and dry shampoo powder in order for the scalp and hair to feel and appear clean. Though dry shampoo is a modern invention, many people throughout history have used powder-based products similar to dry shampoo to cleanse and improve the appearance of hair. Evidence"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2494084", "title": "Hair care", "section": "Section::::Hair cleaning and conditioning.:Hair cleaning.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 8, "end_paragraph_id": 8, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Brushing the scalp also stimulates the sebaceous gland, which in turn produces more sebum. When sebum and sweat combine on the scalp surface, they help to create the acid mantle,", "One way to distribute the hair's natural oils through the hair is by brushing with a natural bristle brush. The natural bristles effectively move the oil from the scalp through to the hair's mid-lengths and ends, nourishing these parts of the hair. Brushing the scalp also stimulates the sebaceous gland, which in turn produces more sebum. When sebum and sweat combine on the scalp surface, they help to create the acid mantle, which is the skin's own protective layer. Washing hair removes excess sweat and oil, as well as unwanted products from the hair and scalp. Often hair is washed as part of a shower or bathing with shampoo, a specialized surfactant. Shampoos"]}}]}]

How are consumable meats cultured in labs?

5gtfuh

[{"answer": "Actually we all start out as a lump of cells when we were still an embryo. When cells divide, you will grow in size and your cells will start to specialize in certain functions (for example skin cells can absorb sunlight). Thus by absorbing enough nutrients, the lump of cells can divide and grow into a human. Now if you want to grow meat, the process is more complex. Main problem is that the cells will try to specialize into a task. So you add drugs to stop the process. Also your Petri dish will run out of nutrients as the cells kept dividing non-stop, thus it will be better if you use an entire tank of cell culture instead. Just keep refilling the tank until the meat is ready. Keep in mind though this is VERY expensive. Controlling the enviroment (temperature, pressure......) is not easy and it cost at least $10000 for a pound of lab grown meat. Most meat we eat today are just animals kept in farms (most likely GM for more meat), which is cheaper and safer."}, {"answer": "As far as I know, they don't grow meat in labs on a large scale, although it's currently being researched. In the same way that you can grow bacteria in petri dishes, you can also grow animal cells in flasks filled with nutrient-rich liquid (media). Generally, the cells will stick to the bottom of the flask as they grow. The trick with growing tissues (meat is just muscle tissue) is that you have to grow the right type of cells and you have to get the cells to organize into that tissue. Research is focused mostly on which chemical signals the cells need to organize into the tissue and what sort of structure they need to grow on. As the cells grow they get all of their food from the liquid media, so if you want to grow pounds of meat you will have to replace the media a lot."}, {"answer": "About a year ago I listened to a podcast by Sam Harris and he was talking to the CEO of a company called Memphis Meats, who are trying to find a way to mass produced cultured meats. They talk a bit about the science and the rationale behind why they would try such a thing. The Podcast is \"Waking Up\" by Sam Harris and episode is called \"Meat without Misery\"."}, {"answer": "Getting muscle cells to grow is a solved problem at this point. The obstacle to industrial-scale production is a circulatory system. In a living being, blood brings oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and removes waste products. There is an upper limit to the volume of tissue that can be maintained solely by 'diffusion'. Very small animals like insects can survive without hearts or lungs because none of their tissues are very 'deep'. It's possible to grow tissue with veins in it, but then it would need to be hooked up to a mechanical or organic pump and use real blood or a blood substitute. The last I time I saw anything was a story that said they had been able to produce enough meat to make a single hamburger. Presumable that was because they made lots of small bits of tissue and when ground up, it was exactly equivalent ground beef. Something like boneless hams or turkey should be pretty easy because those things are basically glued-together bits of meat anyway."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "511626", "title": "Cultured meat", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 145, "bleu_score": 0.5033434254649044}]}]

How are people expected to know the difference between a lawful open carrier and an active shooter who hasn't started shooting yet?

439937

[{"answer": "Stories of cops being called on open carriers are common. That's why the vast majority of people who carry, do so concealed. However, it's pretty easy to tell the difference between an open carrier and an active shooter: Open carriers must have their guns holstered or otherwise out of hand, by law. Walking around with a gun in your hand is an illegal act of brandishing under every state law I've ever seen. Among the few people who habitually open carry, many also make a point of dressing nicely, because they find it greatly decreases the chances that people call the cops."}, {"answer": "If it's holstered, they're obviously not about to start a mass shooting. I understand that he could quickly pull it out and start shooting, but anyone I walk past on the sidewalk could push me into traffic. But personally, if I see an open carry, my first assumption is that it's a cop."}, {"answer": " > Especially in light of the fact that it would be illegal to yell \"FIRE\" in a crowded theater, would someone who had a natural, panicky reaction to seeing a firearm in plain view in the grocery store and who yelled \"GUN!\" be subject to the same kind of punishment that someone yelling FIRE in a theater would? > Who, legally, if anyone, would be responsible for a mass hysteria situation in this instance? The open carrier or the person who yelled GUN? The only reason you would yell \"FIRE!\" in a crowded theater if there was no fire would be to incite panic, which is why it's a crime. A person lawfully open-carrying in a venue that has not prohibited it isn't breaking any laws and can't be held liable for someone else's over-reaction. As to whether the person freaking out is liable is a question for someone with more legal acumen than I. As for how can you tell, you can't definitively, but neither could you tell if the guy with a knife on his belt is going to pull it out and start stabbing people in the neck."}, {"answer": "People can say \"it depends on how they're carrying it\", but the reality is you can't know. That's why if you open carry somewhere, chances are you're going to have the cops called on you. This is why I think open carry is a bad idea, it does absolutely nothing except make the 2/3rds of the population who aren't familiar with guns terrified. If you see someone walking down the street with an AK47 strapped to their back, you're probably not going to think \"oh, he's just on his way to pick up some milk\". Regarding the panic, when someone with a gun is seen you aren't going to scream about it, you're going to run away as quietly as possible as to not attract the attention of the guy with the gun. People call the police from a safe hiding spot from open carriers all the time, and it's perfectly legal to do so."}, {"answer": "Unfortunately, by definition an Active shooter is one who is actively shooting. You may as well ask \"how can you spot a criminal before they actually break the law? \" That being said, those who are practicing open carry legally will have their weapons holstered or slung. You don't have to aim a weapon at someone to be brandishing it."}, {"answer": "OP, I am a gun owner, and I sympathize with your position because I'm in that same position, too. We all are. There are millions of weapon permit holders in the United States. We carry for various reasons, but almost all would cite 'personal protection' at the top of the list. Many carry a firearm in rural areas where it can be dangerous by yourself. We might have to deal with rabid animals, predators, or even people while tens of miles away from help. We just carry a firearm as a daily part of our lives and don't take it off in public because things could go just as badly at the 7-11 as they could in the woods. An active shooter is a completely different situation. I'll lump gang violence in here as well, for good measure. Anyone like that is going to have an aggressive posture about them. They might be yelling, walking/running fast, making sharp movements of aggression at another party. Your average concealed carrier is likely much like myself. I wear nice khakis and boots, plaid over shirts, and my firearm on my hip (in my case, with the gun underneath my shirt so I don't offend or startle anyone not used to being around firearms). I'll probably be shopping at a local store calm, collected, and likely pushing a cart full of goods. I'm just minding my own business and living my life. I appreciate that you're interested in learning more about the differences. Please realize that 'gun people' are not bad people. There sure is a loud minority of gun owners that absolutely ~~espouse~~ live up to the stereotypes, but there are likely many more people with firearms that you never see or hear from. We are just going about our daily lives while carrying an extra tool to ensure that we always make it home to the ones we love. **tl;dr-** It comes down to posture and intent. People going about their business will appear as such, someone looking to make trouble will be aggressive or suspicious looking. There are outliers for sure, but that's where it gets into \"we can't prepare for everything\" territory. **edit:** Added tl;dr, changed espouse to 'live up to'"}, {"answer": "An \"active shooter who hasn't started shooting yet\" is not active nor a shooter. When everyone carries guns it is nonsensical to yell \"he's got a gun!\" And no one would likely react if you did, any more than folks anywhere would react if you yelled \"OMG look behind you!\""}, {"answer": " > Who, legally, if anyone, would be responsible for a mass hysteria situation in this instance? The open carrier or the person who yelled GUN? Why would the open carrier (not doing anything illegal) be responsible for anything someone else did? Assuming open carry is legal where you live: If someone is carrying a gun in a holster, go about your business. If someone is carrying a gun stuck in their waistband, I would immediately leave the area, but otherwise not worry about it. If someone is carrying a gun in their HAND, I would immediately leave the area and call police."}, {"answer": "The legal word here is \"brandishing\" and there are brandishing laws in most states. Its when the carry of a weapon becomes threatening. In most cases the officer will just arrest anyone accused of brandishing a weapon and let the legal system sort it out. Obviously the problem arises of when does a carry become a brandish and how can you be prepared. The answer is really that you can't. In your situation where a guy yells \"Oh my god, run. Hes got a gun\" - anyone who shot the guy would also be arrested and have to prove they didn't commit murder and the guy who yelled it... well I dont know. Hes an ass for sure though."}, {"answer": "If the open carrier is wearing a handgun, then it will remain holstered at all times. Gun in hand would be illegally brandishing the firearm, or else preparing to lawfully use it in defense. If the open carrier is wearing a rifle, I believe most states that allow this form of carrying require that the gun is always slung behind the back, with the safety on. In either case, it should be noted that their behavior is safe and follows the letter of the law. Perhaps someone could find a counter example, but I've never heard of a mass shooter exercising such prudence. They generally don't care since they don't have lawful intentions. Furthermore, a mass shooter isn't very likely to give very much time between exposing their weapon and using it; they probably won't be on an errand run while they choose to shoot everyone. As for yelling \"GUN!\" upon seeing one: these stories pop up every once in a while on subs like /r/CCW and the reaction can vary quite a bit. Some stores will ask the carrier to leave, and the carrier will generally choose not to go there anymore. This is usually the case if a bystander doesn't incite panic but instead just complains very strongly about the carrier. Some stories posted have indicated that the authorities will in fact side with the carrier, as long as they are following the law, and sometimes charge the one yelling \"gun!\" for inciting panic. TL;DR: If it's not in the carrier's hands, then it is very likely to be a lawful case of open carrying. Assess the situation for a second before you decide whether to warn others about it. Mass shooter probably isn't going to be filling a grocery cart with green beans right before going on their rampage, and inciting panic could sometimes mean charges against you rather than against the open carrier."}, {"answer": "I spoke with a few friends of mine that are allowed to carry concealed. They said, they wouldn't open carry..... they'd simply continue to carry concealed. It's just easier that way. If I had a choice I wouldn't open carry, it draws too much attention. Just as I don't wear a Bluetooth headset while walking around."}, {"answer": "Carrying a weapon (on a sling, in a holster) is far different than actually *brandishing* it. The term \"open carry\" can be confusing to people who don't use guns, but it does not mean running around with their hands on the grip, ducking and dodging around corners Die Hard style."}, {"answer": "I had a guy in my neighborhood get shot for that exact reason. He was open carrying (although it was an airsoft rifle for vermin) and was shot by police. It wasn't ever noted if he was acting aggressive or not. So I think the point is that there isn't a strict black and white explanation."}, {"answer": "[in case anybody is curious about their jurisdiction]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "The same way you can distinguish someone lawfully driving a vehicle from someone about run over a crowd of innocent people but hasn't done it yet."}, {"answer": "point your finger at the person you suspect really fast and go \"hey why do you have a gun?!?!\". the lawful open carry person cannot shoot you legally and will show you his permit, the active shooter will proceed to shoot you"}, {"answer": "For the British guys and gals saying they can't even imagine this, all I'm picturing is David Bowie's \"I'm afraid of Americans\" music video."}, {"answer": "The same way you tell the difference between someone who is driving a car legally, and a drunk driver who hasn't gotten drunk yet. My point is that there's really absolutely zero reason anyone should be alarmed by someone conducting a legal activity. Until the person IS an active shooter, why would anyone be worried about it? That's like saying you're worried by bars that have parking lots, because obviously it allows drunk driving murderers to have access to their cars where they drink. You're right... But it also allows responsible people to have access to their cars when they want to go home after having some bar food and watching a football game. Our society is full of good guys and bad guys. You tell the difference by what they're doing... Not what they might do."}, {"answer": "In instances where the police are called because someone is holding a \"gun\" and the police show up and shoot someone with a toy gun.... It does not seem like much responsibility is laid on the overly cautious caller or police. See the cases in Beavercreek Oh, Cleveland Oh and AZ."}, {"answer": "Reading the comments in here... I am so stunned at how chill a lot of Americans seem to be about guns. Lots of \"if it's in a holster go about your business there is nothing to be afraid of\". I just... find it difficult to comprehend living in a world where you see a person with a gun and just go about your day! edit: Wow some people are so defensive! I wasn't criticising, I'm just saying it's strange for two countries that share such similarities to have such a stark difference. (I'm in the UK)"}, {"answer": "Just to clarify - it's perfectly acceptable, legal and encouraged if an actual fire breaks out in a movie theater to yell, \"Fire!\" When people use this example they so often omit the important part, being, it's illegal to yell, \"Fire!\" when there is no fire. And, that makes this whole ELIM apples to oranges and a really awful attempt at comparison."}, {"answer": "Don't you see cops and other security personnel open carrying all the time? How do you know they aren't active shooters who are just dressed that way to ensure maximum damage? Why aren't you in a constant state of panic?"}, {"answer": "If you see a person, who has a visible gun, that is *in a holster*, the likelihood is 99.999999% that person is not about to go on a shooting spree. If seeing a gun in a holster makes you afraid that a mass shooting is about to happen, buy a lotto ticket on the way out the door, then lay on the ground to reduce your chances of being killed by lightning, and prepare to punch a shark in the nose to stop it from attacking you."}, {"answer": "Normally a lawful open carry will have their weapon holstered/shouldered as opposed to the [low and ready]( URL_2 ). I'm not sure what sort of legal obligation there is to this, but aiming a weapon at someone or in their general direction is a crime, [brandishing]( URL_0 ). Side note: if you see someone carrying a weapon and in an active shooter situation: [run, hide, fight]( URL_1 ). Do not yell he has a gun, you will only draw attention to yourself and cause panic."}, {"answer": "None of the answers to this completely legitimate question have really given a way to differentiate between the two. I'm glad I don't live in the US, cause I'd be noping the fuck out of anywhere if someone who wasn't a cop walked in with a gun strapped to them. I'm not going to risk my kids' lives on the assumption that these are just assholes who think they look cool with their guns visible."}, {"answer": "i'm not a fan of open carry, i'm def. pro concealed. there should be no reason to SHOW your carrying a weapon, that makes you target # 1."}, {"answer": "A good starting point: roughly 99% of people who own guns do not intend to harm you with them."}, {"answer": "I don't have an answer, but had this very experience the other day, shortly after the Paris shootings. Sitting outside a coffee shop in a strip mall, a large, angry looking guy gets out of his truck and walks purposefully over to the coffee shop with a handgun visible on his hip (holstered). He was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses. I was alarmed at the sight and wondered, how do I know if this guy is going in there to shoot up the place? Wait until I hear shots? Sure, he didn't have the gun in hand ... but he also wasn't inside yet."}, {"answer": "Carried in non threatening manner is also in most laws. This goes for rifles as well as handguns. A holstered handgun or slinged ride is considered non threatening."}, {"answer": "It's called brandishing. If they have pulled the weapon from it's holster or are pointing a rifle then they are performing an illegal action."}, {"answer": "I know a few conceal carry permit holders who carry because their work either involves high risk (cousin drives an armored van for Brinks), or they work in high risk areas (dad works as a wholesaler for a hardware distributor, some of his accounts are in some seriously tough neighborhoods), my friend is also in the junk car business and keeps large amounts of cash on hand because most his customers and competitors deal in cash and he needs to to stay competitive. I know where I live in NY its very difficult to get a concealed carry permit. Personal defense is NOT a valid reason to be able to obtain one."}, {"answer": "I can understand in a society where everyone is armed you would need to be armed for the event you are attacked. Having it openly displayed though is provocative and as the OP said could easily be mistaken for someone who is about to use the weapon. Personally I live in a gunless society and am glad I don't have to live in paranoia and fear that come with an armed populace. It also means the police are less paranoid and the average 'beat' policeman doesn't need to be armed any more."}, {"answer": "They won't. This is just one of the many practical flaws in both open carry and concealed carry in the event of an active shooter situation. When guns start being drawn there will be chaos and innocent people being shot. This doesn't fit very well with the gun nut's hero fantasies though."}, {"answer": "On October 31st, this exact thing happened. Noah Harpham was spotted by a neighbor walking down the street with a gun. Police were called, but not dispatched since open carry is illegal. Not long after, he shot and killed three random people."}, {"answer": "People who live in states that open carry is legal are probably used to seeing people open carry and not freak out every time they see a gun"}, {"answer": "Active shooter who hasn't started shooting yet? You need to rethink that one."}, {"answer": "Well I personally think open carry is stupid. Don't get me wrong, I support the right to do what you want to do and if that's what you feel comfortable with doing then go for it. I just think, practically speaking, it's a bad idea. First off I don't want people knowing I have a gun. It's there for my protection. Not to show people some level of \"don't fuck with me\" or that you have a gun. I also don't want any harassment or being made out as a criminal by others, especially law enforcement, by openly carrying. I mean think about it from a leo's stand point when dealing with the variety of reasons an leo might have an interaction with you. Even just passing on the street. Lets say you get into a fender bender and the guy behind you smashes up your car because he wasn't paying attention. You get out of the car and start assessing damage and trading info. I police officer drives by and stops as they do. He is trained to assess potential threats in every situation. He sees two guys on the side of the road. If he sees someone openly carrying he is likely to approach the situation guarded and even with his gun drawn. So instead of dealing with the situation at hand the first reaction is hostile. It just doesn't set you up for success. Also, what if for some reason you match the description of someone they are looking for. For any amount of reasons. This has happened time and time again where people who fit the description of a wanted criminal are stopped and questions by police. If you are minding your own business walking down the street openly carrying and an leo notices you are openly carrying you will be treated as if you are the criminal until they can determine otherwise. The officer would likely draw his weapon, have you lay down, cuff you, and disarm you until the situation is resolved. If you are concealed carrying the officer would approach you calmly. You can inform them of your concealed carry, he will disarm you, and the interaction can continue peacefully. My biggest thing is that it is a big marker saying \"I have a gun\" and in many many situations you just don't want people knowing this. The climate surrounding interactions with you are different and for no real added benefit."}, {"answer": "How do you know if someone is a heavily armed police officer doing his job, walking his beat, and not a spree shooter dressed as a police officer? Or even a cop who's gone over the edge and about to go on a rampage himself. When you ask 'how are people expected to know', you are dealing with perception of security vs actual danger, and I think the answer is: they aren't. How are you expected to know that the car stopped at the light isn't planning on crushing you as you walk in the crosswalk in front of it? You never know. How are you expected to know that the cashier at the store isn't giving high-quality counterfeit bills? You probably don't know. How are you expected to know that your pharmacist hasn't dipped all your pills with a cyanide broth? You can't really know. How can you be expected to know if the hotel maid dipped your toothbrush in the toilet? You'll probably never know. How are you expected to know that your own government isn't covering up the fact that there are toxins in the drinking water? You aren't, really. The world has the potential to be dangerous and insecure, but generally we are getting safer and safer, at least here in the usa, things are getting safer year after year, and life expectancy continues to increase. But there are never real guarantees. And if you come across anyone who guarantees your safety, your critical mind should ask, \"how do I know that this guarantee will keep me from harm?\""}, {"answer": "This thread is proof that guns **need** to be restricted to the actual, original intent of the 2nd Amendment in the USA (only allowable to keep stored for a \"well regulated militia\"). I'm tired of the misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment by everyone including our own goddamn government just because they have this perverse, violent need to own a damn gun to use for whatever reason they think. Our country would be so much safer if it wasn't for this diseased way of thinking. \"But only criminals will have guns!\" Yes, well, do you want to make everything legal then, because this dumb idea could be applied to anything that's illegal. Legality and the law isn't an all or nothing thing. We reduce the amount of guns to a bare minimum, remove access to them, regulate them, and so on, and guess what? Any event suddenly becomes more rare because not every single person is walking around with a gun or has access to same. Only \"well-regulated militias\", meaning organizations that are actually responsible. The USA needs to grow up and realize their little shooty toys is making this country insanely dangerous to live in."}, {"answer": "I don't think guns are very useful in a robbery situation. I've been robbed twice. One time, a guy put a gun to my head and demanded all my weed. Even if I had a gun, it would have done nothing. I would not have had time to get a gun out at all. Also, I had my best friend(female) there with me and I couldn't risk anything happening to her. I had to just hand over my weed. At least I kept the $75 in my pocket:) The other time I was robbed was at work where I couldn't have a gun anyway. I suspect people think having a gun gives you all this power but it really doesn't. The only ones with the power are the ones willing to do violence. All you can do is do as they say and hope for the best. They're not gonna let you pull a gun out. I've served in the Army and definitely love guns, I just don't think they're as much of a help as people think they are."}, {"answer": "Not exactly answering your question but more so just explaining a bit more about the new open carry law and how it affects gun owners. As someone has already said, most people who carry a pistol do so concealed. The catch with the CHL is (at least in Texas) if it accidentally becomes unconcealed then there could be legal consequences. Why so many supported the open carry ruling is that it protects chl carriers if it becomes exposed in public. Honestly as far as knowing if an open carrier is a threat or not, there's honestly no way to know. In my logic, I doubt any one who intends to use it would have it holstered on their belt for the world to see because then every one would already know there's a gun in the room. That's why in chl training they talk about the importance of your handgun not being visible to possible assailants because they would react differently if there was a gun in play."}, {"answer": "A good rule of thumb is that if you see a person with a gun in hand, get to cover. Whether they are a \"good guy\" (i.e. responding to a bad guy) or a \"bad guy\" is a moot point. Bullets are likely about to start flying and you don't want to be around for it. My question... And I rarely hear of this happening, surprisingly... Is how do CCW holders identify if someone is a threat or not? Isn't it plausible that you see a guy holding a gun as if he is looking for a target in a crowded place... So you draw your weapon. You see him raise his gun as if he is about to fire, so you shoot him. Then it turns out that he was about to shoot a guy he spotted about to stab a child with a large knife. So not only do you shoot a good guy, but the bad guy still stabs the child."}, {"answer": "If I'm driving my car on the highway, how do I know that the guy driving alongside me isn't drunk and about to veer into my lane? If I call the police on him and there's a collision while the police are responding, who is liable, the person who is driving alongside me or me, who originally placed the call? That hypo is the same as what you posed. The driver/open-carrier is doing nothing wrong, and you want to know if he can be found criminally liable for his lawful conduct. It doesn't work like that. In the U.S., someone is only criminally liable for doing something that is illegal. Your question essentially asks if it is okay to hold someone criminally liable because a third person acts irrationally. The answer is no. The third person might be liable for inducing panic or disorderly conduct."}, {"answer": "I live in a southern state in an area where open carry is pretty common. If you take the time to focus on the person rather than the gun it becomes pretty obvious what their intentions are. As in, they are doing what they would normally be doing except they have a gun on their hip. So when I see a guy pushing a shopping cart of groceries at Walmart with a gun on his hip I have 0% feeling that he is going to cause trouble. Same thing for the guy in the parking lot tinkering with his pickup truck engine with a gun on his hip. I don't particularly care for open carry in suburban or urban environments, I think it draws too much unnecessary attention and causes distress to folks unaccustomed to it."}, {"answer": "Mt father is a handgun licence instructor and I do marketing for him. The biggest thing that you will notice about a lawful open-carrier is their discreet nature. My father carries his weapon on his belt at a particular angle in a tension lock holster. When you're carrying a weapon, you have to have a licence. I licence means you have never comitted a felony, and one slip up with your gun could cost you your weapon forever. As a result, serious open-carriers often dress nice, wear a jacket over their weapon, or try to look like upstanding members of society rather than gun toting hoodlums. An active shooter has a different psyche that often excludes others from the equation, unlike a lawful carrier who has their weapon on lockdown under strict circumstances."}, {"answer": "Most of the comments are about how most concealed carriers and open carriers are law abiding citizens who carry to protect themselves and the average person should not feel scared or worried around people carrying. That is perfectly understandable, but how do trust that the person carrying is responsible. People are by nature fallible. We make mistakes all of the time and misread situations constantly. There is no reasonable way to know that the man behind me in the movie theater won't accidentally shoot someone or miss read a situation and shoot an innocent person. That's why I would not trust myself to carry a gun in public and I do not unconditionally trust the people around me, even if they appear to be law abiding."}, {"answer": "Seeing some random person with a tool designed only for killing in plain view, for no apparent reason while walking around the grocery store or something would make me uncomfortable, plain and simple. I've met plenty of reasonable, well-adjusted people I would trust to carry a weapon like that, and I've also met many that I wouldn't at all. These people aren't mass murderers, just assholes. We've all met them, and I'm sure many of these assholes have friends and family who love them, but some people are just unreasonable shitheads for a variety of different reasons. They should not be allowed to carry a gun on a daily basis."}, {"answer": "Not really. Cops will tell you it's best to keep your gun concealed but other than that nothing happens. Honestly freaking out about someone doing something perfectly legal just makes you look like an idiot. If I wanted to walk into a diner with a Mosin over my shoulder I could, but the owner of said Diner also has every right to tell me to get the fuck out or he's calling the cops. But in public I can have it shouldered as I wish. Brandishing a firearm however is never legal in public and is typically only permitted in appropriate circumstances."}, {"answer": "The reason I'm against open/concealed carry isn't that 'guns cause violence' etc. I don't believe humans are smart or responsible enough in general to have that kind of power. All it takes is a few people in a busy mall or street carrying, and some jerk like me to shout 'He's got a gun'. Two carrying-folk draw their weapon to defend themselves, mistake each other as the gun man, fire off a round, which prompts other carrying-folk to draw and fire, panic ensues and a bunch of people get injured or worse."}, {"answer": "Question from TX: Allowing open carry was recently passed in my state. I play poker socially at a local restaurant here in Austin. There was a guy that joined our group that had his pistol holstered, rocking his NRA hat, and with an \"all-access\" companion dog. (not sure of relevance, just adding for color). This guy was drinking alcohol while playing. I was always taught alcohol and guns never mix, but am not sure of the law regarding drinking while open carrying. I'd love to be educated on the law."}, {"answer": "You're not. That's why only the absolute stupidest of carriers will have their guns out. Open carry really only has one tangible benefit, and that's letting ranchers and other outdoor types who occasionally have need to stray from within our fences not to have to stop and drop our belts just to chase down an escaped goat or cross a couple of gates. In those cases the cops of the area usually already know us anyway."}, {"answer": "There's a brilliant software developer that the company that I work for has been trying to get up to Canada to speak. Unfortunately, he doesn't feel safe without his gun and our gun laws won't permit him to carry. Apparently he doesn't go anywhere that guns are not allowed. Fair enough but to someone like me and many of my coworkers who aren't into guns, the mindset seems strange and totally outside of our reality."}, {"answer": "Here's my concern (genuine, not trolling): When cops are involved in shootouts, their accuracy is abysmally low, because \"holy shit, it's a life and death situation\" that goes above and beyond anything that they were trained for. In a \"good guy with a gun\" scenario, where a civilian (on average) has less training than a cop, it's likely that the GGWAG will harm themselves or other innocents."}, {"answer": "I went out for bbq a few weeks ago and a guy in front of me had a gun on his hip. He looked 18-19 and was leaning against the counter while his dad ordered dinner for him and his girlfriend. I assumed he wasn't a shooter because he brought his dad and a date. That was all I really had to go on though."}, {"answer": "If we were to consider the millions of people already legally carrying concealed for many years, we'd be amazed: URL_0 My wife and I have been out all day with friends that conceal carry and we never notice... they don't mention it.. or show it. I won't realize until we get back to their house and they take off holster and lock it up."}, {"answer": "How do you tell the difference between someone with no weapon and someone going on a shooting spree with weapon concealed? You don't know. People need to wake the fuck up and realize we don't live in a utopia. There's bad people doing bad things everywhere, and you may never see it coming. If I wasn't a felon I would carry."}, {"answer": "Canadian. I think the \"I'm going to carry this AR15 with me into wal-mart because that somehow makes me a patriot\" mindset is the hardest thing about America to wrap my head around. What the hell are you proving? Aside from you not actually understanding the point of the second amendment?"}, {"answer": "How do you know someone carries \"responsibly\". Do you just guess? Everyone around the world gets mugged. It happens. I don't think guns save that from happening. People on here are saying you would know the difference to a responsible gun owner and not one. Come on. Lipstick on a pig"}, {"answer": "I took my daughter to the skatepark the other day and saw someone open-carrying for the first time. It seems inappropriate in any circumstance I can imagine, but more so at a public park with 40-50 kids. His kid was a shit skateboarder though, so that made it better."}, {"answer": "This is great. I just got an email saying I have to attend active shooter training because I'm a student employee at my uni. I think it's ridiculous and there are other ways we can handle this that don't mean teaching people how not to die."}, {"answer": "This is exactly why I would much rather have concealed carry laws. I understand the whole self defence thing but to me it seems the only real reason to open carry is because you love guns and you must show everyone else you love guns too."}, {"answer": "That's all the fun of an armed society citizen, stupid shit can happen at any moment and based on our current system liability may or may not fall on the living, but will NOT fall on the police."}, {"answer": "I'm a huge advocate for responsible gun ownership, and my whole family carries. There is nothing that open carry accomplishes that concealed carry can't... Most guys that open carry do it as a penis measuring exercise."}, {"answer": "This is [illustrated]( URL_0 ) guide, details how you tell the difference between an honest patriot and a deranged killer. It's not my work and it has been doing the rounds for a while."}, {"answer": "How do you tell the difference between a guy concealing a gun legally or with then intent of shooting someone? Same thing. You don't."}, {"answer": "You can't. Hence the smarter choice being to not allow people to carry weapons in public. Less risk and less ambiguity."}, {"answer": " > someone who had a natural, panicky reaction to seeing a firearm in plain view There's your problem right there..."}, {"answer": "its probably safer to just shoot everyone you see, when you go out. None of them can be trusted........really."}, {"answer": "any black or african-american open-carry folks on this thread? would like to hear your perspective."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5360793", "title": "Open carry in the United States", "section": "Section::::Constitutional implications.:Grounds for detention.:United States Supreme Court.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 33, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 33, "end_character": 791, "bleu_score": 0.9349563355506381}]}]

Different hair products (mousse, gel, etc.) and what each is good at doing

nuceb

[{"answer": "Here's the really tough part, depending on your hair type, different products do different things. For me: Mousse: make your hair big Gel: sticks your hair in place (think *There's Something About Mary*) Hairspray: sticks your hair in place, but doesn't make it look like cement, like gel can do (and thus, doesn't hold as well) Pommade: gives your hair \"texture,\" makes it less smooth and holds it in place a little more URL_0 (in a pinch you can substitute Vaseline and it works the same) Wax: depending on the brand, the same as pommade, or thicker for heavier hair Leave-in conditioner: detangles, sometimes adds volume Serum: usually calms frizz, can also add shine Oil: usually used to combat dry scalp, less often to add shine Peanut butter: removes gum from hair Mayonnaise: adds shine, useful way to use up that impulse purchase from Costco"}, {"answer": "(this is purely my opinion as a heterosexual male) - Mousse seems to work best to really hold the hair in one direction, its kinda like pasting your hair (but it washes out at the end of the night). imo at a distance it looks hard/reflective/plasticy - Gel does ok in terms of strength, its doesn't work as well as mousse, but it isn't as visible. The main downside is if you sweat, it will drip down your face - Wax is probably my favourite, its neither as effective as the two above, but it holds reasonably well, and is the least visible. Also, when you sweat, it doesn't go everywhere. mowhawk - mousse Ski jump - gel Styled - wax i have nfi what the rest of that stuff is"}, {"answer": "Mousse works best actually to keep your hair down, but still curly and voluptuous. You'll see some people use so much that their hair looks wet, but I've always thought that it works best to maintain a messy look without your hair looking like you're put a lot of product in it. Hairspray is for setting your hair, and is often used with other products. I believe that spritz is a type of hairspray that mainly refers to the way it sprays out of the bottle, in 'spritz' rather than a continuous spray. Gel is for more long lasting or extreme hairstyles, like a mowhawk. Once it is dry, your hair will have to be washed or rinsed to restyle. Pomade, when used for more subtle styles, should be used in small amounts and only as a way to add more texture. When used for more extreme styles, pomade allows for a ridiculous amount of control, and can be fixed throughout the day. I'm not exactly 100% about how all these are used professionally, but that's how I've always used these."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "21749970", "title": "Hairstyling product", "section": "Section::::Types.:Pomade.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 12, "end_paragraph_id": 12, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["curls, or to add texture to hair for a beach blown effect. Pomade is an oil based or water based product designed for slick and tight hairstyles. Unlike hair spray and hair gel, pomade does not dry and often takes several washes to remove. Grease-cutting shampoos and deep-cleansing conditioners can be used to quicken the removal process. Other methods of removal include the use of olive oil, dish washing liquid, and lemon juice. Most oil based pomades contain petroleum jelly (and in fact, petroleum jelly\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "urls, or to add texture to hair for a beach blown effect. Pomade is an oil based or water based product designed for slick and tight hairstyles. Unlike hair spray and hair gel, pomade does not dry and often takes several washes to remove. Grease-cutting shampoos and deep-cleansing conditioners can be used to quicken the removal process. Other methods of removal include the use of olive oil, dish washing liquid, and lemon juice. Most oil based pomades contain petroleum jelly (and in fact, petroleum jelly\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "curls, or to add texture to hair for a beach blown effect. Pomade is an oil based or water based product designed for slick and tight hairstyles. Unlike hair spray and hair gel, pomade does not dry and often takes several washes to remove. Grease-cutting shampoos and deep-cleansing conditioners can be used to quicken the removal process. Other methods of removal include the use of olive oil, dish washing liquid, and lemon juice. Most oil based pomades contain petroleum jelly (and in fact, petroleum jelly"]}}]}]

Why is soccer so ridiculously respected and revered in the rest of the world, and commonly sneered at and bashed in the USA?

1bv6kh

[{"answer": "Soccer is popular because you don't need special equipment or infrastructure to play it. You need a spherical object, and a relatively flat field. All other sports need a lot of special equipment or infrastructure."}, {"answer": "I don't think it has anything to do with how fun/exciting different sports are. Soccer has become a lot more respected in the US over the last twenty years. It\u2019s not huge here professionally, but the united states has had a very competitive (most companies gunning for limited customer base, not sports competition) professional sports market since the NFL was founded and the NBA and ABA merged in the 70s . Americans have always had multiple options, and soccer came about relatively late for us. Kids in the US play what they are exposed to, which is usually football and basketball, and everything else is going to be, as you say, sneered at because people are just unfamiliar with it."}, {"answer": "I think the reason is two fold. First, the comments regarding wealth and the opportunities to play other sports in the US is valid. I think the second reason is that the fans in the US have been trained to like sports with artificial breaks (tv timeouts, change in innings, end of quarters, etc). Also, we in the US like a lot of scoring and have not been told at a young age that there is beauty in a 0-0 tie. We like our home runs, 3 point shots, power plays and hail Mary passes. Finally, it also could have to do with the US not being that competitive at it nor is our league up to par with the EPL. US spoiled US fans ant the bat and it we feel that something is not perceived as the best, we become uninterested. I do love watching soccer but I am in the minority."}, {"answer": "It's kind of hard to generalize a country as large as the US ... where I live, soccer is very popular not only in the schools, but in the pubs. I think to watch it, you have to think (and it also helps if you played for 20 years and know what's going on). It's much easier to drink beer, eat snacks and watch big men bash each other around (e.g. american football, basketball) What I don't understand is how people complain about soccer being boring watch 162 games of baseball a year. I like baseball, but it is also slow ..."}, {"answer": "I don't know how much cost factors in (I'm sure it does) but people in the US tend to love high scoring, high intensity games. Before you go off on how soccer is intense, compare it to american football, basketball, even baseball and you should be able to tell that it is way down of eye-grabbing action. On the other hand, part of America also loves NASCAR, and I can't imagine there being anything more boring than watching cars go really fast in a circle for hours."}, {"answer": "The same reason why the rest of the world sneers at football. You generally grow to enjoy what is revered by your community."}, {"answer": "The cost of equipment does play a role but I don't believe its as great as some people think. For example, take cricket which it could be argued requires more equipment then baseball. However its bigger then any other sport in places like India and Pakistan where kids living in slums will play it with sticks and up turned crates for wickets. I think the reason for the popularity of a sport is down to who the kids playing it aspire to be. If local news/sport is dominated by a particular player/sport, then kids will play that sport to be like their heroes. Who in turn become professional players who are then heroes to another generation and so on. If Messi or Ronaldo were American, \"soccer\" would suddenly become a lot more popular in the US."}, {"answer": "I don't think soccer is sneered at and bashed, as a sport. We sneer at the disdain heaped upon American football, with the hand-egg jokes, and \"hurr, hurr, I thought you were talking about *real* football, not blah blah.\" Nobody likes being looked down on by elitists."}, {"answer": "Americans like american sports. Basketball, football, and baseball originated in the US. Hockey and soccer, not from here, will always be distant 4th and 5th place sports"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "579105", "title": "Soccer in the United States", "section": "Section::::History.:Beginnings and decline: 1850s \u2013 1930s.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 14, "end_paragraph_id": 14, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Early soccer leagues in the U.S. mostly used the name \"football\", for example: the AFA (founded in 1884), the American Amateur Football Association (1893), the American League of Professional Football (1894), the National Association Foot Ball League (1895),", "Early soccer leagues in the U.S. mostly used the name \"football\", for example: the AFA (founded in 1884), the American Amateur Football Association (1893), the American League of Professional Football (1894), the National Association Foot Ball League (1895), and the Southern New England Football League (1914). Common confusion between the terms \"American football\" and \"association football\" eventually led to a more domestic widespread use of the term \"soccer\" with regard to association football. Originally seen as a British slang term for \"association\", the use of \"soccer\" began appearing in the late 1910s and early 1920s. A noticeable example was the American Soccer League (ASL), which formed in 1919", "Early soccer leagues in the U.S. mostly used the name \"football\", for example: the AFA (founded in 1884), the American Amateur Football Association (1893), the American League of Professional Football (1894), the National Association Foot Ball League (1895), and the Southern New England Football League (1914). Common confusion between the terms \"American football\" and \"association football\" eventually led to a more domestic widespread use of the term \"soccer\" with regard to association football. Originally seen as a British slang term for \"association\", the use of \"soccer\" began appearing in the late 1910s and early 1920s. A noticeable example was the American Soccer League (ASL), which formed in 1919. The governing body of the sport in the U.S. did not have the word \"soccer\" in its name until 1945 when it became the United States Soccer Football Association. It did not drop the word \"football\" from its name until 1974, when it became the United States Soccer Federation, often going simply as U.S. Soccer."]}}]}]

Why does everyone on reddit seem to have roommates? (I'm European)

1tn8xr

[{"answer": "bias. when people have roomates, they do things and people post shit about it. When people dont have roomates, nothing about roomates is said. No one says 'i live alone and this happened'. so you notice the occasional roomate post and move on to the next ten thousand posts and then after a while you wonder why so many people have roomates. of course there are other reasons. many people have roomates. but i think the one i said before is probably the biggest factor here on reddit"}, {"answer": "It's common in the UK as well. And in the UK people have *flatmates* instead. It's just cheaper to share a house with five people. It makes financial sense."}, {"answer": "My wife would be *pissed* if I told her to move out."}, {"answer": "Yes, normally people are ashamed of living with their parents so they try to get good apartments they can't afford and split it with someone else. They would both live together and also there are roommates in college because if everyone had their own room it would be too much."}, {"answer": "Also people often use \"roommate\" to mean \"housemate.\""}, {"answer": "A lot of it has to do with housing, where I went to college, the apartments were pretty underwhelming, but you could rent a pretty awesome four bedroom house with kitchen, garage, living room, dining room, yard, etc. and have it be much cheaper than a solo apartment. A lot of people can't stand apartments, myself included, and would way rather share a nice household with a group of friends. I've done it most of ny life and it's great. People tend to have problems when they room with immature people or strangers."}, {"answer": "Americans call people they share apartments or houses with roommates, English people call them housemates or flatmates."}, {"answer": "Some have cited high housing costs and underemployment as the cause of this, but I don't think that's accurate. While these problems are real, they are often exaggerated (and upvoted) on reddit because reddit is disproportionally full of people experiencing these problems (young people bored at work). Regardless of the frequency or severity of these problems, it isn't what drives people to want roommates. Having roommates just makes sense. Regardless of the housing market, the cost per person decreases significantly when you share a living room and kitchen. Even housing is cheap in your area, having roommates will save you a few hundred dollars a month, and in many cases allows you to live in a house instead of an apartment, which gives you more privacy from neighbors and other benefits. Some people move back in with their parents after college, but I think most people try not to. In many cases (maybe because the US is so spread out) that isn't an option because recent grads need to be close to their job and in most cases that's at least a few hours away from mom and dad."}, {"answer": "College dorms in the US typically consist of a single room with two people sharing that space. Typically as one progresses throughout school they move into new dorms more like you described or simply move off campus. In the US independence is a very big concept. Culturally it is seen as a failure in ones personal and professional life if one does not move into their own home shortly after college. While living with ones parents is very financial sound, it gives the impression (especially if older) that they can not take care of themselves. In order to afford a place to live many younger people will simply find roommates to split rent with until they settle down with a significant other and are making enough money in their career to buy an actual home."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5923637", "title": "List of Friends characters", "section": "Section::::Characters recurring throughout series.:Introduced in season 1.:Gunther.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 43, "end_paragraph_id": 43, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Gunther (James Michael Tyler): The manager of the Central Perk coffee house, who first appears as a background character in \"The One with the Sonogram at the End\". He is a former actor who once played Bryce on \"All My Children\" before that character was \"killed in an avalanche.\" Gunther develops an unrequited crush on Rachel in the third season, which he keeps to himself until \"The Last One\". Apart from Ross, whom he dislikes, he is on reasonably good terms with the rest of the gang despite occasionally being annoyed by wacky antics or comments from them. His motivation for disliking Ross is jealousy (as he is aware of Ross' relationship with Rachel), which is made clear numerous times, most notably in \"The One the Morning After\" when he reveals to Rachel that Ross (who mistakenly thought at the time that his relationship with her was over\"We were on a break\") got drunk and cheated on her. Gunther appears in nearly every episode, but only occasionally calls attention to himself and almost never has a large role in the plot of an episode. In \"The One With The Stain\", Gunther is shown to be fluent in Dutch (although with a strong American accent), calling Ross an \"ezel\" as he converses with him. James Michael Tyler was cast as Gunther because", "Gunther (James Michael Tyler): The manager of the Central Perk coffee house, who first appears as a background character in \"The One with the Sonogram at the End\". He is a former actor who once played Bryce on \"All My Children\" before that character was \"killed in an avalanche.\" Gunther develops an unrequited crush on Rachel in the third season, which he keeps to himself until \"The Last One\". Apart from Ross, whom he dislikes, he is on reasonably good terms with the rest of the gang despite occasionally being annoyed by wacky antics or comments from them. His motivation for disliking Ross is jealousy (as he is aware of Ross' relationship with Rachel), which is made clear numerous times, most notably in \"The One the Morning After\" when he reveals to Rachel that Ross (who mistakenly thought at the time that his relationship with her was over\"We were on a break\") got drunk and cheated on her. Gunther appears in nearly every episode, but only occasionally calls attention to himself and almost never has a large role in the plot of an episode. In \"The One With The Stain\", Gunther is shown to be fluent in Dutch (although with a strong American accent), calling Ross an \"ezel\" as he converses with him. James Michael Tyler was cast as Gunther because"]}}]}]

if multiplying by Zero returns Zero, why does division by Zero return 'undefined'?

5mjsp4

[{"answer": "Let's use a 1-pound chocolate bar. Multiplication: if you have a 4 count of 1-pound chocolate bars, you have 4 pounds of chocolate. If you have no 1-pound chocolate bars, you have 0 pounds of chocolate. Makes perfect sense. Division: If you cut the chocolate bar into 4 equal parts, each part is 4 ounces (1/4 of a pound). But try cutting a chocolate bar into zero equal parts... conceptually that makes no sense. If you say that this means removing or destroying the chocolate bar, that would actually be subtraction. In effect, you want to collapse the chocolate bar into fewer than one piece but still expect all 16 ounces of chocolate to still be present in this space where there is no chocolate bar."}, {"answer": "Let us look at the number 10 10 / 2 = 5 Dividing by 2 gives us half 10 / 1 = 10 Dividing by 1 gives us the same number 10 / 0.5 = 20 Dividing by a half doubles the number 10 / 0.25 = 40 Dividing by a quarter quadruples the number. So, the smaller the number we divide by, the bigger the result. This suggest that dividing by 0 should give us infinite. However, let us look at it from the other end of the number line: 10 / -2 = -5 Dividing by -2 gives us minus a half 10 / -1 = 10 Dividing by -1 gives us the same number, only negative 10 / -0.5 = -20 Dividing by a half doubles the number, only negative 10 / -0.25 = -40 Dividing by a quarter quadruples the number, only negative. So the closer we move to zero from the negative direction, the closer the result moves towards minus infinite. This suggest that dividing by 0 should result in minus infinite. I don't think 2 results can be further away from each other than infinite and minus infinite."}, {"answer": "0/0 is undefined precisely *because* x \\* 0 = 0 for any x. So, think about the relationship between multiplication and division. It is similar to the relationship between addition and subtraction, they undo one another, if you will. In other words, we would like it to be the case that a \\* x / x = a for any a and any x. This is just fine as long as x isn't 0. But look at what happens when x = 0. 1 \\* 0 = 0 So, if I want my above undo rule to hold, since 0 = 1 \\* 0, it must be the case that 0 / 0 = (1 \\* 0) / 0 = 1 Okay, great! So 0 / 0 is 1, right? But... 2 \\* 0 = 0 So, if I still insist that the undo rule holds, and I also know that 0 = 2 \\* 0, then... 0 / 0 = (2 \\* 0) / 0 = 2 So, 1 = 0 / 0 = 2. Oh no. That's no good. Clearly 1 isn't equal to 2. So, how do we remedy this problem? Well, where is the problem? The problem is that we decided that division by 0 *could* mean something."}, {"answer": "5 year old explanation: Imagine you have a room with 5 people in it. A pizza is on the table in the room. If the pizza has 20 slices each person gets 4 slices. Now what if you have the same situation with a 20 slice pizza but there are 0 people in the room. Now how many slices does each person recieve... If there are no people to divide up the slices than there is no conceivable answer to this problem."}, {"answer": "0 x 0 is the same as 0 + 0, just as 2 x 2 is 2 + 2. Nothing added to nothing is nothing. 0/0 is asking how many nothings could I fit into nothing? Who knows. There's no real answer."}, {"answer": "I'll try for an intuitive approach. Let's have a*b=c Let's define division as a slight reordering of this into a=c/b So 0/0 is not undefined but indeterminate. This distinction is important because the number itself IS defined, but cannot be determined as it has an infinite number of valid solutions. To see this, let's try plugging in 0 for c and b (to give us our 0/0) and rearrange it into our first equation a*0=0 Well shoot, that's true no matter what value we put in for a. This is why it's indeterminate. Now let's try division by zero where the numerator isn't 0. Let's try c=1 and b=0 a*0=1 Well as we can see, we run into a problem. What value of a can possibly make this true? None of them can. There is no value of a that can ever be multiplied by zero to give us an answer of anything BUT zero. Using *this specific definition of division*, it's easy to see why division by zero is undefined. There IS a way to give division by zero a definition but that starts going into beginnings of calculus :)"}, {"answer": "Simple way to look at this. Division is what is known as the inverse (mathematical opposite) of multiplication. Where multiplication can be thought of as combining many copies of something and counting the total; division is counting how many times you can remove a quantity from another until you can't remove any more. Saying six divided by two equals three is the same as asking how many times can I remove two things from a group of six things before I have no more things to remove. Three, of course. Division by zero is then the same as asking the question, \"How many times can I remove no (zero) objects from a collection of things before there are not enough things left for me to remove no more things? Looking at division as the inverse of multiplication I ask how many times I can add a bunch of things until I have a particular quantity. How many times can I add two objects to a pile until I have six objects? Three times because if I add a fourth bunch of two things I will have more than six. Now how many times to I have to add no things to a pile until I have a pile of six things? There is no number that counts how many nothings I remove from a pile until it is empty or how many nothings I pile together until I have a specific quantity. And it doesn't matter how large a pile I begin subtracting from or how large a pile I wish to end up with. It's simply undefined."}, {"answer": "Typically we use limits to deal with zeroes and infinities. Basically instead of saying what's 1/infinity. We rephrase this to say what's the limit as n approaches positive infinity for 1/n. In other words, we look at the behaviour as n get's bigger. & nbsp; So 1/10 = 0.1 & nbsp; 1/100 = 0.01 & nbsp; 1/1000 = 0.001 & nbsp; As you can see 1/n is getting smaller as 'n' (the number at the bottom) gets larger. So we say the limit as n approaches positive infinity for 1/n is 0. & nbsp; & nbsp; Now, let's try the limit as n approaches 0 for 1/n. & nbsp; 1/0.1 = 10 & nbsp; 1/0.01 = 100 & nbsp; 1/0.001 = 1000 & nbsp; As you can see, as 'n' gets smaller 1/n gets bigger so it might be tempting to say 1/0 is infinity. & nbsp; & nbsp; However, we can approach 0 from the negative numbers too. & nbsp; 1/-0.1 = -10 & nbsp; 1/-0.01 = -100 & nbsp; 1/-0.001 = -1000 & nbsp; Both arguments are equally compelling. So, we can't say whether 1/0 is infinity or -infinity for sure. In cases where we can divide by 0, either: all sides converge to the same thing or we're specific about which direction we are coming from."}, {"answer": "Let's imagine a scenario for each equation: we have nothing, and we must multiply this nothing, by nothing. Well if we have one thing, we can multiply it by nothing, and receive the consequence of having nothing. knowing this, we now can determine that since we started with zero, we remain with zero. now we have nothing, and we suppose to divide the nothing. how might one go about dividing the absence of a thing? Once we realize that the very nature of zero (ie. nothing), we must assume that the only manner to define it is in fact imaginary. Once we attempt to imagine such an application as dividing nothing by nothing, we would seem to arrive at nothing again, only this time the nothing has been divided into separate nothings. Only we cannot define how many nothings it has been divided into because there is nothing, therefore we cannot define the difference between 0 and 0/0. Another way of showing this is in the notation itself. to represent dividing zero by zero, we can express it as the fraction 0/0. but to define a fraction, one must have extrapolated parts. how might we part out zero? it is indefinite, and therefore undefined."}, {"answer": "If you have 3 bags with 2 apples each, you have 6 apples. That's 3*2=6. If you have 3 empty bags, you have no apples. That's 3*0=0. So that explains why multiplying by 0 always returns 0. If you have 10 apples and have 2 bags to fill, you'd need to put 5 apples in each bag. That's 10 / 2 = 5. But if you have 10 apples and have no bags, how many apples fit in each bag? The question doesn't make sense because there are no bags. That's why dividing by zero is illogical."}, {"answer": "I like to think of simple division as taking a small group of things from a larger group of things or x how many y(s) (if that makes sense). As in 10/5 is 2 because you can take 2 groups of 5 from 10. So X/0 is technically infinite because you can keep taking zero blocks from a pile of 10 and have an infinite amount of groups of zero 0/X has no answer because you can't take 10 blocks from a pile of zero and make multiple piles of 10"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "185663", "title": "Division by zero", "section": "Section::::Higher mathematics.:Abstract algebra.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 70, "end_paragraph_id": 70, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In a field, every nonzero element is invertible under multiplication; as above, division poses problems only when attempting to divide by zero", "forms a commutative ringfor instance, the integers, the real numbers, and the complex numberscan be extended to a wheel in which division by zero is always possible; however, in such a case, \"division\" has a slightly different meaning. The concepts applied to standard arithmetic are similar to those in more general algebraic structures, such as rings and fields. In a field, every nonzero element is invertible under multiplication; as above, division poses problems only when attempting to divide by zero."]}}]}]

MKUltra

88rc24

[{"answer": "The MKUltra project wasn't about some kind of mysterious \"mind control\" ability. It was a research project to investigate a wide variety of drugs and forms of torture that could be used to further the CIA's agendas. The reason it's often called the \"CIA mind control project\" is because part of the project was investigating drugs such as LSD that they hoped would make victims vulnerable to suggesting and manipulation. Experiments of the project mostly include administering various drugs to people and then conducting behavioral tests, sometimes without the victims' knowledge or consent. LSD was their primary focus, but they also tested a number of other drugs ([from the Wikipedia article]( URL_0 )): > Other experiments involved heroin, morphine, temazepam (used under code name MKSEARCH), mescaline, psilocybin, scopolamine, cannabis, alcohol, and sodium pentothal"}, {"answer": "Think less 'mind control' and more 'using drugs to torture people'. For instance, say you recruit a bunch of college students to do a scientific test, and have them sign non-disclosure agreements. This is a relatively rich market, as there are always college students willing to spend a few hours being poked in exchange for a token sum that can be spent on food or alcohol. Tell them whatever you want; it's enshrined in American law and scientific ethics that it's 100% ok to lie to test subjects about what you actually plan on doing to them, so long as they know they're being tested in a broad sense. Give them each their own room, pump half of them full of saline solution, the other half full of LSD, and blast them with light and sound and see if the LSD-dosed students beg for mercy before the saline crew. Afterwards, write down your results, hand each kid $20 and remind them that if they break their non-disclosure agreement you will send them to federal pound-you-in-the-ass penitentiary. As for how they found out, the MK-series experiments left a pretty broad paper trail, and as time went on more and more of it made it out into the open air. At first it was mostly rumor and hearsay, hence how ULTRA got it's killer rep as a \"mind control\" program. But as the years ground on, stuff got declassified or released via the Freedom of Information Act, and the actual paperwork started entering public knowledge."}, {"answer": "I would very much recommend listening to The Last Podcast on the Left, episode 52 on mkultra. They also have more episodes on weird government programs, cover ups, and conspiracies."}, {"answer": "The series \"Manhunt\" on Netflix about the Unabomber has an absolutely amazing depiction of Ted K's version of what he went through in MKUltra at Harvard. Some people are convinced that his experiences in MKUltra led him to what he became. The scenes are so sad I definitely felt bad for him. In the series, a very young and lonely Ted turns to a larger-than-life professor at Harvard for support. The professor spends a year encouraging Ted's anti-technology ideas and builds-up his ego and trust. Ted absolutely worships the professor and participates in his experiments to please him. During the second year, the professor does a complete 180 and belittles Ted, destroying his ego and ideas. It is revealed that the professor never cared about Ted and only used him for his twisted experiments, and Ted is broken forever. I'm sure it's dramatized to some extent, but I believe much of the content of the show is taken from first-hand accounts and interviews."}, {"answer": "To piggy back off of other people's comments, apparently only 20,000 pages of the original document was found because the rest were destroyed. That's noteworthy, especially considering people claiming to be MKUltra victims went into extensive detail about how the program also entailed sexual abuse, the attempt to produce people that could wage psychological warfare through psychic means, and the act of inducing dissociation to create personalities that would do their bidding, kind of like pawns or figureheads. It sounds crazy, but governments, which are comprised of people in positions of power, do crazy things in order to keep a grip on the power they already have or to obtain even more. I can't imagine that anyone wanting that much authority is sane, so it really doesn't seem like a far stretch that they actually tried all of those known things and worse."}, {"answer": "Wasnt the unibomber subjected to these experiments? IIRC they basically broke him down and assaulted his views and it had long lasting effects."}, {"answer": "It's is proven the documents are declassified they laced the bread in France with lsd as well as other ways and conducted experiments on people when they were high"}, {"answer": "\"drugs are bad.\" \"How?\" \"They can make you say and do things you'd never normally even consider.\" \"I bet we can use that to get people to do we want.\" \"Let's try\" fast forward twenty years \"ya that really didn't work. For some reason when we secretly give people large amounts of unstable mind altering drugs, that induce frightening hallucinations, without their knowledge or when they're our prisoner it's hard to predict or control what they'll do and even made some people very pissed off with us.\" \"Huh, who knew?\""}, {"answer": "posted this as a reply elsewhere, but here's my contribution. MKULTRA is **proven** and was exposed during the 70s. It was discovered because someone forgot to incinerate a storage room full of boxes uncovered during an FOIA request. The papers in that storage room (along with rumors) are the **only** sources we really have on MKULTRA. The origins of MKULTRA are largely based on continuation of work of Nazi scientists that came over here during Operation Paperclip. US Navy reports from 1945 included observations of Nazis using mescaline during interrogations at Dachau. In 1947, the Navy started their own testing of mescaline, scopolamine and others during Project CHAPTER (1947) which then evolved into Project CHATTER (1951-1953). This is what then eventually combined with some other projects to form MKULTRA after numerous other names and projects (ARTICHOKE, CASTIGATE, MKNAOMI, MKDELTA, etc.) The roots of the program were in drugs and interrogation -- but over the 20+ years that the program was in existence, it expanded well beyond that. Research into hypnotism (MKULTRA subproject 49, 84, others), brain concussions to erase memories (subproject 54), sensory deprivation (subproject 61), electric shock therapy (subproject 62), psychic driving by Ewen Cameron (subproject 68), neurotoxins and biological warfare (subproject 99, 101), study of adolescent gangs and social dynamics (subproject 102), children's summer camps (subproject 103), sabotage of petroleum resources (104), the infamous Witch Doctor Study by Dr. Raymond Prince at McGill Universtiy (subproject 121) the list goes on and on and on with more and more interesting subprojects. There are all documented, I haven't brought up any that can't be backed up by redacted documents on URL_0 own website. TL;DR MKULTRA started off as research into drugs and torture as interrogation techniques, but it expanded into all things \"mind-control\" related. Implanting false memories, erasing memories, hypnotism, cultural dynamics, peer pressure -- if it had to do with influencing human behavior in isolation or groups, MKULTRA touched it."}, {"answer": "How it was discovered: in the 1970s there was a lot of Congressional interest in CIA misdeeds from the 1950s and 1960s. These included investigations into assassination attempts, the CIA's role in destabilizing democratic regimes, and its experiments on civilian populations. The Church Committee in particular held extensive hearings on all these things. What is most interesting here is that without CIA cooperation they probably would have been limited in what they could have unearthed. The head of the CIA, William Colby, decided for various reasons known probably only to him (he seemed perhaps a bit tortured by his participation in the Phoenix Program), to give them a ton of information. There is a great documentary on Colby, _[The Man Nobody Knew]( URL_0 )_ (2011), that goes into this part of things."}, {"answer": "The wild thing is that LSD testing wasn't esoteric to the CIA alone. At the time, many countries around the world where conducting similar tests but mostly as a means of incapacitating foreign armies for a short period. The theory was that by poisoning a supply of water they could incapacitate whole units without firing a shot. This video isn't from MK Ultra but was a test conducted by the british army URL_0 "}, {"answer": "This is a subject I've been super fascinated with and have done a lot of research on. If you want to be thoroughly creeped out, check out the book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. The author, John Marks, went through a bunch of declassified CIA files and interviewed people involved in the MKUltra project. It's a fantastic read about the history and events of the project. One aspect of the project I'm most intrigued by is they recruited a federal drug agent, George White, to set up a safe house and run experiments on people. So by day he's keeping drugs off the streets, and by night, he's testing them on unwitting criminals. As also mentioned, Wormwood is an excellent documentary on netflix about someone else involved in the project who became a victim. Not to spam, but I'm also writing a comic series called North Bend, inspired by the events of MKUltra. It's about a Seattle DEA agent who is recruited by the CIA to test an experimental mind control drug on unwitting people. Our kickstarter for issue #2 just wrapped up. Here's a link though if anyone might be interested, if you're into stuff like Mindhunter, The Americans, or Wormwood. [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "42043", "title": "Project MKUltra", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 432, "bleu_score": 0.8380982596670846}]}]

Why does cold air come out when we go "hoooo" with our mouth but warm air comes out if we go "haaaa" with our mouth?

8w0b3z

[{"answer": "Hooo mouth shape makes the air go faster which pulls other air along with it. So the warm air from your mouth is closer to normal temperature air because it's mixed more. The faster moving air feels cooler because it can absorb a little heat from whatever you're blowing on and move away to let other air do the same. Haaaa mouth shape doesn't pull other air along with it as much so ends up being closer to the temperature inside your body (warmer) which is normally warmer (and more humid) than what you're blowing on so it feels warmer."}, {"answer": "Actually, the air coming out of your mouth is (almost exacty) the same temperature. To prove this to yourself, \"hooo\"-blow on the back of your hand from a very short distance away. The air is warm, just like when you \"ha\"-blow. But move your hand farther away, and the \"hooo\"-blown air feels cool. The reason is that \"hooo\"-blown air is moving so fast, it can pull a lot of surrounding, cooler air with it. Ha blown air, doesn't move very fast, so it doesn't pull surrounding cooler air along and keeps feeling warm and humid."}, {"answer": "It depends on the way your lips are. When your lips are pursed and going \u201coooh\u201d, the air that comes out has a narrower exit point which increases the air\u2019s speed thus decreasing temperature. When opened, there\u2019s a larger exit point thus slower speed and maintaining heat. Basically, the faster the speed, the faster the cooling."}, {"answer": "Hoooo air is compressed therefore expands upon exit. Expanding air cools. Haaaa air is less compressed and doesn't expand that much upon exit."}, {"answer": "The reason is that when air is forced through a small opening in your lips, its pressure drops, which forces its temperature to drop also. This is the principle used to power air conditioners and refrigerators."}, {"answer": "I would have thought it would be the breath going from a high pressure to a low pressure making it cool."}, {"answer": "If you blow through a tight mouth, there is a smaller volume of air but a higher velocity. This pulls in and mixes with a lot ambient air (Venturi or Bornoulli effect)- in fact the air stream is only typically 40% body warmth and 60% ambient so it will be marked colder. As a experiment you pucker and blow threw a tube held to your mouth, this excludes the ambient air and you will get reduced airflow but at a higher tempeture again. But with a wide mouth there is hardly any air entertainment. It's tempeture will be almost the same as the air in your lungs wich is higher than the ambient air."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1488888", "title": "Cabin pressurization", "section": "Section::::Cabin altitude.:Aircraft.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 12, "end_paragraph_id": 12, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Keeping the cabin altitude below generally prevents significant hypoxia, altitude sickness, decompression sickness, and barotrauma. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations in the U.S. mandate that under normal operating conditions, the cabin altitude may not exceed this limit at the maximum operating altitude of the aircraft. This mandatory maximum cabin altitude does not eliminate all physiological problems; passengers with conditions such as pneumothorax are advised not to fly until fully healed, and people suffering from a cold or other infection may still experience pain in the ears and sinuses. The rate of change of cabin altitude strongly affects comfort as humans are sensitive to pressure changes in the inner ear and sinuses and this has to be managed carefully. Scuba divers flying within the \"no fly\" period after a dive are at risk of decompression sickness because the accumulated nitrogen in their bodies can form bubbles when exposed to reduced cabin pressure.", "Keeping the cabin altitude below generally prevents significant hypoxia, altitude sickness, decompression sickness, and barotrauma. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations in the U.S. mandate that under normal operating conditions, the cabin altitude may not exceed this limit at the maximum operating altitude of the aircraft. This mandatory maximum cabin altitude does not eliminate all physiological problems; passengers with conditions such as pneumothorax are advised not to fly until fully healed, and people suffering from a cold or other infection may still experience pain in the ears and sinuses. The rate of change of cabin altitude strongly affects comfort as humans are sensitive to pressure changes in the inner ear and sinuses and this has to be managed carefully. Scuba divers flying within the \"no fly\" period after a dive are at risk of decompression sickness because the accumulated nitrogen in their bodies can form bubbles when exposed to reduced cabin pressure.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "3083643", "title": "Flue", "section": "Section::::Heat retention.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 4, "end_paragraph_id": 4, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Fireplaces are one of the biggest energy wasters when the flue is not used properly. This occurs when the flue is left open too wide after the fire is started. Known as convection, warm air from the house is pulled up the chimney, while cold air from outside is pulled into the house wherever it can enter, including around leaking windows and doors. Ideally, the flue should be open all the way when the fire is first started, and then adjusted toward closure as the fire burns until it is open just enough to slowly pull smoke from the fire up the chimney. After the flue heats up from the fire, they are easier to move, but also hotter. Hands should be protected when operating the flue lever; and if a new log is added to the fire, the flue must be adjusted again to ensure that smoke does not billow out into the house.", "Fireplaces are one of the biggest energy wasters when the flue is not used properly. This occurs when the flue is left open too wide after the fire is started. Known as convection, warm air from the house is pulled up the chimney, while cold air from outside is pulled into the house wherever it can enter, including around leaking windows and doors. Ideally, the flue should be open all the way when the fire is first started, and then adjusted toward closure as the fire burns until it is open just enough to slowly pull smoke from the fire up the chimney. After the flue heats up from the fire, they are easier to move, but also hotter. Hands should be protected when operating the flue lever; and if a new log is added to the fire, the flue must be adjusted again to ensure that smoke does not billow out into the house.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}]

How is an i7 processor faster than an i3 if the clock speed is almost the same?

7z536z

[{"answer": "**Short answer**: the difference is in how much your processor does in those clock cycles. **Long answer:** The amount of instructions your processor handles each second depends on two factors: * Clock speed: the speed at which the processor components switch state * Instructions per Clock cycle (IPC): the amount of instructions the processor can handle during one cycle. Clock speed has not improved that much over the last 5-10 years. A higher clock speed results in more heat, and we have hit a limit to how much we can comfortably cool. For desktops that's in between 3-4 GHz, for laptops that's even lower. Therefore lots of improvements have been made to the IPC. Mostly it comes down to parallellism: processing multiple instructions at the same time. If we compare processing instructions to doing the laundry: * Pipelining: instead of washing, drying, ironing the first load, then doing the same for the second, third, ... the second load can already start using the washing machine as soon as the first load is transfered to the dryer. * Instruction parallellism: if two loads of laundry require the same washing machine settings, we can put them together and execute in the same cycle. * Multiple processor cores: we use multiple washing machines, dryers, irons to wach multiple loads at the same time. * Multiple instruction threads per core: if a certain load does not need to be ironed, we can use the iron for another load. EDIT: * Most people seem to use the term \"IPC\" only to indicate single core performance, here I used it in the broader sense and do count multicore processors as an improvement in IPC. * Cache is indeed a factor I forgot. In laundry terms, cache is a set of racks where you can store a small amount of laundry. You can store laundry you just washed while it waits for the dryer to be free. Or if you have a load of blue shirts in the washing machine you can already prepare another load of blue shirts to follow so you don't have to switch settings."}, {"answer": "Oooh a question I can answer. Ok, imagine you have some people painting a wall. They can paint thousands strokes a second because these are some really fast painters. There are two ways you can finish painting the wall quicker, either make them paint faster, or get more painters. In this analogy: * clock speed = number of strokes a second * the number of cores = number of painters Now when you get a hyperthreaded (or multithreaded) CPU, this is like giving the painters a brush in each hand. They can multitask now! It's hard to multitask though, so two painters are usually better than one painter with two brushes. *(In reality it's a little more complex than that, sometimes faster clock speeds will be better, and sometimes more cores will be better)* **EDIT:** I noticed I hadn't brought it back to the question really, but an i7 has one big benefit over an i3, the i7 has more cores. Now, the i3 might be better if the i7 is a lot lot older [for example an 8th generation i3 vs a 3rd generation i7]( URL_0 )."}, {"answer": "Have you got the model numbers of both parts on you? If it's the same architecture for both, you're only going to see a very tiny boost in single threaded performance but the i7 probably has twice as many threads to throw around. Your team of CPU men hasn't gotten much stronger individually, it's just doubled in size. I went from an i5 4300M to an i7 4810MQ, the clock speed only went up from 2.6 to 2.8 but it also went from two cores and four threads to four cores and eight threads. Effectively, I've got twice the power to throw around now. It won't neccessarily make every single application faster, because not everything uses more than one core, but it'll let me do more things at once."}, {"answer": "The first thing to understand is that \"i3\" and \"i7\" are more about *branding* than technical specifications. Depending on year it came out & even the particular model that year, they could have different numbers of cores, different amounts of cache, different onboard graphics processors and other differences. The systems they're in can have different amounts and speeds of RAM, different types & speeds of HDD/SSD and might have different types/speeds of graphics processor (or none at all). All of these can have significant differences in performance. Year over year, the \"2.3GHz i3\" gets faster because they're constantly updating the core architecture so it can do more per clock tick. [Going from a 2000-series to a 5000-series gives you about a 20% performance boost]( URL_0 []=750 & cmp[]=2602). Then you're jumping from an i3, which is supposed to a mid/low-end chip to an i7, which is supposed to be a high-end chip. It's going to have more cores, hyperthreading and all the bells & whistles enabled."}, {"answer": "Another factor not yet mentioned here is cache. A computer uses multiple forms of short-term memory. These things cannot hold data without drawing power, but have much higher bandwidth. Which basically mean how fast data can be moved around. One of those types of memory is called cache, and is part of the actual CPU chipset. It's much faster than the system memory you have called RAM. The most used data is stored in the cache, anything that doesn't fit is put in system memory. Higher grade CPU's come with more cache. And this plays a part in the better performance."}, {"answer": "ELI5 answer. Imagine you need to move a lot of boxes from one location to another. All CPU cycle speed does is measure how many runs you can do in an hour. But an I7 CPU can carry a lot more boxes than I3 CPU per run. So even though I7 and I3 run at exactly the same speed, I7 can do a lot more work than I3."}, {"answer": "This is super simplified but still. Let's say clock speed is akin to speed of two animals, a common pet dog (assuming it is similar to an i3 processor) & an elephant (i7 processor). While both of them can go from place A to place B 4 times per hour, the amount of wooden logs they can carry with them on each trip would be different. A typical elephant would be able to carry huge amount of logs in a single trip when compared to the dog. Thus elephant would be able to get more amount of work done per trip, even though both have same speed. While the dog may need 10 trips to take 10 logs, the elephant probably would be able to take 10 logs in 2 trips only, thus requiring lesser trips. In the same way, an i7 processor would be able to execute much more amount of instructions per clock cycle when compared to an i3 processor. So it would complete the same task in fewer clock cycles than i3 processor, even though the clock speeds are the same. It is definitely an upgrade. Then there also the case of number of physical cores present in the processor - the i3 processor may have only two cores while i7 might have 4 cores."}, {"answer": "Clock speed is only useful to compare two processors of the same generation/type and brand, i.e i5, i7, Ryzen, Pentium. You can't compare a 4.0GHZ Pentium 4, to a 1.7GHZ i3, to a ryzen 7 3.7GHZ If you want to compare the performance of the two processors that arn't the same generation/type you need to look at the benchmarks, like this URL_0 benchmarks a a good guide, real life performance varies by work load. Funny fact, Quality control is the main reason there are different processors. All processors are made from the same die. Lets take the current intel coffee lake (lga1151) for example. Every one is supposed to be a 6 core 12 thread processor. The perfect ones go in the i7 bin. 6 core 12 thread If there is a broken core, they disable 1 other cores and hyper threading and it goes in the i3 bin (4 core 4 thread). If just hyper threading doesn't work it goes in the i5 bin (6 cores, 6 thread). After that they are tested to see what clock speed they can maintain, that's why a i7-8700k runs at 3.7Ghz and a i7-8700 3.2Ghz. I'm ignoring boost speeds for simplicity."}, {"answer": "The number of cores is important, the memory level is important. Core i3 processors have two cores, Core i5 CPUs have four and Core i7 models also have four processors and sometimes six or eight cores."}, {"answer": "You can compare you CPUs here: URL_0 Clock speed is only one of the factors that determine the performance of a processor."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1813537", "title": "POWER7", "section": "Section::::Design.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 6, "end_paragraph_id": 6, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The POWER7 superscalar symmetric multiprocessor architecture was a substantial evolution from the POWER6 design, focusing more on power efficiency through multiple cores and simultaneous multithreading (SMT). The POWER6 architecture was built from the ground up to maximize processor frequency at the cost of power efficiency. It achieved a remarkable 5\u00a0GHz. While the POWER6 features a dual-core processor, each capable of two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT), the IBM POWER 7 processor has up to eight cores, and four threads per core, for a total capacity of 32 simultaneous threads. IBM stated at ISCA 29 that peak performance was achieved by high frequency designs with 1020 FO4 delays per pipeline stage at the cost of power efficiency. However, the POWER6 binary floating-point unit achieves a \"6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline\". Therefore, the pipeline for the POWER7 CPU has been changed again,", "The POWER7 superscalar symmetric multiprocessor architecture was a substantial evolution from the POWER6 design, focusing more on power efficiency through multiple cores and simultaneous multithreading (SMT). The POWER6 architecture was built from the ground up to maximize processor frequency at the cost of power efficiency. It achieved a remarkable 5\u00a0GHz. While the POWER6 features a dual-core processor, each capable of two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT), the IBM POWER 7 processor has up to eight cores, and four threads per core, for a total capacity of 32 simultaneous threads. IBM stated at ISCA 29 that peak performance was achieved by high frequency designs with 1020 FO4 delays per pipeline stage at the cost of power efficiency."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "145162", "title": "Parallel computing", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time.", "Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or the execution of processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. Parallelism has long been employed in high-performance computing, but it's gaining broader interest due to the physical constraints preventing frequency scaling. As power consumption (and consequently heat generation) by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors."]}}]}]

Are females colder than males?

1ajoeg

[{"answer": "Women have less hemoglobin, lower hematocrit (RBC concentration), total RBC count, and lower metabolism/caloric requirements than men. Their temperatures also fluctuate based on hormone levels more than men. I haven't directly heard that their temperatures differ, but with these differences I wouldn't be surprised, at least peripheral temperature."}, {"answer": "Yes on average women's hands and feet are 3 degree's colder then a man's. URL_1 URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I respect your quest for knowledge, and I really hate to say this, but /r/explainlikeimfive is more about explaining things you don't really have a full grasp of, rather than just getting singular answers to questions you could post in /r/askscience or /r/askreddit."}, {"answer": "Biological stuff aside, women's clothing is thinner and even the more modest tops expose a lot more skin then their male counterparts."}, {"answer": "Women have less lean body mass than men. Muscles make warm."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1522987", "title": "Gonochorism", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In biology, gonochorism (\"Greek\" offspring + disperse) or unisexualism or gonochory describes the state of having just one of at least two distinct sexes in any one individual organism. The term is most often used with animals, in which the individual organisms are often gonochorous. Gonochory is less common in plants. For example, in flowering plants, individual flowers may be hermaphroditic (i.e. with both stamens and ovaries) or gonochorous (unisexual), having either no stamens (i.e. no male parts) or no ovaries (i.e. no female parts). Among flowering plant species that have unisexual flowers, some also produce hermaphrodite flowers, and the three types occur in different arrangements on separate plants; species can be monoecious, dioecious, trioecious, polygamomonoecious, polygamodioecious, andromonoecious, or gynomonoecious.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "In biology, gonochorism (\"Greek\" offspring + disperse) or unisexualism or gonochory describes the state of having just one of at least two distinct sexes in any one individual organism. The term is most often used with animals, in which the individual organisms are often gonochorous. Gonochory is less common in plants. For example, in flowering plants, individual flowers may be hermaphroditic (i.e. with both stamens and ovaries) or gonochorous (unisexual), having either no stamens (i.e. no male parts) or no ovaries (i.e. no female parts). Among flowering plant species that have unisexual flowers, some also produce hermaphrodite flowers, and the three types occur in different arrangements on separate plants; species can be monoecious, dioecious, trioecious, polygamomonoecious, polygamodioecious, andromonoecious, or gynomonoecious."]}}]}]

What happens when we jam a finger?

2dc2uq

[{"answer": "The impact causes inflammation. One of inflammation's 'goals ' is to immobilize the affected area to allow for quicker healing. Hence your finger feels stiff. Edit: a word for you /u/MrsAgentDaleCooper"}, {"answer": "Non native english speaker requesting an explanation of finger jamming. EDIT: OH! I get it! Jamming, as in jammed, caught between two objects. EDIT2: I'm an idiot."}, {"answer": "Basically, two things can happen: 1. You sprain the ligaments around your knuckles that allow it to move. 2. You sprain the joint capsule in the knuckles. (Think of it as a pad in-between your joints so the bones don't rub directly together) In either case, there is swelling. This, coupled with the sprain, is what causes limited motion and strength. *Edit: Grammar mistakes. * Edit 2: Apparently I have missinformed you. see u\\itssallgoodman's comment below."}, {"answer": "Thank you everyone for the answers. Now I have a satisfactory answer to why my fingers are jammed as fuck from playing football last night."}, {"answer": "Worst thing I ever did: jersey finger. Caught my finger on something while falling, it went sideways and tore the ligament. I never went to the doctor so it stayed swollen for a month. Six monthly later I finally regained most of my finger flexibility but I dont think it'll ever be the same."}, {"answer": "Maybe it means something different where I'm from, but I've only heard of jamming a finger when specifically referring to the injury (most commonly occurring in sports) where your finger is \"jammed\" into the joint and feels like it needs to be popped back out. That usually signifies a partial dislocation of the joint, also known as subluxation. When it pops back into place, that's called a reduction of the joint. It hurts like hell when it's subluxed because the misaligment causes increased tension (straining) or tearing (spraining) of the ligaments connecting the two bone segments. When it's reduced, it feels better because the tension is relieved, but the strained/sprained ligaments can continue to be sore for a few weeks while they heal. Reducing the joint on your own is generally advised against because pulling on the finger can do more harm than good, e.g. turning a partial tear into a complete tear, which will then require surgery, and also because these injuries can often be accompanied by a fracture."}, {"answer": "Ran my middle finger straight into a wall 6 months ago. Mobility has gotten better, but it's still not the same as the other hand and the middle joint is still swollen. At the time it happened, a doc x-rayed it and said there was no fracture but it could take \"3 weeks\" to heal. After a month, I started getting concerned but I've had two friends tell me they've had similar injuries and it took them each about a year to heal! I know I should probably get it checked out again, but any other suggestions or personal experiences on how long this can take to heal?"}, {"answer": "GRRRRRRRRR- Jammed and Jarred are two different things (in Australia)... Jammed is getting it squished (i.e. in a door) Jarred is when a ball bounces off the tip of you finger..."}, {"answer": "I'm pretty sure a miniature big bang occurs in an alternate universe when I jam my little finger"}, {"answer": "Jamming a finger causes physical damage to tissues at the site of the 'jam' and your body diverts some blood from your other muscles/organs to the damaged tissues. The term 'inflammation' has been thrown about a bit: it comprises 5 main factors: - Rubor - Redness - Calor - Heat - Dolor - Pain - Tumor - swelling - Laesa Functio (or Functio Laesa, I've heard both) - Loss of function All of these are due to an increased blood supply and this is to, primarily, swarm the area with white blood cells, platelets and many other blood components to prevent infection and produce a clot (preventing blood loss) This is quite ELI5, but hopefully this answers your question."}, {"answer": "I done this about 4 months ago and the joint is still swollen as fuck and hurts to move. Google said a doctor wouldn't do anything and just to rest it, what does Reddit think?"}, {"answer": "The reason why I clicked this because I jammed my toe while walking and redditing."}, {"answer": "God damn this is a genius ELI5 (Zero sarcasm)"}, {"answer": "Damn, I came in thinking this was going to be about the delayed pain reaction that's very particular to fingerjamming. I can't be the only one... One time I shut my finger in the car door... I opened the door to let it out, and it was kind of numb and throbby for 10-15 seconds, and then BOOOOM, that sensation of all the blood rushing from your head, teeth clenching, feeling faint; the same thing when you stub your big toe; numbness, and then delayed pain and shock. I'm not alone with this, right?"}, {"answer": "I got told it was called 'mallet finger' by an NHS nurse and then a doctor. Apparently that's what we call it in the UK. I googled it and it's also known as Baseball finger. They were both wrong. Here's a picture I took today when I was having the pins pulled out of my finger. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "In addition to this, why is that my fingers still hurt in the same place, when under a lot of pressure, (popping knuckles, for example) from times that I had jammed the same fingers in the past?"}, {"answer": "In Australia we call what you refer to 'jammed' as 'jarred', and reserve the use of 'jammed' for when something is actually jammed; like a finger in a door."}, {"answer": "Since were' on the subject, I sprained my finger 8 months ago and it still hurts when I bend it to the maximum (normal) amount. Is this typical?"}, {"answer": "\u2022be councilman Jeremy Jam \u2022trick finger into giving you what you want in order to screw finger over \u2022finger has been jammed"}, {"answer": "This is going to get buried, but what happens when we give ourselves a black fingernail?"}, {"answer": "We sit down in our cube, resigned to our fate."}, {"answer": "A jammed finger is another term for a finger sprain."}, {"answer": "I cry like a little bitch... That's what happens."}, {"answer": "generally my kids learn a few new words."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "16310345", "title": "Egg tapping", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["As with any other game, it has been a subject of cheating; eggs with cement, alabaster and even marble cores have been reported.", "Egg tapping, or also known as egg fight, egg knocking, egg pacqueing, egg boxing, egg picking, egg chucking, or egg jarping is a traditional Easter game. In English folk traditions, the game has variously been known as \"shackling\", \"jarping\" or \"dumping\". The rule of the game is simple. One holds a hard-boiled egg and taps the egg of another participant with one's own egg intending to break the other's, without breaking one's own. As with any other game, it has been a subject of cheating; eggs with cement, alabaster and even marble cores have been reported."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "70425", "title": "Inflammation", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 446, "bleu_score": 0.9138433310034753}]}]

How can other counties already be at 50% renewable energy while the U.S. struggles with getting it done by 2030?

3yn28c

[{"answer": "$97 million was spent on Oil and Gas lobbying in the United states. The United States is also rich in natural resources and is well set up for the refining of oil, meaning there is not much of an incentive for it to switch to renewable energy besides being more environmentally friendly. On top of that the European countries that are leading in renewable energy are a lot smaller both in terms of area and population, meaning they need to produce far less energy and don't have to transport it as far."}, {"answer": "There are a few reasons: 1. The USA is not a particularly densely populated country. Some areas, such as Manhattan and LA are, but on the whole the population and industry are spread out - which increases the cost of any infrastructure work compared to countries such as the Netherlands, UK or Japan. 2. The electrical infrastructure in the USA is woefully underfunded - there are huge chunks of the electrical network that are either so old or poorly maintained that they should be scrapped, but there is no money to do so. This is often a reason for not being able to build plants or even install panels on a house - the local grid is often at its limit and any more load would cause major problems. 3. The USA is actually one of the highest power users per capita in the world, and that use is growing thanks to increased use of electric cars, air conditioning and other gadgets. This means that more energy sources per person are required to achieve the same proportion of renewable supply that is seen in other countries. URL_0 URL_1 "}, {"answer": "The easiest issue to understand is that most other advanced countries have much higher taxes than the US. Simple by lowering taxes on *any* kind of economic activity, they can immediately get much more of it. So tax subsidies produce much larger effects for them than for Americans. All the countries that have met aggressive targets are islands or peninsulas. Why does this matter? Because there is nowhere in Denmark more than a few miles from the ocean. The ocean is an easy place for wind power (no land features that break up the movement of pressure systems) but is also typically close to population centers, which cluster around ports. The US has a long coastline, but also an immense interior where windpower is dubious until long-distance transmission becomes more reliable. Finally, all measurements are different in smaller units than in bigger units. I could easily get my home to be 50% renewable simply by adding solar panels. But I would still have to use coal power for the other 50%. My entire *region* could not do that so easily, because any one home that wants to use coal power when the sun goes behind a cloud is parasitic on all the other homes who are using a coal power plant that can adjust its output according to demand. For *everyone* to be 50% renewable, we need to find ways to get power without using that coal power plant."}, {"answer": "Well, let's look at the other countries which are at 50% renewable electricity (**Important note : energy =/= electricity**) As you can see in the list, most of those countries get most of their renewable power from Hydro power plants. There are only two exceptions. Denmark, and Belize. Belize is a small middle American nation which spreads it's renewable energy production equally between biomass and hydropower. Denmark gets pretty much all their renewable energy from Wind, but they just happen to be located next to hydropower giants Norway and Sweden, and closely insulated in the European grid, which allows them to balance their energy production easily. The answer thus is simple. The US doesn't have hydro power plants. No conspiracy, simply geology. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "We make far more electricity than those countries, so it will take a lot more time to convert it to renewable sources. Here is an example: Denmark makes about 35 TWh of power a year, using about 8 fuel-burning power stations and 13 wind farms. 100% renewable electricity could be achieved by replacing those 8 fuel-burning power plants. The US, however, makes about 4300 TWh of power a year, using around 7000 power plants. Of those plants, about 1200 are renewable (mostly wind or hydroelectric) and 5800 are non-renewable (mostly natural gas, oil, or coal). To reach 100% renewable electricity we would have to replace 5800 power plants instead of 8. In short, the United States has MANY more power plants than these small countries, and replacing them with renewables is a far, far bigger task, and involves dramatically more effort. Sources: - URL_3 - URL_2 - URL_0 - URL_1 "}, {"answer": "The size of the united states is one factor, having grids that meet the demands of energy in very short periods of time across a wide area is a hassle, especially when you consider that most renewable sources of energy don't have instant yield like fossil fuels do. Oil money is huge in the U.S. and with Canada, Texas, and Alaskan oil as well as an established refining and distribution network it doesn't make economic sense in the short term with oil so cheap. If the United States government NEEDED to get it done sooner it would; but there isn't the political and social pressure needed to serve as a catalyst to counter the inertia of so many powerful people with a vested interest in riding the oil cash cow as long as possible. Nuclear energy is also hugely unpopular, for reasons I don't really agree with but it means a huge part of that renewable energy pie is off limits for the most part. With recent blunders over seas, (fukushima etc.), the nuclear movement has all but come to a halt in the mainstream. Without a reliable form of Hydro-Electric or Geothermal NATIONWIDE (excluding the isolated locations) the united states is left with wind and solar. Both of which require massive investments to reach gigawatt levels of output which can't be relied upon completely. It's very complicated to design a grid with fall backs to maintain the necessary energy levels/freq/etc and variable levels of output only further complicate it. **TLDR: Bigger/Sparser/fossil fuels are the perfect energy source if you don't give a fuck about pollution and we can get plenty cheap.**"}, {"answer": "Total worldwide installation of new wind power in 2014 was 50 GWhr. Total worldwide installation of new solar was 40 GWhr. U.S. electricity production in 2014 was 4000 GWhr of which 13% was renewable (plus another 19% nuclear). So to get to 50% renewable, the U.S. would need an additional 1500 GWhr of renewable installations or 15 years of the entire world wide production rate."}, {"answer": "Electrical engineer here. I'd guess 2-3 reasons. 1. Subsidies. It's not profitable to build renewables at all! Not as long as nom renewables get a tax cut. If we give renewables Subsidies people build them like crazy. 2. State dependent resources. Some places need wind and others solar. Both put different stresses on the grid that requires more government funding. Our low tax system can't handle building a new energy grid. Generally speaking a mile of power line runs around 1-3 million per mile of high voltage transmission line. It's a cost that really factors in."}, {"answer": "Different countries have different situations with regard to how much energy they use, where they use it, and what methods of generating energy are available. Iceland, for example, has a fairly small population that's densely packed into ciities - pretty much ideal - and is sitting on some great volcanoes for geothermal power; they very much have it easy. The US is a big country, consumes a lot of power (way too much, really), has large areas where people are very spread out, and can be hit or miss when talking about how well a hydroelectric, solar or wind farm will work for the area. When you get to smaller levels, states or sometimes counties, you'll see that it varies by region (my county has an option for 100% renewable electricity to homes, for instance, that I'm on). Politics also come up given how big the US is: some states care more than others, and some states may be invested in other modes of power, so at the federal level it'll take time."}, {"answer": "Let's just remember that all those countries had a renewables national policy and action plan in place first before they achieved those high percentages. In Uruguay, where they achieved 55% very quickly, \"the main attraction for foreign investors ... is a fixed price for 20 years that is guaranteed by the state utility. Because maintenance costs are low and stable, this guarantees a profit. As a result, foreign firms are lining up to secure windfarm contracts. The competition is pushing down bids, cutting electricity generating costs by more than 30% over the past three years.\" URL_0 ) . US could do the same if... you fill in the blanks. Renewables are more about smart politics than about geography or abundance of national resources."}, {"answer": "Think about the size of the US. It is the same answer for all infrastructure related questions. If the US only had New York, Florida, Texas and California to worry about things would be easy to change. But we don't, we have the largest developed country (as in developed aera)."}, {"answer": "A better comparison is looking at individual states, and seeing which states are far behind and which ones are leading with high % of renewables. That is more apples to apples to a European country."}, {"answer": "If you don't make it your priority, it won't happen if its not more lucrative moneywise, which it isn't (if it were, they would use it)."}, {"answer": "Those countries haven't actually solved the problem. Either: 1. They have very high hydro production, which isn't something you can't build more of. Most countries are already heavily using their natural hydro capacity. 2. They have high \"nameplate capacity\" of wind and solar production, but don't actually power their economy off of it. Oil, gas, and coal continue to supply the baseload capacity of most countries with heavy renewables. The wind/solar power, which is variable, unreliable, and cannot be stored, becomes a hot potato that no utility really wants, and tends to get dumped on export markets. It's possible for a few small markets to have high renewables production, but not everybody, because it is not feasible to load-balance all of it around on the grid."}, {"answer": "There could be many factors involved. Most people dont realise the USA is almost or just as big as Europe iirc. Also countries like Sweden, 440,000km^2, with a population of only about 10million (Pop. of Chicago and New York combined, which would be 1300km^2) has vast amounts of empty land and the georgraphy of the place allows for lots of hydroelectric energy production, up to 44% of their energy is from that. The rest is 47% nuclear. I guess the rest is politics too."}, {"answer": "Very few countries are at 50% renewable energy. Occasionally we will hear a story about an extremely windy day in germany where they made 50% of their power from wind but its not the norm. I strongly recommend you go to the [OECD's better life index]( URL_0 ), they have a little bit of information on each countries renewable energy %. Here are a few examples. Australia 5%, Belgium 5%, Canada 18%, France 8%, Germany 11%, Italy 13%, Japan 4%, Netherlands 4%. etc"}, {"answer": "I sat in on a \"public forum\" about wind farms and offshore drilling near the Chesapeake bay. It was hosted by oil lobbyists and did not take questions or comments from the audience. Highly touted was the \"All of the above\" doctrine of the Obama administration (as in fossil fuel, renewables, and nuclear) and this terminology was used to essentially justify offshore drilling. Strangely, despite an offshore wind farm being a major item on the agenda, it was completely glossed over."}, {"answer": "Other countries are physically much smaller and have much smaller populations. Some countries are small enough they could provide power for the entire nation with less than a dozen power plants so they only have to replace a small number of them with renewable energy plants. If they have rivers then it is even easier to get to that number."}, {"answer": "Corporations which have big money invested in fossil fuels are lobbying and paying off power companies to try and slow down the progress of green energy. Little do they know Compact Fusion is on its way like a downhill train without brakes, and they won't know what hit them."}, {"answer": "because it's a lot easier to supply the energy needs of a country of 5-6 million (norway, finland for example) than a country of 330 million."}, {"answer": "The GOP has been taken control of by oil and natural gas lobbyists. The GOP opposes anything that may potentially be bad for their wealthy donors."}, {"answer": "Hydro electricity is the reason these countries succeeded. You can't just build more dams in the US till you get 50%."}, {"answer": "Ignoring the financial burden, take a look at how big the US is compared to Europe. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Lobbyists, logistics, people who think climate changes is a myth, snowballs in Congress...etc"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "23195", "title": "Petroleum", "section": "Section::::Alternatives.:Electricity.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 172, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 172, "end_character": 313, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

What is a quark?

kp4e1

[{"answer": "**Matter** (in the everyday sense) is made of **molecules**, which are made of **atoms**, which are made of _particles_: **protons**, **neutrons** and **electrons**. That seemed to be the whole story, and that the component particles of atoms were \"fundamental\" \u2014 they weren't made of anything else, they were just kind of themselves. But then we found out that **protons and neutrons are actually made of smaller particles**, which are called \"**quarks**\". Quarks have some interesting properties. It turns out that quarks have six different \"flavors\" -- just intrinsically different varieties. There are only a handful of stable combinations of flavors that will last when they clump together. Other combos break down quickly or never form at all. And most importantly and weirdly, they can't be separated \u2014 they can only exist in these combos. Particles made of combinations of quarks are called, as a family, \"**hadrons**\". The protons and neutrons we know so well from our daily lives are the most stable combination of quarks, which are made of just two flavors called \"up\" and \"down\" quarks. These are also the most stable flavors of quarks \u2014 other flavors quickly decay into up and downs. But there are also more exotic combinations of quarks that show up as relatively short-lived particles in cosmic rays and stuff. These can involve combinations of the other four flavors of quark: \"strange\", \"charm\", \"bottom\", and \"top\". Quarks and hadrons have a lot of other interesting properties and important roles in particle physics. But to everyday human experience, the combos of up and down quarks that we know as protons and neutrons are the biggest part of the picture."}, {"answer": "The bartender on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."}, {"answer": "Related: Please explain how a quark and a neutrino are related, if at all."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "25179", "title": "Quark", "section": "Section::::Classification.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 7, "end_paragraph_id": 7, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Quarks are spin- particles, implying that they are fermions according to the spinstatistics theorem. They are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two identical fermions can simultaneously occupy the same quantum state. This is in contrast to bosons (particles with integer spin), of which any number can be in the same state. Unlike leptons, quarks possess color charge, which causes them to engage in the strong interaction. The resulting attraction between different quarks causes the formation of composite particles known as \"hadrons\" (see \"Strong interaction and color charge\" below). The quarks that determine the quantum numbers of hadrons are called \"valence quarks\"; apart from these, any hadron may contain an indefinite number of virtual \"sea\" quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, which do not influence its quantum numbers. There are", "Quarks are spin- particles, implying that they are fermions according to the spinstatistics theorem. They are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two identical fermions can simultaneously occupy the same quantum state. This is in contrast to bosons (particles with integer spin), of which any number can be in the same state. Unlike leptons, quarks possess color charge, which causes them to engage in the strong interaction. The resulting attraction between different quarks causes the formation of composite particles known as \"hadrons\" (see \"Strong interaction and color charge\" below). The quarks that determine the quantum numbers of hadrons are called \"valence quarks\"; apart from these, any hadron may contain an indefinite number of virtual \"sea\" quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, which do not influence its quantum numbers."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "105340", "title": "Strange quark", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 3, "end_paragraph_id": 3, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["I value of 0 while the u (up) and d (down) quarks have values of + and respectively. Along with the charm quark, it is part of the second generation of matter, and has an electric charge of \u00a0\"e\" and a bare mass of . Like all quarks, the strange quark is an elementary fermion with spin , and experiences all four fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. The antiparticle of the strange quark is the strange antiquark (sometimes called \"antistrange quark\" or simply \"antistrange\"), which differs from it only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.", "I value of 0 while the u (up) and d (down) quarks have values of + and respectively. Along with the charm quark, it is part of the second generation of matter, and has an electric charge of \u00a0\"e\" and a bare mass of . Like all quarks, the strange quark is an elementary fermion with spin , and experiences all four fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. The antiparticle of the strange quark is the strange antiquark (sometimes called \"antistrange quark\" or simply \"antistrange\"), which differs from it only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign."]}}]}]

How did grapes become the most popular fruit to ferment into wine? Why didn't we end up with like a blueberry or apple or banana fermented beverage as a cultural standard?

1vqhkm

[{"answer": "Grapevines produce an enormous amount of fruit, and it grows in bunches that are easy to harvest. Grapes are soft and easy to crush for juice. Once you have the juice, it ferments all by itself and you're drinking wine. Berries are a possibility, but you have to pick them one at a time. Blackberries and raspberries grow on thorny vines, in dense brambles. I've picked them both, and it's not a volume task. You'll get all scratched up and very weary picking a gallon of berries, and they're so tasty you'd be an idiot to crush them for a jug of hooch. Other berries, like strawberries, are mostly very recent additions to our crops. Apples produce abundantly, and are easy to pick, but getting the juice out of them is much harder than it is for grapes. A mechanical press of some sort is required. And they are the best bet of tree fruit. Stone fruits like peaches have the additional problem of a large, slightly poisonous seeds in the middle that you want to avoid crushing into the juice. Grapes have it all. Easy to grow, easy to harvest, easy to crush."}, {"answer": "Archeological evidence shows us that early man realized that grapes left in the hot sun for prolonged periods of time produced an alcoholic drink when crushed. Grapes, probably, because they produce large amounts of juice and were naturally occurring and prevalent in Mediterranean regions. This are is where early man lived and would have been hot enough for the juice to ferment."}, {"answer": "The next time you have some grapes, notice the white dust on them. I've read that it is the yeast necessary for fermentation. In other words, grapes come from the vine ready to make alcohol. Perhaps other fruits do too, but I believe that grapes do. A long time ago, somebody made grape juice, and a few days later got drunk on it. Maybe. .."}, {"answer": "You can't grow bananas in the fields of France. Cider from apples was quite popular as well, but Europeans were not skilled enough to make alcoholic beverages from fruits they didn't actually have access to."}, {"answer": "Grapes produce their own yeast. This means you can crush them and leave them to ferment. Other fruits require the yeast to be added separately. So leaving the grapes out in the sun made wine, other fruit just made rotten juice."}, {"answer": "the yeast culture that makes wine grows on the grapes themselves. i suspect this may not be true for other berries, or that their natural cultures are less palatable."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "12436", "title": "Grape", "section": "Section::::Juice.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 32, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 32, "end_character": 420, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

Can someone explain Rocky Horror Picture Show to me? I feel like I didn't "get it"

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[{"answer": "I was in middle school when Rocky Horror Picture Show first became popular; a few years later in high school, several of my friends and I went to the midnight shows on a regular basis. It was a blast. We stayed out until 3am, with parental approval, since they knew the older kids we were with. The crowd was exotic - were those actual gay people? And when the show started, the sideshow was remarkable - young people dressed up like the cast, at the front of the theater, acting out the movie as it went along. Others dressed up in the audience, participating in some sort of secret code that they were all in on... and that we learned over a few screenings. Years later a girlfriend had never seen it, so we rented it and watched on TV. It was horrible. It's a campy B-movie. TL;dr: RHPS was all about the scene that developed around the midnight shows - a counterculture where the odd, artsy kids could blend in, and if you were gay or trans, it didn't matter. Back in the late 70's or early 80's, this was a big thing, because social acceptance wasn't at the point it was today."}, {"answer": "It's a musical spin on Frankenstein. Teaching people to be open minded and not judge people just because they are different. It's ahead of its time and shear genius and the music is amazing. People who look deeper when they watch movies like this will get the inner meaning. Brad and Janet were two clean cut squares who never stepped outside their country club like lifestyle. Once they gave something new a chance it changed them forever and opened their minds to people who are different. It's a fun, weird, wacky movie. I Love it, and I'm a straight as an arrow."}, {"answer": "sexual liberation, good fun and someone realized that Tim Curry looked hot in a corset and heels"}, {"answer": "The current top comment bums me out. I think Rocky Horror is one of the most widely misunderstood films around. And while the midnight experience is amusing, I don't think I'll ever go again, as these days it simply amounts to a bunch of people trying to yell over each other for the best callback line. And there's always *that* guy who's gone online and memorized entire callback screenplays. It no longer feels like a cult embracing this freakish movie, but instead a culture that's evolved separately and gathers to make fun of a \"horrible, campy\" film. What I think a lot of people miss is that Rocky Horror is more along the lines of Airplane! than The Room. There is no unintentional humor. It knows exactly what it's doing and what it wants to do. It is to 50's sci-fi and horror what Airplane! was to the disaster pictures of its day. The problem is that while most of us are familiar with the titles of the great 50's sci-fi and horror films, like Them! and Tarantula and such, the vast majority of Rocky's audience *these days* haven't actually seen them. I'm not saying you need to be a schlock scholar to \"get\" the movie, just like I saw Airplane! before Zero Hour! and still got the jist of it. But I definitely enjoyed Airplane! more after I did my homework. Others have already mentioned the film's themes of sexual liberation and personal freedom, but I'll add that those themes are what turned a lot of us on to the movie in the first place. I originally saw it in junior high and just didn't get it at all. Returned a few years later, and it felt like Richard O'Brien was speaking directly to me. Christ, the movie's got rock n' roll, monsters, kinky sex, and cannibalism, all wrapped up in a simple coming of age story. Welcome to the mind of 15 year-old me. And yet, I was Brad at that time of my life, and I was dating a real Janet. Seeing the stereotypical 50's couple perverted by rock music and 70's openness about sex, with horror references serving as the sugar to help the medicine down, was a revelation to me, as I imagine it has been for several generations of closeted weirdos who needed to hear someone tell them, \"don't dream it - be it!\" Finally, this is the least important point in the film's defense, but I think it's surprisingly well made. I love the cinematography, and some of the camera work is just awesome. I say that as a huge fan of 70's cinematography, so perhaps I'm biased. I love the handheld shots of Frank coming up out of the pool during Wild and Untamed Thing. Or maybe I'm the one who's missing the point. I don't know. I respect all the opinions in this thread, as it's obviously a pretty divisive picture. I just really, really love this movie, and the midnight experience no longer feels like they're laughing *with* it, but *at* it. Either way, the conversation should be interesting. So stay for the night. Or maybe a bite..."}, {"answer": "Some thoughts, as a cast member: RHPS is not a good film. It is a ridiculous film that is fun with catchy songs. Part camp, part loving homage, part absurd farce, all dealing with imagery and themes from decades of horror movies and B sci-fi movies. Its got a lot going on in it, which people recognize. That makes the whole thing accessible. So the transgressive parts, dealing with alternative and non-traditional sexualities, are easier to digest. RHPS is normally seen in theatres, with a live cast and/or audience participation. Those are places where, in my experience, sexuality of all stripes is championed. Not just LGBTQ and straight sexuality, but bondage, plus-size folks, disabled folks, everything. You can let your freak flag fly in a fairly safe, non-judgmental space, that is still public. This is a movie where Tim Curry in a corset is *believable* as the sexiest thing you've ever seen. The audience participation also is transgressive in other ways. There are nazi salutes, because one character is clearly a nazi. There are racial jokes. We make fun of current tragedies. (When the RKO tower comes down at the end, the AP line is \"Wait, I thought two towers fell?\") There are no sacred cows. It is a safe place to be absolutely horrible and let your inner thirteen year old out. Its the first place that its okay to laugh after a tragedy. What don't you get about the show? I mean, it requires a lot of American and British film context, but outside of that, maybe there is something else I or someone could explain?"}, {"answer": "It is a campy, ludicrous sort of spin on a vampire/Frankenstein movie that became a cult classic because of its treatment of alternate sexualities at that time period, and its catchy songs. It remained a hit because of the audience participation part, turning it into an 'experience' where people can dress up and be silly."}, {"answer": "Honestly, there isn't much to get. It is meant to be over the top, obnoxious, and campy. It is a send up of the old sci-fi/horror films that generally focused on mad scientist what go a tromping through God's domain with creating life and all that. But if you're looking for a deeper meaning... well it is there, but it doesn't add anything. Just sit back, enjoy the music, and don't dig too deeply."}, {"answer": "It's pastiche of horror movies, but it's also a piss-take of traditional puritan values. And DAMN Tim Curry can shake it."}, {"answer": "It really isn't a good movie. What made it a cult classic was the audience participation. If you haven't seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a big screen with the entire audience participating, then you haven't watched it."}, {"answer": "Thanks for all the replies! The biggeat thing I'm getting from all this is that this movie is a lot of things to a lot of people. I'm gonna try to give some context to my question. I watched this movie while hanging out with a few friends and my wife, who kept popping in to sing random lines. The themes of freedom and openness were really obvious to me. I got all that. I actually liked a lot of the movie for what it was, so I don't want people thinking I was weirded out or thought I'd was stupid or anything. The plot was a bit hard to follow on my first time watching but that's cool. After reading the responses I probably will try to go to a live show. Seems like one of those life experience things everyone should just go and do at least once. One thing that really took me out of the experience was the murder of that Eddie guy. It really changed my impression of Frank from a lovable creep who represents freedom and the alternative lifestyle to someone genuinely ill and extremely dangerous to be around. And then the film went right on celebrating him. Maybe it's just me. I loved Tim Curry's entrance and his character before and after that moment but I just couldn't get past it completely. It seemed like Frank was supposed to be someone you weren't sure to cheer for or be disgusted by and by casually killing someone it just pushed me too far into the latter. I think it may partially be a cultural lens thing. Seeing that movie in this day and age and being all too keenly aware of the whole \"transexual villain\" movie trope which paints people who act and think differently than most of us as something dangerous and to be distrusted. Feel free to weigh in. Like I said his character may have come across differently then than it does now. But for some reason it bugged me."}, {"answer": "It's okay, I didn't \"get it\" either. When I saw it for the first time I felt like I had walked into someone else's inside joke. I think the point is that its supposed to be a place of total acceptance and liberation. But to be honest I think a lot of the original charms that made the movie/experience so great have been lost and now people use it as an excuse to be as weird as fucking possible, at least in the theater I go to. Just couldn't get into it."}, {"answer": "It made me happy as a 'weird kid' who didn't know any other weird kids. It was my first glimpse of a world I'd only dreamed of. And [Hot Patootie by Meat Loaf]( URL_0 ) is just the most wonderful thing."}, {"answer": "A lot of people here are saying that the movie is bad, but fun. These people are wrong. Plan Nine from Outer Space is bad but fun. Killer Klowns from Outer Space is bad but fun, but RHPS is awesome and fun. Here's what makes it awesome: 1. The music is fucking great. Nearly every song on the soundtrack is a legitimately good song if you like musicals. \"Science Fiction\" is great. \"Time Warp\" is great. \"Sweet Transvestite\" is great. \"Hot Patootie\" is great. The Floor Show leading into \"I'm Going Home\" is beyond great---it's fucking awesome. 2. The script is great. Yes, it's cheesy camp satirizing even cheesier camp from the 50s and 60s, but that's the point and it was masterfully executed. 3. The characters. They're so original and great (except when they're supposed to be like the types of characters they're satirizing, but they're great at that too). Sure, the movie isn't for everyone. It's a musical for one. It's 50s-style sci-fi for another. But if you are the kind of person who likes *Guys and Dolls* and *Forbidden Planet*, there's nothing not to like abut RHPS. Plus, throw in some sexual liberation and *Wizard of Oz* references and you've got an awful lot to like."}, {"answer": "They eat a guy named Meatloaf and then sing about it."}, {"answer": "It's about knowing. About nailing it all together in a group. It's 1980, you've just finished doing your first school musical, you're 15, and the cool seniors who had the leads and have cars say \"let's get the whole cast together and go to RHPS\" You beg and plead with your parents to go *and they let you* because they know the seniors and they're the geeky/artsy/smart ones, so you roll your Columbia costume up in a wad because there's some things your parents don't need to know, and you bike over to your friends house to pick up the carpool and change there (into pajamas with a band-aid over one very important spot) and then you go and because your older friends coached you *you know a bunch of the right things to say at the right time*. And you say them along with everyone else, and it is JUST SO COOL. You get to yell \"SHOW US A TIT, COLUMBIA\" really loud. It's every time you've recited the Pledge of Allegiance or sung the Gloria Patri, but turned into something *yours*, you and your cohort. It's the satisfaction of knowing how to how to clap Miss Mary Mack, really fast, totally perfect, or singing \"Jingle Bells, Batman Smells\" really loud with all the other kids on the bus, *except with sex.* Humans of all ages like doing things together. Sweet Caroline at a Sox game, that big \"DA DA DAAAA\" moment. *Adult* humans like sex. *Adolescent* humans need to push boundaries and screw around with taboos. RHPS puts them all together with just a Jump to the Left, black lipstick, and toilet paper."}, {"answer": "An innocent, young, newly engaged couple (Brad and Janet) stumble upon a castle occupied by Dr. Frank N Furter when their car breaks down. The Dr. is holding a party for aliens from the planet Transexual to reveal his creation Rocky Horror. Dr Scott comes looking for his son Eddie (Meatloaf) who Frank N Furter killed earlier but ends up discovering that Frank N Furter has developed a device called the Sonic Transducer. Everybody pretty much sleeps with everybody, they chase each other around and everyone is frozen and then thawed out for the grand finale, Rose Tint my World & Don't Dream It. Frank N Furter and Columbia (Meatloaf's GF) die, Riff-Raff and Magenta blasts off in the castle and Brad, Janet and Dr. Scott live."}, {"answer": "The film is an adaptation of the stage production, *The Rocky Horror Show,* written by Richard O'Brien and produced by Jim Sharman. It's a tribute to cheesy sci-fi, horror, and muscle, and rock 'n' roll flicks of the mid-20th Century. The film and play are chock full of cultural references likely lost on most people under O'Brien's age (born 1942). I've seen an exhaustive list of them, and I was embarrassed to admit that I'd missed *most* of them, despite having seen it many times. There's much more to it, too, however. On another level, it's a celebration of freak culture, and if you were a freak growing up in the Star Wars era when this came out, this film was one of the very few positive experiences you could share with other freaks in relative safety and security, for the low price of movie ticket and a late-night meal."}, {"answer": "If you're under the age of 40 or so you probably have no hope of \"getting it\". The RHPS is the movie version of a play that was staged in London in the 70's. It is a tribute to- and poking more than a little fun of, the cheesy sci fi and horror movies of the 50's. In a way it was a direct response to the heavy and serious culture of the 60's. People were tired of the endless riots, VietNam, the cold war, race riots + civil rights and all the \"bad news\". It was kind of like disco- the subtext being \"fuck it- enough already- lets just have some fun\". The modern equivalent of it is the fascination of our current culture with the 70's- \"Boogie Nights\" and it's spin-offs springs to mind- even then- if you're under the age of 40 you don;t remember the pre-aids 70's so\"getting it\" might be more academic than experiential for you."}, {"answer": "Man, RHPS sure was fun when I went to see it at a live theater. Transgender alien comes to Earth, owns a giant manor, lures people in to become crazy sex-cultists that also like to sing and dance in an environment that is completely accepting of gender/sexual preference/race. Honestly, there's not much to it. Just turn your brain off and enjoy the show, like a lot of theater. PS. Tim Curry makes this movie. By himself."}, {"answer": "The RHPS is a bad, campy movie where the main attraction is playing along with the movie with audience participation and in-jokes. It is not for everyone. I have seen it and done the audience participation thing. I don't think it is that great and see no need to ever see it again, with or without audience participation. Personally, I think the people who go repeatedly are kind of living out a fantasy or lifestyle they don't feel they can engage in fully."}, {"answer": "I've never been to one of the midnight showings. I deny the assumption that this is at the core of what makes it great. RHPS is a combination of camp, kitsch, musicals, and B-movie tribute. It takes a particular combination of tastes to LOVE it, and just a few to like it. I would say you'd need to fully enjoy / get it: 1. **It's intentional shlock.** aka [kitsch]( URL_0 ). It's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. You're supposed to laugh at the over-the-top sexuality, violence, melodrama, sociopathy, and poor production. If you just \"don't find it funny\", that's fine, let's move on to: 2. **Gender-bending as a genre**. [Gender-bending]( URL_9 ) is at least part of this film's genre, if you can call it that. There's something about gender-bending that appeals to a lot of people. Think of films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or musical artists like Prince, David Bowie, and Lady Gaga. For whatever reason, there's an appeal - and if this doesn't appeal to you, even as a curiosity, you're missing something. Okay - you don't like that, then there's always: 3. **It's a tribute to sci-fi B-movies**. This is pretty similar to #1, except that where the movie can be taken as shlock in its own right, Richard O'Brien specifically created this as a comedy tribute sci-fi B-movies. It's one reason why people like Mystery Science Theater 3000. You don't even have to be familiar with those old films to understand what they're trying to say about them. Dang, you don't like throwbacks? Well there's always: 4. **It's a musical with a great soundtrack**. The songs are very catchy and have stood the test of time. Most of them have tongue-in-cheek lyrics, but they're very catchy. The stage show is still running in theater houses around the world, even without the craziness of the full throwing-toast experience. Hm, you don't like the music either? There might not be much hope for you... at least there's always: 5. **It's a comedy**, and a pretty good one. Or at least, most RHPS fans laugh a lot throughout the film. Tim Curry's timing and physical comedy is great - that show pretty much launched his long and varied career. He actually started as the first Dr. Frank N. Furter in the original stage production in London, and he carried it through to the movie. Pretty much every character in the movie comes with laughs, and only Riff Raff takes himself completely seriously. Are you telling me you didn't even chuckle? Geez, I guess there's always the fact that: 6. **It has iconic imagery**. Obviously, it wouldn't be iconic if it wasn't so popular for other reasons -- but since it is, it has an unusually high # of distinctive images within it. Here are a few examples: a. Dr. Frank N Furter's [Outfit #1]( URL_3 ) and [Outfit #2]( URL_10 ) and [Outfit #3]( URL_4 ) b. [The Lips]( URL_1 ) c. [Frank's Sneers]( URL_7 ) d. [The kitsch logo]( URL_2 ) e. [Pretty much every character]( URL_5 ) f. [The Phantoms]( URL_8 ) g. [The RKO Tower]( URL_6 ) There are many more reasons (including the cult that's built around it, memorizing the scripts, being a kind of outsider-identity thing, positive messages about gender and fun, a grotesque storyline, etc) but other folks covered those in more detail. Hope that helps! Edit #1: Fixed outfit links"}, {"answer": "The big thing to recognize is that it means a much different thing now than when it was first produced. The original movie was a film version of a stage musical just called the \"Rocky Horror Show.\" It was first produced in 1973, and was \"retro\" even then. It started out as a spoof of bad 50s and 60s sci-fi films, which is where elements like the creation of a Frankenstein-style monster, the Time Warp, and the alien/outer-space element all come in. At some point during the writing, it also became a show about sexual liberation and breaking conventions--and of course being a piece of avant-garde British theater from the Monty Python era only helped this. The stage show basically made Tim Curry's career, and was so successful that the movie version was put into production almost immediately. It came out in 1975. At the time of release, it wasn't a particularly huge success, or well-received critically. Most mainstream audiences saw it for what it was: a less-than-perfect adaptation of a very weird British stage show. But it became a potent cultural symbol of the radical sexual awakenings of the 1970s--consider not just the content of the film, but the practice of lipsticking the letter V on \"Rocky Horror virgins\" their first time at a public screening. It was *because* the film was like nothing you'd seen before in a theater that it became such a symbol of avant-garde weirdness. And later on, as it opened the door for other very strange, queer (in all senses) movies to be made, I think the audience participation at RHPS screenings started to get more and more involved as a way of reasserting that it was still a \"mind-blowing\" experience, like nothing you'd seen before. To this day, the film's biggest following are people that identify with its original target audience--that is, freaks and outcasts, people who didn't relate to The Mousetrap or Hamlet or whatever other fairly conservative standard-fare drama was playing in the British West End theaters. Nowadays it's common to see midnight screenings on Halloween, particularly in the U.S. and Canada, as we've got it hard-coded into our culture that this is the one night it's OK for even normal, well-balanced adults (the Brads and Janets of the world) to take off their normal clothes, dress up in funny and transgressive (and for adults, overtly sexual) costumes, get out of their skin, and have a wild liberating carnivalesque experience before going back to ordinary life the next day. As a result, whatever you think of the film itself--I don't think it's aged particularly well--the cultural importance of the film has radically changed it. The sexual and especially transsexual elements don't shock us out of our skin today they way they would have for British theatre audiences 41 (!!!) years ago. But for the people who still care enough about the film to go \"all-in\" at public screenings, that's still the function it serves."}, {"answer": "I believe it's what they called an \"erotic comedy-thriller.\" It's not the only one that exists, but it became the most popular through the culture that formed around it. The fact that a number of the main actors went on to greater fame (Tim Curry, Barry Bostwick, Susan Sarandon, Meat Loaf) has certainly helped its longevity. As for the movie itself... it's your standard boy meets girl, boy and girl get stranded in woods, boy and girl find creepy castle in woods, boy and girl meet flamboyant transvestite and mad scientist with god complex, boy and girl discover sex, fetishes, and explore taboos, mad scientist's companions flip out, kill him, and return house to home planet leaving everyone else behind story."}, {"answer": "I think something to add is that Rocky Horror is really nuanced in many ways. Frank steals part of Eddie's brain, murders him, then serves him for dinner, unknowingly forcing the others into cannibalism. The promiscuous sex in the movie is not benign, but triggers jealousy and sometimes borders on rape. It ends with a triple homicide and a description of humans as insects crawling on the earth. The mixture of celebration and critique only serves to make the play more intriguing."}, {"answer": "I went to see it before the \"audience cult\" went stupid. Before I saw it, it was a play for several years. It was supposed to be a parody of all the \"B\" rated horror films of the time, that's all."}, {"answer": "I'm the type of person who just hates musicals, so I'll never get it. Nothing makes me cringe harder than Bollywood movies or Glee."}, {"answer": "Essentially it's a camp parody of Frankenstein, and a homage to fifties B-movies and rock 'n' roll."}, {"answer": "First thing you need to understand is that its just a jump to the left..."}, {"answer": "I've participated in the community since 2002, and have run a cast for the last four years in Long Beach, CA. I don't care if this gets buried, but I love how many points and comments this thread has. My first show was on Halloween with what would eventually be the cast I joined - Long Beach Rocky Horror (formerly Midnight Insanity). I was a bit of shy, sheltered kid, but seeing such a collection of weirdos look so comfortable with themselves was...amazing. Music was blasting in the theater, people were dancing, making out in their seats and against walls, and folks were smoking *everything*. The preshow festivities started, and so did the audience participation. I was dry-humped by my friend who brought me to the show in front of the crowd in mock-de-virginization. I knew some of the words to the songs from some Dr. Demento albums my dad had shared with me, and we all sang along. Rocky Horror and the community has been a great way for me to constantly step out of my comfort zone. I can't sing, I can't dance, but none of that mattered to me for three hours I was at that theater. I felt free and comfortable. I've crossed paths with some of the most talented, beautiful, interesting people, and am absolutely humbled for having them remain in my life even after their time at Rocky is done. That being said, Rocky isn't for everybody. I've brought friends and family to the show, and it can be hit-or-miss. We have people leave our theater because they weren't expecting to participate (optional at our show, but not at all shows), or were upset with folks yelling out the audience participation lines. The movie is goofy, and I think some folks might not appreciate what it's trying to satirize. I don't hold that against anybody. I DO think folks should give it a chance before dismissing it. It will always hold a very special place in my heart."}, {"answer": "I was 16 and took the subway with friends to see it at 8th Street Playhouse in the Village - summer of 1982. Huge audience participation and got drunk on a 40 of Old English. What makes is compelling? (a) Great soundtrack, (b) brilliant Tim curry acting, (c) titillating themes such as promiscuity, homosexuality, at midnight showings (d) but none of these can stand alone without the audience phenomenon While the movies does have a moral; it is intended to be zany with great music. But what made it so appealing and lasting for years is the cult following that manifested into audience participation. The two can be decoupled, certainly. but then you are left with a silly movie with a great soundtrack. Its appeal is the midnight movie phenomenon and the audience particpation"}, {"answer": "i would add that it was what was called a \"happening\", or an excuse to have a happening. back in those days there were midnight movies and The Rocky Horror Picture Show was most popular. people would dress up and go and participate as the movie progressed. it was just lots and lots of fun and laughs. you would not be able to get it because the ambience for that sort of thing is no longer there. it is like people of today's generation trying to have a Woodstock but they don't know how. that is why we say carpe diem. live in your own time and seize that moment--there don't seem to be very many of them anymore."}, {"answer": "I always describe The Rocky Horror Picture Show as something between a nightmare and a wet dream. The plot, that is. Culturally however, RHPS is just plain weirdness for the sake of being weird. The point was to be in your face and to say \"You think gay/lesbian/trans/artsy-people/whatever is weird?.....You're right, we're fucking ridiculous lunatics, and we love it!\" That is I think the main consensus."}, {"answer": "The musical (and subsequent movie) are a parody of American stereotypes and archetypes as seen by a foreigner. I wrote a whole essay on it back in high school."}, {"answer": "Go to a live show of RHPS in a large/larger city. It's an experience. Let people know it's your first time. =)"}, {"answer": "It's a musical with Transvestites, humanoid-aliens and uptight white people who eventually find their inner tranny groove. It is best TO NOT SEE IT at home on VH1. LAME!!! You must have a large quantity of caffeinated beverages to keep yourself awake and attend a midnight showing. In the midnight showing (and go to one in a large-ish town/city) you will be able to hear the crowd interaction with the screen, be part of the micro-vandalism of the theater (just throwing stuff and squirt guns...lots of squirt guns) and watch the crowd re-enactment of the movie. It's for those reasons why you go. It's camp, it's fun and it's a great release. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have attended far over 100 theater showings of RHPS and it was a formative part of my youth. I went to midnight movie after midnight movie and it IS a place where the disaffected/socially awkward (penguin) can go to feel part of a group. It's immensely therapeutic. If you're part of the cooler-than-thou crowd the movie will annoy you. If you are looking to enjoy a logical movie/plot you will be disappointed and perhaps even pissed off that you sat through the film. However, I cannot recommend it enough as it's as good an initiation into the USA's counter-culture as anything you'll find. That and you'll figure out that Tim Curry is THE SHIT!!!"}, {"answer": "Ill take the opposite stance on it. It is a musical version of \"oh so random\" Frankenstein. People choose to go to the late showings and have crowd participation even though it is a completely sub-par movie. To them the movie is amazing, but deep down it is just people with no personalities bonding over something that has been decided to be random therefore good and interesting by the leagues of (we are interesting because we are different) people. Someone saying \"oh a toast\" and having the crowd throw fucking bread at the screen doesn't make you, or the movie interesting. Everyone I've ever met who is a huge rocky horror fan is the equivalent of facebook girl meme only older. Its pathetic"}, {"answer": "It is interesting this was posted today. I finally decided that my daughter and her friends are old enough to pop their Rocky Horror cherries. I am awaiting one of their parent's permission. If you want to \"get\" the film without seeing it live there isn't much to get. The Rocky Horror experience has to be live with a bunch of people that collectively know the responses and are into it enough to mimic the action of the film on stage in full regalia."}, {"answer": "I think it's one of those movies where you have to watch it several times. While yes, it has a message, I've watched it so many times now that just, every single moment of the movie is entertaining. Every single frame has something remarkable going on. And it's comedic but the comedy doesn't feel forced at all. Try watching it a few more times and maybe you'll get it."}, {"answer": "Where else could you get subversion, science fiction, singing, dancing, gore, t & a, fetish, cross-dressing, transexualism (is that a word?), horror, comedy all with a nod and wink to the B-movie genre all in one package in 1975? Up until that point there had never ever been anything like it. It had something for everyone and offended your mom and dad."}, {"answer": "You mean like this? Two people got stuck with a flat, tried to find help, but instead found a house full of crazy stuff that is supposed to be funny and entertaining, which turns into a spaceship and flies away. I think that's what happened at the end, I was usually so bored by then I quit watching."}, {"answer": "Uhm .. yeah I went to that. I can see it as being rebelious and fun during the 70's. The jokes are so old now, that it's kind of boring."}, {"answer": "People feel like they should enjoy it so they pretend to do so and maybe convince themselves."}, {"answer": "In my experience, \"theater people\" like it. I found it unwatchable."}, {"answer": "Two straight kids catch gay. A real Christian Horror Show."}, {"answer": "It cannot be explained. It can only be experienced."}, {"answer": "You mean it didn't toucha toucha toucha touch you?"}, {"answer": "This pretty much explains it to a \"T\": URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Oh, also, /r/rhps in case you get interested"}, {"answer": "There were essentially three contributing factors to the success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: * It was a camp film that developed an \"underground\" cult following. By being an intentionally weird musical comedy, RHPS basically created the formula for making a movie that defined cult movie. It was the quintessential movie that \"was so crazy, you just have to see it.\" This allowed viewers to forgive nearly all the apparent shortcomings of the film or gaps in the plot. It was clear it wasn't intended to be art, so people could simply enjoy it for the crazy, crappy film it was. It's rare that people get to be so free with movies, so when it's done right people immediately attach to it. * It has a legitimately awesome soundtrack. The lyrics are funny, all the songs are very memorable, and it's easy to sing along with. Some would argue that the film was essentially an excuse to highlight the soundtrack and open it up to a greater market. The plot also happens to be entirely contained within the soundtrack, so listening to the album pretty much gives you the whole experience (sans Tim Curry's exuberance). * The revival. The midnight showings with the interactivity and the singalongs and the whatnot is a symptom of the bug, not a cause of it. It does still help drive attachment to new generations to RHPS, but RHPS was it's own legitimate \"thing\" well before the theater showings started."}, {"answer": "RHPS is a satirical, horror, musical, comedy, cult film, centered on an axis of profound indulgence. It starts when Brad and Janet ( in their honeymoon), break down near the estate of Dr Frank-N-Futer. They knock on his door in hope of assistance. Dr Frank-N-Futer(a sweet transvestite) answers the door in the midst of a raucous ball, could be orgy. The doc answers the door thinking it was the \"candy man\". Once Doc Furter realizes these Brad and Janet people, are legit innocents, he sets about corrupting them. Individually. What ensues is a ridiculous, semi surreal, plot concerning mostly corruption of innocence. There are numerous traditions associated with viewing the pic in a public theater. Some showings include a real time Live interpretation with actors, along side the film on screen. Squirt guns, everyone fires them off in the theater during the rain scene. Newspapers, the relevance will be apparent. Added traditional lines, concocted as responses from the cult community, spoken out loud in unison, triggered by various script lines said on screen And other gags of this nature. It is truly a original production. Also check out The Adventures of Buckaroo Benzi. Not a musical, but still ridiculous."}, {"answer": "I would recommend finding out more about the social and political times in which the musical play and succeeding film was born. Until very recently, openly gay, lesbian and trans characters were still very much on the margins of pop culture. If you can find it, I would recommend watching \"The Celluloid Closet\", which is an excellent documentary about gay, lesbian and trans representation in cinema. Not surprisingly, these types of characters have always been present, but the further back you go, the more heavily disguised they had to be to evade the oppressive censorship. URL_0 I think that one of the primary reasons \"Rocky Horror\" became so popular is because it was one of the few films where gay, lesbian and trans audience members could recognize themselves. There is little emphasis on death or suffering or discrimination. The Dionysian atmosphere of joy, sex and music is a celebrations of pleasure in every form. There is no shame in being who you are. After all, one of the primary reasons we go to the movies is to be told stories in which we can see fantasy versions of ourselves reflected and our life choices celebrated."}, {"answer": "For a year and a half I went with my girlfriend to watch RHPS every weekend. The movie would play up on the theatre screen while a cast acted it out beneath. Everyone ran around in underwear or whatever they felt like. We threw toilet paper and made out. We ate cookies piled up on the stomach of a giggling girl. We danced and sang modified lyrics to the songs. There was almost no alcohol or drug use yet we were high on a complete disregard for adherance to societal norms. I'm as straight as they come but learned not to to give a shit when same sex couples made out. I learned a lot from that experience. I became a lot more open minded, less concerned about what other people think. Everyone at the show were themselves, were friends, knew we'd go back to our normal lives until next Saturday when we would sprawl out across several movie seats with our significant others on our laps yelling out our own words to the songs at the top of our lungs. It was a lot of unadulterated fun. Movie itself was meh."}, {"answer": "If you don't get it, then you don't get it. I went once, wasn't thrilled with it. Would have rather watched the movie at home than be forced to strip in front of a bunch of strangers. A couple of people were doing some heavy petting, giving everyone a chance to watch, some people were dancing and singing, one girl actually got on stage and did a strip tease during the intro song. Lot's of exhibitionism, both gay and straight, and lots of anything else that might make middle america uncomfortable. Some posts on here talk about \"Growing up with it\", sadly I don't think that really applies anymore, at least not in Hollywood, where I saw it for the first time, recently. I think it's more of an outlet for the \"Hollywood\" crowd to go be weird...I didn't see anyone there over 35. If you don't get it, then don't feel bad. I don't really get it either."}, {"answer": "I feel the appeal is people like it because it's different and weird. It's definitely not meant to be taken seriously. Full disclosure: I'm not a fan. I found it on tv when I was like 7 and liked \"time warp\" but now I don't really get why so many people are into it. It's one of those things that people like simply because it's out there and offensive to some and people think they're cool because of that. Like how all these people are like \"man I'm so different and unique that I love Nightmare Before Christmas, wear Doc Martens, and love this indie band Arctic Monkeys that not many people know of.\" Sorry... I had a friend who thought he was so counterculture that he literally said that and thought that RHPS was some underground thing that no one knew about."}, {"answer": "It was a throwback to the old Sci-Fi movies which were part Sci-Fi and part horror. The \"horror\" part comes in with all the sexual discord and a life of hedonism and how everybody has that inside themselves. The problem is, once you turn that loose, things tend to end badly--people might, for instance, get killed in the name of having a \"good time\" one can become \"too extreme\". The sci-fi part comes from the fact he is from some other planet where gender is more fluid. It ends on a somewhat dark note--that we are all lost in time and space and meaning--trying to figure out what works--and we try our solutions--but sometimes those solutions even IF they are hedonistic and seem to bring us pleasure can come up empty."}, {"answer": "Has anyone ever done a deep analysis of RHPS? I've seen it a bunch of times and it feels like there is a deeper meaning there somewhere.... Maybe something about alternative sexuality replacing the norm, wherein SciFi represents the alternative? Maybe that's what the whole Eddie storyline is about. Eddie being the stand-in for \"normal sexuality\" that gets murdered by SciFi. (Frank). But then the movie suggests there are, and maybe should be, limits to this. Frank gets killed (Frank N. Furter it's all over, you are now my prisoner, your mission is a failure, your lifestyle's too extreme!). The castle leaves, leaving Brad and Janet changed forever...possibly for the worse. Anyway, that's my loose interpretation."}, {"answer": "The movie is at the same time a love letter to the old monster movies of the RKO era and a lampooning of everything that society at the time found taboo. It was also a movie version of a stage musical of the same name with all the original actors with a few questionable additions (namely Meatloaf played both Eddie and Dr. Scott in the play to show that they were related but he was bumped from the role in the film). That is pretty much the gist of it. It is a satire of taboo subjects of the day and a send up to the monster movies of the 50's and 60's."}, {"answer": "Basically it's about shedding sexual hangups (or hangups of any sort really) and living an open and free lifestyle regardless of judgement. Brad and Janet were in love, it was swell but not passionate until Frank showe them how to live by putting indulgence first, saving their relationship. Also he's an alien from outer space and Magenta and Riff Raff are his underlings who cause a mutiny and seize power."}, {"answer": "Honestly, I think it's stupid as hell. You go to a crowded theatre to be made comically uncomfortable by a myriad of socially retarded strangers whilst watching a really, really shitty movie. It's great if you're one of them, but if you weren't one of the weird theatre kids in high school, it's probably not worth your time."}, {"answer": "There's nothing to get. It's an \"alternative\", pop-culture anachronism that had a cult following during its period of popularity. There are dozens of historical examples of analogous movies/plays/musical groups/events, all equally devoid of anything to \"get\" beyond their arbitrary popularity at a given point in time, and whatever cultural significance they may (or may not) have had."}, {"answer": "The movie was really good and weird up until Frankenfurter started sleeping with everyone, then it took an unnecessary and even weirder turn into aliens and laser guns and a bunch of stupid. Also I'm unable to explain how Tim Curry looked so hot dressed as a transvestite."}, {"answer": "What's to \"Get?' Enjoy it for what it is!! Never supposed to be intellectually stimulating, or have a thick plot. it's only supposed to be fun!! Historically, they have some thing wrong anyway. Don't worry about it!! That flick is not about plot development!!"}, {"answer": "It's outsider art from a time period when horror, sci-fi, camp and 'alternative' sexuality were all very underground. It's a weirdo fantasy merging all those things, and being very funny while doing it. If you were weird, Rocky was for you."}, {"answer": "In your defense, it is a truly awful movie. It became popular due to its shocking content (for that era). It really took off after cosplay came into it. It's basically a funny and cheesy movie to watch with your friends."}, {"answer": "Not sure if you're a regular reader of the AV Club, but they did a really great feature on RHPS a few years ago. URL_0 tldr; it was probably groundbreaking in its era, but hasn't aged terribly well."}, {"answer": "Did you see it at a screening? Unless you see it at a screening it isn't going to make any sense at all. Actually, it will never ever make sense, but that's why it's great."}, {"answer": "I enjoy the film and music so much on a visceral level that I haven't bothered to find a deeper meaning, however I must say that I love the top comment in this thread."}, {"answer": "Did you watch it with 100 other people yelling at the screen and ton of props? It kind of doesn't make any sense without that."}, {"answer": "that makes me really sad.. its like the essence of all that is good in this world.. that and monty python.."}, {"answer": "Never sat through it all, but always attributed its popularity to girls loving to singalong. Like Grease or Hair movies."}, {"answer": "Are you a man? Are you a straight man? Then you probably weren't meant to get it."}, {"answer": "I enjoy anything that makes my super christian conservative parents feel weird."}, {"answer": "it's like a less good version of phantom of the paradise"}, {"answer": "It was 1985, I was a junior in high school, and some friends had heard about this thing called the \"Rocky Horror Picture Show\" that was shown at midnight at the Lynbrook theater. With some of us having just got our drivers licenses and cars we thought it would be fun to go, so we did. We were \"virgins\" and had no idea what we were in for. Before we know if there are people in costume on the stage and a guy in a corset and fishnets dancing around and sitting in people's laps. People are shouting out lines, squirting water, throwing rice and toilet paper, and having a freakin BLAST! We had so much fun we decided to go again the following Saturday night. We showed up early this time and were prepared. We meet the \"actors\" and talked to them and got to know them as we kept going back every week. After a few months, when one of the actors couldn't make it, the group asked if one of us would step in. We all wanted to. Fast forward another few months, and the start of our senior year and my group of friends (all guys) are now hanging out with a group of girls from a different school every Sat. night at the show. And then one week the leader of the acting group tells us that they are moving to the big time, the 8th Street Playhouse in NYC and asks if we would take over the acting here in Lynbrook. We wholeheartedly agree and go about decided who would play who. We decided who would play who based on looks, and that is how I ended up strutting around the Lynbrook theater every Sat. night for about 8 months in a corset, speedo, fishnets, and pearl necklace and having the time of my life. During the opening I would dance around and sit in people's laps. I would have people come to me before the show and point out a friend who was a \"virgin\" and ask me to come to them during the show, and I would. It was fucking awesome. I even dated \"Janet\" for a few months, she was I think my 3rd girlfriend. And then later I dated and fell in love with \"Columbia\", though it didn't last long after I went away to college (she was a year younger). But I am still friends with those folks. As for what the movie is about, it is a campy silly parody of an entire genre of movies that was so bad it was good, and it gained a cult following because of people who would act it out and make the movie interactive with the audience."}, {"answer": "Rocky Horror Picture Show started out as a broadway show, which was fun to go to and a great show. It got great reviews and everyone loved going to see it live. When it got a little more popular, they decided to make a movie for it. Rocky Horror by itself is a horrible movie, all sorts of things wrong with it cinematically. However, it is a lot of fun to make fun of, and the only reminder of the show that we have. Whenever people say that they're going to \"see\" Rocky Horror, there's many different ways to experience it. What most people do is set up a show with actors that dress up as the characters while the movie is playing in the background. Other times it's the movie playing on a big screen with the audience members doing whatever they want, dressed as the characters and whatnot. The reason why people go see Rocky Horror multiple times is because there's always something different happening, always something exciting to make every show different. Since the show is so widely different from others, it has a kind of ritual when people see Rocky Horror for the first time. Usually, the actors, your friends, someone at the show will write a V on your face showing that you are a virgin to seeing the show (it has nothing to do with whether or not you've had sex). There are other things that the people at the theater will make virgins do on the beginning of the show, but it is different for every show, and every stage (so I can't even spoil it for you if I wanted to.) Everyone who has seen it knows that there are \"call outs\" that are yelled out in the middle of the show to make it funnier. To some people these call outs seem rude and vulgar, but again, it's all about making fun of the movie. There's a lot of call outs that are staples in every performance, but people like to make up new ones; depending on where you live there may also be different call outs (ie. California's call outs are different from NYC's). Audience members are even given props to use during certain times in the performance to have fun with each other (ie. The audience throws a piece of toast in the air when Frank says \"a toast\"). TLDR; it's a show that everyone makes fun of, where the call outs are cheesy puns, and everyone plays with the idea of sex."}, {"answer": "The first time I went and saw Rocky Horror it was hosted by a small town theater group and played at one of the downtown movie houses. It seemed like a great idea for second / third date with the girl I was seeing at the time. It was the first time for both of us and so when a nice young man wearing lingerie and heels drew a V on our foreheads we just went with it. We had been given props at the front door but didn't really know what to do with them as we watched people file in and the whole atmosphere had this great surreal feeling. As the show was getting ready to start they asked all the people with V's on their foreheads to stand up and then they split us in to two groups. Each group had to go on stage and perform an action to the general amusement of the stage group and the general public. Now this is a second or third date- I'm 19, and this takes place during a particularly unremarkable summer in some small town in Idaho. It can be very telling to see someone you are on a date with fake an orgasm before coitus is even on the table. She was in the first group and after they had all filed on to the stage the host in his black bra and garters bid them to their task, which was to provide their most realistic fake orgasm noise. It was mesmerizing, awkward, and very silly- I can remember staring at her face and thinking about how beautiful she was and how I would never know the difference. When my time came- it was the first time I had been on that side of a stage since I was in grade-school at one of those events where they made everyone sing to their parents on Christmas. So anyways- the first part of our group had to bend over and grab their ankles while the other group had to dry hump them and the crowd sang the Oscar Meyer wiener song. The nice young woman that I was partnered with (not my date - she was back in the crowd) threw in a few thrusts that took my heels off the stage. Everyone laughed- we sat back down and then later through toast at the stage and called Brad an \"Asshole!\""}, {"answer": "If I'm reading your \"get it\" correctly, then perhaps this will help. It appeals in a large way to the freaks, the geeks, the nerds and the stamp collectors; *a crowd I'm very much apart of.* When I was about 10 when I first saw RHPS, I didn't understand a lot of it, but I liked it. I was the kid that had his own rock tumbler, that knew how to program QBasic and made my own computer games, that enjoyed math! So I enjoyed RHPS straight away for all the crazy people in it ^susan ^sarandon's ^cleavage ^came ^later. This was a movie with a whole bunch of outsiders who were singing, dancing, having a good time and (in my mind) the 'normals' became like them. It also had an 'oddball' as the villian and the normals as the victims. It was the anti every-other-movie-ever. It's always the nerdy kid that you route for that gets attacked by the dumb strong guy. Karate Kid, Weird Science, Back to the Future and so on. Here we have a man in drag (Tim Curry ^and ^his ^sexy ^legs, ^and ^^I'm ^^straight! ) who's the evil mastermind. On top of that you have the music, and then the sexual fantasy perversion etc. I know a few of my friends in school used to argue over who was the cutest in RHPS (Personally I liked [Little Nell]( URL_1 ), especially in the sequal [Shock Treatment in the nurses outfit!]( URL_0 ) ) So that's my take on it's popularity. I know that's not everyone's interpretation, but basically it's popular because it's a movie that gave us something we hadn't seen before. It gave something to the *outcasts.*"}, {"answer": "From what I see, most people are saying that either there isn't anything to get (campy and silly), or you haven't seen it unless you've seen it at a theater with audience participation. I partially disagree on both parts. This has been my favorite movie for the last fifteen years. I have never seen it at a theater, but it opened my mind. While it may be silly and camp on the surface, it tells a tale of two straight edge kids who haven't really experienced anything and are engaged too early in life. How does anyone know what makes them happy unless they experiment and find out what can make them happy? The only comparison I can think of is the Amish rumspringa (sp?). They have to know what life is (and the world they're giving up) before they can commit to their religion. Well, the same thing applies to the rest of the world, but on a less strict scale. Brad and Janet didn't know much about themselves. RHPS is about opening their world and stepping out of the confines of polite society to find out who they can be. I also took from it, if someone is raised prim and proper and strict, being exposed to debauchery and freer lifestyles suddenly, can be traumatic. Slow exposure over time near maturity is healthier than a sudden immersion. I believe that's why Brad and Janet went off the deep end."}, {"answer": "I feel like I got it when you get to the dancing scenes at the end. The editing makes frank look very raw and unpolished there is no fancy lighting you can see every crag and hairy hair. MY take on it was that (as well as what everyone else has said) is that Frank is himself he knows who he is but knows he really doesn't belong anywhere that nowhere to him is real because he can't be real outside of his make-believe palace. He just wants someone to join in the dance so it can be like it should. Frank knows it's an awful fiction but at the same is the only thing that makes him real in the way he wants to be. Its like the thing that makes him wonderful makes everything wonderful but it is self-destructive force that will take evryon with him. I kind of connect to the show on the mental health level. The bipolar super amazing powerful and terribly agonising insecurity/depression at yourself and the world and the fact that you know if you touch others your poison but at the same time you have a gift to see the world in a way they never can and you mast have someone see you for the best you are even if it means sorrow in the end. maybe a little ??"}, {"answer": "As many people have probably explained, it's not about the movie, it's about the scene. You must have never gone to see it at a theater. Just do that. You may or may not enjoy it, but you'll understand why other people do. It's similar to the cults that surround movies like *Mean Girls* or *Clueless* (both decidedly mediocre films), it's no longer about the film itself, but yet there was something about them that made them endearing to people and continuously so. For me, the first time I watched it, I watched it on DVD, by myself in my apartment, and I fell in love with it. The first thing you have to notice is that it's silly and campy on purpose. The movie is actually quite funny after you understand that it's supposed to be. Also, in spite of the terrible music (except for 2 or 3 awesome songs, \"Sweet Transvestite\" is my favorite), and the ridiculous plot, the performances are actually quite good. Tim Curry is absolutely amazing in the movie, and Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn (Riff Raff and Magenta) also are great."}, {"answer": "You don't go to see the movie, you go to make fun of the movie. If you just sit in your living room and watch it like any other movie, you're gonna have a bad time because it's not very good in that context. If you go to see it in a theater where there's a bunch of people who know the movie and all of the participatory extras, you're going to have a good time. It's a blast learning that every time someone say's Brad's name, everyone in the theater shouts \"Asshole!\" (unless there's a better line that goes into that particular time slot). It's unreal watching people act out the movie right in front of the screen as it's going on on the screen, and doubly so when the people on the screen and in front of it interact with each other, finish each other's sentences, and answer each other's questions. Without the audience participation, it's nothing. With the audience participation, it is a fun time that makes it the film with the longest theatrical run in the history of cinema."}, {"answer": "Are you asking about the scene or the plot? Everyone's already talked about the scene, so here's the plot. I'm not going to black it out with spoilers because 1) it's a forty year old movie and 2) knowing how it ends has little impact on your enjoyment: Dr. Frank N Furter, Riff Raff, and Magenta are all aliens from another planet (the planet Transsexual in the galaxy of Transylvania). They are on a mission to do something, but it's not really revealed what it is. I always figured it was some sort of \"make human alien clone things\" but Dr. Frank N Furter decided to make \"human sex toy things.\" Once Riff Raff and Magenta figure out that Frank N Furter just wants to fuck everything that moves, and then make more things that move so he can fuck them, they realize how off the rails things have gone and kill him in a mutiny (Frank N Furter was the boss, it seems), as well as Rocky (the failed experiment?) and Columbia (though not on purpose)."}, {"answer": "From what I can tell, people like it because its a show about \"alternative sexuality\" In our society, the sexy image is an attractive young woman showing a lot of skin. This is probably because men are very visual and like eye candy, while women care less about sexy images. This means what a lot of people consider sexy is left out of mainstream society. The Rock horror picture show is an outlet for that. So the people who enjoy it are women and gay men. My guess is transgender and transsexual people also like it because they are seeing and even interacting in a show were their sexuality and gender identification can be expressed without shame. In everyday society they can't do this. tl;dr: It's an alternative sexuality and gender identification outlet for everybody who's sexuality and/or gender identification cannot be freely expressed in society, i.e., anybody but straight males, who's sexual preferences (scantly clad young women) are found everywhere."}, {"answer": "I have seen Rocky Horror around...30 times (all in theatre setting) and I just love it for what it is. The music, but a lot of it is if you're with an active audience. If you see it at home, its clearly not the same. Though, I've never looked at it like the others are explaining, but they all make sense now that I think about it. I wish they still played the movie at midnight at our local theatre but they don't anymore. :( I miss giving myself over to absolute pleasure on a monthly basis. Hell, I've seen it so much, someone can just mention it, or if its on tv or anything, I immediately switch to 'theatre-mode' and start saying the lines that are said with the film. Brad and Janet enter the mansion at Riff-Raff's beckoning: Audience: \"Hey Brad show us out a butterfly masturbates!\" Brad shakes the lapels of his wet jacket."}, {"answer": "I played a Halloween show a few years ago in a Florida amphitheater along with another band and they ended the night with a showing of the rhps. Long story short, they played, we played. All went well. So I hung out to check out the showing. Note that during our show I did notice that everyone was dressed up as I had heard about when the fans go see a showing of the film in theaters. It was so cool to hear the crowd singing along, reciting almost every good line from the film, rice throwing. I grew up with two older sisters and an older brother, so I had seen it and they always would say the usual dammit Janet on occasion. But I really had a new respect once I saw the live experience. My two cents. Edit: tribute bands, by the way. So it fit we Halloween mood."}, {"answer": "I've been shadowcasting rocky for about 10 years now and I've thought a lot about this. To me, it boils down to acceptance and open mindedness. I believe the overall message of acceptance for everybody is why they ultimately kill frank in the end. He seems sort of like an open minded character initially but he forces his way of life upon everybody he meets, as if he were the far left, gay version of the religious right. He doesn't open brad and janet's minds, he screws with their heads (just listen to superheroes) and practically dooms their relationship (you see the fallout in shock treatment). I feel like, ultimately, the movie is saying that everybody should be able to live the life they want to live, be accepting of other people's lifestyles but don't force yours on others. But with lasers and shit."}, {"answer": "Watched it in a student cinema. Hetero cis men dressed up in traditionally extremely female clothing. The girl next door suddenly dressed up slutty. When he said \"a toast!\" we all threw slices of toast. When it rained in the movie, people were shooting water pistols. We were all singing and dancing along, and it was amazing, liberating fun. Watching this movie, I learnt that I found trans women and gay men hot, and that there was a lot of stuff about sluthood that attracted me. I'm pretty sure I am not the only one - this movie came out in 1975, so it was basically a sexual revolution, coupled with silliness, horror and awesome, catchy music (\"Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me\" is a favourite) which resulted in quotes, memes, cult."}, {"answer": "I feel like this has always been difficult for me to explain. Because the obsession with this movie is based on the culture, the midnight showings. But I have never been to a midnight showing. Yet I LOVE the movie. It's not really the greatest movie if I were to look at it objectively. But I don't get a \"so bad it's good\" type of enjoyment out if it either. And I'm not gay, nor do I particularly care for the accepting of others theme that this movie has. I just can't explain why I love this movie? The only think I can easily explain is that I love the music. But even the parts that aren't sung, I enjoy. Also, Columbia is so sexy!"}, {"answer": "There isn't exactly a hidden message or anything. It's shock humor and silliness and a whole mess of in-jokes. A lot of it was the audience yelling things out at the actors. Like when they yell out, \"Describe your balls!\" right before the Narrator says, \"heavy, black, and pendulous\" or when they yell \"Hey Riff, kill that Smurf!\" and the actor who plays Riffraff throws a pitchfork into the bushes. About half or more of the comedy is in the Audience script, and the movie versions I've seen just don't do that section justice. Have you ever seen Mystery Science Theater 3000? It's like that, only with a full audience yelling things instead of three guys."}, {"answer": "It's a parody on the crazy sci-fi movies of the 50s. When it was first released in theaters it was a huge flop. This is also at a time when theatres would run movies for years because there was no way to own a movie yet. People would get drunk and go to the movie just to make fun of it. They would yell at the screen and soon learned the places where you can shout something and the actors would give a hilarious response. Soon there was a whole culture adopted behind it."}, {"answer": "Well, stop trying to \"get it.\" There isn't much to get. You really need to experience the full Rocky Horror Picture Show experience which includes a set of actors performing the movie on stage while the movie is being played on a big screen and the audience participation. This occurs at a movie theater. By itself, RHPS is a terrible movie. When coupled with a theater and audience participation it's a lot more fun."}, {"answer": "That's just it. There isn't anything *To Get*. It's just a film about being who you are, because you are that person. Or at least that is what i took from it. For example. The line audiences shout in the callbacks: \"Say something sexy Riffraff.\" They don't ask him this, because he is sexy, but because he is Riffraff and he *Will* say something sexy if you ask him too."}, {"answer": "I've really enjoyed reading all the varied responses to OP's question and learning about how different the meaning of RHPS is to others. I remember the first time watching it in an old, rundown theatre on Halloween and seeing the spectrum of humanity enjoying the show and participating in the ceremony and tradition that was just as much a part of the movie as the film itself."}, {"answer": "fun times like this from the Drew Carey Show - pretty much shows exactly what people do at midnight shows - the costumes, the dancing (although obviously not a dance battle with Priscilla), the crowd - URL_0 and if you're from the conservative mid-west, how are you going to let your closeted gay friends know that you're okay with things viewed as counter-culture? Watch this movie."}, {"answer": "watching the movie at home? yeah its terrible, but a midnight showing at a theater is a completely different story. its played on the big screen while actors actually act it out in front of the audience and also have the audience take part in some of the wackyness. its not normal by any means but its very fun for some! :-D"}, {"answer": "I've also tried to \"get it,\" but I never did. That's fine, though - to each their own. I don't particularly care for the movie, but I think that's because it's just not my style of film. I do appreciate the cult-status it has gathered, though, and I do get that - I'm a huge Lebowski fan."}, {"answer": "It took me repeated viewings to really get it. The first time I watched it I was like what is this madness, I don't get it and that was really weird. The next time I watched it I started to sing along with a few of the songs and from there it just took off."}, {"answer": "It's very ordinary parody of the '50s and '60s horror B-movies - think *Night of the Living Dead* or the Hammer version of *Frankenstein*. Now it's viewed by a bunch of people who've never seen the films it's sending up and are there for the (somewhat bizarre) sexual innuendo and mockery of middle-class values."}, {"answer": "i think it matters most to people who were weirdos that didn't fit in in high school, because it's a celebration of being a weirdo who doesn't fit in. that being said, it's a fun movie, and if you haven't seen a proper live screening of it, you haven't really seen it."}, {"answer": "You can't get it. You either like or tolerate musicals or they make you want to punch someone. If you are in the later category you will never understand any musical. All you will want to do is escape them and murder anyone who gets in your way to the exit."}, {"answer": "No, we can not. If you don't get it, we can't explain it. Get way drunker next time you see it. And go with a big boned girl in a too small dress and a really, really, flamboyantly gay guy. If you still don't \"get it\", move on with your life."}, {"answer": "Such fond memories of seeing RHPS at the Roxy in Toronto in the late '70's. A sexual eye opener in an era that was quite homophobic. I'm straight, but between this and Lou Reed's \"Walk on the wild side\", I realized gay people were humans, and often talented ones at that."}, {"answer": "To understand RHPS, all you must do is understand the Floor Show. To understand the Floor Show, all you must do is understand Tim Curry's part in the Floor Show. To understand that, all you must do is understand, \"Don't dream it. Be it.\" That is all."}, {"answer": "a celebration of freaks and freak culture, plus awesome glam rock written by Richard O'Brien (Riff Raff) Wonderful performances from Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Meat Loaf, etc. It's a joy. Don't try too hard to \"get it\" just enjoy the tunes and the absurd story"}, {"answer": "I was never a fan and have been on the losing end of many arguments about weather or not it's a good movie. I feel like Ben from Parks and Rec over Little Sebastian, and I just have to accept that I don't get it."}, {"answer": "If you're watching it at home on DVD... there's nothing to get. It's a silly movie with some good songs. You must see it at a theatre to get the full effect with the live performers, the audience participation, etc."}, {"answer": "The best way to experience it is with other people. If you have seen the movie, go see the stage performance. Bring ask the props, and it's just a lot of fun just to participate in everything"}, {"answer": "The audience participation and midnight time make it a fun date movie, women love it and if you show yourself centered enough to be ok with it, laugh and have a good time... need I go on?"}, {"answer": "The first time I watched Rocky Horror was in college, with my Classics professor. We were *stunned* by the amount of classical mythology references in the movie, and later learned that the writers had been Classics students."}, {"answer": "I was studying abroad in South Korea when I was super excited to find a RHPS. Doing the time warp halfway across the world from home was one of the best experiences I've had in Asia."}, {"answer": "Thanks for this question. I've never gotten this movie, either, although Tim Curry is amazing in his opening number. I never saw the stage show in college and now I'm too old."}, {"answer": "What's not to get? It's a Musical. sit back. watch. have fun. And Realise it's ok to think Tim Curry is the best thing in the universe."}, {"answer": "Just looked this film up, and The now hotel that it was filmed at, is a 1 minute drive from my house! What a coincidence...."}, {"answer": "bunch of hardcore drug addicts, living in a commune get together and dance to freak out weary travelers that make the mistake of visiting them."}, {"answer": "Kinky sex. Crossdressing. Glitter. Meatloaf. Catchy and sexually charged music. If you like any combination of these things, you usually like the movie"}, {"answer": "It's a goofy, raunchy, whacky story, filled with old-time movie references, great music, great performances, humor, and is quite a spectacle."}, {"answer": "How many of you ware aware that Tim Curry is also IT, the clown? I was amazed when I realized."}, {"answer": "Because: Tim Curry's \"sweet transvestite\" performance. If that didn't hook you, then you didn't get it and that's OK."}, {"answer": "A lot of you are explaining the culture and minor details. I think he's asking what the plot is."}, {"answer": "its just a musical that was good and ground breaking in its time. today it's just a crappy movie."}, {"answer": "The Village Alamo Drafthouse in Austin has midnight showings every weekend. See it that way if you haven't yet."}, {"answer": "It's Tim Curry being fucking fabulous with heavy glam influences in a tribute to 50s sci-fi and horror."}, {"answer": "The music is awesome. That's why I like it. I could listen to Time Warp a thousand times."}, {"answer": "The entire success of the movie hinges on Tim Curry's face and Susan Sarandon's breasts. Get it?"}, {"answer": "Well, we all have different tastes. You may just not like the movie, and that's perfectly valid."}, {"answer": "Reasons i don't like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Musical Feeling like i'm trying to be subverted"}, {"answer": "I love this movie so hard, but it's just a weird, coke-fueled thing from the 70s."}, {"answer": "You had to be there. I wasn't there, but I know people who were."}, {"answer": "Well, you could always swing by /r/rhps and ask us We'll wait, with antici-"}, {"answer": "Who would let a five year old watch rocky horror picture show?"}, {"answer": "Weirdos may murder you. Keep away from them at all costs."}, {"answer": "It's a documentary about the hunting lodges of the American midwest."}, {"answer": "I think OP needs to do the time warp again."}, {"answer": "Until I see a definitive answer, I'm riddled with ."}, {"answer": "Its about giving your self up to absolute pleasure."}, {"answer": "[Here's a word cloud of these comments.]( URL_0 )"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "28933435", "title": "The Rocky Horror Glee Show", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["usical \"The Rocky Horror Show\", with elements of its 1975 film adaptation \"The Rocky Horror Picture Show\", by staging it as a school musical. While cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) attempts to sabotage the production, glee club director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) dwells on his feelings for guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays), and club members Finn (Cory Monteith) and Sam (Chord Overstreet) deal with body image issues. Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf, who star in the original film, appear in cameo roles in this episode.", "\"The Rocky Horror Glee Show\" is the fifth episode of the second season of the American television series \"Glee\", and the twenty-seventh episode overall. It was written by Ryan Murphy, from a story by Murphy and Tim Wollaston, directed by Adam Shankman, and premiered on Fox on October 26, 2010. The episode features the glee club paying tribute to the 1973 musical \"The Rocky Horror Show\", with elements of its 1975 film adaptation \"The Rocky Horror Picture Show\", by staging it as a school musical. While cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) attempts to sabotage the production, glee club director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) dwells on his feelings for guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays), and club members Finn (Cory Monteith) and Sam (Chord Overstreet) deal with body image issues. Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf, who star in the original film, appear in cameo roles in this episode.", "\"The Rocky Horror Glee Show\" is the fifth episode of the second season of the American television series \"Glee\", and the twenty-seventh episode overall. It was written by Ryan Murphy, from a story by Murphy and Tim Wollaston, directed by Adam Shankman, and premiered on Fox on October 26, 2010. The episode features the glee club paying tribute to the 1973 musical \"The Rocky Horror Show\", with elements of its 1975 film adaptation \"The Rocky Horror Picture Show\", by staging it as a school musical. While cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) attempts to sabotage the production, glee club director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) dwells on his feelings for guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays), and club members Finn (Cory Monteith) and Sam (Chord Overstreet) deal with body image issues. Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf, who star in the original film, appear in cameo roles in this episode.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}]

If a person was to fall from an extreme height but something very heavy was to hit the water first, breaking the surface tension, would there be a chance of survival? If so how injured?

2zux0t

[{"answer": "No. It's true that water is unforgiving when falling from a great height, but there's no such thing as \"breaking the surface tension\". Surface tension is a property of water, not a thing that \"forms\" like a film. Your best bet would still be a high-diver style efficient entry."}, {"answer": "Then you'd be falling onto an object even harder than water. So the answer is likely still 'Splat'."}, {"answer": "No. Mythbusters actually tested this and messing with the surface tension had no effect on the injuries your sustain."}, {"answer": "surface tension is not a factor, it's water's resistance to compression. you need to minimize the amount of water you displace when you hit. Compare a steep dive to a bellyflop."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1132704", "title": "Denny's paradox", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In the study of animal locomotion on the surface layer of water, Denny's paradox refers to the apparent impossibility of surface-dwelling animals such as the water strider generating enough propulsive force to move. It is named after Mark Denny.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "In the study of animal locomotion on the surface layer of water, Denny's paradox refers to the apparent impossibility of surface-dwelling animals such as the water strider generating enoug"]}}]}]

Can heart attacks happen randomly or are they always brought on by something?

2t7tnn

[{"answer": "Heart attacks, like all things, have a cause. A heart attack may appear random, but that's simply because you didn't see it coming. Heart attacks can be reoccurring, or they can be a once in a lifetime thing, it depends on numerous factors."}, {"answer": "The term \"heart attack\" refers to a myocardial infarction, which specifically refers to an obstruction of blood flow to a part of the cardiac muscle. The obstruction has to come from somewhere. Most often it is arterial plaque, the bad stuff that builds up on the walls of your larger blood vessels. It could also be a rupture or collapse of a section of the blood vessel that interupts the blood flow. It depends on your definition of random, but something pre-existing causes these blockages, ruptures, collapses. They aren't random in that sense. I refer to young healthy individuals getting severe cardiac conditions as \"random\" because they have no apparent risk factors for developing whatever disease it might be. That's a pretty loose definition of random though."}, {"answer": "They're always brought on by *something,* but that something isn't always very controllable. Obviously there are several habits or lifestyles that can increase your risk, but there are always going to be people who smoke, drink, and eat fast food daily who live to 95 without a problem, and there are 40-year-old cross country runners who have a heart attack out of nowhere."}, {"answer": "After reading the previous comments the ELI5 answer is: Stress from outside your body can trigger a heart attack, but the real causes are hiding *inside* your body, where you don't always see them. So, a heart attack can come at a random time, but *not* for a random reason. It just might feel random, because you weren't expecting it."}, {"answer": "If you're asking if someone can have a heart attack with none of the risk factors (stress, obesity, smoking, etc) the answer is yes. Most coronary artery disease has a genetic component. Participating in the risk factors just makes the end result (the heart attack) develop A LOT faster. Source: I am a cardiovascular intensive care RN"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "44502784", "title": "Yentl Syndrome", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The name is taken from the 1983 film \"Yentl\" starring Barbra Streisand in which her character plays the role of a male in order to receive the education she desires. The phrase was coined in a 1991 academic paper by Dr. Bernadine Healy titled \"The Yentl syndrome.\"", "The Yentl Syndrome is the different course of action that heart attacks usually follow for women than for men. This is a problem because much of medical research has focused primarily on symptoms of male heart attacks, and many women have died due to misdiagnosis because their symptoms present differently"]}}]}]

If fires go out when oxygen is removed, how is the Sun burning?

2xpjyu

[{"answer": "Short answer: the sun is not burning. It is too hot to burn. The sun is a nuclear fusion reaction (mostly hydrogen into helium), which is far and away a higher energy than simple oxygen combustion."}, {"answer": "The sun isn't burning. Nor is it exploding. The sun is *glowing*. Nuclear fusion is what keeps the sun going. As the gas rises towards the surface it cools off quite a bit, but is still very hot. The light you see coming from the sun is due to the exact same physics behind why that metal pot you left on the stove glows red."}, {"answer": "The sun **isn't** burning. The core of the sun is undergoing nuclear fusion. The intense pressure is enough to force hydrogen atoms to fuse together into helium atoms, and that reaction releases energy."}, {"answer": "The sun isn't burning. Stars are heated by nuclear fussion in their cores. Hydrogen and Helium are under such high pressure (due to gravity) that they begin to fuse into heavier elements, releasing tons of energy in the process."}, {"answer": "Like everyone says, the sun is not burning. But another thing to realize is that there are fires here on earth even that do not need oxygen to burn."}, {"answer": "Basically, the sun takes a couple smaller atoms and puts them together into bigger ones. Doing so releases a lot of energy, which we see as light/electromagnetic radiation."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "217720", "title": "Oxygen-burning process", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The oxygen-burning process is a set of nuclear fusion reactions that take place in massive stars that have used up the lighter elements in their cores.", "The oxygen-burning process is a set of nuclear fusion reactions that take place in massive stars that have used up the lighter elements in their cores. Oxygen-burning is preceded by the neon-burning process and succeeded by the silicon-burning process. As the neon-burning process ends, the core of the star contracts and heats until it reaches the ignition temperature for oxygen burning. Oxygen burning reactions are similar to those of carbon burning; however, they must occur at higher temperatures and densities due to the larger Coulomb barrier of oxygen. Oxygen in the core ignites in the temperature range of (1.52.6)\u00d710 K and in the density range of (2.66.7)\u00d710g/cm. The principal reactions are given below, where the branching ratios assume that the deuteron channel is open (at high temperatures):\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "26751", "title": "Sun", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 99, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

If it takes up to 6 weeks for an antidepressant to work its way theough the blood-brain barrier, how come it only takes an aspirin 10 minutes to start working?

3sw6wn

[{"answer": "Because it doesn't take weeks to cross the blood brain barrier. It gets there in mins to hours like everything else, But ssri's take weeks to change the way your brain works. Which is when you will start feeling them \"work\"."}, {"answer": "Aspirin isn't working behind the blood brain barrier, aspirin, acetaminophen, all the pain pills, are working on some part of your pain system. Aspirin, specifically, stops a chemical that is produced in your body called Prostoglandin (just think of it as liquid pain) Aspirin goes in and stops more liquid pain form forming. When you have a headache, it is not in your brain, but the area around your brain, that is where you feel it, and where aspirin can get to."}, {"answer": "Anti-depressants are actually changing the neural connections in your brain. The change in the chemical levels happens quickly, but those changes prompt the re-wiring that is actually what you're trying to achieve with the drug. That's why short term your symptoms can even get worse. Imagine putting up a stop sign in the forest where people used to walk. The immediate effect is that more people are going to walk around the forest instead of through it. The long term effect is that grass and trees will grow and the old walking path will disappear. Medication crosses the blood brain barrier very quickly. If it didn't you wouldn't be able to fall asleep for surgery. Anyone who's been to the OR knows how fast you fall asleep."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "178769", "title": "Intravenous therapy", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Intravenous therapy (IV) is a therapy that delivers fluids directly into a vein (\"intra-\" + \"ven-\" + \"-ous\"). The intravenous route of administration can be used for injections (with a syringe at higher pressures) or infusions (typically using only the pressure supplied by gravity).", "Intravenous therapy (IV) is a therapy that delivers fluids directly into a vein (\"intra-\" + \"ven-\" + \"-ous\"). The intravenous route of administration can be used for injections (with a syringe at higher pressures) or infusions (typically using only the pressure supplied by gravity). Intravenous infusions are commonly referred to as \"drips\". The intravenous route is the fastest way to deliver medications and fluid replacement throughout the body, because the circulation carries them. Intravenous therapy may be used for fluid replacement (such as correcting dehydration), to correct electrolyte imbalances, to deliver medications, and for blood transfusions."]}}]}]

How is it that, say, Lebron James and Danny DeVito are considered to be the same species despite being so physically different, but a brown bear and a black bear are considered to be completely different species despite being so physically similar?

2cr00z

[{"answer": "Defining species is a tricky and often subjective part of the various scientific disciplines which interact with it. Some will say that the viability of offspring among groups of sexually reproducing organisms is a good test, and it does offer some utility, but it is by no means exhaustive. Polar bears and grizzley bears are a famous example of two types of organisms which are generally considered different species, but which occasionally mate in wild, producing reproductively viable offspring. Mosquitos can become behaviorally different enough that they don't know how to entice mates between groups and they are often considered diferent species despite the reproductive viability of offspring created by human intervention. Archaeological evidence throws in additional wrinkles. Although we generally consider domesticated dogs to all be of the same species, if the only record we had of them were bones (ignoring DNA) we would likely consider great danes to be a completely different species from pugs. This problem rears its head when examining hominids which co-existed as it is difficult to say if these are divergent groups of one species or two separate species; some the scientists involved usually prefer the latter result as it is more prestigeous to discover a new species than just a member of an existing one. Non-sexual reproducers add additional problems as the detectable differences in species has a lot to do with how they look and how they behave around other similar organisms. DNA has added an additional tool which allows us to statistically compare gene differences between two organisms. This has been done to create base-lines of what we already feel are different species and how much their genetics deviate from each other and then we can use this to compare other similar appearing organisms, both those we can observe today and those from the relatively recent past. If they are too similar, it is a strong mark against it being a different species and if they are quite different, it is a strong mark in favor of it. In the end, the idea of 'species' is only important when it is useful in describing our world. It's useful to differentiate between predators and prey, or the reproductive viability of populations of organisms, or tracking forms of organism through the archaeological record. It is important to recognize that the walls we put up around species are not entirely sound and if we aren't careful we can make mistakes, but in so far that they are useful tools for helping us to grapple with the complexity of the world, they are just fine."}, {"answer": "If Danny had a son and James had a daughter those two could have a child together."}, {"answer": "The simplest test to distinguish species is whether or not they can produce offspring together. Both Lebron and DeVito would be capable of impregnating a standard human woman so they're the same species. There's some weird edge cases & exceptions but they're not really important for your questions."}, {"answer": "Well, there are a [few]( URL_0 ) different ways to define a species. That list is a little long, so here are the three main definitions, in order of least to most likely to result in defining a new species. * Phenetic: Determined by differences in morphology, aka visual differences, between the individuals. * Biological: Determined by whether or not the individuals are able to produce viable (fertile) offspring. * Phylogenetic: Determined by evolutionary history of traits that may or may not be visible, such as a coloration pattern or the ability to produce a specific protein. These all have trade-offs, but the biological species concept is the most-used. When you're talking about something like bacteria, however, other species definitions like the phylogenetic concept become much more useful."}, {"answer": "A few people gave pointed out that one of the defining characteristics of a species is the ability to breed and produce fertile offspring. I'd like to add that the physical differences, from a biological perspective, between Danny Devito and Lebron are pretty minor. Overall body size, skin color being the obvious ones. Take a look at an animal like the angler fish to see how completely different members of the same species can be. As a species humans are actually lacking much genetic diversity."}, {"answer": "Think of it more like dogs. Danny D is a pug. LeBron J is a self centered baby."}, {"answer": "To be the same species you need to be able to produce fertile offspring. 2 Humans no matter what ethnicity mating can produce fertile offspring. Some species can mate and produce offspring, but their offspring are infertile, such as when a horse and a donkey mate they produce a mule, which is infertile therefore they are different species."}, {"answer": "It's worth noting that polar bears and grizzly bears are a bit more seperated evolutionarily then different ethnicities of human. I believe that it's only about 100,000 years between human ethnicities, yet p. bears and g. bears are closer to 7-10 million. How two things look and behave can be a poor measure of speciation. Biological species definition (Can they make fertile babies?) is also pretty flawed. It only really works for animals, and even then it's pretty hit and miss (Asexual reproduction, yo! Also plants. Plants are batshit insane). All in all, I am a bit biased towards phylogenetic evidence! I'd load up some key regions from Lebron and Danny's genome (Why, I have them right here! (Not really)) aswell as some sequences from the p. bear and g. bear and compare them for differences. The problem here is when do call two things different species? There isn't a set date where after x years two things become different species. Species definition all in all is only really useful for a snapshot at one particular timepoint. It serves to make it easier to talk about species, but the concept of a species is a very hard one to solidly define. Too many just break the rules. In the end of the day, it's kind of whatever we want to label them based off of what's practical."}, {"answer": "Because if lebron fucked danny's daughter they could make babies that could reproduce. It's the same with a Great Dane and a toy poodle."}, {"answer": "Tuned in to this thread to learn things and stuff, pleasantly surprised to not find any racist comments (yet)."}, {"answer": "There's also a sociological component to your question that can't be ignored. There was historically a time when (white) people did argue that Lebron James' ancestors were essentially a different species from (some) if Danny De Vito's and were treated very differently. There has been a social pressure to move away from that kind of thinking because biologically, mentally, spiritually, etc. Lebron and Danny are similar enough that you can't justify treating them differently as a function of the few ways that they're different. The science of speciation is really interesting but the question you're asking isn't about science but about society."}, {"answer": "There are differences between two black bears that we aren't accustomed to notice, just like I'm sure that all humans would look the same to a bear."}, {"answer": "A species is a group of animals that can have viable offspring that can also reproduce upon successful breeding. So someone from Mr James's family could have a child with someone from Mr DeVito's family and they would have perfectly healthy children. But in the known cases of a Black bear / Brown bear hybrid the offspring were sterile and often unhealthy. URL_0 "}, {"answer": "May be a bit late to the discussion, but here's my take: The definition of species takes many different forms, both in biology and in our understanding. The most commonly accepted definition is: Can these two organisms procreate and produce an offspring that can also procreate. (all that matters in biology is sex/babies) This can be stopped/prevented in two forms, either Pre-zygotic or Post-zygotic methods. Let's go through each one: Pre-zygotic (literally meaning *before baby is created in womb*): These are restrictions such as geographic boundaries (opposite sides of a canyon), mechanical boundaries (that male part doesn't fit in the females), or behavioral differences that will prevent two organisms from even having an opportunity to actually attempt procreation. These will sometimes be overwhelmed in specific circumstances (mostly human interaction), but, if overwhelmed, will, in most cases, result in an \"unviable\" organism. (can't produce another baby, remember what Biology is all about) Post-zygotic (after the baby is *created in womb*): These are restrictions that arise after the two \"species\" have had sex and created a fetus. Whether it be chromosomal differences, the inability to form gametes, or the fact the subsequent infants become less and less viable. (yes, even if the first set is viable, if the next ones to come aren't, it's also considered unviable. called Hybrid Breakdown.) The point is, this type of speciation is the fact that although reproduction can occur, it does not better the species in itself, and is, because of that, not significant (in terms of biology) These definitions only arise because they give us as humans at least some way of categorizing all the organisms on earth. Although prizzlies exist and are viable, they are very rare to occur in natural situations, and because of stark differences in \"race,\" are seen as unique. (behavioral, geographical differences). Just like most scenarios in the natural sciences, it's always about perspective. Sometimes it's easier to accept a specific understanding simply because it prevents further confusion and is sufficient in most cases."}, {"answer": "Because James and DeVito are practically identical, and two different species of bear are very different. Because we are very social creatures, identification of different people is very important to us. This means that our brains focus on differences between people, exaggerating them. But we don't care about differences between bears, so we tend to ignore most of them unless we train ourselves."}, {"answer": "two organisms are consitered the same species if they can mate and produce fertile offspring, assuming one is male and the other is female"}, {"answer": "To put it simply, it all depends on how you define species. Scientists can't agree on one single definition because most hard definitions end up resulting in humans being considered different species, which is the most politically incorrect thing a scientist could suggest. If we use genetic similarity, since we already consider chimps and bonobos different species, we'd have to consider humans different species (since the difference between chimps and bonobos is similar to the difference between different human groups). If we use shape and size and looks, humans come in extremely different forms, enough to warrant calling them different species. Same for social structure. And if the test is the fertility test (can they produce fertile offspring?), we have members of different species producing fertile offspring. So scientists have decided to agree to differentiate species based on what's most acceptable to the fashions of the age. Nazi scientists would say there are different species, others would say we are all the same. Personally I think the whole argument is foolish. It's all just bickering over a name. The differences are there regardless of what we call the different groups of humans; different sub-species, races, ethnicities or populations of similar genomic structures. Whenever there is a bickering over a name, someone's agenda/politics is being threatened. There is no bickering on whatever the fuck we call the sun or the moon, because nobody gives a shit what you call them. But when it comes to race, some people stand to gain and some people stand to lose (or think they stand to lose), and so all hell breaks lose. And the most intelligent among us reserve our right to think whatever the fuck we want, leaving the bickering over names and labels to idiots."}, {"answer": "There is so much misinformation in this thread! Hopefully you will see this. Biological species concept (aka \"species much produce fertile offspring\" thing everyone is spouting out here) is hugely outdated. The generalized lineage concept is currently accepted by those up-to-date in the field. Sure, two individuals of different species *tend* to be unable to produce viable offspring, but this is a property, not the definition of a species. Nowadays, scientists can use statistical methods to delimit species based on divergence date estimated through sequencing DNA. It's not as subjective anymore as most of these people are claiming. Since Lebron James and Danny DeVito's ancestors diverged not too long ago (on a geological time scale) they are absolutely the same species. See any papers by Kevin de Queiroz. Try this one: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "Danny DeVito and Lebron James aren't as different as you think. Human brains are hardwired to recognize human faces and notice details that would seem obvious to us, but would be completely unnoticeable to others. There's a [disorder]( URL_0 ) where one cannot recognize faces; their brains aren't hardwired like that. So, to someone with Prosopagnosia, they just might see Danny DeVito as a short guy and LeBron James as a tall guy, just as you could see in different black bears. To them, Lebron and Danny would be a lot closer than a black bear and a brown bear."}, {"answer": "A brown and black bear can't interbreed, but LeBron and Danny can."}, {"answer": "Danny DeVito should print out this question and have it framed."}, {"answer": "It's all in the biology, they just don't split up humans into seperate species also, brown bear (Ursus arctos) (genus = Ursus) (species = arctos) is from the same genus as black bear (Ursus americanus), but it's species (americanus (hehehe it says anus) ) is different because members of one certain species can reproduce fertile children, while members of the same genus but different species cannot produce fertile children humans are all 1 species, because one human can mate with every other human of the opposite sex to produce fertile children (you shouldn't try tho) so to get to your example: Lebron and DeVito can both mate with, lets say, Angelina Joly (but Bratt wouldn't be happy with that) and get a fertile baby (if nothing goes wrong of course). to give you an example: donkeys can mate with horses (in either way, so male horse + female donkey or male donkey + female horse) which gives you mules, but mules aren't fertile, they can't get children themselves. (horse (Equus ferus caballus) / donkey (Equus africanus asinus) they are same genus, but different species) source: biology in highschool and a bit of wikipedia (mostly for the right names)"}, {"answer": "There are a many contributing factors (this is by no means a complete list): * Taxonomy, the naming of species, is in a process of change from old physiological techniques (bone size and shape, mating habits and viability of offspring etc...) to more recenct DNA techniques. * Species definitions are not always agreed upon. * There are major social and cutural ramifications of classifying the human species, especially splitting it up into multiple species."}, {"answer": "Even species aren't that well defined. People say if two animals can't have an offspring then they are of different species. But one has ring species, where adjacent populations can breed with each other but if two populations are too far away from each other they can not. So species is on a continuum. A great evidence for evolution btw."}, {"answer": "That's because Lebron and Danny devito could breed and the bears can't."}, {"answer": "The difference between those two people is the same difference between blue and brown eyes, or large or small ears. They can breed with members of the same species and produce viable offspring. Bears of different species cannot, their differences are like us and chimps."}, {"answer": "Historically \"species\" has been used to mean the largest group that can reproduce to produce fertile offspring. Since all humans can reproduce and produce fertile babies, we are all classified as the same species (Homo sapiens sapiens)."}, {"answer": "A better comparison would be a black bear that is very \"athletic\" and really good at hunting, and another black bear that is fat and sits around all day making bad jokes."}, {"answer": "if Lebron James banges Danny DeVito's sister they have the ability to obtain a fertile child. So by definition they are the same species"}, {"answer": "Danny Devito already made a documentary about this with Arnold Schwarzenegger called \"Twins\""}, {"answer": "Because Lebron James and Danny DeVito can have a baby together."}, {"answer": "The human race, when comparing to other species, is incredibly un-diverse. Technically, \"race\" is just a social construct and has no genetic backing. People always say \"oh yeah? well skin is different colors and hair is different!\" and blah blah blah. But these very superficial differences may be easy to see, but they actually don't represent much. Pacific Islanders or South Indians have skin colors similar to some Africans, East Asians and Europeans both have lighter skin - the list of superficial similarities is just as long as superficial differences, despite likely differing genetic origin. Everything is just an adaptation, and human populations (to our knowledge) have not experienced natural selection to a great enough degree to create what could scientifically be defined as different \"races\" - let alone different species. In fact, due to multiple founder effects (i.e., genetic diversity decreases as small populations move farther from the original population - that is, as humans migrated away from Africa) if you were to divide humans into what would be closest to genetically defined \"races\" (although I hate using that word because, scientifically, there are no human races), there would be 3-4 races: Two races of entirely African populations, and a 3rd of everyone else. Some human genomics researchers also advocate for a 4th genetic race, which would be constituted of Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal Australians. There's also the complicated fact that speciation is defined by sexual isolation. But the line between the ability and inability to interbreed is slow to be created, and evolutionarily, could take millions of years (and many generations of isolation, or continued interbreeding where more \"pure\" species members are more fit to survive). Because the line between species can be hard to draw - not only genetically, but physically - ancient humans interbred with \"different species\" of humanoid creatures that lived at the same time, like homo erectus (giggle), Denisovans or what are known as Neanderthals. These \"mixed species\" humans were not mutants, and many survived - we know because of the distinctly Neanderthal, Denisovan and other early humanoid genes that are found within our modern human DNA. Some humans, especially Europeans, are significant portion Neanderthal (fun fact: red hair/\"gingerness\" is a Neanderthal trait! so if you're a Catholic and think only humans have souls...) SAUCE: studied genomic perspectives on human evolution in school so... My professors! edits: clarifying and grammar"}, {"answer": "To refine infocide's response to a degree: It all depends on your criteria! In fact, even within biology and biochemistry, there are multiple ways to categorize animals. When making general distinctions, there are methods that divide species according to anatomical, reporductive, and genetic differences as pointed out. However, on a day-to-day basis, the same biochemist/biologist, may argue for a relation of two species based on their genomes (DNA), transcriptomes (RNA or expressed genes), or their proteomes (actual proteins manufactured and incorporated in cell structure and function). Phylogenetic trees (those stickly diagrams that show proposed organisms on various \"branches\" that diverge from common ancestors) are generated by statistical comparison of sequences of DNA, RNA, and proteins. These can all be very different and employed to relate species you wouldn't think are the same at all depending on which aspect of life (or cell function) you are studying/comparing."}, {"answer": "There's a lot of different answers in this thread but it looks like what comes out of it is a bit of subjectivity when classifying species and that humans don't necessarily play by the rules when it comes down to classifying themselves. Another big part is the actual similitude between the 2. A lot of species that look similar can actually be quite different : for instance, despite looking the same, black bear and brown bear's common ancestor date from [5 million years ago]( URL_2 ) ( almost as big of a difference as the [7 million years that made the split between chimps and us]( URL_0 ) ). There's actually a short [wikipedia page]( URL_1 ) going over some debate regarding human classification. Sorry that it's not so much ELI5 but worth checking out if you're really wondering."}, {"answer": "Both Lebron and DeVito have the same homologous structures that the rest of humans share with other animals, which also correspond to other species with similar structures. For instance, whales and birds share a similar bones structure where the bird's wing is and where the whale's flipper is, however they don't operate for the same purpose. While Lebron and DeVito may have different sized femurs, they are both used for the same purpose meaning they are most likely the same species. Note: This is just one of the many ways that species can be compared, and it is by no means the most accurate. You can also differentiate species through fossils, DNA testing, interbreeding (many reasons that it won't work), and probably some other ways that I'm forgetting."}, {"answer": "Beware of relativism inherent in your own species. A wild brown bear would perceive Lebron James and Danny Devito as big and small humans but isn't going to make much more of a distinction on an initial encounter. Put it in a room with a black bear and it will immediately perceive that it is very different to one of its own sloth. The smells and communication techniques will be different enough for it to register as a very different beast. This is for the same reason that I was recently plagued by white guilt when I confused two GPs as the same person because they were both of Asian descent. Essentially, the closer you are to a species the easier it is for you to perceive differences."}, {"answer": "Those are exceptions than the rule (your bear example). The 'exception' rule should be considered as important since the tests for species were pretty loose before genetic diversity tests came in. Forget about other animals, humans don't have enough genetic diversity to classify different races as different species. That's the scientific reason. Political reasons, humans are intellectually evolved to the point where classification of races as species (even if it were scientifically true) would be very controversial and polarizing."}, {"answer": "The way you ask the question is a little misleading, since you're taking opposite extremes. Lebron James is taller than 99% of men, while Danny Devito is shorter than 99%. When you intentionally take two very different looking people, of course a question like yours will arise. When you look at the averages, though, and ask something like, \"How are Brad Pitt and Tiger Woods considered the same species?\", the answer becomes a little more obvious."}, {"answer": "I feel like this question borders on violating the \"not for literal five year olds\" rule. The genetic difference between a short white guy and a tall black guy are extremely tiny compared to the genetic difference between 2 different species of bears. The definition of species is obviously not based on what looks physically similar to an untrained human eye, especially since the human brain is wired to notice small differences between humans."}, {"answer": "Human language, and peoples feelings. Thats pretty much it. The laws we write for nature don't apply to us, because someone will always want to make it a negative. And hurt some groups feelings. I'm not saying any race is better. But I'm fairly certain there's no reliable racial studies simply because someone either will end up at the bottom. Or they'll feel like they have. Then you have racism/classism all over again."}, {"answer": "Species are defined in reference to a common ancestor and not solely on similarity. In humans the differences in height are not substantial enough to define a different species. The bears are distinguished as separate species a) since all brown bears can potentially reproduce and are isolated from mating with black bear b) they are defined or identified using other traits besides \"color\" (which are shared derived traits according to Biologist)."}, {"answer": "It is worth noting that human brains are particularly good at picking out human differences. They are less good at picking out bear differences. Now I'm not claiming that Lebron James and Danny DeVito are more similar than a black bear and a brown bear, but the bears are almost certainly more different than one would assume from casual observation."}, {"answer": "Well the species known as human are made up of many sub species such as: caucasoid (homosapien + neanderthal) negroid (homosapien) mongoloid and other smaller sub species such as pacific aboriginal etc.etc. it's not racist, it's just science, we are all human but with that there are sub species as well all enjoy different characteristics which are innate."}, {"answer": "Haha I was listening to a podcast this morning and for awhile they discussed the same thing. They talked about how if an alien race came to earth and never saw humans before and the first they saw were Shaquille oneal and a white female dwarf they would certainly think they are of a different species."}, {"answer": "I think different races sub species. We're all houman and we can all reproduce with eachother, but most races are adapted enough to their native ranges that they should be considered sub species. Of course there's the issue that labeling races as sub species would give racists and supremacists something new to mess around with."}, {"answer": "Haha, oh man. I had a biology teacher in high school who pointed this out, but instead used the shortest girl in the class and compared her to the tallest, beefiest guy he could find. That teacher also jumped from table to table screaming like a chimp one time. He was awesome."}, {"answer": "Well if Lebron and Danny really love eachother. They do a special handshake, and nine months later Arnold comes out. But then Arnold needs to be able to have a special handshake of his own and make babies of his own for Danny and Lebron to be considered the same species."}, {"answer": "I'd presume because the genetic makeup of a brown bear is not the same for a black bear. Even though physical traits (phenotypes) may be similar their genes (genotypes) can be wildly different. Just like how certains flowers, trees, and insects can looks similar, but be completely different species."}, {"answer": "If Lebron James had sex with a female version of Danny DeVito they could produce a fertile child. That's what same species means. If a black bear and brown bear can't produce fully fertile offspring then they're different species."}, {"answer": "Well, think of it this way. It's not like Species are what they are, and that we discovered that fact. We made the shit up. We decided, and we could easily undecide it if we wanted to."}, {"answer": "Because brilliant scientists who spent their entire lives watching bears or digging up lizard bones want to have discovered a species all for themselves and not commit suicide because their life is pointless."}, {"answer": "I think their offspring has to be able to reproduce in order to be considered the same species. So we'll only know if Lebron and Danny try to make a baby."}, {"answer": "Because a black bear can't reproduce with a brown bear, yet if you take to very different looking humans, male and female, they can reproduce. Hence, being the same species."}, {"answer": "A female Danny DeVito and a male Lebron James could mate and produce fertile offspring, the bears could reproduce but the offspring would be sterile."}, {"answer": "Can't the supermod hire someone from /r/askscience to tight up things around here? I don't want to read someone's shitty jokes."}, {"answer": "Lebron James and Danny DeVito can mate (or at least, mate with each others' sisters) to produce probably nonsterile offspring."}, {"answer": "I've always kind of assumed the various races of humans to be different human species. Is this incorrect?"}, {"answer": "copied this from the joe rogan podcast, they used Shaquille O'Neil & another small actor as a reference"}, {"answer": "Sounds like OP also listened to Chris Ryan's podcast! edit: And you should too. He's the best."}, {"answer": "The same reason a great dane and a toy poodle are the same species."}, {"answer": "I must have stumbled into the \"Explain Like I'm a Scientist\" sub-reddit."}, {"answer": "What about how all dogs are considered the same species?"}, {"answer": "The spaniards BANGED the Mayans and turned them into Mexicans."}, {"answer": "Do you mean like a Poodle and a Mastiff?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "652737", "title": "Kaput and Z\u00f6sky", "section": "Section::::Characters.:Minor characters.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 28, "end_paragraph_id": 28, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["\"Heads and Tails\" - These two (they are two different personalities with one body) are the instruction manual of the planet Gamma Blorg, and are conjoined twins. One speaks in a strong British accent and has a tiara as well as red hair, is named Heads, and the other, Tails is a moose head with a Canadian accent. They argue continuously and have a cauldron as a body. \"\"Babblers\"\" - Though the name of these small aliens is unknown, they are small creatures who", "\"Heads and Tails\" - These two (they are two different personalities with one body) are the instruction manual of the planet Gamma Blorg, and are conjoined twins. One speaks in a strong British accent and has a tiara as well as red hair, is named Heads, and the other, Tails is a moose head with a Canadian accent. They argue continuously and have a cauldron as a body. \"\"Babblers\"\" - Though the name of these small aliens is unknown, they are small creatures who"]}}]}]

Aleppo and the Syrian War

5i74ml

[{"answer": "Been watching this from the beginning. It started out, as attempted revolutions do, with protests against the Assad Regime. It quickly escalated to an armed conflict. America backed the rebels and Assad responded with destruction of neighborhoods. Many people fled and many people were killed. Eventually a branch of al Qaeda started fighting Assad as well. When they had Damascus surrounded and it looked like the government might fall Iran sent troops in. Seeing an opening, ISIS moved in and seized a lot of territory in Syria and then Iraq. With the money they were making by selling oil they brought a lot of foreign fighters to the region. When ISIS was close to toppling Assad Russia joined the fight. And here we are."}, {"answer": "I think it's important to point out that in the beginning, yes the \"Arab Spring\" was happening in other countries, however it took a while to get to Syria. Of all the countries in the area, nobody really thought something like that would happen there, because of many factors, but including just how repressive the state was. And when people did start protesting, they were lackluster at best, and were not even really against the regime, but rather protesting the bad economy, high unemployment, lack of oppurtunities, etc. People by and large were asking for reform, not total regime change. There was growing resentment and anti-government feeling but it bubbled well below the surface. However, that changed with Daraa. In the city of Daraa, at some point, a group of school children were arrested by the government for painting the same anti-government slogan being chanted in other parts of the Arab world: \"The people want the downfall of the government.\" A slogan they would have heard on television or radio. The children were arrested and tortured, with reports of at least one being brutally killed, with his mutilated body sent back to his family. This was a spark that sparked other sparks, and ultimately contributed to the growing seriousness of the protests. The government's violent and disproportionate response, directed at children , their disregard for life in such a blatant way. This was it for people who had had it and endured great difficulties and a brutally repressive government. There was nothing left to lose once people saw so clearly that even the lives of their children had no value in the government's eyes. This is so simplified, but I thought it important to add. Edit: spelling Edit (12/20/16): It should be noted that the arrests of the school children led to protests and came before the Seige of Daraa, and that the death of Hamza Ali al-Khatiib occured after the seige began."}, {"answer": "As a reasonably irrelevant and pretty ignorant-to-the-situation American, is there anything at all that I the single person, (as opposed to we the entity), can do to help these individuals? I hate reading these stories and then going back to my life having made no action to do something, anything."}, {"answer": "You have many sides to this conflict all in support of a main objective which remains unclear for the most part. Battling groups: Side #1: Syrian Government,Iran,Iraq,Russia,Hezbollah and to a small extent China, Kurds Side #2: Saudi Arabia,Israel,United States,Qatar,Turkey, Moderate & extremists Rebels(Hard to separate),other western actors such as France And U.K,Kurds Side #3: Straight up Al-qeada and ISIS All these groups are battling in some form or another. Side #1 has U.N legitimacy, but viewed negatively Side #2 has Popular support in media but no legal standing and is seen as an occupying force Side #3 Mixing in and out with rebels making it very hard to differentiate Moderates from I.S.I.S and Al-Queda Important Note: Sanctions Placed on Syria in 2011 for continuing escalation of violence against the people of Syria through Executive Order 13573 by side #2 (Very early into the conflict worsening the economic situation arguably adding fuel to the fire. Objectives: Side #1: Maintain Syria as is, with President Bashar Assad in power, And keep a key geopolitical alliance destroy ISIS and rebels who Flip-Flop and ultimately re secure Syria to pre-2011 standing Side #2: (U.S,France,U.K)Regime Change, Dismantle I.S.I.S-(Israel)Secure Golan Heights and get rid of hostile bordering government.(Turkey) Destroy I.S.I.S but mostly destroy Kurdish entities on southern boarder. (Saudi Arabia)Greater influence divide \"Shia Crescent\" and partner Oil pipeline into Europe, (Qatar) Route Pipeline into Europe.(Kurds) Create Autonomous Kurdish state(Against Turkey but allied with U.S and Assad, tough to put on one side or another),also destroy ISIS. Side #3: Kill anyone who fails to agree with their extremists interpretation of Islam and create a 21st century Caliphate. These are the Main points you can try to figure this debacle out but make sure to follow what the U.N is saying and various news outlets both those for the government of Syria and those against it. To try to get a clearer picture of whats going on. Pro-Rebel new sources are CNN,Fox News,BBC, Aj+ Pro-Government news sources-SANA,PressTV,RT,Southfront Its very hard to find a neutral media outlet, all have an agenda they want heard. Its important to decode and read between the lines and determine which side you believe is justified."}, {"answer": "Please explain what is happening in Aleppo. I have read some of the news but the stories are very confusing. First and foremost, can someone explain the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of this \"conflict\"? Is this a 2 sided proxy war between US and Russia? Is this a 3 sided war? 4 or even 5? I see a lot of players in this conflict and I do not fully understand each one's interest(s). There is the ruler Assad who is being backed by Russia but then there is Iran. There are rebels who are fighting against Assad and the US is backing (?) the rebels? But then there are Al Qaeda and ISIS who are also fighting Assad? So is the US supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS? That makes no sense. Anyways, I am really confused and would love to hear a simple break down on whose is fighting one whose side and how many sides are there (apparently more than 2 but correct me if I am wrong)."}, {"answer": "US Involvement. There are at least four sides in the war. It can be understood that the US is both for and against each side. Although one can say that the US policy is to be 1) against ISIS & 2) for the Kurdish SDF & 3) for the Syrian rebels/Islamists \u2013 at least until recently. Each of these sides may not see it as such. The Kurds\u2019 see that the US is providing them with support against ISIS but is also providing their Islamist opponents with a lot of arms and training. The rebels see that the US is arming them, training them, and supporting them diplomatically, but also sometimes bombing their best fighters, Jabhat al-Nusra, although without fanfare or media attention, so that Turkey and KSA don't get too upset The Assad Government sees that the US is arming and training and diplomatically supporting the Islamist rebels, but it has also shared some useful intelligence with it and has killed off some of its enemies in ISIS and al-Qaeda and Nusra. ISIS see that the US is bombing them and boosting their enemies, but has also helped arm them by equipping FSA groups, which shared trenches and supplies with ISIS."}, {"answer": "Why does Russia support Assad? What do they get from it?"}, {"answer": "Why is no one doing anything? I get the argument that no one wants to be world cops, but this looks like a massacre. Why is no one but the Russians (on the side of Assad) getting involved?"}, {"answer": "Okay so I read through a lot of these comments and I understand everything except one thing: What was Assad doing that made people rebel? Was he being an evil leader?"}, {"answer": "I read several answers... n I might have been late as the correct answer might alrdy be out...but here goes nothing. . Year 2011 - peace full protest (Arab spring) demonstration being brutally crushed.. Causes several Syrian army to defect and join NOW VIOLENT protestor to form FREE SYRIAN ARMY ... PROTEST NOW BECOMES CIVIL WAR . Extremist from other Arab nations join rebels. ( 2 party confrontation so far ) 2012 - suppressed Kurdish groups of North East uprise and break away from Asad regime and starts fighting Asad. Iran now intervenes as Syrian gov is Shia and Iran backs shia muslims... ( 3 party war so far )to reduce Iran influence almost all sunni states specially saudi arabia starts financially backing rebel group (by now Al qaueda has made Syrian force ...name I don't rember ) this money mainly flows through Turkey Nd Jordan. .. conflict now is not limited to syria as entire middle east gets involved.. still 3 party war rebel , Asad and Kurds. 2013 - hezbollah - lebanese Extremist shia group joins Asad. . As Asad was loosing ground. Usa intervenes .. asks CIA to secretly train rebels.. Asad uses chemical weapons on civilians.. usa full fledged back rebels now, Russia requests Asad to give up chemical weapons to un..but backs Asad unconditionally , mostly coz saudi russia oil competetors is against it and mostly coz usa ...it's super power competetors is against Asad. loads of Iraq troop of old Saddam army are also amongst the rebels..Due to some internal politics and conflict this troop parts away ..becomes isis and take huge land mass and oil fields forcibly in Iraq and syria. Now there are 4 parties.. isis fighting rebels more than Asad. Kurds fighting Asad and now isis as land was forcibly taken. rebels ... now fighting Asad and isis and Asad. .. well happy coz isis came up as it was loosing ground. Now usa really gets mad and focuses more towards isis than Asad. . Full fledged military support starts from usa to rebels now.. and focus is towards end of isis. Us Bombing of isis happens...now there r 4 parties.. rebels backed by saudi led sunni Arab nations & usa , Asad backed by hezbollah , Iran and Russia ( no monetary or military support yet) Isis and Kurds. . 2014 .. turkey starts attacking Kurds. ..their long time enemy in a way. Turkey doesn't fight any other participating force apart from Kurds. . 2015 Asad loosing major ground. ..rebels and isis gain ground... russia intervenes on behalf of Asad. ..says it wants to bomb isis ..but bombs rebels including us backed specific groups.. 2016.. isis loosing ground coz usa and Russia both attacking it. . Asad gaining grounds.. rebels disintegrating or changing sides.. Kurds in bad shape and battling Turkey as well now. Aleppo major strong hold... soon about to fall but none of the above forces are wiped out or have surrendered ...so this Syrian war is far from over...even if allepo falls."}, {"answer": "Would it really be such a disaster if Assad won and Syria stabilised, much as it was 5-6 years ago? I mean yes, I know he did terrible things. But at this point, isn't it just the best thing for everyone if this war finally ends."}, {"answer": "so after spending my french lesson reading this very informative thread i drew a graphic to make it easier to understand. maybe it will help someone! :) [Syrian War Graphic]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "How many of the rebels are \"moderates\" who oppose the government and how many are what we would consider extremist Jihadis? Do these groups want to create an Islamic government in Syria? Do they also share goals with ISIS like wanting to attack the West?"}, {"answer": "Can someone explain to me why so many people are against Assad if he won the elections democratically?"}, {"answer": "Why didn't the USA do more to prevent the human carnage?"}, {"answer": "Who held the city of Aleppo, ISIS or the rebel forces?"}, {"answer": "One of the main things I'm confused about is the United States' stance. At first Obama was backing the rebels because of the way Assad treated his people with chemical warfare and he was helping the rebels with ISIS. But just recently in Aleppo when the Syrian government had the upper hand and were going to take over the rebel territory, the US and Russia made negotiations that insinuated the US is with Assad in having the rebels surrender. Also, Russia had said that anyone who didn't surrender would be treated like a terrorist against the Syrian government. I looked on so many timelines/news articles today about this and Aleppo but haven't seen anything to explain this question yet."}, {"answer": "Some interesting reading (some self-promotion) - [Kevan Harris]( URL_0 ) on the economic and cultural back story to the war from a leftist perspective - [Fractured Lands]( URL_3 ) Fascinating NYT long read on the rise of Isis, but I do mean long, it's 43,000 words and the format doesn't work at all. - The book \"rise of Islamic State\" by Olivia Wilde's uncle is very good. Cynical, but very good. - [UNA]( URL_1 ) statement on Aleppo war crimes, captures my view. - [Here's something I wrote]( URL_2 ) 3 years ago. Bits of it have aged better than other bits, but I still think it's worth a read."}, {"answer": "Can somebody explain all the outrage in media about the conquest of aleppo? as far as I know there are no more fights in aleppo, unlike the last month and years. my question is: in how far is there a humanitarian crysis that didnt exist before?"}, {"answer": "Why was the Russian ambassador assassinated? Was the killer an Islamist, a rebel (whatever these terms mean)."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "40775529", "title": "Aleppo offensive (OctoberDecember 2013)", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The OctoberDecember 2013 Aleppo offensive or Operation Northern Storm was a campaign during the Syrian civil war launched by the Syrian army in the Aleppo Governorate to reopen a key supply route linking central Syria to the largest city, Aleppo. The offensive began when the Syrian Army attacked the strategic town of Khanasir.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "The OctoberDecember 2013 Aleppo offensive or Operation Northern Storm was a campaign during the Syrian civil war launched by the Syrian army in the Aleppo Governorate to reopen a key supply route linking central Syria to the largest city, Aleppo. The offensive began when the Syrian Army attacked the strategic town of Khanasir."]}}]}]

Why does the UK use . URL_0 rather than just .uk?

8n7kqi

[{"answer": "When the country-specific top-level domains were created, the UK already had an academic network of its own (JANET) with its own naming scheme similar to DNS. Academic sites started URL_1 , commercial ones started URL_2 , and government ones UK.MOD (Ministry of Defence). The obvious thing to do was flip all the existing names around to create the equivalent DNS names. So Cambridge university was already known as URL_1 .CAM on JANET, and was assigned the domain URL_0 to match."}, {"answer": "In the very early days of the internet, nobody really knew what effect it would have, and thus how to future-proof it. Many countries simply took the assigned top-level domain for their country and left it at that; others, including the UK, created their own versions of the generic top-level domains like .com, .net, .gov, etc, all the better to manage the whole system if it got massively big. . URL_5 is the most common UK second-level domain, as it's used for commercial and general purposes. Others include . URL_4 for academic institutions, . URL_3 for government websites, . URL_1 for the police forces, . URL_2 for educational authorities, . URL_0 for the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces, and so on. ETA: Thus somerset. URL_3 is the official website for Somerset County Council, while somerset. URL_2 is the third-level domain for primary and secondary schools in Somerset."}, {"answer": "Because the .co subdomain is meant for commercial sites, and the UK is very stringent on who is allowed straight .uk sites (mainly government sites), so commercial entities had to use . URL_0 because they weren't allowed to register as just .uk"}, {"answer": "The domain name system was made in the US and not initially designed for international use. The idea back then was that the top level domain were to be used to group different classes of organizations. So there were .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .mil, etc. But when the Internet came around and became global it was obvious that there were a need for other countries to manage their own top level domains. So country specific top level domains were created. The UK government were given the .uk domain. A lot of these governments implemented their own second level domains to group different organizations. But due to length some important organizations were given a domain in the top level domain zone. But people liked shorter domain names so this became more and more common and third level domains became rarer and rarer. There are still a few of them around and . URL_0 is maybe the larges one of them."}, {"answer": "The way a countries top level domain is subdivded is up to the registrar that manages it. some chose to mirror generic TLDs like *.com as second level tlds like *. URL_0 and *.gov as *. URL_1 . This makes sense as the standard .gov and .edu or even .mil are reserved for American government, education or military institution and a country wanting to have something like that of their own would need to make them underneath their countries TLD. Other countries never bothered with that and just threw everything in directly under their main TLD and others again made a mixed solution. Much of that is grown from poor standardization when stuff got started and inertia and tradition carrying it to the present day."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "2636393", "title": "Domain hack", "section": "Section::::International names.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 17, "end_paragraph_id": 17, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["For example, makes use of the ccTLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell \"blogs\", makes use of the ccTLD .st (S\u00e3o Tom\u00e9 and Pr\u00edncipe) to spell \"fast\", uses the .one gTLD to spell \"everyone\", makes use of the ccTLD .am (Armenia) to spell the name of photo-sharing service \"Instagram\", makes use of the ccTLD .it (Italy) to spell \"help me learn it\", uses ccTLD .am (Armenia) and uses ccTLD .us (United States) and sharing it for subdomains with free hosting, uses ccTLD .ly (Libya) to spell \"telly\" (a popular British colloquial term for television), and some of Danbooru-style imageboards that end their name with '-booru' suffix may use the ccTLD .ru (Russia) to spell their own name", "For example, makes use of the ccTLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell \"blogs\", makes use of the ccTLD .st (S\u00e3o Tom\u00e9 and Pr\u00edncipe) to spell \"fast\", uses the .one gTLD to spell \"everyone\", makes use of the ccTLD .am (Armenia) to spell the name of photo-sharing service \"Instagram\", makes use of the ccTLD .it (Italy) to spell \"help me learn it\", uses ccTLD .am (Armenia) and uses ccTLD .us (United States) and sharing it for subdomains with free hosting, uses ccTLD .ly (Libya) to spell \"telly\" (a popular British colloquial term for television), and some of Danbooru-style imageboards that end their name with '-booru' suffix may use the ccTLD .ru (Russia) to spell their own name. The third-level domains , and make use of the SLDs , and from the ccTLDs .us (United States), .to (", "For example, makes use of the ccTLD .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands) to spell \"blogs\", makes use of the ccTLD .st (S\u00e3o Tom\u00e9 and Pr\u00edncipe) to spell \"fast\", uses the .one gTLD to spell \"everyone\", makes use of the ccTLD .am (Armenia) to spell the name of photo-sharing service \"Instagram\", makes use of the ccTLD .it (Italy) to spell \"help me learn it\", uses ccTLD .am (Armenia) and uses ccTLD .us (United States) and sharing it for subdomains with free hosting, uses ccTLD .ly (Libya) to spell \"telly\" (a popular British colloquial term for television), and some of Danbooru-style imageboards that end their name with '-booru' suffix may use the ccTLD .ru (Russia) to spell their own name. The third-level domains , and make use of the SLDs , and from the ccTLDs .us (United States), .to ("]}}]}]

LI5: How do ones and zeros become complex computer games?

j2s6d

[{"answer": "First read the question about how programming languages work: URL_1 Games these days are all written in high level programming languages. These languages all have support for *loops*. A loop allows the programmer to make a certain behavior repeat over and over again. The programmer can put conditions on when the loop should stop (e.g., you hit the escape key, or click \"Quit\" on the menu). At the center of every game is a loop that repeats itself really fast. Each time the loop iterates, the entire game is updated. The computer will check whether you've pressed any butons or moved the mouse, and if so it will recalculate the positions of relevant objects in the game world. This might be simple, but it might also involve a vast physics simulation in the background which has a lot of brilliant tricks to take into account the fact that the physics is updated at discrete steps (every time the loop iterates), not continuously as in the real world (or so we assume... :D). As for how pictures get on the screen, the screen is *redrawn* every single frame. Every. Single. Frame. It's all redrawn. (And a \"frame\" is nothing but an iteration of the loop I talked about above.) How does the programmer actually get stuff on the screen? That's what DirectX and OpenGL are for. These are vast libraries of pre-written code that can communicate directly with the video card, which in turn has the capability of convincing the monitor to display stuff. How does DirectX know how to communicate with your video card? That's what the video driver is for. Now, finally, what does the programmer tell the video card to draw? How in the world does he figure out how to draw a 3D scene on a 2D grid of pixels? This uses [linear algebra]( URL_0 ). But forget about the details of the math. It's just a sequence of steps. Say you want to draw a cube on the screen. Now the vertices of the square exist in some arbitrary coordinate system whose origin is probably the cube's center. The first step is to translate the cube to its desired location in the actual game environment. This also involves rotating the cube or scaling it. Now we know that the player is somewhere in the environment looking in some direction. The second step is to translate and rotate the entire world according to where the player is standing and where he's looking. Ex: if the player strafes left, the world slides right; if the player is looking up, then world rotates down, around the point where the player's eyes are at. (Simplified.) I remember playing Crusin' USA on N64 when I was little, and I sometimes wondered... is the car really moving, or is the ground moving while the car is stationary? The truth is much closer to the latter! The world moves around the player. (Simplified.) The final step is to project all the transformed geometry onto a plane, which represents the screen. This produces a set of polygons on the plane to be drawn, almost always triangles because video hardware is optimized for rendering triangles. These data are then send to the video card, which then gets it on the monitor. Each of these three steps is a simple mathematical computation expressible in a unified manner using linear algebra. Video hardware is exceptionally well-optimized for performing these calcluations with triangles."}, {"answer": "To a five year old I'd say... You know how a brick is basically just a block of stuff. If you put enough bricks and shape them, they can become something huge like a house, bridge, etc. Computer games and programs are similar, except they are made from ideas that you can't touch like you can touch a brick. If you have an idea you can tell me your idea using sentences, words and letters. To a computer, the Ones are Zeros are the \"letters\" that make up the words that form the ideas which in turn make up a computer program/game."}, {"answer": "Think of the ones and zeroes like on/off switches. In a computer the one or zero determines if a given gate is open or closed to an electronic signal. This can be likened to a mechanical calculator. As switches are flipped and the gears move they manipulate other switches in a predictable pattern. Old calculators were like this. You punched a series of buttons and then the machine whirred through one \"step\" and produced an output. If you get more fancy you take that output and feed it back in and run another step. Do it over and over and you can manage complex calculations over time. A computer does exactly the same thing except electronically instead of mechanically. Being electronic allows for massive speed increases and dramatically smaller size. Your computer also runs through one \"step\" at a time, same as a mechanical computer. This is the \"clock speed\" you see advertised for CPUs and such. Your computer runs like a metronome doing one thing per tick. It happens it can do a helluva lot of ticks in one second. So, how does this convert to a computer game? Make it simpler and consider how digital music becomes sound. The switches are manipulated according to rules as mentioned above. The final output is a digital stream. This is fed into a digital-analog-converter (DAC) which converts the input into an analog output that runs your speakers (all speakers are analog at the end of it). Given the enormous speeds and huge number of switches (billions) in a modern computer you can get them to produce elaborate results that can be converted into colors and sound and tactile or whatever you want. When you can do enough of them fast enough the results can be combined into a game. Obviously in the past when they were slower you had less elaborate results. Hope that made some sense."}, {"answer": "Alright, I'll take a shot at it. You're right, at the lowest level, computers manipulate all data in the form of 1's and 0's. However, any information can be translated into 1's and 0's. On the computer, a picture (and you can see this clearly when you really zoom into a digital image) is just a grid of tiny squares. Each square is assigned a color, and each color is created by mixing 256 different shades of red, green and blue (RGB). So saving any image is just a matter of writing down the RGB values for each square in the grid, each of which can vary from 0 to 255. Conversely, your computer screen is also just a grid, with a fixed resolution (E.g. 1280x1024 squares), so to display an image it just needs to figure out what color to show on each of those squares and transmit that information to the monitor. An animation, or moving image, is achieved by changing the display very quickly to fool the eye into perceiving continuous motion. Similarly a sound is just a waveform. So, to save a sound, you would have to note down the amplitude of the wave at a given point in time. If you noted this amplitude once per second, you would get a very crude approximation of the actual sound. If you increased this to many thousands of times per second, it would be very hard for a human ear to distinguish between the original wave and the digitized version. E.g. CDs sample music at a rate of 44,100 samples per second."}, {"answer": "You may have sort-of read it already, but I think that some people are trying to add too much detail. You read the other question about compilers already, so you kinda get how you can program in a higher level language and get that converted into the 1s and 0s. A fundamental concept that needs to be understood is that you can represent a wide variety of complex things using a combination of more simple things. Words are probably the good and obvious example. Letters, in and of themselves, are meaningless. When you combine them together, you get things (words) that are more complex and have *some* meaning. Then you combine those words together into paragraphs for more meaning, and some context, and so on until you have chapters, books and so on. To represent numbers, with ones and zeros you have to know how binary works. I'm not going to go into detail, but it's enough to know that 0001 is the number 1, 0010 is the number 2, 0011 is the number three and 0100 is the number 4. This goes on and on. Then, at some point people decided that the numbers 65 and 97 would be the letters A and a (this is in [ASCII]( URL_0 ), which is a common encoding, though less-so than it used to be) along with a bunch of other numbers for characters. So, now a computer 'knows' what letters are. And a human can type using a language that the computer is capable of converting to its 1s and 0s. But how does the computer know what those *words* mean? Well, you need a language. Just like we have English to communicate, computers understand languages too. With the right tools/compilers (\"dictionary\" maybe is a good parallel) a computer is able to know what your words mean. Constructing all of those words together, you have higher-order meaning like methods/aka subroutines and from there you can have things like objects, and from there you have groupings of objects that have meaning. If some of these groupings are common then programmers often call these design patterns and give them a name that they can then use to speak about at a higher level. Get all of these together and you have something that conveys the entire meaning of what you're trying to say: a program or game."}, {"answer": "First point: You can do a lot with mathematical functions. Second point: You can think of your computer display as one big number. However, instead of going from 0-9, it goes from Red to Green to Blue, and anywhere in between. The computer display is a very, very, large number which our eye interprets as an image. Third Point: This large number can vary over time in a variety of ways, and your computer can determine the time between the delays. Say, for example, I know that the number 10 looks like a person on some theoretical computer screen. Maybe 10 looks like him with his left foot forward, and 11 looks like him with his right foot forward. Therefore, by switching back and forth between 10 and 11, I can create the illusion of a walking man. Combine all three of these things together, add a whole mess of complexity, and you can have a simple game."}, {"answer": "I hope I understand your question correctly. If I do I think no one's quite addressed it. I'm coming at this from the angle of \"What does it mean to say data on a computer drive is just 1's and 0's\" or perhaps \"How can a string of 1's and 0's actually be a computer program / game\". ----- Starting with something like a Turing machine: Imagine you have an old-school tape-recorder. So you have a long magnetic strip of tape, and a tape head which is sensitive to how the tape is magnetized (charged (1) or not (0)), and it can also write out onto the tape either 1 or zero. Being an electronics genius, you hook up a circuit to the tape recorder which does the following: * if the value under the tape is a 0 * move to the right one inch * write another 1 on the tape * if the value under the tape is a 1 * move to the left one inch * write another 1 on the tape If you set this going, it wouldn't be very exciting: The initial value would be zero, so the machine would go right, and write a 1, then the value under the head would be 1, so it'd go left and write a 1, then the value under the head would be 1, so it'd go left and write another 1 and so on forever. Let's say you make another circuit that does the same as the first one, but moves left instead of right when it sees a 0, and right instead of left when it sees a 1. Now you hook up both circuits to the tape-recorder, and you have a switch that allows you to toggle between them. So Lets say you modify the first circuit such that if the value it sees is a zero, it does what it did before, then switches to the second circuit. And you make the second circuit, if it sees a zero, switch back to the first circuit. Ok - so you could expand this principle, making additional circuits that write zero instead of 1, and move left instead of right, and so on depending on what's underneath the tape-head. And each time you'd be hard-coded to switch to a different circuit. Let's say you have (at least) 1 circuit where if it sees one symbol (a 1 say), it rings a bell and stops the machine to tell you it's done. Groovy. Now you could start out with some set of symbols on the tape (1,0,0,1) and depending on how your circuits were set up you'd end up hearing a bell ring, and if you looked at the tape you'd have some different set of symbols on it (1,1,0,0). Exactly what symbols you end up with would depend on how your circuits were configured, but you could (for example) have a setup which put all the 1's together at the beginning of the tape. This is actually the beginning of performing automatic calculations. For example if you took a base 10 number and represented it in binary (so 1 is 1, 2 is 10, 2 is 11, and so on), you could have circuits set up that would automatically increment by 1 (so 10 - > 11 or 11 - > 100, etc), or double, or add 2 numbers together, multiply by (an approximation of) pi, etc etc. and write the result out to the tape. Great - you've got a calculator. In the description so far, the tape contains raw input data (a number to double or whatever). However it's also actually telling the machine what to do (go left, go right, switch to circuit 'b', etc). So you could also think of it as containing a set of instructions being applied to the machine. In the case of adding 1 to the value: if I want to write out \"11\", I pass in \"10\". In fact, it could contain both -- for example - I could have a string of 1's and zero's that caused the machine to read the slot to the right of the string, and to the right of that, and write out the total in the two slots beyond that (Then stop and ring the bell!). This is actually a computer program, right? You've got some instructions and some raw data to perform the instructions on. Fast forward 90 years and circuits are miniaturized down to microchip size, information is written out to hard drives, and you of course are not ringing a bell and having to examine a tape to see what the results of a calculation are - instead you have hardware that responds to the instructions, displaying pixels on a screen, playing sound through speakers, etc., and of course you have a keyboard and mouse, which essentially are electronic switches picked up by the hardware and software to modify how the programs behave. And of course programs aren't written by hand in 1's and 0's. See the programming language discussion that everyone else is linking to for more on that! URL_0 I hope this is somewhat helpful. Disclaimers: 1) I am a programmer but I write JavaScript and some Java so deal with no low level memory management stuff directly 2) My explanation is based on my somewhat hazy memories of computability classes from University which I really haven't used or revisited in 15 years, and a quick skim through the wikipedia entry on Turing machines. If I'm way off base please feel free to make this better"}, {"answer": "Here is a view from LOW LEVEL to HIGH LEVEL. *Processor Work. The CPU is a pretty simple concept. Transistors are devices which either let voltage through or not. They are controlled by voltage. Therefore, combine transistors together and you can make gates. [2 inputs, and if they are both high the output is high]. Ok, so now we can combine those gates to make a multiplexer [selects output], registers, memory, etc. Once those are made we can make an Arithmetic Logical Unit. It will have 3 inputs: A, B, fun. Fun selects what you want to do. For example, Fun is a two wire input, 00 is add, 01 is sub, 10 is AND, 11 is OR. Thus it will be a simple multiplexer to these operations. Then the CPU has a register called IR - instruction register. The current instructor [16 bit for example] is stored there. Individual bits go to multiplexers to control different operation for operation. For example, let's say first two bits make the CPU add/sub/add/xor. That means those two wires will go directly to Fun wires in ALU. Thus, a single instruction can be processed purely easily with multiplexers and registers. Now, there is a control register. This register gets incremented* every clock cycle. The processor then has a comparator, and if CR = 0 then it loads a new instruction in. If CR=1 then it takes the output of ALU and stores it into a register using multipexer. If CR=2 then it increments the PC [program counter]. See? Simple. We now have a very simple processor that loads an instruction, executes it and then increments PC. Now, more advanced processors have instuctions that tell CPU many more things -- like load or store from memory, talk to other chips on the board, etc. But that is not needed. Instead we will connect the output of ALU to a screen. The screen will display the colour that it gets from CPU. Then the programmer will program the memory to output the pixel to screen."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "18153855", "title": "Continuous game", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["A continuous game is a mathematical concept, used in game theory, that generalizes the idea of an ordinary game like tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) or checkers (draughts). In other words, it extends the notion of a discrete game, where the players choose from a finite set of pure strategies. The continuous game concepts allows games to include more general sets of pure strategies, which may be uncountably infinite.", "A continuous game is a mathematical concept, used in game theory, that generalizes the idea of an ordinary game like tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) or checkers (draughts). In other words, it extends the notion of a discrete game, where the players choose from a finite set of pure strategies. The continuous game concepts allows games to include more general sets of pure strategies, which may be uncountably infinite."]}}]}]

If the Earths atmosphere is 78% Nitrogen, why dont we have Nitrogen based life?

81heux

[{"answer": "Life isn't nitrogen based, but life does make use of lots of nitrogen atoms. Life is carbon based because the structure of carbon enables lots of different variations of organic molecules. Nitrogen doesn't form the types of bonds to enable the same amount of variation."}, {"answer": "Because Nitrogen is an \"inert\" gas, which means it doesn't react with anything. Oxygen is different. Oxygen reacts with all kinds of different chemicals and elements. And a lot of those reactions release heat or energy, which your body uses. It's like gasoline for cars. We don't put gasoline in cars because there is so much of it, we use it because it has the energy needed to make the car go. The same thing goes for life and oxygen, living things don't use oxygen because it's plentiful, but because it has the energy we need to live."}, {"answer": "Nitrogen is fairly inert. It's not super reactive with things by itself (until it becomes a molecule with something else like nitrous oxide). Oxygen is incredibly reactive and very helpful at converting something into something else via oxidation. Rather than looking at nitrogen as an oxygen replacement, you'd probably want to look at something below oxygen on the periodic table of elements, since it will share similar reactive properties (the elements below oxygen are Sulphur, Selenium, and Tellurium)."}, {"answer": "Nitrogen gas is very *inert* which means that it doesn't react easily with other elements. So when you inhale, most of that Nitrogen gas is simply going in your lungs and coming back out, without being used by your body at all - while your body is able to absorb and utilize the oxygen in the air. Nitrogen is very important to life, and much of it comes to us through food, where nitrogen atoms are usually bonded to other atoms and are a bit easier to react, break apart, and reorganize. But oxygen is far more reactive and very good at transferring energy, which is why it's so useful to our bodies."}, {"answer": "It's not as versatile as oxygen because it's less reactive and this is because of how its electrons are round its nucleus. Electrons round the nucleus form layers called shells and nitrogen had a full outer shell. This makes it harder for it to share electrons with other atoms and form a chemical bond. But! it does figure a lot in plant life.. \"nitrates\" (chemical compounds containing nitrogen) are widely used by plants for growth."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "78490", "title": "Exosphere", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The exosphere ( \"outside, external, beyond\", \"sphere\") is a thin, atmosphere-like volume surrounding a planet or natural satellite where molecules are gravitationally bound to that body, but where the density is too low for them to behave as a gas by colliding with each other. In the case of bodies with substantial atmospheres, such as Earth's atmosphere, the exosphere is the uppermost layer, where the atmosphere thins out and merges with interplanetary space. It is located directly above the thermosphere. Very little is known about it due to lack of research. Mercury, the Moon and the Galilean satellites of Jupiter have surface boundary exospheres, which are exospheres without a denser atmosphere underneath.", "The exosphere ( \"outside, external, beyond\", \"sphere\") is a thin, atmosphere-like volume surrounding a planet or natural satellite where molecules are gravitationally bound to that body, but where the density is too low for them to behave as a gas by colliding with each other"]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "18393", "title": "Life", "section": "Section::::Environmental conditions.:Range of tolerance.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 78, "end_paragraph_id": 78, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["This includes artificial biospheres such as Biosphere 2 and BIOS-3, and potentially ones on other planets or moons. The inert components of an ecosystem are the physical and chemical factors necessary for lifeenergy (sunlight or chemical energy), water, heat, atmosphere, gravity, nutrients, and ultraviolet solar radiation protection. In most ecosystems, the conditions vary during the day and from one season to the next. To live in most ecosystems, then, organisms must be able to survive a range of conditions, called the \"range of tolerance.\" Outside that are the \"zones of physiological stress,\" where the survival and reproduction are possible but not optimal. Beyond these zones are the \"zones of intolerance,\" where survival and reproduction of that organism is unlikely or impossible. Organisms that have a wide range of tolerance are more widely distributed than organisms with a narrow range of tolerance.", "Beyond these zones are the \"zones of intolerance,\" where survival and reproduction of that organism is unlikely or impossible. Organisms that have a wide range of tolerance are more widely distributed than organisms with a narrow range of tolerance."]}}]}]

Why is it that when something is flavored grape (grape soda), that it tastes nothing like an actual grape?

3xpz72

[{"answer": "Grape flavored soda tastes like Concord grapes. Find them. Try them. Marvel in how exact they got it right."}, {"answer": "The varieties of \"table grapes\" that you can buy at the grocery store taste significantly different from various other varieties of grapes that exist. The grapes you buy at the store have been bred to be larger and more resilient, often seedless, and with a thinner less bitter skin. They're easier to handle and eat, but they don't taste as good. The \"grape flavor\" that is commonly seen in drinks/candy/etc. is very similar to the taste of actual Concord grapes."}, {"answer": "I personally find the artificial orange flavor is completely different to an actual orange."}, {"answer": "Bad example using grapes, a better example is watermelon and its artificial flavoring. The two are nothing alike."}, {"answer": "Is blue raspberry something that occurs in nature or is it strictly something the flavor companies thought of? I'm assuming they used blue to avoid confusion with strawberries."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "3031996", "title": "Wine fault", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Many of the compounds that cause wine faults are already naturally present in wine but at insufficient concentrations to be of issue. In fact, depending on perception, these concentrations may impart positive characters to the wine. However, when the concentration of these compounds greatly exceeds the sensory threshold, they replace or obscure the flavors and aromas that the wine should be expressing (or that the winemaker wants the wine to express). Ultimately the quality of the wine is reduced, making it less appealing and sometimes undrinkable.", "A wine fault or defect is an unpleasant characteristic of a wine often resulting from poor winemaking practices or storage conditions, and leading to wine spoilage. Many of the compounds that cause wine faults are already naturally present in wine but at insufficient concentrations to be of issue. In fact, depending on perception, these concentrations may impart positive characters to the wine. However, when the concentration of these compounds greatly exceeds the sensory threshold, they replace or obscure the flavors and aromas that the wine should be expressing (or that the winemaker wants the wine to express). Ultimately the quality of the wine is reduced, making it less appealing and sometimes undrinkable."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "10253024", "title": "Coulure", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Flowers stay closed and are not fertilized. Thus the vines are not pollinated as the grape fails to develop and falls off. Coulure can also cause irregular bunches of grapes which are less compact than normal. These bunches are more sensitive to developing various grape diseases. The yield of a vine with coulure will decrease substantially. Grape varieties with high proclivity to coulure are Grenache, Malbec, Merlot, and Muscat Ottonel. Other causes of coulure may be vineyard conditions and practices, pruning too early or too severely, excessively fertile soils or overuse of fertilizers, and improper selection of rootstocks or clones.", "Coulure (pronounced coo-LYUR) is a viticultural hazard that is the result of metabolic reactions to weather conditions that causes a failure of grapes to develop after flowering. In English the word \"shatter\" is sometimes used. Coulure is triggered by periods of cold, cloudy, rainy weather or very high out-of-season temperatures. The condition is most often manifested in the spring. It also occurs in vines that have little sugar content in their tissue. Flowers stay closed and are not fertilized. Thus the vines are not pollinated as the grape fails to develop and falls off. Coulure can also cause irregular bunches of grapes which are less compact than normal. These bunches are more sensitive to developing various grape diseases. The yield of a vine with coulure will decrease substantially. Grape varieties with high proclivity to coulure are Grenache, Malbec, Merlot, and Muscat Ottonel. Other causes of coulure may be vineyard conditions and practices, pruning too early or too severely, excessively fertile soils or overuse of fertilizers, and improper selection of rootstocks or clones."]}}]}]

Déjà vu

1jnspm

[{"answer": "There are various theories explaining deja vu. A lack of research exists on the subject simply because the instance occurs infrequently amongst those that have reported experiencing it. Therefore, it is difficult to pinpoint this experience in someone and analyze the electrical signals in the brain. My favorite theory encompasses the idea that deja vu is essentially a delay in short term memory storage; similar to that of a computer's CPU telling the ram to store an amount of data, but the process is stalled briefly due to a hang up with other processes. The result, is an interesting feeling of 'hearing something' or 'seeing something' that is 'familiar' when in reality your brain is just playing catch up with your short term memory storage process. [Vsauce has a bit on this as well.]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "what is your question exactly? Are you asking what it is, or why it happens?"}, {"answer": "*what is your question exactly?* Are you asking *what it is*, or *why it happens?*"}, {"answer": "You have two forms of memory, short term and long term. Usually your experiences go into the short term, then long term When you experience a deja vu, it goes to both at once, so even though you are experiencing something for the first time, you have the sensation that you are also remembering it."}, {"answer": "According to fringe logic, your other half in the multiuniverse went through the same thing so you felt a d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu"}, {"answer": "I feel like I've seen this question before."}, {"answer": "There are three types of memories your brain has. One is sensory. These are felt and discarded almost immediately, if you even noted them at all. If you do notice them, it's something like an itch or a hair in your face, quickly gotten rid of, and not very memorable. The second is short-term memory. It's remembering someone's phone number until you get it in your phone, or the page you left off in a book. It's front and center in your mind for a little while, but it's not something you commit to the third type of memory. Long term. It's the name of your husband or wife, or your native tongue. You never forget. When deja-vu occurs, it's a some neurons messing up where they're supposed to go. Instead of just sensory information being discarded, it's getting rerouted to the short or long term memory. It makes everything feel as if it has happened before, even if it has not. It is a false experience of memories being recalled, because it wasn't in your other memories before your neurons shot wrong. There are two other occurrences like deva vu; jamais vu and presque vu. Jamais vu is like deja vu, except when you feel as if you remember something you're experiencing now with deja vu, jamais vu makes familiar things seem foreign. It's when you sit down in your car you've had for years and forget how to start it. Your brain is again misfiring and not making the connection that it should be. Presque vu is when you have \"It's on the tip of my tongue\" feeling. You're trying to remember your friend's name, but it's not there. All of these things just point to your brain as being a huge, mishmashed ball of cords with a little cover over the middle of them, but the ends can fire energy anywhere and it may get caught in a wire that wasn't supposed to receive it. It's really a wonder it works so well for us, with everything that you're thinking about throughout the day."}, {"answer": "I have epilepsy (Now fully controlled by medication), my aura before a seizure was deja vu sometimes lasting several minutes. That I was convinced what I was experiencing had happened before is undeniable but I know that it wasn't true just an intense feeling of familiarity. I have also experienced the opposite Jamais vu where places, objects, people that you know well, feel unfamiliar. Deja vu used to be a pleasant experience for me before I developed epilepsy ( due to a heamorage). I am sure other experiences I have had such as seeing people and being sure I know them or even seeing friends and them have an 'aura' of being some famous personality are related. As my experience of deja vu was directly related to my epilepsy I am sure it is due to electrical activity in the temporal lobes."}, {"answer": "Humans (and other, intelligent animals) are hard-wired for false positives. We are constantly gathering and organizing information, and most importantly, making connections. This has been tested with the Skinner box. URL_0 Of course you haven't experienced that *exact* situation twice, but you likely have made enough connections to feel so. This is my untested hypothesis, but it might work as some kind of explanation. I shudder every time I experience it, regardless."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "8888", "title": "D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu", "section": "Section::::Explanations.:Dream-based explanation.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 24, "end_paragraph_id": 24, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Dream can also be used to explain the experience of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, and they are related in three different aspects. Firstly, some d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences duplicate the situation in dreams instead of waking conditions, according to the survey done by Brown (2004). 20% of the respondents reported their d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences were from dreams and 40% of the respondents reported that from both reality and dreams. Secondly, people may experience d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu because some elements in their remembered dreams were shown. A research done by Zuger (1966) supported this idea by investigating the relationship between remembered dreams and d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences, and suggested that there is a strong correlation. Thirdly, people may experience d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu during a dream state, which links d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu with dream frequency. \"Jamais vu\" (from French, meaning \"never seen\") is any familiar situation which is not recognized by the observer. Often described as the opposite of \"d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\", \"jamais vu\" involves a", "Dream can also be used to explain the experience of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, and they are related in three different aspects. Firstly, some d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences duplicate the situation in dreams instead of waking conditions, according to the survey done by Brown (2004). 20% of the respondents reported their d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences were from dreams and 40% of the respondents reported that from both reality and dreams. Secondly, people may experience d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu because some elements in their remembered dreams were shown. A research done by Zuger (1966) supported this idea by investigating the relationship between remembered dreams and d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu experiences, and suggested that there is a strong correlation. Thirdly, people may experience d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu during a dream state, which links d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu with dream frequency. \"Jamais vu\" (from French, meaning \"never seen\") is any familiar situation which is not recognized by the observer. Often described as the opposite of \"d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\", \"jamais vu\" involves a"]}}]}]

Why does 0.5 round to the nearest integer above, and not below?

8pw3eb

[{"answer": "Since it's exactly in the middle, you need to pick *something* and be consistent about it. It's completely arbitrary, you could just as easily round down. There's also other systems of rounding that you can use. You can round towards/away from 0, you can alternate up/down on odd/even integers and I'm sure there's others. Depending on the application, the might give you numbers that are more suitable."}, {"answer": "I've searched tha seven seas fer an answer. Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: Why does .5 round up? ]( URL_3 ) ^(_20 comments_) 1. [Why do we round up at 5? Isn't it right \"in the middle\" between 1 and 10? ]( URL_0 ) ^(_29 comments_) 1. [ELI5: Why do we round up on 5? ]( URL_5 ) ^(_28 comments_) 1. [Why is 5 rounded up? ]( URL_1 ) ^(_9 comments_) 1. [ELI5: Why do we round 0.500 up to 1? ]( URL_2 ) ^(_33 comments_) 1. [ELI5: Why does 0.5 get rounded to 1 while it has the same length to 0 as to 1. ]( URL_4 ) ^(_6 comments_)"}, {"answer": "It's arbitrary if you only look at one significant figure. But if you look at 0.51, 0.501, 0.5001 etc they are all closer to 1 than zero. It would be rather inconsistent if every possible decimal starting with 0.5 rounded up except for 0.5000000... which was to be rounded down."}, {"answer": "Since 0,5 is exactly in the middle you just have to choose to go down or up. Since it is a advantage to be consistent we have all agreed on going up instead of people choosing to go up or down. The reason why we agreed on going up instead of down is that going up is useful in many situations where you need to measure something since. A good example of this is if you are buying a washing machine or something and need to measure the available space to make sure the machine fits, you would rather have 0,5cm more space than 0,5cm to little. Or if you are at the store with limited cash in your wallet and want to know how much stuff you can buy. Tl;dr: In most cases it\u2019s preferable to round up instead of down and we choose to always stick with up for consistency."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1113108", "title": "Factorial number system", "section": "Section::::Definition.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 12, "end_paragraph_id": 12, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["a factorial representation by these successive divisions: The process terminates when the quotient reaches zero. Reading the remainders backward gives 341010. In principle, this system may be extended to represent fractional numbers, though rather than the natural extension of place values (1)!, (2)!, etc., which are undefined, the symmetric choice of radix values n = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. after the point may be used instead. Again, the 0 and 1 places may be omitted as these are always zero. The corresponding place values are therefore 1/1, 1/1, 1/2, 1/6, 1/24, ..., 1/n!, etc.", "a factorial representation by these successive divisions: The process terminates when the quotient reaches zero. Reading the remainders backward gives 341010. In principle, this system may be extended to represent fractional numbers, though rather than the natural extension of place values (1)!, (2)!, etc., which are undefined, the symmetric choice of radix"]}}]}]

So I'm in My mid 20's and don't understand why we Americans are so scared of socialism? I read a lot back in the day about Russia Cuba etc and I get the whole not wanting a dictatorship but where does this whole fear/attitude cone from. What sustains it?

nbqko

[{"answer": "The main argument most people use against socialism is that you're forced to give away your hard earned money to assist other people. Key word there being forced. I personally agree with socialism to an extent; I think we should provide food, clothing, shelter and health insurance to everyone who can't afford it. I don't agree with providing cash just the necessities."}, {"answer": "I'll try to answer this the best I can. Many Americans really don't like taxes, they hate them so much they fought a war so they wouldn't have to pay for a previous war. They also don't like being ordered what to do, so the first 10 Amendments to their Constitution severely limits how the government could order it's citizens around. So because Americans don't like paying taxes and don't like being ordered around, they definitely do not like being ordered to pay more taxes to help someone else. It's not that Americans aren't generous, many choose to give to numerous charities, but the fact that they're being ordered to give to someone else really rubs them the wrong way."}, {"answer": "Remember that the same exact Red Scare-like counterpart was created in the Soviet Union, except the enemies were the Americans and the dirty word was capitalist or bourgeois. Both sides did it to their people to make them fear and hate each other, and thus be ready to ultimately to take arms and die to protect their corporate owners. It's the never-ending cycle of finding a virtual enemy and blaming everything on it, it comes in all sorts of flavor. We should ask Sweden if socialism is the devil and many people seem to think."}, {"answer": "I don't understand why people cant ever think that Socialism and Capitalism could be compatible. Honestly, combine the two and you get a Social Democracy that still has a mostly Capitalist economy no?"}, {"answer": "The Communist Manifesto depicts the undoing of capitalism. Now this doesn't seem like too big a problem when said like that but the people who controlled the United States freaked the fuck out! If capitalism is going to be replaced by communism then there would be rebellion, war, and people would lose power. And so a huge propaganda campaign started that painted the USSR (and by extension, Communism) as America's arch-enemy. Events like The Bay of Pigs and the McCarthy Trials radicalized the divide, throwing in irrational fear and forever cementing leftism as un-American."}, {"answer": "I have no idea why this is being downvoted. This gets at the heart of American politics."}, {"answer": "Thanks for asking this. Living outside the US this confuses me so much."}, {"answer": "Because America doesn't get communist influence from it's neighbors, unlike Europe, where countries are more geographically closer together. Here in Finland communism can't be a boogeyman when St. Petersburg is only a 2-hour drive away and you can go check it out for yourself. Europe has been in the crossroads between American capitalism and Russian socialism/communism and absorbed a lot of good ideas from both, which spawned the Scandinavian welfare state model over time. It's not a secret that communist influences do a lot of good too in terms of strengthening the worker's rights. Now, America doesn't have this luxury. The only communist state near it is puny little Cuba, while Russia and China are literally on the other side of the globe. America doesn't have a communist counterweight which has resulted in it developing into a fully capitalist society."}, {"answer": "Socialism is too ambiguous a term. I think most Americans conceive socialism as synonymous with state welfarism. Is this what you are referring to? Broadly speaking, the means of accomplishing socialist goals usually involve the threat of force by a collective levied against the individual."}, {"answer": "Just throwing this out there, but a recent podcast by Dan Carlin has some cool insight into your question: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "The main problem that most see with socialism is its connection to communism, or rather its perceived connection. Many Americans do not know the difference. In addition the idea goes beyond what typical American ideology is which rather then to help everyone is much more of help myself. The second biggest contribution here is the fear that socialism leads to dictatorships. Typically the idea sprouts as \"everyone will help everyone while still being free\" but the problem arises when one person says, \"don't worry, I'll tell you what you need\". That person often ends up a dictator. At least this is how Americans perceive it. Many do not see the socialism in this country already, such as public schools, police, fire, roads, post, ect. Because of that they can not see small steps towards a better tomorrow because again they perceive it as socialism which as stated above is greatly misunderstood by the people. The final piece to this puzzle is the rising theocracy ideals in presidential candidates. The general idea for theocracy if it followed the morals they want us to believe that we should all follow wouldn't be so bad, but rarely if ever has a theocracy shown to be productive and produces and entirely different and often negative style of governing from socialism."}, {"answer": "a) For better and worse, we're an individualistic society. We don't want to sacrifice to better the collective. More than that, we can't even think in those terms very well. b) We know enough history to know that Communism has a bad track record. We don't know enough theory to differentiate between the ideological backbone and the historical manifestation. c) Fear of change. America, historically, is such a melting pot that our common culture is driven by consumerism. Without it, a lot of people would be confused as to their roles, if not their values. d) Part of any political system's agenda is the propagation of that system. From elementary school on, we've been taught that American democracy is the city on the hill. Despite many disenfranchised and frustrated people, the current system is (at least structurally) stable. Edit: let's say \"we\" is 4 AM shorthand for Americans who haven't thought critically about their potential bias."}, {"answer": "It's because we're a Christian nation and Jesus was very clear when he said that we should accumulate wealth and tell lazy poor people to get the fuck out of our way."}, {"answer": "people believe socialism is \"foreign\" and \"un-american\". being afraid of socialism has to do often with the will to follow traditions of capitalism, but can also be an actual economic concern."}, {"answer": "When did this turn into r/circlejerk? Keep this shit to r/politics man. Seriously."}, {"answer": "\u201cSocialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.\u201d Also, there is a bit of depth to this fear. I believe a lot of it stems from people who are irritated by the 'hippies who want handouts'. People usually also hold the view that they don't want their government turning into a 'nanny state' whose operations cost taxpayers extra money for its inflated bureaucracy leading to overhead costs due to the legislations made to create social welfare programs to help people, after all, the government doesn't do things as efficiently as the private, capitalist industry (/s). Lastly, [moral hazard]( URL_0 ) is a concept held closely by a lot of the intellectual anti-socialist crowd. Moral hazard is basically the idea that if you are insured from risk, you are more likely to act riskier. If your nanny state government insures you from going completely bankrupt by providing you food stamps and welfare checks, you are less likely to find a job that would help you climb out of your debts sooner. While I believe some of these talking points have important information to pull away from it, it just simply is a terribly cynical view of humanity. We don't live in a purely capitalist society right now, it operates based on 'socialist' regulations and we all drive on roads built from 'socialist' legislation. A true capitalist society means that power is achieved by capital, ie resources. And I don't see how this is any different from anarchy. In a stateless soceity, the people with the most resources will have the most influence. My biggest gripe against conservatives is the idea that social healthcare should 'never ever' be implemented because it's too expensive. It's as if they are reading this out of some bible, some rule of life. It's purely ideological. A basic, accountable form of social healthcare, one that conducts voluntary tests on its population to help prevent epidemics, is certainly a necessity. And I don't think leaving those types of responsibilities up to a deregulated/unregulated private industry who answers to shareholders first would be the best thing for society. Hence, some form of socialism is necessary for, well, our social health."}, {"answer": "I'll address the \"what sustains it\" question, because I think understanding the origin of the fear is as simple as them being our enemies. It's pretty much exactly what happens every time we have an enemy. Not only propaganda, but also the natural instincts of humans to defend their group. So, my theory for why this fear is still sustained is that communism has turned out to be the most convenient 'other' for (especially right wing) politicians to use. One reason it is convenient is because by picking something radically left-wing as the enemy, you can associate our own left wing with it. Picking radical Islam as the enemy, for example, was less effective because it has helped contribute to a rise in atheism and weaken the base for the right wing. At the same time, it increased nationalism, so it wasn't all bad, but I feel like the most calculating and cynical right wing politicians (hypothetical, I'm not trying to build strawmen here) would secretly curse the fact that it wasn't FARC or some other communist faction who engineered the attacks. So, basically, my theory is that the fear was sustained by politicians, whether it was purposeful or just because it was a natural enemy."}, {"answer": "One reason is anyone can look at socialist institutions and see how awful they are to market alternatives. Compare public housing projects to private housing, or compare public schools to private schools, or private bodyguards and security firms to local police. Virtually anything government produces will cost more and be of lower quality than the market equivalent. Furthermore, with government control comes all the stupid political bullshit, like blue laws that prohibit selling alcohol on Sundays, or rules against file sharing that would come with government control of ISPs, for just two quick examples."}, {"answer": "As I understand it (ie, only from a pop/news angle), it's that \"American dream\" that gets in the way of understanding/accepting things like socialism, socialist democracy, etc: The overriding theory, even for poor laborers, is that somehow, at some time, everyone can earn their own living, and in this world view, it's a sin to share your hard earned wealth with less successful people. But then, I suppose, the question becomes: Where *did* that American Dream world view come from?"}, {"answer": "Most Americans don't know the difference between Communism and socialism. There was a *lot* of negative propaganda villifying Communism during the Cold War (like the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism but on an even larger scale) and the older generation still believes most of it. They might try to come up with rationalizations & arguments against it but it really boils down to an instinctive conflict between \"Us\" and \"Them\"."}, {"answer": "I don't know what the hell people think america is ? America [spends a lot on social programs]( URL_0 ) social security,welfare,Medicare, Medicaid are more than 50% of the Us budget. this is not counting the local and state expenses. Which go mostly towards education and other social programs. It is not communism, which the state owns all means of capital, but it is a combination of socialism and capitalism!!"}, {"answer": "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was an enemy of the USA for a long time. That fear of the word included in the name of the USSR still lingers to this day."}, {"answer": "Late to the party, but do you simply want to know why there is such a vitriolic hatred for socialism or why people dislike the notion of socialism on a philosophical level?"}, {"answer": "There are some complicated and subtle explanations for the perpetuation of irrational fear, but the single biggest reason is \"THIS ISN'T WHAT I'M USED TO!!\""}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "18717037", "title": "Society of the United States", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The society of the United States is based on Western culture, and has been developing since long before the United States became a country with its own unique social and cultural characteristics such as dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine, folklore, etc. Today the United States of America is an ethnically and racially diverse country as a result of large-scale immigration from many different countries throughout its history", "The society of the United States is based on Western culture, and has been developing since long before the United States became a country with its own unique social and cultural characteristics such as dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine, folklore, etc. Today the United States of America is an ethnically and racially diverse country as a result of large-scale immigration from many different countries throughout its history."]}}]}]

Why is there no unanimous name for the years 2000-2009? And if there is one, what is it?

1l50pl

[{"answer": "I've only heard it referred to as the Two Thousands."}, {"answer": "The term popularly used here is 'the noughties'"}, {"answer": "the 1900-1909 years were called the \"oughts\" so calling the 2000-2009 years that isn't really that terrible. People just don't use the term \"oughts\" very often so they prefer to use phrases like 2000s (two thousands) instead."}, {"answer": "I've heard \"new millennium\" a few times. Of course, my generation is also called \"millenneals\", which compared to \"the greatest generation\", the \"baby boomers\" \"gen X'ers\" and the like, sounds downright stupid to me."}, {"answer": "No, I've used the \"oughts\" before, and I've heard it used by others. I've also heard them referred to as the \"thousands,\" but not very often."}, {"answer": "Because '70' is a number that we can easily add an 's' too. It is a standard form that no one has to think about. With the decades beginning in 2000 and 2010 we don't have that. So it takes a little creativity, and different persons will have different ideas. 'Noughties' is fun, but not really fit for formal usage, '2000s' is ambiguous, etc. We can call this decade the '2010s', but that is somewhat ugly, 'teens' is informal, so we won't have a standard form until we have a new '20s' in a few years time."}, {"answer": "On a similar note, if someone said to me to pronounce the year 2008, I would say \"two thousand and eight\", but we have a quiz show called University Challenge here in the UK and Jeremy Paxman (the host) always pronounces 2008 as \"twenty oh eight\", which always blindsides me every single week when I watch it :/"}, {"answer": "in medieval times, time periods are referred to as ages, like the dark age, the silver age. etc"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "34579", "title": "2000s (decade)", "section": "Section::::Name for the decade.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 5, "start_character": 24, "end_paragraph_id": 5, "end_character": 757, "bleu_score": 0.8162655011578235}]}]

When you're sick and can only breathe out of one nostril, then you turn over and a few minutes later it "falls" and you can breathe out the other.

2inhq5

[{"answer": "from [Iowa ENT Center]( URL_0 ) > **What is a turbinate?** A turbinate is a strip of tissue along the lining of the nose. It can swell or shrink based on many factors. When swollen, it blocks airflow; when decongested, it permits airflow. The turbinate is responsible for the back-and-forth nasal blockage people experience. For instance, when one rolls over in bed and one side of the nose opens and the other closes off, it is the turbinate swelling on one side and shrinking on the other that is responsible for this change."}, {"answer": "when sick? i've always only been able to breath our of one nostril :( it changes from time to time."}, {"answer": "I get this too, especially at the moment due to my cold. It's not due to any actual mucus that you feel you have a blocked nose, it's actually an infection swelling your blood vessels in your nose that causes the blockage. When you lie on your side with a blocked nose, the blood in the vessels have weight and do shift, albeit ever so slightly, from one side of the nostril to the other. This means that although it feels like you have something in your nose, it's actually the nostril's passage that is being changed in shape and size."}, {"answer": "When you're sick and your nose is stopped up, it's actually not from mucous/snot, it's from inflammation in the lining of your nose. As the lining fills with blood, it swells, blocking your nasal passage. Rolling from one side to the other affects how the blood drains. When you roll over what you find is that the \"higher\" side of your nose is the part you can breathe out of...It is actually physically harder for your heart to pump to the higher side, and it's easier for the blood to drain back, so the inflammation isn't so bad. Something to notice is that when you cry, your nasal passage isn't inflamed in the same way it is when you're fighting an infection. You actually produce a tremendous amount of mucous when you cry, but you can easily blow it out and breathe freely. TL;DR, Stuffed up feeling isn't from snot, it's from nasal passage inflammation, rolling over helps \"drain\" the blood allows you to breathe again."}, {"answer": "Wait, why have I never heard of this? I almost wish I had a blocked nose so I could try it."}, {"answer": "I asked my ENT about this, except it's slightly different. When one of my nostril's is clogged, it will randomly clear up and the other one will get clogged. It will swap back and forth all day, but not as a result of lying down. People are correct that it's the inflamed turbinates, but the question is why does it switch sides? He told me it was actually neurological and that they didn't know the reason it happens."}, {"answer": "There's something called a \"Nasal Cycle\" where which nostril you are primarily breathing through switches. This change occurs every 2-3 hours on average. When you are congested it becomes more obvious which side is which at the given time."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "183858", "title": "Ventricular fibrillation", "section": "Section::::History.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 42, "end_paragraph_id": 42, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Another definition of VF was produced by Wiggers in 1940. He described ventricular fibrillation as \"an incoordinate type of contraction which, despite a high metabolic rate of the myocardium, produces no useful beats. As a result, the arterial pressure falls abruptly to very low levels, and death results within six to eight minutes from anemia [ischemia] of the brain and spinal cord\". Spontaneous conversion of ventricular fibrillation to a more benign rhythm is rare in all but small animals. Defibrillation is the process that converts ventricular fibrillation to a more benign rhythm. This is usually by application of an", "Another definition of VF was produced by Wiggers in 1940. He described ventricular fibrillation as \"an incoordinate type of contraction which, despite a high metabolic rate of the myocardium, produces no useful beats. As a result, the arterial pressure falls abruptly to very low levels, and death results within six to eight minutes from anemia [ischemia] of the brain and spinal cord\". Spontaneous conversion of ventricular fibrillation to a more benign rhythm is rare in all but small animals. Defibrillation is the process that converts ventricular fibrillation to a more benign rhythm. This is usually by application of an"]}}]}]

why is the US the only country, apart from Liberia and Burma, not to have adopted the International System of units?

5d94do

[{"answer": "The short answer about this is that the US *has* officially adopted it. But nobody wants to use it. There's no public will to actually change everything over to standard units, so that doesn't happen. But if you talk to scientists, or medical personnel, they will tell you that they use metric at work."}, {"answer": "Aerospace Engineer *(emphasis space)* here. The short answer is we have and we haven't The long answer is in industries that are collaborative with other countries (Medical, space programs, shipping) we HAVE switched over. (Ever hear a US TV medical show go \"I need 20 CC's, STAT!\" - CC means cubic centimeter, a metric unit). In other industries that are more insular and only affect the US, we haven't. Civil engineers still use Kips, feet, pound-feet etc., as do car manufacturers (EDIT Apparently they're metric now), bakers, and your everyday carpenter. They haven't switched for a number of reasons, but I'll explain why I use meters, Newtons etc for work: * When doing complex calculations, having everything be multiples of 10 is VERY useful. Making a kilometer into a meter means moving the decimal point 3 to the right, while making a mile into a foot means multiplying by 5280 -- try doing that in your head in 5 seconds. * Every paper and textbook in my field is already in SI, so to find a constant or something I need to use in calculations is a breeze in SI but can be a nightmare in Customary. * Converting to Customary just to convert back to SI can cause errors in measurement that get worse each conversion. It's similar to how you can put a sentence into Google Translate (\"I love doing math!\"), translate it to a random language--Hindi sounds fun-- then translating it back, only to see your initial input has changed (\"I love doing the math\"). That is what can happen if you convert too many times. That all being said, this is why I still use customary at home: * Converting is annoying and difficult. Even if everyday use doesn't really care about round off errors, I don't want to have to convert 1 Cup of flour to milliliters every time I'm making a cake. * I know customary more than metric, and it would take a lot of readjusting to get used to an entirely new system. Imagine being told your country was abandoning its language for a new one-- Swahili seems interesting. How long would it take you to get used to speaking Swahili? Would you EVER be fluent? * This is the most controversial, but there's no NEED to change. As great as converting by ten is for calculations, most of the time your conversions are very simple or nonexistent (except for the whole pinch-teaspoon-tablespoon-cup-pint thing. ARRRGGGHHH that's more confusing than orbital mechanics). And the smug \"Customary units are arbitrary!\" people forget that SI is just as arbitrary: some guys in France grabbed a chunk of Platinum and thought 'eh, this is good' and BAM, the kilogram was born."}, {"answer": "I'm pretty late to the party here, but I'll chime in anyhow. The turning point dates back to the Carter/Reagan divide in the 1980 election. About the time that everyone else (including England) were switching from English units to metric, Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter pushed very hard for America to switch as well. This was moderately successful, and between congressional action and executive order America began to move toward accepting SI standards. \"Metric\" measurements were commonly taught in schools, cars had to report km/h as well as mph, and there was a trend toward acceptance of MKS in daily life. There were large information campaigns with pamphlets, guides to the metric system, television spots, lesson-plan packets in schools -- even school lunchboxes (remember those?) with the metric system outlined on them. I still remember a few of them from the late 1970s, but you can find TV PSA spots dating to 1973 on YouTube. Then Ronald Reagan got elected, on a wave of reactionary resentment against the actions Carter was taking with the economy, Volcker's \"bitter pill\" of very high interest rates to curb resource shocks, and \"stagflation\". But Reagan's campaign was taking no chances, and pulled out all the self-identity stops. A minor plank in Reagan's platform was to roll back adoption of the metric system, to leverage general grousing and resentment at the changing systems of units into a small additional advantage in the vote. So in 1981 all motion toward SI for commonplace things in America stopped cold. That's why, for example, NASA specifies all space hardware in SI units -- but the numbers always turn out to be round numbers in English units rather than in MKS (e.g. the Space Shuttle's dimensions, and the ISS modules' dimensions, are all in round multiples of 25.4mm). **tl;dr**: SI adoption fell prey to identity politics in the 1980 presidential election. Ronald Reagan killed it, nobody else picked it up. And here we are."}, {"answer": "Reading these comments has been interesting. For what it's worth, I have a Canadian perspective on all of this. Our government made the decision to swap years ago and faced heavy opposition for the same reasons the US did during their attempt. People claimed that metric was confusing and cited the costs of swapping road network signage over. The government was firm, though, and a couple generations later we are all \"fluent\" in metric. The USA never made this swap, though. We are all huddled against the border trying to stay warm.... Through this proximity, most of us having a working knowledge of imperial as well. This leads to some uniquely Canadian issues: We drive in kilometers per hour, and buy our gas and milk in litres. However, if you ask us our height and weight you will most certainly receive it in feet, inches and pounds. The temperature outside? Probably in Celcius, unless you're from the oldest generation. Personally, I'd like to think we took the best of both worlds. I might just be telling myself that though."}, {"answer": "Let's not pretend like the adoption of the metric system is as universal and pervasive as you suggest. When in the UK I ordered beer by the pint; in Central America I bought much of my produce by the pound and gasoline by the gallon. The US simply hasn't had a big government-led push to make a changeover happen, and until it does people will continue to use what is familiar and comfortable."}, {"answer": "This isn't the whole answer, but a part no one else has brought up. Outside Britain and its colonies, customary units varied from place to place within a modern country. A pound in southeastern France was 18% lighter than a pound in Paris. A Japanese cloth foot was 25% longer than a Japanese construction foot. Measurement differences were easily abused by fraudulent sellers. So changing to the metric system was an opportunity for new regimes to unify a chaotic system of measurement. England was able to mostly unify its measurement system in the Middle Ages, so it bequeathed a usable system to the modern US. It's not perfect, and there has been some drift between units used when the US broke away and units used when the UK switched to metric. But switching from most countries' patchwork of local customary units in 1850 to a unified English system would be a bigger improvement than switching from a unified English system to a unified metric system."}, {"answer": "Drug dealers have been at the forefront of teaching students the metric system for decades. That's how I learned to convert ounces to grams when I was in high-school. 3.5 grams to an eighth an ounce. Metric, Imperial, decimals and fraction conversions all in one little baggie of weed!"}, {"answer": "I'm in the UK. Distances are in Miles. Car mileage is in Miles Per Gallon (it's a different gallon, though). Height is feet and inches, and weight is stone and pounds. In the US you buy soda in Liters. The US is far from alone, ignoring Liberia and Burma, in this. Modern society in many places is just all mixed up."}, {"answer": "Don't Forget Belize. Why does everyone forget Belize when they bring up the old English system? That tiny relic of British Imperialism shoved on the Isthmus of North America. Inches for days in that place."}, {"answer": "Just chiming in to say that Liberia is using both imperial and metric at the same time, but metric has never been made official simply because nobody cares. The reason for the dual system is that Liberia is still one of the poorest countries on earth, and hence all goods are imported from wherever they can be obtained cheapest. Now some cars (almost exclusively used ones) are imported from the US, others from Europe, so you'll have gauges in miles and kilometers, as well as fuel indicators in gallons and liters. Same goes for clothes and fabrics - you'll have them in inches and meters. People need to be familiar with both, since the availability varies. Even some road signs are in km instead of the official miles (distances and speed limits alike), which might be considered as \"officially adopted\". Source: Been working there as a development finance specialist about 2.5 years ago."}, {"answer": "The US actually has adopted the metric system. That's why you see it on things like bottles and packaging. The thing is Americans understand the imperial system better so packaging and signage continues to use it alongside the metric system. In order to break the cycle would essentially require banning the imperial measure on packaging and other parts of daily life until people's perception of measurement changes but since people grew up with imperial measures they think in them. They mentally know a sheet of paper is half an inch shorter than a foot and they can mentally judge feet and inches."}, {"answer": "In defense of the customary system, it has several benefits over the metric system, namely its use of fractions and convenient metrics. There are 12 inches in a foot because 1/12, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, and 1/2 of a foot then come out to an integer number of inches. (1,2,3,4,6 respectively). Most of our customary system is in use for this reason. Most all of our measures are maximally divisible for their size. For example 12 (inched in a foot, points in a pica) is divisible by 1,2,3,4,6,12; 60 (seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour) by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30,60. The rest are often powers of 2 (2 tablespoons in an ounce, 8 ounces in a cup2 cups in a pint, 2 pints on a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon, 16 ounces in a pound, 2 weeks in a fortnight), so that they can be halved repeatedly with ease. Others are just a maximally divisible number times a power of 2 (24=12\u20222 hours in a day). Other units like the mile used to divide up nicely too, but the units they were based on are now uncommon, likely because we can travel so quickly by car. The metric system is instead based on decimals, and its ability to easily convert between units because all units are multiples of ten of the base unit has been much trouted, but it actually adds very little. Sure I can convert 2,000,000 meters into 2 Mega meters, but I could already do that! I just call it 2 million meters. A gigawatt is just a billion wats. This base ten conversion is not a nice property of the metric system then, but a result of any base ten system that has a special word for each third power of ten. We have that too, we just call 2,340,000 ft \"2.34 million feet\". Edit:spelling"}, {"answer": "Because that is not something that can be dictated as a country. The Federal government can adopt it for the purposes of the Federal government. Currently the Federal government is \"bilingual\" and you will see both imperial and metric units on labeled goods and such things as fall under the authority of the Federal government. However, at a lower level, that is up to each individual state and no state has adopted the metric system. Recently Hawaii and Oregon have proposed bills, but none of have passed. The short (if unsatisifying) answer is: we just haven't decided to as a country."}, {"answer": "Because there's really no compelling reason to other than \"everyone else is doing it.\" Sure, there's the science and engineering argument, but both fields already use metric either extensively or exclusively, so that leaves the everyday use argument, and that just falls apart. Kilometers don't make our cities closer together, and Celsius doesn't tell the weather more accurately than Farenheit (I'd argue that Farenheit is superior here). Plus, there's the cost. Just changing every single speed limit sign would cost billions."}, {"answer": "Why doesn't Great Britain change to drive on the same side of the road as much of the rest of the world? There would be some minor advantages, and a huge amount of cost. Go to a hardware store. Look at the number of products that are sized in nice round numbers of units. It isn't a simple matter of renaming things, the things are all sized in convenient fractions or multiples of inches (in the US) or meters (elsewhere). All those parts would have to shift over to things in metric sizes. They'd be similar, but different. As noted elsewhere, much of the US is already heavily metric. Why the rest will shift when it needs to."}, {"answer": "I feel like this belongs here: \"In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade\u2014which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to \u2018How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?\u2019 is \u2018Go fuck yourself,\u2019 because you can\u2019t directly relate any of those quantities.\" Wild Thing by Josh Bazell. Oh and still using a measurement for temperature which is based on the coldest day of the winter of 1708/09 in Danzig is kind of stupid, if you ask me."}, {"answer": "Mechanic here. I can tell you bolt head sizes in metric all day, but can't even spit ball what size a bolt is in standard measures. But if you tell me to go a kilometer down the road, you better change that to \"just over half a mile\" because metric distances mean nothing to me"}, {"answer": "Engineer here. Science has adopted SI globally, so US scientists use SI. Because scientists use SI, most engineers use SI on things that are big, important, and might involve other countries."}, {"answer": "The US tried to switch in the 70's/80's but nobody liked it so it was canceled. The STEM fields extensively use the metric system though."}, {"answer": "In general, engineers, scientists, and a few others use metric primarily. I work entirely in metric and only convert back when talking with customers."}, {"answer": "I know the oil industry doesn't use it because restrapping, changing the tools and measurement system would cost a lot of money that they don't want to spend. My job for a long time was converting from standard to metric based on API gravity or weight in lbs/per gallon at temperasure farenheight to centigrade temperature, density, cubes, and metric tonnes. Plus foreign tankers are all strapped in cubic metres so we have a separate tools for measuring level there than we do with shore tank figures. Thousands and thousands of hours I've spent doing it."}, {"answer": "For most people, whatever measurement system they are familiar with, and is the one they are confident of using, is the one that is better. People who have learnt metric from an early age, will say metric is better, while people who have learnt Imperial or US Customary measures from an early age will say that Imperial or US Customary measures are better. However, if one is to take a neutral position, and analyses the metric system, and compare it to any other measurement system, them metric is undoubtably better. All counties use metric, although no country is totally metric. Metrication is advancing in all countries, including the US. It has been for at least 100 years, and it will continue to be learnt, understood, and used by more and more people throughout the world every year. It's popularity increases as people see the many advantages of the metric system. Why is the metric system easier, and better, than Imperial or USC? The most frequently given answers include: 1\u2026Because metric is simple and consistent. There is only one meter and one kilometer and one liter..Unlike the mile (3 miles, international mile, US Survey mile, nautical mile.) and two gallons (Imperial gallon and US gallon) metric is simple and less confusing, fewer errors, less cost. 2\u2026Because it dramatically reduces conversion factors in calculations. Less time doing calculations, fewer errors, less wastage in material and time, less cost. 3\u2026Because metric prefix\u2019s enable whole numbers only. Avoiding decimal fractions and missinteruptation and errors. 4\u2026Because metric offers units from very large to very small. 5\u2026Because metric dimensions are easier to divide by three. 6\u2026Because it has links between related measurements. 7\u2026Because it uses logical symbols. 8..Because it is the only properly maintained system. 9..Because practically everyone uses it. For more than 95% of the world population, the metric system is the customary system of units, and for more than half of the industrialized world, it has been for at least a century. 10..Because when one uses it, there is no need to use any other system of measurement, because it is a complete system of measurement, and everything in the known universe can be measured with it. Also I believe that the metric system is better than Imperial measures because.. The metric system is a system. The metric system is the only measurement method ever developed as a complete system. All previous attempts used random developments at different places, at different times, and for different purposes. The metric system is universal. The metric system has been gradually adopted by all of the world\u2019s people. Despite often-vigorous opposition, the metric system has always been successful. The metric system is coherent. Because the metric system was developed as a complete system, it was possible to design it so that it has an internal consistency. Its internal coherence means that if you learn one part of the metric system you can easily extend your knowledge to all other parts. The metric system is capable. All crafts, trades, and professions can successfully use the metric system. Although the structure of the metric system is quite simple, it can be used in every human activity. The metric system is equitable. The metric system is fair and just to all who use it. The metric system is simple. The metric system uses only 7 base units and 22 units with special names \u2014 29 units in all. There are now only 20 old measures left that are non-SI units currently accepted for use with the International System. The metric system is supported. International treaties and research keep the metric system modern and forward looking. The metric system is fundamental. The metric system is the only system used internationally. It is now fundamental to all measurements, both old and new. The metric system is unique. The metric system is unique because: it was planned; it is decimal; it has prefixes; and it is human in scale. It is unique because there has never been a measuring system like it. The metric system is legal. Legislation in every country in the world supports the metric system. It is often the sole method of measurement recognised by governments. International agreements also support the metric system so that contracts written in metric units have validity across international borders. The US adopted the metric system, when it was made legal and official in 1866, with the Metric Act, the only measurement system to have an Act of Congress. The primary reason that it has never been universally accepted, is because its uptake is voluntary, whereas standard/USC is by default mandatory, and the first measurements learnt in schools, thereby resulting in metric to be mainly understood, through messy and unpopular conversions to standard/USC"}, {"answer": "Hey, I'm from India, a metric using country, and let me tell you that we don't just use the metric system, we sometimes use the imperial (american) system sometimes too. A barber can cut in inches or centimeters. Wood, cloth, tiles, etc. are still measured in inches and feet. Gasoline and other liquids are sometimes measured in gallons. Volume is measured in gallons for devices and appliances. etc, etc, etc. So in addition to everyone else's answers, the whole world uses both systems whenever it is convenient."}, {"answer": "Because people with a deep sense of misplaced patriotism think that we need to be different, thus freedom units^tm. Plus metrication would cost money and people are weird about how the government spends it."}, {"answer": "The people use both in their lives, but it is very expensive to change all of the signs on roads and other public places."}, {"answer": "Isn't a miscalculation between SI and US something that caused one of the Space Shuttle disasters?"}, {"answer": "I think this had largely to do with post WWII era construction. America's 'Big Boom' happened in part because most of the world-wide infrastructure for manufacturing was destroyed, damaged, or converted to military hardware during the war. As a result the US, having not lost its factories, became a manufacturing power house. Had we adopted the ISoU prior, the 'inches' would have been a thing of the past. However, even though manufacturing has declined in the last 20 years or so, many generations have been manufacturing on the 'inches' scale. Some industries made the conversion but at times I feel like its just complacency and a lack of desire to change/learn something new."}, {"answer": "We tried and it never caught on. That's why we have soda bottles in liters. The major soda companies spent quite a bit to switch their production equipment to metric when we tried to change as a whole country. It never caught on and the soda companies didn't see any advantage to spending the money to switch back after the movement died."}, {"answer": "Liberia and Myanmar (Burma) are both in the process of switching over to the metric system. The US stands alone."}, {"answer": "As someone who went from never using metric to using it all the time, I think it has to with the people in charge of it becoming the school curriculum nationwide are all old. What they have ingrained is one thing, and for their whole world to change (even in a slight way) is more headache than they'd want. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but why would they want to go out of their way to do it?"}, {"answer": "Odd thing is \"time\" isn't measured in the metric system really unless working with small values... Second Millisecond Microsecond Nanosecond Picosecond But conversely, there's no kilosecond, megosecond, gigasecond, terasecond, unless talking about astronomical values I think. Instead, we use minutes/hours/days/months/years."}, {"answer": "As a side note, many lives have been lost and billions have been spent because of errors while converting"}, {"answer": "As others have said, when the United States tried to switch over to the metric system about 40 years ago, the public didn't take to it. But have you noticed that the switch was never really implemented in full? Here's an example: what do you think the cost would be to replace all those mile markers, one every tenth of a mile, along all 47,856 miles of interstate highways in the country? Not to mention the signage along non interstate highways! It's just too damn expensive!"}, {"answer": "I don't understand why there can't be a slow and steady initiative to gradually ween off the imperial system and use the metric system. Mandate it in all our schools to to put a much heavier emphasis on the metric system. Add kilometers/meters to road signs in addition to the existing Miles. So when you're driving on an interstate, you'll see a sign that says something like, \"Los Angeles: 345 Miles / 555 Kilometers\""}, {"answer": "For much the same reason that we use QWERTY keyboards instead of Dvorak. The productivity gains wouldn't feel worth the investment of time and mental energy to convert for most of us."}, {"answer": "We do use it, I personally use it in engineering. Most people choose not to because they grew up with the standard."}, {"answer": "At least in the field of civil engineering, switching over would cause a decade of stagnation, not to mention most of the practitioners losing productivity on a large scale for a LONG time. They (we) would lose our intuition for the numbers. I personally don't see how English vs. SI units measure things any differently; it's arbitrary what you use. I used both systems extensively in school, and it's not really that hard to use either one. I think you should have to explain why we should exclusively use one system of units, other than the argument \"it just makes sense.\""}, {"answer": "Metrologist here. The official measurement system is metric SI in every country. This provides a traceable path to the 7 standard units of the SI. All primary standards operated by that country's national measurement system will be expressed in units derived from those units. E.g. Volume is length^3 in units of metres. This is different to what the general public sees. However, the true amount of something will be based on the SI, then converted to customary units using a defined conversion factor."}, {"answer": "The same reason we still have the electoral college and marijuana legislation. It's yet another outdated thing we've never bothered to get rid of that causes a lot of problems, but not enough for people to stick their necks out and solve."}, {"answer": "It would expensive to change over all the signs for speed limits and distances but mostly there is no will to change. The mindset is, it has always been this way and it works why change it now?"}, {"answer": "Every other country had a plan and stuck to it. The US had a policy that metric was better, but conversion had to be voluntary. The Metric Act of 1866 let everyone be as metric as they wanted to, so those who wanted to metricate did so and ignored those who didn't. (The domestic auto industry converted in the 70's). In some ways, this makes metrication harder, as those who wish to metricate just do, leaving only the opposition caring enough to be vocal. The politicians listen to the vocal and continue to insist metrication be voluntary. The pols don't even realize how many industries and multinational corporations in the US are metric. The auto industry has a lot of leverage with its supply base and forced them to metricate as well. Smaller companies may have more of a problem buying metric parts they need at fair prices."}, {"answer": "One big reason is the interstate system. Changing all the speed limit signs would be expensive, and people would have to get used to it, but also how the exit systems work. The exits arent just numbered 1,2,3,4 etc. They are numbered by what mile they are, so if you are at mile 14, you pass exit 1r, but the next exit might not be for 3 miles which would be exit 17, skippinh 15 and 16. Also the interstates have mile markers on the side of the road every 1/10 of a mile, so that would have to be changed too. Ut would be HUGELY expensive for no benefit other than a slightly easier system for conversions."}, {"answer": "Automotive industry is mostly metric with a little standard tossed in. Short of older classics and some early 90's vehicles, I couldn't tell you the last time I used a standard tool short of improvising. Engine sizes are metric, bolts, nuts and many parts are labeled in metric. However hoses, lines, and similar items are often in standard. The odd ball is wheels and tires. Tires incorporate both in their sizing. 225/60r16? That's 225mm tread width, fitting a 16 inch wheel with a sidewall ratio of 60% the tread width."}, {"answer": "Because we don't have to. There is no real drive to change. We are a big enough country and most of us only interact with Americans that there is little incentive to change. When we collectively have to interact regularly with people on the Metric system, then we will more happily embrace it. There is no need to government mandate 'force' it. Same with learning a foreign language. When our population really needs to collectively learn a foreign language, we will....until then, we don't need to."}, {"answer": "It is hard to change a thing we're all used to and most people refuse to change or learn new system. But what we can do is a gradual change, starting from the scientific community, where they really do understand the advantages of the metric system and go from there. NASA have already adopted the metric system after the big snafu a few years ago. We can do it!"}, {"answer": "What's funny is how metric has (to some people's POV) \"infiltrated\" the U.S. just for practical reasons. Go look at your Jack Daniel's bottle. See that word near the bottom? It reads \"Litre.\" Europe is a huge market, so they're kind of calling the tune on that and other beverages. It's not the old guy sippin' whiskey on his Kentucky porch that demanded his \"fifth\" switch to metric units."}, {"answer": "It is slowly changing as schools are no longer concentrating on teaching inches and ounces as measurement , it does take time though but as kids grow up they will understand what mm and cm are more than inches and feet. Do they still teach inches and feet in the US schools? Right now everything in the uk is labeled in both."}, {"answer": "Imperial units are still the standard in some fields. International aviation uses nautical miles as the standard of distance and feet as the standard of altitude. I would imagine the same for nautical navigation, but my experience has been in the air. Edit: As for the reason why, because it's a hassle."}, {"answer": "Interestingly enough in the North Sea we still use Customary units for oilfield work (lb, US gallons, US barrels, PSI, etc.) but when reporting to clients that are Europe based we have to convert over to bar, kg, m3, L etc. In Canada they use all metric in their oilfield units."}, {"answer": "I always thought it was to befuddle possible invaders. And so our spy's could report if any national forces are learning miles/feet, causing them to show their hand. I'm not right, never thought I was. I'm gonna keep using my explanation when I hear it mentioned."}, {"answer": "Because the British suck. They arrested the French Ambassador who brought it to us, and he got chucked in a Caribbean jail and ended up dying before being able to deliver it. So yeah, thanks British empire, again."}, {"answer": "I read that machinist unions oppose metric whenever that discussion comes up because many of the measurements in hardware are done in respect to inches. Screws, sockets, etc."}, {"answer": "It is because adjusting to new things is tough on people. Kind of like Burma nowadays is called Myanmar but people keep calling it Burma. ;-)"}, {"answer": "I never get this question. We officially adopted the metric system long ago. Does it not count until we criminalize use of standard units?"}, {"answer": "It's not true, many countries still use a mix of units, especially European counties. Example, The UK still posts speeds in MPH."}, {"answer": "Have you ever seen parents try to teach \"new math\" I'd imagine changing the measuring system would be disastrous lol"}, {"answer": "Americans don't want to have to learn anything \"new\". See Common Core and the outrage it has created."}, {"answer": "Didn't the Reagan administration decide not to switch because they wanted to minimize unnecessary spending?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1631295", "title": "ISO 1000", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["International standard ISO 1000 (\"SI units and recommendations for the use of their multiples and of certain other units\", International Organization for Standardization, 1992) is the ISO standard describing the International System of Units (SI).", "International standard ISO 1000 (\"SI units and recommendations for the use of their multiples and of certain other units\", International Organization for Standardization, 1992) is the ISO standard describing the International System of Units (SI)."]}}]}]

Why do french fries taste awful if reheated, but something like pizza is comparable whether fresh or reheated?

2jlv7x

[{"answer": "I assume you're asking about microwave reheating? Microwaving essentially boils your food. Oils will make your food more soggy, water will evaporate, drying it out. Something crispy like a fry becomes soggy. Something moist like rice becomes dry."}, {"answer": "Pizza reheated in the oven tastes a ton better than it does in the microwave. Put it at 350 for 10 minutes and it's fantastic."}, {"answer": "Only way to resuscitate french fries is to either put them in a pan in the oven with some olive oil on them or fry them in a pan with olive oil."}, {"answer": "In my experience, rice and macaroni and cheese reheat just fine if you cover them up and add a little water to rehydrate them. To answer the title, I think it has to do with the structure of the food itself. Fries are crispy because the water in them has basically been replaced with oil which doesn't soften the starch. When you microwave them any water inside steams up and enters the fried area. Pizza, on the other hand, is basically just bread, sauce, and cheese. Bread is already moist, the sauce has enough water to not dry out, and cheese has a lot of oil already which keeps it from getting dry."}, {"answer": "Mallard reactions are what make food crispy. They are a class of reactions that **only occur in the absence of water**. The breadlike texture of pizza, and the oil from the cheese, allow the water to be driven out of the food during re-heating. For fries, the potato has less airspaces, and the fry holds less oil (no cheese or greasy meat), so there is no hot oil to push out the water, and no channels to push it out of."}, {"answer": "Dry foods need to have a bit of water in a bowl in the microwave as well to keep moisture. French Fries are incredibly starchy and oiled and neither react super well to microwaving a second time."}, {"answer": "Sort of related. Toaster ovens are the best thing ever for reheating pizza (among other foods). Takes a little bit longer than a microwave, but so worth the wait!"}, {"answer": "Oven man. Cant stress that enough for leftovers. Everything from pizza to chicken strips, fish and frys. All taste awesome reheated in the oven."}, {"answer": "re-heating french fries in a toaster oven is pretty good actually. it depends on the food and where it is re-heated."}, {"answer": "Rice - dampen a paper towel and place it over the rice and microwave. It'll come out like normal"}, {"answer": "Fries are loaded with starches that absorb water. They get mushy and stale if left to cool."}, {"answer": "I disagree that pizza is comparable fresh or reheated."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "10885", "title": "French fries", "section": "Section::::Preparation.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 7, "end_paragraph_id": 7, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Most french fries are produced from frozen potatoes which have been blanched or at least air-dried industrially. Most chains that sell fresh cut fries use the Idaho Russet Burbank variety of potatoes. It has been the standard for french fries in the United States. The usual fat for making french fries is vegetable oil. In the past, beef suet was recommended as superior, with vegetable shortening as an alternative. In fact, McDonald's used a mixture of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil until 1990, when they switched to vegetable oil with beef flavoring. Starting in the 1960s, more fast food restaurants have been using frozen french fries.", "Most french fries are produced from frozen potatoes which have been blanched or at least air-dried industrially. Most chains that sell fresh cut fries use the Idaho Russet Burbank variety of potatoes. It has been the standard for french fries in the United States. The usual fat for making french fries is vegetable oil. In the past, beef suet was recommended as superior, with vegetable shortening as an alternative. In fact, McDonald's used a mixture of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil until 1990, when they switched to vegetable oil with beef flavoring. Starting in the 1960s, more fast food restaurants have been using frozen french fries."]}}]}]

Why are rape fantasies so common among women?

2609es

[{"answer": "First of all, I want to say that the rest of the comments on this post thus far are horse shit. The key word in this is \"fantasy.\" These women don't actually *want* to be raped, they want to role play a dangerous situation. It's the same reason people enjoy horror movies or roller coasters- simulated danger for the sake of an adrenalin rush. For you, OP, to say it makes you lose respect for a women with rape fantasies would be comparable to women losing respect for you because of the porn you like to watch. They have control over the situation in these fantasies, it's fake. Edit: When I made this post, there were only about three other comments in this thread, and they were pretty immature. A lot of you have since made some great points."}, {"answer": "People have spent their entire careers [trying to answer that question]( URL_1 ). The only definitive answer is the one that applies to most questions beginning with, \"Why do women. . ..\": \"Depends on the woman.\" As you seem to be troubled by this, however, I thought this quote [from Michael Castleman]( URL_0 ) might be helpful: > At first glance, rape fantasies make no sense. Why fantasize about something that in real life would be traumatic, repugnant, and life-threatening? > > But on closer examination, such fantasies are not unusual. Many men daydream about getting the girl by rescuing her from a dangerous situation--without the slightest wish to confront armed thugs, or be trapped in a fire on the 23rd floor. None of us can really say why (or how) we're turned on by what we are. I'm sure you've had fantasies that surprised you. Don't be too quick to judge women as less than sane because of theirs. I'd also like to mention that you can't assume that every woman who has rape fantasies wants to act them out, or that every woman who would like to act out a rape fantasy considers it a deal breaker if a man isn't willing to play along. Fantasy is fantasy, and most people are happy to keep it that way."}, {"answer": "Assuming you are a straight male, with little experience in the BDSM world. How much do like her being on top? How much do you like eating pussy? Do you like having your face sat on? Surrounded by that wet, sweet cunt of hers? Her lips grinding up and down your face? Thighs clamped over your head, you can hardly breathe, but you just love it? You come up for air, but she grabs the back of your head and shoves it between her thighs, taking your mouth and lips for another ride. She holds you into the moist little slit of hers until she cums over and over. Do you like it when sits down on your cock and hands braced against your chest rides you until she's cums? She unwraps her fingers from your hair and falls back, ready to take a nap. Most guys do love it, because it's great. Who doesn't love pussy? Hey, dude, hate to tell you, but you just got used for sex. That's it, she just USED you to get herself off. It can be wonderful to feel THAT wanted that she can't help but take it from you. It's nice when you lose that control from time to time. She just raped your face and you let her. Rape fantasies are just that. Take me and lose control. Grind me, need me, want me, they say. There's such a culture of men being unable to be raped, and women being so able to be raped, that rough CONSENSUAL rape play tends to be pretty one sided. When in reality, we as men don't even notice the power dynamic when it happens to us. It's all about power, and consensual play. Fantasy is the word you seem to be glossing over. Consensual non-consent is the phrase you are missing. It's generally saying that it's okay to objectify me and be rough with me, as long as we both know we are playing. Sex is fun, let's play. Remember your safe word."}, {"answer": "This, of course, varies by person. I saw one good explanation: The fantasy allows a woman to do things sexually that she wouldn't normally do, and she is allowed to not feel guilty for doing them or debauched for wanting them. Hence the rape fantasy. Also, feeling helpless and out of control - within limits (e.g. with a trusted partner and a safe word, or on a roller coaster) - is a good adrenaline rush."}, {"answer": "Many women fantasize about being dominated. When you fantasize about something repeatedly, your fantasy gets more extreme. Rape fantasies are simply a more extreme domination fantasy. Maybe the fantasy starts as wanting rougher sex, then as that fantasy is replayed over and over, it becomes wanting to be manhandled, then wanting to be held down, then restrained. Pretty soon, it's a rape fantasy. Realize that most rape fantasies are very different from an actual rape."}, {"answer": "Hold on, there's not a \"social stigma\" against rape. Rape is one of the worst things you can do to another person; it's not some stigma like using the word retarded."}, {"answer": "Personally, my own research on the topic leads me to think that because of the guilt and shame often associated with sexual woman (slut-shaming etc), women are hesitant to admit to desiring sex. The rape fantasy is a means to an end, in which they can enjoy all the good things about sex - the pleasure, feeling intensely desired and appreciated - without the guilt or shame of having had morally reprehensible sexual desire. A lot of this research is spouted by misogynists and anti-feminists (who are usually of the opinion that women SHOULD feel shame about sex). Obviously I don't think women should feel shame about it, but I think a lot of women have an ingrained sense of guilt about sex. Again, as many of the posts have said, it depends on the woman, but as a base line I think this idea has merit."}, {"answer": "If they've been raped or sexually assaulted it's a way of taking control of a situation they had no control over. It's a way to own it and be in control there."}, {"answer": "Try explaining this to a 5 year old!"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "958156", "title": "Rape fantasy", "section": "Section::::Fantasy.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 4, "start_character": 250, "end_paragraph_id": 4, "end_character": 472, "bleu_score": 0.9234732618882052}]}]

A piano and a violin can play the same note but their sound differs; you can tell them apart. How do notes differ with each instrument, but retain the characteristics of its assigned pitch?

5z61tp

[{"answer": "Sounds are usually described by three characteristics - pitch, loudness, and quality (or \"timbre\"). Pitch is determined by frequency and describes how high or low a note is. Loudness is what it sounds like (forgive the pun - I simply mean loudness is self-explanatory). Everything else is generally categorized as \"timbre,\" which is what allows you to tell the difference between a piano and violin playing a note at the same pitch and loudness. Quite a bit goes into timbre such as harmonic content, attack and decay, and vibrato. I don't really know enough about those to explain them further other than to say they are characteristics of sound waves that affect how you hear, but don't change the pitch or loudness. If you can find an app that lets you play around with a synthesizer, you can usually change those settings directly so you can play around with how they affect sound. Edit: There are some more technical responses below from people who know more about this than I do. Check them out for more details. And thanks to everyone who provided more details! Edit 2: Most of the comments below are saying that attack (the beginning of a sound and how long it takes to get to peak volume/loudness) and slight variations in the pitch and loudness are the physical properties that create different timbres, though the area is still being researched. Apparently when you play a note on an instrument the part of the instrument producing the note actually produces multiple frequencies and can have slight variations in loudness. The frequencies not associated with the pitch you hear are called overtones. You generally only perceive the fundamental frequency (the pitch of the note), but the overtones change how you perceive that. To bring it back to your original question, you can tell the difference between a piano and violin playing middle C because they have different attack, overtones, and the loudness during the note will change slightly. And you might not be able to tell the difference if you didn't hear the attack (the beginning of the note). As an added bonus, if I understand correctly, the different overtones result in a different spectral flux and the changing loudness over the duration of the note results in a different spectral envelope."}, {"answer": "Oooooo!!! Somebody asked about the best electives we took in college, and I unwittingly answered this exact question in my excitement (with bonus radio info, because that's what I do for a living now)! > Physics of musical acoustics, what I remember of it, mostly went extremely in depth on what makes audio audio. > For instance, the timbre, or the *kind* of sound, is determined by the type of waveform. A guitar, for instance, has a sine wave, as [can be easily seen in slow motion]( URL_2 ). A violin, on the other hand, has a sawtooth wave, due to the [string constantly catching the bow as it vibrates]( URL_1 ). Percussion has a scattered waveform that doesn't resonate well, hence why most people don't think of it having \"pitch\" in the same way other instruments do. What we think of as electronic sounds are usually [a square waveform]( URL_0 ). > The pitch of the sound is determined by the frequency of the wave, or how many times the wave \"cycles\" in a given time period. The slow motion guitar video I posted above does a great job of showing this, actually. The thicker strings do not vibrate as quickly as the thinner ones do, which is why they are lower in pitch. You can change the amount of cycles these strings will emit by tightening and loosening the strings. The same thing is done with the air pockets in instruments like the oboe or the trumpet--by changing the size of the vibrating space, you change the pitch. > Lastly, there is the amplitude. Going back to the slow motion guitar, you might think that the cycles would be affected by how hard you plucked the strings. But if you've ever played a guitar, you know that only the volume is affected by how hard you pluck the strings, not the pitch. This is because they vibrate further up and down, not faster or slower. So, simply put, the amplitude of a waveform is your volume. The higher up and down the wave goes, the more powerful it will be. > Now where it gets tricky is when you get radio involved... Amplitude modulation (AM), for instance, changes the amplitude of a radio signal that is of a much higher frequency than we can hear, and, then your radio when it receives that Very High Frequency (VHF) signal, then knows what frequency to strip off of it (the frequency you tuned your radio to), and leaves only those minor variations that were inserted in the signal. Those minor variations in amplitude? They're the audio that was originally inserted into the signal, called the \"intelligence\". > Frequency Modulation (FM) does the same thing, only it inserts minor variations in the frequency of the signal, then strips off that frequency in the same way and takes the difference, leaving just the original audio frequency. > Anyway... physics is awesome."}, {"answer": "/u/tellahthesage is right on the money: timbre is what defines it all, and there's a lot that goes into it. Let's start with a pure tone (i.e. a sine wave) at 1000 Hz, or 1kHz. (For reference, that's close to the C two octaves above middle C.) **Harmonics** are multiples of the frequency at lower levels, e.g. 2kHz, 4kHz, 8kHz, and so forth. Adding different harmonics in different mathematical patterns will result in different wave shapes and different sounds. [Wikipedia has some good links on the subject]( URL_0 ), including sample clips of the main wave forms. Incidentally, a given instrument may 'voice' two (or more) notes simultaneously, with a harmonic series for each note, which adds complexity and in some cases (like percussion), perhaps noise. Now that we have a wave form, we can vary the pitch of it by a little bit. This is **vibrato**, and is described by a width (how much it varies - maybe a quarter tone for example) and frequency (how fast it varies). A similar (but not identical) effect can be got by varying the *volume* by a small amount, which is called **tremolo**. Now, you can change how fast the note gets up to 'full' volume (**attack**), and how fast it fades away afterwards (**decay**). A flute has a relatively slow attack. A hammered piano note has a much faster attack, and a glockenspiel (with metal bars and hard mallets) is faster still. A violin note doesn't actually decay as long as the musician is bowing it continuously, whereas a damped xylophone will fall off very quickly. And that's...most of it. Except for all of the other parts. :-)"}, {"answer": "Everything mentioned here is great! Superb answers, all. One thing is missing tho: noise, and its colours. In addition to the basic tone and its various overtones, there is always some level of [noise]( URL_6 ) in any given [timbre.]( URL_8 ) Noise can mean many things, but in this context, it means sound that is not recognizable as one focussed frequency, but is spread out across the spectrum; [white noise]( URL_7 ) being probably the most well-known variety. White noise was given the name because, like white light, it was once thought to be sound spread evenly across the spectrum, AKA all frequencies at once, evenly distributed. This has since been disproven, but among [the other colours of noise]( URL_5 ), [pink noise]( URL_0 ) has been found to truly give an equal loudness to all audible frequencies. That's just a fun tangent tho; no physical instrument consistently produces any one colour of noise perfectly, but they all do produce different colours of noise, changing along with the other elements of timbre. Elements of noise like the breath of a flautist may increase or decrease with loudness, or the flautist may deliberately make their sound *more breathy* (more noisy) by varying the shape of their mouth, AKA their [embrouchure.]( URL_1 ) The bowed instruments are a classic example; the bow produces a [fairly noisy and complex timbre,]( URL_2 ) as the sound is produced by friction, an action we all have experienced as being \"noisy\". Once you get into electronic instruments, noise becomes a fully malleable thing; you can increase it, modulate it, make it reactive to loudness/pitch/time in new ways, or just completely neglect to add it, for a decidedly unnatural yet pure sound. Incidentally, noise is a vital component of modern emergency vehicle sirens; [it helps our ears detect where the sound is coming from,]( URL_3 ) an incredibly useful thing in busy traffic. Hope this was as fun to read as it was to write! Edit: Whoops! Turns out I was wrong, and pink noise isn't equally loud across the spectrum; [gray noise]( URL_4 ) is the correct answer, I just like pink noise better, and my desires hijacked my memory."}, {"answer": "In a single word: overtones. URL_0 While yes, others have already mentioned characteristics of a given sound, the one thing that differentiates different instruments are the array of overtones produced when the instrument is played. Lots of factors can influence the overtones (which include \"harmonics\") and it has even been theorized that in some cases, instrument components or construction techniques have influenced the distribution of overtones (one example being a Stradivarius violin). Even more cool are \"sum\" or \"difference\" tones - [which exist only in the mind of the listener]( URL_1 )."}, {"answer": "There are three elements of sound: pitch, amplitude, and timbre. Pitch refers to the rate at which the sound is vibrating, measured by frequency over a second. A440 refers to a sound vibrating at 440 times a second, for example. This is measured in hertz (hz). Amplitude refers to attack, peak, and decay of a sound. So essentially how fast and loud does the sound peak to its max volume, and likewise how does it decay back into silence (or the next note). Finally, and most importantly, is timbre, which refers to the harmonic qualities of a sound. This is what determines the unique quality of any instrument or voice. Essentially, every sound made by a physical source (hitting a cymbal, striking a piano note, attacking a string on a guitar, etc.) is composed not just of the \u201cprinciple\u201d or \u201cfundamental\u201d note \u2014 what we might call \u201cmiddle C\u201d \u2014 but of lots of other notes or pitches that aren\u2019t as prominent as the fundamental. These other notes that compose the entire sound of a given pitch on an instrument are called \u201charmonics\u201d or \u201covertones.\u201d (Technically there are some minor differences between these two words, but for the purposes of this explanation, don\u2019t worry). The best way to illustrate how this works this is to google \u201csine wave,\u201d and you\u2019ll hear an electronic generated sound wave that is only composed of a single note, such as just a 440hz. It sounds really odd and unnatural. This is because there aren\u2019t any other The reason every instrument sounds different is because the amplitude of these overtones are varied. For example, the fundamental pitch of the note is twice as loud as the first overtone, which is an octave higher than the fundamental. The first overtone is four times as loud as the second overtone, which is a fifth higher than the first overtone (and an octave and an a fifth higher than the fundamental). This continues on a loose logarithmic scale, with the amplitude of each successive overtone decreasing at a given rate. What this rate is for each instrument and the \u201charmonic\u201d composition of each pitch is different for each instrument (and each person\u2019s voice, or any physical sound). You can, interestingly, map the composition of an instrument visually or mathematically. This is how electronic instruments attempt to \u201csample\u201d or \u201csynthesize\u201d real physical instruments through electronic means. There is software out there that, for example, has spent thousands of hours sampling real string instruments to such a precise degree that it\u2019s nearly impossible to tell the difference between the electronic and real versions of, say, a violin. You can adjust for all three elements of sounds. And there\u2019s a reason that this particular plugin costs somewhere around $5,000. Hope that helps."}, {"answer": "Timbre and pitch are fundamentally two different aspects of sound. Like color and shape in visual arts. Just completely different aspects. I'm sure a lot of others have gotten it but I'll add my two cents as a staff pianist and composer for a fairly large organization, who's thought about this stuff for a long time, at least on an artistic level. Timbre (pronounced tam-burr), is the quality of a sound. There are theories about where this comes from: for example, there are different balances within the overtone series, for different instruments. If you haven't heard of the overtone series (or harmonic series) the basic idea is this: every single note that you hear, there are actually about 8 notes above that note that are sounding above that note (produced by divisions of the fundamental note). They are tough to hear, but they are there. And it's not really 8 notes above, it's more like infinite notes above, but the human ear is limited in how many it perceives. URL_0 From the article \"The relative amplitudes (strengths) of the various harmonics primarily determine the timbre of different instruments and sounds, though onset transients, formants, noises, and inharmonicities also play a role. For example, the clarinet and saxophone have similar mouthpieces and reeds, and both produce sound through resonance of air inside a chamber whose mouthpiece end is considered closed. Because the clarinet's resonator is cylindrical, the even-numbered harmonics are less present. The saxophone's resonator is conical, which allows the even-numbered harmonics to sound more strongly and thus produces a more complex tone. The inharmonic ringing of the instrument's metal resonator is even more prominent in the sounds of brass instruments.\" So basically, the physical aspects of each instrument will effect how loud or soft those invisible notes above the actual note are (the fundamental), which produces differences in the character of the sound. As an extra thing, there's a great story in the composer John Adams' memoir URL_1 where he talks about experimenting in the 70's with tape recordings of different instruments. Long story short, if they took tape recordings of different instruments playing a C note, for example, and they cut off the beginning of the note (the attack), it became MUCH more difficult to distinguish between the different instruments. In other words, a big part of the difference in timbre comes from the attack of a note, while the sustained part is harder to differentiate."}, {"answer": "Well I'm not seeing any that a 5 year old could understand, so I'll take a crack at it. Sound is made up of waves in the air, just like you see waves in the water. When there's no sound, the line is flat. No waves. Like this ______ When there is sound, the air is all wavy, like this ~~~~ When the sound gets higher, that means there's more waves per second. So 200~ is twice as high as 100~. 400~ is twice as high as 200~ and so on. We call these octaves. When two different instruments play the same note; they are playing the same amount of waves (200~) but the waves just look different and have a different shape. Some even have more waves stacked on top of them (usually double or triple the amount, just at a lower volume so you can't hear them as distinctly) Hope this helped someone! This is how I explained to my daughter. Source: audio engineer and father to a seven year old."}, {"answer": "Sound is air moving back and forth. The faster it moves back and forth, the higher the note sounds. Picture this as your arm moving up and down in front of your face. To produce the same note but with a different \"sound\", small sub-vibrations occur simultaneously along with the \"main\" vibration. Picture this as your hand waving up and down as your arm also moves up and down in front of your face. Two notes from different instruments have the same \"main\" vibration (your arm in the above description), but different sub-vibrations (your hand in the above description)."}, {"answer": "Sound is made of a bunch of wobbles. Some wobble fast and some wobble slow. When you have a string, or a drum head, or a tube that's doing the wobbling, only some lengths of wobble are allowed to happen. Imagine a piece of string, held tight, and you pluck it in the middle. You can see the middle goes up and down a lot, but the ends don't move at all. Now, imagine geeeeently pinching the middle. The pattern that happens now is you get two halves that wobble up and down, in sync but in opposite directions. This means the \"wave\" on the string has half the distance between crests. Because maths, this makes the rate at which it wobbles twice as high; when the \"wavelength\" is halved, the \"frequency\" is doubled. You can do the same thing but pinching in two places (as long as the places are evenly spread out), three, four, five and on to infinity places. The collection of these pitches that are allowed to happen is called the \"Overtone Series\". For anything that wobbles like the string (drum head, air in a tube etc.), the lowest allowed pitch is called the \"Fundamental\". This is almost always the loudest wobble that happens, and is the pitch that you hear when comparing the sound of a violin and piano playing the same note. The thing that makes the sound different is how strong each overtone is. Every instrument, every human and animal voice, anything that makes sound like this, has a unique pattern in the strengths of its overtones. For example, if you listen to something called a \"Square Wave\" as you get higher and higher up the overtone series, each one gets half as strong. Real instruments, and especially human voices, have very complicated patterns in their overtones. In fact, it is these patterns that allow us to tell vowels apart! Try this: start with your mouth wide open and say Ah. Now slowly close your lips, while making the ah sound with your voice box. What you'll hear is the vowel turning from an Ah into an Ooh, without changing pitch! This is because when your mouth closes, some of the very highest overtones get completely stopped, leaving only the lowest few to make it out of your mouth. Now try this: start off with an Ooh. Now make the sound really nasal, like you're pushing the sound through your nose. Move your lips around to make the shape of an Ee sound. If you do it slowly and carefully, and play around with if, you should hear a note that you aren't singing, that sounds quite a lot higher than the sound of your throat. Congratulations, you've found an overtone in your own voice! Overtones and the \"harmonic series\", which is all the notes that make up the overtone series, have been studied since Pythagoras first started thinking about why music sounded pleasant. Since then we've got very very got at choosing what kind of overtones we want our instruments to play. Even singers can do it; if you listen to good Barbershop quartets you can often hear very high notes that no one is singing, where the overtones of everyone's voices line up and ring really loudly. Train horns have been chosen to have two notes that don't share any overtones, so they really grab your attention by sounding really unpleasant. Overtones are all around us, and at the very least, you can make some cool mouth noises now. I hope this helps!"}, {"answer": "There are a lot of good answers here so I wont bother repeating all that juicy information. Once you're comfortable with the answer, I did want to leave you with a new, but related question. Pick a random note and sing the vowel sounds: A E I O U. How can you sing/speak the same pitch but tell different vowel sounds apart? It turn out to be almost the same thing as piano vs violin playing the same note: The mixture of harmonics/overtones (and a few lesser elements of the timbre in the vocal instrument). You mention in another comment that you record music on your computer. If you have a spectrogram plugin for the recording software, trying recoding yourself singing \"A E I O U\" and see how it looks. I think its pretty cool, myself. Here's a spectrogram of someone saying [\"I can see you\"]( URL_0 ). Notice how all of the vowel sounds have those (less dark) overtones above the fundamental pitch being spoken. Those are what gives the different vowels each its own timbre. A bit of a tangent but hopefully you found that interesting :)"}, {"answer": "According to Daniel Levitin, known obsessor over sound and how we hear it, it was mentioned once briefly, the attack, or the very first instant we hear a note on any instrument (or in nature) is the key factor to identifying it's source. Running a bow across a string sounds different than picking a string, sounds different than the same note coming out of a brass or wind instrument, etc. Our brains pick up on this subtlety, good composers make the most of our ability to distinguish instruments, and without the attack, our brains are unable to detect the source of a note. Dr. Levitin said if you could cut out the attack, ie. the first tenth of a second of a given sound, we would be unable to know exactly the source and it would just sound like the note. As far as vibrato goes that's a back and forth tweak on a string to give it a little extra something, it changes the frequency of the note a little sharp and a little flat repeatedly, very fast and gives the note a lot more character."}, {"answer": "Here's a fun experiment - if you have audio editing software cut the attack off of a bunch of different instruments playing the same pitch. Without the attack it becomes much more difficult to identify an instrument. There are many other factors like timbre which is essentially harmonic content produced by each instrument but the attack is perhaps the biggest one and one that few people realize."}, {"answer": "Imagine the same note played by a piano and a violin, for the sake of easy comparison. In a piano, a hammer strikes the string which makes the string vibrate. The pitch of the note is determined by how often in a second the string vibrates up and down. This is the lowest so-called \u201cmode\u201d of the string, the \u201cslowest\u201d vibration, causing a big bulge: \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 But, at the same time, the string can also vibrate in higher modes: the first half can wiggle up while the second half wiggles down, and vice versa: \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 This vibration has a pitch that\u2019s twice as high as the lowest vibration mode. But it is not as strong. The next mode has 3 bulges, the next mode has 4 bulges, and so on... each of these modes being usually weaker than the other modes, sometimes with certain exceptions. In a violin for example, the combinations of these modes can make the string appear to vibrate in an interesting pattern, looking rather like a triangle changing its shape, the pointy bit moving from one end to the other, than round bulges wiggling up and down. This is because the bow constantly scratches the string, which creates a lot of higher modes: \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022 \u2022\u2022\u2022\u2022 The combination of these modes makes the timbre of the sound generated by this string. If the higher modes are very weak then the sound is very \u201csterile\u201d and muffled. if the higher modes are stronger then the sound is brighter. As an example, imagine a flute and a violin playing the same note. The air column in a flute produces mainly the lowest mode, which makes a flute sound very \u201csimple\u201d. The same note, played with a violin, sounds much more \u201ccomplex\u201d, brighter. The reason is that the bow scratches the string over and over again, producing lots of higher modes which make the sound appear much more vivid. Each instrument produces different strengths for each of these modes, and that variation of combinations of modes makes every instrument sound different. And this is valid no matter if the sound is produced by a string or a column of air or by even other means like a vibrating metal plate or the head of a drum. Plates or bells (instead of strings or air columns) just add one additional direction in which they can generate more vibrational modes, which makes them sound even more complex, as everyone knows who has heard xylophones, marimbas or church bells before. Edit: grammar"}, {"answer": "(1) a \"pitch\" is just a frequency of a sound wave. But, two waves with the same pitch will have very different shapes. The piano and violin generate waves of different shapes. (2) The waves have different rates of decay. A piano makes a tone when a hammer hits a string. The string starts to vibrate, but the vibrations decay away. In contrast, the violin passes a bow over the string, causing the vibrations not to decay away. (3) Each instrument has different acoustic properties that cause harmonics and reverberations to add to (or subtract from) the initial wave form. (4) The piano typically hits more than one string at the same time. While the strings technically supposed to be identical, they are not precisely, and that produces wave forms that are slightly off from the original pitch."}, {"answer": "pitch is from how many times a sound wave goes from up to down in a second, it's *frequency*. tone comes from how smooth the lines of the curve are. a perfectly smooth and curved sound wave is called a 'sine wave' and sounds like a beep or computer tone. different instruments can produce sound waves which have the same basic frequency, but the shape of the actual sound wave is much different due to different ways of generating the tone. Over-generally but not completely wrong is the smoother the waveform, the more like a beep, the rougher the waveform, the more like a buzz. edit: in other comments OP described using an oscilloscope to see these waveforms."}, {"answer": "Interesting additional fact to all the previous comments: A lot of instruments sound a lot more similar than you may think. A university in my hometown once did a study about that, where a bunch of single instruments were recorded. They all played the same note quite long. The attack of every note was then cut off, so people could only hear the note, but not it's start where for example a piano's hammer hit the string, the bow of a violin touching the string, and so on. The majority of people listening to these sounds couldn't tell the difference between a violin and a trumpet."}, {"answer": "When you hear a piano play a note, you think of it as a single frequency. In reality, that note you hear is the base frequency, but you're also hearing hundreds of higher notes as well, called 'harmonics.' The harmonics differ depending on the instrument. So if a violin plays the same base note, you hear the same base, but the harmonics are different, which is why they sound different. (This is also why chords sound muddy in the low piano register - you can hear much more of the harmonics interacting together)."}, {"answer": "Think of it like waves on the ocean. The note or pitch values come from how often a wave breaks/how far they are apart from one another. The instrument sound comes from the general shape of the waves and the changes between each wave."}, {"answer": "Let's ELI5 this! I see some nice answers that are WAY above ELI5, so let's make this simple here. You know what a pitch is -- it's a frequency. Basically, the air is vibrating so many times per second. For example, if it vibrates 440 times a second, we name that note A4. Just what we call it. It's the A above middle C on the piano, and it's the second highest string on the violin. If a sound wave is vibrating at 440 Hz, that is, 440 times per second, it's an A4. So OK, can you draw a wave on a piece of paper? It waves up and down like a snake, right? Well, one time going up and one time going down is one cycle. That's the bit that repeats. The main thing that makes different sounds sound different is that these waves have different shapes. Maybe instead of being like a snake, it goes straight up, over, straight down, over, straight up, over, etc. That's a square wave. Or maybe it goes in triangles, making a triangle wave. Each shape of wave makes a different sound. For example, if you sing \"ah\" or \"eh\" or \"ee\" or \"oh\" or \"oo\" or \"aw\" or \"uh\" or whatever, on the same note, each of those vowels will make a wave of a different shape. It'll still have the same number of cycles per second, but the cycle of the \"eh\" will look different from the cycle of the \"oo\". They'll probably be kind of weird curvy thingies, but they'll be *different* kind of weird curvy thingies. That's what makes the sound different... ...when you're holding it. Because there's other stuff too. When you *start* a sound or *end* a sound, different things can happen. For example, you can start the sound really hard, hitting it very loud for a very short time and then quickly going away to a normal volume. For example, if you say \"Dah\", with a hard D, you'll have a different start from if you say \"nah\" with a light n. These features at the start are called attack and decay; the attack is how long it takes to get to the loudest bit, then the decay is how long it takes to get to the regular volume. Then comes the end of the sound. The violin can just keep holding a note at constant volume for a long time, but you can't do that on piano; once you strike a key, the sound starts dying away slowly while you're holding the key down (you can make it stop quickly if you want by releasing the key). This behavior is called sustain. When you finally release the key, or when you stop bowing the note, there's a little bit of echo or some sort of sound when you stop; this is called the release. These four parameters, attack, decay, sustain, and release, are collectively known as the envelope of the sound. Different sounds have different envelopes too. But sounds don't have to be pure. There can be many different sounds that together make up one sound. For example, when you say \"Dah\", there's a \"D\" and there's an \"ah\". If you say \"Tah\" or \"nah\" or \"sah\", you'll have a different initial sound -- the consonant -- but the same vowel sound. The shape of the wave is in the vowel; the consonant is just what happens right at the beginning. In those cases, it's not usually a wave at a particular frequency; it's just a burst of energy, and that burst can have any shape at all and it doesn't have to repeat 440 times a second. Each shape makes a different sound. Sound is one thing and one thing only: air vibrating. The type of sound we hear is based entirely on the shape of the sound wave. Different sounds come from different shapes."}, {"answer": "Sound is made when something vibrates at a certain speed - in the case of both a violin and a piano what vibrates is strings (with the body of the instrument adding extra \"flavouring\", but we can ignore that). If you draw that vibration on a piece of paper, you get a _wave_ - they look [something like this]( URL_1 ). The waves generated by each instrument have different shape - that's how we can recognise them. That shape is called the _timbre_. What give those sounds their shape? It turns out a sound is not just one vibration - it's a lot of independent vibrations going on the same time, which add up to create the single sound we hear. These vibrations are in a sequence - if the base ones vibrates 200 times per second, the next one will vibrate 400 times, then the one after 600 times, and so on. They are called \"harmonics\", and the sequence of vibrations (x, 2x, 3x, ...) is called _harmonic sequence_. All instruments have harmonics in that sequence - what changes is that in some instrument the some harmonics are louder and other softer. You don't hear the individual sounds, they just add up to make a single sound. That combination of harmonics is what changes the _timbre_ of a sound, and makes the instrument recognisable. There is a mathematical technique called \"fourier analysis\" which allow you to show all the harmonics for a given sound - the [graphs look like this]( URL_0 ) But the harmonics are only the \"pure\" components of sound - you can hear them well in old synthesizers from the 70s. In the real world there are also other vibrations which are outside the sequence - typically they are considered \"noise\", but they exist, typically for percussion instruments, but also at the very beginning of other sounds, particularly wind instruments (they tend to die off quickly and leave mostly harmonics) So a combination of all these vibrations, harmonics and inharmonics, each one with its own loudness, each one becoming louder or softer in time independently from the other, is what gives the timbre of a sound. What controls which harmonics are softer / louder in a sound wave? It depends from every instrument. Typically when an object vibrates, the sound comes to our ear because the air between the object and the object vibrates. The air tends to \"fall in line\" with the vibrating object, and vibrate at the same speed. As do any other object in the vicinity which have the ability of vibrate at the same speed (that's why windows vibrate when there is bus engine in the area but not when you have a drill - the frequency of the bus engine matches the \"natural\" frequency of the window, but that of the drill doesn't). So the instrument builders use that and work with the shape of the body of the instrument to give them pockets of air or parts of the body that emphasise certain harmonic and dampen others."}, {"answer": "Fourrier tells us that any sound can be described as the sum of pure frequencies. If one axis is frequency, one is amplitude, and a third is time, then you can create a three dimensional representation of an actual sound (technically you need phase also but that's less prominent). This includes everything from timbre to vibrato to the beginning and end of notes to breath noise. The pitch we recognize is the fundamental, or base frequency of a sound. Three aspects of timbre I want to touch on are harmonics, evolution over time, and musical noise. Harmonics are multiples of the base frequency that we hear as part of it. /u/Darth_Ra did a pretty good job making understanding those accessible as wave forms. I think that's only a third of the story though. Some others have mentioned attack, but I think it's more than that. A guitar pluck for instance starts out with many strong harmonics and fades to just a few as the strings fundamental takes over. A wind instrument on the other hand can become brighter (more harmonics) or more reserved at any time, just based on the breath and mouth control of the player. A paino played backwards doesn't quite sound like a piano, because it's we associate the instrument with a pattern of change in timbre over time. A fast scale on the piano is a series of short bright (many rich harmonics) transients whereas that scale on a wind instrument could be a steady smooth waveform changing only in pitch. Finally musical noise is an important part of what cues our ears in. Some flutes are almost pure sine waves, but the players breath gives the sound context. In a piano the keys make a thud when theyre pressed down and hit the keybed. It has nothing to do with the strings it's just a piece of wood hitting felt. A guitar string plucked hard has some 'twang' which is basically non-harmonic content. The noise gives context and clues the ears into what they're hearing. Even though \"harmonics\" or \"timbre\" is probably good enough for a ELI5, I wanted to add what was missing to create a full spectrum over time picture of the sound."}, {"answer": "A lot of these answers come from music theory, and they discuss things like timbre, texture, noise, attack etc. While that's all true, and indeed necessary to characterize the sound, the fundamental reason is this: When we say that two sounds are the same pitch, we do not mean that they have the same frequency. A sound has many frequencies at once, and those frequencies may change as the sound changes over time (e.g. a bending of a note, vibrato, or as it fades away). The pitch of a sound is a subjective perception of its frequencies, usually based on the most prevalent (loudest) frequency. The wikipedia article ( URL_0 ) has a good discussion of this. So, when we say that two sounds are the same pitch, we usually mean that the loudest frequency of each sound are the same. This means that many things can be different: - How loud is the loudest frequency compared to the others? - What other frequencies are there? How loud are they? - How does all of the above change over time? It's in these aspects that two sounds of the same pitch can sound different! For example, according to google images, the violin waveform looks like [this]( URL_1 ), however a pure tone would look like a clean wave (with the same separation of peaks and troughs). What's amazing is that our ears can \"see\" all of that chaos in the waveform and get harmonies, timbre, vibrato, etc. out of it."}, {"answer": "Welp, looks like I'm throwing my hat in the ring: A note can be defined by three things: its pitch, its loudness, and its timbre. I'm not going to go into the physics of these, but I'll explain it as best I can. The pitch remains consistent among all instruments. It defines how high or low a note is. For instance, a middle F is a higher note than a middle C, therefore it has a higher pitch. No matter what instrument you're playing, this rule holds true. Loudness also is consistent among instruments. It can be defined by a couple of things: how easy it is to hear, and how far away from the source you can move and still hear it. As these increase, the sound can be said to get louder. The timbre is what differs between instruments, and is what makes the various instruments sound different. Differing timbres are created by the different methods each instrument uses to produce music. A violin sounds different from a trombone, or a piano, because all three produce music differently. Again, none of this goes into the physics, so it can't explain why it happens, only that it does. Aannnddddd.... That's my explanation!"}, {"answer": "I'm only writing in because I've seen mostly true but not entirely true responses. The top response as I write this is mostly correct but then cliff dives while describing AM radio frequencies as higher than we can hear - those aren't even the same waves, bro. Anyway, the answer most correct is timbre and to a much smaller extent, attack. Timbre can be described as the relationship in amplitude (volume) between the fundamental (the assigned pitch as you put it) and its overtones or harmonics. Harmonics/overtones are usually multiples of the fundamental. Interestingly, due to the way pianos are played, its harmonics are slightly sharper than the multiples of its fundamentals, so much so that the middle of the piano is tuned to the same pitch as accompanying instruments, but the lows are tuned almost a quarter tone below where it should be relative to the middle notes, and the highs nearly a quarter note tuned higher. The attack is the second most important distinction between instruments. The attack is simply how the sound is initiated. The bowed violin, for example, is nearly a sine wave after the initial attack."}, {"answer": "ELI5-style: Each note consists of a bunch of frequencies laid on top of each other. Whenever you play an \"A\" or \"C-sharp\" or whatever, you're playing a sound that has the same frequencies relatively \"louder\" than the other frequencies in the note and it creates sort of a \"finger print\" which lets us say, \"Oh, that's an A.\" The reason a piano and violin sound different (the \"timbre\") is because they're playing different frequencies in addition to the \"louder\" frequencies. Whenever anyone in this thread talks about a Fourier analysis, they mean something [like this]( URL_0 ). Those big peaks are the \"louder\" frequencies I was talking about, and the non-zero squiggles are the other frequencies."}, {"answer": "If you were actually 5, I would tell you that the different shapes and materials instruments are made out of make different types of sounds called timbres. The sound could be the same high or low pitch, but things made of wood and metal are going to have different timbres. It's like how your voice is a little bit different than your friend's because your body is a different shape and size. As an adult, I would explain to you how harmonics work, but many others here have done a good job of that."}, {"answer": "Harmonics. Those sounds are not made of a single note, they just have a root note, but have hundreds of overtone harmonics that make up the timbre of the sound. That single note will also have 3rds, 5ths, 7ths, etc mixed in with it that give it that timbre. Otherwise you would only have a simple sine wave and everything would sound identical. This is also not taking into account how the sound waves bounce and refract off of surfaces and the . return back to your ear at different times."}, {"answer": "I know this has already been answered, but I wanted to simplify it a bit. An easy way to think of it is: pitch is how quickly the the sound wave is repeating, whereas, the *way* it sounds is determined by the *shape* of the sound wave. Yes there are a lot of other factors that play into the timbre of a sound, but the most important element of what makes a violin sound like a violin, etc. is its unique sound wave."}, {"answer": "I was once told by my music teacher in high school that the attack (the beginning of the sound) is the most important part. In fact he said that if you took out the attack and heard a note after it had already begun it would be very difficult to distinguish what thing is making that sound. If you ever are switching stations on the radio occasionally you'll experience this by accident."}, {"answer": "You mentioned that you have a daw. Open up a basic oscillator and play any note. You'll notice that the wave is a perfectly curve sine wave. Change it to a saw wave, and it sounds different. This is timbre: same wavelength and amplitude, but just different shapes. Now, open up an acoustic instrument and look at the wave. It resembles a sine wave, but it's more jagged. Another example of timbre"}, {"answer": "A real musical tone isn't just made up of a single smoothly repeating sine wave. In the real world, instruments that make music produce incredibly complex sound waves. Even two sound samples recorded from the same instrument, played exactly the same way, have noticeable differences, due to imperceptible differences in the movement of the musician's body, or air pressure, or temperature, or name a thing."}, {"answer": "If I'm not mistaken, I heard in a class once that if you take away the attack and decay of 2 sound waves produced by 2 different instruments, but maintained the same pitch and loudness, it would be difficult to determine whic instrument was producing the sound. Can anyone confirm? (This was mentioned in a studio music recording class)"}, {"answer": "True ELI5: The specific sound of an instrument (timbre) is like the flavour of a piece of candy. Pitch is just how fast you can eat the candy. It does not change the flavour of the candy."}, {"answer": "Omg thank you for asking this. I've been wondering about this in the back of my mind for a long long time. Glad to see it got some traction and some good answers! Thanks!"}, {"answer": "I am late to post, but I made [a video]( URL_0 ) that deals with your question. The intro may throw you off, but just watch."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "32427", "title": "Violin", "section": "Section::::Tuning.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 56, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 56, "end_character": 196, "bleu_score": 0.8266660014007987}]}]

What happens inside the body during diarrhea?

1qu285

[{"answer": "This can happen a couple of ways. When you have substances in your intestine that aren't being readily absorbed into the body, the concentration of the substances is higher in the intestine. Water flows from areas of low concentration to high concentration, so when there is a greater amount of a substance in your intestine, water will flow in. More water = diarrhea sometimes. Another way is in certain conditions, such as cholera, water is continuously being released in the intestine regardless of the how much there is present in the intestine. Yet another way occurs because your GI tract has a base level of motility; its continually contracting and relaxing to move the contents. Certain conditions can increase the motility, so the water doesn't have time to be absorbed, and comes out the other end as diarrhea. Essentially, there are quite a few ways diarrhea can happen, these are just a couple. Source: pre-med"}, {"answer": "Background - When you eat food, your body immediately *adds* fluid to the food to help break it down. Since this is the case, the watery state found diarrhea can easily be found early on during digestion. Typically, by the time food and drink gets to the end of your colon, all of the water has been absorbed or reabsorbed by your body. Stool is always liquid at first as it passes through the body but normally the body is able to absorb lots of water before it is passed out of the body. If the transit time of the food/soon-to-be stool is quickened, this can cause diarrhea due to speed of transit - the colon takes a long time to reabsorb water. Water and Food - The body is a filter for nutrients. Anything that you swallow is assessed for it's ability to be used by the body. If the body can't use it (as is the case with non-digestible fiber found in celery) it is passed through and bulks stool, which is a good thing if you need to slow down the rate of stool output. Water intake will prevent constipation by hydrating fiber in your intestines but it won't increase the water content of your stools. This is only because your kidneys work *way* faster than your intestines do at *reabsorbing* water from the intestines/tubules in your kidneys. If you drink a lot of water, you pee it out quickly before it could cause diarrhea. If you were to drink lots of water frequently and consistently for an extended period of time, only then would you possibly be able increase the water content of your stool. Salt - As changheill said, diarrhea can often be caused by electrolyte imbalances, which direct the flow of water. **Water follows salt**. Though we typically think of table salt (NaCl) when we hear salt, in chemistry, a salt can be any set of charged molecules. This is exactly what happens when people take a salt-based laxative when they are constipated. Salty contents of the intestine (the laxative) *pull* water in to keep equilibrium (this means equal concentrations of everything, everywhere) between the body and the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. For diarrhea to take place, there is some sort of imbalance in what you have eaten that has caused the stool to retain water. When it exits, it still has water. If anyone is interested, I'll be glad reformat/clarify my above response or answer more questions. **EDIT:** - Taco Bell Butt - Ah yes, the Taco Bell Butt Syndrome (TBBS)...this is actually caused not by electrolyte imbalances but instead by inflammation of the intestines. Much like cold weather, black pepper, or any variety of things can cause you to have a runny nose, spices can inflame your intestines, leading to \"runny nose gut syndrome\". All of your GI tract creates mucus (often called bowel sweat by GI doctors). TBBS is also due to heavy use of Sodium (salt) as a flavor enhancer. Something can also be said about the low fiber content of heavily processed foods such as one would find at Taco Bell. The more something is processed, the easier it is for your body to break it down on the chemical level and ingest it's nutrients - meaning quicker transit time through the GI, so fast that the body doesn't have time to reabsorb water from the colon before the exit of stool. As a side note, think of of celery. It is a low-calorie food because humans cannot break down the cellulose fibers - other animals can and, for them, celery is not a low-calorie *or* fiber-rich food...the fiber part of food is only the part that isn't digested. Celery is natural and full of fiber - everything Taco Bell is not. Taco Bell food has been chemically broken down, cooked, stirred, pounded, mashed, ground up, chemically treated again, spiced and seasoned - it's a Ferrari in your stomach. Salt (the need for equilibrium that drives water into the GI tract)**+**Spices that cause your stomach to have a runny nose**+**low residue foods that move too quickly through the GI tract**=**TBBS."}, {"answer": "There are a couple ways to think about diarrhea. The way the gut moves shit through it is called gastric motility and is controlled by a couple of things: * what's inside the gut (water, sugar, fat, protein) * hormones acting on the gut (which change in response to food and stress) * electrical signals (kind of like the heart, the gut has rhythmic contractions. These can be dysregulated and result in problems with gut motility) There are a lot of causes of diarrhea. * Suddenly loading the stomach/small intestine with a high VOLUME load can cause rapid emptying. For example, this occurs in dumping syndrome, and yes, it can be caused by drinking a shitload of water!! * A large load of sugary or salty food/beverage into the GI can cause an OSMOTIC load. This means that water rushes into the intestine and WHOOSH. Etc. This is called osmotic diarrhea. * Gut motility can be really messed up after bowel surgery. A normal gut can tell the brain \"there's food here\" and the brain can stimulate the release of hormones that move things along. However, removing parts of the GI, or not using them for a long time can mess up these pathways and cause both constipation and diarrhea. * Stimulant drugs can cause diarrhea. * There are viral causes of diarrhea which affect (usually) kids or older folks in (often) developing countries. * Inflammatory GI disorders like Crohn's or UC can cause diarrhea. Often it's osmotic diarrhea which happens due to gut inflammation. However, the gut also shows hypercontractility (lots of movement) in these disorders for reasons which are not well understood, and this can cause diarrhea. * The gut is like the heart in that it has its own pacemaker cells and rhythmic contractions. You've heard of cardiac arrhythmias? That's where the heart doesn't beat properly because of electrical issues in the tissues. The gut can also develop these problems, for example in diabetes when the nerves get worn out all over the body. This can contribute to diarrhea (or constipation) depending on where/when it occurs."}, {"answer": "The Chipotle has changed its mind and decided to stand up for itself"}, {"answer": "The large intestine not doing it's job of absorbing water is diarrhea Constipation is the opposite, it does it's job too well."}, {"answer": "Wow, if this post doesn't have perfect timing."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "53951", "title": "Diarrhea", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 2, "end_paragraph_id": 2, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The three types of diarrhea are: short duration watery diarrhea, short duration bloody diarrhea, and persistent diarrhea (lasting more than two weeks, which can be either watery or bloody)", "The most common cause is an infection of the intestines due to either a virus, bacteria, or parasitea condition also known as gastroenteritis. These infections are often acquired from food or water that has been contaminated by feces, or directly from another person who is infected. The three types of diarrhea are: short duration watery diarrhea, short duration bloody diarrhea, and persistent diarrhea (lasting more than two weeks, which can be either watery or bloody). The short duration watery diarrhea may be due to cholera, although this is rare in the developed world. If blood is present, it is also known as dysentery.", "The most common cause is an infection of the intestines due to either a virus, bacteria, or parasitea condition also known as gastroenteritis. These infections are often acquired from food or water that has been contaminated by feces, or directly from another person who is infected."]}}]}]

Why does Google have a high turnover rate when it offers such good compensation? The average Google employee tenure is only 1.1 years.

1ovytd

[{"answer": "I assume your talking about the recent results by [PayScale]( URL_0 ) report. Basically it is really bad reporting, turnover and tenure rate might be directly related for some companies but not for a newish company which is growing at an enormous rate. The [reported employment numbers]( URL_1 ) in 2011 where 32,467 d now in 2013 its 42,162 employees. That is an additional 9695 new employees, or 33% of the company. Think about that for the moment, 33% of the company *literally* can't have tenure greater than 2 years! To make this problem even worse, Google has only been a company for 15 years. Unlike much older companies nobody at Google can have a tenure of more than 15 years. To make this even more apparent; **TL;DR: I start a company yesterday, my company has an average tenure of 1 day, what a turn over rate I must have!**"}, {"answer": "Head-hunters. Head-hunters everywhere. Generally, if you landed a job at Google, you're the shit at whatever it is you do. You are *extremely* employable. Because of this, other companies want to hire these people, and the average Google employee is batting off job offers left and right. This massive demand means that Google has to work just as hard to retain its talent as it does to attract it in the first place."}, {"answer": "In Google, it's kind of accepted that you will work long hours and basically have very little work/life balance. You are encouraged not to go home as you can relax, unwind and such using their many facilities (PS3s, free canteen, gym, etc.) and as a result, you stay in longer and work more hours. I used to get the train from Grand Canal Dock station in Dublin, which is right next to the Dublin branch of Google. You can see, at 10pm even, that people are still there beavering away at their desks. Google don't force you to do this - but it's sort of an unwritten rule that, if you don't go above and beyond the call of duty, there are 10 other extremely talented engineers who will, and they'll progress in their career faster than you will. Personally, and I know a lot of people feel the same, when you are in a long-term relationship, or are married or have kids, this is not the type of job you want to be working in. You want more reasonable hours and a proper work/life balance so you can spend time with your SO and/or kids. Google isn't conducive to this philosophy, so people move on when it comes time for them to do so. I have 4 friends who are Google employees, in different departments, here in Dublin, who've described the company philosophy as above."}, {"answer": "first off the tech sector has fast turnover everywhere - that is just a fact. Second, google kind of has oddball hiring practices. I imagine they are hiring people that they think are a good fit and as an unintended consequence lots of them are prone to be flighty - you know, young kids with money and a spirit for adventure are not widely recognized as the most stable people"}, {"answer": "All big companies have big turnover. Especially in software. It has been the case for many years in software that when you want a raise, you find a new job. Many people take jobs at large companies because they pay more, and later decide they'd prefer to work for a smaller company and leave. It's pretty standard."}, {"answer": "/u/mithro has a very good answer at the top, but I also want to add that Google probably works its employees to the bone. Yeah, you get paid well, get a ton of benefits, etc... but you're also under enormous pressure to produce results, and often. The old stories of them allowing employees one day per week to work on individual projects are now just old stories; that policy is gone in order to increase productivity. And sure, they have daycare at the office -- because you're there all the time and still have to take work home with you. It's awesome to get the experience there, but it burns you out quickly, and you can take that awesome experience and your saved cash to a new job that lets you have a home life too."}, {"answer": "Technical positions within Google are often highly stressful and require great skill and knowledge to perform well. It's also true that because so many of Googles systems are home grown (out of necessity because of the nature of complexity and scale of problems that have to be solved), it takes many many months for new hires to become truly productive. When you join Google, you will most likely have come from a job where you were the big fish; the most technically skilled in your particular department or field. Even for such intelligent and highly skilled people, it can be an enormous shock to the system to go from an environment where you know everything required to do your job, and all the years of your expert industry knowledge were usually directly relevant your job, to then be employed by a highly prestigious company (perhaps Google is your dream job) where you're now a little fish in a big pond surrounded by thousands of people who are just as clever as you, where you find there is a steep learning curve and you're not immediately productive, and where most of the systems and softwares you are working on are unfamiliar so you cannot directly draw on your past job experience to let you coast by (you have to learn learn learn to do your new job). I think THIS is probably the biggest single contributing factor to technical staff turn over. i.e. Google is a fantastic opportunity, but by the pure nature of what is required to perform your job and perform it well, some prefer to go back to an easier job where there can turn down the dial on the stress and pressure. Don't underestimate the power of feeling like you're really great at being able to do it on auto-pilot without having to really think too hard. ...and being headhunted and flattered and offered more money to go back to doing something you know how to do in your sleep is just too much to turn down by some. That's my 2 cents anyway."}, {"answer": "Simple. Resume padding. Spend a year at \"the google\" and you can likely write your own ticket anywhere. I assume this is even more true if you're applying for work while you're still working at Google. \"oh, you work for google, and you want to work for us?\" sign here please."}, {"answer": "Working at the same place for longer than three years is considered bad for your career over here (Silicon Valley). I heard this but not from a Google employee but I believe this credo may have wide-spread acceptance over here."}, {"answer": "believe it or not, competitive jobs with great perks and high salaries are tough and have high attrition rates"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5575327", "title": "Turnover (employment)", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "start_character": 28, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "end_character": 530, "bleu_score": 0.9415913480077499}]}]

- Why do airline ticket prices fluctuate so much on a day to day basis?

13lidw

[{"answer": "You make and sell widgets. They are really cheap for you to make so we won't consider your costs for this example. Fred is willing to pay $6 for a widget, and Wilma is willing to pay $10, and Shaggy is willing to pay $12. What should you set your price at? If you sell at $6, all three will buy from you and your gross income will be $18. If you sell at $10, Wilma and Shaggy will buy from you and your gross will be $20. If you sell at $12, only Shaggy will buy from you and your gross will be $12. Clearly you should set your price at $10, right? If this was the only way you could set prices, then the answer would be yes. But what if you came up with some clever way of charging different prices for each person. If you could charge everybody the most they would be willing to pay, then you could make $28 instead. This is called \"capturing the consumer surplus\". You see this in lots of places, with things like senior citizen or child discounts (groups that would often just rather pass up something than pay full price), or with region codes on DVDs. Any time you have a chance to divide up your market you have an opportunity to capture consumer surplus. Airlines have made this into an art, deciding how much somebody is probably willing to pay based on all sorts of signals like where they are going, whether it is round trip, how many stops there are, how far in advance they are looking for a ticket, when they are flying, etc, etc. It would not be surprising to learn that every person on a flight paid a different price. TL;DR - They are making a guess at the most you'd be willing to pay based on the information they have about you."}, {"answer": "Yay it's finally my day to shine! I am an IBE (Internet Booking Engine) software developer working for one of the bigger international companies in the industry, I basically make the websites you go to buy your tickets. Here is my ELI5 explanation, if anyone has more detailed questions I'd be happy to answer them as well: There is a limited number of seats in an aircraft. The people working in the airline divide them into slices, like you would with a cake for example, and give a difference price to each slice. So for example if an aircraft has 200 seats, they will first divide them into something called \"cabin classes\", usually as first / business / economy. Seats in the first class slice of the cake have all the toppings and choco-chips and fruit pieces: They are very comfy, have big TV screens and get the best food. Business class is like that but with smaller seats and less fun, and economy class is just to get you through your flight (although you usually still get some food and a small TV). Since many people can't pay for first and business slices, the majority of the seats will be in the economy slice, may be like 8 / 16 / 176 for our 200 seats. Now that you have those 176 seats in a huge single slice, you notice that not everyone wants to eat the same amount of cake. Some people will just want a taste, and they don't want to pay for a big piece which they couldn't finish anyway. Other people are really in a hurry to eat some of the cake, so they would be willing to pay more to get a piece. So you further divide your big economy slice into \"reservation classes\" (also called by the fancy name of Reservation Booking Designators). Out of those 176 seats, you can say that 26 will be very cheap but don't get any food on the plane, some other 40 are reasonably priced but you have to pay for them at least one month before the flight, another 30 are very pricey but you can get them even in the last second and so on, so that everyone can get a piece of cake according to their money and their needs. When they buy such a slice, we say that they bought tickets. So let's say someone wants to buy one of those really cheap tickets. But there were only 26 of them to begin with, and people buy cheap tickets even if they are not sure they would be able to use them later, because hey they are cheap. So when you go to the airline website, it will tell you \"Nope, you can only get one of these more expensive tickets\". But 5 minutes after that, someone who bought a cheap ticket may decide he doesn't want it anymore and return it, so when you check back during the same day what you will see is that ticket prices dropped like crazy. Another thing is this: The airline wants to sell all slices of the cake, because they already paid for it and baked it. And if some slices are left, they will go to waste when the airplane lifts off with empty seats. So the people in the airline look at each flight, and if the slices are selling very well and just a few are left, they increase the price above normal because hey, people clearly want a piece of this cake, so someone will likely pay extra for the last pieces. But if there are a lot of empty seats left, they will lower the price below normal to lure more people in before the plane leaves the airport. Sorry for the long response, but this is a much more complicated issue than people realise and I happen to know way too much of it :) **TLDR: Airlines group seats together and assign different prices to them. Cheaper seats are fewer in number, so they go out of stock more easily. The airlines will also adjust these prices at the last minute based on how well the sales are doing. So when you check the prices for the same flight during the same day, you might see expensive (no cheap seats left), then super cheap (someone cancelled their reservation with a cheap seat), and then as the takeoff time approaches something even lower (there are a lot of empty seats left) or higher (very few seats remaining).**"}, {"answer": "Prices work on fluctuating demand. Believe it not or, a lot of the prices are made up to start with, and then you monitor from there to see how it's going. Selling tickets at $159 too fast, bump it up to $179, selling too slow, drop it to $169. Not selling anything at all, drop them to $99 but put the flights on dates either side at $159 and suddenly they seem more attractive."}, {"answer": "Prices are highest when casual travelers are most likely to buy (weekends, evenings). Buy on a Tuesday around noon for the (historically) lowest prices. I don't know if this is still true. For Southwest, prices are first-come, first served. Buy 6 months in advance right when they post the tickets, and you'll get the lowest price. If they ever have a sale, you can call and get the difference refunded."}, {"answer": "Also, picked this one up on reddit. Airlines will use their browser cookies to raise prices based on the number of times you visit to check for lower prices. URL_0 Not sure if there is any truth to this, as I don't often travel by plane. But it is something to keep in mind."}, {"answer": "Prices don't actually fluctuate as much as you might think. It's the availability of the *type* of ticket that changes. The differences in types of tickets aren't usually explained to customers because, frankly, they don't care. They just want the 'cheapeset'. Travel agents, confusingly, refer to these ticket types as 'classes' of tickets, even tho they are all in the same class (economy/business/etc) A rather contrived example might be: You go look up a flight, online, from LA to London. You find a LA- > New York- > London. It's a ticket with American Airlines purchased through an online travel agency called Bucket Prices. The LA- > New York on American Airlines is $300 in economy class which is $200 non-refundable. Then an economy class ticket from New York- > London for $520 which is 100% non-refundable. Bucket Prices charges their approx. 6% commission which brings it up to 870$ You think you might be able to do better, so you head to a travel agency downtown called Shop'n'Fly. They find the exact same flight, also with American Airlines. Except this travel agent has a different contract. They can get you the same price LA- > New York, but because of their contacts with American Airlines, they don't have access to the 100% non-refundable tickets for $520. They can only sell the $250 non-refundable tickets, which are $650. They charge 2% commission and so their price is $969. Exact same flights. Exact same class of service. Different class of tickets, so different prices. Well, crap. It was cheaper online. So you go back there. Except, for that day the 100% non-refundable tickets are now sold out -- there were only 20 available with those conditions.. So, *now* the only available tickets (For exactly the same flight, remember. Same plane, still in economy class, just different conditions) is $1145 because the only type of economy class ticket available is more expensive. Of course the Shop'n'Fly downtown now has the cheaper flight because the contract they (or, more likely, their wholesalers) have worked out with American Airlines give them access to the (now) cheaper class of ticket. Three prices, all for the same flight, all in the course of one day."}, {"answer": "Each ticket has its own set of rules. Like what you can do with the ticket. Change dates. Refund. Etc. the more expensive the ticket the more flexible the ticket usually is. Say an airline has 100 seats to sell 10 seats will be at their cheapest, the next 10 will be a little bit more but will be cheaper to change dates or will give you more money back if you cancel etc. So the more tickets that get booked on a flight the more the price goes up, as people will usually want to get the cheapest available. Then there are fuel surcharges. If fuel costs more the price goes up on the available tickets so they don't loose out on using that fuel now for tickets that were sold when the fuel price wasn't so high. If the price goes down the current price will go down again too."}, {"answer": "LPT: clean your cache/cookies when shopping for airfares. Websites track if you've recently visited (say, in the past couple days) and will adjust prices accordingly. Why? Cause they ****ing can. Don't get caught with your pants down."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "156259", "title": "Price discrimination", "section": "Section::::Two necessary conditions for price discrimination.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 83, "end_paragraph_id": 83, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["For example, airlines routinely engage in price discrimination by charging high prices for customers with relatively inelastic demand - business travelers - and discount prices for tourist who have relatively elastic demand.", "There are two conditions that must be met if a price discrimination scheme is to work. First the firm must be able to identify market segments by their price elasticity of demand and second the firms must be able to enforce the scheme. For example, airlines routinely engage in price discrimination by charging high prices for customers with relatively inelastic demand - business travelers - and discount prices for tourist who have relatively elastic demand. The airlines enforce the scheme by enforcing a no resale policy on the tickets preventing a tourist from buying a ticket at a discounted price and selling it to a business traveler (arbitrage). Airlines must also prevent business travelers from directly buying discount tickets. Airlines accomplish this by imposing advance ticketing requirements or minimum stay requirements conditions that would be difficult for the average business traveler to meet."]}}]}]

why do firefighters bother putting out a fire (and endanger themselves) if the building is empty and there are no other buildings around it ?

62l145

[{"answer": "I am a career paid Fireman. The best way to simplify it is to say that we do not ALWAYS enter a burning structure. There are quite a few common sense reasons that are a definite no go for us (such as flames through the roof, indicating a high probability for collapse on most residential fires). If there is a possibility that we can enter the structure, the incident commander has to make a decision which comes down to \"risk a little to save a little, risk a lot to save a lot\". If there is any chance that a VIABLE human life is inside, you can guarantee that every firefighter on the scene would risk their life without question to save the person inside. The big word there being viable. Most of the time the toxic chemicals produced by modern manufacturing give off super heated and immediately deadly fumes that can kill you after only a few breaths. We have to take that into account and will not risk as much to recover someone who has without a doubt perished. Our next goal is to save property that can be saved. Family photos and heirlooms are irreplaceable and we make every effort to minimize your loss. If I can read the conditions of the fire and make a direct attack inside the house right at the seat of the fire, it extinguishes the fire quicker, preventing extension and also limiting damage from water being shot in through Windows. Most of our nozzles put out at least 200 gallons per minute. That is a lot if water to put inside your house blindly through a window. Most kitchen fires could probably be extinguished with less than 30 gallons if there is no extension into the walls/roof. Also as others have said, there are a lot of times you can't be certain that the building is unoccupied. A lot of accidental fires happen because squatters light \"camp fires\" in abandoned buildings to keep warm. They have a right to be saved and us not completing a search of the building (conditions permitting) would be negligent. In residential buildings we keep our eye out for indicators of people that would occupy the structure. For instance if there is a car in the driveway then someone was likely home. Or if there are small children's toys in the yard or house then we automatically assume the possibility that we need to account for children. Sorry for any typos, I'm on mobile. Hope this helps answer your question. If you take anything away from this, just know that if there is a possibility for me or any of the firefighters I know to save a life, we will fight until our last breath to get you out safely. Edit: Thank you all for the kind words and thank you for the gold! Reading through all of your comments really brightened my day!"}, {"answer": "Firefighter here. ELI5 version: Because even a partially burned building is still worth money. Long version: If the building is truly empty/unoccupied, with no buildings around it, depending on the age and condition of the structure pre-fire, many times, it will be left to burn. As long as there is some value to the structure and contents post-fire, we'll try our best to contain and extinguish the fire. There's a lot of factors that go into whether to let it burn or to try and put it out. If only one room is involved, the rest of the house is still good, and we'll put the fire out in that room, then check to see how far it's extended into the rest of the house. The more we can save of the structure and contents, the better. If the fire is blowing out every window and door, then we know that the structure is unsafe for us to enter. There are some structures that are unsafe for us to enter because the Fire Inspectors have already done an inspection, and determined that the building is unsafe, and marked it as such on the building itself, and on pre-plan documents. When we're putting a fire out, we try to do our best to save the contents, either by removing them or covering them before we start squirting water and tearing up walls and ceilings. We try to only use as much water and tear up as few walls and ceilings as necessary to put the fire out and make sure it hasn't spread."}, {"answer": "People get rescued from \"vacant\" buildings all the time. Having your house or business on fire is a very stressful experience, and people forget things under stress. They forget that one of the kids had a friend staying over. Or that the maintenance guy was going to stay late to work on the air conditioner, or whatever. They can also be wrong - they may not know someone was squatting in their building or coming in early, or snuck their girlfriend in after bed time. That's why we get paid to go on and check every survivable space at every fire."}, {"answer": "Firefighter here, like mentioned above there are multiple ways we deal with structure fires. 1: Defensive attack- Just like it says, we're defending. The building/structure/ ect. has no individuals or life inside of it and is so engulfed in flames that it's unsafe for us to go in. So we set up hoses/aerial hoses (ladder trucks)/ etc around the house to extinguish if from the outside. Also, we constantly water down adjacent houses and tree lines to prevent the fire from spreading (radiant heat warms things up quickly when its thousands of degrees). Practically, we're just controlling the demolition of a house by fire, with a primary goal of attempting to extinguish it completely. 2: Offensive- Just like it sounds again. We're going in and trying to put it out from the source. This takes place when we have the ABILITY to, such as when the fire is still in the intial phases of growing and not like the scene from spidey 1 where the entire apartment complex is engulfed. I could elaborate more if you so desire, but i hope this amswers your question directly in the simplest way."}, {"answer": "Am a firefighter. These three above me are all correct. If you were a 5 year old I would say, \"What if your favorite stuffed animal or pet was hidden away in a corner or somewhere the fire needs time to reach? If I try to put out the fire from the outside, there's a chance it would be usable or survive. If I don't, its most likely it would be burnt and gone forever and you would be mad at me for not even trying.\""}, {"answer": "Lived in neighborhood with suspected drug cook house. Police told firefighters about suspicion, firefighters just kept the bushes wet to contain the blaze. Neighbors cheered on as it burnt to the ground. Three propane tanks exploded in the burning house during the event. It was neat."}, {"answer": "If no one is in danger they generally won't risk their lives for property. They'll shoot it with water until it is out. For the most part, risk taking is done if there are people inside or if they are unsure if there are people in danger, or danger of the fire spreading."}, {"answer": "30 year career fireman here, times have changed, we don't go in like we used to. We compare risk versus reward, if people aren't trapped and the structure is well involved then typically it is a defensive extinguishment. (Squirt water in from the outside) If it is not well involved, we go inside to put it out and save as much of the property and possessions as possible. The bravado BS is old school and archaic. The chemicals in pretty much all home products are filled with countless carcinogens and poisons unlike a few decades ago. Breathing these products of combustion is stupid and lethal..."}, {"answer": "Firefighter here. No building is empty until we search and confirm it's empty. Now there is a point where going in just isn't an option."}, {"answer": "Former firefighter here, If the building was confirmed to be empty, of little value and there was no other buildings around it, it would likely be treated as a \"defensive fire operation\" and the fire would be extinguished from the outside. Most fire departments work on a Risk VS Benefit model and will only risk their lives if there's a good chance of saving lives. If a building and all it's contents are 100% involved in fire (flashover) and there's a 0% chance of saving anyone, firefighters won't enter, even if there are people inside. However, if there's a small fire that easy to contain with relatively low risk, they will enter, even if its just to save property."}, {"answer": "Not a firefighter but lived two blocks over from a building separated from me by football fields of space/a giant paved lot and cincrete parking structure several stories tall, which burned down. Sparks and embers blew on very light updrafts and set trees alight blocks away, near a heavily used public path. The building then relit (reignited?) the next night, because the water hosed into and onto it wasn't enough or was not directed properly, and I don't think people went in to check to see if there smoldering areas, to truly extinguish it for good. This was not in the US. I have no idea how fire suppression strategies work here or elsewhere. Talk about scary, though."}, {"answer": "Firefighter here, ill just throw this out there. We have an acronym we use \"LIP\". LIFE SAFETY, INCIDENT STABILIZATION AND PROPERTY CONSERVATION. Those our are 3 most important aspects of a fire scene in that order. Then we say : Risk a lot to save a lot (usually lives) Risk a little to save a little (usually property) Risk nothing to save whats been lost I hope that sheds a little light on decision making on a fire ground. We re aren't the smartest bunch so we use these sayings to help us remember."}, {"answer": "It should be risk a little to save a little risk a lot to save a lot, but the number one priority of a firefighter is there safety and the safety of the other firefighters. That being said emotions get the best of us, if there is a chance that someone is inside we will make every effort to help that person. Which in times has gotten firefighters in dangerous and deadly situations. I think there has been a shift in the mentality and culture of the firefighters over the past years, when the older guys got hired it was at all cost put out the fire now it's becoming common for many department's to not risk much when a building is fully involved."}, {"answer": "Back in 2009, the Army Medical Depot in Alameda, California caught fire and they just let it burn. Now there's a Chipotle and a Target there. I guess the fire saved the city some demolition money but I was pissed that it rained bits of charcoal all over my car and backyard. I later found out that it also rained a bunch of asbestos. Yeah. Shoulda put it out."}, {"answer": "Another FF here... One thing that needs to be considered is that as FF's allowing a building to burn to the ground goes against everything we stand for and trained for. It's just not \"normal\" for us. This is even mentioned in the documentary \"Burn\" in which our brothers in the Detroit FD are ordered to let abandoned houses slated for demolition just burn and protect the neighboring abandoned houses. The large fire department I work for will usually adopt a defensive attack on an abandoned building that has been confirmed empty (meaning if we can safely enter and search a building and confirm it's vacant and empty of squatters, we'll retreat and \"surround and drown\" it.) For an non-abandoned building, we'll try an aggressive interior attack to attempt to save it and it's content if it's safe to do so. I'll admit that in the 26 years I've been on the job, I've only seen one or two instances where we let a building burn to the ground."}, {"answer": "Though rare, sometimes we throw some water on there just because the taxpayers are watching."}, {"answer": "I am no firefighter but my guess would be so that the fire does not spread to other building near by. Also the questioned building could collapse and hurt pedestrians or private property."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "855608", "title": "Firefighting", "section": "Section::::Firefighter duties.:Fire wardens.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 58, "end_paragraph_id": 58, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["must have extensive knowledge of the city, the location of streets, fire hydrants and fire alarm boxes, and the principal buildings. Also he must have knowledge of explosives, hazardous chemicals, and the combustion qualities of materials in buildings, homes, and industrial plants. In certain jurisdictions, civilians can get certified to be a Fire Warden, and some cities require certain types of buildings, such as high rises, to have a certain number of Fire Wardens. For example, the City of Houston, Texas, requires every tenant in a high-rise to have at least one Fire Warden for every 7500 sq. ft. occupied, and a minimum of two Fire Wardens per floor. In this example, their duties include investigating any fire alarms (see if there really is a fire and if so, its nature), ensuring the fire department is contacted, directing the evacuation of the facility, activating or delaying activation of fire suppression equipment such as halon and sprinklers (delayed in case of a false alarm), meeting the fire department and taking them to the location of the alarm or to the fire past any security or locked doors, and, if necessary, fighting the fire until the fire department arrives.", "must have extensive knowledge of the city, the location of streets, fire hydrants and fire alarm boxes, and the principal buildings. Also he must have knowledge of explosives, hazardous chemicals, and the combustion qualities of materials in buildings, homes, and industrial plants. In certain jurisdictions, civilians can get certified to be a Fire Warden, and some cities require certain types of buildings, such as high rises, to have a certain number of Fire Wardens. For example, the City of Houston, Texas, requires every tenant in a high-rise to have at least one Fire Warden for every 7500 sq. ft. occupied, and a minimum of two Fire Wardens per floor. In this example, their duties include investigating any fire alarms (see if there really is a fire and if so, its nature), ensuring the fire department is contacted, directing the evacuation of the facility, activating or delaying activation of fire suppression equipment such as halon and sprinklers (delayed in case of a false alarm), meeting the fire department and taking them to the location of the alarm or to the fire past any security or locked doors, and, if necessary, fighting the fire until the fire department arrives."]}}]}]

Can someone please explain to me how exactly a 3-D printer works? My mind simply cannot grasp the concept of a printer that can make an actual gun that can shoot real bullets.

2hhpvw

[{"answer": "First imagine if we could put a gun onto a deli slicer. Then start making slices of the gun that are very thin. 1mm or less in thickness. The 3D printer works in the reverse of this. It will take something that is in liquid form, but will solidify when lowered to room temperature and exposed to air (like liquid latex, cyanoacrilate, heated up plastic). So it lays down the first slice. Then the next slice on top of it, and so forth until you have the gun (this is greatly simplified, but illustrates the concept). To shoot real bullets isn't terribly difficult. It just requires a hammer to strike a firing pin. You could make one out of papier mache as long as you had a hammer (not taking accuracy or rifling into consideration)"}, {"answer": "If you have never listened to the podcast \"Stuff You Should Know\" I highly recommend it. They have a great episode on how 3-d printers work along with a bunch of others"}, {"answer": "Please do not ever shoot a 3D printed gun. They are not put under the same stress tests and cannot handle bullets well at all. Most will probably explode in your hand."}, {"answer": "You can make a gun from clay too. That doesn't mean it's safe to use."}, {"answer": "Most 3D printers work by printing multiple thin layers of plastic on top of each other. 3D printers won't necessarily make machines that just work, but they can be used to build parts that a user can then assemble."}, {"answer": "So I'll just say it.....I thought a 3D printer used paper. A gun from a paper printer...WTF?!?!? I really needed an ELI3 on this subject...."}, {"answer": " URL_0 Here you go. I was printing a shotgun stock spacer. It basically warms up the plastic (fed from above) and lets it flow out the nozzle while moving the head. That produces lines of plastic. From those lines (placing them one next to the other) you get layers. And so on."}, {"answer": "I built a Prusa i3 3D Printer about 10 months ago and i must say its a little confusing concept to hear about. There are different types of printers that can print all sorts of things (99% of these materials being some sort of plastic). Mine is extrusion based, think of having a veeerrry fine tipped (.35mm diameter) hot glue gun...that squirts out molten plastic .1mm away from the surface to print on...until it is finished with that layer on the X and Y axes, after the first layer is done...the nozzle tip is then raised on the Z axis by another .1mm and the X and Y axes continue precisely squirt out more molten plastic on top of the first layer (which has already cooled) and is a good medium for the current layer to adhere to. Look up 'Reprap Time Lapse' on youtube...one of the first ones should be a blue hand lookin' thing. Should bridge some gaps for ya :P hope this helped some."}, {"answer": "Don't think of it as a printer. Think of it as a machine that builds things with tiny Legos. It puts down a base layer, then another, then another, slowly building a recognizable object, the same way a kid makes a toy Lego gun. The 3D printer just uses much smaller pieces that tend to permanently bond to each other. If your imagination is stuck on every object being blocky, just think of how those huge, 10ft tall Lego sculptures look. Not as much pixelation. Now just scale it down."}, {"answer": "Basically lays down a layer of plastic, then lays down a layer of another material that supports the next layer, so on and so on, until it's competed. You could see it as a sandwich. Many layers but not ready to eat until it's done. Fun fact, you can buy a kit to build a 3d printed 3d printer."}, {"answer": "What if we could 3D print a 3D printer?"}, {"answer": "Coffee maker - is technically a 3d printer.."}, {"answer": "Super simple explanation. It has print heads that can move on the X, Y, and Z axis. This allows the placement of \"ink\" on top of and next to. Just like stacking building blocks. Moving parts are generally printed separately and the item is assembled once it is printed. The software is just telling the print heads where to poop out the plastic, frosting, metal powder, or whatever other material that particular 3D printer is supposed to be using as its \"ink\""}, {"answer": "Thank you for asking this. I don't get it either. Why not just...make a gun the normal way? How does a *printed copy* of anything even work?. Ugh. Brain hurts."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1305947", "title": "3D printing", "section": "Section::::General principles.:Modeling.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 25, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 25, "end_character": 586, "bleu_score": 0.7642613942309077}]}]

If our body is constantly producing new cells to replace old ones, why do we age?

2hzvm1

[{"answer": "When you make a copy of a copy of a copy, you start to get errors. As you get more errors, you get older."}, {"answer": "The accepted theory at the moment is telomeres. When your DNA is copied you lose a tiny bit off the end due to the chemical nature of DNA replication. To prevent you losing anything important there are long segments of DNA that do not code \"traditional\" information (called telomeres) that will be lost instead. You can think of telomeres as a DNA clock, when they run out your cells won't naturally divide anymore. This is one cause of aging."}, {"answer": "So at about what age have we completely replaced our body with new cells?"}, {"answer": "The generally accepted theory at the moment is because of a part of DNA called the telomeres. Telomeres are essentially a \"buffer zone\" around your DNA. Basically, when your DNA is copied (this occurs whenever new cells are created), you lose a tiny bit of DNA from the ends. This means that each time a cell is copied, you lose some Telomere, then, when cells have been copied so much that there is no Telomere left, you begin to lose important DNA and your body essentially begins to degrade."}, {"answer": "Because of the way that those new cells are made. The simplest way to describe it is to think of what happens to a piece of paper if you make a photocopy of something, then take the photocopy of that and photocopy it again. Over and over again you take the new photocopy and when you want another copy you make a copy of a copy. The image quality is going to get worse and worse, with it harder to make out certain things on the paper. Eventually it will be unreadable. Then you die."}, {"answer": "Lots of incorrect answers here about mutations occurring when a cell divides, and how making \"copies of copies\" eventually results in DNA that is too damaged. This is not correct. Luckily we are not jpegs, and DNA replication is very accurate. DNA does not accumulate enough mutations (usually) fast enough to be a factor in aging. Aging has been linked to the length and presence of \"telomeres\". When a cell divides, and DNA replicates, the replication process (while fast and accurate) is unable to copy the end pieces of DNA. Because of this, DNA is capped with junk code at both ends. We refer to these as telomeres. So, every division results in a loss of some of these telomeres. When the telomeres run out, further divisions would result in losing valuable DNA code. Instead of doing this, cells will cease further division and die. To further complicate this, a thing called \"telomerase\" is responsible for replenishing telomeres. ~~As you get older, the telomerase replenishes less and less of your telomeres.~~ Telomerase is active during fetal cell replication, and in your balls where frequent rapid cell division occurs. In the rest of your body, dividing cells will whittle away at their available telomeres. This results in fewer new cells, and more frequent dying of cells. This onset of shortlived, dying cells is \"aging\" in the traditional sense. People with \"hyperactive\" telomerase tend to live longer. However, a careful balance of telomeres and telomerase is thought to be crucial in preventing cancerous growths."}, {"answer": "Tissues in your body can be broadly divided into permanent, stable, and labile. Their regenerative capacity is dependent on which category they are in. Permanent tissues don't have significant regenerative capacity. If you have a myocardial infarction (a \"heart attack\") the heart muscle that is killed will scar and there will be no significant replacement of that killed muscle. If you kill neurons in your central nervous system, there will be scarring and little to no replacement (although interestingly this is not the case in the peripheral nervous system). Stable tissues are tissues which can regenerate if they are injured (note: regenerate and repair are not synonymous; regeneration means the tissue is \"like new\", repair means scar formation). The classic example of this is the liver, which can regenerate almost completely if part of it is removed (for example liver transplantation works this way). Labile tissues are tissues that are constantly being replaced; these would be immune / blood cells, the cells lining your GI tract, urogenital tract, etc. These cells slough off and are repaired continuously throughout your life."}, {"answer": "I know the female eggs are all created at birth (I believe?) but the male testes are always producing sperms. Do the male sperms change over time as the cells are being copied as well? Is there a different process when creating a zygote vs copying a whole cell? EDIT: To clarify and to admit I used the word zygote incorrectly, my question was specific to the creation of sperms or gametes. Does the deterioration of the telomeres in the cells creating these gametes affect the gametes in anyway?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "605501", "title": "Free-radical theory of aging", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["The free radical theory of aging (FRTA) states that organisms age because cells accumulate free radical damage over time. A free radical is any atom or molecule that has a single unpaired electron in an outer shell. While a few free radicals such as melanin are not chemically reactive, most biologically relevant free radicals are highly reactive. For most biological structures, free radical damage is closely associated with oxidative damage. Antioxidants are reducing agents, and limit oxidative damage to biological structures by passivating them from free radicals.", "The free radical theory of aging (FRTA) states that organisms age because cells accumulate free radical damage over time. A free radical is any atom or molecule that has a single unpaired electron in an outer shell. While a few free radicals such as melanin are not chemically reactive, most biologically relevant free radicals are highly reactive. For most biological structures, free radical damage is closely associated with oxidative damage. Antioxidants are reducing agents, and limit oxidative damage to biological structures by passivating them from free radicals."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "29847460", "title": "Cancer cell", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Cancer cells are cells that divide relentlessly, forming solid tumors or flooding the blood with abnormal cells. Cell division is a normal process used by the body for growth and repair. A parent cell divides to form two daughter cells, and these daughter cells are used to build new tissue, or to replace cells that have died because of aging or damage. Healthy cells stop dividing when there is no longer a need for more daughter cells, but cancer cells continue to produce copies. They are also able to spread from one part of the body to another in a process known as metastasis.", "Cancer cells are cells that divide relentlessly, forming solid tumors or flooding the blood with abnormal cells. Cell division is a normal process used by the body for growth and repair. A parent cell divides to form two daughter cells, and these daughter cells are used to build new tissue, or to replace cells that have died because of aging or damage. Healthy cells stop dividing when there is no longer a need for more daughter cells, but cancer cells continue to produce copies. They are also able to spread from one part of the body to another in a process known as metastasis."]}}]}]

Why American sport teams expect that the public should pay for their stadiums.

ljjxn

[{"answer": "Because they can. In most instances where a team threatens to leave if the city/state/whatever doesn't build them a new stadium, they get their stadium. Lots of people rely on the team for employment, and plenty of others like the team enough that they would hate to see it leave. This results in political pressure to keep the team around."}, {"answer": "Because politicians and the public are made to believe that the increased revenue and jobs for the surrounding community will eventually make back the money spent on the construction of the stadium. Basically, since the public would seem to benefit, it makes sense to spend public money on it. In truth, there's no way to ever know if that has ever happened or would ever happen, because there's no real data to compare and say \"Look, you made X more dollars than you would have if you hadn't built this stadium!\" It's just speculation. In a lot of cases, though, it's plainly obvious that the stadium was a huge net loss for the community. Not so much in the US, but look at Greece after the Olympics, South Africa after the World Cup, etc. Source: \"Soccernomics\" by Simon Kuper and Stephen Szymanski"}, {"answer": "I think its's because sportsteams have so much leverage. Sports stadiums bring in tourism, jobs, economic growth, so it ends up profiting the public more anyway. If City A won't pay for it, they'll find a City that will."}, {"answer": "For anyone looking for a more in depth look at stadium subsidies [Dennis Kucinich had a hearing about this exact topic in 2007]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "There's a movement to get us a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings. Part of the current budget proposal is a hotel and restaurant tax for those in the county where the stadium is to be built. These hotels and restaurants would benefit hugely by having an NFL stadium near them, and they know it."}, {"answer": "Oh give me a break. stadiums get built fine without gigantic subsidies in other countries for far less lucrative sport leagues. If it was any other industry, redditors would moan about the rich buying off politicians"}, {"answer": "There are numerous reasons. The first is that the city will own the stadium, not the team. This means that the city has the power to lease the stadium out to any tenant for any purpose. Thus, the city can use that stadium for civic events pretty much rent-free (and subsidized by the sports team and other tenants). Also, they have some control over which other acts get booked: if they don't want, say, Lady Gaga coming to town, they have the ability to deny her the largest venue without overstepping their bounds. Additionally, it gives the city some leverage with the teams playing in it--the lease can be conditional upon the team keeping proper order and ensuring riots don't happen (though the team really can't stop anything that happens because of people watching at home). That's why the *city* wants to pay for the stadium. Sports teams want it because while they only use the stadium during a part of the year, they would still have to maintain it through the *whole* year. They would also have to pay taxes on it. The fact is that event-specific rent is a lot cheaper than just flat-out owning the stadium."}, {"answer": "One counter-argument to the idea that a stadium brings jobs and an economic boost, particularly to the neighborhood it's in - a sentiment often pedaled by venue developers looking to get a sweet tax deal from another locality - is this: If sports venues were always net positives to a community, then we wouldn't be taking old stadiums out of poor areas and re-building them in better areas. Tiger Stadium to Comerica Park is a good example. If Tiger Stadium were such a boon to the area it were in, there would have been a lot more political pressure to keep the Tigers where they were."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "14743863", "title": "Stadium subsidy", "section": "Section::::Background.:In Europe.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 9, "end_paragraph_id": 9, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["They will not threaten to relocate to another city if not provided with a subsidy, or at the very least the threat would not be credible.", "awarded the contract for Super Bowl LIII. Public subsidies for major league sports stadiums and arenas are far less common in Europe than in the United States. The relationship between the local clubs and the cities that host them is typically much stronger than in the United States, with the team being more intrinsic to the cities' identity. Cities would be significantly more upset at the departure of their beloved local teams, and viable alternative cities already have their own clubs to whom their residents are loyal. As a result, the leagues in Europe have significantly less bargaining power. They will not threaten to relocate to another city if not provided with a subsidy, or at the very least the threat would not be credible. It is also worth noting that the NFL, the league in the United States whose stadiums have the highest percentage of public financing of the four major leagues, does not have an equivalent in Europe; American football is relatively unpopular."]}}]}]

How can so many Russians miss the Soviet Union despite the famines, the poverty, and the mass killings?

71fg3e

[{"answer": " > a brutal autocracy that would systematically slaughter everybody even remotely suspected of being critical of the regime Could describe almost any point in Russian history in the last thousand years. The Soviet Union was a huge step up in living standards for the vast majority of Russians compared to the pre-Soviet period. The collapse of the USSR at the end of the 80's and the capitalism-gone-mad gutting of the country in the 90's was a huge step down in standard of living from the Soviet era for many people. Remember that in the Soviet era (especially the post-Stalin period) the power stayed on, you could drink the water, your children could go to good schools and could get good jobs, the state provided healthcare and assistance for the elderly and the disabled. To use a cliche, the trains ran on time. in the 90's that all collapsed. A whole country of people who depended on the state were left at the mercy of the worst of capitalist excess. The mob ruled, nothing worked, the economy was in shambles. That's not a step up from an oppressive state. It's just the same oppression with less stability. Basically Soviet Russia had *rules*. They weren't good or fair, but if you played by the rules you could do alright. Post-Soviet Russia was the wild fuckin' west. It's why Russians approve so strongly of Putin. Him and United Russia have managed to reign in the worst of the corruption and crime and make the state functional again for a lot of people."}, {"answer": " > systematically slaughtered The Soviet Union of the 80's was not the Soviet Union of the 30's. Its most horrific crimes against its people ended with the death of Stalin in the 50's. The later leaders even openly denounced those crimes. As for the rest, Russia today still has a crappy economy and an authoritarian regime, so that's not much different. The Soviet Union *was* however, a superpower considered (incorrectly, but still) an equal of the United States. That gave its people a lot of pride and sense of superiority that they lost when the USSR dissolved. Plus, some people miss the sense of stability. Nobody was rich, but the government took care of a lot of things. Some people are okay with a low standard of living if they don't have to do any work to maintain it."}, {"answer": "The same reason a lot of Americans yearn for the 1950's, despite its racism, wife beating, and political paranoia. That's just how nostalgia works, when things are the way you like them, you get very selective memory about the past. Also, many Russians aren't doing that much better. Quality of life and life expectancy is low compared to the West, the average Russian has about half the disposable income of their Western counterpart, and crime and drug abuse are epidemic. Most people in the USSR weren't directly exposed to the state sanctioned brutality and had jobs, food, and shelter. I'm not saying it was necessarily better, but the difference might not be as great as yout think."}, {"answer": "People miss what they're familiar with. It may have been shitty, but it had the benefit of being the system they grew up in, the world that they were comfortable in. The new world is strange and thus frightening, and so nostalgia helps smooth out the bad memories and paints a rosy glow around the old world. As well as that, while the soviet union was undoubtedly a terrible place for many reasons, we are only truly aware of the negative aspects because as westerners they were our longstanding enemies. While people's lives may very well have been punctuated by periods of extreme uncertainty/violence, there were also long periods of time where they just...lived their lives. The transition period in contrast was a highly chaotic and uncertain time, which for many people translates into a negative view of the transition altogether. Finally, there's the propaganda element, in which citizens were constantly reassured and told that this was the best place and system on Earth. Some of that propaganda sticks well into adulthood, and so despite evidence to the contrary they continue to repeat the propaganda message."}, {"answer": "For many of the common folk, life sucks now about the same as it did back then. Russia has always been a poor country by per capita standards. As shitty as it was to be a Soviet citizen, there was at least a certain predictable stability to life. The rapid fall of the Soviet regime thrust the citizens of the former USSR into an economic reality that the country was not prepared for. Arguably, it would have been better off if the Soviet system had been gradually internally dismantled over a couple of decades rather then abruptly disintegrating within the span of a couple of years. What many of these nostalgic older Russians are expressing is a yearning for a time when their country was globally respected (or at least feared) and seen as a peer to the United States. Putin knows this, hence his Tough Guy Russian Bear act (Syria, Ukraine, Georgia) continuing to drive his relatively high popularity ratings. The collapse of the USSR was definitely a net benefit to the world- and for most Russians, in the long term at least- although the shift to a market economy was a turbulent one. It left modern Russia with some systemic problems like corruption that continue to plague the country (admittedly, most of these problems began before the fall of the USSR.)"}, {"answer": "Well, first of all, the most oppressive forms of government mostly died with Stalin, and gradually ebbed out , with Gorbachev as the least oppressive point. I'm not saying thet were perfect, but as far as the cold war goes, they were OK-ish. People have a fairly short memory. Also, the trains went on time, as the saying goes. Things worked. Corruption was low. After the USSR fell, crime and corruption skyrocketed, and the economy took a sharp downward turn. People notice such things. Then, of course, we have the fact that it was a superpower. It's gratifying to be part of something big, a nation which leads, not just in military, but also science, engineering, medicine and so on. Much of that went down the drain when the USSR fell. People don't like that."}, {"answer": "\"Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.\" -Vladimir Putin"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "1487120", "title": "Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union", "section": "Section::::1930s.:Demographic impact.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 24, "end_paragraph_id": 24, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Estimates of Soviet deaths attributable to the 19321933 famine vary wildly, but are typically given in the range of millions. Vallin et al. estimated that the disasters of the decade culminated in a dramatic fall in fertility and a rise in mortality. Their estimates suggest that total losses can be put at about 4.6 million, 0.9 million of which was due to forced migration, 1 million to a deficit in births, and 2.6 million to exceptional mortality.", "The long-term demographic consequences of collectivization and the Second World War meant that the Soviet Union's 1989 population was 288 million rather than 315 million, 9% lower than it otherwise would have been"]}}]}]

What would happen if a Nuclear Power Plant was left unattended?

8zooqt

[{"answer": "There are safeguards that would trigger and shut the whole thing down safely. They'd just turn off. If you're asking about potential for meltdown, that's possible but exceedingly unlikely. Even in that case, most reactors (all American reactors) are designed to meltdown as safely as possible. Most people don't know that a \"meltdown\" is actually a safety feature. The reactor is positioned over a huge block of cement. In the event of an uncontrolled reactor (it's still not a bomb), the heat generated melts the cement, the reactor sinks, and the cement hardens behind it, \"melting down\" into a cement tomb designed to contain the reactor and radiation for as long as it has to."}, {"answer": "To add to what's been said, the vast majority of land based nuclear reactors are designed in such a way that the water surrounding the core is necessary for the chain reaction to continue. Even if every SCRAM fail-safe fails, once the water boils off the core, the reaction stops. That doesn\u2019t prevent a meltdown, but it does limit the danger of one. The fuel would melt and pool at the bottom of the reaction vessel. It might leak and it might make it into the water table (all of which would be bad but for chemical and not radiological reasons, mainly). Pretty quickly, however, the molten core would cool and solidify. It would remain dangerously radioactive for millennia, but it would never \u201cgo off\u201d like a nuclear bomb. Naval and some Soviet designs don\u2019t work this way. They're essentially slow burning bombs, as I understand them. The good news is that water is just about the best shielding against radiation you could ever ask for and as long as the ship goes down in deep water, there's no problem. This has, in fact, happened. A submarine at the bottom of the ocean is probably a better containment vessel than anything we could engineer for the task. Even then, they wouldn\u2019t go off like a nuclear weapon. They\u2019d melt down and continue reacting until the fuel was dispersed or depleted. Chernobyl style reactors, however? Don\u2019t be down wind of them if civilization collapses. They explode, but still not a nuclear explosion. They'll kick a whole cloud if radioactive death into the atmosphere though. They're closest to what we would call a \u201cdirty bomb\u201d. I\u2019m not a professional. I\u2019m just a nuclear hobbyist. Some people collect stamps."}, {"answer": "Most of these things are designed to shut themselves down if they don't receive maintenance. So probably they won't be the huge problem shown in, like, 'last man on earth'"}, {"answer": "A nuclear plant with modern safety systems would likely eventually encounter some sort of fault scenario and shut itself down. They are designed to be *extremely* failsafe now, both due to the actual threat presented, and the perception of threat presented."}, {"answer": "My former nuclear engineering roommate explained it to me like this: without monitoring it may overheat. When this happens there are automated emergency processes that try to make it not overheat anymore and stop the reaction. If those fail it will keep getting hotter and things will start to melt down through the floor. There's no nuclear explosion but it's possible for there to be a sudden release of pressurized steam or hydrogen if things have gone really bad."}, {"answer": "Edit: TL;DR- not much. Well it depends on what type of reactor we are talking about. But let's assume it's simplified pressurized water reactor with a simplified steam plant attached. Now, the type of apocalyptic scenario will play some apply some key features. In all scenarios where there is one trained operator alive and functional, he will ensure the reactor is in a safe condition before abandoning. It will be ultimately recoverable and functional. There will be no contamination of anything in the surrounding environment for over 3000 years assuming all material requirements/inspections were above board during construction and maintenance. The internal metallic components (which are submerged in water) should have minimal corrosion for over 200 years assuming the system remains closed (a reasonable assumption) and will still be functional. We must in any \"interesting\" scenarios remove all operators from ensuring a safe and effective shutdown. **Let's first assume that the reactor and attached plant are simply abandoned in place and that the society around it for all intents and purposes ceases to exist.** The only loads to the steam system will be the power utilized by the plant itself (associated pumps, heating rods, indicators, ect). With no electric load the Steam System will fail to cool the reactor side water. The inlet temperature will rise which will cause lowering of thermal neutron density in the core. This means Reactor Power will lower to almost nothing. Excess heat generated by the Reactor will reach equilibrium with losses to ambient. Power will remain stable at < 1%. Since no person is around to maintain rod height, temperature will lower in a compensatory fashion as more fuel is expended. Overall temperature of the plant will eventually reach a set point and the reactor will scram to prevent a cold water incursion. The reactor and associated plant will remain dormant essentially indefinitely until a trained team of operators commences with a properly executed startup procedure. **Now let's assume a non directed physical assault on the plant from an external source (i.e. earthquake, or if on a ship a collision). The operators are all incapacitated simultaneously.** Reactor control rods will immediately be driven to the bottom of the core. Reactor power will immediately reach the subcritical range (any fission events will not result in a chain reaction). For Plants with a fill system the pumps will fill the entire reactor compartment with water from a fill system. The plant will likely be damaged but contained. The containment features of any plant will make contamination spread highly unlikely (astronomically unlikely). The plant will likely be unrecoverable without significant maintenance if at all. **Final scenario is a directed attack whether internal or external to the plant. All operators are either incapacitated or directly working to sabotage the system safeties** One level of containment will be immediately lost. Trained saboteurs will likely attempt to create a cold water incursion as that is the most assured way to destroy primary containment. The problem is that this will immediately disengage irrecoverable safeties. The plant is completely irrecoverable at this point. Further containment will prevent spread of the system to the surrounding environment (barring sabotage). Dilution will rapidly occur as reactor fill systems kick in (barring sabotage). The water will be highly radioactive but localized and designed to stay inside the plant. A significant flooding event would be required to spread the contaminated water. Assuming a missile or other external strike. The reactor will scram. The strike will breach outer containment. No other layer of containment will likely be affected. The Reactor plant will be largely unaffected (and shutdown). Recovery of the Reactor plant will be possible, but the steam plant will need to be rebuilt."}, {"answer": "These answers about automatic shutdown are correct, but if the plant remained unattended, say for months or years, then eventually things would start to break, cooling would cease to function as designed, and there would be a probable meltdown. In this scenario, there would be no ongoing chain reaction but the fuel would still generate enough decay heat to heat up and boil a few days or weeks after the last cooling pump stopped working. With no one at the plant to maintain the pumps, the pumps will certainly fail eventually, then the fuel will heat up and melt. Once the fuel melts it may melt through the bottom of the reactor vessel and drop to the floor of the containment structure. Since this scenario takes so long to evolve, the final melting will happen in a fully depressurization system with relatively low decay heat, so the fuel wouldn\u2019t be so likely to be hot enough to burns through the concrete floor. The discussion above assumes that everyone simply has lost their mind and has just forgotten about the plant, but has continued to provide electricity to power the pumps. If electricity vanishes with the missing attendants, then the plant would automatically shut down and cool itself, by itself, until the diesel tanks were empty, at which time the emergency diesels stop generating emergency power, the cooling pumps stop, and the meltdown scenario would begin. Plants are required to have a 30 day supply of emergency power. If no attendants are available to restore electrical power at the end of 30 days then the pumps would stop, the cooling water would boil away, the fuel would melt, the bottom of the vessel would melt and the molten floor would spill onto the concrete containment floor. At 30 days the decay heat is sort of high, so the containment might be more challenged. The result would not be like Fukushima because Fukushima lost cooling within a day or so after shutting down so decay heat was very high. The above scenarios happen with much lower decay heat, so would be dramatically less hideously spectacular."}, {"answer": "It depends a bit on the circumstances under which it was abandoned, but assuming it was left in normal operating conditions, the automatic safety systems would shut the reactor down with very little danger to the surrounding area once the lack of people had caused something important to fail."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "4222539", "title": "Nuclear safety and security", "section": "Section::::Nuclear power plant safety and security.:Failure modes of nuclear power plants.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 51, "end_paragraph_id": 51, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Nuclear safety rules in the United States \"do not adequately weigh the risk of a single event that would knock out electricity from the grid and from emergency generators, as a quake and tsunami recently did in Japan\", Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said in June 2011. As a safeguard against mechanical failure, many nuclear plants are designed to shut down automatically after two days of continuous and unattended operation. Nuclear reactors become preferred targets during military conflict and, over the past three decades, have been repeatedly attacked during military air strikes, occupations,", "As a safeguard against mechanical failure, many nuclear plants are designed to shut down automatically after two days of continuous and unattended operation."]}}]}]

Who is Davy Jones and why is the bottom of the sea referred to as his locker?

2joug4

[{"answer": "To understand, you need to know how language and slang has changed. Duffy used to be a word meaning ghost. Jones used to just mean some random person. And locker was . . . Well, still a locker. Originally, the term was probably Duffy Jones's Locker, which meant the grave of all the unknown ghosts of people who had died at sea. Over time, Duffy became Davey, and so the original meaning of a nameless forgotten ghost was confused. So what originally meant \"The graves of the forgotten\" became \"The grave of this one guy.\""}, {"answer": "Davy Jones is a character from old stories sailors used to tell eachother to frighten eachother. It was believed that if you died while on sea, your soul would go to the bottom of the sea, where Davy Jones would capture it and place it in his Locker."}, {"answer": "Davy Jones was the captain of the ship *The Flying Dutchman*. One day a formless figure appeared on deck who claimed to be the devil. this figure challenged him to sail his ship until he (the devil) returned to tell him to stop. He never did. The crew slowly died and the Flying Dutchman decayed and was slowly ripped apart by the sea and storm. Now the ship rests at the bottom of the sea, Davy Jones still trying to sail it until the devil returns to release his soul. this was a story i read in elementary school, so take it with a grain of salt."}, {"answer": "He was in The Monkees. His chest is at the bottom of the sea because they liked to monkey around."}, {"answer": "Is there any particular reason why most of this shit can't be googled? URL_0 "}, {"answer": "[Davy Jones was a member of a band called The Monkees]( URL_0 ) who were basically a constructed band made to emulate the Beatles, who were already unpopular with people who were against youth culture. Most vocal of anyone against youth culture would be adult conservative groups who hold no qualms about punching someone in the face, like longshoremen and sailors. As a sailor all of your belongings would be kept in a duffle bag or a locker. If you were an asshole you might find your belongs hurled into the sea, where it would sink to the bottom never to be seen again. During this era of the emergence of youth culture in the 60's and 70's Davy Jones emerged as the poster boy for boy bands adults loved to hate, sort of that era's version of Justin Bieber. So if there was anyone's locker a sailor would like to hurl into the sea, it would be Davy Jones. So one place you don't want to wind up in is Davy Jones' locker."}, {"answer": "Also, why is he a part time Green ghost, part time octopus man?"}, {"answer": "I don't know where I heard this but I always thought Davy Jones was a nickname for the devil, his locker being hell."}, {"answer": "Davy Jones is the actual birth name of rock god David Bowie, look it up. And the bottom of the sea is referred to as his locker because in his role as The Sovereign of The Guild of Calamitous Intent, an organization that oversees the operations of super-villains, that's where he keeps his secret hideout located\u2014right next to Sealab 2021."}, {"answer": "From the Oxford English Dictionary. I posted this below in a reply but I'll post it here too. b. Naut. A chest or compartment for containing clothes, stores, ammunition, etc. Often with word prefixed to indicate its use, as chain-locker, shot-locker. boatswain's locker: \u2018a chest in small craft wherein material for working upon rigging is kept\u2019 (Smyth Sailor's Word-bk. 1867). (not) a shot in the locker , used fig. for: (no) money in one's pocket, (not) a chance left. laid in the lockers fig., dead. Also Davy Jones's locker at Davy Jones n."}, {"answer": "David Jones was a 16th century pirate that used to throw his crew or prisoners overboard tied to a weight. Thus creating Davy Jones' locker."}, {"answer": "All I know is that tons of people during school make references to this since my name is David Jones."}, {"answer": "Op you saw that episode of SpongeBob didn't you?"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "481745", "title": "Davy Jones' Locker", "section": "Section::::Use in media.:21st century.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 45, "end_paragraph_id": 45, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Davy Jones is portrayed in the movie as an enigma of the sea, featuring octopus arms for a beard and crab claw for a hand. The origins of Davy Jones and Calypso are revealed in the stand-alone novella \"Davy Jones & the Heart of Darkness\"", "his lover, the sea-goddess Calypso. Davy Jones is portrayed in the movie as an enigma of the sea, featuring octopus arms for a beard and crab claw for a hand. The origins of Davy Jones and Calypso are revealed in the stand-alone novella \"Davy Jones & the Heart of Darkness\". The Scottish origins are consistent with the legend, but this novella includes Davy's training aboard Inferno with Charon, the ferryman of Hades. The tale is written by Dave Montalbano and illustrated by Rachel Galvin."]}}]}]

If a human were the size of an ant, could they see things that are microscopic?

735tk7

[{"answer": "Microbes: yes; atoms: no. With a straight, magical scaling down of a human you'd hit the resolution limits of visible light which has a wavelength of about 0.5\u03bcm. This would mean that you could see everything that can be seen with an optical microscope but atoms are a challenge even for electron microscopes. If you delve into the kind of magic that would be required to scale a human then many more problems arise. The retinal cells in our eyes just don't scale down like that. Insect cells are roughly the same size as human cells; they just have way fewer of them. That's partly why insects have compound eyes which work in a very different way from human eyes. The most fundamental problem is that the square-cube law means that you can't just scale cells or organisms and expect them to work in the same way. There's a reason that the smallest mammals are bigger than insects."}, {"answer": "No, the world would look drastically different, but you wouldn't be able to see microbes or atoms or anything like that. Microbes are incredibly small, in many cases much smaller the cells in mammals or other complex life."}, {"answer": "Biology answer: as you shrink everything shrinks including your retina iris etc. so the amount of light let in would be tiny. This means the world would become very dark, if not black. Your ears wouldn't be able to accept sound waves, making you deaf. Your lungs would be too small to absorb oxygen, and the capellaries would be too small to transport oxygen which means you would suffocate in a dark silent world. So no you wouldnt be able to see microbes"}, {"answer": "The smallest ants - pharaoh ants at around 2mm - are about 1/1000th the size of the tallest humans - a little over 2m - so you can estimate that with the same visual acuity he would see things at effectively 1000x \"magnification\". We can perceive objects down to about 0.1mm, so our shrunken human would in principle be able to perceive down to 0.1\u03bcm (microns). Most bacteria are 2-100x that size so he could see them easily. You start hitting the limits of visible light at these scales though, which is why we move to things like electron microscopes at higher magnifications. There may be other optical effects I'm missing that would mess things up at such a small scale."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "5367445", "title": "Microparticle", "section": "Section::::Alternative definitions for size.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 8, "end_paragraph_id": 8, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Very often particles with dimensions more than 100\u00a0nm are still called nanoparticles. The upper range may be between 300 to 700\u00a0nm, so this would give a size definition for microparticles of 0.3 to 300 \u03bcm or 0.7 to 700 micrometers", "The upper range may be between 300 to 700\u00a0nm, so this would give a size definition for microparticles of 0.3 to 300 \u03bcm or 0.7 to 700 micrometers. Home pregnancy tests make use of gold microparticles. Many applications are also listed in the microsphere article. A recent study showed that infused, negatively charged, immune-modifying microparticles could have therapeutic use in diseases caused or potentiated by inflammatory monocytes. Microspheres are small spherical particles, with diameters"]}}]}]

Classical music is still relevant es ever. Nevertheless how come there are no longer super star composers like in earlier times and how do you actually transcend undying music of genius composers to be relevant today?

8cnbov

[{"answer": "Well, the landscape of classical music changed a lot over the course of the last hundred and fifty years because there are other means of entertainment. It used to be that classical music was the music of the common man, but now it has the appearance of an aristocratic activity. Composers writing academic art music aren\u2019t necessarily writing for a wider audience, rather they\u2019re writing for academically trained composers like themselves. That doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t composers that everyone knows these days, take John Williams or Hans Zimmer for example. They\u2019re writing for the most popular media of today just like how Puccini, Verdi or Wagner wrote for opera, which was the most popular media in the 19th century."}, {"answer": "I like to listen to the musical scores nominated for the Oscars every year. John Williams work is amazing - the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Harry Potter. James Newton Howard: the Fugitive, Prince of Tides, the Dark Knight. John Barry - Dances with Wolves (my favourite movie score)."}, {"answer": "It\u2019s in film. John Williams is a great example of a symphonic composer. Old classical symphonies and ballets and operas were the entertainment of the day. Now we see movies, and amazing music is written for them. We might think it\u2019s \u201cjust\u201d a movie soundtrack, but the music can be held to the same standard as classical operas etc."}, {"answer": "John Adams and Philip Glass are probably the two biggest art music composers today. Interestingly, they both practice their own unique take on the minimalist style, perfected by Steve Reich. My sense is that we are in a transition phase culturally. Our world society is changing and music is changing along with it. Where things will land is hard to say. The Internet is transforming so many paradigms. I find out about new, good music from people who send me links almost instantly. But it still takes years of effort and study to create anything of high quality. So society is moving much faster, but composers still have to woodshed their work. It\u2019s possible the \u2018slow & steady\u2019 efforts of composers are, in a sense, time capsules that bypass faster societal development. So a piece is completed for a society that has changed from when they began. The Rip Van Winkle school of composing, if you will. Not a deliberate decision, just a by-product of living in a fast, changing society."}, {"answer": "I studied music composition in college, and there are a couple other points I think might help understand. Pretty much everything said so far is spot on, but the market for New art music is also very limited. You can make some money writing for commercials and tv if you are lucky/good enough to get in but it is highly competitive and like most fields now they want you to start off working for free and doing more than writing the music. I quit altogether because I couldn't find lucrative work even with a master's degree. Of all the people I knew, I can only think of maybe one who is making a living at it. The other problem with modern art music is that it is kind of hard to get performers to play it. There are people and groups that specialize in modern music but a performer 's bread and butter is still going to be in playing the classic repertoire. Most concert goers don't like new music (sounds like shit or it's scary) and just want to hear the old music. As a performer who needs to pay the bills you have to spend as much time as you can at being the best at what makes money in a very competitive field. Not much time left over to work out new music. It's just like any other art. In today's economy with the abundance of talent and lack of real demand it makes the skills almost worthless."}, {"answer": "It only really seems like there are comparatively tons of old superstar composers because we've had hundreds of years to cement them as superstars. Gershwin, Stravinsky, Shastakovich, Cage were all active until the late (or late-ish) 20th century, and they're incredibly well-known composers. Their style of music might be different, but so are the styles of Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Handel. I guarantee you that in another fifty years, someone will ask this same question, and someone else will respond with another fifty years' worth of similar work that has become revered over the passage of time. This segues into a phenomenon called \"availability bias\". Essentially, think about the statement, \"They just don't make cars like they used to.\" Well, they actually make cars _better_ than they used to--they generally last longer and crashes in them are more survivable (as well as getting better gas mileage and going faster and so forth). It only seems like old cars lasted longer because the few that lasted, have now lasted a _really long time_ and are impressive for it, and our brains take that notable data point and emphasize it when creating our understanding of time/quality relationships. At the same time, we don't see the ones that didn't last, so we don't think about their non-existence (our brain de-emphasizes them). This overweighting of what is \"available\" is the fundamental characteristic of \"availability bias\" (see also \"survivorship bias\", of which both of these are also examples)"}, {"answer": "The Nazis killed it off. Seriously, since the times of Bach or earlier that had been a trend of increasing complexity, in ways that were sort of designed for intellectual analysis rather than listening to. (Bach is plenty complex too, but in ways that jump out at you at first listen.) This abstractness accelerated through the Romantic period until you get to the Modern period. 12-tone music seems pretty clever when you look at it on paper, but I don't think I'm really going too far out on a limb to say it sounds like shit. That's not what you hear on the classical music radio stations. And a lot of it did come out of Germany, which was the intellectual center of the world at the time. Afterwards, you get the Postmodern period, which has some pretty cool stuff (I'd recommend Philip Glass) but there was basically no further to go in the direction of intellectualism in music. And then of course there was also more competition from lower-brow \"folk\" music, which of course always existed, but could then be more easily recorded and reproduced."}, {"answer": "Throwing my two cents in here, might not be worth anything: The Classical circuit became inundated with increasingly experimental music in the 20th century. I've heard some argue that the last original thought in music was the Tristan Chord, which introduced dissonance in the 1860s. Later people like Arnold Schoenberg and Krzysztof Penderecki steered classical music into increasingly atonal directions and there was the similar rise of minimalism/serialism like Philip Glass. While I personally enjoy some of this music (Glass, Corigliano) it can leave a lot of people cold, confused and even angry. Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring's premiere was met with a literal riot, and listening to Glass's solo piano album is tough on a lot of people. And as the classical arena became more and more (pardon the term) academic in their writing, that doesn't appeal to a mass audience. Most people like melody and harmony and a great deal of these composers turn their nose up at this style - G\u00f3recki's minimalist but beautifully melodic Symphony No 3 was outright dismissed by his contemporaries (Story goes fellow composer Boulez shouted \"SHIT!\" at the end of the premiere), yet its one of the few classical works of the last 50 years that has gained real acknowledgement outside the classical music world: in the early nineties, a recording sold something like a million copies in its first year which is unheard of. So while there are some amazingly talented people who write for orchestra - Corgliano, Goldenthal, John Williams, John Adams, Joseph Curiale are some I adore - the majority of the movement is not what most people want to hear."}, {"answer": "You are right to say that \u201cclassical\u201d composers don\u2019t hold the same rock star status they once did. However it all depends what you mean by \u201cclassical\u201d. If you are referring to people composing in the style of the classical period then of course there isn\u2019t anyone famous doing that because music isn\u2019t static, it continues to change. However by saying \u201cclassical\u201d you mean high art music for a large professional musical ensembles then there are plenty of examples of contemporary composers of great renown. Others have already mentioned movie composers, I would contend musicals fall in that category as well. While some may regard them as \u201clow\u201d or \u201ccommercial\u201d in a few centuries we will look at them in the same way we look at the works of Shakespeare (I know he is not a composer but he was the best example I could think of for someone who\u2019s craft was actually quite raunchy and accessible to the masses who now is considered the epitome of high culture). Even among composers who write for other musicians there are \u201crockstars\u201d like Eric Whiteaker who enjoy some degree of mainstream success. Will a composer in this day and age ever be as famous as a pop star? Probably not. But I suspect that the reason history remembers classical composers has a lot less to do with how popular they were during their lifetime and a lot more to with how well their works were documented and talked about by their patrons (usually the rich and the powerful). I would guess that like pop music, the music of the people, folk music, has always been more popular, but until the printing press and recording studio became widely accessible to the masses there was no way of easily documenting and distributing the work of any one artist or band to a wider audience."}, {"answer": "Most \"classical\" pieces are quite long \\(compared to modern pieces\\) and thus require time aswell as effort to listen to properly. As such they aren't really fit for a society that lives at a speed like today; you can't just listen to a symphony on your 10\\-15 min way to go grocery shopping and indeed not properly while driving at all. These pieces \\- and this gets worse both the longer and the better they are \\- need one's full attention rather than being a relaxing backround while driving and listening to the radio. On top of that, they are very difficult to produce, requiring highly skilled artists, while some people with mediocre skills and a computer can produce one \"modern\" piece after another and better fit the speed of today. Lastly, as for where the next Beethoven or Vivaldi are, consider this: 1. They were towering geniuses of a nigh unprecedented caliber in their field. 2. It may very well be that their form of music \\(the \"classical\" genre so to speak\\) has been maxed out in terms of skill and actual musical beauty. Just look at Bach's later work; He basically maxed out organ music halfway through his lifetime and though his later works were growing ever more **technically** brilliant and needed near genius level skill to just be played, they weren't any better in terms of musical quality, in fact, less people liked those brilliant works of pure technique and skill."}, {"answer": "Critique people, whom regulates popularity, are really, really slow on recognizing genius if they are not motivated by money and social connections. Generally recognition happens after the genius departs. So maybe a hundred years later, there will be sayings about great musicians and scientists whom we didn't even noticed now. Another reason -I think this one is outright evolution- it takes many years of tests to prove something as worthy of attention and imitation. And those testful years are way more than lifespan of who created that thing. In either cases, good works are mostly done by those who selfless; they work for the work's own sake. They aren't interested in fame and they are generally getting none. On the other hand, with fame comes support -which makes difference in realizing the potential of the genius and increasing the quality of the work. But still, I think it's a lose for society because the genius will perform regardless; as much as he or she can do with available resources and abilities."}, {"answer": "When it comes to the 'industry' of classical music a lot of the observations here can be boiled down to the following: Composition schools do not emphasize creating compositions that the public actually wants to hear. And major orchestras are run by people from that same milieu. So work that people enjoy is not commissioned. But they keep making music that is hard to listen to for status, class, and academic snobbery reasons. This is not to say all current academic ensemble art music is bad. But it is obvious that large numbers of people don't want to listen to it. Because they don't. At the same time composers like Williams, Zimmer, Desplat, and others delight audiences frequently. Outside the concert hall. If the classical music industry actually cared about delighting large audiences they would commission work like that. From new composers. They choose not to. Related: for similar reasons many prestige buildings are ugly and leak."}, {"answer": "I have a theory on this and just discussed it today. Classical music is a very well established genre. There is not a lot of room for innovation and creativity - in terms of the genre itself. Most well-established genres are like this. Country music is similar but still newer than classical. Still, the genre is recognizable. Rock and hip hop are very new, and EDM and electronic music is newer still There are many ways to innovate in the newer areas because it is not yet settled. But hard rock, not so much. So I can imagine a time when people just play rock or rap, with no major stars because, well, been there done that."}, {"answer": "Look at like this, while it is true that most musicians that play classical music only play old pieces it is not true that no more great composers are to come again. If someone were to write a piece of music that sounded like classical music this piece would still be unique in the sense that they aimed to create something similar to the greats. As they continued this trend it might bring about another renaissance of classical music. The only question now is whom will lead us towards this musical rebirth?"}, {"answer": "I wrote a paper arguing that film score composers --- not all these postmodern composers like John cage --- are the true successors to classical- > romantic- > impressionist line. John Williams is a neo-romantic who (imo) borrowed heavily from Beethoven. Hans Zimmer, being a minimalist, reminds me of the French impressionist at the turn of the century."}, {"answer": "This modern and different type of music is a new style of classical music. In \"classical music there are 4 major time periods, Baroque, classical, Romantic, and modern. Modern is typically what newer composers write it because it's the current style of \"classical\" music just as baroque and romantic were at one point"}, {"answer": "Popularly of the genre, the social aspect of attending concertos (business is now done in the VIP boxes at football games), more acceptability of other kinds of music, the emergence of the 3-minute song, a whole lot!"}, {"answer": "interestingly - I just discovered Four Organs by Steve Reich - cool as cold beans - I hear a lot of its influence in post-punk."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "6668778", "title": "Classical music", "section": "Section::::Instrumentation and vocal practices.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 37, "start_character": 341, "end_paragraph_id": 37, "end_character": 1007, "bleu_score": 1.0}]}]

How point systems, like on Snapchat and Reddit, motivate people to participate even though they contribute no tangible value like money or rewards?

6m4neu

[{"answer": "Note: I don't have a Snapchat, So I'll be speaking from a Reddit perspective. Disclaimer: There are so many other niches and elements of the system that I didn't touch on, simply because I didn't know about it, didn't think about it, didn't have time to mention it, or any other number of reasons. This post is just a surface scratch of why the upvote and downvote system works. Human psychology is an incredibly deep and vague subject of which I don't have nearly the credentials to really claim to know what's true and what's not. Part of it is purely because it indicates social acceptance. If someone likes your post, they upvote it. And social acceptance, if functioning correctly, should make you subconsciously feel a little good. It's built into human nature, otherwise we wouldn't be social animals. Another part of it is because it makes the system tangible and measurable, which commonly makes things more appealing to humans, as opposed to vague or entirely indeterminate measurement systems. Imagine if you wrote some blog post on some blog site: would you want it to have an indicator that simply says \"This post is doing well!\" with an image of a small fire next to it (and nothing at all if it does poorly), or a counter of how many views it's had? It's generally more fun to see it go from some number like 1,100 when you go to sleep, and wake up to 2,310. Even better if it suddenly made it big somehow and jumped from 1.5k to 300k overnight. Being quantifiable simply makes things feel more controllable, or at least observable. As to motivation to upvote someone else's content: A common reason is to show appreciation because it was better than the average post or comment. Maybe it made you giggle, or they provided some extremely in-depth answer, or they're a novelty account that does its job well. In any case, showing appreciation is like an honest \"Thank you\", and makes both parties feel good on the inside. Another common reason is to help sort out what's good and bad content. If it's ad-spam; downvote and report. If it's some fan art of something you like, or a funny post, or an interesting video, you upvote it to help others see it, and also to help a post that you like get the attention that you think it deserves. As for comments, it's the same way. When sorted by \"hot\" or \"best\", AskReddit threads almost always sort themselves out into really good comments at the top, and mediocre comments at the bottom, save for the exception when an answer is late to the party and ends up sitting at 1 karma. That sense of helping a fellow human out also triggers that feelgood sensation, because again, if being positively social benefits the species, then it's a good system for the brain to reward. ^^1 I forgot to talk about the case in which downvotes affect the user experience. Basically, it's the \"negative feedback\" response. So, like it seems, you downvote content that you don't like, be it because it doesn't contribute, because it might be factually wrong, because you don't think someone should see it, or because you disagree with it. In some of these cases--where you downvote because of the appropriate reasons--it ties back around to the feeling of contributing to society, which makes you feel like a necessary cog in the social machine. After all, you did your part in making that out-of-place NSFL shock link or extremely aggressive and rude comment more invisible from the eyes of the rest of the community. You've cleaned out part of the trash. In the other cases--in which you downvote because you disagree--it provides a *different* rewarding feeling, albeit more self-aligned. It might make you feel superior. It might make you feel like you're \"more right\" for having more karma on your post. In a very heated Reddit debate, there might be one side which is consistently negative in karma, whereas the other side is consistently positive in karma (usually due to the audience which is viewing it). The side which is positive feels like they have a group behind them, whereas the other party is a solo individual who doesn't stand a chance, and might be completely wrong. In turn, you once again feel like you've aligned with society, and get rewarded for it. --------- TL;DR it feels good to upvote content, and receive upvotes in turn. This TLDR doesn't help much. You should read the full comment. ---------- Edit: two comments have explicitly told me about their upvotes. It feels good. Let me express an honest thank you in return. This makes me even happier. (In case another example is needed, refer to this edit.) Edit 2: an insightful comment from /u/MNGrrl has prompted me to add another section to my comment---though not necessarily directly related to their comment, but rather a tangent of it which I failed to mention. It's notated with a ^^1 superscript."}, {"answer": "A buildup of score, even a meaningless valueless score, still represents time invested. Reddit Karma is a numeric value for how much people agree with you, and therefore, like you."}, {"answer": "To understand this, we must look no further than the famous psychologists Pavlov and Skinner. The names might ring a bell ^^^^heh for the famous experiments sharing their names, \"Pavlov's Dog\", and \"Skinner's Box\". In the experiment of \"Pavlov's dog\", Pavlov would ring a bell, feed his dog, and his dog would drool (an instinct associated with eating food). Pavlov kept doing this, until eventually all Pavlov had to do was ring the bell and the dog would start drooling regardless of food. With this experiment, Pavlov was able to make the dog associate the sound of a bell with his reactions towards food (drooling, for starters); Essentially, Pavlov showed that *reactions* can be conditioned. Then came Skinner. In Skinner's box experiment, he put a pigeon in a box, and in the box there was a button. Whenever the button was pressed, food would be dispensed to the pigeon. Eventually, as the pigeon realized this, it would obsessively press the button in an attempt to get more treats. -There was also a second part to Skinner's findings: If food was given *every* time the button was pressed, eventually the bird would get bored of the button and quit pressing it. But if instead food was given *at random* for button presses, the bird was drastically more likely to keep pressing the button, even after the bird was full it would still want to press the button. With this experiment, Skinner was able to make the pigeon associate the press of a button with the experience of receiving food, and by giving food at random Skinner was able to get the pigeon to want to press the button substantially more. Essentially, Skinner showed that *actions* can be conditioned. --- Essentially, Reddit is a big skinner box. You have come to associate upvotes, and by proxy the act of giving comments people will like, with the feeling of social acceptance and gratification. Your brain desires this social acceptance and gratification, and believes it can gain that by typing certain words into this box on your screen. Yes, peck at your upvotes, pigeon, peck away. ---- FUN FACT: Professor Skinner actually was commissioned by the US government during WW2 to use the very same Skinner Box concept to create *Pigeon Guided Bombs!* Pigeons were put inside of a bomb, with a screen inside that displayed what the bomb saw. The pigeons were conditioned to associate Japanese naval ships with food, and would peck the naval ships on the screen to dispense food, and this pecking of the screen actually controlled the steering of the missile. Apparently the tests of Project Orcon proved surprisingly successful, however the pigeon-bombs were never actually used in combat. (If you haven't noticed, Skinner had a weird obsession with pigeons) And for your viewing pleasure, here are [two pigeons Skinner conditioned to play pingpong! :D]( URL_0 )"}, {"answer": "Validation in a community. Here it's Reddit community and larger, since a lot of it leaks out into the world. Look at IAMA's and news articles that have actually quoted Reddit users. In my opinion everyone cares. Even you, OP, care. If this thread had zero, absolute zero comments, and zero votes. You'd be bum. Heck you created this to validate your answer. I am sure you had some idea of what the answer is already, you just need validation that it's probably right. You might even want to see that the majority agree with your answer. If this thread received 100,000 up votes, you'd be darn happy. But will it make you richer in real life? Would it make you a better person? Probably not, but a smile because you made a thread that receive so many up votes, right?"}, {"answer": "Same reason that when I was five years, I followed the rules in school to get little star stickers. Never received anything in return for said star stickers."}, {"answer": "Hi all. This is the sort of thread that is going to have a ton of removed comments. I want to leave this here as a sort of explanation. Our rule #3 outlines the expectations around top-level comments. I'll post that rule here for convenience. > 3) Top-level comments must be written explanations > Replies directly to OP must be written explanations or relevant follow-up questions. They may not be jokes, anecdotes, etc. Short or succinct answers do not qualify as explanations, even if factually correct. > Links to outside sources are accepted and encouraged, provided they are accompanied by an original explanation (not simply quoted text) or summation. > Exceptions: links to relevant previous ELI5 posts or highly relevant other subreddits may be permitted. People will tend to want to answer questions like this one through the lens of their personal experience and feelings on the matter. This isn't a survey sub and those comments will likely be removed as anecdotal."}, {"answer": "I think there's a difference between Reddit and Snapchat. Reddit awards you for posting good content which motivates people to be creative and post new content while Snapchat just increases your score by one every time you send or receive a snap. High Snap scores are just a result of people who are more social or who use the app for a long time and don't really have any meaning."}, {"answer": "I see a few mentions of gamification here but I\u2019m going to advocate a different perspective. Particularly, I think gamification (i.e. the reward) isn\u2019t accurate because people don\u2019t do things for the rewards- they don\u2019t expect to get upvoted. Well sometimes we do, but we usually don\u2019t and we shouldn\u2019t. I\u2019ll expand on that point more, below. The question then becomes why do we keep posting? The answer is intrinsic motivation which is fostered by three ingredients: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a psychological theory of motivation that explains human behavior in terms of these three ingredients. In fact, when a lot of people talk about \u201cgamifying\u201d things, we are really referring to ensuring that the user is gaining a sense of autonomy (personal control and freedom), competence (via upvotes: their post is funny, their post is accurate, their post is relevant, etc and this affirms their view of themselves as competent) and it allows them to connect with others (obviously this is social media, after all). The behaviorist perspective prevailed throughout early psychology, which said that people do things \u201cin order to get a reward\u201d or because they expect a reward. As I\u2019ve noted, it\u2019s foolish to expect to get upvoted. Indeed, SDT research shows that when people do things for a separable outcome (e.g. reward, money, upvotes), they lose interest, do not enjoy the task, perform poorly, etcetera. This is extrinsic motivation. If people do things because they enjoy the task (because it satisfies the 3 basic needs) they continue to do it. They can even get a reward later, but as long as the reward is not the reason they do it, intrinsic motivation will increase and participation will remain steady. There's TONS and TONS of research on SDT. Read it. It's cool. It's the closest we get to a real theory in psychology instead of just a pet theory. TLDR; Thus, we keep posting because we enjoy it, not for the reward of upvotes. The upvotes foster our sense of competence and relatedness (and probably autonomy), which helps us enjoy it more."}, {"answer": "TIL snapchat has a point system... I just like sending useless and mundane photos to my friends without crowding my text message history or implying the photos are somehow important because they're not. Similarly I don't participate on reddit for the karma, I don't have many IRL social connections and reddit fills that void. But gamification is a real phenomenon, the illusion of reward can be as motivating as reward itself. For example, a daily jog is rewarding in itself because you get exercise endorphins and you get to know you're doing your body good through healthy exercise. But it's still infinitely more fun to go jogging if you make believe you're running from zombies."}, {"answer": "An upvote is a pat on the back for making a good contribution. People need to feel valuable to others. I don't feel very valuable in my day-to-day life, probably because I get suspicious when other people pay me compliments. I think things like \"did they really mean that, or were they just buttering me up to get something from me later?\" Upvotes are honest because they're given anonymously. Source: I have over 700,000 karma."}, {"answer": "In the case of Reddit and to some degree other social media, they help prop up the \"good\" content. As a user, I want that, and I don't want to spend time weeding through \"bad\" content and comments. I'm more likely to contribute to the conversation when the generally \"good\" and interesting stuff is given to me quickly and easily. It's not perfect, and there are pros and cons to different ways of doing it. But generally speaking with a glut of information, having a flawed but reasonable voting system for propping up good content/comments is valued."}, {"answer": "Same reason people buy the latest iPhone or Galaxy when the old ones or even a flip phone would suffice, status. No matter how much they deny it, every person (at least secretly) wants more than the next person, even if it is useless bullshit."}, {"answer": "It's the same online as it is in the real world. If you're chatting with friends and make a joke, it feels good when people laugh. You created something and somebody else appreciated it. Or if you write a paper and somebody cites it in their work. Somebody read my paper! Somebody out there I've never met got value from something I created. Validation can be a double edged sword, though. When your sense of worth is tied to the reactions you get from others, a joke that falls flat won't feel good. Somebody ridiculing your paper. Any site can implement votes and comments, but that won't suddenly give it that value. The value is the users. Yahoo Answers and YouTube are cesspools. The infrastructure is fine, but without the quality users, you won't find the validation of participating. Reddit has many widely different subs. The kind of people you encounter in one will be very different from another. The \"bad\" users tend to be hidden from view by the voting system, saving users from a YouTube like experience. And Snapchat is for sending nudes. Edit to add: I spend way too much time in /r/cpp_questions helping people who are learning to program in C++. It's a small sub, so if a comment were to get 10 votes that would be surprising. Instead of a large number next to a comment to make me think that a lot of people got value out of something I wrote, I'll have just one person that got value. Maybe they were just looking for the easy way out of a difficult programming assignment, but if I helped them understand a concept in a way that they weren't able to in class or with a TA, that makes me feel good. Teaching is incredibly rewarding. They won't remember me 10 years later but they'll maybe remember whatever concept eluded them, and that's kind of neat."}, {"answer": "I compare it to a \"Skinner box\" mechanic, or \"operant conditioning\". We get so little positive feedback in our life, that when something says \"well done!\" consistently when you perform an action, you want to keep doing it. It's been tested with animals, and buttons which dispense food. They learn that good things happen when they press the button, and want to keep pressing it. Same concept applies for treats when training dogs"}, {"answer": "Take a look at \"NoseDive\" the first episode of the 3rd season of Black Mirror on netflix. This is a great example of glamification and definitely seems to be the likely direction that the human race is headed in. Siednote: there is no need to watch Black Mirror in any order as the episodes do not correlate to each other."}, {"answer": "Social approval is a reward and voting based point systems like reddit's rely on that. If I get 100 upvotes on a post I know that 100 people like what I had to say an that, in and of itself, is nice."}, {"answer": "Can I just say that everyone is making a big assumption that but users on Snapchat and Reddit are motivated to participate by \"points\"? How about the community aspect of it all? I would hypothesize that that is far far bigger of an incentive for people to participate. I hypothesize that Reddit attracts so many users to comment because it mimics social interaction and our brains love social interaction. Not this weird gamification based on points."}, {"answer": "Snapchat and Reddit are diametrally opposite examples, but both valid. Snapchat purely gamifies the service (someone already pointed that out), and presents a reward mechanism so users would invest (content) in their platform. It's purely a ladder system, like Twitter followers, that pertains on one's ego (\"mine is bigger than yours\"), and with such point system Snapchat uses human ego extensively to thair advantage. Reddit's point system (karma) on the other hand, is constructed to represent one's reputation. It's much more similar to Quora then Snapchat. While reputation itself can be (and usially is) gamified, i.e. falls under \"mine is bigger than yours\", it is also a cornerstone of service itself, as it helps maintain quality of service and surface and promote/demote content based on user's reputation, i.e. relevancy to a topic. Reddit e.g. won't allow new accounts, or users with very low karma (points) create new threads, so clearly point system is used to reduce signal vs. noise ratio. So how does a point system motivate us when it doesn't provode any tangible reward? People have a tendency to climb a ladder, in every aspect of their life. 2000 followers on Twitter makes me \"more influential\" than someone with 1400 - so I'll be more active to gain larger follower base. Hence Snapchat. Rewards for relevancy and competency helps people build their own brand and expand relevant reach, so they \"invest\" in themselves. Hence Reddit, Quora. To summarize: - points as a ladder system pertain to human competitiveness and are extensively used as gamification mechanisms to \"trick\" users into spending more time on service (Foursquare, Twitter, Snapchat) - points as a reputation system pertain to increasing and maintaining quality of service, by providing relevancy, context, and reducing signal2noise ratio (Reddit, Quora)."}, {"answer": "The thing that motivates us most is feeling good. Acknowledgements, compliments, positive feedback...we have an appetite for it. Money doesn't satiate that appetite. There are tons of studies and research on this, but this is ELI5, so whatever. There's an excellent TED talk on motivation, I think it's called \"the problem of motivation,\" and it's definitely worth a watch."}, {"answer": "That IS the reward. You post for a reaction. You get a reaction. If it's a positive one? You feel vindicated in your opinion and that's rewarding. If it's negative, you feel the need to defend your opinion, further reinforcing this feedback loop. I want to get off Mr. Bones wild ride..."}, {"answer": "It's like a drug. When you see that like or upvote, you get a little hit of happy hormones in your brain so you keep coming back for more."}, {"answer": "My idea is good because other people voted it up with their bias. That's the most apt description possible. Virtue signalling."}, {"answer": "It's the same reward system that encourages employees to work harder for something that is virtually non existent. Take for example a place like Dave and busters. Games that cost \"points\" (now 100 points = $1. So they will have games that cost 85 points to make it seem like you are spending less money, where in reality most people want to end on an even dollar as they do not know the next time they will be back.) Most of these games reward tickets, these tickets have 0 monetary value but are assumed to be valuable due to the rewards that they can \"buy\". This system encourages you to spend X amount of time, effort, and money just to \"earn\" a $3 teddy bear you can buy at Wal-Mart. With this in mind, companies use this tactic to encourage workers to be more active, and in return they \"earn\" something. Reddit and Snapchat work off the same system, however with reddit the point system encourages activeness, trustworthiness, as well as \"rewards\" a user by allowing them to post and comment more often on different subreddits. Snapchat on the other hand works off of notoriety and the more someone promotes their snapchat, the more followers they gain, and in turn they \"earn\" internet fame for their tiny little corner of the interwebs. So, while they do not earn anything tangible with immediate value, they do earn something that is valuable to them, which will cause them (because humans are fucking greedy) to continue doing so in a never ending cycle until something presents itself that offers more \"valuable rewards\". At least to that particular individual."}, {"answer": "the points system decoys the 15% of redditors who are toxically stupid these people think they have done something with a downvote and having done this then go away, otherwise they feel an unmet need to punish and pursue other avenues to flagellate more vigorously i have noticed my best OP's and comments are usually downvoted, but not always, they can be upvoted or ignored reddit never made any sense to me until they published some stats, say .1% of redditors post 10% of the content, you know these vociferous idiots arguing and disagreeing in an obsessively and traumatic way with anything of sense seem to be dominant, but its domination by the sheer volume of posting or focus so the vote system decoys these people somewhat since the next step they would take is campaigning for removal by the admins etc or more posting to try to \"swamp by content\" or [hassle]( URL_0 ) ! the other interesting thing is people find high reading age or confronting ideas offensive, even though well worked out but are simply against conventional social norms i think they try to punish this as well because the implication is, their value houses are built wrong ! so three cheers for downvotes ! and the spell checker ! : o)"}, {"answer": "When there's a voice we either agree with or find entertaining, we \"upvote\", which allows others to see and share our enjoyment with them. There's more to it than that but there's actually a redeemable purpose to points on sites like Reddit, and that's introducing others to something we like/agree with. EDIT: As far as Snapchat goes, that's more of a psychological 'thing'. I think people just enjoy easy, accessible challenges like streaks. \"How long will it last, who's going to break it first?\" etc. are fun questions to find the answer to."}, {"answer": "Any kind of positive social media interaction triggers release of oxytocin. It's the hormone that makes you feel good when you get a hug or applauded. By giving you a score to based on your acceptance and participation, you reward yourself by releasing pleasure hormones. The people that develop these social networks know this and have gamified their sites in order to keep the good feeling going which keeps people coming back."}, {"answer": "Read a book recently titled 'Solitude.' One of the chapters touched on social media reward systems, and how it ties into the fact that people are uncomfortable with solitude. It's all about feeling connected, and being a part of something with the luxury of being able to correct, edit, etc what you participate in to show off the part of your 'best self,' if you will. Great book. 10/10."}, {"answer": "\"The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important\" -John Dewey This is why. Nowadays it's admittedly a bit different, but the vast majority of people thrive on the feeling of being important or in other words feeling accepted. The momentary satisfying of this \"deepest urge\" is what motivates people to participate. People want to be heard and feel like they matter"}, {"answer": "It's the same reason people want money even though it has no real value. It's a social game. People are naturally driven to seek social status, and any type of numerical measure of that is appealing. At some point, those points began to have a real world value simply because people want them."}, {"answer": "The simplest way of telling it would be that the point system shows that someone is popular or not in the perspective of the consumer. If you have 2K points but your friend has 30K then it would feel like you're not participating enough."}, {"answer": "At least on Reddit, there is a tangible benefit in that low scores make you wait between posting. So you can 'spend' points by making the occasional controversial or risky post that attracts downvotes, and still be able to effectively participate."}, {"answer": "All these comments are quite sophisticated, but from a perspective of a teenager with 300k+ Snapchat points, it's all about the social hierarchy. The \"cool kids\" have more points, and having more points makes you \"seem cool\". Simple as that"}, {"answer": "Why bother getting a high score? Because it makes people feel good that either they are good at something, are attractive, or have a popular opinion. Any type of reward, even fake ones, are going to make you feel good."}, {"answer": "To actual to 5yo: Something something Sociological reasons.Like this, every culture had their norms and URL_0 reddit culture, karma points are the value.Therefore,its up to the individuals to either accept or reject the values.Maybe\u261d\ud83d\ude02"}, {"answer": "Money is not a basic human motivator. However belongingness and self-esteem are fundamental human drivers (after things like safety), according to Maslow. It's all there in the Hierarchy of Needs."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "58426738", "title": "Crowdsource (app)", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 2, "end_paragraph_id": 2, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["provide Google with data to improve services such as Google Maps, Google Translate, and Android. As users complete tasks, they earn achievements including stats, badges, and certificates, which track their progress. Crowdsource was released for Android on the Google Play store (download link) on August 29, 2016, and is also available on the web. Crowdsource includes a variety of short tasks users can complete to improve many of Google's different services. Such tasks include image label verification, sentiment evaluation, and translation validation. By completing these tasks, users provide Google with data to improve services such as Google Maps, Google Translate, and Android. As users complete tasks, they earn achievements including stats, badges, and certificates, which track their progress. Crowdsource was released quietly on the Google Play store, with no marketing from Google. It received mixed reviews on release, with many reviews stating that its lack of monetary rewards is unusual, as similar platforms, such as Google Opinion Rewards, often reward users with Play Store credits. Crowdsource includes different types of tasks,", "provide Google with data to improve services such as Google Maps, Google Translate, and Android. As users complete tasks, they earn achievements including stats, badges, and certificates, which track their progress. Crowdsource was released for Android on the Google Play store (download link) on August 29, 2016, and is also available on the web. Crowdsource includes a variety of short tasks users can complete to improve many of Google's different services."]}}]}]

If polygamy is illegal in the U.S., how does the show 'Sister Wives' exist?

1j7d0c

[{"answer": "Being lawfully married to more than one person at a time is disallowed everywhere in the U.S. But this only pertains to *lawful marriage.* You can engage in *holy matrimony* ('church wedding') with as many people as you want, and even beings and objects that are not people, if your church is up for that. A wedding (holy or not) by itself is not a legal marriage without a lawfully issued marriage certificate. And in some cases, even that might not be enough. For example, if you lawfully execute a second marriage in another state or county (because the first one would catch on before issuing you the license), that's *bigamy,* and the first result is that the second marriage is automatically annulled. In effect, you just can't do it, period. But it's perfectly lawful to *treat other people as spouses even if they're not legally so,* so long as you don't extend that to any act that might constitute fraud. For example, you can claim only your lawful spouse as such on tax forms, or you're committing tax fraud."}, {"answer": "For the moonshine one, there is a legality issue where they don't show all the steps so they technically don't make shine."}, {"answer": "The same reason openly polygamous compounds exist in states with strong anti-bigamy laws; the authorities just aren't interested in prosecuting it. This has a lot to do with the [Short Creek Raid]( URL_0 ) in 1953. The Governor of Arizona invited tons of journalists to witness the raid in which they took basically every member of the community into custody, including children. This backfired, as what people saw on camera were hundreds of kids being ripped away from their mothers, and the public and media response was overwhelmingly negative. Tons of bad press, and the Governor lost reelection. Since then, authorities haven't really been in a big hurry to plan large scale raids of polygamous sects. Instead, what typically gets prosecuted is underage marriages that would qualify as statutory rape, or conspiracy to commit such, which is why Warren Jeffs is in prison."}, {"answer": "Not sure about moonshine, but I think polygamy is illegal the same way that gay marriage is illegal. They are not legally allowed the marriage, but no one is arresting people for their plural marriages, just like no one breaks up a gay wedding ceremony"}, {"answer": "If it is illegal in every state, and I had to guess, I'd say only one wife would be legally married to the man, and the marriages to the others are only recognised by their church of cult or whatever. However different states have different laws regarding marriage, and the federal government only recognises \"traditional marriages\" or at least until they reformed DOMA to recognise same sex marriages."}, {"answer": "I don't know the legal details, but one of the major plot points of the show Sister Wives is somewhat related: They originally live in Utah. The state of Utah somehow communicated that they intended to prosecute the family for polygamy, so the family had to uproot their entire lives and move to another state and area where the laws (or enforcement?) is more relaxed."}, {"answer": "The man on the show is married \"spiritually\"with his wives, or so he says. The show, according to him, is not meant to push polygamy on others, but just to show what it's like. I'm not sure if spiritual weddings are considered legally binding, but any person with internet and a passion for polygamy could find out."}, {"answer": "Didn't they move from the state of Utah to escape law enforcement coming down on them? Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it cannot be documented on TV. I'm sure they are on the law enforcement radar wherever they live, but Nevada has much more lenient laws and liberal stance on sexual perversion."}, {"answer": "And just as was explained, that it's a church, not government marriage, in the show they were in I think Utah but became under suspicion for something technical, which is why a lot of the show revolves around their being pressured to leave and relocating to LV, Nevada."}, {"answer": "Reporting from about 8 houses up the street where the plig family on TV lived: It is is simply not prosecuted in most cases, if ever. In Provo, there was a sitting plig judge on the bench for decades: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "According to Wiki, \"The only legal marriage is between Kody and his first wife, Meri, and the others' marriages are considered spiritual unions\" [Source]( URL_0 )"}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "19792942", "title": "Americans", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Americans are nationals and citizens of the United States of America. Although nationals and citizens make up the majority of Americans, some dual citizens, expatriates, and permanent residents may also claim American nationality. The United States is home to people of many different ethnic origins. As a result, American culture and law does not equate nationality with race or ethnicity, but with citizenship and permanent allegiance.", "Americans are nationals and citizens of the United States of America. Although nationals and citizens make up the majority of Americans, some dual citizens, expatriates, and permanent residents may also claim American nationality. The United States is home to people of many different ethnic origins. As a result, American culture and law does not equate nationality with race or ethnicity, but with citizenship and permanent allegiance."]}}]}]

why is it that when I look to myself in the mirror I think "damn I'm hot" but when I see myself in pictures I seem to be comparatively uglier?

1c8gt5

[{"answer": "this comes up frequently around here and other parts of reddit. Most cameras have a narrow focal length and it can distort the way your face looks, like so. URL_1 URL_0 When you look in a mirror you're seeing yourself as others see you, and not how a camera sees you."}, {"answer": "You're lucky. I see myself ugly in both."}, {"answer": "You're seeing, funny enough, a mirror image of yourself while at home. You're used to seeing your minor asymmetrical features on a certain side of your face in the mirror, so seeing them on the other side in a photo is unusual to you. Whereas everyone else in the world sees you the same way as a photograph, you have a \"backward\" view."}, {"answer": "When you look in a mirror you're likely not making funny faces or in the midst of talking, chewing, yawning, nor are you drunk, sweaty or reacting to some thought you just had. In front of mirror, looking for beauty, you'll deliberately seek out the expression that flatters you the most. Additionally, while you're used to the lighting around your mirror, the lighting in photos can be all over the place, playing tricks with your appearance. I'm sure you look lovely in any medium."}, {"answer": "/u/stoopdapoop has a really great answer, but I may be able to provide a reason from a different perspective. I learned a while ago in my Intro Psych class that the more we see things, the more we tend to find them attractive. With that being said, whenever you see yourself, it's almost always through a mirror.. And that's why you tend to find yourself more attractive when you look at your reflection in the mirror, as opposed to looking at yourself from a photo that's taken at an angle that you don't see yourself in. Theoretically, even though you THINK you look ugly in photos, your friends might think you look attractive because they're more used to seeing you in that light. I hope that made sense.. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any citations on this.. Hopefully somebody with an actual background in psychology can back this up/debunk it. Edit: /u/Nut_Cancer below found the wikipedia article referencing the thing I was talking about. It's called the [Mere-exposure effect](/ URL_0 )."}, {"answer": "The worst is when you think aw yeah lookin' good let's capture this shit and update the ol' profile pic. And then you go into photobooth and it takes a picture and you just close the laptop. fucking photobooth."}, {"answer": "Stoopdapoop has a great answer... but that's not the whole story. The other part is that maybe you just don't know how to photograph well. Models, actors, and other camera personalities actually work to learn their angles. They figure out (usually with a coach) what body/head positions and angles make them look the best on a camera. This is emphatically not the same thing as what makes you look good in day to day life. One of my best angles is one shoulder to the front, slightly down, with my head tilted a little bit down. In real life it looks (and feels) awkward. On camera I look like a badass. There are some good general rules for this (standing side on with your arm pressed against your side makes your arm look fat. Duck face for better cheekbones. bend over a little to show some cleavage. That kind of stuff), but it is mostly individual. Best thing to do is to actually experiment with it... set your camera up on a tripod (or better yet, get a portrait photographer for a couple of hours!), and try to copy the face and body positions from a few magazine shoots of celebrities you think you look like, or just ones that you think look good. Most people manage to find 2 or 3 angles that just look great no matter what."}, {"answer": "I read somewhere that this has something to do with it... URL_0 "}, {"answer": "When you look in a mirror, it's in actual time. You can adjust your angle, your expression, your posture, flex, the lighting, all in fractions of a second to fine the perfect alignment. In photos, it's a single moment. It's locked. If you were slouching, smiling funny, hair out of place, unflattering angle, stomach sticking out, whatever, it's set. Done. Unless you have a professional photographer who understands all these things, and takes 100s of pictures of you, it's extremely unlikely that every detail will fall into place for that single moment in time."}, {"answer": "Yeah, the focal length is part of it, but most of it is that when you look in a mirror, you automatically adjust your facial expressions to be the most aesthetically pleasing you can do. You can't see what you look like in a camera and make those same adjustments. Your blank stare is not as sexy as your mirror smirk."}, {"answer": "My understanding is that a sensor on a camera does not have binocular vision like we do, and it tends to ever so slightly alter appearances."}, {"answer": "This is why pro photographers get paid a lot of money."}, {"answer": "This seems to be an issue with being photogenic: 1. You have two eyes, the camera has one \"eye\". You need strong features to look good in a flattened representation of yourself. 2. Posing takes practice, even the most photogenic person in the world can look awful at the wrong angle. 3. You may be using unflattering direct flash to take pictures."}, {"answer": "stoopdapoop pretty much nails it, but there's also the issue of color temperature....I just wrote a longer explanation, then remembered what subreddit I was on. Basically, the light bulbs in your bathroom are usually a warm color that's flattering to human skin. The flash of a camera often uses a different spectrum of light that's more likely to pick up the color of your veins and blemishes, as well as making you look more pale in general. Even if your camera has an auto-white function, you're still looking at a more balanced color image, which tends to pick up on more imperfections than the bulbs in your vanity."}, {"answer": "Isn't it true that part of the reason may because you can look at yourself in whatever pose you find yourself most attractive, and you do it naturally? For example; someone self-conscious about their nose may prefer to see themselves in a mirror head-on, but a picture of them from the side may make them self-conscious."}, {"answer": "Take a picture of yourself in the mirror to foolproof your camera."}, {"answer": " URL_0 This is the radiolab episode in question."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "14023", "title": "Hot or Not", "section": "Section::::Research.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 11, "end_paragraph_id": 11, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["In 2005, as an example of using image morphing methods to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet (as shown above). On the Hot or Not web site, people rate others' attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot or not palette of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them. Unlike projects like Face of Tomorrow, where the subjects are posed for the purpose, the portraits are blurry because the source images are of low resolution with differences in variables such as posture, hair styles and glasses, so that in this instance images could use only 36 control points for the morphs. A similar study was done with Miss Universe contestants, as shown in the averageness article, as well as one for age, as shown in youthfulness article.", "n 2005, as an example of using image morphing methods to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet (as shown above). On the Hot or Not web site, people rate others' attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot or not palette of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them.", "In 2005, as an example of using image morphing methods to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet (as shown above). On the Hot or Not web site, people rate others' attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot or not palette of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them. Unlike projects like Face of Tomorrow, where the subjects are posed for the purpose, the portraits are blurry because the source images are of low resolution with differences in variables such as posture, hair styles and glasses, so that in this instance images could use only 36 control points for the morphs. A similar study was done with Miss Universe contestants, as shown in the averageness article, as well as one for age, as shown in youthfulness article."]}}]}]

Malcolm X and why Schools in the united states seem to pass over him when learning about the civil rights movent.

z2e3d

[{"answer": "He was Magneto to Martin Luther King's Professor X. One was a militant and a proponent of \"any means necessary\" and the other advocated peaceful integration. They were at war with the same people but were fighting different fights, one more violent and dangerous than the other"}, {"answer": "To start, Malcolm X is not discussed in history because he was often wrong. He believed, and literally so, that colored skin was a sign of pureness in humanity, and that white people were spawned of the devil, bred until their blackness left them 6000 years ago, and now wander the earth wreaking havoc among the peaceful colored peoples. These were the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, who was in all regards a nut job. Malcolm spent over a decade in Elijah Muhammad's church, spreading a radical message of division and disharmony. It was only during the last years of his life, after his break with the Nation of Islam, and specifically after his visits to Mecca, that he realized that the concept of Islam embodied by the Nation was not true Islam, that white people were not inherently evil, and that humanity was equal. He was killed shortly after. Malcolm X isn't mentioned in mainstream history courses because he was polarizing, radical, and very often, simply wrong. In addition, the very \"establishment\" he discusses and laments is the same establishment that creates our history curriculums. He's also such an eccentric character that he doesn't fit well into the popular narrative of civil rights. As someone else has said, quite elegantly, he was Magneto to MLK's Professor X. That being said, he was a truly inspirational man."}, {"answer": "Malcom X represented something scary to many people. There are other people that are also ignored that were vital to the formation of the movment, such as [Bayard Rustin]( URL_0 ). Both of these men are heros to me, and I am an old White guy."}, {"answer": "Curriculum standards in the US are determined by elected (read: political) boards, who have a clear agenda. They want to instill certain values in the children, and the teaching of those values tends to trump historical accuracy in determining the History standards. They don't just ignore Malcolm X. They also teach a version of Dr. King that is incredibly less controversial and radical than he actually was."}, {"answer": "Instead of trying to peacefully make a change in the country like Martin Luther King, he wanted to accomplish change through violence. I don't think he is any better than who he hated. You don't want to spend a ton of time teaching children his message, when there are many others in the civil rights movement to learn from."}, {"answer": "For why he's not taught much in schools, a lot of it has to do with 1) the message that school boards want to teach kids, and 2) that Malcolm X and his views were incredibly complex and nuanced, and it's really difficult to teach something like that to (literally) immature people. Even through high school, things are taught in a very black and white / binary way, so trying to get people to understand why he felt violence had acceptable applications or why he didn't completely oppose segregation is really difficult without spending a LOT of time on the subject and its context, and similarly if you go too in-depth on just his views (e.g. reading his autobiography to kids at a very young age), it can be difficult to explain why these views may also be detrimental. I have two quick examples regarding this: 1) Based on the one paragraph about Marcus Garvey in my high school US history book, nobody understood why he promoted segregation and everybody thought he was terrible, and 2) We read \"A Modest Proposal\" in my sophomore year of high school, and I kid you not, I was possibly the only one in the class of 30+ that recognized it as satire (it's possible more did and just didn't speak up, but the majority of the class thought the whole thing was barbaric and were disgusted by it)."}, {"answer": "Because for much of his life he was as racist as the people his was fighting."}, {"answer": "So, this is kind of a random question, but how do \"civil rights activists\" support themselves? I know King was a reverend, but how do other people make a living while making waves? I honestly don't know."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "20796", "title": "Malcolm X", "section": "Section::::Activity after leaving Nation of Islam.:France and United Kingdom.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 79, "end_paragraph_id": 79, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["On November23, 1964, on his way home from Africa, MalcolmX stopped in Paris, where he spoke in the Salle de la Mutualit\u00e9. A week later, on November30, MalcolmX flew to the United Kingdom, and on December3 took part in a debate at the Oxford Union Society. The motion was taken from a statement made earlier that year by U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater: \"Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice; Moderation in the Pursuit of Justice is No Virtue\". MalcolmX argued for the affirmative, and interest in the debate was so high that it was televised nationally by the BBC.\rhighlight sentence(s) containing evidence, not only the answer", "On November23, 1964, on his way home from Africa, MalcolmX stopped in Paris, where he spoke in the Salle de la Mutualit\u00e9. A week later, on November30, MalcolmX flew to the United Kingdom, and on December3 took part in a debate at the Oxford Union Society. The motion was taken from a statement made earlier that year by U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater: \"Extremism in the Defense of Liberty is No Vice; Moderation in the Pursuit of Justice is No Virtue\". MalcolmX argued for the affirmative, and interest in the debate was so high that it was televised nationally by the BBC."]}}]}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "20796", "title": "Malcolm X", "section": "Section::::Philosophy.:Independent views.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 142, "end_paragraph_id": 142, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurantthe one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get togetherand I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie thenlike all [Black] MuslimsI was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years.", "Brother, remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurantthe one who wanted to help the [Black] Muslims and the whites get togetherand I told her there wasn't a ghost of a chance and she went away crying? Well, I've lived to regret that incident. In many parts of the African continent I saw white students helping black people. Something like this kills a lot of argument. I did many things as a [Black] Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie thenlike all [Black] MuslimsI was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years."]}}]}]

The concept of the 'Demiurge'

1jvr15

[{"answer": "Namaskar! In Christianity the idea is common due to the presence, seemingly, of two different gods in the Christian Bible. In the Christian Old Testament there is YHVH, the ineffable God of the Hebrews who selects them as His chosen people - and no other - and who, while merciful and slow to anger, is also violent and vengeful. Then there is the god of the Christian New Testament, represented by Jesus. This god is loving, kind, merciful, never (or rarely) violent, vengeful, and so on. There have been attempts to reconcile these two depictions of the Christian idea of God and one of the earliest came from Marcion of Sinope; this idea would come to be known as Marcionism. Marcion proposed that there were actually two different gods: the true god, represented by Jesus in the New Testament; and the Hebrew god who was a separate and lower entity than Jesus and the god he represented. In this idea, Marcionism shares a link with Christian Gnosticism. Christian Gnosticism is a separate following which believes that Jesus, as a manifestation of Sophia (wisdom), came from the true God's realm to deliver mankind from the clutches of the tyrannical god of the Hebrews. The god of the Hebrews, as per Christian Gnosticism, is either ignorant at best or malevolent at worst; he believes that he is the only god and his works are all that are. He forces men to submit to his will and blinds them with the illusions that are our \"reality\". Jesus comes from the true world to share gnosis (knowledge, enlightenment) with mankind so that we can see through the illusion that the demiurge - the Hebrew god - pulls over our eyes. He shares this with us because the true god recognizes our potential as beings who possess wisdom and power the demiurge does not have and, as such, recognizes that it is unfair that anything with such capacity does not deserve the true hell that is the wise being ruled by the ignorant or incompetent."}, {"answer": "The term isn't specific to just one religious system. The literal translation of the word is 'public servant'. Sometimes it's used to mean a malevolent or misguided deity, others just to refer to a sort of genuine mystical public servant, sort of a architect or accountant for the universe. The myth I heard goes like this, and if memory serves belongs before genesis time-wise: There's this divine reality, comprised of a sort of divine family. The thing at the top (a 'true' god sort of thing) spawned some of the 'family' (some male, some female), and the rest of the family spawned other members with the grace and guidance/permission of the head divine god-critter. One of these members decided to spawn a new member of the family without grace and guidance from the big divinity on top. Her name is Sophia, and this conception goes horribly wrong. After creating this sort of divine abortion/abomination, she stares at it and realizes she fucked up big. In shame, she covers it with a sort of cloud/haze before it comes to and awakes. When it awakes, it sees nothing but itself. Being of divine origin, it's certainly powerful and, so far as it is concerned, all powerful. Spotting no cause other than itself, it assumes it's the causeless cause (in actuality this is the big divine head honcho) because if nothing exists but it, what else could it be? In ignorance, it creates a host of servants (angels), these servants help it build a world. On this world, he and his servants create creatures to worship and love him. But the spark that lets him create doesn't come from him, and his misuse produces beings that inevitably flee the cages he builds for them. There's a number of failed worlds he builds, starting flowy and spirity and slowly coalescing over each failed model into the existing world in front of us today. Additionally, this story comes with a modified version of genesis: Sophia, realizing she fucked up big and that pieces of her own divine essence are getting misused by her bastard son (the demiurge), tries to repent and fix her mistakes. An extra woman shows up in eden named lilith. One who defies the demiurge and leaves after it demands she submit to Adam by invoking the name of the actual god. The actual god also makes an appearance at one point, terrifying the demiurge; but the demiurge stays in denial about it's place in things and continues to believe it must be in charge of all; even trying to snatch at and steal the power of that head honcho god for itself. That is rusty, and probably inaccurate as it's from memory. Sooo... URL_0 here are translations of the relevant original texts, in case you wish to pour over them yourself. :)"}, {"answer": "The Demiurge is the creator of the physical world. He is, unlike God, a flawed being, either incompetent or outright evil. The concept of the Demiurge is an answer to the philosophical problem of why evil exists. Why do young children die of horrible diseases? Why do natural disasters kill innocent people? The answer is because the world was not created by an all-powerful, perfectly good being, but rather by a flawed creator. Gnosticism posits a series of 'emanations' from God, each a being in its own right, becoming progressively more and more flawed, and ending with the Demiurge. Human beings are part spirit and part matter. Our spirits are pure, but are trapped within flawed physical flesh, which is responsible for lust, greed, and other sinful desires. Our spirits are not the creation of the Demiurge, and long to be reunited with God."}, {"answer": "So far the answers here are making me have kittens. The Demiurge is not a religious concept, it is a philosophical one later co-opted by religious organisations. Loosely the Demiurge is a sentience that has fashioned (and has complete control over) the material world we live in. However the Demiurge exists as part of a greater existence, it itself is an inhabitant of a greater reality. An adjacent thought is the idea of the Monad. A divinity that is connects all real things, not just material things but the ideals of things. The Monad is \"the One\", the soul that is everything. To Pythagoreans the Monad is the points and lines - the building blocks of existence. A point in space time is the Monad, a rock is (a slightly more complicated form of) the Monad, your consciousness is (an even more complicated form of) the Monad. So: the Demiurge (which may or may not exist) could be the creator of our universe but is itself (as we are) part of a greater existence which has no conscious creator or indeed creation event. From this point of view Abrahamic religions worship the Demiurge, their god is a conscious being which created the universe we live in. Some would argue that the Demiurge is some false creator god and the Monad is truly God as Christians, Jews and Muslims worship Him but this is just bullshit. The Demiurge and Monad philosophy is a complete rejection of that line of thought. The Monad is not a being, it just is."}, {"answer": "Like he's five.... Some people think ideas, virtue and dreams are more real and good than the physical normal world. It's easier to imagine a perfect circle but real circles are always a little messed up. Some people believe a really good god or goddess made the world of ideas and dreams while another god, the demiurge, was jealous or something and created our world but he's mean and stupid so that is why there are bad things in the world."}, {"answer": "It depends on the system of belief we attach the concept of the demiurge to. The christian God is a demiurge because he both created and shaped the Universe. In other religions, there is a primordial being that created the Universe from nothingness but there is also a god that shapes the universe into lands, waters, mountains etc."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "54223", "title": "Creator deity", "section": "Section::::Polytheism.:Platonic demiurge.\n", "start_paragraph_id": 64, "end_paragraph_id": 64, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Plato, in his dialogue \"Timaeus\", describes a creation myth involving a being called the demiurge ( \"craftsman\"). Neoplatonism and Gnosticism continued and developed this concept. In Neoplatonism, the demiurge represents the second cause or dyad, after the monad. In Gnostic dualism, the demiurge is an imperfect spirit and possibly an evil being, transcended by divine Fullness (Pleroma)", "Plato, in his dialogue \"Timaeus\", describes a creation myth involving a being called the demiurge ( \"craftsman\"). Neoplatonism and Gnosticism continued and developed this concept. In Neoplatonism, the demiurge represents the second cause or dyad, after the monad. In Gnostic dualism, the demiurge is an imperfect spirit and possibly an evil being, transcended by divine Fullness (Pleroma). Unlike the Abrahamic God, Plato's demiurge is unable to create ex-nihilo. Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning monotheism, polytheism, panentheism,"]}}]}]

If most money is now just numbers in a computer, what keeps a bank from just adding a couple million to its accounts?

33r0ac

[{"answer": "Banks lend out more money than they have actual money, so they're creating imaginary money that only exists on paper out of thin air. It would be illegal to put free money in their own accounts, but having someone owe you money is an asset too, so they put free money in other people's accounts. If then bank sitting on too much outstanding debt, they might bundle it up and sell it to someone else, then use that money to loan more people thin-air money."}, {"answer": "A banks is accountable to it's countries tax office and independent financial regulators. Throughout the financial year, the bank must produce financial reports which include a balance sheet, which shows the opening and closing balances of all of their accounts, showing the bank's total assets and therefore the health of the bank. Financial regulators constantly monitor these reports to make sure that the bank has enough assets to cope with an unexpected financial event. If a bank were to simply add a few billion dollars to it's accounting records, the discrepancy from one balance sheet to the next would show that this money was simply invented and the bank would be fined or (hopefully) be shut down by the regulators. Also, every dollar in the bank's accounts has to be shown to have originated from a source and those sources are also required to show a corresponding transaction. For banks, this may be other banks, government treasuries, business, profit from interest charged, profit from financial trades, or from public savings accounts. TL:DR a bank can't just edit it's accounts because their ongoing reporting would show that the money just materialized and didn't come from a source."}, {"answer": "The Federal Reserve actually does just this as a matter of course. It is the largest bank in the Unites States."}, {"answer": "Its called fractional reserve banking. A bank can create money for loans and mortgages up to a certain multiple of the total amount of cash deposits from its customers. Normally a bank takes money you deposit and lends out that money to borrowers. But since most people keep their deposits sitting in their bank accounts for a long time banks then are able to lend more out \"on paper\" then the total deposits. The problem is when there's a crisis, or a bank is running into trouble then people start withdrawing their cash deposits and the bank becomes insolvent. Therefore the government sets a limit (multiples) on how much a bank can lend out over and above the amount of total deposits. To answer your question: a bank can make themselves 1 million dollars (in their books) if they have the required reserves in deposits (someone came in and deposited, say, $250k if the multiple set by the government is 4 times)."}, {"answer": "I actually did my term paper on this. A bank is profitable only because it states it has money in its account that isn't there. The way banks work is they loan out 95% of the money they have in their account as debt and then make a profit on the interest. For example purposes, let's say a bank's account has $100.00 in it, there is actually only $5 or 5% of that money in the vault at a given moment. As long as people take out only a fraction of their money and do not demand their money back all at once, the bank is fine. Feel free to ask any more questions or for me to expand on my answer. * This article explains the inner workings of banks very well URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I don't know the intricacies and I'm sure someone else will chime in with them, but there has to be a record of it coming from somewhere. It's not as simple as just typing in a number and saying \"tada! there is now this much money!\" Audits and whatnot."}, {"answer": "Debits must equal credits and auditors would find it pretty quick."}, {"answer": "Nothing really prevents a bank from doing this, but one deterrent is the existence i financial statement audits. Every company, including banks, are audited by public accounting firms each year to verify that what they are telling regulators and stockholders is true. While small amounts could probably be concealed, adding a few zeros to any account would most likely be detected."}, {"answer": "Banks do their taxes just like you do. If they suddenly reported millions of dollars appearing out of nowhere, they'd get caught and punished severely."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "209411", "title": "Embezzlement", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 1, "end_paragraph_id": 1, "meta": {"evidence_span": ["Embezzlement is the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion (theft) of such assets, by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes. Embezzlement is a type of financial fraud. For example, a lawyer might embezzle funds from the trust accounts of their clients; a financial advisor might embezzle the funds of investors; and a husband or a wife might embezzle funds from a bank account jointly held with the spouse.", "Embezzlement is the act of withholding assets for the purpose of conversion (theft) of such assets, by one or more persons to whom the assets were entrusted, either to be held or to be used for specific purposes. Embezzlement is a type of financial fraud. For example, a lawyer might embezzle funds from the trust accounts of their clients; a financial advisor might embezzle the funds of investors; and a husband or a wife might embezzle funds from a bank account jointly held with the spouse."]}}]}]

The bizarre border between Russia, China and North Korea

1vxxh3

[{"answer": "The border between North Korea and China is defined by the Yalu river and the Tumen river. Russia deliberatly didn't want China to have control over the entrance to the tumen river because it might threaten its Far eastern shipping route cities like Vladistock in the northern Pacific. Russia has had the 18 km border since an 1860 treaty with China and it was used during the 1940s as a transit route for Soviet arms and supplies to reach the North Korean leadership. The border was deliberatly designed for strategic and commercial reasons agains't China and then utilized for Russian dominance over the North Korean regime in the Soviet period. Edit: URL_2 This is the treaty the Qing Empire negotiated with Russia ceding territory in assistance in getting rid of the Anglo-French force that occupied Peking ( Beijing) in 1860 ( due to unequal treaties of the 2nd Opium war). the area of Fuangchuancun was given over to Russia. Its now part of China but as you can read here their are environmental issues at play as well and Russian hostility over a port that might compete with its possesions in the Russian Far east: URL_1 Edit 2: There is a growing issue that was touched upon recently in a reuter article about growing Chinese investment in Agriculture in the Russian Far East and the ambivalence and worry in Moscow over this: URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I bet C.G.P Grey ( /u/MindOfMetalAndWheels ) could explain this in very entertaining way, like this: URL_1 URL_0 "}, {"answer": "I always love borders where 3 countries meet in the same point."}, {"answer": "I read a guy's travel blog once about a trip he made by train from Moscow to Pyongyang via the Russia-North Korea border which is apparently closed to tourists now (though some sources say that it's reopened/\"unofficially\" open). It was quite a fascinating read, the route is obviously well off the beaten path, and I'd love to make the same journey some day. I'm on mobile, but you can find the blog if you google \"from Vienna to Pyongyang\" IIRC. Also, checking out the obscure geopolitical features of the world on Google Maps is one of my favorite things to do as well."}, {"provenance": [{"wikipedia_id": "57213334", "title": "China\u2013North Korea\u2013Russia tripoint", "section": "Section::::Abstract.", "start_paragraph_id": 2, "start_character": 0, "end_paragraph_id": 2, "end_character": 157, "bleu_score": 0.5380627025180059}]}]