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5ox5s7 | Why, when slowly opening a plastic soda bottle, does a little air come out when you Crack it a little open, but then more comes out when you open more? | If the first crack is enough to let some air out, Spyker it be enough to let it all out? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your whole high school is in the gym for an assembly. The presentation comes to an end and everyone needs to leave all at once. If you never open the doors, people will never leave. If you open one door, how long will it take for everyone to leave? If you open all the doors, how long will it take for everyone to leave? Relate this to your problem. Basically, it doesn't matter how fast or slow you open the bottle, the air will equalize anyway. It's only a function of how fast it equalizes."
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5ox83l | Why do radios stations from far away come on when it rains? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Radio waves are just another form of light, and like visible light, they can be reflected off objects. The phenomenon you're talking about probably has to do with [Tropospheric Ducting]( URL_0 ). During a rain storm, you might have a layer of cold air near ground level bordered by warmer air higher up in the troposphere. This is called a temperature inversion (since normally the reverse is true). This creates a \"duct\" of cool air near ground level. The boundary between the sudden rise in temperature has a high refractive index. The denser cooler air slows the wave a little more than the warmer air, making it curve downwards. When a radio wave enters the boundary between cold and warm, it reflects it back down to Earth. If it hits this boundary at a low angle, it can curve well beyond the horizon. So it's not really the rain that's causing it, but usually the front that brings in the storm. Rain can actually have the opposite effect at higher microwave frequencies. Scattering the signal until its unintelligible."
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5ox994 | Why do humans have favorite colors? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No science here but probably association. Things like nostalgia probably contribute. Live near the ocean and more drawn to blue or yellow. Your mother liked to have a rose garden so seeing red reminds you of that and gives you a warm feeling etc"
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5oxc9q | Black bars across ones eyes and censorship? | Assuming I'm staring at two photos and each of those photos includes a friend that I know, one photo has black bars across everyones eyes but the other one doesnt. Why is it when I scan the photos with my eyes I can spot my friend on the normal photos really fast but usually wouldn't recognise if my friend in the other one due to the black bar. I want to know why that whole back bar across the eyes in a photo is effective as a form of censorship to protect identity when all it does is cover ones eyes. How Does it trick the brain into misidentification even if you can see all other aspects of the person? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't, really, but it's just enough to satisfy the legal requirements of certain nations or publications to make identification difficult. For various reasons some legal systems require censorship for those who do not give their permission to be published. Therefore, there is a minimum effort required for a publisher to say \"hey, we complied with the law, nobody knows who this person is.\""
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5oxe7m | How did ancient peoples make it to Hawaii and other geographically disparate islands centuries before reasonably modernized shipbuilding? | I'm not talking about riding a ship over a few dozen miles. I'm asking how people navigated thousands of miles of treacherous open ocean before sails were even commonly implemented. Ships in the 1400's and 1500's were still dodgy risks. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On a boat. The Polynesian people lived on strings of islands for thousands of years, some islands that were close together and some that were further away past the horizon. They were experts at seafaring, had excellent boats, excellent navigation, and understood the cyclical way the ocean current and winds changed over the year to let them go far out and then circle back. They knew what supplies to bring, how to get fish and fresh water on long trips. They could spend weeks at sea.",
"It was a pretty dodgy risk, but people still did it, just with a lower probability of success. [Thor Heyerdahl]( URL_0 ) proved that sailing across the Pacific ocean in a primitive raft was possible and in later expeditions that it was possible to sail across the Atlantic ocean using primitive technology. > before sails were even commonly implemented Sails have been in use as far back as 6000 - 4300 BC or even longer.",
"The prevailing theory out there is people from either SE Asia or Australia set out in large rigger canoes possibly with sails. They bounced further outward from island to island from West to east. Hawaii was the last island(s) to be reached and colonized. They used the stars to navigate and it was a rather rigorous process and most settlers never returned to the original island.",
"[In the Marshall Islands, they navigated by examining the change in the waves (which travel in a consistent direction) caused by islands.]( URL_0 ) These aren't nearly as far as Hawaii, but they are far beyond visual range.",
"The Polynesian people were great boat people and fierce navigators always out in search for new lands to claim. The first people to get to Hawaii were following a flock of birds (Pacific Golden Plover). The birds migrate from Alaska to the South Pacific to lay eggs. Early Polynesian explorers followed these birds as long as they could see streams of them. They knew they had to be stopping at a land mass somewhere, so they would follow them until they couldn't see them anymore and resume next year from the spot they lost them last. It took 400 years for them to find Hawaii. URL_0",
"Follow up questions - Is there any idea of their success rate in these voyages? Could groups set out with a clear idea of where they were going or would they just set out to sea and see how things went? Clearly, they discovered islands along the way. Were these exploratory missions or just people adrift? If they did find an island, could they navigate back home to tell others?",
"Sea faring people used small sailboats to travel many hundreds of miles. Not big European caravels. More like 4-6 person sailboats. Sailing has been around for millennia. Ancient Egypt 5000 years ago were sailing. Ancient China was sailing in Pacific.",
"They used outrigger canoes like [Hōkūle`a]( URL_0 ) and the ancient discipline of wayfinding. There's been some recent resurgence in studying this discipline.",
"Modern shipbuilding isn't needed to sail across an ocean. Accurate navigation is what's important. Ancient peoples knew how to find latitude with the sun. Pacific islanders tacked on local knowledge (current, seasonal winds, wildlife) to get a good approximation of where they were. Imagine ocean currents as highways that are visible to the trained eye. Ancient peoples road these highways to their destinations.",
"[Polynesian Wayfinding]( URL_1 ) > On his first voyage of Pacific exploration, [Captain] James Cook had the services of a Polynesian navigator, Tupaia, who drew a chart of the islands within a 2,000 miles (3,200 km) radius (to the north and west) of his home island of Ra'iatea. Tupaia had knowledge of 130 islands and named 74 on his chart. Also, here's a cool anecdote about Polynesian Wayfinding: URL_0",
"IIRC they also used the clouds to figure out where other island were. Certain types of clouds only build up around land masses.",
"Google Thor Heyerdahl, he had a theory about how the Polynesians travelles on rafts over the ocean. Everyonw thought it was bullshit, so to prove it he decided to do the same thing. There's also a Norwegian movie about the expedition called Kon-Tiki, check it out :)",
"This could interest you OP. This was built around the corner from my house. It is a giant double hulled canoe, built in the ancient ways. They have been touring the world with it. They first replicated this ancient travel in the 70s, and are continuing the tradition. URL_0"
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5oxfls | How can Navient, the student loan servicer in the news today, have a 100% negative reviews with the Better Business Bureau, but still be rated an A+? | Here is the link: URL_0 | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The BBB is not a governmental agency or regulatory body. They function is neither to regulate business or to protect consumers. They can say anything they want, but at the end of the day, they just want money, often raised from \"bribes\" paid by companies."
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5oxhtm | Is it legal to pirate a game I own legitimately? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If I remember correctly, you're not buying the game per se, but a license to play that game on whichever system you buy it for, which makes playing same game technically illegal on an emulator. Hopefully someone else can verify/expand on this.",
"I'm assuming you're in the US. There are two things that govern the law on this issue: US law and the agreement you have with the software publisher. First, let's talk about US law. US copyright law generally assumes you bought a copy of the program. As the owner you can keep and use the program or you can sell the program. If you keep the program, you can make an archival backup of it, but that's it. If you sell the program you have to destroy the backup. Emulators aren't necessarily illegal under copyright law. You can't copy the code directly from a system, but if someone makes their own system to play the games then that's fine. I don't actually know how most emulators are made, so I couldn't say if they're legal or not. Given all of that, you should be able to play your game on an emulator since you paid to run the program and you can run the program on whatever system you like. I also don't know if you can say that the disc the game is on is your \"backup\" and the ISO you use on the emulator is your main copy - there hasn't been a court case on that as far as I know. So that's all and good for US law, but most software publishers also include an End User License Agreement (EULA) with additional restrictions. They typically say that you are actually buying a \"license\" to play the game, so you can't resell it or back it up or anything like that. US courts have been split on whether EULAs that force you to buy a \"license\" instead of outright buying a copy of the program are effective. Some circuits have said yes, others have said no. tl;dr US Courts are split on how much they will enforce an EULA. If an EULA is completely enforceable, it would be illegal for your to pirate your own game. If the EULA is not enforceable, it's legal for you to make a backup copy of your game. Whether you can play your backup copy on another system is a legal gray area.",
"No, that's not legal. Owning a legitimate copy doesn't give you the right to download a copy from an illegitimate source. However, you are allowed to make a backup of your own copy. So it's legal to rip your own iso from your own discs.",
"Generally, no. The terms of service you agreed to when you purchased the game only allow you to use the game in the medium that you purchased it on - you are not allowed to utilize it on other platforms.",
"its a gray area but generally speaking it wouldnt make sense to prosecute unless you were distributing copies as that is what takes away from sales. The fact that sony discontinued the earlier playstations is not fair to you as a consumer of their games and I think theyd agree with you as a company as the cost of producing those consoles to too high compared to the value theyd provide. if you bought the games thats as good as you can do"
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5oxjlr | How do people get roms off of cartridges? | When it comes to, say, ripping a rom off of a gba or nes game, what is the method for that? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious, not because I'm trying to :P | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You just need a device that can connect to the cartridge and to a computer, at which point the cartridge either appears as a serial device. [This]( URL_0 ) page shows various projects that have been done with gameboy cartridges."
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5oxksa | what would happen if you never cut the umbilical cord? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Even if you cut and clamp it, it detaches in a few days. If you don't cut it, it would still detach. You'd just have a stinky placenta lying around for a few days.",
"It's not made of flesh like your skin. The umbilical cord is comprised of a substance called wharton's jelly. After it is exposed, it will dry and fall off after a period of time."
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5oxlhm | How the Dark Web operates | Not looking to know how to get on it, just how it actually operates. How it stays hidden, etc. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It operates just like the rest of the Internet. It's computers that use IP messages to send information to each other. It's just not indexed by Google or send to your browser as HTTP messages. For example, the email network is dark. My email server sends SMTP messages to your email server. Both machines have a database of the messages they've received, and they don't let Google see it or anybody see it. There might be a webmail server that you can log into and see the contents of the mail server's database, but you're not seeing the actual mail server."
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5oxs2o | White Hats of Reddit, what are simple steps everyone should be taking to preserve anonymity and security online? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. Buy a brand new laptop with cash. If you are ultra paranoid have somebody else buy it for you. 2. Tape over or otherwise disable the webcam. 3. Never log into any personal website with this laptop. Never log into facebook, email, reddit ect. 4. Never have the battery installed in the laptop when not using. 5. Never have the laptop plugged in while your home modem/router is plugged on at the same time. 6. Always use open networks to access the internet. 7. If there are no open networks at home and you want to use the laptop at home get a burner cell phone that you can tether to for data that you also pay cash with. Pay cash for refill cards.",
"This may sound silly, but don't use Facespace etc and post information about yourself. One of the easiest parts of data mining is grabbing everything people already willfully share about themselves.",
"I'm not a white hat, just interested in this particular topic lately. I mainly use [ URL_2 ]( URL_2 ), along with [/r/privacytoolsIO/]( URL_1 ). But there's also [this]( URL_3 ) guide from [Electronic Frontier Foundation]( URL_0 )."
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5oxt8t | What does the chip on our cards do, why do we only now need it, and why can't every store/vendor mainstream the darn thing so we don't have to swipe? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It changes your card number every time it's used, and it prevents itself from being swiped in a reader activated for chip. This lowers the likelihood of your info being stolen and used by magnitudes. Now, most stores in the US have a reader capable of accepting chip. However, both their bank and their card processor has to allow it and the reader needs to be updated to allow it. Also, readers need a certificate (which says that they are genuine and safe), which can take months to acquire even if you everything else setup. Also, the UK and most if the world has had them for years. Also, in the US we had tap cards like a decade ago, but scary news stories caused people to fear the tech. The one big chink in the armor is online payments, as you have to enter the physical numbers. This is where \"Pay with Apple Pay\" come in. Services like PayPal and some banks (Chase I believe) also allow online payments, but I don't think they are as secure, as your bank account number is being used to authenticate the purchase, but I could be wrong and they actually use tokenization."
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5oxwvs | How and why birds move their heads in perfectly smooth and almost mechanical motions. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Birds have very precise muscles in their necks because they cannot move their eyes like we do when we want to look at different things in our field of view. They would have to move their necks to point their head and eyes at something else. Their heads have [extremely smooth stabilized movement]( URL_0 ) because they need to keep their heads and thus, eyes steady to look at something. When moving, some birds have a bobbing motion (pigeons in particular) because their heads are moving from one stabilized position to another."
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5oy1pt | How do you read the pioneer plaque on the Pioneer spacecrafts? | [Image in question.]( URL_0 ) I can't really get my head around it. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"At the bottom you have our position in the solar system and origin point for the probe inc pluto(it's a planet again bitches!). At the top is a helium atom I think. Between them I'm guessing is our place within the local cluster of galaxies and on the right is a standard size man and woman next to the probe I'd assume for scale . Edit: i was a bit out. Wiki has a section dedicated to it. It's really interesting URL_0"
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5oy20i | Why does water taste terrible when you're sick, even though you're supposed to be drinking lots of fluids to get better? | When I'm sick with a bad cold or flu I'm always told that I need to drink lots of fluids. I can usually take a sip of juice or gatorade every once in awhile, but in general fluids do not sound good to me, and water is completely out of the question. If my body is sick and really needs fluids to get better, shouldn't my body be telling me I need them by making me extra thirsty? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a part of so called [sickness behavior]( URL_0 ). Imagine you're an animal living in wilderness and your food/water sources are scarce and require certain amount of energy to get to them. At the same time, there is quite high chance that you will fail in this task so it is wise to avoid search for them and invest all available energy into recuperative processes. Moreover, you can unintentionally provide essential factors (iron, zinc, vitamins) contained in food to pathogens which is a bad thing - your body makes its best to make them scarce to bacteria also on physiological level (e.g. lowering their concentrations and availability in the blood). It's much more broad than getting food and water. While sick, you can also infect others, so staying at one place will lower sickness transmission. It's a hard-wired response to infection and immune system changes motivational dispositions so you subjectively perceive that you don't need them thus fooling you to (not) do something."
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5oy5bb | Why are sodas made with such strong acids? | I've read before that the reason that, for example, a can of Coke has ~46 grams of sugar is because if it had less, you wouldn't be able to taste the sweetness over the sour/bitter taste of phosphoric acid. So why are they made with such high concentrations of phosphoric and citric acid? What does that do for the soda? If they used less, surely they'd need far less sugar? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As far as I understand it, the do it to equalize the sweet taste of sugar. Now, you asked why they even add as much sugar in the first place.. sugar sells. Your body reacts to sugar well comparable to how it reacts to heroin, although significantly less drastic. You have the feeling of happiness and being energized. If they didnt add that sugar, coke would sell a lot less. If your body notices a lack of sugar or wants more of the energy/happiness, it usually forces you to drink coke or eat something sweet. Compare it to salt/umami tastes in chips. The umami is really beneficial for your body, it would normally carry lots of nutritients and minerals. The bad thing is, that umami in chips is usually just the pure taste without the extracts that you would have in natural umami taste. Well I drifted off-topic here, but in general, sugar makes you lets you more likely grab a coke than water/another soda, acid is used to equalize the sweetness."
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5oy9fh | Why do we tilt our head/eyes to one side when thinking or trying to remember about something? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here's one estimate. Ever notice how people turn down the volume of music in their car when they're driving to a new area or looking for a location? I've read that this can be described as an intentional reduction of stimulus used in order to improve focus. In fact, I turned down my music half way through writing that sentence. Perhaps in the same way when you're trying to think of something, you look off to the side to try and ignore whatever is in your visual field while you focus on searching for that info within your brain!",
"We do this to reduce stimulus so we can focus better. When your eyes look left or right you are making your field of view smaller thus reducing the amount of stimulus you receive from your visual field. This allows for more processing power to be used in whatever mental task you're attempting like remembering something or calculating a math problem. We will also look in different directions depending on the type of mental task because many mental tasks majorly occupy either the right or left half of our brain and our visual fields are mostly split in the same way. Example: for most people language is majorly located on the left half of your brain. If you're struggling to remember a word you might look to your left. This decreases the amount of light that can enter your right visual field. Everything in your right visual field is usually sent to your left brain (confusing I know) so by reducing the amount of stimulus received in the right visual field you send less signals to the left brain allowing for more processing power and better focus on remembering the word.",
"This happens often when you are talking to someone and are trying to remember some detail of the story you are telling. The human brain has an amazing capacity of distinguishing between faces, but it comes at a cost of a lot of attention and focus required when looking at that person.The brain is almost captivated by their face. Looking away breaks this captivation and makes it much easier to remember by focusing more on the story rather than the person's face that you're talking to. Turning the head would to the side would focus on the face even less helping you focus even better."
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5oy9mv | Does the president really have 'Launch Codes', or is that a Euphemism for some other mechanism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is literal. The launch codes are known internally as the \"gold codes.\" They are printed on a card nicknamed \"the biscuit,\" that is kept on the president's person at all times. The Vice President also has the gold codes, in case the President is incapacitated and some nukes need launching. There is also what's known as the Nuclear Football, which is a metal Zero Haliburton briefcase that travels with the President at all times. It contains within it retaliatory options, classified launch site co-ordinates, information on how to operate the emergency broadcast system, and 3x5 index cards with the launch codes. The Gold Codes *and* the biscuit are required for the president to be given access to the Football, which is used for the actual authorization. They are used in conjunction.",
"They are literally codes that authenticate the order to the military. Once the military receives the order to conduct a nuclear strike, and confirms that it came from the President, they decide the best way to carry out that order, and issue orders to launch to the assets chosen using a Seperate code system. The President does not have direct contact with a silo or ballistic submarine.",
"What's terrifying is the President alone authorizes the launch of nuclear missiles, the two-man rule does not apply to him. Harold Hering was a navy officer in training to man a nuclear missile launch site, and was administratively discharged for asking the question during class, effectively, > \"How can I know, when the order comes to launch missiles, that the order came from a sane president?\" The launch system is exclusively concerned with identity, not sanity. There is absolutely nothing preventing a deranged President from destroying the Earth and this remains an open problem.",
"There is a briefcase carried around by a military officer with the president at all times. It contains within it a \"biscuit\" that contains authentication codes for nuclear launches. So yes, they literally have launch codes. Edit: The biscuit is basically a sealed container that can be snapped in half to reveal a slip of paper with the codes. It is single use.",
"While no legal precedent exists to stop a president from launching nuclear weapons. High ranking officials can still defy him and not carry out his orders. It would effectively be treason of the highest order, but don't expect everyone to bend over backwards if a president wants to initiate a first strike."
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5oya18 | What's the hold up with the ability for residents to text 911 for emergencies? Is it a technology-related problem? Jurisdictional? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There is a technological hurdle and then the organizations willingness to upgrade their systems. Legacy 911 call routing applications only handle voice as that was all that was required or envisioned at the time. Voice is a lot easier to hand off to PSAP (public safety access points) than text is. Most text based applications for 911 require persistent connections during a texting session because you wouldn't want the first text to go to operator 1 who responds, but the second text goes to operator 2 who has no awareness or has to read the original lines to get up to speed. This requires some modern network features, software applications, and upgraded hardware usually. Due to these reasons not only does the 911 carrier (Verizon, att, frontier, etc) have to upgrade their systems to support this, but the PSAP network has to be reconfigure and most likely new workstations deployed for the operators that support the text functions. All of this cost a lot of time and money. Source: created deployment plans for 911 provider to upgrade to text",
"It costs money by private cell providers to implement that system,. And there's no profit to be made. The only reason they would do it is if the law demanded it and the gov was going to pay to costs of it."
],
"score": [
18,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
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|
5oyvp5 | When taking a shower, why does using bar soap make my skin feel like it's more rough / has more friction after I wash it off? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn5g8x"
],
"text": [
"Soap is a surfactant. Surfactants break the surface tension of oils. So, soap allows oils to be washed off your skin, effectively cleaning it. The loss of skin oil cause your skin to feel rougher until your body can replace that oil."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
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|
5oyx7e | why is torrenting so much faster than regular downloads | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn7yh4"
],
"text": [
"You're actually downloading multiple parts from different places (seeds) at the same time, then combining them, whereas normal download is like a single-file line."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5oz3tt | How am I able to daydream while driving and still arrive to my destination safely? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn5g4m",
"dcnjcuz"
],
"text": [
"If you're comfortable with driving especially to a familiar location on an often travelled route, your \"lizard brain\" as they call it, takes over and allows most of the task to be automated. Our lizard brain handles about 80% of our daily tasks, so any consistently repeated actions will start to fall into that automated/semi automated \"part\" of the brain.",
"Because you're lucky. \"Muscle memory means very little when you encounter a new situation that requires your full attention. Distraction has a devastating impact on reaction, cognition and problem-solving, yet it is insidious and you aren't aware of the extend of your impairment. [Here is one study.] ( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
19,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018720813495280"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5oz66q | Why do presidents wait until the very last week of their presidency to pardon convicted inmates, rather than doing it earlier on? | For example, Obama's comment regarding the 330 inmates he just pardoned was that he was trying to correct systematic injustice. So why did he wait 8 years to do it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn61rp",
"dcn6502"
],
"text": [
"Pardons are the most politically controversial thing a president can do. He's probably doing them for the right reason, but it would've made his re-election/presidency far more complicated if he'd done the pardons earlier. Also, tradition.",
"There are two reasons. One it's a bit of a tradition to grant some clemency as part of the final acts. Secondly an out going president is basically immune from political blow back so it's an opportune moment. For one it will get mostly ignored what with the big news of having a new president, and even if people do notice you can't exactly punish the prez for it since they are entering retirement and don't need to win a popularity contest anymore."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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} | [
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5oz676 | Why do squatters in the UK have rights to where they are squatting? Why can't they be kicked out as soon as they are discovered? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn6284",
"dcn650m",
"dcnm5nd"
],
"text": [
"Although the specific laws and development differ in different places, the ultimate reason is always that the people who have to enforce an eviction don't know in advance who is actually right. Even if it may seem obvious in a news report, if someone is living at a place and some third party comes in and says \"that's not there house!\" presumptively believing that second person can create a lot of problems. Generally, society thinks it's better to let the tenant/squatter stay in place while the court system sorts out the truth, rather than acting hastily. It also incentivizes landowners to monitor their property (and prevent squatters) rather than pushing all the costs to the police. Of course, this can lead to weird outcomes, but the same thing could happen the other way.",
"\"Squatting in residential buildings (like a house or flat) is illegal. It can lead to 6 months in prison, a £5,000 fine or both.\" URL_0 Squatters can request to take ownership of land if it is deemed the land is no longer being used etc and the original owner doesn't raise any objects. Also property law is completely different in Scotland and you have to have a registered title for property so this doesn't work.",
"Has anybody here actually been homeless? People freeze to death and in the UK we have thousands of abandoned buildings. If I can prove that I have occupied a building for 12 years why not let me keep it - it's not like the owners want it. In the 1950s social housing supported 40+% of the population, now we are down to 10%. Investment in homeless services has halved since the tories took power and homelessness has doubled. If you own a building and you have squatters chances are they are doing a better job of looking after it than you."
],
"score": [
41,
16,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.gov.uk/squatting-law/overview"
],
[]
]
} | [
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] | [
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|
5ozbu5 | How do cemeteries work when it floods or they get a ton of rain? Do the caskets get wet or does embalming stuff seep into the ground? | So many questions - I feel like I know nothing about this! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn7yih"
],
"text": [
"A wooden casket placed directly in the ground will rot with time and collapse. But modern cemeteries usually don't place a wooden casket directly in the ground. Instead, a burial vault, typically made of concrete, is placed in the grave and the casket is placed in and sealed inside the burial vault. This prevents water getting in (or embalming chemicals getting out). That said, floods can unearth caskets. Given that the cemetery grounds may be saturated or washed away/eroded by the flood and the vault or casket may have air trapped in it, sometimes vaults/caskets in flooded cemeteries will [float up out of the ground]( URL_0 )!"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2HESyod_Q0"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5ozgez | The Crisis in Gambia and subsequent Invasion | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcngqdl"
],
"text": [
"A **VERY** TL;DR is Jammeh, the out-going president, just lost an election and was due to leave his post this week. Yesterday he declared a state of emergency within The Gambia to buy himself 90 more days of power. This was ignored and his opponent swore an oath earlier at the Gambian Embassy in Senegal, making him the rightful president of The Gambia. He doesn't want to leave because his opponent is basically a nobody, but was *heavily* backed by George Soros (you know, the guy who buys his way into power in small countries then tanks their economy and makes billions? That guy) and therefore Jammeh, not unreasonably, has said the election is rigged. As I type, elite soldiers from The Gambia, Nigeria and Senegal are moving through the country to forcibly remove Jammeh; the next 12 hours or so could get extremely messy."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5ozghz | Why do we tend to look worse in pictures than we see ourselves? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnat05"
],
"text": [
"Most of the time we see ourselves it is in a mirror, so photos of us always look a bit off because they are not flipped around."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5ozhdl | Why does cold water feel "wetter" than hot water? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcn98ja"
],
"text": [
"Part of the \"wet\" feeling is that cold feeling. Part of your sensory response to determine if something is wet is to see whether it makes your skin feel cold after you've touched it (Edit: Because wet things pull heat from your skin faster than the air). That's why it's sometimes hard to tell if cold metal is wet or not, because it makes you cold quickly. Without that cold feeling, all you're left with is texture, pressure, weight,and consistency which can be nebulous when touching a liquid."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
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|
5ozhrb | What makes our cells "stick" together and what stops them all from falling down into a giant splodge on the floor? | I know that we have bone for solid structure, fibres in muscles, ligaments etc. but all of them are ultimately made up of cells too right? How do they "stick" together and not fall apart? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnac4h",
"dcno1ry",
"dcnrn3l"
],
"text": [
"Animal cells have a coating that has a bunch of tendrils. These stick to each other. It is called the Extra Cellular Matrix.",
"Cells excrete (leak? squirt out?) collagen, which is the major structural protein (shape chemical) in animals. Collagen binds to itself and creates a mesh that cells can attach to. This forms the basis of the extracellular matrix (outside cell stuff).",
"There's the extracellular matrix (ECM), as mentioned by other posters, but to be comprehensive I'd like to mention some other types of connections between cells including gap junctions (cells are literally fused together at certain points, useful for fast coordination like in the intestines), tight junctions (keep out water, etc., useful in places like the skin), and desmosomes (allow some flexibility between neighboring cells, also useful in skin)."
],
"score": [
9,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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} | [
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5ozlf7 | How can another persons hands feel colder to the touch than ambient room temperature? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnail7"
],
"text": [
"This is for the same reason a piece of metal or granite can feel cold to the touch. Your hands are generally warmer than the ambient temperature. The problem is that air is a very poor conductor of heat, while metal is a very good conductor of heat. Metal will feel cold because it absorbs heat from your body much more efficiently than the air does. The same goes for someone with cold hands. Their hands aren't colder than the air, but their hands can be colder than your hands and skin is a much better conductor of heat than air."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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|
5ozr1q | Why do slugs dissolve/turn to sludge when exposed to table salt? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnbry3"
],
"text": [
"What is happening is osmosis. Salt draws the water out of their bodies and kills them, they don't dissolve or turn to sludge. Slugs have thin skin which water can pass through."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
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|
5ozr2m | Why does being/getting cold sometimes prevent vomiting, even if you're actually sick (not just overheated, carsick, etc)? | You know. You feel like you're going to throw up, then you go somewhere cooler or press something cold against your face and then you don't. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnrf4a"
],
"text": [
"My guess is this is related to the vasovagal response. ( URL_0 ) Essentially, in a vasovagal response, you have too much vasodilation (widening of blood vessels) which causes nausea, lightheadedness, etc. You then cause vasoconstriction with something cold and reduce the nausea, etc."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasovagal_syncope"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5ozsah | Why do mobile browsers always seem to recognize a desktop link and automatically turn into a mobile one, but desktop browsers don't recognize mobile links and convert them the other way? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnbuap",
"dcnaxl2"
],
"text": [
"It's not the mobile browser doing it. It's the server side software. Whenever you go to a webpage, your browser is sending data to the server, specifically including the browser program name, the version, the platform. This is called agent data. Your phone browser is sending Chrome Mobile, 60.2, Android. Your desktop browser is sending Chrome, 60.2, Windows.",
"It's actually the opposite way around. Often, a site has code built into it to 'sense' what device is trying to connect. The site then sends that device what the programmers thought was the most appropriate version of the site (usually mobile). Phones can then 'spoof' their way into getting the desktop version by pretending to be something else. When you punch in the specific mobile link, and the site isn't smart enough to see if you are actually a mobile device or not, it'll just give you what you asked for."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
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]
} | [
"url"
] | [
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|
5ozufp | Why do children typically have more frequent nightmares/night terrors than most adults? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnbp8z",
"dcnccb5",
"dcnb6s1"
],
"text": [
"Because adults live a waking nightmare. Sleep is the reward. Extra sentence. Extra, extra sentence.",
"Because they have less experience and knowledge about the environment. AKA their brain is less adapted to the environment, when you are an adult you have thousands of experiences and confidence in how the universe works. When young you are ignorant of everything and haven't learned about anything just yet. The lack of knowledge and experience means it's easier to be scared of everything, your body and mind adjust to experiences after repeated exposure. If you performed an experiment where you raised children at home and have them grew up around adults doing scary things the child would eventually normalise their behavior. The mind/body adapts to the situation it finds itself in after repeated exposure. It's the same way cannibalism and killing can be found among tribal peoples and those tribal people will think its 'no big deal'.",
"They have more vibrant imaginations. You have to imagine something to be afraid of it. Extra sentence."
],
"score": [
25,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
5ozynn | how do organizations (business or government) in general validate if a person's signature is real and not just a doodle? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnd3a6",
"dcnd7w8"
],
"text": [
"A signature IS a doodle. The signature doesn't authenticate the person. The person's act of signing is the authorization for the execution of the document. That act is witnessed by the signer and of important enough, another person, such as a notary public. It doesn't matter what you sign, it's the act of signing. That's why you can just put an X, or draw a doodle, or draw dickbutt, and that's still a valid signature.",
"A signature does not have to be a name or anything. It can be a doodle. The hope is that the doodle is consistent for the same person can be used to show that the person signed the document. The government/business isn't running hand writing recognition to see whose name it is. They are merely using it as proof that you signed the document in question."
],
"score": [
16,
6
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
5ozyzh | What is the catch behind "factory-direct" jewelry stores which sell diamonds and jewelry at half the cost, said to "appraise for double?" | My fellow Chicagoans will recognize this name. How do they do this? For example, a 2 carat ring is $2,000? What is the catch?! | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnc8ps"
],
"text": [
"Markup on diamonds started in early 20th century, by the jewelry companies, to make them seem more valuable. You can buy precious stones in bulk for pretty cheap (relatively)"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
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] | [
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] |
5p03dh | Why are we trying to get in contact with aliens if messages will take millions or billions of years to go back and forth? (And they might not even be able to catch it or decipher it then) | It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me to waste any time doing that. If I send a message today and I receive the response millions of years from today, how is humanity going to keep track of the conversation? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcndehd",
"dcndg9i",
"dcnewqg",
"dcndjqh"
],
"text": [
"I don't think anyone is trying to find a *conversation* here. Any sign of intelligent life present elsewhere in the universe would be interesting, even if it was just alien sitcom broadcasts we accidentally receive.",
"We assume that there are many alien civilizations that are more technologically advanced as we are. They may be able to detect our beacon and come to visit us via faster than light travel means.",
"We might receive a message that contains information on how to communicate or travel faster than light",
"the nearest solar system is only 4.24 light years away. That means that a round trip message would only take 30 months if there was aliens living there. Its very possible that intelligent life developed somewhere else in the milky way. if that happened we are looking at a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years max. also it likely wouldn't be a conversation. it would most likely be more of a distress signal \"hi where here you should stop by\" then first contact."
],
"score": [
28,
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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5p0igq | Why is the safest thing to due during a tsunami climb a high tree or high building? | Surely if you climb a high tree it will be knocked over, and possibly the same outcome for a really tall building. Wouldn't the safest thing to do to survive be grab some oxygen tanks, diving gear and go deep under the water so the tsunami goes over the top of you? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcngu49"
],
"text": [
"A tree may or may not be knocked over. Yes, if it falls, you're in trouble. But its better than the option of being dragged through the water. Buildings are a safer choice as they'll likely not be knocked down unless you're facing a significantly large tsunami and/or in a weakly made building. As for diving under it, access to scuba equipment in the moments between knowing a tsunami is coming and it hitting is going to be extremely limited. Even if you were near a dive shop, it takes precious time to locate all the various parts and piece them together to be useable and so that you won't be torn away from it when the water hits. Which brings us to the next problem, that being you have to also deal with the extreme force of the water. It will push you helplessly into debris and push debris into you. It's be incredibly disorienting and very likely to knock you unconscious and drown. And then you could be pulled out sea where the current of the water pulling back from the tsunami may put you so far that you can't get back to shore. In short, it's better to just not be in the water if you can avoid it."
],
"score": [
3
],
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} | [
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5p0kxt | Why do some stores close one entrance off at night | Mainly Walmart and Schnucks is where I've seen it but even 24 hour stores I've never known why. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnh6qi",
"dcnh6af",
"dcni044"
],
"text": [
"I'll give this a shot. Since there are less customers to serve at night the store would schedule fewer employees. By closing an entrance it cuts down on employees needing to watch/stand/patrol the entrance & allows the store to control foot traffic.",
"So thieves can't sneak in on the night staff, one way in one way out, makes life easier for security",
"Worked at a store with said layout. It was to reduce thefts. Usually when quiet like on Sundays. They would case the joint see the staff all at one end then pop in pop out the other."
],
"score": [
9,
6,
6
],
"text_urls": [
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]
} | [
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5p0t2s | Why does dry air cause dry skin if skin being dry means it lack oils, not water? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dco1ovm"
],
"text": [
"Just like water, oil also has a vapor pressure, and so just like water it evaporates. You can actually find a lot of things that have a vapor pressure because you can smell them. What you are smelling is actually the small amount of whatever it is that is now in the air. But a lot of things don't have a smell to humans so this is not entirely reliable. On a calm day your body releases enough new oil to replace the amount lost. It changes on a windy day, the extra air that comes into contact with your skin increases the amount of oil that evaporates (just like it does with water) and you skin doesn't push enough new oil to the surface to replace it."
],
"score": [
3
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"text_urls": [
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} | [
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|
5p0vhw | If the Foucault Pendulum works, then why can't something hover in the air and see the world moving under it? | A helicopter can't hover in the air for 4 hours and arrive at it's destination because it will move along with the atmosphere. But the pendulum changes it's plane of swinging (you get what I mean) because of Earth's rotation under it. Also, I heard something about long-range snipers taking the rotation into account. Again, why does this affect bullets, but not planes and other aircraft? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnjnlc"
],
"text": [
"The Foucault pendulum works because of the Coriolis force. The Coriolis force on an object stationary with respect to the surface of the Earth is zero. So there is no Coriolis force on a helicopter which is hovering perfectly still. The Coriolis force is proportional to the velocity of the projectile, so it has a stronger effect of things which are moving fast, all else constant."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
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]
} | [
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] | [
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5p0w4y | What's the difference between Bulls, Bison, Buffalos, and Oxen? Are they all related to "normal" black and white cows? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnn4l5",
"dcnjzbc",
"dcnjv0f"
],
"text": [
"A bull is a male cow. A bison is a species related to cows that is native to North America. A buffalo is one of many species related to cows native to Africa or Asia. And unlike *every other post here, get it together people,* an ox is a job description, not a species. They are the same species as the \"normal\" cow or bull, just trained to do labor instead of be meat or milk suppliers. Not to be confused with a musk ox, which is not that closely related.",
"A bull is a male of typically any herbivore herbivore, in cattle or cows it's the male's that have not been casterated. Casterated cows are steer which will be raised for meat. Bison are large north American plains members of the bovine family. Buffalo are also bovine that are are common in Africa and Eurasia. Oxen are typically casterated male cows that are used as beasts of burden, often a different breed from cows raised for milk or beef.",
"A bull if an uncasterated bovine (the type of animal cows are) Bison are a species of bovine native to the great plains of North America Buffalo are one of a number of different species of bovine native to Africa and Asia Oxen are a species of bovine domesticated over 4000 years ago for draft labor (working on a farm), they've mostly died out since the advert of tractors and other machines All of these animals are members of the bovine family just like cows"
],
"score": [
14,
6,
3
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|
5p0xl1 | Why can't phone service providers offer spam filtering in the same fashion that email service providers do? | I am aware of the do-not-call list, however I have my doubts about it's effectiveness. It also seems like it would be in the service providers best interest to advocate spam filtering as it could potentially eliminate a lot of strain on phone network capacity? Thanks for any insight on this. :-) | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnkkt4"
],
"text": [
"Because the phone companies wouldn't make money. They buy and sell on a per minute basis of a connected call. Filter out a spam call? That's a few minutes of profit not earned. Email providers don't charge per email, just a flat rate (or ad-supported fee), so they don't care if they deliver a spam message or not."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
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} | [
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5p193p | Engine oil grades, what's the difference and how different are their manufacturing processes? | So my car uses fully synthetic 5W-30 oil, I have no idea what it means but when i am picking up a bottle of oil in shop - there is hundreds of oil grades. What's the difference and how different is manufacturing process for each? Will engine seize if wrong grade is put in? I mean it's still slippery oil? P.S - flairing as chemistry as I assume chemistry is involved? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnoq3d",
"dcnnipe"
],
"text": [
"There are lots of differences between oils. The most obvious difference is the viscosity - 5W-30 means it's viscosity #5 in winter and #30 when hot. Note that #5 or #30 isn't a unit, #30 isn't 1/6th as viscous as #5. The viscosity number is determined in a lab by filling a special tank with a hole in the bottom and measuring the time to drain and they give it a number from a look-up table based on that rather than SI units. The other big difference is Synthetic vs semi-synthetic vs mineral. Your car will probably want synthetic or semi- as they are more highly refined and stable. Mineral is generally used in things that don't work very hard and aren't expected to live very long. But there are other less obvious differences. Oils have all sorts of additives so they can do things like stick to engine components after shutdown to be ready to work immediately next start-up, or raise the thermal stability so it doesn't decompose with heavy use, or changes to its chemical properties so it won't damage engine block alloys etc. So, to answer your primary concern: manufacturers will tell you (read your car manual) that you need something like \"5W-30 LL-04\", where \"LL-04\" is a standard used by some manufacturer that describes all the other additives they recommend for oil in your car (I just picked what my car uses - yours will probably differ). When you read the bottle it'll tell you it is compatible with a whole bunch of manufacturers standards \"5W-30 LL-01 LL-04 GM-whatever etc\" - just make sure the standard written in your manual is listed on the bottle, and the weight is correct, and that it is fully synthetic (if your manual calls for it)",
"It's a measure of viscosity. 10W-30 means that the oil is SAE10 viscosity at low (**W**inter) temps and SAE30 at high (100C) temp. Your engine won't seize with the wrong oil in it unless it's *really* wrong. Using the wrong oil will increase wear and degrade engine performance though, and some engines depend on the oil for things other than lubrication and have very strict viscosity requirements. It's always best to use the oil recommended by your engine's manufacturer."
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5p1grl | Differences between summer seasons on the North and South hemispheres | I was told that on the southern hemisphere, during the summer, the mornings get earlier and earlier until the solstice. This is as opposed to the summer on the northern hemisphere where the evenings get longer until the solstice. is this true? can you help me understand? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"you seem to be confused - the days do not get longer at just one end of the day. both sunrise and sunset get earlier and later at roughly an equal rate. the closer you are to the poles, the more drastically they change, and the closer you are to the equator the less they change. the graphs below help demonstrate this. go to the link, and slide your mouse along the big blue graph with the red line. underneath you will see the sunrise and sunset times growing and shrinking together. (those jumps near the beginning and end is when daylight savings comes in). i chose london and melbourne as the cities to use as examples, both relatively far north and south respectively. URL_0 URL_1"
],
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"https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london",
"https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/australia/melbourne"
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5p1n8q | How does Alberta not have any rats? | Alberta is the largest inhabited area in the world without any rats. How'd that happen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnsdjl"
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"text": [
"Rats didn't arrive in Alberta until the early 1900s, and Alberta was proactive about killing them early on. When the first infestations were found, Alberta passed legislation to eradicate the rats currently living there and prevent new infestations. The harsh climate means that rats can only realistically survive near human settlements, so Alberta's rural layout meant that they were able to limit the movement of rats into the area by poisoning or destroying abandoned farmhouses and other areas that were ideal for rats to move into. Any new rat infestations were targeted with rat poison or fumigation to eradicate them, and that continues today. The Alberta government has more info on the history of the program [here]( URL_0 )."
],
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"http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/All/agdex3441#government"
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5p1s2l | how come fresh food such as ketchup, mayonnaise, and sour cream, don't need to be refrigerated when they are in small packets? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The packets are sealed and sterilized so that any bacteria inside is killed (so yes, you are eating a small amount of dead bacteria when you squirt that ketchup onto your hot dog). Only live bacteria can reproduce and proliferate, but live bacteria can't get inside a sealed packet, so there is almost no risk of bacterial contamination regardless of what temperature the product is stored at. The same goes for large bottles of ketchup as well, you can store them in a pantry at room temperature, but once you open it and break the seal it has to be refrigerated as it essentially becomes an open environment, free for bacteria to enter. Personally I've never seen sour cream stored unrefrigerated. It can't be sterilized because it has a live bacterial culture living in it, they make it taste the way it does (same with yogourt). I would advise against eating sour cream if you don't think it has been refrigerated."
],
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5p1t6a | how did speakers address/were heard when giving speeches to large crowds (like that which will be seen tomorrow) before the inventions of the microphone and speakers systems? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The spoke very loudly or used a hand-held megaphone. Also, there were things like cars, planes, and cameras to make random noises... also, people would be quiet.",
"The trick is to project rather than yell. When you project, you push the sound up from your diaphram, so you can maintain a loud volume for an extended period of time. It involves a lot of abdominal control and a lot of practice to actually pull off successfully, but if you do, a human can fill a BIG space with sound.",
"Some had naturally loud voices, others trained to project meaning to speak loudly but clearly. This is still a thing for stage actors. Ben Franklin calculated that an orator with a strong voice could harangue an audience of 10,000 closely packed people at one time. I think that would be the upper limit, I doubt anyone actually did."
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5p1y9j | In the winter, why do my clothes get more static electricity? | Of course they can have static in the summer as well, but it seems like it's always worse in winter. I'll also take any tips you've got on how to get rid of the shock/sticking to my skin | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The air is much more humid in the summer, which makes the air more conductive. This means that the static electricity is dispersed into the air. The dry air in the winter doesn't allow that method of release, so the static charge builds up. A humidifier or air ionizer will do the same thing, making the air more conductive and thus releasing the charge into the air instead of building up. You can also get anti-static sprays to spray on the clothes, which disperse the charge across the surface of the clothes.",
"Cold weather makes the air dryer. Dryness makes it easier to generate static electricity. (Dry) clothing made of certain materials + dry skin= more shocks as they rub together. Maybe try shoes with leather soles? URL_0"
],
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5p24ne | Doctors : why has there been a female contraceptive pill for decades but only now is there one being made for men? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcntz20",
"dcnxfft"
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"text": [
"There is a already a natural biological way that the female body prevents itself from getting pregnant. The female contraceptive pill works by basically abusing this system and to trick the body into think that it is always time to avoid pregnancy. Males do not have this luxury. We always produce sperm and any pill that is created to stop this would have find a way to turn off the ability to create sperm.",
"The Patriarchy. Kidding! Women naturally go through a complex monthly cycle which governs their fertility. They can only get pregnant during a very limited window. If she fails to become pregnant, levels of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone naturally fall in the body and the cycle begins anew. When we give oral contraceptives, we are supplying those hormones artificially, extending one of the nonpregnant phases indefinitely. When we take them away, she can resume her normal cycles. This system is reliable, extremely effective and has (usually) relatively minor side effects (though some of them can be fatal! So they're not right for everyone). In contrast, there isn't any natural process in men to easily take advantage of. There have been a wide variety of strategies employed but they have typically ran into things like...uh..making you sterile. Permanently. Or they don't work so reliably. Or they have other significant and potentially dangerous side effects."
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5p2658 | How is it that microscopes can see through an organism? | How is it that microscopes can see through an organism via "layers?" Like, my friend said that he can see through a fruit fly using a microscope (I think olympus bh2 or something) and see at different layers? I super don't understand how they do that. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"The microscope focuses on a very thin plane. Everything above and below is blurred out. So as long as light is getting through then you can see an image. If you think about it, MRI's get their pictures the same way. One layer is in sharp detail. Every thing else is taken out. I never tried to do anything but sex a fruit fly with with a microscope. It was a dissecting scope which was different. But most of the time microscope images are transmitted light modified by the organism viewed. Thin slices are used to view bacteria. The slide is generally stained first to enhance detail. You can also view with reflected light."
],
"score": [
7
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5p2b7s | How do desert biomes end? | Kind of a silly question but I'm in the middle of writing a story and I came to realize I have no idea how a desert goes from being giant sand dunes to being a different biome. Could a desert eventually lead into grasslands or even a forest? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnzeva"
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"text": [
"Not a silly question! Focusing on Earth's hot deserts, rather than the polar ones (which meet the desert requirement of very little rainfall), let's look at why they are there in the first place. The latitudes either side of the equator are where these deserts can be found. This is due to the particular atmospheric cells over these parts of the Earth, which pick up moisture in evaporated seawater at the equator, rain it out at above, and circulate over neighbouring latitudes with no moisture. The return leg of this circulation is where the air travels back towards the equator close to sea-level, forming the 'trade winds', which allowed sailors a few hundred years ago to travel west and do business with faraway lands. [Here is a lovely animated explanation of the whole thing.]( URL_0 ) The way the winds come back travelling south-west over the sea is because the whole atmospheric cell has a displacement due to Earth's rotation. Top half of the cell goes north-east, bottom half goes south-west. (South-east and then north-west in the Southern Hemisphere). That's the reason for deserts out of the way, but how to escape them? Those atmospheric circulation cells have been around since Earth's atmosphere stabilised, over 4 billion years ago. They are eternal and unchanging, driven by heat energy from the Sun. For the same patch of land to transition to a different biome, it would have to migrate to a different latitude - north to savannah, or south to tropical rainforest. That's where plate tectonics comes in. The tectonic plates split up the Earth's surface into large scale plates with the oceans and continents on top, and they are constantly being created (undersea volcano ridges) and destroyed in various places. Which means they move about. Over very long timescales (hundreds of millions of years) the continents are shifted across the globe, gradually broken apart and reunited, witnessing the birth and death of oceans and mountain ranges in the process. So give it 500 million years or so and Bob's your uncle, desert is now temperate forest. Finally, if we remain with our 'deep time' hats still on, you could also think in terms of global sea-level. The late Cretaceous, glory days of the dinosaurs some 80 million years ago was considerably warmer than today. So much so that the poles did not have any ice-caps and all that water was part of the liquid oceans, some of it rising up over the continents to form shallow seas. Swathes of Northern Africa, the UK, Southern Europe, Russia and a central strip of North America were all covered in these shallow seas. As ice-caps can melt a lot quicker than continents can move, this mechanism operates on much shorter timescales, dramatic global climate shifts have occurred in the past in as little as a few thousand years. (Note: if such a shallow sea is at a 'desert latitude' it will still receive very little rainfall, but a sea is most definitely not a desert)."
],
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"https://youtu.be/T6Us1sPXBfA"
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5p2bgg | Are there any real studies showing that things like ginger, turmeric, capsaicin, propolis... help preventing/curing diseases? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are a LOT of studies. Almost no proper clinical trials though. Certainly no clear benefit. Turmeric is almost certainly ineffective as it decomposes quickly. If there is no clinical use after such long research then there probably is no significant activity. Good paper in Science about turmeric recently.",
"[Propolis seems to be antifungal]( URL_0 ) and [antibacterial]( URL_1 ). Notice that these effects seem to be topical, so I doubt sticking propolis in your tea will help. It's been suggested bees produce it to sterilize their hives, so at least in that case you'd have a justification for any effect. I don't think you can find such a justification for the other substances you mentioned. Health benefits may exist, but it seems less conclusive.",
"Apparently, capsaicin may actually prolong life. [Article]( URL_1 ) It also has potential against cancer. [Article abstract]( URL_0 )",
"Capsaicin has been shown to be effective for local pain relief and ginger has been proven effective in the treatment of nausea, but nothing afaik regarding curing or preventing disease. I am unaware if any of the other substances have any peer reviewed studies showing any medical benefits"
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"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11766101",
"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1292560/"
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"https://www.dovepress.com/expression-and-functionality-of-trpv1-in-breast-cancer-cells-peer-reviewed-article-BCTT",
"http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169876"
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5p2lcm | In what ways would removing the penny affect the US economy? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnxcoc",
"dcnxk6h"
],
"text": [
"It saves all the money involved in manufacturing and dispersing the coins. I don't think there is much change beyond that. FYI, Canada just got rid of their penny a few years ago, wasn't really a big deal.",
"It costs the US Mint more to make pennies (and nickels) then they are worth. The loss was $43 million in 2015. That's tiny in the scheme of the size of the US Government but $43 million is $43 million. As for consumers, there is a perception that eliminating the penny and nickel would result in price increases. I have not seen any strong evidence to suggest that this is true. Most transactions these days are done via credit/debit card (cash transactions are a small percentage of total transactions). Eliminating pennies and nickels would reduce cash handling costs for businesses as well. The biggest negative would be for zinc producers, particularly the company that makes zinc blanks for the US Mint to be pressed into pennies. TL;DR Eliminating pennies would save money for the US Treasury and businesses but would cost zinc producers. There is no evidence that prices for consumers would rise."
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5p2m55 | why do people's faces get red when embarrassed | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcnxczh"
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"text": [
"Blood pressure goes up due to adrenaline release, and as blood vessels in the face are very close to the skin, it reddens?"
],
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5p31p1 | Bankruptcy | * What exactly is bankruptcy? At what point is a person/organisation considered bankrupt? * Why must a person declare if he is bankrupt? * Why do employers tend to avoid hiring people who have declared bankruptcy? * How does one realistically recover from being bankrupt? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dco0qm0",
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"text": [
"> What exactly is bankruptcy? At what point is a person/organisation considered bankrupt? A person/organization is pretty much bankrupt when debts and obligations to other people *dwarf* the amount of income being brought in. Basically, a person is bankrupt if they owe $70K in unsecured debt and liabilities (credit card + hospital bills), are currently laid off, and can barely feed themselves daily. > Why must a person declare if he is bankrupt? Because the law demands it! If there was no such thing as bankruptcy, people could just say \"cannot afford to pay ya, so piss off\". By saying you're bankrupt and declaring it, you're legally saying you're broke, going to prove that you're broke in court, and get protections by the government that allow you to stop being harassed by creditors. By going through the difficult process of bankruptcy, you're proving to your creditors that you really have nothing to give them (in hopes that you could work out a better deal *or* discharge all of the debt) > Why do employers tend to avoid hiring people who have declared bankruptcy? Bankruptcy happens for a variety of reasons, but a lot of it has to do with the stigma - you filed for bankruptcy? You're financially irresponsible, and probably are irresponsible at work as well. > How does one realistically recover from being bankrupt? Much like losing weight, it's a long and slow process. Often times, it involves getting credit cards with low limits and high rates, and slowly starting the process of earning trust back from creditors. As a person who filed for bankruptcy, my first *two years* sucked. My credit limit was $150.",
"Instead of sending debtors to prison where they wouldn't be able to work to repay their debts, law makers developed a process where the legal system could be used to perform an assessment of a debtors ability to repay his/her debts, lay out a plan for the repayment of those debts if possible, and backed it up with legal processes that eliminate the lender's ability to enforce the full repayment of the debts. Understand, if the debtor did not file bankruptcy everything the lender would need to do to legally force the debtor to repay the debt would involve courts, lawyers and judges. So the bankruptcy process removes the lender's ability to use those and will also turn those same courts, lawyers and judges on the lender if they violate the rules of the bankruptcy by pursuing collection actions against a debtor in bankruptcy. The debtor has to abide by the terms of the bankruptcy such as paying what s/he can as determined by those involved. Interestingly, bankruptcy removes the debts, but does not remove liens against property, although it does allow bankruptcy officials to reduce the amount of the liens to a current market value of the collateral. So, debts that have collateral pledged against them are technically wiped out, but the lender can enforce their lien rights (with bankruptcy official's approval) to repossess the car or foreclose on the real estate that was pledged as collateral. But usually, these lenders will receive some amount of repayment of their debts. There's actually a \"meeting of creditors\" at one point in the bankruptcy process before the plan of repayment is set where the bankruptcy lawyer and judge/trustee and lenders and debtor can all sit down and haggle out the details of who gets paid what. Lenders with collateral can show up to figure out what the debtor plans to do and learn quickly if they need to repossess/foreclose on their collateral or wait for payments (or reduced payments) to resume. A person/organization is considered bankrupt when they decide to pursue it by filing with the court for bankruptcy protection. When they file, there are some immediate protections that come into place, but that doesn't guarantee that the bankruptcy will be approved or that the full protections of the bankruptcy process will actually happen. The debtor still needs to perform his/her duties, although those duties are almost always easier than the work involved to earn the money to repay the original debts. A person doesn't have to declare bankruptcy unless they want the protection that bankruptcy provides. If you can't pay your debts and your lenders/creditors are garnishing your wages, seizing money in your checking account, repossessing the car you pledged as collateral (affecting your ability to get to work to earn money), foreclosing on the house you pledge as collateral, then filing for bankruptcy can stop all that until the bankruptcy officials can review your situation and come up with a plan that works for you. Employers would avoid hiring those who have filed bankruptcy because it can be indicative of poor decision-making and turmoil in the employee's personal life that would affect job performance. But, if the employer is the understanding type, you could also prove to them that despite the bankruptcy, you are trust-worthy and stable, especially if it's medical bankruptcy. If the job involves handling money (cashier/teller), a great deal of trust is required. To recover from bankruptcy, you'd need to follow the rules for your specific bankruptcy. Pay what the bankruptcy plan says you have to pay (a lesser amount than you'd pay if you hadn't filed) and pay it on time. If you don't pay those amounts, your bankruptcy will be dismissed and those protections that the courts put in place are stripped and then you're back at the mercy of the lenders. More recovery: Don't default on any debts after bankruptcy. Use the bankruptcy as your clean slate (or as clean as you're going to get it for 7 or 10 years until that Bankruptcy no longer appears on your credit report) and don't fall into any bad habits that may have contributed to your bankruptcy. More recovery: You can rebuild your credit slowly. Some credit unions and community banks may work with you to get a deposit-secured loan. You give them $1000 to keep as collateral and they give you a $1000 loan or credit card. Yes, it sounds backwards, but it's a loan on your credit report that you should repay without going delinquent. Over time, that loan performing well on your credit report will increase your credit score. That increase credit score means you can get other loans too, even unsecured, but MAKE SURE YOU REPAY THEM ON TIME. If you fall back into delinquency, coupled with a bankruptcy on your credit report, it's just detrimental to your credit score."
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5p3338 | why is it that a lot of soft drink inventors were pharmacists? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dco0kxj"
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"text": [
"Depends a bit where you are from, but generally speaking it was pharmacists selling carbonated mineral water. They probably thought it was a bit plain and added different things for health benefits (herbs) or for taste to add to resell value, and all of a sudden you had flavoured carbonated water, which is what most soft drinks are today."
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5p34tn | How does semen glow under black light? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dco8u70"
],
"text": [
"Ok, since no one else is answering... This applies to *anything* that glows under a black light. Basically all light is a spectrum (if you think of the old Pink Floyd prism logo) a \"white\" light would consist of all the colors available. When you see things as a color it's because that thing is absorbing all the other colors in the spectrum, and reflecting back anything not absorbed. A black light emits only ultra violet light, which isn't visible to the human eye. Items that \"glow\" under UV \"black\" lights redirect the UV light energy from the UV range (less than 400nm) into the visible spectrum (Usually as a blue shade white). This is actually how detergents can \"get your whites whiter\". They contain \"optical brighteners\" which can reflect more than 100% of the the visible \"white\" light. I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions."
],
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5p3733 | What is socialism? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I'm just going to copy/paste my favorite no bullshit summary of socialism. > Central to the meaning of socialism is common ownership. This means the resources of the world being owned in common by the entire global population. > But does it really make sense for everybody to own everything in common? Of course, some goods tend to be for personal consumption, rather than to share—clothes, for example. People 'owning' certain personal possessions does not contradict the principle of a society based upon common ownership. > In practice, common ownership will mean everybody having the right to participate in decisions on how global resources will be used. It means nobody being able to take personal control of resources, beyond their own personal possessions. > Democratic control is therefore also essential to the meaning of socialism. Socialism will be a society in which everybody will have the right to participate in the social decisions that affect them. These decisions could be on a wide range of issues—one of the most important kinds of decision, for example, would be how to organise the production of goods and services. > Production under socialism would be directly and solely for use. With the natural and technical resources of the world held in common and controlled democratically, the sole object of production would be to meet human needs. This would entail an end to buying, selling and money. Instead, we would take freely what we had communally produced. The old slogan of \"from each according to ability, to each according to needs\" would apply. > So how would we decide what human needs are? This question takes us back to the concept of democracy, for the choices of society will reflect their needs. These needs will, of course, vary among different cultures and with individual preferences—but the democratic system could easily be designed to provide for this variety. > We cannot, of course, predict the exact form that would be taken by this future global democracy. The democratic system will itself be the outcome of future democratic decisions. We can however say that it is likely that decisions will need to be taken at a number of different levels—from local to global. This would help to streamline the democratic participation of every individual towards the issues that concern them. > In socialism, everybody would have free access to the goods and services designed to directly meet their needs and there need be no system of payment for the work that each individual contributes to producing them. All work would be on a voluntary basis. Producing for needs means that people would engage in work that has a direct usefulness. The satisfaction that this would provide, along with the increased opportunity to shape working patterns and conditions, would bring about new attitudes to work. **Source**: URL_0 **TL;DR**: Common ownership by the workers of the means of production. How society's resources are used is decided democratically by the people rather than a select wealthy few. Instead of a focus on generating wealth, such a society would produce based on needs. Such needs are decided democratically. One would have free access to what is needed from people that produce voluntarily for the good of society.",
"Socialism is the idea that people who work for a living should also decide how they live. [See this introduction to socialism]( URL_0 ) for more details.",
"Fundamentally, Marxian Socialism is a state in which workers own the means of production. In a capitalist society you go to work, labour, and you are remunerated for your labour. Your employer, however, profits from your labour. In a socialist society you go to work, labour, and you are remunerated for your labour. You don't have an employer. The output of your labour benefits you and your society. There is no one person who owns the proceeds of your labour, instead you distribute the proceeds for shared purposes such as infrastructure, education, health and social security.",
"The government works for the people. It does all it can to make life the best it can be for its citizens. The people have the power. The country is more of a community, rather than a place where everyone is fighting each other for more power and wealth. Propaganda by the governments in power have lead most people to think socialism is equal to communism, or is evil, but that is just not so."
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5p377g | How did we get 'Mom' from 'Mother' | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* **mom** actually derives from *momma* which is a variant of *mamma*, which is nearly universal in Indo-European languages. That is, people all over the world say a variant of *mamma*. It's really, really old and was used over 6,000 years ago (and probably further back but that's about as far back as we can trace Indo-European) * **mother** derives from the Old English *modor*, which is from the Proto-Germanic *mothær*, which was in use about 2,500 years ago as near as we can tell Because mothær/modor/mother are not nearly as world-universal as mamma/momma, we know the latter came first.",
"Turn it around. I think every language has a word like Mom/mum/mem for mother, and dad/dada/.. for father. Those are the first sounds a baby can make. The father and mother have another origin, not based on babyspeak.",
"\"Mom\" doesn't derive from any \"real\" words at all, but rather from baby speak. The speech sounds involved in words like mom/mama or pop/papa are generally the first ones babies learn to make, since they are extremely easy to produce. The consonants m and p require no complicated tongue movements, involving only the lips. The same goes for the \"a\" vowel, which more or less just requires you to open your mouth.",
"Certain sounds (like m, d, t) are easier and more innate for babies and toddlers, so terms kids use to call their parents tend to rely on these sounds. I don't know how it's related to, or if it is related to, \"mother\". > “Mom” is first recorded in the 1800s and probably originates as a shortened form of “mamma,” which appears in the 1550s. Ultimately, they both appear to come from baby talk. > But, the OED continues, “the forms dada and tata, meaning ‘father,’ originating in infantile or childish speech, occur independently in many languages.” In other words, “dad” might come from baby talk. [Source]( URL_0 )"
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5p37t3 | How can physicists spend years on solving a single equation ? | Why is it so hard, and what does it entail? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not about solving the equation, it's about finding the right equation. It's like finding out (without a cooking book) how a cake is made, it takes trial and error to find out that you'll need eggs, flower, butter, etc but even more time how to prepare it.",
"They don't start with an equation and find the answer, they start with a bunch of answers (i.e. observations of something) and try to find an equation that fits all of them. For example, say you want an equation that explains why a molecule moves the way it does. You observe the molecule moving in a bunch of different ways and then come up with an equation, do all the math and see that it indeed does fit all those ways you observed. But then you test it with a magnetic field nearby, and you find it moves in all these totally different ways your equation doesn't account for. So now you have to modify your equation (or even come up with an entirely new one) that explains not only the original movements, but these new movements you observed when a magnetic field was present. And then you have to try different fields of different strength and positions and whatnot and make sure you equation fits all of those, too. This all takes time and money, sometimes quite a lot, depending on what exactly you're testing."
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5p38x6 | Why do we build tolerance on some drugs, coffee and alcohol? And how do we overcome this tolerance? | It's tolerance that often leads to a person overdosing bc the person would be needing a higher dosage to reach his/her regular "high". By "some drugs" I mean coke, heroin etc or even the simple kiddie coke and addy. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all due to your brain wanting to maintain homeostasis, or a stable equilibrium. Let's use nicotine for our example. When you inhale the cigarette smoke the nicotine diffuses into your blood from the lungs and reaches your receptors in the brain. You're brain says woah woah woah this isn't normal how can I combat the stimulation being caused by the nicotine? Oh I know! I'll remove some of the receptors that the nicotine is binding to! This is called receptor down regulation. Now that there are fewer receptors to bind to you need more of the drug to achieve the same effect with fewer receptors, hence tolerance. Could go into more detail but almost forgot we're in ELI5. Source: bachelors in biochemistry and ex IV poly substance abuser."
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5p3bbe | When a woman cries, why does it have a powerful effect on men? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Human instinct makes us alert when we hear a high-pitched sound such as a woman crying, kids screaming or cries of a dying animal. It's similar to the \"fight or flight\" instinct and takes advantage of our muscle memory. The ears let the brain know something dangerous is afoot. The shot of adenaline makes us more perceptive, more engaged with our environment. When that excitement is coupled with compassion for another person, the resulting energy is naturally redirected into making that person feel better. You might try to console that person by letting them \"vent\", or cheer them up with laughter or encouragement. At the end of the day, you could say it's simply a matter of human empathy.",
"Maybe its just me but if i see anyone cry it has an effect on me. Maybe its just because women are more likely to cry than men so you only notice women doing it. I mean if you saw one of your best friends tore up about something, it might have just as much a profound effect. Edit: Maybe moreso if there wasnt such a stigma against men having emotions too.",
"My husband gets turned on when I cry. So weird, it makes me laugh. But like, WTF. Happen to anyone else??",
"Because we put so much effort into pleasing women, make them happy and their lives worth living, when we hear them crying, it is really upsetting because we put so much effort into pleasing them, and seeing them upset is really painful because we feel as if we've failed them.",
"I think men process emotion so differently from women that it's often hard to find the right way to respond. As a man, I often can't comprehend the reasons why women cry; in my personal experience, I have noticed that women are just more likely to resort to tears in situations that would make most men scratch their heads"
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5p3j4i | Some jobs are unpleasant but fundamental to society (eg: janitor, bus driver). Why aren't these the best paid jobs? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because anyone can do them. They are low skill and lots of people can fill that role. Sometimes they do get better pay because the job is undesirable (I think trash collectors get paid decent, at least compared to minimum wage).",
"The most highly paid jobs require some combination of: a) exceptional intelligence/skill/education/training; and/or b) an unwillingness on the part of most people to perform the job. Example (A AND B): patent attorney. A patent attorney must have an outstanding technical background (undergrad degree (4 years) plus at least a master's degree (2yrs), and frequently a PhD (5-6 years)), must have a law degree (3 years), and then must want (or at least agree) to write patents consisting of scores/hundred of pages of highly detailed technical/legal jargon. It's insufferable, and most people (including me) find it incredibly boring. At a large law firm, a patent attorney can start at $160-180K per year and in 10 years make anywhere from $500K to a few million dollars per year. Other examples (A and B) include: neurosurgeon, heart surgeon. Example (A NOT B): Movie actor. While many people may *want* the job, few have the skill to be able to perform adequately. Same for NFL player, etc. Result = high salary. Example (B NOT A): Garbageman. While few people *want* the job, it doesn't take much skill to perform. Result: higher salary than other low skilled positions, but not anywhere near as high as, say, a patent attorney.",
"Jobs are categorized by amount of skills you need to have to perform the job or amount of profit that you produce per period of time. Also, supply and demand curve of labor. How many people are available on the market to do some particular job. Being a janitor doesn't require a much of skills or bachelors degree, a lot of people can do this job, and the outcome is just a clean place you work/ live.",
"Because they don't need to. Simple as that. The market doesn't require it. At the current pay, they can find qualified people to fill those positions. A brain surgeon would make $10/hr if they could hire good people at that amount.",
"Jobs aren't paid by how \"tough\" or \"important\" they are. They are (imperfectly) paid by how replaceable the skill is of the person doing the job.",
"Supply and demand. Most people can be janitors or, with the proper training, drive buses. This large labor pool puts downward pressure on the wages for these occupations.",
"It's basically supply and demand. More people are able and willing to become janitors, bus drivers, social workers, etc (massive supply) than there are positions available (limited demand), which drives down the price of the labor."
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5p3jpd | what is my body doing in the "Aaaah, AAAAAAH-" moment of a sneeze? Why does it vary in length? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you start to sneeze, it's because of some sort of irritation in your nose to release histamines. When histamines reach the nerve cells in your nose, it tells the brain to start what I'll call the Sneeze Sequence. The \"Ah\" sound you make is due to your body reflexively taking a large breath. During this time, the muscles in your throat and nose expand, creating an opening that allows large amounts of air to pass through. Then, your chest muscles rapidly contract, forcing the air out of your lungs and through your nose. The variation in length is based on personal anatomy and how your brain handles the Sneeze Sequence. It's different from person to person.",
"Your body is preparing the expulsion of air, to clear the airways, by forcing you to breathe in, the \"ah\" part. The duration varies due to the volume of air currently in your lungs, and your own biology. Everyone reacts differently."
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5p3rhj | Some entries on Wikipedia have bizarre spellings that appear to be how to pronounce the word, but are confusing. What do the weird letters mean? | For example, this is apparently how 'Ireland' is pronounced: aɪərlənd | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> this is apparently how 'Ireland' is pronounced: aɪərlənd In fact /ˈaɪərlənd/. This is the International Phonetic Alphabet, used by linguists (and in at least some countries most people with an academic education, especially those who have learned foreign languages) to exactly describe the pronunciation of the word. The IPA contains enough symbols for all the sounds in all of the world's languages. Going through /ˈaɪərlənd/ bit by bit: * The slashes indicate that this is a *phonemic*, not a *phonetic*, transcription. Basically, a phonetic transcription is a description of exactly how one speaker is pronouncing something; while a phonemic transcription is a rough description of how it should be pronounced, although individual speakers may pronounce it slightly differently depending on their accent. * The little sign that looks like a kind of apostrophe indicates that the next syllable has the primary stress -- that is, it's emphasized. * aɪ is the first syllable, and it's a diphthong -- two vowels smushed together. It begins like a short \"a\", but ends like a short \"i\" -- this is the pronunciation of the word \"eye\". * ə is a sound called \"schwa\": it's the indistinct \"uh\" sound, like the \"a\" in \"about\". * All the other symbols are pretty much self-explanatory. The point is that you have a universal system for describing pronunciations. Instead of saying, for example, \"It's like the 'a' in 'hat'\" (because how you pronounce \"hat\" will vary depending on where you're from), you can say, \"It's pronounced /æ/.\" If you go to that Wikipedia page and hover the mouse pointer over the transcription, you should see a tool-tip pop up with a more understandable pronunciation guide (assuming your native language is standard American English, that is). ---------- Non-ELI5 section: The difference between a phonemic transcription and a phonetic transcription is a little tricky to explain. But in the IPA transcription for \"Ireland\", you can see the symbol /r/. But it you look it up on the IPA chart, it will tell you this represents a sound called an \"alveolar trill\", which you might better know as the \"rolled R\". Not many people actually use that sound: we just use it here, in the phonemic transcription, because it's the most convenient symbol to use. But if I want to write a *phonetic* transcription, I would need to know the exact sound being pronounced. To indicate a phonetic transcription, I would use square brackets instead of slashes. In other words, the different ways of pronouncing /r/ in English are: * [r] = alveolar trill, the \"rolled R\", most often used in Scotland * [ɹ̠] = postalveolar approximant, the usual American pronunciation * [ɻ] = retroflex approximant, like the postalveolar approximant above, but with the tip of the tongue curled more * [ʋ] = labiodental approximant, pronounced by bringing the lips close together but not actually touching; it sounds almost like a \"w\" * [ɾ] = alveolar flap, pronounced by rapping the tip of the tongue once against the roof of the mouth just behind the teeth * [ʁ] = the very rare voiced uvular fricative, once used in some dialects of English but now dying out: it's a weird raspy noise pronounced by pushing the back of the tongue against the uvula, that fleshy thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth.",
"These are using the International Phonetic Alphabet. URL_1 URL_0 The idea is to show the sounds in a way that everyone agrees to regardless of what language or alphabet they are used to."
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5p3u5z | What is the difference between low level programming language and high level language? | What is the difference between low level programming language and high level language? I have no knowledge of coding/computer language at all so please keep that in mind. Also examples of both would be great. Thanks! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's basically how close it is to the \"real\" operations the computer is doing. For example, take a list of names you need to alphabetically sort. Using plain English to make it simpler, in a high level language you basically just say: Computer, sort the list alphabetically and the rest is handled by the in built functions of the language that convert this to machine code. In a low level language you need to be more specific, e.g.: Take the first name and compare it to the second. If the first letter is lower then put name A first. If they are the same then take the second letter... etc. Basically a high level language comes bundled with lots of operations simplified and with many abstractions that mean you don't need to be thinking (mostly) about what the computer is *actually* doing, you only think about results. Whereas a low level language needs to constantly think about how the machine is actually wired and work appropriately. To expand a little as to which is \"better\", it depends on your purpose and requirements. Generally high level languages are preferred because they are easier and less error prone, and therefore generally cheaper. Also these days performance is usually about the same because high level languages are pretty good these days at generating low level code for the computer to run. However sometimes it's possible to write a more efficient algorithm in a low level language compared to what the high level language produces. Also some devices are very idiosyncratic in their requirements and a low level language allows you to tailor code more specifically. Additionally since low level languages are typically older, they can produce code for basically any device (although this point is increasingly moot as high level languages are nowadays usually able to be compiled for just about anything).",
"Low level languages hide less from you regarding what the computer is actually doing. For example, object oriented programming is a thing. However, cpu knows no such thing as an object. It's something that you can use that doesn't actually correspond to what cpu is doing, and thus it's actually difficult to estimate, when you summon an object, to guess what exactly your cpu is doing. Low level languages on the other hand deal with things that cpu is actually doing. You'll deal with memory addresses, allocating memory, releasing memory, consider when to fetch data from ram to cpu registers and how that works out... it's not easy to write what you mean, but you know exactly what cpu is doing in response to these instructions",
"Computers read simple instructions from the application code. This machine code is quite primitive, for example \"41\" might mean \"add the number in register a and register b and store the result in register c\", \"17\" might mean \"read the number stored in the memory at the address in register d and store it in register a\". To help remembering all these numbers we mostly use assembly language which is simple translations. It is simple to write an assembler that translates the assembly commands into machine code. Then we get to low level languages. Most notably C. This is a way to simplify the process of making assembly code by adding some structure to the language. So if you write \"int a = 2*b+c\" the compiler will break down the operations into simple assembly instructions. It makes it much easier to read and write which speeds up the programming. However you are still working a lot with memory addresses and the size of variables and such low level stuff. High level languages on the other hand is an extra step away from the machine code. They often abstract away a lot of the low level stuff like how much data you can store in a single variable and where in memory the data resides. This removes a huge workload from the programmer so it is possible to work faster."
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5p3w46 | What are the pros/cons between putting a video game on a cartridge vs a disc? | The release of the Switch has me curious | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Optical media has long held an advantage for stationary consoles because it is dirt cheap and holds a lot of data. However, it is not practical for mobile devices (moving parts) and suffers from long loading times. Solid state media, like cartridges, is more expensive to make (although the price has fallen a lot over the past decade), but it benefits from fast access times and can tolerate being used in a moving device (no moving parts). Cartridges are also generally a lot more durable than optical discs."
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5p3z90 | What did Hank Williams Sr. Mean when he sang "Oh, the woman on our party line's the nosiest thing, she picks up her receiver when she knows it's my ring" in the song Mind Your Own Business released in 1949. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Until the 1960's, out in rural areas people shared phone lines in a system called 'party lines', sometimes as many as 8 neighbors on one line. When a call came in, there was a different ring pattern for each house, like long-long-short, or long-short-long. Gossips or busy bodies would quietly pick up the phone to listen in on neighbor's conversations."
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5p402q | How selling stuff on Ebay works | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's pretty straight-forward, here's how I do it: 1. On the main eBay page hit the little \"Advanced\" link next to the Search button up top, check the \"completed items\" checkbox and type in what you're selling as the search term. 2. Look through the search results to get an idea of what people are paying for your item, what shipping options are the most popular and what sort of items are typically included. (This has helped me remember to grab pack-in cables and stuff I would have otherwise forgotten should be included.) 3. Take some decent pictures of said item, from multiple angles with a detail on any blemishes that people might complain about so they can't accuse you of trying to hide a scratch or two. 4. Hit the sell button, run through the wizard to build a basic listing for your item. Add your pictures, write up a decent description (grammar and spelling go a long ways here, as does detail of the item's condition and if it has been tested and found functional.) 5. Once your pictures and description are done, set your pricing Personally I almost always do Buy It Now with a fairly long listing duration. The only time I'll run a legit auction is if the item has a healthy amount of demand going for it. Make sure you set a reasonable reserve so you don't get screwed... but if you're going to set you reserve at the average Buy It Now price don't bother with an auction and just put a fixed price on it. 6. Set your shipping options. When doing price research you'll probably find that free shipping is the preferred option, it draws buyers with that little Free Shipping tag you get on your listing. The only time I deviate from free shipping is if the item is pretty large and I know it's going to cost a considerable amount to ship. I like USPS for shipping, pricing is always pretty dang good, the flat-rate boxes are great for heavier stuff and I have never had a problem with package delivery. When you sell an item on eBay it's super easy, you get a link to hit to ship the item from your Selling dashboard and it pre-populates the address and all that jazz. Hit the signature and insurance options on expensive items to cover your ass, I also recommend disabling international shipping as it greatly cuts down on headaches and eliminates a large chunk of the scammers. 7. Print out your shipping label, pack your item with plenty of padding then take a picture of the shipping label next to the open box with the item clearly visible. After that tape it up, attach the label and drop it off at your local USPS or other shipping location. I think you'll find it pretty easy, eBay has a pretty decent system in place and it integrates nicely with shippers and PayPal. You won't get screwed as long as you do your pricing research and are honest about the condition of the item. Worst case a dickhead buyer tries to pull a fast one and you can point to your honest description and the picture of the item in the box with the shipping label. That last part sounds goofy, but it was a tip from a co-worker and it's saved his ass a couple times when buyers have tried to pull the old \"he sent me a plank instead of a motherboard\" trick. Oh, one last tip, be mindful of your fees. Aside from shipping costs eBay will take around 10%, PayPal about 3% of your final selling price."
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5p419h | Why do internet data caps exist? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the case of both wired and wireless connections (cable and cell towers), it's a tactic by the internet provider to try and slow the growth of bandwidth use. People using more bandwidth means they need to spend a lot of money upgrading their back end infrastructure to support the connections. That equipment is expensive and hard to upgrade, and the companies don't want to spend that money unless they have to."
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5p485q | Why are hand written signatures still commonly used and important? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When the Judge asks you if that's your signature, and you lie, that's perjury. There's a reason the important signatures are notarized. Most signatures are simply used to reinforce in your mind that the contract is real. If the shit hits the fan, the strongest proof of your involvement usually lies elsewhere--the signature is just one piece of the evidence.",
"A signature, hand written or digital, is just an acknowledgement that you were presented with a document to review and approve. If it ever came up in a court case like a lawsuit, any actual analysis of your signature would probably be a last ditch effort by either side to prove their point. There's other evidence that's generally much more telling in a case, such as fulfilment of the contract. Let's say you think that your signature was forged on an agreement. The other party involved in the dispute would first point to any of your actions to fulfill the contract, such as paying the amount specified in the contract or taking the goods traded in the contract home with you. If you did those things, and fulfilled your side of the contract, it's going to be pretty hard to claim that you didn't sign the contract."
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5p49ll | How was the universe created? Given the fact that energy cant be created or destroyed... | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Science don't have an answer our model and experience can only go back to the planck time so far (it's 5.39 × 10-44 second). It's an estimate of when our current understanding of quantum physic break out. We simply have no way to confirm our idea of what happen before that, at least for now. There is different concept about the ''apparent'' problem of no energy can be created. Science say that energy can't be created, only transformed, but that's because of our understanding of causality, which require time. Maybe that time as we understand it started with the big bang, so we can't use physics law to explain before the big bang, even if before the big bang even make any sense. Maybe the Big bang was only the start of our universe in a multiverse. So that no energy was created for our universe, maybe it was just a small portion of energy of the multi-verse that created ours. Maybe the singularity always existed. The energy was always there, it just needed something to trigger the big bang and transform that energy into our universe. So far it's only idea and hypothesis until we can create new models or find evidence of how the universe was created.",
"How ? Our Universe may very well be the result of two universes on completely different dimensions of imagination, colliding. Your question is pretty much what scientists and accomplished people throughout history were and are still trying to answer. We know how life came to be, how our solar system was created, but everything before the big bang ? No idea"
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5p4ea0 | if there were a mass extinction event that didn't involve weapons or violence, what would happen to the supply of nukes and nuclear power plants and chemical storage facilities and such? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If all the people on Earth suddenly disappeared at once you mean? Nuclear weapons have a limited amount of time that they will remain viable. They rely on a conventional chemical explosive to detonate, and those have shelf lives like food. They would sit and do nothing. Most nuclear reactors are kept inside a concrete building and the automatic safety features would keep them from exploding. On a thousand-year time scale, the concrete domes might break, but at that point the most volatile radioactive elements would have decayed into oblivion and the heavy fuels would no longer be hot enough to go anywhere. As for chemical storage, it depends on the chemical. Again, many have a limited amount of time that they remain potent until they break down or react with air or metal to form other compounds. Eventually the storage units would either wear down or corrode to the point that the chemicals leaked out, and depending on when that happened there could be some small ecological disasters. Nothing that would last more than a few hundred years. Nature's pretty good about reclaiming what we've taken from it.",
"The nuclear plants would automatically scram (shut down), but as the environment reclaims the area the reactor would represent a significant contamination of the immediate area. This means life in the area would see an increased rate of mutations (including cancers)."
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5p4j02 | Why aren't sperm cells killed when frozen for preservation? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Human cells, when frozen, all cellular functions are slowed down near zero/still.. Including the process of cellular death, which is a physiological process that depends on enzymes and energy. So, the sperm is caught in a time freeze... can not live or die... until rewarmed back to the living world"
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5p4j04 | Why do gas stations hide my debit card pin for security, yet leave my credit card zip code visible? | If it's a security measure, why would they not obscure the zip code? This has never, ever made sense to me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> This has never, ever made sense to me. How about why do they even ask for the zip code if losing your credit card often would involve also losing your driver's license that has your home zip code on it anyway? The reason is that asking for the zip code makes it more difficult for someone to just copy your card number with a skimmer and use it because they need additional information. They don't really care about someone looking over your shoulder and figuring out your zip code because, hey, *phone books exist.*"
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5p4nqs | How do scientists come to the decision of how old something like a star is | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The early universe was composed mostly if not completely of hydrogen. So the oldest stars will be almost completely made up of hydrogen. As stars go through their nova and supernova phases, they create heavier and heavier elements which are incorporated into the next generation of stars. You will obtain a larger spectrum of elements in younger stars and far fewer in older stars.",
"Imagine an alien civilization that looks at our faces having no prior knowledge of ou birth, growth, aging and death. They will soon realize that humans go through different stages, they will build up working models, and they will able to estimate the age of new humans they find around."
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5p4xe6 | Why do humans sleep and why does the stuff that happens during sleep not happen when awake? | I don't get sleep, in my head it seems like it achieves nothing. You don't actually gain energy (since energy comes from food) and I don't get why you couldn't just grow, as for memory that happens during sleep, while you are awake. We could be so damn productive without it. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sleep is about shutting down and then using that time to repair your body and reorganize the stuff in your head. Imagine you're a librarian and you have to organize a bunch of books back onto the shelf. If you had a hundred people constantly taking out books and delivering new books which pile up on your desk. Your job is really hard. Especially since people are also looking for those same books and some of them are waaaay in the back. So you get fed up. You close the library. You put away all the new books. You move popular books where they are more accessible and less important ones to the back. Now you're ready to open and everyone finds books faster and you have room for new books to be delivered. Similarly, say you're a car mechanic. You need to change a wheel. How hard is that if the cars constantly driving all over the place? Better to tell them to stop and give you time to do the repair. You can't fix the machines you're using.",
"Sleep is the brain's \"flush\" cycle. It's a cleaning process. Every cell in your body has a metabolism: they absorb nutrients and expel waste. For most cells, this is handled by the blood. The blood picks up the metabolic waste from each cell and carries it away; this waste then gets filtered out by the kidneys and turned into urine. But the brain is different. The blood doesn't have direct access to brain cells; it's separated by a thing called the *blood-brain barrier*. This is a protective mechanism that prevents (most) chemicals that might happen to be floating around in the blood from affecting your brain cells. You don't want to have a different personality based on what you had for lunch, after all. Since the blood doesn't have direct access to brain cells, the brain needs its own way of getting nutrients and getting rid of waste. This is the *cerebrospinal fluid* (CSF), which is a special fluid that surrounds and cushions the brain, flowing very slowly. The CSF pulls nutrients through the blood-brain barrier and lets them diffuse around the brain. Your brain cells end up basically floating in a slow-moving nutrient soup. But what about their metabolic waste? The CSF doesn't flow fast enough to carry it away. So as the day goes by, the brain cells spit out more and more waste into the CSF around them. By the day's end, the nutrient soup is grimy and nasty, full of waste. That's where sleep comes in. When you sleep, certain brain cells change size, opening up channels into/out of the brain. The CSF, so slow-moving during the day, starts getting pumped out of the brain and replaced by fresh CSF. The body basically \"flushes\" the old, nasty CSF down the drain, giving you a nice and clean brain to start tomorrow with.",
"Stuff *does* happen when you're asleep that doesn't happen while you're awake, as has been noted in the other responses. However, as to *why*, from an evolutionary point, creatures didn't evolve out of sleep - we just don't know. Evolution *is* random, so possibly that trait just never randomly happened, or possibly it didn't provide enough of an advantage. The way you phrase your question, though, indicates you think there's some sort of plan nature has where everything makes sense. This is not the case. Nature (and evolution) is random. Sometimes cool stuff happens, sometimes not. There's nobody you can submit a feature request to."
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5p4xxj | How does reverse image search work perfectly? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dcoe5r5"
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"text": [
"Check dimensions of photo, check pixel color values throughout the image, search for images that resemble those parameters very closely."
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5p540m | How does your phone know where you are tapping the screen through a plastic/glass screen protector? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Phones use something called \"capacitance\" to detect contact. Basically, your phone has a weak electrical current running through the screen. When something conductive gets close to the screen (doesn't actually have to make physical contact), some of the current travels through that instead of the screen. The phone can detect this change in current and, if it matches the kind of change caused by a human finger (which is pretty consistent), it registers that as input. A plastic cover is generally very thin and 'electrically transparent', which basically just means it has similar conductive properties to air. As such, the current will still change in the same way when your finger (or a stylus with similar electrical properties to your finger) gets close to the screen."
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5p5ara | Why does soda taste bad when it goes flat? | Or any carbonated drink for that matter. Also, can you recarbonate a drink? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Carbon dioxide dissolved in water forms carbonic acid, which has a sharp taste. Soda has sugar added to offset this. Without carbonation, there's no carbonic acid, meaning that the soda tastes too sweet. You can re-carbonate a soda if you can put it under sufficient pressure with carbon dioxide."
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5p5ccj | What's the difference between Neutron Stars, Pulsars, and Quasars? | I've heard all 3 terms used pretty closely when reading about them, but I've never been sure what the actual difference is. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neutron stars are older stars that have collapsed in on themselves, and now the only thing keeping them from turning into a black hole is the [pressure that neutrons exert]( URL_0 ) because they don't like to be squashed into the same place. Pulsars are a type of neutron star spinning very fast in which a beam of radiation is emitted from its magnetic poles. If the magnetic pole is off from the geographic pole (the axis of rotation) it will cause the star to appear to pulsate from certain angles (Imagine a giant laser coming from the north geomagnetic pole in Canada, it would appear to aliens far away that earth was emitting laser late at 24 hour intervals). A further subtype of pulsar are [magnetars]( URL_1 ) which are likely very young pulsars, and are named for their ridiculously strong magnetic fields, strong enough to rip the iron from your blood at a million miles away. Quasars are a different creature altogether. They are supermassive black holes that existed in the early Universe. We can only see them now because some of them are so far away that their light has only just reached us. They tore through a literally unimaginable amount of material every second, so quickly and with such force that the gas and plasma around it glowed trillions of times brighter than our Sun."
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5p5l60 | If clear pee means you're hydrated, then why does beer make my pee clear even though it dehydrates. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because that's exactly the way beer dehydrates you. It reduces the amount of vasopressin your body produces, a hormone that tells your kidneys to reabsorb sufficient water. This makes you excrete a lot of water, making your pee clear as if you're hydrated. But you're not, and that dehydrates you.",
"When your pee is clear, it means there's excess water in your body it's getting rid of. This is a good thing because dumping excess water is no prob, but having to make do with little water is unhealthy. However, when you drink alcohol, your kidneys have to do quite a lot of filtration work. Kidneys require a lot of h2o to do their filtering thang and dump the waste+water to your bladder. So even though your pee is clear your body is still filtering, and dumping a lot of water in the process to do it. At the end of the night it's possible you had to pee out more water than you ingested.",
"Firstly, those saying that it hydrates you because it is mostly water are incorrect and lack an understanding of biology. It does not work in a manner that simple. Your body functions through a lengthy chain of signal transfers that can be broken down (mostly) to the creation of biomolecules. These include hormones such as antidiuretic hormone/vasopressin (ADH) which helps regulate water intake by telling your body your body \"hey, we need more water!\". The more dehydrated you become, the more ADH is made by your hypothalamus. Alcohol inhibits ADH activity. When you drink, it's like you are \"blindfolding\" this signaling pathway. Basically your hypothalamus things \"oh man we have plenty of water! We can get rid of some!\", Even though this isn't true. Your body then excretes the \"excess\" water thereby diluting the urea your body is expelling and causing the solution of your per to be clear. This dehydration can help lead to hangovers the next day.",
"Beer itself isn't going to dehydrate you: What dehydrates you is your kidneys, in that case. Basically your kidneys arne't just responsible for getting rid of waste, they want to do it efficiently. They want to have your body uptake as much moisture as possible from what you're getting rid of, and it has a special area of the system (called the loop of henle) where this is done. What this area does is it uses very special chemical pumps from INSIDE YOUR BODY to make the urine (your pee) more concentrated, so it needs less water. When you drink alcohol like in beer, this doesn't work as well. The alcohol makes it harder for your body to use something called ADH, or anti-diuretic hormone. Effectively, your body has a special chemical that helps tell it to make sure it doesn't let too much diluted urine out, and so you don't have to pee as MUCH or as often, and you don't lose the water that you would. But since alcohol slows/inhibits this, it means your body doesn't use the loop of henle as well, as you don't get as much water OUT of the urine and staying in your body. So, if your body doesn't get as much water back...you pee more out! Which makes you have more to pee, and WHAT you pee is less concentrated (so it's pretty clear and less yellow). But that also means that your body kept less water inside...and that means that usually the next day, you wake up feeling dehydrated! And this is even MORE pronounced with higher concentrations of alcohol, or high concentrations of liquid. Which is why drinking lots of beer makes you need to pee a lot (to let your body get extra fluids out) and pee clearly (because it's diluted urine) all while actually making your body lose out on water (because you're peeing it out without letting your body's natural processes take the water back)"
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5p5m3l | I know a banana is technically a herb, but why? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because .... \"Herbaceous plants (in botanical use frequently simply herbs) are plants that have no persistent woody stem above ground.\" - [Wiki]( URL_0 ) \"banana and plantain plants are not woody and their apparent \"stem\" is made up of the bases of the huge leaf stalks. Thus, they are technically gigantic herbs.\" [Wiki]( URL_1 )"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_(genus\\)"
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5p5xlt | what makes the wind ? | I have always wondered why we have wind and what makes wind hope you guys can help ^-^ | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Warm air rises, cold air sinks and nature hates vacuums. The sun warms the Earth and makes air hot in places. When a big patch of air gets hot it rises and leaves a big space near the ground where there's less air. Colder air near the ground will get sucked into those places. That's the wind. If you look at the weather maps, you see high and low pressure zones. Low pressure zones are the hot air rising away. The high pressure zones are the cold air trying to fill in the gaps."
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5p66w4 | The color white reflects all colors. Then what does a mirror do? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A white surface is a diffuse reflector. The light that falls on it is reflected in several directions, so it reflects the average light that falls on it in every direction. A mirror reflects the light that falls on it is a non-diffuse way, maintaining the relative position and angle of the light rays.",
"Your white wall returns all colors, but not as a mirror image. If you look closely, it's a rough surface down to the microscopic level, so while it doesn't absorb colors significantly, it scatters them when they reflect. A mirror is much smoother and so it not only reflects all colors, it does so so neatly and uniformly that the image is preserved."
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5p6g6u | Why do large private companies and banks pay politicians vast sums of money simply for a speech at their conference or event? | I'm just reading about the UK's former Chancellor earning over £600,000 during the autumn of 2016 from giving speeches in the US. What is going on? URL_0 | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're an influencer and important person. It's the same as a big corporation paying a musician or comedian to perform at an event. Politicians are allegedly smart and well informed individuals. The speeches are intended to impart some form of advice or knowledge to the attendees as well as lend a certain celebrity to an event. Now, for a more insidious take, a politician is generally a well connected individual, thereby paying them vast amounts of money a corporation may be able to exert influence on policy and so forth."
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5p6ocz | why are some metals magnetic? | Note: Please don't explain how a magnet works, just tell me why some metals aren't magnetic. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"metals are comprised of atoms which like to interact with charges. these atoms are basically assorted randomly in terms of their polarity so any given point could either push or pull on a like charge. Because they are assorted randomly they cancel each other out and the net magnetism is basically 0. In a magnet however they arent assorted randomly. They all line up in one direction so their magnetism is amplified instead of canceled out."
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5p6pqd | Do pets get a sore neck from always having to look up to us? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Possibly, but not nearly as much as you would think. As bipeds, our muscles and bones are designed to keep our heads upright, looking forward. Most pets have musculoskeletal structures that are meant to keep their eyes aligned with their spines. Looking up is a much smaller movement and less effort for them, so they can do it more often and for longer with less overall strain.",
"Animals do get sore after exercise or being cramped in one position for too long but I don't think they get sore looking up at us. Compare the amount of time they spend looking up to the amount of time they spend sleeping, sniffing, running, etc. It's pretty negligible. They might be a little stiff if they stared up at you for an hour straight while you ate but generally animals don't really commit like that to things that hurt.",
"Do humans get sore necks from always having to look down at pets?",
"The bigger concern is the size of your animal vs the world. Larger dogs often have joint and bone problems just due to size. I've also personally had a beagke/dachshund mix with spinsl problems that ended their life. Her vet described it as relatively common due to the small stature vs the size of steps and other or all human-sized objects. So it's not unreasonable to think arthritis and similar issues have a correlation to the size of our pets vs their environment. Otherwise, I would have to think the answer to this is yes, if indeed they spend a majority of their time looking up at you - which they probably don't. You don't find people out of sorts for looking at the sky, which happens all the time.",
"I don't know that looking at people gives your pet aches, but animals can have aches and pains. Despite being different shapes and sizes, most (if not all) animal muscles work the same way as our human muscles. Any muscle that is overworked or injured can become painful to use. Pain is the body's way of letting you know that something's wrong. This happens in animals and humans."
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5p6wxs | How can every country in the world be in debt? Shouldn't the sum-total of debt in the world be zero? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When a government borrows money, what they do is sell \"bonds\" that are purchased by mostly individuals, banks, investment funds, etc. They don't borrow it from other governments. So no, the sum of debts in governments shouldn't be 0.",
"Imagine three people: Alex, Bob, and Charlie. Alex lends Bob $20. Bob spends this money on some fancy new pants. Now Alex wants some of Charlie's famous fruit smoothie. He doesn't have any money, though, so he asks Charlie for some smoothie anyway, and says that he'll pay Charlie back $20 after he gets the money back from Bob. Charlie agrees. Now Charlie wants some fancy pants to wear to the ball. But Charlie can't find any pants. So he asks to borrow Bob's pants. But Bob won't lend them out for free, since he knows he has the fanciest pants around. He charges $20 for the use of the pants for one evening. Charlie doesn't have any money right now, so he asks to borrow the pants and repay the $20 as soon as he has the $20 he knows Alex owes him. Bob agrees. Now Alex owes Charlie $20. Bob owes Alex $20. Charlie owes Bob $20.",
"Most of the debt isn't held by countries, it's held by banks and other financial institutions, and everyday citizens. For example, most US debt is held by US citizens and organizations."
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5p70z8 | Why can't computers/operating systems detect when they are about to "freeze"? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You could easily set up something that alerts you if the memory capacity reaches a certain point. However, just halting it early if it *might* freeze would be even more ineffective and would be basically the same thing as just freezing early. Most times when the computer freezes it's because of a memory leak or some kind of operation that is looping in a way that doesn't end. But there's no way for the computer to *know* the looping will never end, since the only way for it to know is to keep looping and just hope. It can't even just say \"If I loop a hundred times, cancel what I was doing\" since some actions *would* need to loop a hundred times, so it's up to the individual program to do this for the operating system. Many programs *do* halt automatically if certain conditions are met, and typically pop out an error message to the user in those situations. But if something goes wrong and no failsafe had been built in, there's no way for it to *know* that's the case. Hence why things freeze and you have to manually force quit them.",
"You've got it a little backwards. A computer operating at 100% CPU usage does not cause it to freeze, so watching for high usage as a warning wouldn't help. In fact your computer *regularly* jumps from 0-100 and back. Try it yourself: open Task Manager, check the CPU graph and start doing stuff. It'll spike then drop back low. The CPU works hard to do what you need it to then mostly idles waiting. Rather, **stuck code** causes the CPU to shoot to 100% and stay there. If a program gets stuck in an infinite loop, that can lock up the CPU and effectively freeze the computer, because nothing else is able to get some CPU time to run. This includes the scheduler and any other utilities that could potentially stop the errant app. If a computer is running at 100% *finishing a task that isn't stuck, just time consuming* then the other system components may have a hard time getting a byte in edgewise, causing it to appear temporarily locked up because none of the graphics-related code gets to run for a little while."
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5p7c4b | How come in movies giant characters seem to move slower than normal sized people? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The same reason spiders and fleas can seem super fast to us. When you enbigger (make big) a thing, it needs more energy to move. The energy required to open and close a mouth or move a leg at the same rate we can would be enormous. Just like dogs with short legs can (generally) move their feet faster than a Great Dane (and most mediocre Swedes). Also, that energy would be very taxing on the bones. You would need some Wolverine bones to handle the torque and leverage on the limbs if they moved at the same rate as humans. You can also look at it by moving your finger up and down while your hand stays still and compare it to moving your finger up and down by holding it out straight and moving your whole arm up and down. They are (or should be) able to move faster (miles per hour) But the frequency of individual actions (steps per minute) is lower because of energy requirements."
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5p7cl0 | How people created languages like latin | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Humans are pretty good at patterns. We notice one thing, we notice another and we connect the two together. Language is at it's most basic level, making a bunch of mouth sounds that take thoughts from your head and put them in someone elses head. Text is just symbols that represent the sounds we use to put ideas in your head. So. Adam picks up a rock and goes \"Oooh\". Betty, notices Adam has picked up a rock and made a sound. Every time Adam picks up a rock, he goes \"Oooh\". Betty notices a pattern. Rocks and the sound \"Oooh\". Next time Adam is near a rock Betty wants, she goes \"Oooh\" and Adam hears his sound for rock and picks up a rock. Both of them smile because they just understood one another! They just invented a language. It's simple. But it turns the thought of a rock into a sound that both can send to one another. After that they just make more sounds to represent things. Man, woman, me, you, rock, water, meat, fire etc. They just name things. Connecting two things like \"me\" and \"rock\" though is ambiguous. I dunno what you mean by that. Do you want a rock? Do you have a rock? Are you a rock? So we need doing words. I hand you a rock. \"Me give rock\". Every time I hand you a rock I ise this new word. I'm trying to get you to understand a concept. The concept of giving, and connect it with a sound. We just invested verbs. Action words. Finally you come say \"you give rock\". But I have two rocks. Which rock do you want? You need specifics. You need adjectives. You happen to want my black rock instead of my red one. So you point to my black rock and go \"black rock\". I dunno what you mean but ok. then you point to my hair. \"Black hair\" and you put the two next to each other. I notice they both have the same colour. We just invented our first adjective to describe black things. From there it's just a frenzy of making up sounds to go with concepts we come up with. We teach our neighbours and their neighbours. But two villages away people are lazy. While we say \"boy\" to describe our young males, they drop the O sound. They say \"by\". But everyone in their village understands \"by\" means young male. So they go with it. Two more villages later they change the sound again. They say \"byee\" then \"bey\" then \"ey\" then \"eam\" and so on and so on. Our origional sound has turned into a new sound. We can't understand \"eam\" means young male in our village. They have their own words. Their own language. Pretty soon we come up with rules for our words like making them male or female. Changing words for when they happened or who it belongs to or how important someone is. Distant villages and cities make their own rules because they're isolated from our villages and cities and people are talking to their neighbours instead of us. But everyone in the villages understand each other and so long as they do, we keep using the sounds we come up with. And that's how Latin came to be. Which turned into french. Which got absorbed by some early English nobility and folded into our language. And across the sea somewhere, Quebec turned both languages into neither of them.",
"I'm afraid that the answers given by /u/Lukimcsod and /u/dmazzoni are, at best, speculation: we simply have no idea how the first human languages came into being. There are a number of suggestions, all of which have their weaknesses, and some of which are simply bizarre, but nothing that's really watertight. The idea of simply pointing to objects and associating sounds with them seems straightforward, but that's not even the very beginnings of language. That's just mapping symbols to objects. It's a start, but you need to come up with a convincing theory to explain how early hominids came up with verbs and combined them with nouns to make sentences. Lukimcsod did suggest a possible way this could have happened, but it's not a very convincing one. If it were convincing, linguists would have cracked the mystery of \"the first human language\" long ago, but they haven't.\\* In particular, Lukimcsod is suggesting that Adam has invented a language in his head and is teaching it to Betty, which is extremely unlikely ever to have happened. I'm not sure, OP, what you're actually asking. If you're wondering how people invented the Latin language, perhaps because you think that Latin was the first language, it didn't happen like that. Latin was originally a dialect spoken by the Latini tribe, and evolved from a language that has no written records, but is called by linguists Proto-Italic; Proto-Italic itself evolved from the Proto-Indo-European language that was spoken something like 6,000 years ago. And that's as far as we can get. Nobody knows how Proto-Indo-European came into being, but it must have evolved from something else. If you're asking about how all the intricate grammar came into being, that's really difficult to ELI5. Classical Latin has such a complex grammar you do wonder how people came up with it, but in fact it wasn't invented: it evolved spontaneously. All languages evolve spontaneously all the time, and this includes their grammars. Speech is very complex, and people take shortcuts all the time; these create new irregularities, which are then regularized into consistent patterns, but then new shortcuts are made and the process continues. For example, English seems to be in the process of creating a new series of pronouns to express future intent. A few hundred years ago, if you said, \"I am going to visit Mr Smith,\" that would literally mean you were leaving the house at that moment in order to make your way to Mr Smith's residence. Later, it came to signal future intent, so \"I'm going to read this book\" became an acceptable sentence even if you were sitting in an armchair holding that very book, and didn't literally need to go somewhere else. More recently, when \"going to\" was used in the sense of future intent, it became normal to shorten it to \"gonna\": you could say \"I'm gonna drive to Baltimore\" but not \"I'm gonna Baltimore\". Even more recently, \"I'm gonna\" has become shortened to \"Imma\", as in \"Imma let you finish\" -- and if this process continues and becomes generalized to other pronouns as well, future generations of people trying to learn English as a foreign language will have to struggle with two sets of pronouns used for different tenses. If you're really interested in this kind of thing, I'd recommend *The Unfolding of Language* by Guy Deutscher. --------- \\* For example, one of the big problems for linguists is the issue of \"reliability\". When a leopard growls at you, it's instantly clear to everyone what that means. That's not the case with words, though: they are completely arbitrary. There's nothing rock-like about \"Oooh\", so \"Oooh\" could mean anything: it's unreliable. Speakers can, either deliberately or accidentally, use the wrong sounds, and that already starts to mess up the superficially simple explanation of \"point and grunt\" to the point that it becomes impossible to even imagine how it could have developed into a specific language."
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5p7kt3 | what is happening in your body when you're daydreaming, like, why does everything seem to just tune out? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"dcpfud5"
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"Welp, it's been a while since you posted this, so you probably have an answer from somewhere else already, but I will answer anyway. This is mainly due to our brains being very good at selective attention. It is impossible for the human brain to focus on every bit of information it receives, so instead it will focus on one or two main points and effectively ignore the rest. A good example of selective focus is [the infoumous Monkey Business Illussion]( URL_0 ) [More info]( URL_1 ) When you are day dreaming, your brain can only focus on that, thus tuning the world around you out."
],
"score": [
17
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"https://youtu.be/IGQmdoK_ZfY",
"http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html"
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|
5p7mmo | What was the reasoning behind exempting the POTUS from federal rules that prohibit executive branch employees from participating in matters in which they have financial interests? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There are restrictions on the president, mostly in that he isn't able to accept any sort of gift from foreign governments, ~~which is why he will be donating profits from his international businesses since keeping them would violate the constitution. It becomes more complicated with his domestic businesses since even a foreign dignitary staying at his hotels would violate his constitutional restrictions.~~ Edit: I apparently read these reports incorrectly. Trump intends to donate profits from Foreign government spending at all his hotels, not all profits from his international hotels. Source: URL_0 Also: ELI5 how do I get that line through thing."
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"https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2017/01/11/trump-will-donate-profitsfrom-foreign-governments.amp.html?client=safari"
]
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5p7rq3 | How can one city be the "turning point" of a war? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"A useful trade route could be broken, political hostages could be taken, large amounts of citizens could be killed, military outposts could be destroyed, or it could have been the first city attacked. For example Pearl Harbor or Nagasaki. Pearl Harbor was when the US joined the war, nagasaki was approximately when japan stopped their fight. Im not a history genius so my bad for any inaccuracies/bad spellings but this was what i was told a while back"
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5p7wcr | Why do we instinctively put our hands behind our head when something bad happens? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Well. I would rather call it cultural thing and challenge the question. In the USA, Canada, Uk this gesture is indeed popular. In other countries I observed - it is not. It could be raising hands in the air like in some middle-east cultures, or covering your face in other places. For me, personally, this gesture is completely foreign and unnatural. I would personally just resort to lowering my head forward/down like I do not want to see the ordeal. So, my suggestion would be this is a cultural/social thing."
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5p82o3 | How are flies able to dodge such swift attacks thrown at them? It's crazy how fast they react and I've always been curious. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcp56k8",
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"text": [
"Flys are small and tough, which means their body can take a lot more acceleration than your hand. Your body/brain is careful not to accelerate your hand in a way that would damage it, and that limits your performance to less than the fly's performance. Instead, you're supposed to use your big brain to buy a flyswatter.",
"Another factor to consider is that the nerve impulses from the fly's central nervous system to their flight muscles have a vastly smaller distance to travel than the nerve impulses from your brain to your arm. Sheer distance does matter, since nerve signals travel at a set speed. The fly has the advantage of not only a shorter time from processing an incoming threat to reacting to it, but as already mentioned, a significantly smaller mass to accelerate. As one other poster mentioned, you essentially have to *predict* where the fly will be in order to kill it, since there is no chance you'll track and follow it."
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5p82w6 | Are there certain foods you can't be allergic to? | I've never heard of anyone being allergic to oil, yeast, or vinegar, are those things you can't biologically be allergic to? I'm specifically wondering about ingestion allergies, not skin allergies. I posted this a while ago and was told it is possible to have an allergic reaction when water touches your skin, I googled it and couldn't find anything about an allergy when ingesting it, so I'm also wondering if anyone can be allergic to water when ingested, if not then why? Is there anything else you can't be allergic to when you ingest and why can't you be allergic to it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcp6mu7",
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"(EDIT: The vast, vast majority of) Allergies are triggered by an inappropriate immune system response to specific proteins. So, one cannot (EDIT: In the vast, vast majority of cases) be allergic to pure water, pure salt, pure sugar, pure fat, pure sand, oxygen, etc. Naturally, nothing handled by humans is going to be pure; there are always going to be impurities. If you have an allergy, you have a threshold (however low) below which your allergies won't be triggered. This is why most people with peanut allergies can consume *refined* peanut oil without problems -- it's all fat (or, close enough to all fat for all intents and purposes). But fancier, cold-pressed peanut oils cause problems because they leave a lot of the protein behind.",
"I have seen water allergies first hand, a friend of mine during his teenage years couldn't bath without boils/blisters, he couldn't drink without major irritation to his oesophagus. He luckily grew out of this by age 20 and is right as rain now!",
"Iodine, well more specifically, Iodized Salt, which is most salt sold unless you buy non-iodized salt. For years as a Paramedic, I was always hearing things like: Pt. I am allergic to Iodine Me: No you're not. Maybe the dye in Iodine (Betadine) but not Iodine. Pt. The doctor said so... Me: Well he is wrong... Pt. Uh-Uh, you're wrong. Me: you need Iodine to live. It controls your Thyroid. If you don't get Iodine you could get Goiter (Look it up). I then told them I'll bet their salt has it. Paraphrased from an actual conversation from 20+ years ago. It was this stupid ignorance that has led to the removal of Betadine swabs on a lot of Ambulances and to use alcohol wipes or Chlorhexidine wipes. Some bright minded individual also came up with the idea to ask the patient if they had a shellfish allergy. If they had this allergy, the patient was allergic to Iodine. Uh-HUH, right, That is so wrong on so many levels. BTW guess what quick-clot is made from: Chitosan from the Chitin of shrimp and crustaceans and sometimes an Iodized salt. Burns like hell, stops bleeding, savage AF to get out of a wound at the hospital. So, no, you are not allergic to Iodine.",
"I've never been diagnosed with an allergy but somehow every time I eat kiwis when I was little I get this throat rash? I doubt there's a specific allergy for kiwis tho...",
"URL_0 It seems when she drinks water she feels pain/swollen/itchy in her throat. URL_1 Apparently she drinks diet coke I dunno how true are those stories tho"
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"http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160915-the-woman-who-is-allergic-to-water",
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1172102/Mothers-allergy-water-means-drink-bathe-wipe-away-sons-tears.html"
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5p84xy | Who benefits from FHA mortgage insurance rate cuts and who benefits from suspending the rate cuts? | Elizabeth Warren is positioning this as bad for first time home buyers, which makes sense, but I'm trying to understand the other side. The LA Times article I read isn't helping. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"If you have a mortgage and the insurance costs $20 a month, cutting the insurance cost to $18 is \"good\". The program was cutting rates because actual losses could be covered at a lower rate. Not cutting rates causes the government to make money, which might reduce the public debt. If you're a first-time home buyer and you decide not to buy a house because the cost of mortgage insurance is too high - you can't afford the house. It's not a huge sum of money.",
"The mortgage insurance premium (MIP) rate cut would have made an already low FHA mortgage payment even lower. FHA was hoping to increase its market share as low rates mean people get commercial loan rather than an FHA mortgage which comes with more strings. Right now FHA's loan pools mostly consist of higher risk loans. By doing the cut, FHA was hoping to get more people out of renting and into a home, including those with better credit to shore up its risky loan pools. Its loans are risky as a FHA mortgage also does not require as much money down as a commercial mortgage, and it takes riskier borrowers (those with some credit issues). This MIP cut stall may also benefit the secondary loan marketers as they will not see their market decrease as it would have if FHA had gone forward with the cut. There also the other whole issue about the mortgage industry complaining about not earning these fees that they have relied on as an income stream for years. Most people don't realize that if you pay your principal balance down below 80%, you can cancel you mortgage insurance premium. However, you have to request to cancel it, it is not something that happens automatically. MIP normally runs for a set period of years."
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