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5pic4m | Why can't we run out of certain types of energy, like wind and geothermal? | When we harness wind power, for example, aren't we taking energy out of the system? If we had enough wind farms running for long enough, would wind on Earth come to a halt? Does the same thing apply for geothermal power? If we keep pulling heat from the Earth and turning it into electricity, won't we eventually freeze the core? Do these power sources just have such vast reserves of energy that we will never run out, or are they being replenished somehow? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> When we harness wind power, for example, aren't we taking energy out of the system? Sure, but the same happens when you plant a tree or build a house. Every time the wind hits an obstacle, it takes energy out of that system. The thing is that there's *a lot* of energy in the wind, and it is constantly renewed by temperature fluctuations. Wind is created whenever there are temperature differences between areas, as the air expands in the warmer area, and pushes into the colder areas. And the sun makes sure that this is constantly happening. So as long as the sun exists, wind power is constantly renewed. > If we had enough wind farms running for long enough, would wind on Earth come to a halt? ~~~The wind isn't what's causing the Earth to spin.~~~ Sorry, I misread that one. As I said above, any obstacle the wind hits takes a tiny bit of energy out of the wind, so sure, kind of, if the entire atmosphere was covered in windmills (not just ones standing on the ground and reaching perhaps 100m up into the air, but covering the *entire* atmosphere, all ~100km up), then yes, that would reduce the wind to almost nothing. (But only *almost*, because the sun is still there, and it would still heat up air and create new wind. That wind would just again dissipate quickly as it constantly bounces into windmill after windmill) But for that to happen, it's not enough to just cover the surface in windmills, because even if we did that, there'd still be plenty of wind above them, and that would also drive wind downwards into the windmills. > Does the same thing apply for geothermal power? If we keep pulling heat from the Earth and turning it into electricity, won't we eventually freeze the core? Heat is leaking out from the ground no matter what we do. Geothermal power just makes *use* of this while it's happening. It doesn't pull *more* heat out. It's like if you stand next to an oven while it's on. That warms you up, but you're not pulling heat out of the oven. You're just making use of the waste heat that leaks out regardless of whether or not you're standing there. Walking away doesn't eliminate the waste heat. (ok, as a commenter pointed out, we technically do drain a teensy bit of power from the outermost layer of the Earth. But we only drill a few hundred meters down and so we're still only touching the surface of the Earth. In the oven analogy, you can think of that as putting a wet cloth on the oven door. Yes, it'll cool down the oven door ever so slightly, which will drain a liiiiiittle bit of heat from the oven, but the effect is minuscule) But yes, eventually, in a few billion years, the Earth's core will cool down. But that will happen regardless of whether we use geothermal power. That heat is primarily generated by the decay of radioactive elements, and one day, those will have decayed so much that very little heat is produced. So yes, they do have vast reserves of energy, far more than we'll ever be able to use, but they're also constantly being replenished (although in the case of wind, it'll only be replenished as long as we have the sun as a source of heat, and in the case of geothermal, only as long as there's enough radioactive material in the center of the Earth to release energy as radiation. But we should be good for a few billion years, and crucially, neither process is sped up by us trying to harness the energy. **Edit:** Updated with a few caveats. :)",
"the sun heats our atmosphere driving global climate which produces wind, so wind energy is really just second hand solar energy. not sure about geothermal."
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5pidbt | why does fake tan make you orange whilst a real tan makes you more brown? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think OP means why do tanning beds cause one to be orange but the sun makes one more tan over orange. I don't have the answer but I'm not sure the OP meant spray tans when they said \"fake tans\". I for one used tanning beds in my teens and was bright orange instead of a nice golden tan. Never knew why.",
"So the active ingredient in spray tans, DHA interacts with the amino acids in your dead skin cells to make a chemical reaction that basically \"dyes\" the skin cells that orangey-brown color. Depending on what level of melanin you already have in those cells, this can look really orange rather than brown. A natural tan is melanin concentration in response to sun damage. Melanin is a true brown color in the skin. To;dr: spray tan is orange dye, melanin is brown \"homemade\" sunscreen."
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5pima1 | They say that if you jumped off the empire state building, you would be dead before you hit the ground. Is this true and why?? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not true there is nothing that would cause you to doe before you hit the ground. The myth is based on the idea of dying of fright which isn't actually a thing. It's possible the jumper might have a heart attack on the way down but that same person was likely prone to a heart attack already and would have had one very shortly anyway and there likely wouldn't be enough time for them to actually die of the heart attack before they hit even if it started when they jumped. If this were true skydiving would be far more fatal than it is and would likely be illegal.",
"I believe this is false for anyone in decent physical health. Skydivers in free fall routinely reach terminal velocity, which often exceeds 120 mph. During a typical plunge they may drop 10,000 feet in 60 seconds, remaining conscious throughout. There are a handful of soldiers that fell from aircraft at 15,000 or more feet and survived. The Empire State Building is about 1300 feet tall. I suppose you could suffer an ultra-quick fatal aneurysm during the fall. Still, you're more likely to hit the ground first."
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5piml3 | why acceleration is constant in a vacuum, and an airplane would fall at the same velocity as a tennis ball? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because in a vacuum a moving object has no resistance acting on it. Clarify the second part of the question please.",
"The force of gravity acting on an object is proportional to its mass. Mass times gravity = weight. Acceleration is force divided by mass. For example, if I push on a small rock, it accelerates away from me pretty quickly while if I push on a boulder, it takes a long time to start moving with any speed. (Ignoring friction, of course; pretend both of them are on frictionless rails.) Note that weight is just a kind of force. So if weight = gravity * mass and acceleration down = weight ÷ mass then acceleration down = gravity * mass ÷ mass and the mass cancels out leaving acceleration down = gravity All of this assumes there's no friction of course, and air resistance is a kind of friction. In a vacuum, all objects fall at the same rate and their mass doesn't enter into it. Here's a great video: [Brian Cox visits the world's biggest vacuum chamber]( URL_0 )"
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5piuyj | In the case of an apocalyptic event what happens to those in space like on the ISS? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When it became clear they wouldn't be getting any more resupply flights they would probably stay up as long as possible to avoid whatever devastation or disaster occurred. Then they could use the Soyuz spacecraft to return to Earth. Likely they couldn't be retrieved in the middle of the disaster but they would be able to try to survive like everyone else.",
"Quick Google search indicates the Soyuz escape module only holds three crew, so not everyone would be able to get out without aid from the surface. I'm also not able to find whether the crew would need help from the surface in navigating. US rocket capsules were designed for water landings, but the standard Soyuz capsules land on dry land. Im assuming the escape Soyuz is no different. While this means they are better able to return to civilization on landing since they don't need to be rescued from the middle of the ocean, it also means they only have 30% of the Earth's surface available to them for landing, compared to 70% for an ocean landing. I don't know how hard it would be for them to time and plot their own landing without help from Mission Control. According to the below website, the capsule drifts away from ISS for a couple of hours before actually beginning its deorbit, and once that thing hits the atmosphere, it's pretty much a free-falling projectile, so where they enter the atmosphere is going to determine where that thing lands. That's the tricky part in all this and the part I don't know if astronauts are trained to handle on their own. They've got 30% of the Earth's surface to land on safely, but they also want to try to land somewhere in walking distance of a friendly community, ideally in one of the astronauts' home countries, but not so close to a community that they'll land on buildings. URL_0"
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5pj2i3 | Why is being sick so exhausting? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"More energy is expended on doing things like raising body temperature and using up more immune system cells. As such, one will feel a heightened sense of lethargy and will prefer to stay still in order to conserve what energy is left."
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5pj6bd | Which symptoms of the flu are caused by the virus itself and which are caused by our body trying to destroy the virus? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Symptoms of the flu are actually often caused by your body trying to rid itself of the virus; high fever is a way to try and kill the virus by essentially cooking it, but in the process destroys a lot of your own cells, which can make you feel tired and shitty. Increased mucus production is a way to try and expel the virus from your system by trapping it, then sneezing or coughing it out. Tiredness can also be a result of energy being funnelled into your immune system to try and combat the virus. The virus affects you by invading your cells, reprogramming them to create more viruses, then lysing (exploding) them, which can result in overall reduced physiological function. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea are also a bodily response to try and expel the virus.",
"for almost any disease, most symptoms will be a result of your immune system activating, and the cytokines produced from that activation- fever, aches, fatigue, etc. these symptoms are grouped as \"flu like symptoms\", and are very common and somewhat useless to diagnose anything without other symptoms- you might have a mild stomach virus, a cold, or something far worse. other symptoms depend on what cells are being attacked. respiratory attacks present coughing, excessive mucus production in the nose or lungs, sneezing, and the like. flu, cold, pneumonia, etc. gastrointestinal attacks result in vomiting, diarrhea. \"mild stomach virus\", cholera, etc. lymph node swelling can occur for two reasons- normal immune response and increased fluid movement in that system, or the virus attacking the nodes."
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5pj83q | Why do we seem to lose muscular strength/control/stamina when we laugh? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"According to [this article]( URL_0 ) researchers found that laughter triggers a reflex that diminishes a person's ability to control their muscles. There's actually a more severe form of this called cataplexy, which can be bad enough to make people collapse."
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5pjend | Why do women seem to have a harder time losing weight than men? I've known several guys who said they cut out soda and lost 20-50+lbs, but I never hear stories like that from women, even on a smaller scale. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My experience is that women in general are more aware of how many calories we're consuming in the first place because we're inundated with weight-loss information in the media that's targeted at us. I know a lot of guys who eat and drink a ton of calories that they're not even aware of, or think something like an ice cream dessert is \"just a little snack\" and doesn't really count when it's got more calories in it than I'd eat in an average lunch. So if a guy decides at 30 or so to start counting calories, he might realize that cutting out soda would make a huge difference. Whereas a woman who's been reading women's magazines since she was 12 already knows that, and if she hasn't cut out soda yet it's probably because she really likes soda or has some kind of emotional attachment to it. (My experience might not be totally normal here because I've struggled with eating disorders from a very young age. But it seems like a lot of people I know have similar experiences.)",
"Part of the problem is that women are lighter. If you are 200 lbs., 20 lbs. is a tenth of your body weight, but if you are 140, it is a seventh. The more excess weight you have, the easier it is to lose it. It doesn't help that social judgments about being overweight are usually applied more harshly to women. Also, the bigger you are, the more calories you burn. A man who works out for an hour will lose more weight than a woman, simply by virtue of being larger. What's more, women tend to have a slower metabolic rate, so even if they are the same size, the man will still lose more weight.",
"Main factor is biological, the tldr is 'Hormones'. Women's body produces more hormones which encourage the storage of fat just in case it's ever baby time. Men's body instead produce hormones which encourage muscle growth instead of fat. This is why men will always be stronger than women even when everything else is equal and accounted for. both kinds of hormones exist in men and women but our sex influences which gets produced more often.",
"Testosterone. Both men and women have testosterone. Men have testosterone levels about 10 times higher than women. Sometimes even more. High testosterone = more muscle, less fat. Estrogen increases body fat. Women naturally have higher bodyfat levels too. It is because they need energy storage for possible pregnancies."
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5pjkig | How did insects survive the Ice Age? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ice did not cover the whole planet. There were large regions of decent weather closer to the equator. Insects lived there in the normal manner.",
"The ice ages (plural!) weren't a several hundrey thousand years winter. Seasons did exist and they weren't any shorter or longer than the seasons we know now. The only difference is they were colder on average, which is why glacier ice shields could stay at their maximum reach longer and eventually stayed there permanently. Insects in the northern hemisphere very likely had their normal life cycle during the summer but fell into hibernation during the winter."
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5pjrjw | Why do years feel progressively shorter as we age? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Routine. When you're young, life is full of new experiences and change. But there comes a time when established routine takes over and there is less to differentiate one day from the next. A steady diet of get up, go to work, come home, kiss the wife, beat the children, go to bed get up, go to work etc. causes one day to blend into the next and the years blast by and you're suddenly old.",
"I remember watching a video that explained this pretty mathematically, but iirc, it goes that our brains are logarithmic in nature. When we turn 1 year old, a year then feels like it took forever seeing as well, that's what it seemed like to us. When we turn 10, a year feels shorter because we have already completed 9 previous ones. 65 means that you have already completed 64 others and so on. Each year feels shorter as we go on aging because we have several other years under our belts, so what's one more?"
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5pjvji | Why do scissors only work if used with a specific hand? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They work with both hands.. Using the wrong scissor for your main hand, makes it hard to see where you are cutting since the top part is covering your eyesight.. To compensate for this, you tend to tilt the scissors so that you can see, cutting the paper from a steep angle.. If the pressure between the two scissor parts aren't sufficiently strong - the paper can be trapped between them, instead of being cut.."
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5pk33j | Explain it like I'm an old white guy, what is the difference between rap and hip-hop? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Rap is simply the act of rapping, which is spoken word lyricism, usually with a flow or delivery that matches the beat it's delivered over. Rap is often utilised in hip-hop music, but you can have hip-hop music without rap. Rap is also utilised heavily in grime and, to a lesser extent, metal and rock, and I'm sure also in a plethora of other genres that I'm personally unaware of. Hip-hop is a culture, but is often also used to describe a music genre born of this culture. Hip-hop music is often associated with DJing, turntabling, scratching and sampling. As previously stated, rapping is often a part of Hip-hop music but is not a necessity. Edit: there's so much more that I could put in this, but for the sake of assuming OP is an old man after a quick answer I tried to make it quite concise. There are a lot of aspects of Hip-hop culture that I've not included, some great examples are given by others in this thread",
"Rap is to Hip-hop what Singing is to Jazz. Jazz can exist without singing, singing is an element of jazz that is optional and not limited to jazz alone. Singing can also be found in other genres and jazz without singing is still jazz. Equally hip-hop can exist without rap, rap is an element of hip-hop that is optional. There's a ton of instrumental hip-hop or music with just singing that I would still categorize as hip-hop. Also rap isn't limited to hip-hop alone. Nu-metal (Linkin Park) is a good example but by now most major genres feature rap at some point. Also, as others have mentioned, hip-hop turned into a culture that reaches beyond music (graffiti, dance, etc)",
"\"rap is something you do, hip hop is something you live\" KRS1. rap is the music of hip hop culture.",
"KRS-ONE said it best : \"Rappers spit rhymes that are mostly illegal Emcees spit rhymes to uplift their people\" Rapping is a specific musical/literary form that is about battling and being hard - showing off your lyrical skills and boasting. Hip hop is a larger cultural movement that includes more than just rapping, more than just music and is generally thought of as more positive than rap - although it also includes rap.",
"I'm going to get downvoted, but the distinction was invented in the mid 90s by a rapper named KRS-One. He wanted to distinguish between the popular rap of the time and the underground stuff that was going in different directions.",
"Most of the answers here are only getting it partly right. DJ Afrika Bambaataa was one of the originators of HipHop. At the outset, he identified four elements to Hip Hop culture: rapping, breakdancing, graffiti and djing. These days, most people don't practice all four. But the word Hip Hop still refers to those elements, with rapping and DJing being the most popularly associated with the term.",
"Check out a movie called \"Style Wars\". All you need to know. URL_0",
"Hip Hop is a culture with 4 main elements to represent them; 1. Emcees who are lyricists that rap on tracks. 2. B-Boys who are the dancers to the music 3. Graffiti which is the visual art form of Hip Hop 4. DJs who are the ones that mix and play and spread the musical part of Hip Hop. There is also the lost element which ultimately began the rise of hip hop which is 5. Knowledge The term Hip Hop comes from the roots of being Hip which means to be aware and Hop which is a movement to keep it moving and be aware of the world around you."
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5pk5yy | what happens if a baby is born at 28 weeks? | pretty simple, looking for short and long term effects | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My baby was born at 27 weeks. She had icu 24 hr round the clock care for the first two weeks, then she was transferred to special care where she was monitored until around 36 weeks where she was let home. During the icu she was given fats and vitamins via a large syringe that would gradually build her mass. She had meds to help build the lungs and lights in case of jaundice. Note. Shes 7 now and everything is fine with her.",
"They have to be in the nicu for a while and it can be hard on the parents. Long term is tricky. I've had a sister that gave birth around that time, no side effects that I've seen and it was over a year ago. My friend had his around that time too and she is in a wheelchair, blind, and has the mental capacity of a toddler (she's 17 now) so it really depends."
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5pk6t6 | What is a PGP fingerprint and why are reporters putting it in their twitter bio? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"PGP is a form of \"public key\" cryptography, which lets people talk to the reporter without anyone listening in. Suppose I'm a government worker who wants to talk to a reporter about something horrible our government is doing. I have two problems: 1) How can I send my info to the reporter without my bosses finding out about it? 2) Once the reporter writes back, how can I be sure the person I'm talking to is really the reporter, rather than someone pretending to be him/her? PGP can solve both of these problems. It uses a special code that has two passwords: one secret, which the reporter knows, and one public, which is public knowledge (and is related to the \"fingerprint\"). A message encoded with the public password can only be read by someone with the secret password, and vice versa. So I email the reporter, and encode my email using his public password. I know only he can read it. He writes back, encoding his email with his *secret* password. I decode it with his public password, which means only he could have written it, and nobody could have messed with it along the way.",
"You can use it to encrypt a message and send it to the reporter. They have the key that will decrypt it. It's a way to send them a secure message only they can read.",
"PGP is a way of having a secure way of talking to another while not seeing each other. Imagine you want to write to your aunt but want to be sure only your aunt can read the letter. So you use a special glue (public pgp key of your aunt) to close the letter, knowing only your aunt has the right chemical to undo the glue. (This is her private pgp key). Now every person (read: email-adress) has their own pair of PGP keys. The PGP fingerprint contains the information about the key (the glue used to conceal the letter) and the owner (email-address). It is used to verify the identiy of a person. Journalists publish their pgp keys so everybody can write them super secret emails and know that they use the right clue to seal the letters. Edit: typos"
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5pket0 | If scratching our skin is generally bad for us, why does it feel sooooo good? | Dry skin, mosquito bites, rashes, etc. We know we shouldn't scratch, but when we do it feels amazing. How come? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Scratching in daily life isn't bad. It let's us monitor the health of our skin, alerts us to possible irritants. BUT when there is something for extreme going on like a mosquito bite or chicken pox, scratching the area doesn't protect us or remove irritants, bc they're already in us. Instead, we just scratch until a sore opens, which can lead to the irritant spreading to more areas, or can allow another infection to take hold"
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5pkfv2 | Why are their weird designs on the soles of shoes. What's the purpose? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The traction on the bottom of shoes is intended to stop you from slipping, especially on smooth surfaces. Hiking and winter boots especially need good traction, but your average pair of sneaks needs some, too. Since they're going to put designs all over them anyway, some shoe companies have fun with it and include their logo or some colors."
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5pkgcf | Why does an avalanche occur in snow but not in sand? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One major reason is that snow falls from the sky, and can build up to a point where it's unstable. But sand is deposited by blowing wind, the force of which keeps sand dunes from building up too high, rather than just dropping out of the sky.",
"First, avalanches do occur, though to a lesser extent, in sand...usually when a large dune has been disturbed by weather or natural force, or by things like vehicles trying to traverse the tops. With snow, changes in temperature at high altitudes causes snow to freeze in layers. An avalanche occurs when gravity (weight) causes the outer/upper layers to detach or when an another force (earthquakes, snowmobiles, skiers, etc) cause these layers to fracture. The resultant snowslide can range from minor to massive. In large avalanches, the snow can reach speeds surpassing 80MPH, and can reach several stories in depth. Overloading is a major factor; this is when the weight of the snow exceeds the cohesion to the snowpack. Temperature plays a major factor, since the bonds weaken when temps increase, but falling temps can also cause these same bonds to be brittle and easily broken. Slop angle is another factor; most avalanches occur on slopes between 35-40 degrees. Vibrations are triggers: explosions, earthquakes, gun shots, even shouting can trigger an avalanche. There are 3 major types: * A powder avalanche- which starts from a single point and gathers snow as it travels, creating a snowball effect. This usually happens after heavy snowfall on a smooth surface. * Wet avalanches- which occur when weather is unseasonably warm or during the spring thaw, when the melt weakens the bonds of the ice crystals. * Slab avalanches- which are the most common, when large slabs of snow pack break free from the layers beneath and slide down the slope."
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5pkh7z | What happens when the founder of a private company owning 100% of the stocks decides to take the company public , but decides to keep control of 51% of the shares? | * Would the SEC oppose that? * Would they be able to appoint members of the board? * Would they be able to serve as the CEO? * Would the board be able to fire the CEO? And if that's the case what happens given that the CEO would also be the major shareholder? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Would the SEC oppose that? No, absolutely not, this is VERY common for companies, many owners retain huge amounts of their company when going public > Would they be able to appoint members of the board? Yes > Would they be able to serve as the CEO? Yes, there is nothing to prevent anyone from working at the company, they could own 100% of the shares or 0%, they just work there. > Would the board be able to fire the CEO? And if that's the case what happens given that the CEO would also be the major shareholder? Yes the board could fire the CEO, but since the owner is on the board, and has the majority of votes, he would have to vote to fire him/herself or \"step down\" voluntarily."
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5pkocn | Why is one vein on one bicep a forking horizontal vein and the other a line down the side and what is the difference? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a general blueprint that the human body follows but everyone is different and everyone has variations and variants. Source: Gross anatomy class. And the fact that my right radial pulse/artery runs on the dorsal aspect of my wrist rather than the ventral side like most people and like my left hand haha."
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5pl2kb | How does smoke inhalation kill you when it's a fire in a building and how come it doesn't from cigars/cigarettes? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Best example I can give of this Seal your mouth around a cigar and plug your nose. . .now try to breath. When you are smoking a cigar you can breath around the smoke and get a higher percentage of oxygen. you can remove the cigar and take some breaths if you need. This is a luxury you are not afforded in a burning house. Also, the sheer temperature of a house fire might sear your lungs while a cigar wont get that hot.",
"Fire also uses the oxygen in the air to burn. So you are breathing in air but getting less and less oxygen and more particles/ash that damage your lungs."
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5pl2yd | What are different shapes of pasta good for? | Flat, ridged, fluted, shapes...I've heard they are good for holding onto different kinds of sauces but can't find a good source. Any chefs or other food pros that can let us know the secrets? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different pastas suit different dishes and purposes. There are literally hundreds of different types of pasta but they can be organized into different groups, such as shells/cups, round, flat, long, soup pasta, stuffed, and special shapes. Really, it's a matter of personal taste and creativity, but some are better suited to, say, a cream sauces (flat pastas like linguini) and some are better suited to a chunky sauce (cupped pastas like orrechiette) and some are better suited for oils (long, thin pastas like cappellini or angel hair). High texture pastas pair well with textured sauces (which cling to the nooks and crannies of the pasta). Cupped pastas go well with thick or chunky sauces. Long, thin pastas go well with olive oil based sauces that coat the pasta without drowning it. Sheet pastas are best for layering (think lasagna) or rolling. Tomato and simple cream sauces are pretty universal and can be used with basically any pasta. Generally speaking, the smaller or thinner the pasta, the lighter or thinner the sauce or soup it should be paired with. The bigger/thicker the pasta, the heartier and/or meatier the sauce it can handle. And the giant pasta shapes like manicotti, jumbo shells, and canelloni are meant to be stuffed.",
"To put it simply, yes, different kinds of pasta are typically better for soups or creams, spaghetti are far better with something with a low density, tomato sauce boiled with some oil and black pepper while rigatoni works better with cream, meat, dense soups. Source: I'm Italian and I was born in Rome, home of Carbonara and Gricia, you should try those :)"
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5pl4gz | Why does ice on tile flooring melt substantially faster versus being on carpet? | Have a four legged buddy who loves to eat ice cubes and leaves them laying around sometimes. My kitchen has tile and the ice melts within minutes. Other times he leaves them on the carpet. I've picked some up after at least 2 hours and it seems minimally smaller. I'm sure it has a big thing to due with surface contact but why such a big difference? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Carpet is an *insulator,* which means heat flows through it very slowly. Tile is a very poor insulator -- heat flows right through it fairly quickly.",
"Ceramic tile has a much higher thermal conductivity than carpet. This allows heat from the tile to transfer more quickly to the ice, and thus melt it faster. Carpet is essentially an insulator by comparison. If you're wondering about the relative thermal conductivity of other surfaces, then just touch them. The cooler they feel, the higher their thermal conduction."
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5plavh | Why does our voices crack? | As an example, in the song Alive by Sia, she carries long notes for the word Alive, but then squeeks at the end. Why the squeek? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our voice comes from our larynx, a muscle in our throat surrounded by tissues called vocal folds. The position of your vocal folds determine your voice’s pitch. During puberty our vocal folds grow longer and thicken to transition from the high pitched children’s voice to the deeper adult voice. As a result of the sudden growth it's hard for our vocal folds to maintain a single pitch, and the result is voice cracking. This also happens when our vocal cords are subjected to more strain then usual, like from being sick or shouting. Our voices can also \"crack\" while we our in stressful situations. This happens because muscles contract/tense when we our nervous, vocal cords included URL_0"
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5plcrt | How can one develop an unpopular opinion without being taught to do so from others? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"See a tomato. Eat the tomato. Tastes unsatisfactory. Won't eat them anymore. You've now formed an opinion based solely on your own perception. Edit: I happen to quite like tomatoes."
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5plgec | Why did the Pittsburgh Mills mall sell at auction for just $100? | This past week, the Pittsburgh Mills mall sold at an auction for a mere [$100]( URL_0 ). I understand the mall is far-from-profitable, only about 50% full, losing ground to online stores, etc... but if you get the whole shebang for $100 and you don't inherit any of its debts (and only owe property taxes), couldn't you sell it for scrap and make more than $100 just from the light bulbs? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The bank is foreclosing on the owners. The owners are not contesting the foreclosure. The bank want to take possession of the property to cover the loan. The \"auction\" consisted of one bidder, Wells Fargo. This was done so the could legally transfer ownership. But the bank basically bought the mall from itself, because the bank holds the mortgage.",
"well... hard to say. were there terms about keeping the mall in place? Are you allowed to shut it down? If you are, would its salvage value be positive? You cant just strip a few parts and walk away or youd get buried in property taxes in a month. would you waste money demolishing it? would the land be worth anything? could you get it rezoned to something else that would be worth something? Its very possible for a building like this to cost money to get rid of it. edit: looks like this was just a formality based on the article. > The transaction was a “consensual foreclosure,” so there would not have been any other bidders, said Sean Barrie, a research analyst with New York City-based Trepp LLC, which provides market research for the real estate and banking industries. > Wells Fargo is the trustee of a Morgan Stanley trust, which holds the mortgage on the mall. The trust will become the owner when the process is completed."
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5plgf4 | Why is 'Generic Brand' packaging so -- generic? | I was thinking about this the other day while walking through the grocery store. The generic brands want us to buy their products too, right? I'm sure there are exceptions, but for the most part the generic brands are far less appealing from a graphic design perspective. URL_0 < -- This is what I mean | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're aiming for a different demographic. If you're buying the generic brand, then your primary concern is price - so if you want to sell generic merchandise, then it should look like the cheapest thing on the shelves.",
"They *want* to emphasize that it's generic so you'll understand that you are saving money. Some other generic brands have lovely packaging, like Kirkland brand at Costco, and President's Choice brand at a set of grocery chain stores.",
"That and they spend zero money on creativity and colour for printing, which means a cheaper product/investment for a larger profit. :)",
"Sometimes they are not the absolute cheapest. They want yo to think they are though, they want you to think \"there's NO WAY Any of these prettier products are cheaper than this generic bag\". They don't want you to chek prices, just assume they are the cheapest since they don't spend in design."
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5plhza | Why does wind blow in gusts instead of being continuous? | T4R | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well there are consistent global air currents, but those are high enough that we don't really notice them. Wind is air moving between regions of different pressure. Temperature differences between regions, the result of variations in solar energy being recieved at the surface of the earth, cause the pressure variations that are the source of and drive winds. The roation of the earth affects the direction of the winds. This is called the Coriolis Effect. Air density is directly proportional to temperature. Hot air is less dense, so it rises through cooler air. When a region is heated at it's surface by the wun, the air above that surface heats up, causing it to rise. This upward movement creates a region of low pressure. Because nature always strives for balance, the air from the surrounding regions of higher pressure flows toward this low pressure region to even out the difference. The result of this is wind. This wind doesn't blow in a straight line, though. It follows a curved path. This is caused by the rotation of the earth (the Coriolis Effect I mentioned earlier). This Coriolis Effect causes winds to curve to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere if you are standing on the surface. The amount of solar energy (and thus, the amount of heat) absorbed by the earth's surface depends on the location, the slope, and the surface material (for example, dirt heats more rapidly than water). At a given latitude, variations in this solar energy absorption cause air pressure variations and give rise to what are known as local winds. Think coastal breezes. The land heats more rapidly than the sea, causing winds to blow toward the land. At night, the land cools more rapidly than the sea, and the winds reverse. A similar effect happens on a global scale. The Hadley Cell is an air circulation pattern that occurs in the tropics and drives the trade winds. The equator absorbs more energy than the poles. Hot air at the equator rises and flows toward the poles far above the earth's surface. As it moves, it cools. As it cools, it eventually returns to the earth's surface, where it then moves along the earth's surface back toward the low pressure zone created by the rising air at the equator. The Coriolis Effect bends this wind toward the west. A gust front is the leading edge of rain-cooled air that clashes with warm thunderstorm inflow. Variations in solar energy, moisture, weather phenomena and temperature create winds that range from a light breeze to high damage winds."
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5pll4n | Is there any particular reason that water bottles have a 'flat' bottom and pop/soda bottles have a 'five pointed' bottom? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water: not carbonated, no excess internal pressure. Others: carbonated, internal pressure > exterior pressure. If bottom bulges, bottle no stand up!",
"An arch is a strong structure. Imagine taking an arch and spinning it around, you get a dome which is also a very strong structure. It's good at resisting forces from inside too. A bottle with a dome can better resist pressure. Soda has pressure because the bubbles are CO2 gas which can dissolve in water, but getting enough into the water to make it fizzy takes cold and pressure. When you do get enough in there, it doesn't like to stay in the water. Keeping the water under a bit of pressure can help though. We have glass soda bottles without curved bottoms, so what's different? A curved bottom means the bottle can be thin, and it's easy to make. Old plastic soda bottles had a plastic cap glued onto them so they could stand up with the curved bottom. But this is extra material and extra steps. I would also bet the old bottles were harder to recycle but they were phased out before I can recall recycling becoming the norm. I believe someone figure out the 5 pointed bottom would work well enough because we are not talking about crazy high pressures. I believe the bottom of these bottles are also a little thicker than the old ones. But the saving in materials, fewer manufacturing steps, and making them easier to recycle beat out the increases in price for the new process. Edit: If you want to see the ability of a soda bottle to hold pressure in action, google \"soda bottle water rocket\". If your launchpad can fit the mouth of a water bottle, you can see how it behaves under pressure in contrast.",
"Water bottle design engineer here. You would be surprised how much of this type of stuff is legacy and how much is guess and check in tooling. In general flat bottom designs have issues with bowing out, especially under pressure (as many commented below), but they are better in drop tests. It is really just a battle of making it as thin as possible without failing drop/shipping tests or making it feel too flimsy (depending on price point). Usually its like this, \"hey lets try this design because it looks nice, will be more cost effective\", testing time, \"oh crap that didn't work, how can we make it work for the least cost\", testing time, \"OK we are almost there, how about one more tweak\", testing time and 4 months behind schedule, \"eureka we did it and are not going out of business!\"",
"It's all about pressure. Corners are a weak spot in containers. If you look at the flat bottom of a water bottle, you'll see that the wall and the bottom form a somewhat sharp corner where they meet. If you put the bottle under pressure, the bottom would pop out and become round, and the bottle wouldn't stand up any more. If you look at the bottom of a soda bottle, you'll see that all those funny bumps make it so that it's all curves, and no sharp corners. That way it can handle a lot more pressure (up to around 150 PSI).",
"So everyone is quick to say why soda bottles have the domed bottom. Yes, to support the pressure. Nobody is answering why water bottles have flat bottoms. Water bottles are not under pressure, so the bottom doesn't need to be strong and a flat bottom stores more water per volume. I.e. Less wasted space in shipping. Also, ever notice that water bottles are usually filled to the rim so it spills when you open it? The flat bottom bottles don't handle increases in internal pressure well. Any air in the bottle would expand at high altitude and round the bottom. The water doesn't expand. Minimal air allows the bottle to retain shape.",
"Interestingly enough, many of the \"aesthetic\" features on bottles are for functional purposes rather than looks. Carbonated soft drink (CSD) or Pop bottle bases (petaloid) are shaped this way because of the pressure in the bottle. The ideal base for a pressurized bottle would be a sphere, however this is not practical for keeping your pop upright, but if you ever look at packages such as a gel shaving cream dispenser you will notice that there is a cup fit onto the bottom of the bottle. This is because shaving cream requires even higher pressures and so Actually does have a spherical bottom and has a base insert that keeps it upright. Another example of function rather than form in plastic packaging is sports drinks (anything ending in an \"ade\").these bottles are called hot fill meaning that they are.... ta da. Filled hot, so the inset panels that you see on these bottles are to accommodate the loss of pressure once the liquid cools down. These bottles start with the panels popped out and during filling they suck in. There is a lot of interesting things about the plastic packaging world that many of us take for granted until we understand all that goes into it. Sauce - plastic packaging engineer",
"Product designer here; its all about density and PET(or recycled PET)plastic caliber, since soda holds gas,we dont want that gas spilling all over that soda when you package them and send it to stores,So, you'll need a stronger cap and a strong base, in order to hold the strong cap, you'll need a strong bottle neck(that ring along the cap and the first inch below), in order to have a stronger bottleneck you'll need a thicker plastic(known as plastic caliber),and since we already know that soda needs a thicker caliber plastic,than water does, well then we need a design that adapts to the thickness of the plastic and allows us to place the bottle on a flat surface without,accidentally, make the bottle flip and the first thing its gonna hit, its weak bottle neck, so if that happens, gas inverts adds horizontal pressure and pops up the air pocket between the soda and the cap, making a mess all over.",
"I can contribute to this. When they started selling bigger (plastic) soda bottles, a flat bottle couldn't support the weight. They would tip and spill easily, and needed a new design in order to distribute the weight equally. EDIT: but wait, there's more! There used to be a cap on the BOTTOM of the soda bottle in order for it to stand, because it couldn't on its own. Also, the more expensive the water, the less likely you are to see a flat bottom. Dasani, Evian, Fiji, and Aquafina have nubs or square bottoms.",
"Pop/soda is carbonated, which causes pressure on the bottle. The bottle is made to account for this pressure so the bottle can stand up.",
"If you have a sodastream machine you can actually see why they do this. Flat bottoms under pressure turn into round bottoms, the star shaped ones on pop bottles keep their shape under pressure. If you have a sodastream just carbonate some water and fill up an empty water bottle, then fill up an empty pop bottle. The water bottle will tip over after a few minutes from the bottom ballooning out, the pop won't move.",
"I don't understand why, here in the U.S., we haven't moved to the square bottles that I find at Asian supermarkets, or in the international section at my grocery store. It makes much more sense as far as packaging.",
"It's to help handle the pressure of the carbonation. Sparkling water also has a five-pointed bottom.",
"Here in italy i never bought a water bottle with a flat bottom, or seen one for that matter",
"Iirc, the main issue with two liters having a flat bottom was their own weight would kind of cause them to collapse during shipping. The bottle would deform, there'd be a mess, etc... Eventually, a bell pepper ended up being used as the basis for the bottom of two liters. Someone basically figured out if the pressure was applied to multiple points at the bottom, instead of the dead center, it would support the weight of the liquid and they were right. Granted, I'm not an expert, I'm assuming that's what the bell pepper shape accomplishes. If someone wants to step in and provide a more eloquent explanation for that, please do. I'm merely recalling what I've seen from my years of falling down Youtube wormholes. There's a documentary on canned food too. I've seen it. And it made me view Spam in an unbelievably positive new light. They're actually use some pretty quality meat in their product, believe it or not. Anyways, I'm rambling hope this explanation helped. In a nutshell too much weight in the bottom center collapsed the plastic bottles, and glass isn't as cheap. They figured out how to distribute the weight because some bottle engineer smoked a joint and looked at a bell pepper.",
"Put soda in one of those water bottles and then give them a shake or drop it. The bottom will poof out and it won't stand up on its own any more.",
"So the funniest part for me about this question is that MatPat on Game Theory released a video on bottle flipping about a week ago. I already knew the answer, but to add to it, here's a fun fact: Soda bottles used to be flat, but there had to be an extra black cap on the bottom to both hold the internal stress and weigh down the bottle to keep it upright. Only after recycling became a priority did they start reengineering it to what we see today.",
"My Grandfather was an applied mathematician who worked with a team of engineers contracted by Coke to design a bottom for plastic bottles with carbonated liquids. A flat bottom (like in non-carbonated water bottles) would easily bulge out as a hemisphere at the bottom when under the CO2 pressures that a carbonated beverage would release when it's over-perturbed. The idea with the five-pointed bottom is that the bottle would not tip over readily, but also could withstand the pressure of an over-shaken soda beverage without blowout. Of course I have no evidence, but this is the real reason. P.S. The team wrote a program in HAL/S to show the pressures would be contained by such geometry. It is the same software that was used by NASA back then to simulate the effect negative pressures of space have on the shuttles. This idea is what sold their design to Coke. tl;dr: Water bottles are flat because they are not pressurized. Soda bottles are shaped like that to withstand the pressures."
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5pllea | Why didnt the elephant foot from Chernobyl just keep burning down to the Core of the Earth? | Or is this just a myth I heard forever ago? Also they are building a billion dollar building to cover and dismantle it. Why not just send in a bunch of people in lead lined suits to do it? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The melting fissionables melted other materials and got diluted; as it got diluted less and less of a chain reaction was sustained. No self-sustaining chain reaction = less heat. Mind you, it's still hideously radioactive, just not an on-going reactor anymore.",
"To answer the second part, part of the reason we are putting a new shelter over the site is to allow partial deconstruction of the reactor. We need to however ensure we have it done in a sealed environment to prevent any further ecological damage. The new structure will help contain the remnants we cannot get rid of currently, to help future proof and weather proof the aging containment already in place."
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5plml7 | What is hydro dipping and how does it work? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a method of applying paint to complex surfaces in an even way. First, you print the pattern you want on a sheet of polyvinyl alcohol. You float that on top of a tank of water, and spray it with an activator solution, so it dissolves. That leaves your pattern floating on the surface of the water. You carefully dip the object through the pattern, and the surface tension of the water will press it onto your object evenly. Then you shake it to break up the remnants of the pattern that weren't applied, and remove your object. Then you spray on a protective layer."
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5plmmk | In the NFL, what do the different coaches on headsets do? Who does each coach talk to? Who talks to the QB? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The coach is usually talking to his other coaches up in the booth upstairs. The quarterback gets his signals a few other ways. They have earphones in their helmet and that can get plays that way from the offensive coordinator. If it is too loud, they can get the play from a substitute player that comes in with the play. And sometimes they get the plays through hand signals fro the sidelines."
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5plok5 | Why putting water on an oil fire makes it even worse. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oil is lighter than water, and also boils at a much higher temperature than water. So when you dump water on an oil fire, the water sinks below the oil, is superheated by the above-water's-boiling-point oil, flashes almost instantly into steam, and creates a huge eruption of steam that hurls the oil above it outward in a cloud of flaming oil droplets that spews out of the pan in all directions, resulting in a massive fireball that will probably burn down your house. [Here's what it looks like]( URL_0 )."
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5plq0r | Why in the U.S. are we not told the upfront cost of medical care so that we can shop around like we can when making any other purchase. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a word: greed. The U.S. Health care system is a for-profit business. One tactic for maximizing profits is to obscure the true costs so as to stifle competition. Another tactic is to use fear to make a sale. What's more important than your health? To be fair, though, it's becoming more and more common, especially with specialists, to get estimates for procedures to be performed. \"Shopping around\" is accomplished through second opinions in these cases."
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5plv2h | Why can a coaxial cable carry hundreds of HD TV channels but a PC display cable can barely handle high resolutions? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your DisplayPort cable actually has more total bandwidth, as much as 17 GHz. The difference is that this data is sent relatively *uncompressed,* that is, close to every pixel of every frame is transmitted. By contrast, cable TV is sent highly compressed, avoiding sending redundant data but requiring more compute power and high-speed memory on each end.",
"It's the data that the cables carry. The coaxial cable transfers a signal and information in a manner similar to an Ethernet cord from your Internet Provider, which could be data as video, data as a website link (etc.), while a Display Port cable carries specific instructions from the graphics card about how many pixels to place on the display, and where."
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5plxnm | Why do our bodies naturally stay asleep so much longer than they need to? | I remember reading in one of the previous ELI5's that too much sleep can have the equivalent effect of sleeping too little. Makes sense when you explain the science of it, but my follow-up question is why some (if not many people) who have healthy and standard sleep habits will stay asleep for 10-12 hours if they do not have an alarm system. Between 8 and 9 hours is healthy and perfect for our bodies, so why do our bodies push for more despite it ending negatively? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't. Your body stays asleep for the amount of time it needs. If you consistently find yourself sleeping 10-12 hours that is the amount of time you need to sleep to be healthy and sleeping less means you are making yourself sleep deprived.",
"That's wrong. People often sleep the amount they need even if it's more than a DIFFERENT person needs. 8 is not enough for me usually - 12 is enough. Less than 12 will cause problems and 8 or less will leave me sleep-deprived. However I can also comfortably stay awake 30 to 40 hours, not the usual 16 or 18 or whatever for people."
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5pm0g5 | Why do postal tracking numbers have to be incredibly long? Are there that many products in existence? | A recent tracking # of mine was 9241996901177450612702 I sincerely doubt there are 9,241,996,901,177,450,612,702 products on this Earth. I doubt there are even 9,241,996,901,177,450,612,702 rocks on this earth! How is it necessary to need that many digits in order for it to be a tracking number? Why can't they use less digits, when clearly, we have not shipped anywhere near that # of products in the whole history of shipping, much less in the history of tracking numbers being a thing? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is plenty of redundancy to (1) prevent you guessing another package's number, (2) encode information useful to the carrier, and (3) detect and even possibly correct if a digit is entered incorrectly.",
"It's not sequential numbering of packages, there's information encoded in the number: > A UPS tracking number, for domestic packages within the United States, will usually start with \"1Z\" followed by a 6 character shipper number (numbers and letters), a 2 digit service level indicator (e.g., 03 for GROUND), and finally 8 digits identifying the package, for a total of 18 characters."
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5pm135 | Are there any promising alternatives to antibiotics, given the rise of antibiotic resistance? | The consequences of antibiotic resistance are devastating - are there any alternative methods in development (not like a new class of antibiotics, which only delays the problem, but an entirely new method)? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sure, there are several alternatives being studied or developed: Phage therapy - these are viruses that attack bacteria. Phage preparations have been tested in Russia with some success fighting antibiotic-resistant infections. The downside is that they target very specific bacteria, so one phage preparation may not work on a different strain of the same disease. Lysins - these are are enzymes produced by phages. These enzymes break down the cell walls of bacteria, and have been successfully tested in animal models. They only work on some classes of bacteria, but they've been tested successfully in animal studies. Bacteriocin therapy - bacteriocins are toxins produced by bacteria that kill other bacteria. The bacteriocin nisin is already used in food products like cheese and meats to prevent bacteria from spreading, and there are many different types that have been identified. Predatory bacteria - some bacteria naturally target other bacteria, break them down, and use their proteins as nutrients. There are concerns about the potential effects on a patient's immune system, but there have been successful studies in rats where bacterial infections were reduced by introducing these predatory bacteria. Resistance-modifying agents - this isn't really an \"alternative\" to antibiotics, but enzymes have been found that suppress the resistance mechanisms in bacteria. If these are introduced into a patient's system along with regular antibiotics, they may allow the antibiotics to destroy the bacteria as they normally would."
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5pm1ij | How does my Amazon Alexa not react when a commercial for it comes on? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I haven't seen an Alexa commercial honestly, but mine does react to my television sometimes. Since the voice recognition is really done on Amazon's servers, not in the device itself, they could have code to filter out audio clips from their own commercials."
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5pm3xr | How do we actually know that scientific racism is wrong? | High school biology student here. I have a possibly controversial question I wasn't bold enough to ask in class. We've all heard how in the 19th and early 20th century, there were many so-called scientific claims about how blacks and other minorities were intellectually and morally inferior to whites. It's now widely accepted that these ideas are wrong, to the point where somebody like James Watson can have his career ruined for believing some of them. How do we actually know these old theories are wrong, though? What methodological flaws did all of the relevant studies have? I've done some cursory research and have yet to see anybody address or disprove any of them - people just seem to accuse their proponents of racism and all discussion is dropped. If anybody could answer this question without delving into anything overly complicated, I'd appreciate it. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Genetically, there are no races. Also, the most biologically-diverse group of humans are those with direct and recent ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa....meaning if a human from outside of Africa is capable of doing it, a human in Africa is capable of doing it....at least in terms of intelligence and physical ability. It is pretty hard to argue genetic superiority for Europeans or Asians given the genetic evidence. The methodological flaws in most research in the area is that Europeans are biasing the study to (shocking, I know!!!) show Europeans are superior!",
"There *are* differences between different groups of humans. That doesn't mean that some are superior to others. Science confirms differences, but not in a meaningful way. Asians have less offensive body odours, and dry earwax compared to Westerners. I envy them for that. There's more lactose intolerance in Africa than in Europe. Or more accurately, Europeans developed a higher tolerance than Africans. Then there's sickle cell anaemia, which is much more prevalent in Africans and their descendants. But we never discovered any superiority as such, not in the modern definition of \"race\" which almost exclusively focuses on skin colour and intelligence. On the other hand, genetic differences have played a large part in human evolution, so we could well claim that Homo sapiens were superior to Homo neanderthalensis. Arguably racist, but there's some truth in that. Future catastrophes will show us, if there are any survivors, which subtle differences allow some genetic variants to flourish while others go extinct. Superiority in hindsight. And it's the least PC subject ever, so we'll probably never know for sure anyway. The Nazis tried but failed to find any fundamental differences. They really, *really* tried. Unpopular opinion of the month: Being Jewish was a \"race\"-related condition that led to lower survival rates in Germany during the war. An indirect genetic weakness based on subtle facial differences. Were the extermination camps some form of natural selection? Is there such a thing as *un*natural selection? Are humans removed from nature? Try discussing *that* in class. The question of *nature* vs *nurture* also rears its contentious head. Are rednecks less intelligent than others, or is it a cultural issue? I'm not sure I managed to ELY5, but I'm sure I managed to offend quite a few, which is much easier.",
"A huge portion is just wrong because it was old science and based on nonsense, like phrenology. Another whole bunch, we found other, better explanations for. A lot of studies showing that X, Y, Z environmental factors contribute to some condition are refutations of some old racist theory. E.g. There was a bunch of dumb stuff about black people and asthma. The rest, and arguably most important chunk though is just boring ass statistics. Actually, as it happens, a huge part of the history of statics comes down to this fight. Ser Francis Galton invented correlation and regression analysis, and he named them such to advance his own theory of \"survival of the fittest\" (also his invention) among the races of man. The tldr of it is that the best evidence for racist theories just don't have enough power to reject the null hypothesis of racial equality. In fact, they don't have the statistical power to justify breaking people up into the standard six race model (white black Asian Indian native American Aboriginee) or really just about any racial model you want.",
"Because DNA doesn't arrange itself into the classification of \"races.\" So there is no such thing as a \"race.\" For example, how many races are indigenous to Japan? One? Three? Fourteen? Seven thousand? All answers are equally correct because there is no genetic basis for the term \"race.\"",
"There's a lot of good info here, but just to highlight - the original \"studies\" about race and racial differences would in no way stand up to any of today's scientific rigour. They were funded by people with an ideal outcome, and carried out by people with limited resources and a heavy bias. It's important to always \"consider the source\" when it comes to historical accounts - most surviving documentation was written by somebody who won a conflict, not those who lost.",
"There are certainly genes which effect the way people think and act. But as you probably know there is as much variation within races as there is between. If there are studies which show that there are certain genes which are superior in some tangible way then the superior group will almost certainly not conform to any traditional group. Counter example to my point: Ashkenazi Jews.",
"The last big piece on this was \"The Bell Curve\" back in the 90s. It's not kosher to talk about intelligence and races anymore, because race is an inconvenient, non-deterministic and somewhat upsetting way of grouping people. Plus, it's not necessarily accurate, as others have pointed out, and is subject to abuse. That said, there are differences between groups, even though people argue about how to define those groups in a precise way. Since this line of research has basically been shut down it's hard to say what those differences are anymore. As an example, Ashkenazi Jews are said to be a standard deviation or two smarter than \"average.\" People will start picking that statement apart, for obvious reasons. Ask yourself this question: how many Nobel Prize winners were \"your group here.\" Your group could be \"dentists,\" \"eskimos,\" or \"high school seniors\"and you'd get the same answer. The question is pointless. A more interesting question has popped up, though, that has more bearing on this: can you evaluate the future prospects of someone given a basket of behaviors? And the answer to that apparently is \"maybe yes.\" The most recent story on it is here: URL_0",
"Actual simple reason? The genes which people usually refer to as making up a persons race are actually part of a complicated continuum, such that there are not actually distinct \"races\", but rather a spectrum of humans with various visible features which we falsely group into a few ethnic labels. Also, the genes which control things like skin/hair/eye color, hair straight/curled, eyelid folds, etc, do not appear to have any effect on the things which would be potentially judged \"superior/inferior\". E.g. Your skin color genes do not effect things like intelligence. If you want more info ask . Im a biologist.",
"The problem with scientific racism is that it wasn't scientific at all. Generally, someone researching in that topic would start out with the assumption that other races were inferior to theirs along the line of their preferred stereotype. They would then look for physical characteristics of the other race(eg: shape of the head, relative lengths of limbs) and then claim that those characteristics were indicators for the stereotype. In other words, they would start out with a conclusion that had no basis in evidence and then look for anything they could tack on to it to make their conclusion look legitimate.",
"It should be noted that many racially biased forms of pseudoscience were conducted throughout the 1800s and early 1900s on the sole basis of cranial anatomy. This study was know as craniometry. It was used along with other methods including anthropometry. Some initial suggestions may have been made by naturalists such as Charles Darwin, and even favored by polygenists like Vogt. These ideas were developed into the systematic and \"metric\" forms of racism exhibited by those who practiced formal eugenics. (Please mind my non linear information) Pieter Camper(1722-89) was a prominent figure in he World of this kind of thought. He was a craniometric theoretician who used his scientific methods to employ racism. By measurements made of the volume, angle of brow slope etc. of the skull in comparison to other primates It's a very long and very deep subject but it can be easily summed up that modern science does not use these techniques, because they do not adequately show that one race* is superior to another, most races can mentally perform with the same level of intellect given a similar upbringing. Physical superiority is genetic and does happen, but not in the way that easily supports eugenics as it is. Superior Olympic runners may come from places like Kenya, because they have larger populations of individuals that have not lost the gene that expresses certain fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers differently than slower runner, a gene that is significantly lower in Western Europe (yet I am white and of Nordic descent and my family has this gene, and we have very strong legs, so it's not an easily usable form of racism). Stereotypes of intelligence or something that a race may be better at, may have some ground in reality, but physical connotations about the way a race looks rarely supports superior traits in an imperical fashion. *(which is actually a misnomer, humans are more akin to dog breeds, since we are all just slightly different variations of the same species,for now [some research and people, citation needed, suggests that certain mental changes seen in autism spectrum disorders, may in fact be an evolutionary response to the rather large increase in information fed to us since the turn of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st century])"
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5pm4ad | If Linux can't detect SD cards/eMMC at boot, then how do SBCs like the Raspberry Pi boot off them? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The booting process happens long before Linux does anything (in fact, the booting process is what *starts* Linux). The thing that actually does the booting in a computer is something called the \"boot loader,\" and its sole job is to find an operating system and start it. The simplest \"answer\" I can give is just that the Raspberry Pi has a boot loader that is programmed to detect and read SD cards.",
"It can...sort of. It works like this: The BIOS/UEFI on the motherboard does the actual booting. It looks for drives, finds the OS kernel, and starts it. The BIOS/UEFI has to have support for SD cards and/or eMMC built in to boot from these drives. Linux doesn't immediately mount SD cards or eMMC because it considers them to be removable and likely used only for user files after everything is loaded. However, it can start from either type of drive just fine. If the BIOS/UEFI doesn't boot from these drives, the boot loader (the software that bridges the gap between the BIOS/UEFI, i.e. GRUB) can be put on something it will boot like a CD or hard drive, which then loads the rest of the OS from the SD or eMMC."
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5pm5zv | Why does the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit get smaller the lower it gets. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A degree Celsius is exactly 80% bigger than a degree Fahrenheit. The freezing temp of water is 32 in Fahrenheit and 0 in Celsius. For every degree change in Celsius you there is a 1.8 degree change on the Fahrenheit scale. Counting down by 10s of degrees Celsius, then: 0C = 32F -10C = 14F (32 - 18 = 14) -20C = -4F -30C = -22F -40C = -40F They get closer and closer until they cross at -40. The reason for this is just definition. Celsius is defined with the freezing temp of water at 0 and the boiling point of water at 100. Fahrenheit defines these temps as 32 and 212. The difference is 180. In other words, a 100 degree change in Celsius equals a 180 degree change in Fahrenheit.",
"Because the size of them is different. On a graph, they would have different slopes and intersect at -40. Or put another way... degrees_F = (degrees_C * 9/5) +32 So if C=-40 F = (-40 *9/5 ) +32 F= -72+32 F=-40"
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5pm6cw | Why do we have fingernails? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The fingernails are the remnants of claws from our distant ancestors. They are useful for picking at things and provide a slightly more durable tool surface built in to our hands.",
"They improve our dexterity greatly. There was an experiment that hotdogs in place of fingers to pick things up. Even with internal support, simulating bones, they were not very effective. With a simulated fingernail on the tips they were much better at gripping objects."
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5pm8ys | What property of most microwavable food containers makes them microwavable, and what health hazards are are there in using non-microwavable containers to heat up food? | ELI5: What property of most microwavable food containers makes them microwavable, and what health hazards are there in using non-microwavable containers to heat up food? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For a container to be labelled \"microwave safe,\" it has to undergo a series of FDA-approved tests to ensure the chemicals in the plastic don't leach off onto the food. This has less to do with it being in the microwave and more to do with the heat the container will experience with heated food inside of it. The levels considered safe are a couple orders of magnitude lower than levels shown to cause health problems in lab tests. A container not labelled as microwave safe may actually be safe, it just wasn't tested by the manufacturer - say, you use a container not made for food, but it's made out of a food-safe plastic. Or it could leach some plastic chemicals in the food but still be safe. Or not safe. Or it could just melt from the heat."
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5pm91w | Why is it that video games have loading screens after deaths? | Okay, so I accept the need for loading screens in general. I don't get, however, why they're necessary after you **die**. It seems to me that if you have a save in the room/area you're fighting in when you die, the area should already be loaded (because you were JUST standing there) and all the computer has to do is refill everyone's health bars and put the enemies where they were. However in a game like The Witcher 3, it's faster to warp to an entirely different area of the map than it is to load a save or continue after death. What gives? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Resetting just the things that changed back to their proper state can be harder than you think. The laziest way to program it is to just pretend you're loading the game for the first time, and re-initialize everything. It's inefficient, but effective."
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5pmepr | How has the lava in the earth not cooled? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The interior of the Earth is very, very hot mainly for 2 reasons. Radioactive decay. There's a lot of radioactive stuff in the Earth's makeup, and it releases heat as it decays. 20 miles of solid rock is a great insulator. The Earth formed from a lot of extremely violent collisions between bigass space rocks. For a long time it was just one huge ball of liquid rock. Eventually the outside cooled off, but when it did it pretty effectively insulated the inside. 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes of boiling rock takes a long time to cool off."
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5pmnyn | How do fake online dating profiles and Craigslist personal ads work? | Are they ever real people, or are they always "bots"? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"those fake ads basically work by collecting your info or trying to get you to pay for a third party site or webcam model. sometimes those ads are put by bots other times there's a real person doing the posting."
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5pmssr | What is the root cause behind the current anti-intellectualism/anti-science movement that seems to be so pervasive in America today? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's a lot easier not to change when differing information is presented to you. It's a lot easier to remain dumb than to learn and grow. People don't want to be smart, they want to be told they're smart and feel smart, because they're \"special.\" Do you know about cognitive dissonance? IIRC, when you find your worldview or previous understanding of the outside world being challenged, it creates stress and you feel endangered. The easiest way to fight back is, well, to ignore it, call them a nerd, and retreat into an echo chamber.",
"Science writing and science news. When we present untestable things like \"the multiverse\" as science, and when we tell people on Monday that X is good for them, and on Tuesday we tell them X is bad for them, via rigged studies that are unconfirmed, they tend to stop taking us seriously (and rightly so).",
"First, one must prove there is a movement like you are describing. And it is pretentious to believe that attending college makes one \"intellectual\". I've found my college educated peers become close-minded from college."
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5pmun0 | How does the brain "release chemicals?" | So I recently started thinking, how does the brain release chemicals? So I headed straight for this subreddit. For example, when you have an orgasm, oxytocin is released. Or when you see a clickbait thumbnail, dopamine is released. Where does this come from, does the brain make the chemicals? And how do humans get some of these chemicals for drugs? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both dopamine and oxycotin are neurotransmitters - they are made by neurons, and are released into the space between cells to pass the message to the next cell. Nerve signals are only electric within the cell, they are chemical between them. Dopamine is released by neurons associated with reward systems, and released to the brain. Oxycotin is released by the neurons in the posterior pituitary gland to the bloodstream, and also affects tissues outside of the brain - but the idea is still the same. It's a chemical released by the neurons to pass the message. Most of the chemicals, brain synthetizes beforehand and stores in little bubbles inside the cell. Some are made on demand. As for how humans make these, I believe most are either done by chemical engineers or by bacteria manipulated into producing them."
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5pmvj0 | Why is it that when you clank two bottles of beer vertically, the bottom one explodes like a volcano but top one is fine | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A few people are close but the exact answer is [Cavitation]( URL_0 ) When you hit the bottom bottle, the glass itself moves down faster than the beer. This is because the inertia of the beer keeps it at the same spot before it was hit. In order for the glass to move down faster than the beer, a cavity (vacuum) is created between the bottom of the glass and the volume of liquid beer. This cavity creates a low pressure area and releases lots of dissolved CO2 very rapidly and violently to fill this low pressure area which is why the bottom one explodes. To answer the second part of the question, the top one is fine because by the time it hits the bottom bottle, the beer and glass are both moving at the same speed, and when it hits the bottom bottle it slows down not speeds up. It might bubble a little bit because you are just shaking it a bit. In a non carbonated fluid the bottle can break because the low pressure area isn't filled by CO2, and the cavity collapses much faster than it is created. This collapse produces supersonic pressure waves than can break the glass.",
"You create a pressure wave in the bottom bottle. This pressure wave is first positive than negative. So first the pressure in the bottle rises and then it falls very fast. Now you need to know why beer sparkles. There is CO2 solved in the water. The amount of CO2 that solves in water is depended from the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere around the liquid. If the negative pressurewave travels through the liquid it lowers the partial pressure of CO2 with it and very much CO2 is forced out of the solution. It creates bubbles that are lighter than the liquid and push the liquid out with them. Thats the volcano. In an enclosed bottle the CO2 would simply solve into the liquid again but with the bottle open its shooting out to fast to dissolve again in the beer."
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5pmx4d | What makes materials transparent? Can a transparent metal be created in theory? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The electrons in a material have multiple different states they can be in, and each of them requires a certain amount of additional energy to reach from the \"ground state\" (the stable state with the least amount of energy). The distance between these states (measured in energy) corresponds to the energy of light that that material can interact with - mostly absorption and retransmission. Visible light has energies between around 1.65 eV and 2.76 eV. If the electrons in a material can only take on energy in larger packets than that (all the excited states require more than 2.76 eV extra energy) then it allows visible light to pass unhindered - the material is transparent in visible light. Note that it's equally possible for stuff to be transparent in other wavelengths but not in the visible spectrum. Quartz, for instance, is transparent in infrared. Listening to radio transmissions is possible in a decent part because radio waves have little energy and a whole ton of stuff is transparent in the radio spectrum."
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5pmyck | why do people who snore fall asleep within a few minutes after laying down? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"People who snore don't rest well--the airway constriction disrupts sleep states as the body relaxes, and falling asleep quickly can be a sign of sleep deprivation."
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5pn6tm | If planned parenthood is simply refunded the funds from the government for the services that they perform under Medicaid and Title IX, why is planned parenthood required? | Why can't patients just go anywhere for the services? Does PP provide the services at an even cheaper rate? I don't understand why PP gets so much attention if it's just another clinic - abortions are anyway not funded by the government, and the same services can be obtained at other clinics. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Most of the health services that PP provides to women and men can be obtained elsewhere. Abortion services however are few and far between in some areas. Some states only have one abortion clinic (might not be a PP clinic). The other cool thing about PP is that sometimes, thanks to donations, they are able to cover the cost of services for people who can't afford it. So while it's not \"required\" as you've put it, it is a great, well-known, trusted organization that helps many people with a range of health topics. The only reason it gets so much negative attention is the abortion services, which are not even govt. funded as you stated. Some states have been trying to pass legislation blocking the govt. funding to the PP locations in their state (unless they discontinue their abortion services), which obviously would make it very difficult for PP to keep the clinics open at that point.",
"PP provides services that can be obtained at other clinics, yes...the difference is that PP provides free/extremely discounted prices for these services. An annual appointment for a woman to see a gyno without insurance can be around $100+ depending on what services are rendered. PP provides things like breast examinations, sexual health education, reproductive health services, free and/or incredibly cheap birth control, preventative health screenings, etc. The same things that you could get from a private practice, sure, but at a rate that is MUCH more affordable for lower income or uninsured young women and girls. And THAT is why it is so important for PP to continue to operate. It's not simply a baby killing factory."
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5pndu9 | Why are dirty buttholes itchy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Poop is acidic. Hurts your skin. It is why it is so important to clean a babies butt after pooping and to use Vaseline. You feel this first by itching."
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5pnmwg | why are the majority of meteorites that hit earth mainly iron and not some other metal like gold? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Iron is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. In general the bigger an atom is the rarer the element is and atoms with even number of protons are more common than ones with odd ones. Iron and to a lesser degree nickel would be expected to be pretty common based on that alone, being made up of 26 and 28 protons respectively, but they are both much more common than that. Iron, especially Iron-56 is extremely common due to its stability. It gets generated in stars and ends up being the most common metal in the universe due to it. (Astronomers who study that sort of thing consider everything that is not hydrogen and helium to be a metal, so Oxygen, carbon and Neon are three 'metals' that are more common by their definition, but by our normal everyday definition Iron is the most common 'real' metal.) Gold is a much heavier metal than iron and its bigger atoms can't be created by the same process in normal stars that create iron. To get gold you need something like a supernova, which makes it much rarer. Space rocks with nickel and iron in them are just most common because that is mostly what is floating around to make rocks from (including the one you are standing on).",
"All of the elements up to iron are made in stars by the process of nuclear fusion. To fuse any element after iron takes more energy than is given out by the reaction, so the process stops and the star dies. Large stars explode in a supernova, this is where all the other elements are made. Because supernovae are relatively rare, heavy elements are also rare.",
"Iron is considered the most common metallic element in our galaxy. Quite possible even in our universe. That is just how it is."
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5pnxde | Why do all remote controls have squishy rubber buttons instead of proper hard keys like a keyboard? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While hard keys like keyboard keys get produced one by one, the rubber keys of remote controlls are all made in one step. those rubber buttons are on one big pad per remote control so they are produced pretty fast and they are cheap. old cellphones do have the same kind of buttons. the drawback of those rubber buttons is that you cannot type as fast as with keyboard keys, but because u dont need to be as fast as that it is no problem. also the stupid humans would never recognize that they get fucking cheap remote controlls instead of high quality products",
"It's cheaper and easier to produce. This style of button has a plastic membrane, which when pushed down, completes the circuit and registers a button press. There isn't a physical button component soldered on for each button. A keyboard has more tactile buttons because it feels better to type on, however you can get cheap keyboards with the same type of buttons as a remote.",
"Something not mentioned is that they also do a pretty good job of waterproofing the switches. Because all the switches are usually on a single sheet of rubber, random splashes of water don't penetrate into the unit as much as they would with discrete keys. In fact, while the emphasis ITT seems to be cost, in reality I'd argue that the real reason is because it's a brilliant bit of design. You can pull it apart and clean the contacts easily, and in the worst case scenario where the conductive pad is worn, you can even paint on new contacts. If I was purchasing a 20 year old second hand device with heaps of switches, I know which style I'd prefer.",
"Maybe because remotes get dropped a lot, and many people have wood or tile floors? Hard keys might snap off and get lost, or break entirely. Source: watch a fair amount of TV, have hardwood floors, drop remote frequently.",
"Size and complexity which relates to cost. Going from simplest and cheapest to most complex and expensive it would go like this: 1. Plastic mushy button that presses down the circuit board like you see on a remote control. 2. Membrane keyboard where you have plastic mushy piece that pushes on the circuit board but is covered by a hard plastic key that your finger pushes. This is all cheap, non-mechanical keyboards. The vast majority of user keyboards. 3. Mechanical keyboards. A plastic key (of various materials if you like) that pushes down on a mechanical switch made of hard plastics and/or metals. All movements are precise and \"mechanical\" instead of relying on a squishy plastic to deform. So, the reason is essentially cost. The remote is generally the last thought for any device. When have you ever seen a nicely designed remote? Or one with decent materials? Never, or almost never I would bet. The amount of engineering and design and cost that it would take to make a small remote feel *nice* is beyond most consumer electronics that generally focus on low cost.",
"They used to. Personally I prefer soft keys, and judging by other comments, soft keys are cheaper and last longer.",
"If it had keys like a keyboard it would be way easier to accidentally press them. Put the remote down upside down, the channel changes, or the volume skyrockets, or the TV turns off. Same thing if you sit on it, etc.",
"Those squishy buttons are called membrane switches, and most keyboards use them, the same as a remote control. The key difference is the keyboard covers the rubber dimple with a plastic key. The reason membrane switches are used a lot, is because when the dimple is pressed in, it will rebound on it's own without needing a spring. So they are mechanically simple, yet robust. Without this self re-setting type of switch, you would need to have a spring under every switch which would make it less reliable and add to cost. Membrane keys on a remote are not all rubber tipped though, some are plastic on top, rubber on the bottom, such as like an Xbox button."
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5po5km | How have Coca Cola remained the market leader for long? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Extensive marketing and high visibility. They never let up on the marketing side, they're always pushing their brand. When you go into a shop to purchase a drink, you will see coca cola prominently positioned. When you think about soft drinks, coca cola will pop into your head."
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5po977 | Skyrim got a revamped version. It is the same game but with better graphics. One of the new features is the 64 bit engine. What did the programmers have to do? Rewrite the whole game? What is the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit from that perspective? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Answering one bit at a time: > What is the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit - When your CPU runs in 64-bit mode, it gains access to a number of new instructions, which, taken together, may allow certain computations to be performed more efficiently. (Much of it is to do with the width of data being operated on. As a simple example, if your 32-bit application needs to add two 64-bit integers together, it doesn't have a single instruction for that. It has to emulate it through several 32-bit additions). However, the effect of this is negligible for Skyrim, because the program didn't really have a need for 64-bit arithmetic in the first place. - It also gives the CPU access to twice as many registers (where data is stored while the CPU is working on it. A larger number of registers means less need to read/write data from/to memory), and that might speed up the game by a few percent. This probably won't have a huge impact, but it's something. - Finally, it allows the application to use more than 4GB of RAM (which is all you can normally access from a 32-bit application). This has the potential to dramatically cut down on loading times. In the 32-bit version as you moved around the world, different parts had to be unloaded from memory, in order to make room for the parts you were entering. Now that the game can use as much memory as it likes, the game doesn't need to do that at all. (Of course the data still have to be initially loaded from the disk, and depending on how much RAM you have, it may still not be possible to fit *everything* into RAM, but at least the game can hold a lot more than 4GB of data in memory at the same time. The effect of this is twofold: it can cut down on loading times as I described above, but it also gives them the breathing room they need to upgrade the graphics. Higher resolution textures or more detailed models all take up more memory. In the 32-bit version, that would have to push something else out, causing even *more* swapping data back and forth between memory and harddrive. But in the 64-bit version, there's room for this. > What did the programmers have to do? They *had* to do very little. It is quite easy to convert a 32-bit program into a 64-bit one. They likely needed to fix a few bits of code but assuming the source code is of half-decent quality most of it should *just work*, and then just compile the code again, telling the compiler to build a 64-bit application instead of a 32-bit one. So the mandatory work likely wasn't much. But then comes all the optional work, which I hinted at above: if they just did the lazy solution, they'd end up with a 64-bit application which had access to all the RAM in your machine, but which still *tried* to stay within 4GB. So they'd have to rewrite the code that loads/unloads assets to no longer be so strict about unloading assets. There may also have been some performance tuning, because the code performs a bit differently when it runs as 64-bit code. And then of course, any graphical enhancements probably required changes to their rendering engine, shaders would have to be rewritten and so on. But all of that is basically optional; not something they *had* to do in order for Skyrim to work as a 64-bit game, but rather rewriting bits of the game to take advantage of what 64-bit gives them and to make the game prettier and better.",
"It should also be noted that most game studios use revisions of the same engine for multiple games. [Creation Engine]( URL_0 ) was used for Skyrim and Fallout 4, so any improvements they made for Fallout 4 were certainly rolled into Skyrim SE.",
"They updated the lighting and water in the new game, but that's really about it graphically. The 64 bit engine allows for access to more memory, but perhaps more importantly, it gives Modders a much more stable experience with far less crashes compared to the 32 bit version."
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5podq6 | From a strategic point of view, what do the Patriots do that makes them so dominant almost every season? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> As someone who doesn't know football at a high enough level, what kind of strategy does Belichick employ that has such consistent results? The strategy is that it changes every week. It's hard to pinpoint a specific strategy because they are so adaptable. A good example of this is the Denver game from this year. During film and prep, they noticed that the Broncos top corner back (pass defender) only stayed on one side of the field. So the Patriots would line up people who were never going to catch a pass against the corner to effectively take him out of the game and let their top receivers be on the 2nd and 3rd best corner backs. > Do they base their team primarily around passing? based on running? All depends on the game. Some games they'll pass the ball 45 times, and others maybe 20. The game plan adapts to the matchup they have with the defense which isn't like most teams. > And if it's based around Tom Brady, what is it specifically about Tom Brady that they do in order to capitalize on his advantages while covering up for his disadvantages? It's not about just Brady tho he certainly does help. The game plan is put together each week so that whoever is at QB can make the most of it. This was shown in the first 4 games this season when TB was suspended. They're game plan was drastically different depending on the QB. TB does however possess a QB intelligence that is unrivaled. He can read a defense and adapt at the line like no one else. Also to be recognized is that the Patriots don't get the best guys but get the right guys. Their roster is a veritable who's who of throwaways. TB was drafted in the 6th round. Edelman was a mid tier QB in college. Hogan was basically an unknown who they got from Buffalo. Bennet was being tossed around the league for a few years. They get the guys for a discount who have the intangibles and the mentality that they are looking for. 'Do your Job' that's all they ask for. Don't need to be a star or a hero on the field but if every man on the team does THEIR job they can't be stopped.",
"URL_0 this is a great read...the entire article is basically stories and perspectives from players and staff who work(ed) with and for Belichick... The article provides insight into how ridiculously detail oriented the man is in EVERY aspect of preparation. I think Brady is GREAT... I also think Belichick could have built that dynasty with Rodgers, either Manning, Big Ben, Rivers, Matty Ice..any of them"
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5pokne | Why is it that when its night almost every sound you make seems extra loud | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because everything around you is quieter. There is less activity at night for the most part. If you were at a carnival at 12 am and said carnival was busy, everything wouldn't be as loud, but if you live alone every little movement in your home will seem extra loud since there is nothing causing background noise"
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5pokog | How did MS-DOS make Microsoft an OS power house? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'll have to leave most of your questions to others, but here's the answer to your first one: Microsoft's deal with IBM (to create/supply the operating system for the brand new IBM PC) allowed Microsoft to license the operating system to other computer manufacturers. When the makers of IBM compatible computers started selling their products, they could offer MS-DOS, which helped their computers run the same application programs as the IBM PCs, making the compatible computers more attractive to the market. Microsoft earned license fees from the computers that IBM sold, and also from the ones sold by the other manufacturers. The market for PC computers grew very large. IBM's revenue came from only a part of the market (computers sold by IBM), but Microsoft's revenue came from the entire market (computers sold by all the manufacturers). That was the start of Microsoft becoming a powerhouse.",
"> How did MS-DOS make Microsoft an OS power house. Bill Gates became the middle-man between IBM and another company. He bought the rights to DOS from a small computer company, renamed it, and then sold a license to IBM. IBM could have went to that same small computer company, and cut Bill Gates (and this Microsoft out of the picture). Instead, they went through Microsoft - which got a wad of cash from each computer IBM sold - and that is how they came to existence. > Also how did MS-DOS lead to DOS based Windows and eventually Windows NT. Slowly but surely. First you need to realize that DOS-based Windows and Windows NT are two separate beasts. Think of DOS-based Windows as a gasoline car, and Windows NT as diesel car. They both get you from A to B, but the engine is different. With *that* out of the way, imagine DOS as being a small little gasoline powered scooter. With every new version of DOS, they added more stuff to this scooter - flags, a honky horn, and chrome rims. *Eventually*, someone got an idea that this scooter could do more - let's add a basket and another seat. **BOOM.** Dos-based Windows was born. It's still a scooter at this point, but with an upgraded frame - it's a pretty bad-ass scooter. Now, Microsoft keeps refining and adding stuff to this scooter. Eventually, they realize that this scooter is horribly underpowered and is prone to crashing. There's not a whole lot that can be done about *that*, because the fundamental flaws with the scooter (small wheels, lack of shocks, etc) are based off of being a scooter in and of itself. You can mitigate some of the problems, but *cannot fix them*. So, with a perfectly functioning scooter to use as a reference plate, they start developing *a motorcycle*, using brand-new technologies and tools, using the scooter as a reference point. By starting over from scratch, they can gut a lot of bad design choices made during the development from the scooter. However, by making smart design choices on the motorcycle, some accessories from the scooter to be used on the motorcycle. Not all will work, not all will fit, but the accessories (the honky horn) that properly followed the specs for the scooter, will work perfectly on the motorcycle. Cheap junk that barely worked on the scooter will not work on the motorcycle at all. So now, we got DOS-based Windows scooter, and a Windows NT-based motorcycle. They keep both products in the storeroom floor, as some existing accessories will only work for the scooter. Eventually, accessory makers start making products for *both* the scooter and the motorcycle. Eventually, people start buying the motorcycle more because it's flashier - more accessories work on it - it's more stable - that the demand for the scooter dries up, leaving the motorcycle to be the last product remaining. > Finally, how was Microsoft BASIC (for 8 bit computers) effected by MS-DOS? BASIC at that point in the computer history, was an interpreted language. So, think of an \"interpreted\" language this way - you're in a foreign country with a friend, and you ask a local a question. You don't know the language, but your friend does. So you ask your friend the question, who then asks the local, who then responds back to your friend, who then gives you the answer. So with DOS in particular, what's going on is that the change in architecture (8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit) is in ELI5 form, you going to different countries with different friends.",
"The *very* short version is something along the lines of IBM, the computer manufacturer, was releasing a new thing called a 'Personal Computer' to businesses, and needed an O/S, so they scouted around and Bill Gates saw an opportunity, bought in an existing O/S called Q-DOS, modified the source code to the Intel architecture to run on the x86 chipset and called it MS-DOS."
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5popp5 | How and why does motion sickness cause nausea and dizziness to an otherwise healthy person? | I was playing a game today which I later found had very low field-of-view (fov). In just 15 minutes of gameplay, I had me so much dizzied and nauseated that I had to lie down. I don't understand this. How and why does motion sickness cause nausea and dizziness to an otherwise healthy person? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My understanding is that motion sickness occurs when your brain detects a mismatch between what your equilibrium is feeling and what your eyes are seeing. Your brain assumes this mismatch is due to ingesting some kind of toxin so it wants to rid your stomach of its contents."
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5poulu | Why do they call it a Bachelor's degree? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's from the Latin word \"baccalaureus,\" which refers to a young knight. Our modern definition of the word \"bachelor\" has pretty much the same origin."
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5pozts | How can scientists find out what others see? Like how color-blinded people see or how animals see. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Human eyes have rods and cones. We know that people are colorblind due to a genetic issue that makes the cones non-functional. From that, we can conclude that cones are what let us humans see color. We examine the structure of a dog's eye and see it has rods but no cones. Thus we create a theory: dogs can't see color. We can then set up an experiment to test it, by trying to have dogs distinguish between two colors that are identical for the completely colorblind. The dogs can't do it, so we have a pretty good idea that dogs are colorblind. It's not perfect; there's no way to know how the world actually looks to another creature without being inside its head. As many a stoner have remarked, it's possible that not all humans even perceive color the same way, but we do the best with what we have."
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5pp0dz | Why does seafood spoil so much faster than ... land-based meats | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This has already been asked on quite a few forums, and pretty much a quick google search will revert the following: \"As I understand it, their cold blooded anatomy combined with the fact that many of the creatures we commonly eat routinely live at just a few degrees above freezing mean that their bodily enzymes have to function at extremely low temperatures. Put a beef steak in the fridge and the enzymes inside mostly shut down. Put a tuna steak in the fridge and the enzymes inside are still active, breaking things down and causing spoilage. \""
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5pp4de | How and why does the human body generates heat? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basic thermodynamics. Any time energy is converted from one type to another, a little bit of heat is created as a by product.",
"When we burn calories, we actually burn (oxidize) calories. The oxygen we breathe in is used for cells to take the food we eat and turn it into energy. The leftovers are heat, carbon dioxide (which we then breathe out), and a bit of water."
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5pp5c8 | What does water actually taste of? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Nothing, it does not trigger any taste buds (if it did, the water in your mouth would trigger them, so you'd taste it all the time)."
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5pp9m6 | Why are we so fixated on finding water on other planets, as a sign of life? Is it not possible that other life forms would function without water as we know it? | I just find that we are constantly seeking water when we discover other planets, because it would imply that the planet could sustain life. Is this just us saying it could sustain our lives? I just think it a bit myopic to believe that the only life out there must require water for survival. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's *possible*, but life probably needs some liquid medium to do chemistry in and water is by far the most common and convenient. Some planets likely have seas of other liquids like methane and ethane (Like Saturn's moon Titan) but these liquids present some problems that may be difficult for complex biochemistry to solve. Water also gets the top spot because we have to look for something. We would have no idea how to start looking for the bio signatures of rock men with lava blood.",
"It's possible, but we don't know what we would be looking for. The universe is infinitely large. If we tried to look everywhere, we would never find anything. We do know that water is required for life on Earth, so if we focus on all the places in the universe that have water, we are more likely to find something promising. Say I lost my apartment keys. Theoretically it could be anywhere on Earth. But it's most likely to be at work, in my car, at my gym, or other places I visit regularly. It makes more sense to start in those places first. In the same way, life could be anywhere and look like anything. But we know that life as we know it requires water so we might as well focus there first.",
"All life as we know it requires water. No one will be sure there is life that doesn't require water until we find it. Looking for water on Mars is more likely us looking to colonize a new planet. Considering recent events I for one no longer wish to reside here.",
"There's potentially thousands of planets just in our \"neighborhood\" -- and those are entire planets; even our own planet has taken hundreds of years to explore before we really got to know it. So, scientists don't want to spend hundreds of years inspecting *every* planet out there, looking for life that we have no proof exists, since we have no idea how to tell what it looks like. But, what we do know is that we're quite successful at identifying life that uses water in its internal chemical reactions. Water is very useful in that sense -- there's a lot of mechanics inside life as we know it that needs water to work. So, since we're good at identifying water-and-carbon-based life, we're not going to waste time looking at planets that are poor places for water-and-carbon-based life to live on. Too much work. Takes too much time. Baby steps. Understanding life isn't something you jump right to the hard parts on. So, we limit the places we're looking for life to ones with water and carbohydrates. We're much more likely to find life there -- it's not that life is proven impossible elsewhere, it's that we only have so many resources, and so many years, and so many science textbooks to refer to, that looking outside of what we *can* do is a waste of time at this point in science. In the future, maybe, but not now. TL,DR -- it's not that non-water life is impossible, it's that we can easily identify water-based life so we're starting there.",
"What is life? Life is a complex series of chemical reactions. Chemical reactions for pro-creation, consumption of food/fuel, growth, responses to the environment, etc. And because there are a lot of things a life form needs to do there need to be a lot of chemical reactions available to it. Now you might say \"well steel has all sorts of different alloys and stuff, why couldn't life be based on steel?\" And the answer to that is that while there are many chemical reactions that a metal like steel can participate in, there are an ASTRONOMICAL number of chemical reactions water can participate in. And the massive, massive, complexity of even simple life forms requires such a huge number of chemical reactions to function that there are very few candidates for chemicals that could be key to this process. On top of that, of those candidates, water is the best one for a lot of other reasons. For just one example... ice floats. It doesn't have to, most chemicals have their solid sink in their liquid. Why does that matter? Because imagine a primordial pool of life on Venus. You have some microbes floating around in a pool of... whatever... and suddenly the pool starts to freeze. On earth the water freezes at the top of the pool, creating a protective layer that helps prevent the rest of the pool from freezing. On venus our pool of chemicals freezes at the top then sinks to the bottom. If our microbes live on the bottom they might be crushed and killed right away, or without the protective top layer of ice, the whole pool freezes and our microbes are killed that way (fish out of water). Another cool thing about water is what it doesn't react with. You can disolve a lot of stuff in water, but some very simple chemicals that are very useful themselves in chemical reactions, (fats) don't react with water. So you can have cells with fat acting as a sac for the water inside the cell and keeping other things out of the cell. Some other candidates require very rare or complex things for them to become non-reactive. What are the odds that these very complex molecules are going to be abundant coincidently in a place where these chemicals are?"
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5ppjnd | Why do people seem to bleed less during surgery? | I was watching a video of some surgery the other day and I noticed that when they cut the skin, the person didn't bleed very much. I know that when they actually open a person up, they clamp off any veins/arteries/whatever they need to in order to keep the surgery site fairly clear and make sure the person doesn't bleed out, but there was no tourniquet and I expected the person to bleed when they cut the skin? No, they weren't dead lol. I just wondered what they do to make people bleed less/why they bleed less? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a number of methods to reduce blood-loss: * __Cautery:__ The skin / flesh of a wound is burned, in order to close it. * __Clotting agents:__ Certain chemicals can be introduced into a patient's system to aid the coagulation of blood. * __Pressure__ * __Tying off:__ As you mentioned, areas can be tied off to restrict the flow of blood. [...]"
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5ppsa8 | Is there real scientific evidence that marijuana can kill cancer cells? If so, to which degree? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Actually, yes, there is...kind of. Since cannabis use and cultivation is still illegal in much of the world, there have been very limited scientific studies of its effect on cancer and other illnesses. Many scientists rely on government grants to conduct the necessary research, and it is difficult for scientists to obtain funding for cannabis research due to its legal status. However, the [National Cancer Institute]( URL_0 ) has an interesting and user-friendly website about cannabis for cancer patients. They refer to studies where cannabis has been shown to inhibit tumor growth in mice, and to damage or kill liver cancer cells, among other things. But we don't know how well cannabis works in treating cancer in humans, because there have never been any clinical trials on humans before. So the best answer is really that we don't know enough about the effects of cannabis to determine whether it \"kills cancer\" in humans or not. The limited scientific evidence that we *do* have seems to suggest that it might. A bit more common now is the study of [whether cannabis is an effective treatment for epilepsy]( URL_1 ). So far, the answer seems to be that cannabis treatment has a positive effect and can alleviate symptoms for a while at least, but again, most of this research is very new and studies have been limited. Medical marijuana actually has many other possible uses as well, such as the treatment of alcoholism and opioid addiction, which is a huge problem in the United States. A major pro of legalization would be that scientists, medical professionals, and organizations would be much more free to conduct research in these areas, which is why you see so many pro-legalization websites exaggerating the results of these studies."
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5ppu0b | How can game key aglorithms be simultaneously strict enough that they can't be guessed and vague enough that millions of games can generate millions of single-use keys? | And how do the people designing these algorithms can be sure that their key generator won't accidentally create a key for another existing game? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Assuming you have a 16 digit alphanumeric code (A-Z, 0-9), you have 36^16 or 7.96 x 10^24 different combinations. 7.96 x 10^24 combinations is roughly 8 *heptillion*, 8 million million million, unique keys. The chances of getting the same key twice, for any two given games is 64 x 10^48, or 64 *quindecillion*. In other words, for every 64 trillion trillion trillion keys generated, on average, 2 will be the same. That's well within acceptable overlap. That being said, *yes, hypothetically, two keys could be the same for two different games*, although there are most likely algorithms in place to prevent this."
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5ppui9 | Why do some sodas (like Coke) produce a lot of foam when it's poured into a cup, from say, a can, while other sodas (like Sprite) don't produce nearly as much? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"the most important factor in how \"foamy\" a soda acts is which of its ingredients raise or lower surface tension. Aspartame promotes the formation and persistence of bubbles, as do certain preservatives. The combination of multiple foam-promoting ingredients and circumstance is why Diet Coke reacts so energetically with Mentos candy.",
"I know this! The answer is because sprite, unlike coke, contains citric acid, which lowers the surface tension of the fluid making foam less likely to forms and quicker to dissipate when it does. You can create this effect yourself with Coke or Diet Coke by pouring the beverage over a lemon wedge placed in the cup. The lemon oil and citric acid from the lemon prevent foaming.",
"Well, that's because Coke needs an alcoholic beverage, as far as that russian explains: URL_0",
"It also has to do with how cold the beverage is. The bubbles are CO2, which are dissolved into the liquid and released as they're agitated or at nucleation points. The colder the liquid, the harder it is for the CO2 to come out of solution. Try it yourself, take two cans of coke, and put one in a cold fridge overnight and leave one at room temp. Then pour both into separate cups and observe the foam production."
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5pq41v | Why did primitive humans (e.g. Neanderthal) disappear? | I know that it can happen for a whole species to go extinct, but my impression is that every group is still represented by many different animals. Also, if non-human primates are able to survive in the wild, our ancestors who are supposedly smarter should still be out there. What caused them to disappear? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neanderthals were competing for the same environment as our ancestors. Our ancestors won. Neanderthals has to move to areas that were less hospitable to them, and could not adapt and survive. That said, there's a lot of evidence that our ancestors and neanderthals did, in fact, interbreed. Many modern humans have traces of neanderthal DNA... so in a way, they never really disappeared.",
"The keyword is evolution. That does basically mean that smarter/better forms of a species survive and others become extinct. The process takes long though. Also every species adapts to their environment and tasks. So if a human form did not walk upright, they might not be as fast and therefore be caught and killed by wild animals more easily."
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5pq7cb | What does it mean if America pulls out of the TPP? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Technically, it was never in effect so nothing at the moment. In order for it to have gone into effect, it would have had to be ratified by at least 6 of the 12 countries that account for 85% of the groups economic output by February 2018. When the time comes to vote, The US will most likely vote no and it will be no deal. Source: \"TPP: What is it and why does it matter?\" Retrieved from URL_0 Edit: minor text revisions."
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5pqauj | Why does going to sleep earlier affect your body differently than going to sleep later, even if you sleep for the same duration? | I usually go to bed around midnight. But lately I've been waking up feeling a bit tired and feeling a little off all day. I was told I should go to bed earlier, which I'm sure is sound advice, but how does it make a difference when I sleep the same length of time anyway? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your body has a circadian cycle, meaning that certain hormones are released at certain times of the day. For example, melatonin (what makes you feel sleepy) is released at night, and is inhibited by the light. Similarly, other hormones, such as cortisol (the stress hormone) is released in cycles during the day, including a spike early in the morning that helps you wake up. If you try to sleep during a spike, you won't have as good sleep. Your body's circadian rhythm can change, but it takes time. If you choose a sleep schedule and stick to it, after a few days, your body will adjust. If you keep changing your schedule, your body can get confused and it will impact how restful your sleep feels.",
"Plenty of reasons. Circadian rhythm balance(your internal body clock basically), your bodies desire to achieve homeostasis (sleeping the same schedule).",
"This is a good question. I have a very abnormal sleep schedule and have wondered the same thing forever.",
"There are two mechanisms controlling sleep. Circadian rhythm, which responds to light stimulation and issues wake / sleep hormones accordingly, and also a \"body clock\", which generally keeps track of how long you've been awake, to pressure you into sleeping if you've exceeded ~16 hours or so. Circadian rhythms sort of become fixed when we're teenagers, and some people's are more flexible than others'. The rhythms dictate when you produce cortisol, a hormone that induces wakefulness and alertness, and melatonin, a hormone that triggers sleep. And this effects many other systems in the body, including digestion, \"core temperature\" (your internal body temperature), brain patterns, etc. If you're forcing your body to try to go to sleep when its in wake mode, the sleep you get is generally much lower quality, because you're not entering deep sleep and REM. For people whose circadian rhythms are flexible, you can generally go to bed within a wide range of times, and experience relatively little effect. But some people (like me) have a disorder called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Basically, my circadian rhythym is VERY rigid, and what's worse, I feel tired around 4AM and want to wake around 12PM. Deviating from the schedule makes me feel like garbage. And because it isn't flexible, it takes a herculean effort to \"retrain\" my body, and the effort is all wasted the moment I stay up a little too late, and my body \"snaps back\" to the previous configuration. When you put me in a sleep study, and I go to bed at 11, even though I will \"fall\" asleep, its basically restless, crap sleep, until around 3 - 4AM, when suddenly the graph shows me drop into very deep and restful REM sleep. So even though I *think* I'm getting eight hours, because I closed my eyes at 11 and woke up at 7, in reality, I only get about 3. And this is very common for people with DSPS, and most people don't even realize they have it.",
"I'm sure a doctor will pop in with more info later, but your body operates on a schedule called the circadian rhythm. Long story short is your body expects to have a certain amount activity/rest throughout the day, and on a fairly regular schedule. So deviating from that will throw it off slightly. It is also not on a 24 hour cycle, I think the last I read was it's actually a 25 hr schedule, so your body, if left unchecked would have you go to bed a little later each night and sleep in a little more each day (but sunlight and other factors prevent the sleeping in later as a great time for sleep). When the sun is up your body wants to be up, that's why you need blackout curtains to sleep well during the day. So, going to bed an hour early is not going to upset your established circadian rhythm because your body is still going to expect to get up at your normal time, plus it should be during night hours so no morning light to mess up your sleep. Also, if you're planning on sleeping more than usual keep a glass of water next to your bed, that overly groggy feeling from 'too much sleep' is usually just dehydration. I know I have skipped over a lot, experts of sleep please feel free to throw in the gaps/correct as necessary."
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5pqhe5 | Why is the French Revolution considered more important than the American one in world history when it came later and had many of the same themes? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly because the American one was about a part of a nation becoming independent with a new rulership and associated laws. The French one was about getting rid of monarchies, which changed power structures all over Europe, which, even Eurocentricism aside was a huge factor of influence on how the world is today. You can still see monarchies in place in countries where the revolution did not happen, so it also doesn't count as a \"would have happened anyway\" thing.",
"The French Revolution was actually a revolution--the social order and government in France completely changed. The American Revolution isn't consistently considered a revolution by scholars, but rather a war of independence and separation from a colonial master. The government of Britain was not overthrown and social order did not change; America (simply) stopped being a part of Britain.",
"Because the American Revolution was a limited rebellion against a limited monarchy in a far off colony. The French Revolution was an absolutist revolution against an absolute monarchy in the most powerful nation in Europe. It rocked the European monarchs to the core, and terrified them that these revolutions could occur in their backyards, hence why they acted quickly to suppress the revolution (and failed). Not to mention, it put the left-right dichotomy into place, introduced the concept of mass conscription (which would lead to the bloodbaths of the American Civil War and the World Wars) and inspired the revolutionary waves of the 19th and 20th centuries.",
"Rebellion against a colonial power is nothing new. It was practically a national sport in Ireland for centuries before the US existed. Overthrowing a long standing monarchy, especially one as entrenched as France's, and replacing it with a democracy, that was something quite new.",
"In addition to what others have mentioned, the French Revolution led to the rise of Napoleon and what could arguably be called the first truly global war.",
"At the time of the American Revolution, the soon-to-be USA consisted of 13 colonies. Those 13 breakaway colonies did not even comprise the whole of the British interest in the New World - Newfoundland, Quebec and several more substantial colonies remained loyal to the British Crown. France, on the other hand, was an established global empire, with many far-flung political and economic interests. When some of their colonies revolted against British rule, it rattled the British. When the French revolted against monarchic rule, it rattled the wider world - with other nations and rulers considering their own position."
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5pqjfl | The double-slit experimet. How can simply "watching" the electron cause it to stop being a wave? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Prior to quantum mechanics, observation was considered a passive activity that simply recorded events that happened. Quantum Mechanics made us realize that we can't just observe something without also affecting it, because of what observation is. Take, for example, a human observer. When you see something with your eyes, what is going on? A photon is hitting an object and is reflected back toward your eyeball, passes through your pupil, and is received by the rods and cones on the back of your retina. The key thing here is: in order for you to \"see\" something, a photon has to hit it. At a quantum level, that is not a trivial thing. Photons have energy and that energy alters (however slightly) the thing you are observing. This is what is happening in the double-slit experiment. In order to know which slit the electron went through, you have to observe it somehow. In order to observe it, you have to have something that interacts with the electron, and once you interact with it, you cause it to not be a wave anymore.",
"You can't passively \"watch\" an electron in a double-slit experiment. It's not the animation used to explain the experiment, where there are these little white balls moving through the slits. That's just a visualization, not the actual experiment. In a real experiment, measurement requires interaction, and interaction collapses the wave function. However, Quantum Mechanics is highly counter-intuitive. Check out the Quantum Eraser, an even weirder experiment when action after the fact changes measurements. But, that's how the math works and that's how experiments work in the real world. That's what's cool about physics, it's true whether you believe it or not.",
"The explanation with the photon necessary for observing the electron is a nice and kind of intuitive one. However, to my (admittedly limited) understanding of quantum mechanics after seven years of studying physics, the observer does not \"need\" a photon to destroy the wavefunction of an electron. In fact, this explanation is not that quantum mechanical, because if you look at the small scale, even classical physics would tell you that some object with momentum bouncing off of another small object would alter that momentum and therefore the experiment. (not if it's bouncing off a wave i guess, but you get what i mean) There's been experiments in which no direct interaction between the electron and the observer have had taken place, yet the mere ability of an observer to find out where the electron went made its wavefunction collapse (and hence the interference pattern disappear). I remember a paper that has shown that by bouncing off electrons of atoms. The subsequent wiggling of the atoms made it under certain circumstances possible to know which path the electron took. When these circumstances were given, there was no interference pattern between electrons. When they were not, the interference pattern appeared. I am really sorry for not being able to find that paper. I have no idea how to look for it. Quantum mechanics is extremely weird and everybody who tells you different is lying. I've been on a talk of Anton Zeilinger who said \"To be honest: I'm perfectly fine with not understanding a thing in quantum mechanics\". Note that he is probably the most famous quantum mechanics guy of modern times. The wave function resembles a probability distribution. Interference only takes place when waves are present. Once you (as an observer) eliminate the probability distribution by determining with certainty that a particle is somewhere there won't be interference. That's how I look at it."
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5pqkg1 | Why is "Colonel" pronounced "Kernel"? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Colonel originated as a Italian military rank, where it indicated the leader of a column (group of companies) of men (so the name is no surprise). In Spain however, the word used to describe a similar rank (leader of companies of men) was *coronel* (which may have happened because *corona* is crown so *coronel* implies royal authority). So the term *coronel* migrated to English, and the word started being pronounced according to English rules, which is where the modern pronunciation came from. Later, as European communication increased and military ranks were becoming more standardized the spelling was changed to better reflect the original Italian roots of the word, but the pronunciation was well established and remained true to the Spanish coronel.",
"Nevermind that. Which letters in Lieutenant make the F sound in Bringlish?",
"Fun fact: My girlfriends brother gave a speech at his graduation welcoming special guests(top 5 take part in the ceremony), and welcomes a Colonel pronouncing it how the post described it. He still hasn't lived it down in 10 years."
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5pqm3l | is there a definitive number of colours that humans can see? | I don't know anything | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, but there is a limit to how close two colors can be before they look the same. It varies between individuals and with context. In digital imaging, 24 bits per pixel (8 bits for each of red, green, and blue) is usually enough to prevent adjacent colors which vary by a single bit from appearing to be different. That means that somewhere around 2^24 or 16.7 million colors is close to the limit of distinct colors people can see."
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5pqu41 | Why does the water from a plastic bottle taste fine after being on the store shelf for months, yet the day after I put my own tap water in there it tastes of plastic? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here are a few possible reasons: bottled water may have additives in it to enhance flavor(no, really, pure water tastes funny, most water we drink has some levels of minerals dissolved in it that alter the flavor) your tap water's chemical composition might be better at leaching chemicals from the plastic (more corrosive or the dissolved minerals interact with the bottle material) If your tap water drunk from the bottle is warmer than it is from the tap, it could already taste like that, but the coldness masks the flavor when it's straight from the tap.",
"It also has not been in contact with air while inside the bottle. You'll note that water tastes different when left in a glass overnight as well. That's because the water is absorbing CO2, etc. from the air, altering the taste and making it seem \"flat.\""
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5pqul8 | Why isn't apple a popular ingredient in ice cream? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Apple has a very mild flavor. If you mix apple juice with ice cream base (milk, cream, vanilla, and sugar), and then freeze it (which further suppresses flavors), you will hardly taste the apple.",
"Former pastry chef here. As some other users have pointed out, apple has a mild flavor profile. Why is that, though? One of the reasons is that apples are a pretty watery fruit, so it's less concentrated in flavor compared to fruits like strawberries or cherries. B-but wait, what about pineapples or watermelon? Those are watery and you see those in ice cream! Flavor is directly affected by the sugar content of the fruit. Apples don't taste as sweet as other fruits commonly seen in ice cream and they happen to be on the tart side (tartness hinders the way we taste sweetness). The natural sweetness of a fruit is really important for seasoning products. If you make banana bread with bright yellow firm bananas, then the banana bread will be bland because of the lack of sugar development. You'll just end up with a sugar loaf with banana in it. Concentrate the apple flavor by means of reduction, add it to a base and you've got yourself some delicious apple ice cream. However, extra steps in preparation = extra labor costs. It really isn't about texture because people tend to be adventurous with fruit flavors. You can make almost any fruit agreeable in texture. I hope I could offer some insight on this. Edit: Changed sentence wording and added a bit about tartness because I forgot. Edit 2: Edited banana bread sentence to be less confusing.",
"Many of the fibrous fruits (apples, pears) don't blend well into a smooth product. You almost always end up with chunky or grainy ice cream. Which means if you want those flavors, while still keeping ice cream ice cream - you need to use artificial flavors. And with so many other natural flavorings available it's not worth it to go artificial on those two.",
"I don't know in the USA, but it's perfectly possible to find apple ice cream in Argentina (and I happen to be one of the few people who like it), but it's not a \"creamy\" ice cream but it rather has a harder, watered texture, likely pineapple ice \"cream\" has here. I've never been to the USA so I don't know if you have \"creamy\" and \"non creamy\" ice creams there. Also, I don't know if it's made with actual apples or with artificial flavors. But it's still tasty.",
"On a similar note, why does it seem like the only ice cream that is common which contains bits of actual fruit is strawberry or in rare instances, cherry? There's never bits of raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, mango, etc. In fact, aside from sorbet and popsicles, I don't often even see those flavors of ice cream in stores. It's just chocolate this, vanilla that, mixed with chocolate, fudge, marshmallow, or nuts.",
"Because I will NOT tolerate Green Apple taking over the ice cream world, like Skittles changing Lime to Green Apple.",
"Here in Finland we have one \"Oven baked apple with cinnamon and caramel\" icecream. But this comes with apple bits. URL_0",
"I had apple ice cream in Rome and it was every bit as amazing as you'd expect it to be, so it's definitely possible.",
"This doesn't answer your question but I was really craving apples but also ice cream so I went to Frogurt (a frozen yogurt place with a frog mascot) and THEY HAD GREEN APPLE FRO YO AND THE OPTON TO SWIRL IT WITH CARAMEL FRO YO. Drunk me was v pleased. LPT: Frogurt. Just Frogurt.",
"I have seen, and eaten caramel apple pie ice cream. It was good, had chunks of pie crust and caramel and small pieces of apples. Being an apple Orchardist myself I will say that apples do freeze well, but will oxidize, so I coat my apple pieces in cinnamon, flour and sugar before freezing them.",
"I always wondered what type of ice cream [Chunk discovered in The Goonies]( URL_0 ) as he mentions apple and grape as flavors.",
"Apples were not originally consumed as a fruit in the way that we often do today. Before prohibition, apples were used almost exclusively for cider production and in cooking because they basically tasted awful. Apples that are palatable raw and unprocessed are a relatively new phenomenon arising after apple farmers needed a new market for their produce when alcohol was made illegal. Familiar with the phrase \"an apple a day keeps the doctor away?\" Hugely successful marketing campaign.",
"similar to grape, a lot of the flavor of this fruit is in the skin. this is often removed when juicing for making sorbets. there are apple sorbets, but not ice creame, as the fibrous skins would not make a smooth creamy texture.",
"I'm not sure why it isn't popluar, but if you are feeling adventurous try Ben & Jerry's Apple-y ever after, with a side of sauteed apples, or you can use Breyer's Apple Cinnamon Crumble.",
"On a second note, why is there no grape ice cream? It sounds delicious tbh.",
"Being from Asheville, North Carolina, this question blows my mind. We have an Apple parade here, and Apple ice cream everywhere! It's delicious",
"Up here in Canada, we can get apple pie flavoured ice cream. It is pure awesomeness. I'm pretty sure that it is a \"President's Choice\" product.",
"It's hard to mix your apple in as well because it has such a high water content you'll get larger ice crystals causing a rough ice cream but it can be done",
"I have made apple cinnamon ice cream before. I used apple pie filling and added cinnamon. It was delicious. Key is to cut the apples really small so you don't have big chunks of frozen apples.",
"I worked at a homemade ice cream bar for seven years and we have caramel apple ice cream. It was pretty good but the apple flavor wasn't very strong. Mostly just tasted like vanilla ice cream with caramel swirl",
"Apple ice cream is really, really tasty. It takes a whole lot of apples, though - you need to cook them right down to a sticky paste to get the flavour concentrated enough to use - and I'm guessing that's why. A good three pounds of apples for a small batch of ice cream is a lot of apples, and a lot of prep, for a small result. (it's definitely worth trying, though - fold through some crumbled shortbread cookies and you have apple pie flavour, which is amazing.)",
"There's probably some historic or anthropological reason why apples didn't become popular in ice cream while others did. But, other than speculating, I don't know what those reasons are. My best guess would be that fruits that are commonly used in ice cream tend have a stronger flavor profile than apples do. They would stand out more in the ice cream. Cherries are small, but they have strong flavor. Strawberries and raspberries do too. Apples, as well, are comparatively not very resilient. They can rot easily. Even coming in contact with a rotten apple can cause a healthy one to go bad. That's where the saying \"one bad apple spoils the bunch\" comes from. So making an apple flavored ice cream would be more risky to produce on a larger (commercial) scale. Additionally, apples have been used for centuries in other ways that have made them **more valuable** than they would be as a dessert or dessert flavoring. For instance, alcoholic ciders made with apples have been around for centuries; even long before beer. That much I know is true. The types apples used in ciders would require less maintenance and care, as well. It's a lot more work to make the apples that are tasty to eat on their own. That level of care probably wasn't feasible enough back when fruit started being added to ice cream, so it probably just never caught on. Besides, if someone wanted to have apples in ice cream, they could put a scoop of it on their apple pie. However, there are some places that sell \"Apple Pie\" ice cream, but that's less about the apples, I think, and more about the pastry crust and spices."
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5pqwfz | Why is it considered treacherous for the US to restore relations with Russia? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's because the best word to describe Russia's attitude towards neighboring countries is \"Predatory.\" The US has obligations to protect some of those states, and as long as the US continues to do so Russia will not be on good terms with the US. If Russia does become friendlier with the US, then that means that USA is taking a more relaxed approach with guarding the countries it has to guard and a lot of people see this as stabbing them in the back. Russia also has a oppressive attitude towards civil rights for minority groups, but with current US leadership that is probably not a point of conflict between the two countries."
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5pr64z | ; why do we fall into "food comas" after eating a lot of certain foods (e.g pasta) and can do nothing but sleep for an hour or so following consumption? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It takes energy to digest food, and some foods take more energy to digest than others. Foods with lots of complex carbs, like pasta and bread, take a lot of energy for us to process, so until your body processes it and unlocks the energy present in the food, you're spending a lot of energy just to break down the carbs in the food. Eventually you'll get more energy out than you put in, but it takes a while. So in the meantime your body gets tired while it spends all that energy digesting. As an analogy: we can get a lot of energy from oil buried under the ground, but it takes a lot of energy to even access the oil before we can start using it to make more energy."
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5pr6ue | What is happening when your eyes are open, but you're picturing something else in your head. How can you 'see' the thought, while also processing what's in front of you? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First, some studies that helped me with my reasoning: A study has shown that people who are imagining visual stimuli (as opposed to actually seeing it) still show activation in their visual cortex. A different study that looked at the [vase-face illusion]( URL_2 ) found that people's brain activity differed depending on which part of the illusion they were perceiving - if they reported perceiving faces, their fusiform gyrus (the brain's face area) was stimulated, but if they were perceiving a vase, the same area was not lit up. There didn't seem to ever be a time where brain activation showed both patterns indicating perception of both the vase and the faces simultaneously, which suggests that your brain can only perceive one thing or the other. So my guess at what is happening, in the visual aspect at least, is that your visual cortex would be stimulated, but the stimulation in your visual cortex when you're \"seeing\" your thought would be different from the pattern of stimulation when you're consciously perceiving what is in front of you. So for example: you're sitting in front of a striped black and white wall, but you're imaging or \"seeing\" a solid red coloured wall. When you're focusing on (i.e. consciously perceiving) the striped wall, the visual neurons that respond to contrast would be stimulated, but the neurons responsible for colour perception would not. When you switch your focus so that you are consciously perceiving the imagined red wall, your colour neurons would be stimulated, but your contrast neurons would not. The prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain responsible for stuff like reasoning, cognition, and other executive functions - probably also plays a role in the thoughts that you \"see\", because it's implicated to be heavily involved in consciousness. As for people who can't \"see\" things in their minds, you're not alone. There's a condition called [aphantasia]( URL_0 ) where people don't see pictures in their head. If I asked the average person how many windows they had in their home, they would probably do a mental walkthrough of their home and count the windows. For somebody with aphantasia, they'll know, but they might not know how they know. TL;DR: activation in the visual cortex for the \"seeing\" part, and likely activation in the prefrontal cortex for the \"thought\" part. Also, not being able to \"see\" things in your mind is actually a thing - aphantasia. EDIT: [vase-face study]( URL_1 ) EDIT2: [cool example]( URL_3 ) of the vase-face illusion, of faces of two real people - who are they? :D EDIT3: fixed the study link so that you don't need a school log in, but it only shows you the abstract (the summary) for free. EDIT4, **attempting to ELI5 even more**: the part of your brain that you use when you see is turning on both when you're looking at a thing, and thinking about \"seeing\" a thing. there's a different pattern when each of those happen.",
"Add to what others are saying: There was an experiment started by nasa a long time ago where they were having people wear glasses that inverted the vision. The reasoning had to do with the lack of orientation in space. They had to wear this 24/7. It was discovered at about the 3 week mark that all test subjects actually became accustomed to this flip, and they were able to go about their day as if it were normal. What was discovered was that the \"mind's eye\" was able to overcome this change and see things normally again, despite the inverted vision. It was also later discovered that the mind's eye actually flips what images go into the retina naturally. In other words, the mind's eye is more powerful than you can take at face value. The brain just interprets the data as it needs, regardless of what it actually sees.",
"From what I understand what happens in your brain when you visualize something \"in your head\" is nearly identical to when you are viewing something with your eyes. Also, while it is possible to quickly alternate between the two, I believe it is impossible to do both at literally the same time. You will obviously still be receiving signals from your eyes, but your brain will not be processing the data in the same way.",
"I can't answer this on a deeply neurological level, but I can on a cognitive-psychological one. The short answer is that while visualizing something in your head, you're not *fully* processing what's in front of you, at least not to the same extent. Think of your brain like a computer, i.e. an information-processing machine. All of your senses are essentially \"input\" sources for information; your eyes are getting visual info, your ears are picking up sound, your skin is picking up pressure and temperature (and possibly pain), etc. There are actually *way* more than 5 senses, but the point is that at any given time, there is a *lot* of sensory information that is flowing into your brain at any given time. Then you have *internal* information, which you pull from your stores of memory or your thoughts. This would be the origin of something that you're \"picturing\" in your head, without seeing it in front of you. Your brain includes what effectively amounts to a biological graphics card, so when you're picturing something in your mind, you're essentially running a kind of simulation. Anyway, back to the main point: even though all of this sensory and internal info is *presented* to your brain, your brain isn't necessarily *doing anything* with it. It's not all being automatically processed. To use vision as an example, your eyes are basically giving the rest of your brain a video feed, but *that's all that your eyes do*. In order for you to do even basic things like recognize objects or faces, tell the shape of an object, etc, your brain needs to do further processing on this visual feed, and here's where the bottleneck is. As powerful and complex as it is, the brain has a *limited amount* of computing power. It simply *can't handle* everything at once, especially when two different tasks are competing for use of the same parts of the brain. The brain has to choose which information it *attends* to (\"attend\" = the root of \"attention\") and which information it just lets drop and be overwritten. In the case that OP cited, the visual feed from the eyes is usually handled by the same neurological hardware that also performs the \"picture in your mind\" bit, so they're directly competing for cognitive resources. When you're picturing something intensely, your attention is mostly on the simulation that your brain is running. Meanwhile, the info coming from the optic nerve is being stored in [sensory memory,]( URL_0 ) which is sort of like a temporary cache for sensory information that hasn't yet been processed further. Your brain is still paying a *little* bit of attention to this sensory memory, but not as much it normally would, because your attention is being diverted towards another task. The reasons I listed above are also why visualizing something is often easier with your eyes closed. Similarly, for an auditory equivalent, reading comprehension is typically impaired while listening to music with lyrics, but it is *not* as affected by music *without* lyrics; language is processed by the same parts of the brain whether read or heard, so presenting both at once essentially creates competition.",
"How are *so many* people in this thread realizing they can't see mental images? I've read at least five commenters here saying they can't. It's a phenomena I've never heard of before today. Why haven't I heard of someone with this disability in real life?",
"There's evidence > that imagery and perception share common processing mechanisms, and demonstrate that the specific brain regions activated during mental imagery depend on the content of the visual image. That's from [this fMRI study]( URL_0 ), but there are many more. One of the things you learn in a cognition & perception class is that there's not really such a thing as \"multitasking.\" The best we can do is shift our attention between multiple things quickly. So if you're imagining visual imagery, you're attending to that and not really processing—or we should say, *perceiving*—what your eyes are sensing at all. If I understand it correctly, studies like these suggest that the brain uses the same areas to perceive both imagined imagery and real imagery coming through your optic system.",
"The opposite of this is called *aphantasia*. There was a study conducted in recent years as more and more people are coming forward with the condition. I have a close friend with the condition. He can never remember his dreams, and reading fictional literature is a struggle.",
"I've done this for my entire life, over 60 years, and have looked into it extensively. There is a state of consciousness between sleep and dream, where the two merge, and one or the other, or both or neither, seem unreal. The term \"hypnogogic hallucinations\" brings up a lot of interesting detail.",
"'Fun' fact... Some of us can't. I'm one of a small % of people who see nada in their 'minds eye'. Nothing is a bit of an overstatement, but if you ask me to shut my eyes and picture a green triangle, it's just not there. I know what a green triangle IS, 3 sides and green. Can't picture one though for love nor money. I don't think it's a coincidence that my drawing skills are non-existent, very talented musically but my visualisation ability is awful. Is it just genetics? Can this be improved?",
"Your visual cortex, in the occipital lobe, (vision) of the brain is a different area than your prefrontal cortex, in the frontal lobe (higher thinking). So this means you can receive information (action potentials) from your eyes and they can be processed by the occipital lobe, and at the same time your cerebral cortex is picturing something else. When the stimuli in front of you doesn't need to be focused, as in there isn't something like a tiger about to eat you, the imagination can overpower vision so you can 'see' your thought.",
"wait. you see the things you are thinking about? like literally see an image?",
"Follow up question: Why is it easier for me to visualize, or daydream, with my eyes open? Does the brain prefer to have *some* input and use that as a reference or is it arbitrary and different from person to person?",
"The idea of multitasking has been proven to be false. You're not doing these things at the same time. Your brain is switching between processes so fast it appears you are doing two things at once but you're not.",
"This sounds like what happens when I'm driving. I space out and am physically seeing something that I'm imagining while still remaining fully aware of what's going on in front of me while moving. All of a sudden I'll snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity... (sorry) and realise I was basically seeing something entirely different and if I try to focus on seeing what I was imagining again, I can't. I have to just let it naturally happen. It's weird...",
"I can't explain the physicality of it, but I can give you a great example: I was driving from Los Angeles to Phoenix a couple of years ago. My destination was the Superstition Mountains (East of Phoenix). I had been driving all night, and was just West of the city. I must have been more tired than I thought, because I had thought about a conversation I had had with someone a few days before. I was visualizing the entire conversation in my head. I actually replayed the conversation in its entirety. I \"blinked\" and when I looked up, I was just getting off Interstate 10 onto Hwy 60. I had driven about 45 miles without knowing it, while I was \"watching\" the conversation replay in my head. I almost crapped myself. While I was watching a movie in my head, I had driven the same route so many times, I guess my body was on autopilot. Without my being alert, I didn't hit anybody or run off the road. I made the 10-60 merge without even knowing it. Scary as hell.",
"As someone who is aphantastic, someone ELI5 how it is possible to visually hallucinate your thoughts at all? I always thought \"mind's eye\" was some sort of weird analogy. People actually see what they think about?",
"When I describe things, I see them. It's a powerful enough experience that I often go 'blind' to what is physically around me. (At least consciously, though I don't go stumbling into things while walking.) I do tend to drop eye contact, and end up staring somewhere. A friend of mine at work would get a kick out of it, since I'd stare at 'nothing' and seemingly manipulate what I was talking about with my hands. It's pretty common for people to turn to see who I'm talking to when that happens. I do that even abstract ideas, like process work flows. It took a long time to get a handle on the eye contact piece.",
"It's like when you're driving and arrive at your destination, but don't remember the details of driving.",
"So... when I am driving along thinking about this or that and 50 miles later I have no recollection of the landmarks or other vehicles I passed it's perfectly normal? And Safe?",
"Eli5 answer: humans have a billion core processor. We cam process an insane amount of information - its filtering out the useless stuff that is difficult. No source. This is just how I understand it.",
"We know from book reading that the brain can read words and track properly one line to the next while you get distracted and think of something else, only to discover that you've reached the end of the page on autopilot. This implies that there is a lower (subconscious?) sensory processing facility that can act independantly of your attention.",
"Many times we see the shadow of a thing before the actual thing. The third eye known as the pineal gland located in the center of the brain, picks up the electromagnetic shadow of an event or idea right before it becomes manifest physically. Stimulus perceived by the pineal gland activate the same area of the brain as sight. URL_0",
"I researched this in college for a sensation and perception class. In the simplest possible terms, your brain is seeing the picture in reverse. Instead of light activating your retinas and sending info back to your occipital lobe, it's the opposite: info is sent from your brain to your retinas. So it's sort of superimposing the image over what you're already seeing. Fascinating stuff."
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5prhe8 | How does Facebook change its mobile layout and colors without having me update it on the App Store/play store? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bunch of the stuff you see in the FB app is done not with compiled native (Java/Swift) code but with HTML and Javascript. These assets can be downloaded and updated without changing the compiled app and thus don't require a new version in the Play/App Stores. It's a little risky on FB's part, because there are a ton of security checks FB ought to be doing to make sure a malefactor cannot inject their own Javascript into those updates. Imagine Comcast snooping your Internet traffic, recognizing a request for updated FB Javascript, and substituting their own response that tracks what you read and shows you their ads.",
"There are several ways this could be done, but they all include server-side action. So for example, facebook might develop a new layout and put it inside the app, but leave the old layout in as well and don't activate the new one yet. Maybe something on the server side is not ready yet for the new layout, or they want to roll it out to just some people first to see if it works properly. Then, when they think it's good, they can make the server tell the app to switch to the new layout the next time it goes online."
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5prjsz | How does the concept of Universal Basic Income work? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The idea is that instead of need based aid, which requires a huge, inefficient bureaucracy to administer, you just give everyone a set amount of money. Welfare, education, health care, retirement, all of those, at least in part, are provider for with a basic stipend everyone gets. Those who don't need it will still get it, but typically they will be on the ones bearing the tax burden to pay for it. If all goes well, having a healthier, more educated, and happy society will pay the costs of basic income over the long run.",
"Our current way of handling unemployment is to effectively hire them to find a job for themselves. However this does require a lot of social workers and managers to make sure everything works. It also might not fit everyone. For example if you were fired from your job and wanted to start your own business you would have problems in the start up phase as you would have to apply for jobs all day to get your unemployment checks. It might also be that you might want to go back to school or study on your own to improve your skills which might be hard to do if you have to deal with social workers all the time. You also have a lot of employers who might want to get someone new but unwilling to pay a full salary, at least to start. However they can not get anyone to work for less money as they would make more on unemployment benefits. Universal Basic Income is an attempt at simplifying this. To start with a lot of the criteria for getting unemployment benefits is removed, for instance the need to actually be unemployed. There is a lot of similar benefits in place, for instance most countries pay out child support, health care and school tuition even if the receiver makes more then enough to not need it. In a lot of countries the unemployment benefits may have to be cut back to get this to work as some might be content with the UBI without any work. However UBI is always going to be lower then if you get a salary on top of it. So to improve your condition you have to make money though work. The minimum salary can therefore be lowered however the average salary will be the same since taxes goes up and people need more salary to maintain their current net income.",
"Each person is guaranteed at least a certain amount of money from the government, regardless of what they do. The \"pro\" is that it simplifies the welfare system and minimizes the incidence of poverty and homelessness. The \"con\" is that it requires lots of taxes, and people tend to get rather upset at the unfairness of handing money to a person who does literally nothing.",
"In it's most simple form, instead of there being a lot of taxpayer-funded programs like medicare, medicaid, and a thousand others, everyone simply gets a check each month. This amount should be approx enough to get someone over the poverty line, or right at it. Alone it's very difficult to do anything besides eat and survive, but the idea is that it'll save money by eliminating lots of government admin costs.",
"Somebody needs to mention automation in their reply. There won't be enough jobs for everyone and we can't just have them all unemployed.",
"The economy is changing. My parents were able to pay their way through higher education with a summer job. They were able to buy a car in high school with part time work. They got married, bought a house, have kids. Your college degree didn't really matter back then, as long as you had one you could get tons of jobs. They have retirement accounts. That's not the reality any more. My siblings and I all worked summers starting in high school. We all graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We all entered a very unwelcoming job market. Buying a house to us means having to go way, way out in the suburbs and having a long commute or having to move somewhere less expensive. The economy is global. I'm competing with people in India for jobs. People who used to have unskilled labor jobs are competing with robots. Income inequality is getting bigger every year. This isn't going to get better, it's going to get worse. Automation and outsourcing are going to keep making the job market harder. Real estate and tuition are going to keep getting more expensive. There is a utopian future where no one has to work. People can choose to create art, or enrich their lives, or expand human knowledge as they please. A post-scarcity society as envisioned in Star Trek. There is a dystopian future where all but a select, wealthy few work in dirty factory jobs for pennies trying to make ends meet. Not because these jobs can't be done by robots, but because cheap human labor is cheaper than robots. UBI is one idea to get us between where we are now and the utopian future.",
"My ethics class in college actually covered this with a thought experiment: You are given godlike powers over your countries economic system with a single goal: create the best possible system for your client, a randomly chosen person in the population. Could be a baby, a crack addict, a ceo, whatever. What was fascinating is that every single group in the class independently settled on something like UBI. Capitalism penalizes the unemployed or handicapped, but communism penalizes the hard working. UBI where you can work to further improve your income was the middle ground.",
"I'm no expert, but I'll give it a shot. UBI is a form of social insurance from a government to provide its citizens with a small monetary allowance per month so they're not quite so broke all the time. I realize this is a gross oversimplification, and that many may find my choice of words insulting, but that's the best way I could think of to put it. I refer you to r/basicincome for more.",
"Think of it this way super simple: To get welfare, we must fund it, then people spend time applying for it, then people have to review, background check, etc etc etc. Cost all around. Universal Basic Income is like this: Everyone in the country gets say $1000 every month per human. The taxes get skewed so that the poor don't pay much, the richer you are the more of that $1000 gets taken away with taxes. The higher your pay, the more the taxes completely mitigate the income you get. The big thing is once you start working, the tax hit is so low that you really feel like you earn more, just at some point in time, say at $2500 a month you'll start to see diminishing returns on earning more income. This way there's zero overhead of maintaining the system. You just have the regular ol' IRS doing all the work they already do without actually any added anything, and everyone is happy because nobody is completely without money. And nobody has to spend effort applying for it, maintaining it, etc, etc, etc. Edit: Forgot unemployment. Think of magically eliminating like 95% of all overhead of welfare, unemployment, and any other program that gives people basics for living (even basic disability which is effectively welfare).",
"To discuss this with relation to the *ability* for a society to be fully employed, since OP mentioned automation as the lead-in to this: Automation is threatening to kill many jobs, which is an issue because human population is increasing, and the labor market is growing, not shrinking. At the same time, many people are seeing that certain low-paying jobs feel redundant. I work in medical billing, for example: my field doesn't need to exist. It's part of a large, unnecessary bureaucracy that's meant to keep people employed in a society where employment is considered necessary to survive. At the same time, there are many jobs that people want to do, but because they make little to no money, many people cannot do. If you're a local politician, for example, you sit on a town hall council, you probably have a separate full time job, and being a local politician is your hobby. The idea is that our society is based around the idea of full employment, an idea that's becoming increasingly unrealistic and kind of undesirable. Do we really need to work 40 hours a week to be human? What if we guaranteed that people did not need to work full time in a dead-end job just to have a roof over their heads and food on their table? The idea of universal basic income, then, is that everyone, regardless of economic or social status, receives a set amount of money every month from the government, unconditionally. The government will not tell you what to do with that money, they will not require that you be jobless, but looking for a job to keep receiving that money. You simply get it with no questions asked. If you're employed by someone and receive money for your work, that income comes on top of your basic income. It's as much a social experiment as it is an economic one. There's a trial going on in Finland right now that's focused on that social aspect. The project leaders have targeted individuals that currently desire jobs, but remain unemployed because their unemployment benefits are higher than their potential salary. If they receive a large income that does not require them to be jobless, how many of those 2,000 people will try to live off of that? How many will seek a job anyway? What *type* of jobs will they seek? Will it boost employment among the tech sector in Oahu, which is currently suffering by not being able to outbid unemployment insurance? Are humans inherently willing to work, or are humans inherently lazy? That's the deep psychological question that UBI trials are currently trying to answer. It's an extremely fascinating subject, because it looks like the next big social revolution, and there's something interesting about it for everyone."
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5prnjf | why are funeral processions allowed to block traffic and display flashing lights? | I was driving back from lunch and thought a major disaster had just occurred due to multiple emergency vehicles in oncoming traffic. I could see red and blue flashers and was looking for a spot to pull over. When I got closer though, I realized the "emergency vehicles" were just ordinary cars (Honda CRV, F150) equipped with LED lights. tldr: it's illegal to attach red, blue, and green lights to your vehicle. why do funeral processions get a pass? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is illegal to attach those lights to an non-emergency vehicle. Vehicles leading a funeral procession are temporarily designated emergency vehicles.",
"Laws vary from state to state. In most states them putting lights on their own cars is illegal, but it may be different depending on where you live. In many states you can hire a police car to specifically drive with and block traffic for the procession."
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5prqet | How do the rich help our economy? | Not specifically trickle-down economics, but how does having a wealthy upper class help the general public economically? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In Theory, rich people are often employers. They create jobs, which employs people who draw a salary from said jobs. Further, they spend more money on goods and services, which indirectly pays salaries of other people.",
"I'd add that the idea that people can become and stay rich is very beneficial. Money is a huge motivator. People are willing to work hard, take risks, try new ideas, and build new businesses/products for a chance of earning a lot of money. If you remove that possibility, or punish success (either through very high taxes or other means) then many people will not be incentivized(?) to work as hard."
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5prs0r | What is the "Deep State" in the U.S.? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Deep State refers to the people and organizations that *actually* control the politicians that control the government. Who/what the Deep State is depends on whom you ask. For some it is the [Military Industrial Complex]( URL_0 ); for others it is a collection of [oligarchs]( URL_1 ) and plutocrats. Others use the term to refer to the large number of bureaucrats who make policy that has the force of law, but neither the policymaker nor the policy that they come up with is from an elected official. Like many terms used today, it has no clear, single definition."
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5prt80 | Why does our singing sound better when listening to music? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm assuming because the music hides \"defects\" of our voice - we just don't hear them anymore. (It doesn't mean that others don't hear it though)"
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5prtil | Why do games need to restart in order to change certain graphics settings (e.g. resolution) but not certain other ones (shadows, etc.)? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Think of the software like a building. When you construct it, certain specifications (settings) need to be determined as the foundation of the building. If any of these specifications need to be changed, you may have to tear down the building and make a new one. However, the furniture/wiring/plumbing inside can be swapped without modifications to the foundation of the building. Depending on the game engine, some settings need to be defined upon starting the software. Other settings are more dynamic so they can be changed within the game.",
"They don't, always. some games can change resolution without restarting. They'll just flicker momentarily, and then use the new resolution. It is technically possible to write a game that lets you change *any* setting without ever restarting. But from the developer's point of view, it's often simpler to say \"alright, if the user wants to change this, we just exit the game and restart\". That gives them a clean slate, where the can make simplified assumptions such as \"the resolution is never going to change while the game is running\". That makes their life easier, so sometimes they do that. For any setting that can be changed while the game is running, the developer needs to make sure that all relevant parts of the game are notified about the change. For example, when changing the resolution, you need to make sure that all UI elements are redrawn in new positions. You may need to notify the logic that detects the mouse's position to correctly map screen coordinates, and you need to update the renderer to fit the new target. Perhaps, based on resolution, you'll want to swap out certain textures too, for more or less detailed ones. And if you get this wrong, if you forget to update one corner of the game, so that bit of code still thinks you're running with the old resolution, then that might potentially crash the game. So often, it's simpler to just say \"you want to change something that has big knock-on effects on the rest of the game? Fine, but we'll restart to make sure we get it right\"."
],
"score": [
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5ps0qw | Why is it that rope does not unwind or untwist? | Asking specifically about rope made from natural or synthetic materials that is made by winding strands of material together. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dctci48"
],
"text": [
"The natural state of string is to be straight (not twisted). So all the strings (either natural or synthetic) want to be straight. They are individually twisted and then straighten out by twisting into each other. So their new natural state is twisted together, but they are acting as if they are straight so they don't come unwound."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5psghw | How can you hear yourself when you think? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcthdqc",
"dcthdm4"
],
"text": [
"Your mind is a powerful super computer, capable of generating the most lifelike graphics and sounds. I can sing like a 500-pound opera singer in my mind . I can play back entire portions of songs or movies, if I've heard or seen them enough times. Your brain is just that powerful.",
"Well essentially what you're asking is \"what is sentience\". I'm not entirely sure science has figured out that one yet."
],
"score": [
12,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5psiw3 | How did Times New Roman become the 'standard' font for typing? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dctiasz"
],
"text": [
"There was a time when changing a font wasn't as simple as Ctrl-A right click. It meant changing mechanical parts and retyping the whole document again. So when you picked a font, you pretty much stuck with it. Times New Roman was commissioned by a British newspaper (*The Times*, naturally), who wanted a serif font (often called a Roman font), and the result was quite popular. It gained further popularity when Microsoft decided to make it the default font in early versions of their word processing software."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5psjrs | When you press the unlock button on your keys, how does it only work on your car? | I'm guessing it unlocks it with a frequency value, but there must be something more? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dctgzu7"
],
"text": [
"> I'm guessing it unlocks it with a frequency value, but there must be something more? It's not just something more. It's everything more. There is no \"secret frequency\" that's used. Instead, the keyfob and car both have electronic circuits that create psuedo-random numbers. Both the circuits are initialized with the same value, so they both produce the same sequence of numbers. Every time you press the unlock button on your remote, it sends the next number. The car keeps a list of the next hundred or so numbers in the sequence, and if it sees one of those numbers, it unlocks, and resets the sequence to the next hundred numbers from there (so that you have some leeway to accidentally press the button a few times on your remote without getting locked out of the car)."
],
"score": [
8
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5psmsl | Why does it seem like the worse for you the food is the better it tastes? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcthupn",
"dcthwrt"
],
"text": [
"Humans evolved to crave fats, salt, sugar... this was important to consume for survival 1000's of years ago when food was harder to come by, humans had to hunt and gather their food, there were times of shortages, etc. Now that we have plentiful access to food, the basic cravings remain but the reason for their being is no longer relevant and we tend to overindulge in those things because we can.",
"Before the advent of farming, food was a scarce resource. A drought or other natural disaster could result in food shortages and starvation. Because of this, it was important to find nutrient and calorie dense foods. These are foods rich in sugar, fat and protein. We evolved to prefer these foods. With modern food manufacturing, we can create foods that are super charged to appeal to these tastes. However, we no longer live in a society where nutrition is scarce. So these foods that taste amazing cause us to overeat. It's very much a \"too much of a good thing\" kind of situation."
],
"score": [
13,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
5psn2x | Why are blue eyes more sensitive to light | People with blue eyes seem to need to squint/ use sunglasses in much lower light levels than people with other coloured eyes or it hurts their eyes. Why does this happen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcthy9j",
"dctie9k"
],
"text": [
"When a person has dark skin, the person's skin has more melanin. Melanin makes their skin more pigmented, which helps protect it from the sun's rays. Have you ever noticed how, when you go to the beach, people with lighter skin tend to burn more easily? That's because their skin is less pigmented, has less melanin, and is more vulnerable to radiation. The same goes for eye color. People with dark, brown eyes are less sensitive to light, while people with lighter colored eyes (green, blue, gray) have less melanin here and are more sensitive.",
"It also helps to think of it like curtains. Brown eyes with their higher melanin content are thick curtains. Blue eyes are very thin curtains. More light leaks through."
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5psn5f | Since Jupiter is 95% hydrogen, could its atmosphere be lit on fire? | In reference to the Hindenburg. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcthi3e"
],
"text": [
"You'd need an oxidizing agent (e.g. oxygen). The burning of hydrogen is just the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen. No oxygen, no combustion. Any oxygen that is in Jupiter likely already reacted with something like hydrogen a long, long time ago."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5psv8d | How do they produce TV shows so much faster than movies? | It seems they take so much longer to make a entire movie compared to one episode, but think of how long a TV show runtime is for an entire season. How do they do it so much faster? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dctjvey"
],
"text": [
"I believe I can give some reasons * Fewer and more basic special effects. A Hollywood blockbuster can take months on end just creating all the CGI even using countless Indian thralls and huge render farms. * Everything is on a tight predetermined schedule so actors know exactly what they're doing when they're doing it well ahead. Everything is taken into account. * Sets and locations are continuously reused and rarely have to be adjusted, sometimes different series use share sets. A location setup for the pilot can be continuously used for years. * With the exception of some premium channel programming the scope is far smaller. While a film may span the world and have outrageous action a series will typically have few characters who stay in one city unless needed. * Scenes can be filmed concurrently (e.g. the heroes can be chatting at a pub and the villains can be scheming in a mansion and both can be recorded at the same time.) * Most series have multiple directors working at the same time and the screenwriters have already at least outlined the whole season"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
5psyik | is sparkling water just as hydrating as plain water? | Sometimes I like to drink flavored (no sugars/sweeteners) sparkling water throughout the day in addition to plain water. Is it still a good way to stay hydrated? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dctoian"
],
"text": [
"It's both good and bad. The co2 particles break the surface tension and decrease the amount of energy your body needs to spend to separate the water molecules. This is good. Guzzling sparkling water can be harder than you think, making it difficult to guzzle (if that's your goal). So this would be the bad. If you want a good hydrating beverage, try 1/3 OJ or grape juice and 2/3 water. The surface tension will be greatly decreased and it will be very thirst quenching. I drink all my juice this way and after trying it, my girlfriend does too now."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
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