q_id
stringlengths 6
6
| title
stringlengths 3
299
| selftext
stringlengths 0
4.44k
| category
stringclasses 12
values | subreddit
stringclasses 1
value | answers
dict | title_urls
sequencelengths 1
1
| selftext_urls
sequencelengths 1
1
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
74um3v | What causes drunk munchies? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1dfqy",
"do18orr",
"do1fcsc",
"do1cvq2",
"do1fou2",
"do1kigt",
"do1ixd6"
],
"text": [
"The other replies have validity but do not fully answer the question. First, it is true that alcohol acts as a diuretic. It inhibits a molecule called anti-diuretic hormone (Vasopressin) that is responsible for telling your kidneys to hold on to water. As opposed to the other major molecule responsible for this, something called aldosterone, this is acting on water directly and not the electrolytes in your system. As you would guess this is all taking place in the kidneys. Now, when you drink alcohol you are shutting down the effects of anti-diuretic hormone, to an extent, and therefore urinating more water. This is what we would call dilute urine. So as you could imagine it is not losing enough electrolytes, nutrients, and minerals to be the cause of your drunk hunger. The other part to this answer is more complicated. I will not pretend to understand the biochemistry here, but the theory holds that alcohol actually acts in the brain to stimulate hunger. There have been studies done in mice that many think apply to humans in the same way. Basically, the alcohol, and potentially some of its metabolites (breakdown products), act on the neurons in the brain that are active during starvation. When these brain cells are active it is a signal that you should eat something, which makes sense. As far as I know it is not completely understood why this happens. TL:DR - You aren't urinating out nutrients, alcohol stimulates the starvation center of the brain Edit - Source: Medical Student, also grammar and added a word Edit 2 - [Here]( URL_0 ) is the source for the mice studies mention above",
"Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning the body expels fluids and nutrients it wouldn’t normally. Munchies is the body telling you it needs those back.",
"When you eat food you do not use it all at once. Your body takes a little bit of the energy and uses it to keep going but it stores a lot of it elsewhere. Once you use up the little bit of energy floating around you start breaking down your stores. To move these products around you need to turn them back into the bodies favorite energy packages. That way they can be shipped around the bony easily. This process is called Gluconeogenesis. However it takes a lot of steps to make this happen and a lot of workers (secondary cofactors). When we drink alcohol it gets broken down using some of the same workers that gluconeogenesis needs. This means that fewer workers are helping package our energy. This process results in less energy being provided to the body that needs it. This is called hypoglycemia. Now usually this isn't too severe as our bodies fix the problem in time. But while drinking as this happens our brain notices it's not getting the energy it needs. This is because the brain recognizes the low energy levels and tells us we need to add more. More energy is added by eating so we interpret this as being hungry and causing what is commonly called drunchies. Non ELI:5: URL_0",
"I find that it's because you have low inhibition and food tastes good, so why not?",
"Not a scientist, but a drinker. On the nights when I drink a lot, I typically stay up a lot later than I do when I don't drink. And when I'm out and about I'm more active than I normally would be. My body responds to this change in activity levels by requesting food. Add in the final point that when I'm out with friends and the bars close but you don't want the night to end, the idea for tacos/pancakes/burgers etc. seems great for the group to keep going. Add to this that you are drinking liquid calories. Your metabolism is activated from this, but there's nothing solid for your body to process. Your stomach acid responds accordingly, the feeling of which you will interpret as hunger.",
"Alcohol is actually really 'energy dense', about as dense as fats (about 9 kcal per gram). When your liver processes alcohol, it doesn't 'turn' this energy into ATP (which is what happens normally with foodstuffs such as carbohydrates and fats) but instead, the energy is 'released' as NADH (a high energy molecule). Now normally NADH is produced alongside ATP and this process is regulated, but production of NADH due to alcohol detoxification is less regulated and so the levels of NADH in your liver cells rise (and levels of NAD+, which is used up in the detoxification to create NADH, lower). This increased ratio of NADH to NAD+ has several effect, but one of them is the inhibition of a metabolic path called gluconeogenesis. In this path pyruvate is used to create glucose in liver. Since cells need to regenerate NAD+ which was used up in detoxification of alcohol, pyruvate is converted to lactate, 'spending' NADH and givin us NAD+ which the cells need. This then causes the arrest of gluconeogenesis. The arrest of gluconeogenesis has an important consequence - hypoglycemia. Since many cells depend on glucose as their source of energy and the glucose you get after a meal only lasts for about 4 hours, you depend on gluconeogenesis for the glucose after those 4 hours are up. And since your gluconeogenesis is inhibited, glucose levels in your blood fall. Hypoglycemia is then sensed by the hypothalamus, which is the 'control center' of your body. It controls, among other things, hunger. Low levels of blood sugar activate hunger centers in hypothalamus and make you hungry. That's the way we were taught at our med school at least, I hope I didn't make any big mistakes.",
"I always believed it was something to do with the effect of alcohol on blood sugar. It will raise it to begin with and then slump hugely. I'm not a scientist though. Also, there must be other, more individual factors involved because not everyone gets the munchies after drinking. I get the opposite effect. I couldn't even think about food after drinking."
],
"score": [
245,
17,
11,
10,
8,
8,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14014"
],
[],
[
"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22524/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74uqg2 | Why can't we replace limbs like we replace organs? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do17ssx",
"do17nuc",
"do17ms0"
],
"text": [
"Organs can function adequately without nerve connections. As long as they're hooked up to the plumbing (i.e. blood flow) many of them will function just fine. With limbs, the primary purpose of them is to respond to nerve impulses, either sensory or motor (i.e. feeling and moving). Connecting nerves is tricky even when it's re-attaching your own extremities. Transplanting someone else's onto yours is turning the difficultly up to 11. There has been some success with transplanting extremities, but they have nowhere near full function capability.",
"We can. The problem is that the nerves required to have full movement are really hard to fix. So, you end up with a numb limb that flops around and years of work to get it working much at all. This is more hassle than it is worth for most people.",
"We can reattach a severed limb, and in limited cases transplant one. However, connecting the nerves is extremely hard, and most people don't want a new leg that they cannot walk on, or a new hand that can't pick anything up or feel anything."
],
"score": [
34,
16,
9
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74uyvr | Why does "night air" smell/seem different to day air? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do19yu3"
],
"text": [
"I'm coughing all day if I sleep with the windows open. I don't have any regular seasonal allergies. When I say it's the night air making me sick I get crazy looks.???"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74vaxy | why/how coffee eliminates odors | I first noticed this in perfume stores. They put up coffee beans in little bowls to smell after trying out perfume to 'reset' the sense of smell. Also, some of my fellow lacrosse athletes used to put coffee pads (the senseo kind, like these: URL_0 ) in their gym bags and shoes to stop them from smelling so bad. Why is it that coffee (supposedly) has this property? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1ob28"
],
"text": [
"One reason why it helps eliminate odors is that it has a very large amount of surface area that can overpower odors. Baking soda tends to be used more so than coffee for a couple reasons, namely it's cheaper, it actually absorbs odors rather than overpowering them, and there's even more surface area than coffee grounds. Picture a solid block of anything, say baking soda. Surface area will be equal to what's on the outside only, the baking soda inside can't trap anything. Then picture a block of coffee grounds broken into 100,000 grounds. Much more surface area to take over odors with. I would say if you've removed the source of the bad odor, then coffee grounds are a very viable way to get rid of odors. Baking soda is still the superior choice."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74vjpc | Curly Hairedness | What causes curly hair? Both my parents have straight hair and yet here I am blighted by this frizz-fest. Just curious what causes it genetically and as a bonus, what actually physically causes hair to curl. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1ma2b",
"do1lrx5"
],
"text": [
"I have curly hair too and I also had the same question when I was younger. Curly hair versus straight..here we go. So curly hair, when looked at under a microscope is flat, like curling ribbon used to wrap gifts. Straight hair, on the other hand, is noodle or sphere shaped. This is a link to a picture that has a diagram of the hair follicles in trying to explain. When you try to curl flat ribbon with scissors it curls right up. But, noodle shaped, or sphere shaped ribbon cannot be curled because of it's shape. As for why you were born with a flat or sphere shaped hair follicle, that is rooted in your DNA, in which case, although your parents do not have curly hair, they must be carriers of a curly hair gene that they did not present but was then passed on to you, which is a common thing to happen between parents and their children. URL_0 :",
"It's the bonds (-S-S-) between the proteins Their aren't aligned in a curly hair. And made that funny form. When you heat up and extend (smooth) you force the bonds to line up and made the hair straight."
],
"score": [
11,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.google.com/search?q=curly+hair+versus+straight+hair+under+a+microscope&tbm=isch&source=iu&pf=m&ictx=1&fir=BnHocTUD8osoiM%253A%252CjPfvgTzD5sO4dM%252C_&usg=__AY9JRelsUp-zNTHVnT4uKxeRBqg%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTy_PblN_WAhUM9GMKHfmyAhcQ9QEILjAC#imgrc=0OLrN_rtjslO8M"
],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74vkj0 | What is that old people smell? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1fdit",
"do1ffo1",
"do1gbiy",
"do1fskp",
"do1hosf",
"do1j6xx",
"do1kij5",
"do1knfz",
"do1iyss"
],
"text": [
"Actually, it's a natural aging process when the skins antioxidant defenses begins to decline. As they decline, the natural oils become oxidized. Fatty acids from the body's glands then react to the oxygen to form a unsaturated aldehyde (organic compound) called nonenal, which is responsible for that funky smell. It isn't water soluble, so it remains on the skin even after washing and the smell can be quite prominent. Edit: I am leaving Reddit. People are too mean to me. I cry. :c",
"As a getting-older person, I want to know this so I can avoid it. I do shower daily, but that may not be enough. It is not mothballs, by the way. I also wonder if the smell is different based on diet -- is old person smell different in Japan vs the US?",
"> The researchers speculate that the human ability to discern age through scent might be an evolutionary skill related to the way other animals are able to sniff out young, virile mates and avoid those that are older or sick. > Both human and non-human animal body odors are rich with chemical components that can transmit useful social information, the scientists say. And many animals, including mice, rabbits, owls and monkeys, are known to undergo changes to the chemical composition of their body odor as they age. > “Similar to other animals, humans can extract signals from body odors that allow us to identify biological age, avoid sick individuals, pick a suitable partner and distinguish kin from non-kin,” said senior author Johan Lundström, a sensory neuroscientist at Monell URL_0",
"There are many comments suggesting that old people smell that way due to bad hygeine and all but obviously, every old guy you ever met isn't an unhygienic person! The characteristic smell on old people is due to certain chemicals released on there skins. These chemicals release significantly in the skin of old people. One theory suggests that the chemical 2-Nonanal is responsible.",
"My pop (certified old guy) doesn't smell like old people, he has this 1950's cologne musk about him, and my nan? She just smells like cigarette.",
"Dust, old air freshener, mothballs, even hygiene and cosmetic products created back in the day. One of my family members bought a hair product online, an old school pomade that's been around forever. He smells *exactly* like an old man! I told him to throw on some OG Old Spice and shine his shoes to complete the classic \"old man smell\".",
"It is a group of organic compounds called nonenals, particularly 2-nonenal. I don't think it is known why production of this aldehyde increases with age, but it does.",
"My grandparent's house had that old people smell, then they moved in their late 70s and downsized to a smaller brand new townhouse and they've been there for 10+ years. That house doesn't smell like their old house did, it smells normal. I miss the smell of their old house.",
"The ones that still get around okay are probably incontinent and you wouldnt know. The adult diapers are pretty thin so you cant always see them from the outside. The fact is that the private areas can and will stink even if the diaper is dry because the area gets no air to it. Also showering becomes difficult for older people and they normally only do it once a week and they dont like doing it. Hygiene declines because of forgetfullness and weakness. Also wanted to mention the dentures. If they arent being cleaned and soaked everyday they will stink. Source: i work with the elderly."
],
"score": [
350,
181,
130,
33,
24,
8,
5,
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[
"http://healthland.time.com/2012/05/31/old-person-smell-really-exists-scientists-say/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74vlvk | What happens when you quit the military during training? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1ed73"
],
"text": [
"You can generally quit during your initial basic training if you want to. They don’t want people who really don’t want to be there. There will be exceptions but generally if you say you’re done, you can start the process of leaving."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74vqa9 | Why do you always get sick over night and not throughout the day? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1fqug",
"do1frtx"
],
"text": [
"You don't. Symptoms can show up gradualy over a day just as they can show up gradualy over night. The difference is that you consciousness can adapt to the gradual change. You are still sick, but you felt more and more sick over hours. If the symptoms start during the night however, your conciousness turned down quite a bit while sleeping, and when you wake up it goes from last possible, normal state you remeber being maybe a bit down to full on symptoms of a cold when you wake up.",
"You don't. People often do get sick during the day, but going to sleep healthy and waking up 8 hours later sick is a more drastic change than at any point on 8 hours of consciousness gradually getting sicker. And at hour 5 you might think \"I feel shit, actually I felt a bit shit earlier\" and just assume you've been feeling shit since you woke up."
],
"score": [
27,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74vxh2 | How is gravity both the "strongest and weakest force in the universe"? | I've heard this saying before and don't really understand it. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1grbt",
"do1jjk1",
"do1u34z",
"do1h579",
"do1v963"
],
"text": [
"Gravity is a very weak force, in comparison to the electrical or magnetic forces, on a unit by unit basis. That's why if you set a rock on the sidewalk, gravity tries to pull it to the center of the Earth, but the electrons on the outside of the sidewalk have no problems repelling the electrons on the outside of the weight to prevent this sinking. That's the electrons in a one atom thick layer overpowering all the mass in the entire weight. The \"strongest force in the universe\" statement is more poetic than physics. Gravity shapes galaxies and star systems, giving them their attractive shapes.",
"Other people have covered the weakness. The reason it is stronger than EM over long distances is that there are no \"negative\" gravity particles. With EM, there are regions of space that have a net positive charge and regions that have a net negative charge. The attractive force from a distant positively charged region can be cancelled out by repulsion from a negatively charged region between you and the first region. So the overall long distance EM force is small or 0. Since gravity is always attractive, you don't have that screening effect and the force adds up all the way to the edge of the observable universe.",
"Gravity is responsible for our solar system moving the way it does, it controls the movements of planets, controls the movement of the Sun itself. Yet you, a puny human, has managed to defeat the gravity of an entire planet by picking up a pen off a desk.",
"Gravity is a very weak force, but one with incredible range. Gravity has a very low constant that falls off with distance *squared*, magnetic force drops with distance *cubed* The incredibly strong \"strong\" force in atomic nuclei plummets to zero almost immediately with distance. So although gravity is by far the weakest of the fundamental forces, its effects permeate the universe on a vast range while the others can only impact the immediate vicinity of the source.",
"So if you just compare the maths it is the weakest (by far). In terms of importance on the big scale it's the strongest. The thing is: the two forces that can act on a long range are the electromagnetic force and gravity. However, the electromagnetic force can be cancelled out. If you have +1 charge and -1 charge next to each other and look at it from the outside, there is: (+1 -1) charge, or 0 total charge. 0 charge means 0 force. That doesn't happen with gravity. It's determined by mass. A big thing in the sky (like a star) has no over all charge but a lot of mass. So it only acts by gravity."
],
"score": [
113,
20,
6,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74wajq | How do we know by preserving animal species we are not messing up natural "survival of the fittest" part of nature | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1jtob",
"do1k5va"
],
"text": [
"Well, I'm no expert, but I do think that a good amount of the animals currently on their way to extinction, is due to us overhunting/overkilling them, so it's not \"natural order\" in that sense, I'd say",
"Trust me.. we have disrupted \"survival of the fittest\" in many ways.. of which this isn't really one. Survival of the fittest refers to members of a species.. that the weak members of a species will die off/be killed and wont reproduce but the most fit ones will live and reproduce, making the species more healthy. Trophy hunters who kill the biggest and most healthy animals have really disrupted that. Breeders of pets and livestock have done some horrific things too - some species of livestock or domestic pet would never survive in the wild compared to the natural version of their species. This is because certain breeds have attributes we like but that don't help them survive in the wild - broiler chickens being a good example and laying hens being another. Broiler chickens are prone to heart attacks and cannot hardly walk well after a while. Laying hens don't sit on eggs to incubate them so would never hatch eggs. As far as saving a species... it doesn't mean the species is unfit to survive in the wild, it means that we (humans) have messed up their environment so bad it's hard for them to live in it.. or we have hunted them unnecessarily to the brink of extinction (such as rhinos killed for only their horns)."
],
"score": [
7,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74wmac | How does a throwing knife or tomahawk always manage to land blade first and not the handle? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1tr3r",
"do1x569",
"do1mjg6",
"do1m89n",
"do1ztjl",
"do1o3so",
"do1uypq",
"do22ect"
],
"text": [
"The simple answer is that they don't. Thrown weapons are designed to give you the best chance to hit with the blade, but it takes a lot of practice and even then it isn't a sure thing. People who throw knives or axes at fairs and circuses and such are entertainers working in more or less the same conditions every time. With lots of practice they can get good enough throwing *a specific weapon at a specific range into a specific target* that they can land the shot most of the time. In TV and movies they're straight up cheating. They have as many tries as they need to get the shot right, or they use special effects. You only see the end result, which makes it look like thrown weapons are extremely accurate and deadly in the hands of a skilled user, when the reality is it's more of a toss-up. The only exceptions would be weapons like throwing stars, which are designed to be sharp from every angle. Even then, they were hardly ever used as a primary killing weapon. They would instead be thrown as a distraction, or stuck in the ground in the hopes an enemy would step on them. But they were rarely, if ever, thrown at an enemy with the intent to land a killing blow. While I'm sure there were a handful of people throughout history that got extremely good at throwing sharp things and used this skill in combat, for most people throwing a knife or axe in a fight just meant you were throwing your weapon away.",
"Practice. It doesn't happen naturally. As others have said, it takes a lot of practice to even throw a specific weapon a specific distance. Practice long enough at different distances and you can learn to be reasonably effective. In an actual combat situation a thrown weapon is either an act of desperation or distraction. A few suggestions for those idiots that are going to try this at home without expert supervision: * Don't. If you want to learn then find an expert willing to teach you. Renaissance Faires or historical reenactments are good places to look for a tutor. * If you aren't going to listen to the above advice then for the love of Thor make sure that no one else is at risk. People behind the target aren't safe, people next to the target aren't safe and people next to you aren't safe. Seriously. * Weapons bounce back. Some will land blade first and you'll feel awesome, some will partially land blade first but will bounce off, most will land in an awkward mess handle first, but then occasionally it will hit this perfect polar opposite of a sweet spot at the edge of the bottom of the handle which will cause it to bounce back at your face. When you are learning this happens often enough to be a very real risk, but infrequently enough to catch you by surprise. Be ready for this. Don't set your target to close. And take the next advice. * Start with a screwdriver. Seriously. They are a good first step for learners. Still treat it as a weapon, so all the above points still apply. Practice until you are sinking the screw end into the target every time and then work your way up to more deadly weapons. an added bonus is that now you know how to turn a common household tool into an effective thrown weapon. Cool. * Don't drink and throw. Ever. I know, it helps lift your game at pool, but pool balls don't cut your face in half when you get it wrong. Edit: Suggestion of eye-wear is a good safety precaution too. Although there are other parts of the anatomy that are also vulnerable to flying knives and hatchets. Also others have suggested using proper practice knives instead of screwdrivers. That sounds like a good idea. I was taught to practice with screwdrivers before moving on to hatchets.",
"Well... As someone who has trained with throwing knifes for a bit... I think they landed blade first about 5% of the times i threw them for the first few hours... They land blade first because the people throwing them are really good at what they are doing, or because hollywood is cheating, depending on where you saw them",
"Whats actually happening is the person throwing the knife is always landing the blade first. This is because they practiced a huge amount doing it. When you get really familiar with a specific sort of weapon, it becomes very easy to hit exactly where you want.",
"I actually teach throwing knives for a living (2 months a year) and do have a lot of insight into this. They will hit tip first about 20% of the time. There is no trick to it, the knives are as center balanced as can be or they are crap they sell to the uninformed. Note that 20% is kind of misleading but under \"sterile\" conditions is accurate because 20% is the amount of the rotation that is capable of sticking into the board. The way a practiced person does it is based on distance. If you can properly gauge the distance then you can adjust your throw to rotate the right number of times. My style of throw does 1 1/4 rotations per 10 feet (blade up on release). So if my target is 15 feet I will release the knife at a different angle or hold by the other end to adjust how it hits. My personal average is about 5/7 within a 5\" circle at about 12 feet. When I change range I drop to about 50%. Rinaldo of the danger committee can hit within about 1/4 inch from 10 feet and within about an inch from at least 20, but my god is that man talented. Seen him cut a cucumber in half sitting on his partners forearm. The average person will land 1/14 without instructions, some people get lucky some people have a knack for it but without help or practice you are bound to suck at it. If you have questions I would be happy to answer them.",
"You have to learn to judge distances. As the knife/ax travels it spins. So if you can accurately distance yourself from the target it should hit the correct side first. For example I throw a knife and 3 feet away from me it is oriented forward, then the next two feet it's not as it spins, then at 6 feet it is once again oriented correctly. As long as you distance yourself in one of these \"openings\" you should be able to strike the target with the knife correctly oriented.",
"They don't. It's very difficult to land it correctly without training. One time I went camping and my buddy brought some tomahawks, it took me at least 2 hour of practicing before I could reliably sink them blade-first into the tree stump 10 feet away.",
"I see a lot of long winded answers that I'm not going to bother reading. This simple honest answer to this question is \"they don't\"."
],
"score": [
838,
497,
317,
86,
80,
39,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74wntd | Why does cold water help burns? | You would intuitively think that the burn damage is irreversible and not affected by the temperature of the skin after the burn. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1mrrq",
"do1nu7x"
],
"text": [
"There's a few reasons that cold water is recommended for burns. First, depending on the burn and what caused it, there can be ongoing damage occurring- kind of like how scrambled eggs keep cooking for a bit even after you take them out of the pan; residual heat can still be doing harm after you've moved away from the source of the damage. If you were burned by something other than direct heat, like an acid, chemical or other damaging material, the water can help remove any traces remaining, **DEPENDING ON THE CHEMICAL**. You may want to *avoid* water in some situations, but that's usually going to be in scenarios where you should be trained and wearing safety gear. Additionally, cold water helps soothe the pain by numbing it. Also, it can help reduce and prevent immediate swelling.",
"Have you ever heard that you should take your steak off the barbecue just a little bit before it is as rare/well done as you like it? Because the heat within the meat will continue to cook it after it has been taken off the grill. Your meat works exactly the same. The cells have so much heat that they transfer it deeper into your tissue, further damaging it. Cold water helps take that heat away before it has a chance to conduct deeper into you. Running water is used because burns are playgrounds for bacteria, and standing water collects bacteria really well, but if the water is always running out of the tap, nothing can collect in it, and thus on you."
],
"score": [
7,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74wpx9 | This is gross but would a human egg taste like a chicken egg if it was scaled up in size? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1nkvz"
],
"text": [
"Nope A chicken egg contains all the nutrients that the embryo will need to form into a baby chicken, there is no resupply so it has to have all of the food within it A human egg is just a single cell that gets fertilized, it has no nutrients in it because it will implant on the uterine wall and be fed by the placenta until a baby person is ready. With no nutrients you would find a large human egg would give you a very watery and bland omelette with none of the delicious fats, proteins, and other flavors you get from a chicken egg"
],
"score": [
79
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74wrd2 | Why is it so much easier to focus our eyes on something far away than it is to focus on something right next to us? | It seems counterintuitive; a close distance has less distance to travel, so our eyes shouldn't have to work nearly as hard. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1n0rt"
],
"text": [
"Our brains combine the images from both eyes into one. The farther a thing is, the small the angle between both our eyes’ vision and it’s easier for our brain to join the two images. The closer it is, the larger the angle and harder to join them"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74wto6 | Cell Phone Reception | My question is, why does cell phone reception always suck when there are a lot of people in one area? I was just at the expo for the Chicago marathon and couldn’t call my brother that I needed to talk to. Thanks in advance! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1oz79"
],
"text": [
"Think of it as a noisy room. Think of the situation like this. In an empty room, you and your friend can talk to each other just fine. Then another two people walk into the room and also start having a conversation, but no problem because you and your friend can still understand each other. Then another two walk in and they also start talking and suddenly it becomes a tiny bit harder to hear what your friend is saying. And then another two enter...and another two...and another two and so on... After a while all these people talking quietly to each other start to make a loud background noise, and the more people who walk in, the harder and harder it becomes to understand what your friend is saying. Eventually the sound of all these people talking quietly to each other becomes deafening and nobody can hear anyone at all. The same kind of thing is happening with your cell phone. All those phones in the one place starts to cause a sort of interference or over saturation of the radio waves that carry the signal to the cell tower or reception station. To compund the issue, most of those people will be connected to the same cell tower and it has to suddenly deal with all that extra traffic. The same issue affects WiFi, which is why at busy conventions or on close knit streets where the houses are very close to each other, WiFi can become spotty to use and band hopping becomes necessary."
],
"score": [
10
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74wvlx | why does the higher number of Frames per second equal to slow motion. Like why is 60fps a “normal speed” but 240fps considered Slow Motion. Why is 120fps not slower motion than 60? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1o0ok",
"do1nzt1",
"do1oaku"
],
"text": [
"What makes something slow motion is when it's recorded at a higher frames per second than it's played back at. We normally play video back at 60 FPS. So if you record at 120 FPS and play at 60 FPS, the video is twice as slow, since every frame of video covers 1/120th of a second in time, but is played over a longer 1/60th of a second. But anything FPS can be slow motion if you play it back with a lower FPS than it was recorded at. You just end up getting a jerky video if you reduce the playback framerate too much.",
"It depends on the playback speed. For slow motion you'll record at a high frame rate but play back at a normal one. If you record a video at 240 fps and play it back at 60 fps then it will play back at quarter speed. If you play it back at 240 fps then it will play back at normal speed",
"The more frames per second, the more details you can capture of fast moving objects. If at 60fps a bullet moves from one side of the screen to the other nearly instantly, if you play it at 10fps you will see it \"jump\" from one place to another. If you film it at 120,000fps and play it at the standard 60fps you can see the smooth slow movement across the screen. A frame is like a picture. The more still pictures you can cram into one second equals less time between pictures (frames) and the more you can see."
],
"score": [
17,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74x1sk | What are all those pop ups about binary trading options etc? Are they viruses/phishing scams? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1qkm5",
"do23xz7",
"do1vpok"
],
"text": [
"They generally aren't viruses. A goodly proportion of them are scams. Certainly the testimonials are generally fake. Binary options are a sort of bet that's for some reason not regarded as actual gambling. I'm serious: they represent a bet that a stock (usually, though there's no reason you couldn't do it with other market abstractions) will close within a certain price range at a certain time. They're called binary because there are two outcomes: either the target closes in the predicted range, and the option pays out (either in cash or a pre-specified asset), or it doesn't, and the option is worth nothing.",
"Binary options are not a virus however they are a scam as they are gambling disguised as trading.",
"Instead of trading on a regulated exchange, you essentially are just making a bet literally. They are basically like a bookie but for options/stocks without them meeting the capital/collateral requirements that a legit broker does."
],
"score": [
11,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74x5mn | From a business POV, why would McDonalds only give out 20 packets of Szechuan sauce and at limited locations only? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1rlgr",
"do1q327",
"do1qsed",
"do1vm21",
"do1uv5l",
"do1v01l",
"do1ul8u",
"do1vvow",
"do1wysb",
"do1vzkf",
"do1wirl",
"do1uop4",
"do1w6og",
"do1wjeu",
"do1xtom",
"do20zwk"
],
"text": [
"Good marketing that takes advantage of a current trend with low risk. Why only limited locations? Because they literally can only do that or nothing, they can't release the product more broadly because their supply chain for large production is MASSIVE and *SLOW*. Like, I don't think you have an idea of how massively complicated it is for McDonalds to release a new product. I recall an anecdote from one of McD's corporate chefs (the people designing new products and evaluating the existing menu) about how they forewent introducing blueberry milkshakes at one point because releasing that to McDonalds'es throughout America would have required them to buy up *80% of all blueberries produced in North America that year*. The amount of work and preparation that goes into making a new McDonalds product to release world-wide or just in North America is *INSANE*. Remember, the original sauce was a marketing tie-in with a major Disney animated movie, they are not going to do anything close to that for a meme spawned from some random cartoon. But, the people aware of that meme, are also people likely to hear about a limited, smaller scale marketing stunt, meaning McDonalds can get a pretty big chunk of positive marketing with the nerd crowd from the small investment of one of the chefs in the R & D lab cooking up a batch of Szechuan sauce and that being distributed to a couple of locations and notable personages. In fact the exclusivity only makes this kind of marketing even more effective. So, tl;dr :They got *some* positive marketing from it without needing to turn their big, expensive supply chain to produce what would likely be a fad product.",
"What is this szechuan sauce I keep hearing of?",
"Because if they had plenty to go around everyone would wake up and realize it's just a fucking dipping sauce. But if it's rare, people think it's special and talk about it.",
"I couldn't say for sure, but I have a good idea why. I actually live about 5 minutes from one of the participating locations. The event was supposed to begin at 2pm, so me and my friends headed over around 1:30 knowing there would be lines and stuff. We get there and find out they basically gave tickets to the first 17 customers at time of opening for the SEVENTEEN PACKETS OF SAUCE they were shipped. This is a major location on a busy road in a decent-sized city. I don't care too much cuz I was really there for the novelty of the whole thing, but I start to feel bad. People are showing up in R & M tshirts. People are showing up cosplaying Rick. We find out early what's going on but the giant line has no idea. We're starving so we get some of the buttermilk tenders anyway. We're there...and hungry...and we waited in line for 20 minutes, and I assume that was the strategy. You have a metric fuckton of people who showed up for a special event and are gonna be disappointed, but a lot of them will spend some money anyway after they chew your staff out. You didn't spend a ton of money on the ingredients and machinery needed to manufacture enough szechuan sauce for everyone to be happy. The moral of the story is McDonald's is a shitty corporation. They essentially faked a special event to make quick, easy cash at the expense of their employees, who I heard getting yelled at by a bunch of angry nerds the whole time I waited for my food. Edit: by the way, the buttermilk tenders were awful.",
"It's a classic Bait and Switch. They're hoping you will try one of the nine other sauces and their ~new white meat chicken tenders with buttermilk breading.~",
"It’s marketing. Rick and Morty built it up and then McDonalds underdelivered. Anyways I am at the location in LA that had sauce. A fight broke out and they’re closing the store. A couple people got packets, but lots of people disappointed. Realistically everyone here knew they weren’t likely to get the sauce but we cane to have a good time and it was ruined by violence. Just thought you’d like a firsthand account of someone waiting in line.",
"Aside from production and distribution, 'limited time' and 'limited quantity' are how you push the impulse button in the consumer brain. \"Hey, I want to try and get that / taste that, I might not get to again!\"",
"Provided you haven’t killed or hurt anyone, stolen from anyone, or otherwise violated any rights or freedoms, and people are talking about your product or business, congratulations! You just gave good marketing!",
"It's the same as retailers on Black Friday. They advertise let's say a flat screen TV for 70% off retail price, and in the fine print state they only have 10 available. The idea is to create hype, and to get people in the door. It's their hope that even if you aren't one of lucky few to get the sauce, that you'll at least buy *something* because you're already there.",
"I'm not super qualified to answer, but your thread but McDonalds on the front page of reddit, so I'm gonna say that's your answer.",
"McDonald's run a franchise, which means that separate private businesses rent the right to trade under the McDonald's name. They have to sell certain food items (big mac etc) but they have limited flexibility elsewhere. While this doesn't mean they are allowed to sell 'McScampi' they have the option setting up certain local menu items, and to not take part in the corporate promotions. In general they do, because marketing and extra business is usually good, but they don't have to. This means that pretty much every McD promotion has the caveat of 'participating restaurants only'",
"It's much smarter to minimize your risk by testing your offering with real paying customers before you fully commit to making it real. It's called Shadow Testing.",
"To add to what other people have said this product didn't sell well enough to keep on the menu the first time. They're going to be cautious about bringing it back. I'm sure they're doing it as a marketing stunt and it seems to be working.",
"What a timely question. I'm sitting in a hurricane devastated area using the McDonald's internet and I've watched 5 packs of roving teenagers come in and ask about szechuan sauce. Sounds like it doesn't exist here. Most of them then go on to sit down and ask \"how do you spell szechuan?\" so they can snapchat about it.",
"Becuase they don't want to actually relaunch the, instead they want to create a lot of noise about relaunching the sauce. It's cheap advertising",
"Step 1: Hype up Szechuan sauce after S3E1 by giving bottles to a few people Step 2: Announce limited release after S3 ends Step 3: Get a shit ton of brand awareness among younger audience and from the social media and msm reactions Step 4: Bring it back more reliably with a huge new demographic who wouldn't have touched McDonald's before"
],
"score": [
1769,
380,
325,
215,
51,
49,
48,
12,
12,
10,
9,
5,
5,
5,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74xn9k | What's the big hurdle in getting people to Mars? Haven't the major obstacles to doing so already been solved? | I mean, we have: * Rockets to get materials to orbit * Capsules that can keep astronauts in space for a long time (i.e., ISS) * Relatively frequent unmanned missions to Mars That is: we can get people into space, in capsules that will *keep* them in space, and the ability to shoot those packages to Mars. I *feel* like shooting a person, rather than a robot, to Mars would be relatively simple, given the above--after all, each of the major problems, as I understand them, have been solved already. So what's the hold-up? What am I/we missing that is keeping us from shooting someone to Mars, say, *tomorrow?* | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1v00a",
"do1ul4m",
"do1ub2b",
"do1uogj"
],
"text": [
"Mars lines up with the earth about once every two years, so any mission would have to last at least that long, and would have to bring all the food, water, and oxygen needed for a stay that long. We don't have a rocket capable of moving that much material that far, much less come back. Also, all manned space travel, with the exception of the lunar missions, have taken place within the Earth's Van Allen belts. These form when solar wind interacts with the earth's magnetic field, and serves to protect us from radiation. We have no effective way to protect astronauts from the radiation beyond the earth's orbit. > I feel like shooting a person, rather than a robot, to Mars would be relatively simple, given the above Astronauts not only want to go into space, they want to come back home again, they are kind of whiny that way. You need to add a lot of extra fuel, then extra fuel to transport that extra fuel, etc., etc. This is called the tyranny of the rocket equation, as the amount of fuel you need increases exponentially with the mass of your payload. Finally, there isn't really any reason to send a person to Mars. For the cost of one manned mission, we can send dozens unmanned ones, and learn just as much with a greater chance of success.",
"We can't get enough mass into orbit. Your fuel scales significantly with increased payload and right now Curiosity and accompanying equipment is one of the heaviest things we have sent from Earth since the Saturn V rocket stopped launching with only Cassini having been heavier The Mars Science Laboratory had a mass of 3,893 kg of which Curiosity was just 899 kg. The rest was discarded in the process of safely getting Curiosity to the surface. That's it. We've only gotten 899 kg to the surface of Mars. You're going to need a lot more to get people there *and back* along with supplies to survive. In order to get more mass we need a bigger rocket, we don't have a big enough rocket right now. The Delta IV Heavy is the most powerful heavy lift rocket we have right now and it would only let you get double the mass of Curiosity to Mars, we need a Super Heavy Lift rocket like the Saturn V was.",
"Well, mostly the fact that, as it stands, it'd be a suicide mission. We have no way of sending people back to Earth. Also, those who get there would find a pretty unhospitable environment and hanging around to set things up is not an option. So the technology to automatically deploy a basecamp ahead of time isn't there, yet.",
"The biggest hurdle is storage. Mars doesn't have many resources so you have to pack for the entire trip. The ISS sees constant supply restocks throughout the year, but thats not possible for a mission to mars. You have to bring enough supplies to last the 6 month trip, once on mars you would have to stay for another year before your in an optimal position to return home, and then complete the last 6 month journey. That means bringing more fuel to successfully lift and move the massive amounts of supplies you are bringing. The problem with fuel though is that it has weight, so you have to bring more fuel to lift all that other fuel. A round trip to mars requires too many supplies at the moment."
],
"score": [
10,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74xwpf | How do physicists know that they don't know where 95% of the universe is? | I've been seeing a lot of articles recently about physicists not knowing where 95% of the universe is. How do they know it's there if they don't know where it is? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do24fr4",
"do1wyyd"
],
"text": [
"First of all it's weirdly worded We don't know what 95% of the universe is made off, so ya technically we don't know where it is exactly, but it's not really the right way to say it. What they mean is that the universe is made of 3 things. The first is everything we know off. Ordinary matter and elemental particule like neutrons, photon, etc. We can count that. We look at a galaxy and we list all of the stars we can see. We can count them and figure out their mass to get the mass of the galaxy. The problem is that galaxies are spinning way too fast to be stable. There is more mass than we can see that keep all galaxies to not break appart. The problem is not that we can't see a small percentage of the mass that should be there, no 4/5th of the mass, we are not able to detect. So we group all of that mass together under the term dark matter, because we don't know what it is. Maybe it's a bunch of different thing that we still can't detect, or maybe it's only one type of mass that we have yet to discover. What we know is that we can't detect it, but it have a gravitational effect on ordinary matter that we can detect. A bit latter we looked at the red shift of stars and galaxies and we discovered that not only most galaxies are going away from us, the further they are the fastest they are going away from us, meaning that the universe expansion is accelerating and it's not suppose too. Gravity is the only force that we knew off that could shape the expansion of the universe and gravity attract matter, so the expansion should slow down and eventually all of the universe should start to contract, but that's not what we observe. So there must be a force that accelerate the expansion of the universe. We don't know what this is so we named it dark energy. We also calculated how much energy is necessary to combat gravity and create this acceleration. For the universe to act like we observe, 68.3% of the universe must be made of that dark energy.",
"Based on how galaxies and gravity interact, they appear to have much more mass than what we can see is able to account for. It is kind of like going to an office where only a third of desks were occupied. You can deduce there are a lot of people missing without seeing them all."
],
"score": [
11,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74y8ag | Why when there are 2 people shooting a machine gun, does one person have to hold up the belt that the machine gun feeds from? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do1ysjl"
],
"text": [
"Helps to prevent a jam. The belt can catch on things near by. A straight feed in smooths it out for a more reliable feed. Also if you drag a length of belt against the ground it's picking up dirt and you have to overcome the force the belt resists pulling with while feeding. Technically, you don't have to now a days unless you have a loose belt. Modern crew serve weapons ammunition is usually in a special canister that clips onto the weapon that you feed out of fine. Still, you can get jams with the belt if it gets stuck on something l."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74y96x | How do animals, like lions, communicate about catching prey if they can't talk, draw, or use hand signals? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do21zzf",
"do2kd3d"
],
"text": [
"You mean pack animals? Like wolfs and dolphins? They do communicate through sound. They also communicate through body language.",
"Billy Connolly has a wonderful sketch about this. Here it [is]( URL_0 )"
],
"score": [
20,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QilRAJV8d74"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74ya6h | Why is it when giving OTC medication to children, the directions specify dosage by weight, but medication for adults does not? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do207z7"
],
"text": [
"Children's weight varies hugely - a one-year-old is on average around 10 kg while a 13-year-old would be in the region of 50kg. That is a 5 times difference. On the other hand, the weights of adults vary by a much smaller percentage. Having said this - many doctors do take your weight into account when prescribing important medicines like antibiotics - they just look at you and if they see that you are very heavy they might prescribe a higher dose. But here I am not talking about OTC medicines which are OTC for the simple reason that they do not treat life threatening or serious conditions so slight errors in dosage don't make a difference."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74yf9y | Why do we get the urge to move around when we have to pee? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do27sw8"
],
"text": [
"I had learned that it help move some pee back up into the tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74yixg | how did clocks and time pieces work before batteries/electricity? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do21qxj"
],
"text": [
"You may have seen a pendulum swinging under a [grandfather clock]( URL_1 ). One neat thing about pendulums is that the period of the swing (that is, how long it takes to swing back and forth) depends on the length and weight of the pendulum, not how far it's swinging, so as long as the length or weight doesn't change the period won't change. If you are careful about constructing your pendulum, you can know pretty precisely how long it will take to swing and build your clock accordingly (such that, for example, every swing takes exactly two seconds, and each time the pendulum swings to one side or the other, it nudges a gear that nudges your second arm). You can also construct gears that don't constantly rotate the gear next to them, they ratchet the next gear one tick or tooth for every rotation. With very precise construction, again you can fine-tune your gears so that very slight changes in the speed of the gear providing power does not significantly alter the timing of the clock. There are mechanical devices with balanced weights that spin, and as they spin the centrifugal force raises the small weights up. When the weights are raised, it slows the machine; when they are down, it speeds the machine up. So it essentially holds itself at a constant speed, which you can use to drive the rest of the clock. The clocks were powered by springs and weights. In watches, there was (and often still is) a tightly-wound spring that slowly releases its energy in a way controlled by the gears attached to it. You would have to manually wind your watch often, and yes, when it was running out of potential energy stored in the spring it would run slow. People very often had to reset the time on their watches and clocks. (Side note: this was one of the reasons why church bells and large clocks like Big Ben were so important: they were large and reliable, and the ringing of the bells helped the communities around them keep time, usually because they didn't have personal timepieces, but also to know the time to reset theirs when they did). Clocks usually also have springs, but they also usually have weights attached to those springs. The strings or chains holding the weights are attached to gears attached to springs, and potential energy is stored by raising the weight to the top of the space under the clock. As the weights fall, they drive springs and gears, again controlled by those gears. The pendulum swung at a regular pace, as I explained above, and it was kept swinging by the springs and weights and gears attached providing it with energy to keep swinging. These days, grandfather clocks are more likely to be driven by electric motors and the pendulum and weights are purely for show. Back in the day, the clocks, like watches, would have to be wound [with a key]( URL_0 ) that raised the weights and put tension on the spring. The clock could also be calibrated by adjusting the position of other weights that pulled on the pendulum to change its period slightly. Bigger clocks could store more potential energy in the springs and weights, and the pendulums could be more carefully calibrated to be as precise as possible. That made bigger clocks more precise and more reliable (generally speaking; assuming it was a high quality timepiece in the first place)."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.clockworks.com/pics/pics-keys/ck4.jpg",
"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81RSQApUvlL._SY679_.jpg"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74yo8t | How does faking confidence, "fake it til you make it" actually help? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do22ffn",
"do22m23"
],
"text": [
"Confidence is a state of mind. Faking it just means intentionally changing your state of mind. That change actually spills over into the real world. It was fake confidence that got Connor into the ring with Mayweather. He got his ass pounded, but he also got many millions of dollars that otherwise he would not have.",
"When you meet someone.. You don't know whether they are actually confident, and able to spout what's on their mind, or if they had to take a hundred deep breaths to gather the internal courage to say what they want to say. So imagine everyone around you was ACTUALLY super anxious, but just pretending to be self confident.. you'd mever know, because they make you feel as though they are in control of the situation, even if they are just as lost as everyone else."
],
"score": [
9,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74yoc9 | What are those marks on your skin when you take a watch or a pair of socks off? | I reckon they have something to do with them applying pressure and leaving an imprint but I don’t know. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do22l22"
],
"text": [
"Your guess pretty well hit the nail on the head. Your body swells throughout the day. If you're seeing marks, then you swelled enough to let the socks/watch \"bite\" into you. Just like if you feel asleep on a hard object with a specific design, the socks/watch left an imprint into you."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74yrg2 | Why is our current world map, the Mercator Map, not to scale? It represents the US as gigantic is reference to South America and Africa. In reality both of continents dwarf the US in size. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do27j6r",
"do2d6zz",
"do25kn1",
"do2c4l0",
"do261gj"
],
"text": [
"There is no way to accurately project a spherical surface onto a two-dimensional map. Something has to be inaccurate, size, shape, distance, and or direction. The advantage of the Mercator projection is that it preserves direction, which is useful for navigation. It is also rectangular, so it better utilizes the space on a rectangular map. There are [several other]( URL_0 ) map projections, all with their strengths and weaknesses.",
"The Mercator projection is used for most maps because it is the standard chart projection for navigation. The Mercator projection is considered a can-and-sphere projection. This means that if you imagine putting the 'sphere' (oblate spheroid) of the earth within a cylinder like a can of soup, and then projecting the 3d shape onto the 2d can surface area. Naturally this causes distortion problems at the top because a 3d object cannot be represented perfectly on a 2d shape, however for navigation this only becomes a problem near the poles. The benefits of the Mercator projection are that the equator is a straight line perpendicular to the lines of longitude. That meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude are straight lines and perpendicular to each other, which allows for compass bearings to be represented as a straight line. This is of key importance for ship navigation and route plotting. Other benefits of the Mercator projection is its orthomorphic properties, where angles and shapes of land are represented how they are seen in real life. As far as ship navigation goes within the poles, you cannot beat the Mercator projection. Source: Naval Bridge Watchkeeping officer.",
"The way the Mercator projection works is to take the a spherical image and to make it square. The only way to do that is to take the points of the sphere that are being pulled apart to make the spherical image flat (in this case, the North and South poles) and stretch those parts out. The end result of this is that the farther north you travel on the projection, the more distorted the image becomes. Something like [the Mollweide Projection]( URL_0 ) accounts for the distortion in the Mercator projection, but the end result is that the entire world is no longer as clearly visible as it is on the Mercator projection.",
"The thing with all maps is that they will *never* accurately depict the sizes of the land masses. There has to be distortion somewhere just because maps aren't spheres and the only thing that can show a sphere accurately is another sphere.",
"The earth is a sphere and the Mercator projection is a rectangle. A good map projection tries to accomplish several things: * Keep nearby locations together. * Keep the continents in single units, without any sort of split between them. * Make it easy to figure out a location from latitude and longitude. * Be easy to print and display. * Look good. This is difficult. The Mercator projection is relatively simple: center the thing around 0°E, 0°N, then deform the surface of the earth to fit on a rectangle, and adjust east/west to avoid splitting continents much. This gives you a pretty good impression of things near the equator. However, the east-west distance around the earth shrinks as you head away from the equator (all the way down to nothing when you hit the poles). And the Mercator projection is the same width at all latitudes. So it shows northern and southern areas stretched on the east/west axis. [Here's a picture showing roughly how stretched things are]( URL_0 ). North America is a lot broader on the side further from the equator. South America is narrow on the side further from the equator. This means South America's land area looks a lot smaller. I like the Dymaxion map, personally, [as it has less stretching]( URL_1 ), but it's trickier to use."
],
"score": [
22,
18,
4,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://xkcd.com/977/"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollweide_projection"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection#/media/File:Tissot_mercator.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Fuller_projection_with_Tissot%27s_indicatrix_of_deformation.png"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74yvtb | How are we able to manufacture super small objects? | Like the transistors in a cpu for example. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do25819",
"do25ekl"
],
"text": [
"1) Print a pattern of the thing you want to make on a piece of photographic film. 2) coat a piece of silicon with a special material (called \"resist\") that hardens when light strikes it. 3) use a reducing lens to project that image, smaller, onto the silicon. The resist will harden only in certain places. 4) Wash off the un-hardened resist. 5) Now you etch the silicon, or add trace elements, or coat it with gold, or whatever you need to do to make your transistor or whatever. These changes will only take effect where there isn't any resist. 6) Wash off the rest of the resist, and repeat the whole process to add multiple layers or other kinds of detail.",
"An integrated circuit may contain a billion or more transistors, and a few billion connections. There are various kinds of process steps used to form them, most of which are done at high temperatures (but not all). Some of the layers are \"grown\" by exposing the silicon wafer to specific gasses that react with the layers already present, or which simply deposit materials on the wafer. Some of the steps etch holes through insulators at specific sites to create connections between conductive layers, or to etch away unwanted conductors. Some steps are done by aiming ion beams at the wafers at high energies so that atoms will be blasted into specific areas. The key to most of these steps is something called \"photolithography\". It doesn't help to do all of these layers if you can't chose where specific things happen. A chemical called a \"photoresist\" is deposited on the entire wafer in a thin layer. If you expose the photoresist to a specific color of intense light, it changes its ability to be later etched away by a chemical solvent. This is incredibly useful. The trick is to use a \"mask\" to block the light in some areas and let it through in others. If you shine the light through the mask, and then through a lens to reduce the size of the image, you can effectively print a pattern on the photoresist. After etching the photoresist (which only etches away in some places, due to the light masking you did) then the other process steps can also be selective. In addition to using lenses to reduce the image, the mask image starts off being quite small. It is created by a similar process, but instead of using a mask to control exposure of the photoresist, the image is directly drawn on the resist using an electron beam. Most of the layers are then done in an add/subtract method: A layer is deposited or grown on the entire wafer, photoresist is put on, the photoresist is exposed through a mask, and the photoresist is etched off in some areas and left in others (due to the masking I described). Then the wafer is subjected to an etchant that can attack the deposited layer, but the photoresist protects the areas where it wasn't etched away. So the stuff under the photoresist doesn't get etched either. After the etching of the layer, a different etchant is used to remove all of the photoresist so that you can get ready for the next step. There's also a process called Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) that is used to make the wafer very very flat and remove residue from previous steps. The wafer has to be flat so that the images you project onto the photoresist doesn't get distorted and so that all of the layers can be lined up precisely, one on top of the other. This kind of process is repeated many times to build up different patterned layers of transistor parts, conductors, and insulators. After it is all done, the wafer is cut up into individual ICs which are then put into packages that allow them to be connected to circuit boards. This is a great simplification of the process that results in an IC. It will typically take a couple hundred individual process steps and result in an IC with around 10 layers of conductors (wires) connecting hundreds of millions or billions of transistors together into a circuit."
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74z16q | What is happening when a website goes down because of too many people try trying to access it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do26w0h"
],
"text": [
"Somewhere within the computers the website runs on, some resource is being exhausted and can't handle the volume of work demanded of it. The rest only other components have to slow down, web requests get more and more backed up unlike the site comes unusable. The exact nature of the resource exhaustion varies, but somewhere in the web application, something has run out of CPU, memory, network, or disk capacity, slowing everything down."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74z3b8 | Why do you sharpen things like knives, planes or chisels, and yet you peen a Scythe? | So im quite new to this toolmaking and repairing stuff but i've got a lot of old tools, so i just thought "A good wash, maybe some electrolysis and then i sharpen all the cut-y things!" But apparently this isn't how you do it? Can someone explain me WHY?? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do27sbc"
],
"text": [
"Scythe blades are made of lower-carbon steel than knives and chisels, are thinner than a comparable knife blade would be (to reduce friction when cutting stalks), and generally are not heat treated so that they don't chip--or break--- if they hit a particularly tough stalk. Being softer, peening an edge onto the blade is fairly easy, whereas a typical knife or axe blade is too hard and brittle to peen--you'd end up with little pieces of axe or knife blade Peening the edge thins it out even more (making it sharper), and *also* work-hardens it, without affecting the hardness of the rest of the blade. This way, any chips or cracks that *do* form don't propagate through the entire blade--they stop when they hit the softer metal behind the edge. As an added bonus, peening an edge onto a scythe is much faster than grinding an edge onto it with a hand stone (typically a minute or two instead of ten or so). As scythes had to be resharpened several times during a single day of harvesting, efficiency won out over the ability to produce a near-perfect edge with a stone."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74z835 | Correlation of IV drug use and these disease processes | ELI5: Could someone explain the pathophysiology of spinal abscess and why IV drug users in particular are so susceptible to them? Same question but for endocarditis? TIA | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do27y0d"
],
"text": [
"Staphylococcus and streptococcus are the two bacterial classes that most commonly cause spinal abscesses and endocarditis. They're usually only found on the skin or in our mouth, because our bodies have innate physical defences that prevent them from getting into our blood system (skin, acidic stomach etc.) When you're an IV drug user, you introduce virulent bacteria into your bloodstream the second the needle pierces the vein. Normally, your immune system takes care of it, but if your heart valves or spinal cord are even slightly damaged, it's very easy for the bacteria to attach to the tissue, proliferate, and cause an infection! It's why whenever you have an invasive dental procedure, they usually give you a prophylactic antibiotic - the risk of getting endocarditis is high if you introduce streptococcus viridans (which is found in your mouth) into the blood! Hope that helped!"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
74zdbc | If an American astronaut smoked weed on the international space station, could he be prosecuted? Would it make a difference in which state he left earth from? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2ab12",
"do291xd",
"do29m4y"
],
"text": [
"There's actually [an agreement]( URL_0 ) that all counties laws are in effect within each countries modules. And Federal Laws are superior to State Laws so marijuana is still not technically legal in 'legalized states' so yes, they could be prosecuted for 420. However, those charges would be ancillary to the charges brought against them for endangering their fellow astronauts by: 1.) Lighting a fire in a space station 2.) Operating a space station while intoxicated",
"federal laws would apply, their state of residence or launch or whatever else is irrelevant.",
"Your question is moot. Everything that goes up is catalogued. NASA (or whoever is launching) would know. If they let them up there with pot there'd be scientific justification even if it was for recreation. They'd document it somehow."
],
"score": [
9,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law"
],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74zic8 | What is the marketing strategy of continuing to send unwanted emails and making it extremely hard to unsubscribe from them? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2afdz"
],
"text": [
"Cost of email is almost nothing. As long as they get some one to bite and give them money it makes sense for them. Also making easy unsubscribe webpages cost money but don't generate any revenue"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74zk2j | How did we find out our brain was the thinking organ? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2bmlo",
"do2bd5v"
],
"text": [
"Probably through observing injuries. People with serious head trauma can lose the ability to speak, balance, read, move. But not always in an obviously connected way. If someone got say, impaled, they'd always die the same way. Or youd get the same sort of injury. But hit someone in the head and all kinds of weird things can happen. Wouldn't take too long to realize something important was giong on up there. Lots of little things over time really. Someone having seizures and getting their skull broken, only to have blood come out, relieving pressure on their brain and ending the seizures. That sorta thing. Oh also, just to clear up a common misconception: societies like Ancient Egypt did not actually think their heart was where thoughts came from. That was more like a soul. they knew it was the brain that generated thought, but they believed it had no real purpose in the afterlife, so was removed during embalming.",
"A likely explanation is effects of physical damages. If you get hit in another part you might bleed and die or if you survived have local problem in that part. Damages to the head might resulting changed behavior or other easy observed thinking problem. So when head damages result in that kind of damages it is not hard to guess that you think with that part. The explikation is also a part of how we know what different parts of the brain does. A damage to the same part can often have the samma effect in different people so that have been used to identify function."
],
"score": [
20,
6
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74zn6z | Why do we walk into a room and then forget what we went in there for? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2e1cv",
"do2cscs",
"do2dcgp"
],
"text": [
"What people are saying is true, but in a survival point of view entering a new enivornment and immediately focusing on the new enivornment could be life saving.",
"The short-term memory is the place of the brain that contains things like, \"I need to go into room for object.\" Unfortunately the brain can only reliably hold about four pieces of information in short-term memory, and that information only lasts about a minute. Even more unfortunately, the thought, \"I need to go into room for object\" takes up two slots of information: room and object. Your brain is constantly taking in information and the thoughts you are trying to remember become easily bumped aside by inputs you receive while walking from one room to another--where the cat/dog/baby is when you see them out of the corner of your eye, that snippet of whatever is playing on the TV as you pass by, what the weather looks like outside. Basically you forget because there's too much stuff going on between points A and B.",
"Your mind works in the concept of whats happening right now, paying attention to the things immediately surrounding you. When you walk through a door you are suddenly in a different room. What went on in the room you were in doesn't matter anymore, because its gone. It starts up like new, analyzing the current room instead of remembering the events in the previous. Likewise, when you go back into that room, suddenly those events all matter again and you remember. To counter this, you first need to understand that its not changing rooms that causes it, it's walking through a door or some similar abrupt transition. Keeping your thoughts focused on what you were doing as you cross through a door increases the chance of retaining it."
],
"score": [
7,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
74zsts | Why does glass appear to shatter quicker than the projectiles that are hitting them are moving in these clips? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2ep58",
"do2df28"
],
"text": [
"The shock waves cracking the glass are traveling at the speed of sound in the material. Glass is roughly 4-5K m/sec speed of sound whereas the bullet is going around 1-2K m/sec. You can get a more precise answer if you specify the glass type and the bullet type and gunpowder charge. Usually bigger caliber bullets fired from a hand gun go slower, and not all glass has the exact same speed of sound for the material.",
"It depends on what you mean by that. If you mean it looks like it breaks before it's hit, I think that's just due to weird angling of the camera and glass. If you mean it shatters at a higher speed than the bullet moves, that's because glass is a very rigid material. The structure of the atom/particles is very rigid but not necessarily strong, as a result when something hits it shock waves move very quickly through the glass and those shock waves cause it to very easily break very quickly"
],
"score": [
12,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7501xl | Why do police tell you to recite the alphabet backwards as a test for drunk driving? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2fo3i",
"do2ld2x"
],
"text": [
"Cop here: We don't. At least, it's not part of the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFSTs). It's a common misconception like police reading you your rights when you're arrested. It's something that happens on TV, so people assume that's just what happens, because most people never deal with law enforcement like that. The SFSTs are the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN) test, the One-Leg Stand, and the \"Walk-and-Turn\" test. (The ELI5 of the HGN is basically an eye test where we look for eye wobble that occurs when someone is intoxicated). We can use other methods to determine intoxication like divided attention tests, having you say the alphabet from a certain letter to another letter (like D-R for example), or counting from one number to another. An officer wouldn't necessarily be wrong to see if you could say the alphabet backwards, but he wouldn't base his opinion of your level of intoxication solely on it. It would most likely only be done if it was obvious that you're plastered, and he just wanted one more thing on camera to prove it.",
"Why don’t American cops use breathalysers? They are standard kit in the uk and are used in the case of accidents, or anytime police suspect you may be intoxicated. We also now have field drugs tests."
],
"score": [
26,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7503py | Why is collecting rainwater illegal in certain countries & in certain US states? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2fszg",
"do2gpm5",
"do2gopa",
"do2s0l6",
"do2rtab",
"do2hdv2",
"do2ryiy",
"do2qnfn",
"do2qivh",
"do2ujpc",
"do2sss4",
"do2qmmt",
"do2ubjf",
"do2uqd5"
],
"text": [
"Who owns the river? Everyone, it's a public resource and no one has a monopoly on it. It's managed by the government for issues like right of way, pollution dumping, and what you can use it for. Everyone owns it has has rights to use it. Like farmers can pull off so much water for crops. But what about the upstream little rivers that feed into it? Same thing. But what about the source that feeds into those little rivers? ....well that's rain water. Where water rights are a big deal, not letting water flow down stream is considered stealing from those people. And so rain water outs treated the same. Legally, the system is really old and a real mess. Read \"The Water Knife\" for a dramaticized account.",
"No homeowner is going to get in trouble for having a typical rain barrel on their property. What states don't want is mega-corporations who own huge tracts of land disrupting the regional agriculture industry and ecosystems by hoarding vast amounts of water that would normally flow into rivers.",
"My understanding is that collecting too much rain water can screw the people who are downstream. There are farms and communities/cities that rely on water from rivers and lakes. If people upstream collect too much rain water, then less water runs into the rivers and lakes. Now the people who rely on those rivers and lakes have a water shortage.",
"Here in Colorado, every drop of water that falls from the sky or melts into a creek is ultimately owned by someone. It is also not that long since the last drought, when we were not allowed to water yards or wash cars at home, so a lot of people here are water-aware by default. I own a house in a rural subdivision that gets its water from a creek, based on a water rights contract from the 70s, but the state is threatening to shut off every well in the subdivision if we don't mitigate evaporation and run-off. They're not joking, water rights agreement be damned. The association has already gone deep into debt to pay for earth movers to come out and convert our lake into a wetlands with no standing water, and we're still not in the clear. The other option is to own a house with no source of water, so what can we do besides comply with the demands of the state? The state is also actively using satellite data and planes to survey the state, looking for unauthorized ponds and other water collection, and forcing people to drain ponds that have existed for decades, because the water in those unauthorized ponds is \"owned\" by someone else. So yeah, water is serious business here in Colorado, but I think we did recently get permission for each house in the state to be allowed to collect one barrel of rainwater per year, so that's something, I guess. Here is a picture of ditch water from Cottonwood Creek being carried over a stream from Cottonwood Creek that I saw last week. I thought it was a pretty good example of how we really care about our water rights in Colorado, to the point where we won't allow stream water and ditch water to mix once they have been split off, even though it all comes from the same creek. URL_0",
"It's 100% legal in 42 states with restricted legality in only 8 states due to water rights. For example you can only collect up to 150 gallons of rainwater using your personal roof in Colorado, and this was from a law that passed in January of this year. Before that, you couldn't have a rainwater system because the state of CO owns all of the states water rights. It all comes down to who claims ownership of the water in the state. Links to every state's laws about rainwater: URL_0",
"in some areas water is an extremely limited resource and the amount of rain that lands on one person land is enough to actually significantly change the amount of water in the system. so areas that don't get a lot of water pool all their water together with all the other people that are in the same water system and let the state divvy it up so that it will be of the most use. now there are people that say this is a bad thing but if those people live in areas that do not get a lot of rain then i can guarantee they use more water then water then what lands on there property. normally a city covers this because some areas in a water system get a lot more rain than others and often times there is a lot of un owned land that feeds into it as well. but if you are not letting your water flow into the system then you are depleting the system without replenishing it. you might be able to get away a few people on a system doing it but if you get a lot of people then it causes alot of problems that are to long of an explanation to get into in a reddit post",
"There are no US states that make collecting rainwater illegal. Last year, Colorado changed the law to make it legal, and it's been legal in California for a few years. Most states actively encourage the practice, you can even get tax deductions for rainwater barrels in some places. Of course there may be other regulations around the process and how it can be done that vary from place to place, but the general practice of collecting water from your roof is legal everywhere The original laws against rainwater collection in a few western states came down to water rights. So if I have a farm in a valley and have the right to x gallons of water, you aren't allowed to build another farm and a dam upstream of me and take all the water I was using. Rainwater collectors were seen as essentially damming \"upstream\" and thus taking water from those downstream who had water rights. But the truth is that very little of the water that falls on a roof will ever make it downstream into the watershed. A 2007 study by the Colorado water board found only three percent made it (and that was for rainfall landing directly on the ground!). So the actual impact of rainwater collection systems on rooftops is minimal, which is no doubt part of the reason why they've become legal in all states. Useful links URL_0 URL_1",
"Because any rainfall collected and stored does not enter the water table and make its way into the river system. Nestle paid good money for that river water /s",
"In practice you are very unlikely to get in trouble for & the law is not intended to target homeowners installing a rain-barrel under their down-pipes in order to water their garden. It's designed to prevent people digging huge reservoirs and damming rivers in order to collect rainwater.",
"In Nevada, water is scarce and is therefore highly regulated. All water is owned by the state. Individual landowners can obtain water rights permits, allowing them a specified amount of water from a specified source. That permit must be periodically renewed, along with proof that you are actually using the water, or you will lose your water rights. This is true for any water from any source that isn't part of a municipal water system. That said, collecting rainwater has never been much cause for debate here because we get so little rain that you could not reasonably rely on rainwater to fill any actual need.",
"Disease can grow in still standing water that's not properly maintained, there was a deadly outbreak of Legionnaire's disease that sparked a lot of these rules.",
"Collecting rain water, especially in places that are semi arid, can have devastating effects on local groundwater and eco systems. Not only that, things down grade from the collection site can also be devastated. It’s an all around bad idea in a lot of places where water is used sparingly.",
"In Canada, we have issues with Hydraulic Fracking for natural gas and bitumen extraction. They are diverting up to 60% of major rivers and forcing the water deep into the ground where it will likely never be returned to the water table, and if it did, it would be toxic. We’ve also had problems with Nestle bottling water from ground water and drying up city water supplies near the bottling facilities. The biggest issue is the cost of these water contracts. As a citizen paying for water service at your house, you’re likely paying 40$/month, yet Nestle is paying on average about 3$/1 Million Litres of water.",
"Most states in the US employ the riparian water rights system, which derives its origins in common law and allows for all riparian property owners (owners of land abutting lakes or rivers) to make reasonable use of that water source. Western states typically use the \"prior appropriation\" system. This is a \"first in time, first on right\" system that protects the rights of the first users, in the amount of water that they put to beneficial use. It is a separate and distinct property right that can be quite valuable. The prior appropriation right allows for the senior user to get his or her allotment of water before junior users, even if those junior users are upstream, in times of drought. Colorado in particular has a robust prior appropriation scheme, which requires judicial recognition of each water right. The rationale behind prior appropriation is that water has always been scarce in the American West, and so the first in time, first in right principle encourages beneficial development. Any water that remained in streams and fed into the ocean was considered wasteful because that water could have been put to a purpose that actually provides a benefit. Interfering with another's water right by attempting to divert water for another purpose interferes with that property right. Source: Real property attorney (not your attorney and this is not legal advice)"
],
"score": [
1329,
518,
289,
265,
41,
15,
13,
12,
10,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://imgur.com/gallery/0buSj"
],
[
"http://acerwatertanks.com/is-rainwater-harvesting-illegal/"
],
[],
[
"http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resources/rainwater-harvesting.aspx",
"http://www.enlight-inc.com/blog/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
750d4b | Why do most suburban areas with a front garden, use it to display plants and flowers, rather than planting fruits and vegetables for consumption? I live in Australia - is this the case in other countries? Why? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2m0gk",
"do2ozgk",
"do2hhvu",
"do2pca7",
"do2nb2s",
"do2laum",
"do2mymh",
"do2hhhd",
"do2p3k9",
"do2phcw",
"do2ie81",
"do2p72y",
"do2otbj",
"do2qtef",
"do2rx8n",
"do2o4u6",
"do2ob9b",
"do2mpfe",
"do2jikn",
"do2oogr",
"do2iy6t"
],
"text": [
"Along with what others are saying about HOA rules... Fruits and vegetables require a great deal of maintenance and don't really help as much as you would think. We grow tomatoes and peppers and use them in salsas and things. It doesn't really save us that much money, we do it because we enjoy it. But it does attract rabbits and groundhogs, as well as insects. You have to weed regularly, and you have to gather up any fruit and vegetables that drop on the ground (unless you don't mind having even more bugs and rodents). So in short... high labor, not as much savings as you would imagine.",
"There are a lot of cynical answers here about decorative gardens bring a status symbol/ people confirming to the standards of society. However, I think the answer is much simpler than that: people like flowers and decorative plants. I like looking at the front of my home and thinking, \"Wow, this looks just like I always imagined it.\" I don't think of how others will view the house -- I'm just glad that the work I put into the garden paid off for me. Also, vegetables are readily available at the store. You can save a little money by planting your item vegetables, but what if you still want flowers? Potted flowers are harder to take care of (in my opinion, at least), and if you don't like the look of them in a pot you're out of luck. People are entitled to do to their yards what will make them happy. We don't have to conform to the most efficient standard, and doing what's economically a little beneficial does not mean you're doing what's most mentally beneficial. If you want to plant a vegetable garden in your front lawn, you're free to do so (so long as you're not breaking any laws). Other people do not have to justify to you their difference of opinion on how they should utilize their yard. Edit: I definitely misread the question as having an angrier tone than it really does. I apologize for the angry tone of my response to it.",
"Aussie also. It's entirely cultural. The front yard/front facade of a home is essentially a status symbol \"look at how well I'm doing\". So people don't tend to think fruit and veg convey that message. Most people see you grow your own stuff and think \"they're either poor or hipsters\".",
"I'm in USA without an HOA. There vast majority have their fruit/veggies in the backyard, though some in my neighborhood have a couple veggies up front. I think it has more to do with fencing in the backyard that can protect the garden from pests. Fencing in the front yard is more restrictive per ordinance as opposed to the backyard. You have to have some protection from squirrels, rabbits and raccoons here or they'll destroy. Most people have a water spigot in the back, not necessarily the front. Old people in my neighborhood have been known to steal a couple flowers out of people's front yard, I'd assume they could sneak a couple tomatoes if you had it out front. Most houses have more open land in the back as opposed to the front as utilities come in from the street. Don't want to put your garden down where the gas line comes in. Also, for re-sale, most people want a clean \"curbside appeal\" photo.",
"UK here, I wouldn't plant consumables in the front because of potential traffic fumes, and also in case they got stolen.",
"Two thoughts: A lot of people just can't be bothered growing vegetables - they don't look pretty, they take a lot of work and it is much easier just buying food from a supermarket. The front garden and facade of your house is your 'advert' to everyone walking past - to have a nice garden of flowers without any real practical need is a display that you are affluent enough to afford to grow plants, and are willing to spend the money/effort to care for them. Crop plants, being typically less pretty, and requiring more 'ugly' help like protective netting to prevent animals just don't work as a display piece, so are often hidden around the back where they can be tended to in peace without worrying that you have left a bundle of canes and a wheelbarrow laying out...",
"I imagine if you grew in your front garden people would be more tempted to rook your harvest.",
"Because the front of the house is the side that most people will see. Naturally, it will also be the most decorated.",
"Geez, everyone here live in hot climates? Canadian here. Our prime growing season is like 3 months long. Gardens look nice and are productive for about two of those months, the rest of the time they’re either covered in snow, or mushy bogs of mud and mulch. Weeds and grasses thrive in chilly wet weather far better than a lot of food crops do. There’s a reason my province’s main crops are carrots, potatoes, and onions, our weather sucks for a lot of crops that require consistent hot damp weather. People are starting to plant wild prairie heritage grasses and local wild flowers, because they last through the winter and then come back strong and full in early spring when the bees and butterflies need them. Occasionally people will plant food crops, but raised planters are favored over just letting your whole lawn be a garden.",
"Most veggies are delicious to the deer and rabbits in my neighborhood, so they're planted out back behind a fence where my dogs sometimes hang out. Few vegetables look good year-round. My shrubs and perennials do. Sometimes you have to cover your vegetables - early spring for warmth, occasionally in the summer if you're getting three or four days of heavy storms - and nobody wants a sea of plastic sheeting in their front yard.",
"Yeah I'm one of the minority then. We have our veggie patches and raised beds in the front yard. We also have flowers and other decorative plants mixed among it as well. We're still in the process of making it all look nice but for now at least we have a big fence to hide it from the street",
"I think if you grow edible foods then you open yourself up to animals and strangers coming into your yard?",
"I'm a professional landscaper who lives in Florida and I'm not sure it's the same world wide, but I can tell you a few reasons why \"ornamentals\" are planted as opposed to \"edibles\". The first reason is here in the USA, there are both commercial and residential applications for planting ornamentals and that is mostly for beauty and color, but also for natural coverage and sound barriers from the busy highways or streets. The second reason I believe most homes and businesses plant ornamentals, and that is; it's beautiful too look at to the passerby and it sustains the economy. As a landscaper I know when I plant or trim something it will grow back and I will return to maintain this plant or shrub again. This is how landscapers make most of their money, the growth cycle. Things that are trimmed grow back and I find myself there to trim or prune time and time again. Also, I believe the FDA has a bit of a strangle hold on our fruit and vegetable supply. There was a time in Florida, when a citrus disease became prevalent and Floridas citrus industry was at stake, a representative from the state would come and chop down your citrus tree and give you a 2 gallon plant to replace it. As we know this will not produce fruits for another 8 years at least. I think the FDA is afraid of a self sustaining society and fruits and veggies growing in every yard because that would hurt their economic growth in that sector.",
"Modern Society in the US says your house should be pretty, have a nice manicured yard, and look like we expect it to. This image of your house having a nice flower garden out front, and larger back yard, started back in the day when houses were built very close to the road with much larger back yards, or fields behind it, and never changed. Vegetable gardens are not status symbols or pretty Gardens are generally hidden behind houses now because that is normal. The same reason sheds are in the back yard normally, pools, etc. The front is to show off for other people, the back yard is for you. The fallacy that a home garden is not useful for anything more then Salsa isn't accurate. Using front gardens as veggie gardens would be an excellent transformation, that would actually really help and get people eating more fresh produce. A well maintained garden that is 20' x 20' or so would go a long way to helping feed a family of 4 through the majority of the year. Some veggies like beans, peas, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, etc have a fairly long season of production. and produce an abundance of produce, but it takes a lot of work to maintain... society has no need for this now, as you can buy the items from the grocery store at will. When you realize that peppers and cucumbers sell for 1.00 each or so at the store, and each plant can easily produce a dozen, it starts making more sense to grow as much as you can at home",
"Good question, growing vegetables is very rewarding. I was so happy when I picked 20 ghost peppers.",
"I live in London. I don't have a front garden but if I did I wouldn't plant vegetables there because they would either get stolen or trashed by drunk kids coming home after a night out.",
"It's an awesome idea if everyone did it, and everyone in a street planted different stuff and it was open season on eachothers harvest if grown in the front yard. Free fruit and salad for everyone !",
"Planting fruit trees is very common (in Perth atleast) many place the in the back because they block street view, take a lot of care, and people like to go into people's yards and take fruit from the tree",
"Because growing food is hard work, and unless you are a full time farmer with a lot of land, not a great way to supplement your food intake. A commercial farming operation can grow better food far more cheaply than you can. You are better using that effort to focus on your job, and buy food from a farmer. Unless you are doing it for fun, then it is just another hobby.",
"I’ve walked through some more remote villages in Mediterranean countries and seen fruit and vegetable patches in front gardens. These were places where people were growing food to eat, and perhaps even to sell (on a small scale) not just as a hobby. I guess that either their front garden was better suited for growing food, or they had planted up both areas. And I guess they didn’t mind their neighbours knowing that.",
"It's just cultural. I'm an American, but I tend to dabble in utility plants. So I have some ornamentals that grow along the path to my front door. Otherwise it's just grass out front (rental so we cannot do too much) except for a round raised planter in the yard. Currently there is aloe and a lime tree that were there when we moved in. But I often plant tobacco plants in there. Which most people think are beautiful but have no idea what it is."
],
"score": [
228,
175,
81,
76,
63,
54,
21,
19,
11,
9,
5,
4,
4,
4,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
750gov | What causes us to like/dislike certain tastes? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2j9d4"
],
"text": [
"Well, your problem with mint might be a bad example because it contains ethereal oils and those can cause allergies or irritate sensitive tissue in some people, so your reaction probably isn't just due to taste. I'm not quite certain, but as far as I know, your taste often depends on your body's needs. I've read that people with iron deficiency tend to like the taste of blood because blood contains a lot of iron. Following that logic: if you're low on blood sugar, you might want something sweet, salt plays a role in blood pressure, your want for sour foods may depend on your pH levels and so on. Of course nowadays our taste buds are often tricked by additives, either changing taste or with addictive effects on the brain. And sugar for example was only available as longer-chained carbohydrates, with much slower and more controlled blood sugar rise. So trusting only your taste to tell you what your body needs doesn't really work anymore."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
750nwc | How I'm productive at the library as opposed to being lazy and drowsy at home? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2jdk4"
],
"text": [
"Less distractions I guess and simply the act of \"going to the library\" forces you to change the way you're thinking about how you are going to spend your time. I had a similar thing in regards to working out at home vs working out at a gym. Much more productive at a gym."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7511i1 | how can you lift heavier than you weigh | I know you can, but I just don't understand how people can lift three times their body weight. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2m7sf"
],
"text": [
"Think of it more mechnically. A car jack can lift a car, despite weighing distinctly less. While strength is often proportional to weight, it's not limited by it. A combination of the materials we're made up of, the stresses they can bear, and the leverage we can create, influences what we can lift."
],
"score": [
12
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7515he | Usage of muscles and broken bones recover stronger, why does muscle, ligament and tissue damage recover weaker? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2oi2u",
"do2rkpb",
"do2xt60",
"do2qxb5",
"do2uae7"
],
"text": [
"Doesn't muscle recover stronger? I mean, isn't that how you get big muscles?",
"As a rule of thumb, if it bleeds, then it can heal to some degree. Also, tissues in the body generally heal using the same four steps: 1. Hemostasis. It is bleeding and the body sends stuff to stop the bleeding. 2. Inflammation. The body is in alert mode and sends stuff to the injury that will stop infection, clean up junk in the injured area, and generally kickstart the healing process. Without this stage, healing doesn't happen, so in the short term inflammation is a good thing. 3. Proliferation. Basically the stage when the body lays down the raw materials for the injured area to heal. Lots of collagen gets layed down here. If you snip a rubber band partially and keep pulling on it, it will continue to tear. If you somehow connect the torn edges, the tearing stops because the force on the uninjured tissue is reduced. Similar to what is going on here. 4. Maturation. This is the fine tuning stage. Cells that don't need to be there anymore go away or die. The collagen gets stronger by getting aligned with the lines of tension. Bones heal as strong as they were before the injury because your body lays down new bone. However, it can take a long time for bones to get back to full strength because of the structure of the newly laid bone. Your body is always breaking down bone and building it up to some extent, so it takes time for it to remodel into the strongest structure. Remember though, if it doesn't bleed it usually doesn't heal well, so there are some commonly fractured bones that don't heal well and often require surgical intervention. Ligaments usually don't have good blood supply, so they don't heal particularly well. Muscle has very good blood supply, so it bleeds when injured (this is why you often see bruising after significant strains). However, your body doesn't lay down new muscle tissue where the injury occurred. Instead, it lays down collagen in a fairly unorganized way. So at first during healing, the healing tissue is still very weak. As time passes, the new collagen changes into a more organized structure that aligns better with the line of pull of the muscle. When it is aligned better, it is stronger. Previously injured muscle won't be as strong as uninjured muscle (all other factors being kept the same) Tendon is similar to muscle, except a bit less blood supply. All of the same mechanisms of healing apply still. Injured tendon will also not be able to take as much load as uninjured tendon (all other factors being kept the same) Skin follows the rules as well. Generally it won't be as strong as before either. Now, when we talk about \"strength\" I'm not talking about how much weight it can move. I am talking about how much load it can take. Muscles, tendons, and ligaments generally are injured through high tensile loading (like pulling a rubber band apart). So when I say they aren't as strong as before I mean they can't be pulled on as hard as before or they will reinjure. It is still possible for someone with an injured muscle or tendon to physically be able to move more weight than before their injury because they can continue to train the healthy tissue.",
"Bones form callus which is thicker and stronger. Soft tissue heals with scar tissue which is weaker and less flexible. The answer above goes into detail and research has shown that 75% is about as good as it gets after soft tissue injury. So, for all of you who have been in a motor vehicle accident and didn't do therapy afterwards, the soft tissue strength can be as low as 50% of its original value. Once it's injured, it is far more likely to be reinjured in the future.",
"If we put this all into the context of pathological damage, muscle tearing (aka muscle strains), are actually detrimental to muscle function over time. Whereas bone breaks are repaired using the same materials they are originally made of (the organization of mineral deposits, calcium, phosphorus ect.), they get stronger due to the bone callus that forms over a typical fracture. When we injure muscle, tendon, or ligament, you are repairing that damaged tissue with a lesser material, scar tissue. Scar tissue is weaker than the tissues it is meant to repair, because of their different organization of tensile fibers. A muscle full of scar tissue has reduced function, whereas resistance training does not cause scar tissue accumulation, to a similar degree as muscle strains. Same rule applies to tendons and ligaments.",
"Hi, So there are two different principles at work here. 1. When you use a muscle or a bone you are using actin-myosin proteins which help with the strength of a muscle contraction. When you use them however you \"break them\" and your body recruits builds new ones. It will build them such that they won't \"break\" under the same amount of force the next time you use them. That's what is meant by \"tearing/breaking\" your muscles during usage. There is no actual tissue tearing. 2. When you have tissue damage in skeletal muscle and connective tissue there is actual tissue damage. Skeletal muscle are actually cells so I'll talk about them (since connective tissue isn't actually majorly comprised of cells). Skeletal muscle is known as a \"permanent\" tissue, so it can't regenerate, i.e the cells cant replacement themselves back to their normal levels. Instead your body \"repairs\" them by putting in new fibrous scar tissue. Which isn't as strong as the old muscle and doesn't have the same contraction ability. Hope that helps, I know this is ELI5 and this is the best I could do without going into more detail."
],
"score": [
84,
68,
6,
4,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7517pn | How are Nuclear Missiles Safely Decommissioned? | Say during a nuclear arms treaty that states reduces the number of nukes they can have. How exactly are the nukes 'disarmed'? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2ovqv",
"do2pvgb",
"do2nwij",
"do2xvxf",
"do2to5d",
"do2v2jo",
"do3r9fl",
"do3fydu"
],
"text": [
"Nuclear warheads fitted to ICBM's and SLBM's are not really warheads in the same sense as an artillery round. They are in fact a small and complex machine fitted inside a heat resistant and aerodynamic shell. It might be easier to think of them as miniature spacecraft. One nuclear missile will carry several warheads and they will seperate to attack different targets or the same target multiple times. These are called MIRV or Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicle. Because they are basically machines, they are designed to be taken apart and maintained. The pit or the nuclear element of the warhead is just one component. It can be removed and in fact very often is removed from the warhead for things like testing (Where it is replaced by an inert device) and routine maintenance. The decommissioning process varies depending on the terms of the treaty. In some cases it is simply a case of reducing the number of MIRV's the missile carries say from 12 to 8. If physical removal is required it is a case of removing the nuclear element of the warhead and putting it into storage or use as a fuel, while recycling or destroying the components of the MIRV. The missiles themselves are rarely destroyed in entirety, they or their components often have useful secondary peaceful applications. There are a number of common misconceptions about ICBM's, SLBM's and nuclear warheads and their MIRV delivery system. One is that their guidance components use GPS to guide them into their targets. This is in fact not true. These missiles must reach their target and relying on GPS might harm their chances of that happening if the GPS system where to be attacked. So the majority of ICBM/SLBM use celestial navigation (The positions of the stars) to guide them into their targets. They don't have to be super accurate. A circular error of probability of half a mile is acceptable. Russian missiles used to have massive payloads to make up for their less accurate guidance systems. It really doesn't matter if your off target by 3 miles if you ramp up the explosive power by 10 megatons! For this reason you will often see US missiles use smaller warheads than their russian counterparts. Another common misconception is that the warheads have some communication component that offers an ability to communicate with it after launch and give a recall or cancellation ability, so if a missile is fired in some sort of accidental launch scenario it can be communicated with and made inert or to blow itself up without going nuclear. This is also not true and is a myth perpetrated by Hollywood. The risks of an enemy finding out how to communicate with the missile and destroy it would be too great. These weapons are designed to be the ultimate and last deterrent. The missile, once fired, communicates with nothing and no-one. It is a self contained system that once the button has been pressed, will carry out it's mission to it's final horrifying end unless it is somehow intercepted externally. --- EDIT: Clarified decommissioning process and celestial navigation and the fact I may not have mentioned inertial guidance clearly enough. To clarify the correct term is astro-inertial guidance in that the \"majority\" of ICBM's and SLBM's (Lest we not forget the US developed versions are not the only types of these horrific weapons) use both, with inertial guidance being responsible for initial and re-entry guidance and celestial for mid course correction. So celestial navigation is the tracking of your position by looking at where you are in relation to the stars, because where you are and the time of day defines what you can see and where they should be in the night sky. It's not an overly complex skill and we have been doing it for a very long time. It's kind of fallen out of use in these days of GPS. Ships at sea would use a sextant to help them plot their position relative to the time of the day and the position of the stars which was why getting accurate clocks on board ships was such a big deal many years ago. In fact the earliest Boeing 747 aircraft had a porthole in their cockpit roofs to allow the crew to use celestial navigation should the need arise! Obviously celestial navigation is of more use at night and in good weather if your on the ground, but ICBM's and SLBM's don't need to worry about this as within the space of about 30 seconds they are high enough to begin using it without either of these concerns as they use inertial guidance in their initial launch. The missile and MIRV's basically have a digital version of a sextant on board. If you would like to see a vaguely similar approximation of how they work, I suggest you download the [Sky app \\(Formerly Google Sky\\)]( URL_0 ), which allows you to use your phone to plot the stars in the sky (Though Google augments this with GPS data so they cheat a little bit).",
"Simplifying what others have said; 1) remove component warhead parts and break down further. The radioactive material is often reprocessed into the nuclear power industry. 2) remove fuel component from missile. Liquid fuelled missiles are typically only fuelled just prior to launch. Solid fuel missiles are a little more complicated. Rocket fuel can be rather toxic depending upon the type. 3) missile body is then often cut up and left exposed to satellite observation, or observers from the opposite side of the treaty are there watching the destruction processes. Sometimes both. 4) the silos/ mobile launchers can also be destroyed depending upon the treaty. Observers & satellites monitor this. When Kazakhstan became nuclear free the US and Russians were present on the ground. The warheads went back to Russia and monitored into the nuclear fuel industry. The silos were systemically destroyed, with additional work undertaken every ~6 months. I have photos of several of the Kazak silos going through phased destruction back in the mid to late '90's.",
"Nuclear weapons were designed to be maintained (fixed). So most of the device is taken apart. The one thing that was not really designed to be fixed is the \"pit\" made of dangerously radioactive material and high explosive sometimes literally glued to the pit. You can use cold to make the explosive brittle and crack it off or use solvents to dissolve it over time. Once you have the pit, you can recycle it to other nuclear devices or mix it with lower quality material and use it in nuclear reactors.",
"There are really two issues here. One is the dismantling — taking things apart. The other is verification — proving to the other party or parties that you did really take things apart, and aren't just lying about it. The latter is just as important for treaties as the former. As for taking them apart, it is neither as easy nor as hard as one might imagine. Nuclear warheads, and nuclear missiles, and nuclear silos, are all just complex machines. They have many parts. They were not built with the intention of making it easy to take them apart (it isn't just a matter of using a screwdriver), but you can take them apart. Nuclear warheads are disassembled in \"[gravel gertie]( URL_0 )\" containment bays that make it so that if something goes seriously wrong — e.g., their high explosives detonate — contamination will be limited (gravel will collapse onto it, holding in any scattered plutonium, etc.). The missiles themselves can be de-fueled and then disassembled in pieces. It isn't significantly different than deconstructing any other device that contains some dangerous or toxic parts. The warhead is probably the most difficult thing to take apart because it contains toxic, radioactive, and volatile (explosive) components, but they develop procedures for doing it and have been doing it for years. OK, so how do you verify that you've done it? Most treaties focus only on the disassembly of delivery vehicles, e.g., the planes, missiles, or submarines. Proving you took those apart is relatively straightforward: they are large enough to be seen by satellites so you can just destroy the thing in question in a relatively \"public way.\" For airplanes this is particularly striking: the [\"boneyards\"]( URL_2 ) of retired planes, which are just rusting outside, some of which have been \"guillotined\" with massive blades. Submarines can be taken apart in dry dock, silos can be decommissioned and destroyed, etc. Each \"side\" has people whose job it is to count up such activities, and so you can get a pretty good tally of what each side has or hasn't. In a world of ubiquitous satellite coverage, you just don't have states being able to field large numbers of ICBMs or even submarines without it being noticed. None of the treaties currently limit the number of total warheads in a stockpile (they limit the number of _deployed_ warheads which is more a question of delivery vehicles than actual warheads). The question of \"counting warheads\" actually presents really tricky technical aspects that have been recognized for some time. The US and Russia are not willing to share information on how their warheads work with one another. If they were, it would just be a matter of disassembling the warhead while someone else watched. Because they want to keep it secret, all sorts of counting problems are involved. Let's say I am monitoring Russian warhead dismantlement. They show me a box and say, \"there's a warhead in there.\" They take it inside their dismantlement facility, then say they took it apart. They might show me another set of boxes and say, \"here are the parts from that warhead.\" How do I know that any of that is true? How do I know the box isn't just filled with lead? How do I know they haven't just squirreled the warhead out the back of the facility? There aren't easy answers here. There are some interesting technical approaches to being able to verify that the box contains a warhead without learning anything about the warhead's design. [You can read about some of them here if you are interested in more details]( URL_1 ), but they are essentially similar to creating a \"one-way hash\" of a 3D, physical object, e.g., something that lets you verify it is \"X\" without being able to see what the \"X\" actually is on the inside. It is not clear we will ever have treaties that put firm limits on warhead counts, it is not clear it is even necessary (if you can't deliver the warhead, who cares?), but the work is being done under the assumption that maybe, someday, there will be political will to do such a thing, and if that day comes, it would be nice to have worked out all of the technical aspects ahead of time, so they don't become a stumbling block.",
"The biggest component of disarming a nuke is realizing that they're damn near impossible to set off. A nuclear explosion requires very precise timing of reactions to take place.",
"There's disarming the missile, which is removing the solid rocket fuel and recycling the aluminum skin. Then there's disassembly of the warhead. As others point out, that is done by separating the electronics package from the high explosive (which is burned) and taking out the nuclear pit. It would be stored, or mixed with lower concentration U-238. The US does all warhead disassembly at the Pantex plant near Amarillo. Fissile material is stored at Y-12 in Oak Ridge. URL_0",
"A small departure here... Maintenance is a serious business. For those not familiar with the accident in Damascus, AK in 1980 you should check out the PBS documentary that shows how a dropped socket caused a fire and eventual explosion that ejected a 9 megaton nuclear package. URL_0",
"Making it very short, they're handled in two ways: First, the warheads are removed and stored at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico. Specifically, in [this massive bunker.]( URL_0 ) Fun fact: they're not really dismantled for the most part, they just sit in cold storage under observation. Next, the delivery system (missile, bomb, cruise missile, airplane, etc.) are destroyed in a way that makes them impossible to reuse. Airplanes get cut in half — like [these ones]( URL_1 ), in Arizona. Missile launch positions get blown up or filled with concrete. Finally, the warheads are trucked to Texas. Disassembly occurs in a plant there. Once the batteries are disconnected, a nuclear weapon is basically impossible to set off, and becomes much easier to disassemble. The conventional explosives are separated from the nuclear components. Most of the parts are simply stored separately, as they're specialized enough to be incredibly useful to say, a rogue state looking for more information on how to construct a weapon."
],
"score": [
2977,
233,
80,
68,
23,
9,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid&hl=en"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://wordpress.mrreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gravel-gertie.jpg",
"https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-virtues-of-nuclear-ignorance",
"http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01583/planes-big_1583925a.jpg"
],
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantex_Plant?wprov=sfti1"
],
[
"http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/command-and-control/"
],
[
"https://www.google.com/maps/place/35°02'25.0%22N+106°36'33.0%22W/@35.0105695,-106.5507132,955m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d35.040278!4d-106.609167?hl=en",
"https://goo.gl/maps/PBDjAe3b57P2"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
751eye | Wine and food combinations | I've never really understood how to combine food and wine to get a good result, could anyone explain it to me? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2oq76"
],
"text": [
"Like most things to do with wine, it's a fiddly sort of thing that isn't easy to pin down exactly. What it boils down to is finding flavours that work together, and that don't interrupt each other: if you're spending money on a decent bottle of wine, you don't want to pair it with something so rich or flavourful that you can't enjoy it for itself. Likewise, if you've been slaving over a hot stove for hours, you don't want a wine that's so strongly-flavoured that it obstructs the taste of the meal. Generally speaking, though -- and in really simple terms: * White wines go with something light. If you're serving fish or chicken or pasta with a pale sauce (that is, cream or oil based) then I'd stick with a crisp white. Personally, recently I'm all about [pasta aglio e oglio]( URL_0 ) with a roast chicken thigh and a nice, chilled-almost-to-frozen vinho verde. Red wines tend to go with your heavier, darker meats: steak, lamb, rich tomato-based pasta sauces. * In a lot of cases, it's the sauce that makes the difference as to what you should pair with it. If you've got a pork in a more delicate sauce (mushrooms, brandy, cream, that sort of thing), I'd generally go for a slightly fuller white; if you're serving coq au vin, for example, you might like to go for a red wine despite the fact that chicken is normally considered a white-wine meat. Then again, ultimately it's a taste thing. I don't care for red wine, so I wouldn't drink it even if I'd ordered the thickest slab of beef on the menu; in that case, I'd go for either a beer or a tempranillo rosé (look in the bottle when you're at the store; rosés come in a variety of shades, and darker colours generally mean a fuller flavour, but without that tannin or oaky flavour that a lot of people find offputting in a red). Good advice is to get a bunch of those little taster bottles of wine (or full bottles, if you're feeling adventurous or have a bunch of friends), and just try stuff out. Get some people around, cook some food, and experiment with what works for you and what doesn't. Food is for enjoyment, and the best arbiter of what you enjoy is... well, you."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJUiWdM__Qw"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
751gfc | what exactly is an algorithm and how is the algorithm for detecting fake news on Facebook failing? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2oh35"
],
"text": [
"An algorithm is basically a recipe to solving a certain problem. The problem can be something like \"what's the quickest way from point A to point B\", \"how to calculate digits of pi\" or \"how to tell a real news story from a fake one\". In actuality an algorithm is a list of steps that are needed in order to solve the problem, i.e. they describe what a computer program needs to do. Unlike an actual computer program, the algorithm doesn't have to deal with specifics such as how the user enters the input to the problem or how exactly the problem will be represented in the computer's memory. A good analogy for an algorithm is a recipe: a list of general instructions on how to cook something (heat up oven, mix certain ingredients, etc.) When we say \"the algorithm is failing\" it simply means that the program that was written to implement this algorithm is failing to do its job correctly. So in this case, Facebook's program fails to properly detect fake news and separate them from real news."
],
"score": [
9
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
751is6 | eSIM, the tech behind Google Fi | Read this [article]( URL_0 ) which says how Pixel 2 is equipped with eSIM and would be able seamlessly switch between networks, thanks to Google Fi project. How does this eSIM works in real? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2so0a"
],
"text": [
"At the heart of it, a SIM card is basically a unique identifier that is used to tie your account to a device. Your SIM card is actually just a number that boils down to something like this... FG567-56721-65431-124AB-1212Z That's not the exact format of a SIM identifier because they differ from country to country, network to network but you get the idea. The SIM card contains the identifier and some secondary data needed to encrypt your call. Now the reason SIM cards have shrunk over the years into the nano-sim format used in modern smartphones is because in years gone by, people would also store their contacts and some other small bits of information on them. This does not happen any more so they have been able to shrink it's size. Also, people realized the protective board size was superfluous to requirements. Did you know the reason SIM cards arrive in those credit sized cards you pop them out of is because originally, that's how big SIM cards actually where! The whole card would be put into the phone! They no longer do this but to conform to the GSM specification, they need to be able to fit into all sizes of GSM phone, despite the last phone to use credit card sized SIM's disappearing many years ago. Some time ago people looked at CDMA phones, some of which have never required a SIM card because they use a unique identifier built into the phone itself, and thought \"Well why not do the same thing with GSM phones\". The idea of the SIM card was portability, you could take a SIM out of one device, put it into another and have swapped devices or networks in seconds. However at the end of the day it's still just a physical component that carries a piece of information. A piece of information that could also be entered via a barcode. So e-sim was born. Instead of putting a card into the device that then reads the data from it, the phone has a fixed storage area and a unique identifier (Known as it's IMEI code) for the data that you input either by hand or by scanning a barcode or the network can push to you once it sees the device IMEI code trying to register on the network. The advantages are many... * You can flip between networks at the touch of a on screen button or even automatically instead of searching for paperclips and swapping fiddly small components. * Makes multi sim phones easier to implement so you can have two or three networks active at once (Hardware permitting). * Makes call distribution a bit easier. * Devices can be smaller and more waterproof as there's no longer a need to fit a physical tray and the access needed for the sim card to be put into the phone. And a whole host of other advantages. Of course, there are claims that it will make cloning easier to do and less technologically savvy people will find it harder to implement but both these claims are just rubbish really. The simplest way to think of it is a SIM card that is built into your phone and not removable, but now it's rewritable with a new networks info!"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
751l54 | How can colleges see what you post on social media if you are private? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2pooe",
"do2rtsn",
"do2qy41",
"do2rq62",
"do2qx2e",
"do2qwys"
],
"text": [
"They can't. But a ton of people either don't make their stuff private, or add the college account to their friends on social media.",
"To be specific... you can keep all your posts private except your name and profile photo and cover photo. But if you post a comment or photo on someone else's post, they control the privacy of what you wrote or posted. If one of your friends \"Share\" your post, it won't make it public—you still control the privacy on that. But any of your friends can download (or screenshot) and re-post your photos and comments and they can make them public. Another thing... about public accounts that you follow... if you \"like\" a public post or comment on it, there is a good chance that post will appear on your friends' newsfeeds stating that you liked it or commented on it. If you want to see what others can see on your page, go to your page and under your cover photo, in the white box that says, \"View Activity Log\", click the three dots next to that to View As any person (select which person at the top of the page.) Then take some time to back and change the privacy of all your posts and photos (that you don't mind if anyone ever sees) to Friends only and delete everything else.",
"People are dumb. I post on FB a lot - mostly family pictures - my account is on lock down - all you can see is my name if I don’t friend you. Many of my colleagues, teachers, make up fake versions of their name (middle/maiden/random words) to prevent students from finding their pages. Simply because they don’t understand their security settings. In general though, grow up, once you leave college and start a job search - save your drunken pictures to a flash drive and remove them from your social media accounts.",
"Your 'friends' in this closed facebook page, throw you under the bus. I work in a university and I get anonymous screen shots sent to me all the time. Well at least once a month.",
"What you post is private. What others share, copy and paste, screenshot, or repost is only as private as they choose to make it. Nothing is private, my man. Ask anyone who has found that out the hard way.",
"Unless you’re going to a highly competitive college they often couldn’t care less and won’t waste a second checking your social media. Employers though, they definitely check."
],
"score": [
149,
71,
61,
35,
21,
7
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
751ph7 | What's the subconscious drive that gets you motivated to do something your conscious brain doesn't want to do? | Like when you're about to start the last rep or you need to get up and do laundry and you consciously think to yourself "I don't want to do this, I'm tired" but then your body autopilot starts doing the task like starting that final set and you think "oh screw it" and bang it out. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2rqx5"
],
"text": [
"Humans have an instinct side, this decisions are made without our \"permissions\" and it represents what our reptilian side of the brain does. The reptilian side of our brain represents our primary survival function. Your heart, lungs and other parts of the body survive thanks to this. This is the primitive side of the brain; it is involuntary, impulsive, and compulsive and it responds like any animal on danger: 1) fight response, 2) flight response, or the 3) freeze response. Since the main goal of this part of the brain is survival, sometimes your body reacts over certain actions. From a natural perspective, if you see a Tiger in front of you ready to attack you, pretty sure your brain will trigger in automatically and run(flight response). This was a very basic example, but in First World Problems, you can generate these with other dangers such as \"If I don't do my laundry now, I won't have a dress shirt and I am going to get fired from work and I won't have money and I will starve\"."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
751qnk | How does coding actually work? | So, from what I understand a code is a line of instructions that build websites, games, programmes on computers etc. To do this you use a coding programme. That coding programme will have been built with a code, using a coding programme. That coding programme would have also been built with a code using a coding programme - right? So where does the coding begin? How does it start? I'm so confused. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2uujw",
"do2qfbu",
"do2qxdi"
],
"text": [
"Here is my explanation, from a computer engineering perspective. Sorry about the wall of text, hopefully it's helpful. Reducing it all the way down, code maps to transistors. Think of transistors like little on/off switches in a circuit. Applying electricity in the right way lets you flip this switch as desired. We can cram a ton of transistors into a microchip, and modern computers have billions of these things. So, how do transistors help us do anything? The answer is related to the lowest level of computer code...binary code, the 0s and 1s. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit. Each bit represents the on/off status of some physical transistors. It probably still isn't evident how that helps anything, though. The first big advantage of having all these little switches, is that we can use them to do stuff that requires logic. Boolean algebra is a type of algebra used to represent logic, where variables are true or false (1 or 0). Using this tool, you can basically map out any logical rules, like...if this thing happens, do this other thing. This mapping is really what computer programs are, a big set of logical rules used to compute stuff. The other big advantage of using transistors is that we can also represent numbers using just bunch of 0s and 1s. Think about the normal numbers we use, and how everything is based on the number 10. Binary numbers work on a similar way, but everything is based on the number two. The details aren't really important, but the point is that we can use a sequence of binary values to represent a standard number, like 10101010=170. Any computer program is built up by combining logic and numbers in useful ways. A microprocessor has some simple little programs to help you out, called an instruction set. These take care of stuff like adding, multiplying, etc. You make programs at this level using the instruction set, but it's very painful (some people enjoy it, but I'm not one of them). It's also hard to make complex programs, because combining all these simple operations in the correct way gets complicated fast. This is where programming languages come in. To greatly oversimplify it, you can think of a programming language as a collection of rules and programs that make your life easier when trying to create a new program. The language takes care of all the low level stuff, so you don't have to. Creating code at the machine level vs using a higher level language is kind of like trying to swim across an ocean vs. using a boat. Sure, you might theoretically be able to do it, but you are much better off taking the boat to avoid drowning. Programming languages can vary quite a lot on how far they take you away from the machine level stuff. Nowadays, you can be a very proficient programmer while knowing very little about what the machine is doing at a fundamental level. That's a good thing really. I think this is also something that probably doesn't occur to people outside tech, that hardware and software have diverged enough to be separate skills. In the old days, they were really the same thing. Bottom line, code is just a tool we use to share and store ways to flip switches for some purpose. Fortunately, lots of smart people figured out the code for commonly needed tools and combined them into programming languages. This allows us to build onto code others have already made and avoid re-inventing the wheel every time we make a new program.",
"Coding programs translate the code you put into it to 'machine code' (this may not be the correct terminology but I think it is). Machine code is the code the motherboard understands. Motherboards respond to the code given to them by moving around electrons through transistors and whatever other electrical stuff makes up the computer, which gives the outcome we asked for. Coding programs is just like a translator. Translating from one language we understand, to another the motherboard understands. You can program in machine code, but it is a lot more complicated than other coding languages (this is how you create coding languages, connect up machine code to the coding language similar to connecting up the word 'hello' across different languages). Which is why coding languages exist, to make it easier to code stuff. Because machine code naturally isn't easy to understand, I'm pretty sure it's just a sequence of 0 and 1's, or binary. Reading a sequence of 0 and 1's is meaningless to a human, but coding languages all have dicationary words which we understand even if we know nothing about coding.",
"Computers can't really do very complicated things. They can just do very simple things very quickly. By doing very simple things very quickly they take on the appearance of doing complicated things in real time. The kind of things a computer can do are:. Moving data. Saving data. Adding data. Incrementing data. Deleting data. Now say we want to do something else. Something like multiplying. A computer will likely do multiplying by adding lots of times. So 3 times 8 becomes 8 + 8 + 8. We can call this new procedure \"multiply\" and let a human use it to save time. You are now starting to move away from what the computer is actually doing and instead devising a way of representing computer language in a higher level language. Next you might want to have a way of representing how we do percentage calculations. The calculation at human level is current quantity/total quantity * 100. At machine level this will be a complex series of additions, moves, saves etc. But now you are starting to create the building blocks of a high level language. We can do this for all the normal functions you might want to use: percent; mean; highest value; etc; etc. Now we hand over all the building blocks to a person, a programmer. Now that programmer wants to create an application to work out tax on a salary. He already has a percent function but in this language he doesn't have a tax function. So we let him build his own set of instructions based on the higher level instructions we created for him in the last paragraph. The programmer goes away and writes a function that takes a salary and returns the tax to be paid. Now this is still a series of adds, moves, saves and swaps but it is hugely more complex than than just the multiplication function that we initially started with. So we let him name his function so he can use it again. That's pretty much it in a nutshell."
],
"score": [
8,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
751ro0 | The location methods used by explorers like Columbus to record their findings and navigate home | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2qnew"
],
"text": [
"[Columbus was the first sailor who kept a detailed log of his voyages. We therefore know how Columbus navigated, and that he was a dead reckoning navigator. On the first voyage westbound, Columbus sticks to his (magnetic) westward course for weeks at a time. Only three times does Columbus depart from this course: once because of contrary winds, and twice to chase false signs of land southwest.]( URL_0 ) Columbus made very good time on some days of his voyage, as good as sailing vessels achieve."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/navigation.htm"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
751sdn | Why does resetting my phone often fix bad signal strength? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2qnnk",
"do3ncz8",
"do38quc"
],
"text": [
"Doing a reset wipes the cache files. These can cause random software issue. In the case of signal, resetting the phone forces it to restart searching for signal.",
"1. When restarting your phone, or toggling airplane mode on or off, it causes your phone to search for a tower and establish a new session 2. Based on where you are and the primary provider in your region, you may be triggering QoS policies to apply to your session which downgrade your data to a lesser service which has differently tilted and aimed antennas. When you reconnect to the service, the QoS policy resets or other events cause your traffic to return to a normal priority. This is common for when you are dropped from LTE to 3G/EVDO. A lot of carriers will downgrade competition's customers to make room for their own customers. For example, if AT & T has 97 customers on a tower and 5 Verizon customers attempt to join, three of the sessions will remain at LTE while the other 2 will be 3G/EVDO. 3. The firmware which controls the antenna and connectivity portion of your phone may have experienced resource issues or a software bug. 4. Your phone's operating system may have experienced resource issues or a software bug 5. You live or travel through a location where two or more towers are aimed at and your session is improperly being handed off.",
"It will renegotiate with the closest tower as well. It is possible you will pick up off a different tower."
],
"score": [
13,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
751vcj | Why do we eat snails (escargot), but not slugs? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2ru17",
"do2r9i9",
"do2r880"
],
"text": [
"Slugs are eaten all over the world. There was a small town in Italy that had a slug eating festival at one point, slugs have been used as folk remedies for things like TB or a persistent cough, etc. The reason snails are chosen over slugs is that slugs are slightly bitter and the slime is harder to remove during the cooking process (requires vinegar, which further alters the flavor and texture). Snails have the shell, which is actually very useful during the cooking process, as the butter can get inside and marinate the snail while it cooks.",
"I've heard it has to do with what they eat. Snails usually have a plant based diet and slugs will go for mushrooms and other toxic things. I think it breaks down to their chemical balance (from what they eat) and eating a snail is much safer then eating a slug.",
"One reason is that slugs are more likely to eat mushrooms that are toxic, which can spread the toxicity to you through their body. Really it boils down to perception. There's no a huge difference between snails and slugs beyond that. Other than that, I've had snails. Slugs probably taste the same. Really, both of them eat dung as a meal and I prefer to avoid both."
],
"score": [
23,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7524x4 | Electricity and the difference between volts, amps, watts, etc. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2tn7w"
],
"text": [
"A good metaphor for electricity is water flowing through a river. So, voltage is the speed of the water flowing through the river, amperage is how much water is flowing trough the river and resistance (Ohm) is the resistance of the flow. There are always some obstacles in a river, like rocks or curves. This is in fact, is the same in electric conductors, like in copper wires. If you combine all factors, you have the amount of water that is flowing trough the river in one second. The calculation goes: speed (voltage) x amount of water flowing through the river in one second (amperage) x obstacles, resistance in the river (ohm) = amount of water (wattage). In short it is P = R X I^2."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7526tg | Why is the Human neck so fragile and even poorly constructed, when it harbors such a valuable payload? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2ulir",
"do2tz7m",
"do2w3ch",
"do2vvl6",
"do2ucoe",
"do2x29a"
],
"text": [
"Because it *wasn't* \"constructed\", it evolved. Reproductive reinforcement of genetic mutation didn't change the structure of the human neck beyond what you see because it didn't, simple as that. There are a million things about biological bodies that could obviously have been \"designed\" better. But evolution doesn't design things, it experiments through mutation and natural selection chooses the experiments that are most successful at reproducing. NOT most successful at staying alive for eighty years, mind you - humans typically can reproduce between ages 13 and 40 (don't freak out because I said 13, humans were having babies at 13 all the time thousands of years ago, nature doesn't care that that seems too young). So once you reproduce, you've reinforced your genetic material and you're effectively irrelevant to evolution beyond that activity.",
"Because there is no evolutionary pressure to have a stronger neck. Neck trauma is relatively rare and generally comes with other fatal injuries If you have a stronger neck that is more resistant to damage does that increase your odds of surviving to breeding age? Not really because a weak neck was unlikely to remove you from the breeding pool",
"There are many body parts that are poorly designed, and yet, are good enough for the purposes of evolution: to carry the organism to the point that it reproduces. - The neck? OK, that one never occurred to me. - The prostate gland (says me, a 50-something guy). - Oh, my aching joints. - Eyes get worse. - Ears get worse. - Skin wrinkles and sags. - Memory fades. - ... Basically, anything after reproduction is gravy.",
"> that just always hurt if you are a little off balance or just a bit too fast to turn it? This isn't normal. Maybe you need to see a massge therpist, chiro, or physical therapist. Or just work on your posture and flexibility. Maybe your lifestyle plays a role in the neck pain or maybe theres an injury?",
"Cavemen didn't need strong necks. They just ran around chasing medium sized mammals and picking berries. Our necks could handle that. Evolution hasn't figured out that we don't do that anymore. We mostly sit on our butts, staring at computers or hurling ourselves at hundreds of km per hour in giant metal vehicles (choo choo vrmmm vrmmm). That's very bad for our necks. Owwie.",
"Our necks are pretty darn strong. Do you have an inactive lifestyle where the necks not being mobilized regularly and maintain a less than good posture? If you work at a computer those two answers are almost certainly affirmative, so the question is \"why didn't we evolve to stare at a screen\""
],
"score": [
28,
23,
15,
6,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7526vi | How does oily skin cause acne on face? | Can someone please explain the process of pimples forming that is caused by oil to me? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2u0af"
],
"text": [
"The oils block up your pores in the skin. They build up more secretions behind it, including bacteria and various other lipids and fluids. The raised tension behind the buildup causes the visible red bump of the pimple."
],
"score": [
20
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7527gg | Is there a reason we ejaculate in spurts rather than a continuous stream like peeing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2voz4",
"do2twr6"
],
"text": [
"So imagine you have a turkey baster. You have a certain amount of fluid in there that you want to get out. If you squeeze it gently, you'll get a dribbling stream. It doesn't go very far and a bunch is still left inside. Now take that same turkey baster, and squeeze it hard. The fluid shoots out and goes further, right? But now you still have liquid left inside, so squeeze again. Keep on doing this till all the liquid is out. In the end, most of the liquid ends up further away from the tip. If you really want to make sure everything is out, squeeze it a bunch more times. Those are the dry contractions at the end of orgasm. The volume of urine is a lot bigger than the volume of ejaculate. So the urinary bladder contracts to squeeze out the urine, like squeezing a water balloon before you tie it closed. That's why urine comes out in a stream, unless you're an unlucky sod who has prostate problems.. You have a lot less ejaculate than you do urine.",
"Peeing is a downstream action, where the bladder releases the urine and it flows to an area of different pressure by itself. Ejaculation requires muscle contractions to propel the semen outward, so the sperm can actually enter the fallopian tubes. The muscle spasms are why you don't ejaculate in a stream."
],
"score": [
25,
12
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7528ew | When my gums are sore in a particular area, why does it feel sort of... good... to scrape it or continue to injure it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2zbcj"
],
"text": [
"You get comparable sensation when letting out pus, scratching a scab, etc. Part of this is because we're trying to disengage an infection from our body. We are trying to forcibly remove it and hope the outside envoirment can deal with it, instead of letting the infection fester between the layers of our skin. Even in the case of injury, we're letting it come into contact with our immune system instead of giving it a safe spot outside of our body's reach. A sore gum is similar. Infectious organisms build up between our teeth and we're not content to let them just stay there. Don't get the wrong impression, you're still inflicting injury, but there's a small rewarding sensation out of \"cleaning\" such an area."
],
"score": [
40
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7528sn | What does it mean for the body to ‘fight’ a virus? | What does it mean and how does the body do it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2uaeh"
],
"text": [
"To kill the cells infected by it (usually not achieved completely due to latency) and prevent the viruses already in your body from infecting more of your cells. The first part is achieved chiefly by so called T-killer-cells, the rest is the standard human immune response. Wikipedia gets you a long way to understanding those, for literature I would recommend Janeway's Immunology. Edit: The way that infected cells are recognized Every cell in your body presents bits of the proteins it degrades on its surface by using special other proteins. If lots of foreign snippets are presented there - e.g. from degraded virus proteins - T-killer-cells recognize that and trigger suicide in the cell exhibiting them."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
752b1f | What exactly are "frames" in video games, and how do you quantify them? | I hear so much talk about the amount of frames per second in video games and I understand roughly that more frames per second=better graphics, but how can you tell the amount of frames per second a game has without explicitly being told, and why are they so important? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2uo1c",
"do2uu4a",
"do37ohs"
],
"text": [
"A video is just a rapid sequence of pictures, or frames. Once you get too few pictures per second, the movement doesn't seem smooth anymore. By increasing the number of pictures shown to you every second, you decrease the probability of that happening. Of course creating so many pictures requires high processing power - the more taxing a single image (referred to as: \"better graphics\") - the more so.",
"A frame is just a still image. By displaying a sequence of still images rapidly enough, you create a sense of motion. The number of frames per second defines the temporal resolution in a video game. Or, in layman's terms: more frames per second = more stuff to see for the eye when things move around. This doesn't necessarily mean that the graphics are \"better\", but any motion will feel more fluid and immediate. The quantification of FPS is fairly simple: you have a counter that counts up when a frame has finished rendering and after every second, that counter is displayed and then reset to zero. If you want to refresh the FPS counter more frequently, you reset after 0.5 seconds and double the counter value, for example. If the game doesn't have that functionality, then the tricky part is to find out *when* a frame has finished rendering. Tools like FRAPS hook themselves to the graphics API of a video game that tells the graphics card what to render and also use it to display the frame counter.",
"A lot of people answered the question about what frames are, but the reason why they matter in video games is that the more frames you have, the more \"windows\" there are for your game to accept button/mouse inputs, which can make all the difference in high-level gameplay. For example, if you ran a game at 10FPS, not only would it basically look like you were playing a video game with a PowerPoint presentation, but that means the game will only register a maximum of ten inputs in one second. For some very fast-paced games, milliseconds of reaction time can be the difference between a win and loss."
],
"score": [
16,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
752bwn | what is Ngnix ? when and why should you use it for your app? And how would you integrate it with the cloud-hosting services such as heroku? | I keep running into Nginx everywhere I go, I read its a web server and all but it was slightly confusing and I didn't understand when I would need to use it or if I should And more importantly how? Something about all the examples stumped me. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2xovt",
"do398ey"
],
"text": [
"It is a solution to the C10K problem. With a typical web server, each HTTP request is a thread, and most computers start have serious performance problems once they reach a certain number of threads (sometimes, but not always about 10,000 threads). At that point, you need more web servers, no matter how big and strong your hardware is. Ngnix is a Linux based solution that uses an event-driven web server that doesn't assign a thread to each connection, making it more scalable. They also have an email server that takes the same approach. > And how would you integrate it with the cloud-hosting services such as heroku? There is really nothing special with Ngnix when it comes to the cloud. If Ngnix is one of the OS images they can spin up for you, you use it on the cloud like any other application stack.",
"Nginx is a web server comparable to Apache, IIS, and lighttpd. Nginx does a couple of things really, really well that make it ideal for certain configurations. 1.) It serves static content (content that doesn't require any back-end work, such as access to a database, running Python/PHP/Perl/CIL scripts, etc...) extremely quickly and with almost no overhead. Proactive sysadmins will often have a single Nginx server handle static content requests, and then pass dynamic content requests through a load balancer to multiple Apache servers. 2.) It can handle a huge number of http requests at once without choking. As long as these requests are simple, such as a static content request or an idle connection, nginx will run laps around its competitors."
],
"score": [
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
752ink | What are the differences between a highway, freeway, expressway, tollway, interchange, and interstate? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2w0ox",
"do2whpd"
],
"text": [
"A highway is any sort of elevated roadway, usually bounded by access roads. A freeway is any higher order roadway, like a highway, which is free for public use. A toll road is a roadway, including highways, where there is a fee to drive on, usually services by booth attemdents. An interstate is a highway that crosses a state border or is otherwise run by the Interstate Highway System (Hawaii has interstates despite connecting only to itself). An interchange is a junction between two or more highways that allows a driver to switch from one to the other.",
"* highway - generic term for a road you can drive fast on and that has few stop signs or lights * freeway - a highway without tolls * expressway - a highway with at least 2 lanes in each direction, a divider between each direction of traffic, maintains high speeds even through towns, and has interchanges rather than stop signs or lights...also called a limited access highway * tollway - a highway you have to pay to drive on, often also an expressway * interchange - an intersection with on ramps and off ramps, designed so traffic doesn't have to stop to change routes * interstate - a specific system of expressways, initiated by President Eisenhower, funded by the federal government and designed to provide cross-country access"
],
"score": [
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
752jc3 | What is the link between the neurotransmitter GABA and anxiety disorders? | Just for some background, I have good foundational knowledge on how neurons and neurotransmitters work within the brain. With this, I know that many mental and physical disorders are rooted in the way the brain produces or interacts with these neurotransmitters. I remember learning that the neurotransmitter GABA is linked to anxiety disorders, but I cannot find a simplified explanation of this link. How does GABA work and, in the case of anxiety disorders, what is the dysfunctional aspect? EDIT: Just wanted to add that I understand anxiety is complex and can be caused by many factors (both cognitive and biological). I just wanted to understand the purported link here. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2x2tb"
],
"text": [
"GABA is an inhibitory NT, meaning that it blocks certain synaptic activity including the same receptors that help anxiety which we use Valium or Librium. They cause chloride ions enter the neuron causing less synaptic activity."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
752mam | The artificial nose technology used in food processing | Recently, I heard that there are machines which can differentiate between ripe and damaged foods by SMELLING them and they are used in food processing and manufacturing. Can anyone explain me what is the machinery and how it can do such a complex task? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do2z1yp",
"do31589"
],
"text": [
"Most foods give off some very specific chemicals when rotting. So the \"artificial nose\" is not very fancy -- it's just a gas chemical detector, and when too much of one indicator chemical is present, it marks that this item is rotting.",
"It probably is not actually smelling the foods but for example certain fruits and vegetables will release ethylene gas upon ripening. So it would be detecting the presence, or lack thereof, of these molecules in proximity to the given produce item."
],
"score": [
9,
4
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7534rc | what is the difference between the reasons we get thirsty when we eat something too sweet and something too salty? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3xh96"
],
"text": [
"Salt and sugar raise the osmosis* of the blood. The body can sense osmosis, and the response to raised osmosis is a) make urine more concentrated ie lose less fluid that way b) thirst *fancy word for how much shit there is in your blood that isn't cells or water. URL_0 Edit: sorry you asked for 'differences'. That one works for both. Salt probably dries your mouth more, so there's that. Otherwise I am not that sure that there are all that many differences. You wanna come back and give us more about what you are thinking?"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmoreceptor"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
753s4g | Why does the DMV charge more for vehicle registration (tabs) on a newer model vehicle than one that is older? | Went from a 2001 vehicle to a 2014 and the price of registration went from $44/year to over $100/year. WHY? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do36o49",
"do3chl4",
"do3bvg1"
],
"text": [
"Because registration is tax. Some places base that on the value of the vehicle, some base it on the vehicle's weight, and some just have a flat fee.",
"The government's goal is to collect more fees from rich people than from poor people. They estimate that people with a new car are richer (or at least have more money to burn) than those with a cheap old car.",
"Each state is different in how they charge and what they charge. Some states may have different payments based on age or value, while others determine it by vehicle class (car, suv, truck, etc). I'm sure your state's DMV website outlines the different fees, and will explain why you're paying more now for your newer vehicle than your older one. Presumably somebody with an older vehicle is less well off, so that might be a reason why owners of older cars pay less."
],
"score": [
9,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7541h7 | Why do we not become dehydrated when we sleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3cgw7"
],
"text": [
"I think we can, i wake up dehydrated sometimes because my wife turns the heater up when im asleep. Dehydration takes longer than 8 hrs. The easiest way to guage js to look at your pee colour. So long as your not taking vitamins, the more yellow your pee the less hydrated you are."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7542fj | why things like wood, noodles, paper, etc. become more pliable when wet? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3itbc"
],
"text": [
"One effect is water temporally breaking the hydrogen bonds between molecules or polymer chains (starch, cellulose) which would allow the chains to move past each other. Another effect is plasticization. where the glass transition temperature (where something goes from rigid to soft) is lowered - this is the principle behind drip dry clothing. There also may be a bulk effect where large fibres get locked due to friction, but are able to slide past each other when wet."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
754988 | How did the "standard tuning" of a guitar develop? | The standard tuning of a guitar is E A D G B E, but why is it not mixed or completly different? Is it in order to play chords comfortably, or the way it is built and shaped? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3ccly",
"do3d2km"
],
"text": [
"It was a complex compromise, that managed to ease the transition between simple chords and common scales with a minimum of difficult hand movements. Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [How Standard Tuning came to be - Fender Guitar article]( URL_1 ) 1. [Guitar tunings - Wikipedia ]( URL_2 ) 1. [Why is the guitar tuned E A D G B E? - Stack Exchange]( URL_0 )",
"Blame the wolf. :) If you recall the Circle of Fifths, it is based on the fact that going up 12 perfect fifths is the very nearly the same as 7 octaves. But very nearly is not exactly. When tuning an instrument, you have two choices, make all fifths a little off, or make some exact and some way off. Many tuning strategies go for the second option, and music written for them simply avoids the using the bad fifths. One, in particular, makes 11 of the 12 fifths good, and the 12th really bad. That fifth is called the [wolf fifth]( URL_0 ) because the binaural beats it produces warbles, to some people at least, like a howling wolf."
],
"score": [
104,
23
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/12420/why-is-the-guitar-tuned-e-a-d-g-b-e",
"https://www.fender.com/articles/tech-talk/standard-tuning-how-eadgbe-came-to-be",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_tunings"
],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mean5th_Wolf_5th.ogg"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
754a55 | - Why is it easier to rebuild muscle than to build it in the first place? | I've always noticed that once I've "fallen off the wagon" and lost muscle mass, it's relatively easy to put back on- much more so than gaining additional muscle or gaining that weight in the first place. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3qxd3"
],
"text": [
"I'm not a professional in any way but I've been lifting weights for about 15 years now. From what I understand when you start working out most of what you're trying to do is building muscle memory. Simplified it means the more you do something the better you get at it. That's why it seems easier to get back into it after being away for awhile. You may have lost strength but your muscles remember the movements."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
754ik5 | Why do some animals "show off" their babies to humans? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3eiod",
"do3fx0w"
],
"text": [
"Why do humans \"show off\" their babies to other humans? Animals, contrary to some belief, do possess a modicum of intelligence. If the animal believes humans aren't a threat and, especially with animals raised in captivity, a caregiver, they will want to show off their child to one seen as a 'friend'. It's easy to assume, then, that animals are legit going to humans they trust and going \"HEY! LOOK AT MY BABY! ISN'T IT AMAZING?\"",
"Sometimes humans feed wild animals, even though we shouldn't. Sometimes the parents bring their babies for some of that food. I'll quite often see the local baby magpies in my yard because the parents know it is safe, and even animal parents need time away from the kids so they'll ditch them for a little while like leaving your kids at day care, except your kids are month old birds and day care is my yard."
],
"score": [
28,
8
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
754ur5 | How did scientists know what type of space suit was required to survive outer space in the 1960s? | In the early days of space travel, how would scientists have been able to determine what type of space suit material would sufficiently protect an astronaut from the elements without having satellites to relay specific information re: temperature, etc? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3g5qd",
"do3mpwn"
],
"text": [
"There were lots of satellites launched, and lots of real data collected before the first living being was sent into out space. Scientists knew quite a lot about conditions in space before going there.",
"\"Monkeys\" damn bit removed a simple answer. Many test animals were sent into space, monkeys sent into space gave sufficient data to help mankind know how to protect people in space."
],
"score": [
14,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
754yoo | Why does gargling saltwater help with sore throats? | As a singer, gargling saltwater has helped me many times in the past, as well as getting me through a hoarse voice right now. But **why** does it work? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3hxot",
"do3s5u4",
"do3ysp4",
"do44xrn",
"do4ujk4"
],
"text": [
"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: Why is gargling salt water known to help with sore throats, but eating chips doesn't? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: How exactly does gargling salt water help a sore throat? ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5:Why does gargling with salt water help a sore throat? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: Why does gargling warm salt water help a sore throat? ]( URL_3 ) 1. [Does gargling saltwater really help with sore throats? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: Why does gargling with salt water soothe a sore throat, but getting salt in a wound burns like hell? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: Why does gargling salt water make a sore throat feel better? ]( URL_8 ) 1. [ELI5: Why does gargling warm salt water help soothe a sore throat? ]( URL_6 ) 1. [ELI5: How does gargling salt water help? ]( URL_7 )",
"Here is what someone said on another thread: There's a phenomenon called 'osmosis' which plays its role here. When two different liquids with different concentrations are separated by a semipermeable membrane (the one that allows one-way flow only), the liquids would flow in such a way that they attain a state of equilibrium, i.e. now the concentration of both the liquids is same. The bacteria which cause the sore throat also have their skin similar to a semipermeable membrane. When you gargle with salty water, the inner 'fluid' of bacteria (which makes them live, in a literal sense) oozes out (in order to equalize the concentrations of these fluids-salt water and bacterial body fluid). This kills the bacteria and their 'active fluid' is washed away when you gulf-out the liquid. Thus they loose their dominance on the sore throat and you feel relaxed.",
"Yes, the correct answer is it shrinks the swelling of the inflames pharyngeal tissue through simple osmosis- the water passes out of the tissue in order to dilute the salt water. The Chlorine also has some bactericidal activity, but we are usually talking about a virus here.",
"There seems to be a lot of misinformation and false responses to this question. Even if salt did kill bacterias or viruses it wouldn't help to immediatly relieve the pain a sore throat causes. The more likely explanation is that the salt draws out liquid from the inflamed throat reducing inflamation as well as the salt having a numbing effect by overstimulating the nerves pain stimulus.",
"PSA: When you start to feel like you're going to have a sore throat, gargle with mouthwash. The stronger, the better. Kill the bacteria before they do any damage."
],
"score": [
411,
85,
15,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5zdvq2/eli5_why_is_gargling_salt_water_known_to_help/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/72pgpo/does_gargling_saltwater_really_help_with_sore/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4anwf0/eli5why_does_gargling_with_salt_water_help_a_sore/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24c6rn/eli5_why_does_gargling_warm_salt_water_help_a/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35vs1r/eli5_how_exactly_does_gargling_salt_water_help_a/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lmmgs/eli5_why_does_gargling_with_salt_water_soothe_a/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nyik9/eli5_why_does_gargling_warm_salt_water_help/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mvasx/eli5_how_does_gargling_salt_water_help/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pfcva/eli5_why_does_gargling_salt_water_make_a_sore/"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7550rg | If hackers are using "brute force" password guessing, why can't websites lock them out after too many guesses like they do legitimate users? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3hfuh",
"do3i936",
"do3icuo"
],
"text": [
"That's exactly what happens. However, when there is a leak (data security breach) and they get their hands on the encrypted password file, then they get infinity tries to decrypt it.",
"Generally speaking, websites do have timed lockouts. The problem comes when a hacker gets their hands on the encrypted password file, then their number of tries per second is just limited by hardware.",
"The idea is that this is happening offline. The hacker can have the password hashes from the target machine via some other hack. They're attempting to find any password (not even your password) which fits the site's restrictions *and* has the same hash as your password. The hacker could also just have encrypted communications, and possibly their plain text (or an idea of what the plain text looks like). This is the case of wifi password hacking, where given sufficient encrypted information, you can start eliminating possible passwords then brute-force your way to finding one that decrypts all the info you have, and thus must be the one that will let you login."
],
"score": [
18,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7551o2 | Why don’t women use/need aftershave after shaving their legs, pits and private parts? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3jomf"
],
"text": [
"1) most people don't need aftershave 2) most people also don't use products like facial cleaners on their legs. Face skin is different, and nobody really cares about miniscule acne on most other parts of the body."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
755cka | Why do you feel rejuvenated if you take a 15 minute power nap when feeling sleepy during the day, but if you hit the snooze button in the morning, you still feel so sleepy afterwards? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do4path",
"do4pv0e"
],
"text": [
"Simply because you enter the state of [REM (Rapid eye movement) sleep]( URL_1 ). We don't know everything about REM sleep yet and there are a lot of contradictory hypotheses about it. This is the phase in your sleep where most of your dreams happen and also the brain sorts memories in this phase. In a sense, your brain is \"regenerating\". Scientists also believe that that REM sleep has something to do with the process of learning and remembering things. Almost all mammals (except [Echidna]( URL_2 ) and [dolphins]( URL_0 ) ) have some sort of REM sleep. But why is a nap different from snoozing then? Well the thing is that when you power nap for long enough, you will eventually enter REM sleep. However, snoozing after your alarm clock waked you up won't allow you to enter REM sleep again, hence why it doesn't help with sleepiness.",
"It's because you don't reach the stage 3/4 of your sleep cycle. It takes up to 30 minutes to begin cycle 3/4 of your sleep cycle. Think of your sleep cycles as a wave. You go to sleep cycle 1 (Light sleep, easy to wake up) then cycle 2 (Same thing, but its the entrance to deep sleep) Then cycle 3 (Which is starting to the deep sleep, you're less responsive, and you don't wake up to noises that are subtle) you then end up in cycle 4 (Deep sleep) and it will climb back up to cycle 3 and can end up in REM mode (Dreaming phase, it helps your mind process things you learned today, which causes you to be paralyzed, which if you wake up during REM you might have experienced not being able to move.) If you wake up during Deep sleep or REM mode, your body isn't fully woken up yet and it causes you to feel drowsy after you wake up. When you are woken up by the alarm and you're in deep sleep, your body didn't start its preparations to waking up and it causes the body to have to jump start everything which won't give you the wake up that makes you feel great, it instead makes you feel drowsy. However, for a 15 minute power nap, you never reach the deep sleep, you're in light sleep which the body is more prepared to wake up. I am not a student of bio or anatomy, so if I got any of this wrong, please correct me! Edit: Wording Edit 2: if my explanation didn't make sense or you're still confused look at this diagram and it might help you. URL_0"
],
"score": [
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_dolphin",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echidna"
],
[
"https://gdblogs.shu.ac.uk/b2006900/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2014/10/sleep-cycle1.gif"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
755edn | Why do our bodies sometimes continue to try and vomit even after our stomach has been completely emptied? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3kts4"
],
"text": [
"Your body doesn't have a very accurate measurement of whether your stomach has been emptied yet. So it keeps trying."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
755lxi | Why, by Aufbau filling order, does a 3d orbital fill after a 4s, but when the atom loses electrons, the 4s goes first. Likewise, which one, 3d or 4s, is farther from the nucleus and why? | Just a bit frustrated why I missed a few questions on the first exam (and I didn't want a, that's just a thing, answer from my teacher). Thank you. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3nfkb"
],
"text": [
"The 3 in 3d and 4 in 4s refers to the primary quantum number derived from the Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. This number designates how high or low an electron is in the energy well of the nucleus, starting with n=1. A useful definition of ionization is the electron jumping to the infinite energy level. As a matter of fact, this assumption can be used with the Bohr equation to calculate the ionization energy of the hydrogen atom. The higher the primary quantum number of the electron, the closer it is to infinity, and the less energy required to ionize it. This is why the 4s electrons are lost before the 3d. The 4s orbital also spreads out farther from the nucleus, again largely to do with the primary quantum number and its effects on the size and shape of the orbital. As you go higher in quantum number, the orbital shells get larger and larger, allowing the electrons in them to venture farther from the nucleus. The farther out they are, the less they feel the attraction to the nucleus and the easier they are to remove."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
755m4f | Why are audio jacks round while charging and other ports are rectangular? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3mpja",
"do3mvl7"
],
"text": [
"Audio jacks and *some* charging ports use so few wires that they were able to use a \"coaxial\" round design. This enables them to be connected in any orientation, and to rotate freely in the socket, both of which are advantages. These connectors don't work well for digital data (the rotation can screw up the connection momentarily) or for cables requiring more than about 4 wires to be connected.",
"With an audio jack the contacts are arrayed down the length of the plug, meaning the first contact could connect with every other contact along the way in or out. Pumping charging voltage down a data line is a bad idea."
],
"score": [
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
755poz | Why does India have union territories and states? | Whenever I ask an Indian this question, I receive the simple answer "politics." Google searches turn up articles that assume a lot more base knowledge on the subject than I currently have. Why does India have union territories and how are they determined? What is the role of states in all of this? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3p5es"
],
"text": [
"Union territories don't hold elections and are under direct control of the central government. There are 7 of them now. Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Lakshadweep, Puducherry, Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. These all have different reasons for being under central control. Andaman-Nicobar and Lakshwadeep were too far from the mainland and also in vital strategic regions. Chandigarh was a pet project by Nehru to act as a replacement for the loss of Lahore during partition so it had central control. Daman-Diu, Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Puducherry were under different colonial control than the British. So the people there were sort of different than the states which surrounded them. The central government felt that they could administer these territories better. Plus these territories were liberated or relinquished a good deal of time after 1947. States have little to no role in the creation of these territories. The central parliament decides whether these territories can be converted into states, if there is just cause or political will."
],
"score": [
4
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
755rx9 | Why does water create "white rings" on wood? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3tzy2"
],
"text": [
"By wood I believe you are referring to wood furniture. It doesn't effect the wood itself but rather it goes into the clearcoatband finish on the table or other wood surface. A hot pizza box will do the same thing if placed directly on a table. It's a matter of water or water vapor getting into the finish. The shinier(higher gloss) the finish, the more likely you are to have this effect. If you strip the table to bare wood and refinish it, there is no actual impact on the undelying wood. There are exceptions but in most cases it's not going to be water that did it. Just an unrelated fyi: perfume/cologne will eat through a finish better than stripper."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
755txf | "Chinese Proverb: if you are negotiating and you’re buying, [act as if] you are selling. If you’re selling, [act] as if you are buying.” | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3q1lw",
"do4jxv1",
"do47ipg"
],
"text": [
"In negotiation, if I know you're desperate to buy, I can deal harder because I know you won't walk. Similarly if I need to sell, a buyer who knows this can low-ball me. I sold a motorcycle once. The guy fell in love with it the moment he saw it. My asking price was a little high, but I was expecting to haggle. This guy told me he didn't want to haggle, and I'd just watched him decide to buy my bike. It was written on his face. So when he asked, \"How much?\" I gave him the full price I'd put on craigslist. He handed me cash and that was that. edit: I didn't actually answer your question. If I want a good price on your goods, I should pretend I don't need/want it and rope you into the position of changing my mind. You'll end up lowering your price in your efforts to convince me.",
"Generally, a buyer wants a thing, while a seller doesn't want it. So the idea is if you are buying act like you don't really want it that much, while if you're selling act like you really want to keep it. Ideally by acting like you are not that desperate to buy/sell you gain an upper hand in the negotiations. It's like a different saying: \"Whoever cares the least has more power.\" For example, I was able to negotiate a pretty good deal on my house (I bought it for several thousand below market value) because the sellers were really eager to get rid of it, but I wasn't as desperate to buy.",
"We always seem to think of a negotiation as being between a buyer and a seller. What's being bought and sold changes from case to case (like groceries, gas, appliances, cars, and so on - where the buyer gives money for a good or service). Let's start with the barter system. Someone is bartering potatoes for tomatoes. Who is the buyer and who is the seller? Sure, this is trade but it's also one guy buying tomatoes with potatoes ... while for the other guy it's the opposite. Let's change that to a miner using a shiny rock he dug up in exchange for the tomatoes. The miner can either be seen as buying tomatoes with gold, or selling gold for tomatoes. Its just one commodity being traded for another. Cash eventually becomes the universal commodity accepted in trade for anything else. So cash too can be seen as something we are either buying or selling when we make a deal. And if you see yourself as selling your cash for something else rather than just buying that other thing then you now have extra motivation to get more for your money. Especially when you've probably sold a lot of your time in life to buy (or \"earn\") that money in the first place."
],
"score": [
27,
3,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
756eii | how can someone get fired from a company they started/own? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3uhc0",
"do3ua60",
"do3udau",
"do3yvob"
],
"text": [
"If they don't own at least 50% +1 share of the company, then others can vote them out. Most companies have more than one founder, so they may never have that 50% stake... and then their ownership stakes get diluted as they take on investment funding. So it's very realistic that a co-founder only has like 10-25% of a company. EDIT: presumably, this question was the result of Harvey Weinstein being forced out of his company... he controlled a [20% stake in the company]( URL_0 ), so the others who owned pieces had 80%, clearly enough to get a majority in favor of firing him.",
"By not completely owning it. One way to make/raise money for your company is to sell part of your ownership to investors. If other people own more than half, they can get together and fire you. You still own your shares, you just don't work there anymore.",
"If you own it, they kinda can't. But many people that start companies sell off partial ownership for capitol (money). If they sell more than 50 percent ownership, then the people that have that majority can get together and oust the person that started it. If your company is publicly traded (like on the stock market) rival companies can buy a majority share of your stock without you having any saying it one way or the other. This is referred to as a hostile takeover.",
"FYI: another person who was fired from his own company was Steve Jobs. Apple fired him in 1985."
],
"score": [
26,
16,
6,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/harvey-weinstein-out-weinstein-company-1202583568/"
],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
756le4 | why do we have 4k monitors and 144 Hz monitors, but not 4k 144 Hz monitors? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3w8z6",
"do3x7bv",
"do400k6"
],
"text": [
"144 Hz 4K video requires so much data that only the DisplayPort version 1.4 can support it and it was only published in March 2016. Even that requires use of Display Stream Compression which is a mostly lossless form of data compression. Basically it is just too much information for hardware to handle until very recently.",
"They make 120Hz in 4k, 1080p had some 240Hz as well. There is a bit of an issue with cabling. HDMI can only push about 60 frames a second at 4k. Displayport does a little better, getting up to 120Hz at 4k, and potentially reaching 144 or 240 with display stream compression Then you get into issues with actually tryign to find a source that's going to give you a feed at those rates.",
"Your screen works like this: your pc prepares an image in its memory, and then it sends it over to your monitor. Now your gpu, that is transmitting the data needs to be fast enough tontransmit everything you want, and the electronics in the screen must be fast enough to receive all the data. Lets say that you have a 1000x1000 pixel screen and you refresh it 50 times a second (50hz). That is 50.000.000 pixels per second. Now if you want to double the resolution you could go 2000x2000@50Hz that is 400.000.000 pixels per second. If you want to do 1000x1000@200Hz you end up with 400.000.000 pixels per second again. Doing both (2000x2000@200Hz) requires an insane amount of 1.600.000.000 pixels per second. Now your gpu and screen both have maximum pixels per second value, so you have to do the tradeoff depending on what you want: more pixels or faster refresh rates"
],
"score": [
22,
12,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
756nle | Why dont cuttings from plants die once removed from the rest of the plant which can then be grown into a new plant ie; cloning? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do42thl"
],
"text": [
"Basically, it's because of the difference between plants and animals. For a lifeform to survive, it requires energy. For animals (like us), that energy is created through nutrients (ie food) and oxygen. Both are transported throughout our body by the bloodstream. However, nutrients are generally used up much slower than oxygen is. Our bodies can survive not being fed for up to a week, but only 3 minutes of not breathing. There are two main reasons for this. One, while oxygen can be absorbed through the skin (and is!), the majority comes from the lungs or gills. The blood has to carry the oxygen to the rest of your body. This leads to the second reason - oxygen is rather hard to transport. Oxygen(O2) is very reactive and can be toxic if not handled correctly. To counter this, our body uses molecules called hemoglobins to carry them around. However, each hemoglobin can only carry 4 O2 molecules at a time. It's pretty inefficient despite being necessary. Since you can only send so much O2 at a time, our bodies have to keep sending shipments to keep up with demand. This is why the heart can never rest, even when we sleep. Plants, on the other hand, don't have centralized lungs. They breathe through their leaves, absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2). Water and other mineral nutrients are absorbed through the roots. Since they don't need those nutrients as quickly, they don't need to pump the sap (their version of blood) as quickly either. So now let's consider what happens when a limb is cut off. An animal's limb will now be cut off from the bloodstream and lose its oxygen supply. Within minutes, it will have used up most of its stored oxygen (not a lot) and will switch to anaerobic (non-oxygen) energy production, and finally will die out from the damage sustained from prolonged suffocation. On the other hand - a plant's branch still can absorb CO2. The only problem it has is water and mineral nutrients (and sunlight, obviously) which can be absorbed by the stem's base - by sticking it in water. It has much less trouble surviving than an animal would. Eventually roots grow from the base, and the clipping has become a new plant."
],
"score": [
3
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
756y4a | Why do birds fly south for the winter instead of just staying where its warmer all the time? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do3ygoh",
"do43324",
"do42yl6",
"do4uhfc"
],
"text": [
"Two reasons: summer days are longer near the poles compared to the tropics, meaning more time for activity; and springtime sees an absolute explosion of food resources (insect and plant population growth) so the birds that fly back north get access to it, whereas the birds that would stay down south continue having to compete for a standard amount of resources. Basically, seasonal variation makes for some months with an overabundance of food (ie spring) and some months with a dearth of food (ie winter). They fly south to avoid the lack of food.",
"Good question. The other comment about long summer hours in the north is a pretty good point. Where I live we get about 18 hours of sun on the longest day of the summer. Of course that means we only get 4 hours of sun in the shortest day of winter, but hey, plants can't grow in the snow anyway. While people have this idea that the north is a sort of ecological wasteland, its really not. That is an old idea tied to agrarian lifestyles. ie: if it's not good farmland, it's useless. That isn't true. The north, the boreal/taiga forest and tundra, are rich in flora and food, and this is evident in the extremely large animals you'll find, like moose, polar bears, grizzly bears, brown bears, wolves, cougars, musk ox, walruses, seals, elk, and so on. For avians, there are large species too, like trumpeter swans, eagles, snowy owls. Big animals need lots of food, so their presence in the north tells a tale. Even the mosquitoes and flies get into the act. There are huge black swarms of them at times, and in certain places. URL_0 For an enterprising and hungry animal, the north is a table full of food.",
"They’re basically chasing new sources of food. If they stayed in one place all the time they would eat all of the bugs/fish/algae/etc. and their population would experience a die off due to lack of food. By continually moving North and South during the year they eat a little here, once things get scarce they move along, and by the time they return to that area their food supply has replenished. They also have breeding grounds they return to for nesting, and they stick around there long enough to hatch their eggs and get their offspring mobile before beginning another migration.",
"Some birds _do_ stay where it's warmer all the time. In Rochester, MN there's a man-made lake called Silver Lake. It stays warm all year round, and the town ended up with [a resident population of huge Canada geese]( URL_0 ) who decided it wasn't worth migrating. Then there's the grackle population of Texas. They're supposed to be migratory birds, but huge flocks of them hang out near the grocery stores of Dallas and Austin all year round. So it's a tradeoff birds make depending on specific circumstances."
],
"score": [
106,
17,
10,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Black_Fly_Attack_on_theDubawnt_River_Nunavut.jpg/300px-Black_Fly_Attack_on_theDubawnt_River_Nunavut.jpg"
],
[],
[
"https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/121512/Daniel%20Eckberg%20Thesis%20sp10.pdf?sequence=1"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
7577ap | With all the stuff happening around YouTube’s policy towards content creators, why can’t they move/create a new alternative to YouTube? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do40r0j",
"do4c77x",
"do43ohb",
"do407f0"
],
"text": [
"They can move, there are other sites that you can host videos on. Dailymotion, Vimeo, or their own website, are all viable options. However, there's a pretty big downside. They don't have large audiences. For every successful channel, they will have a subset of viewers who watch religiously. People who can be relied upon to continue to watch regularly. But they are very much in the minority. Most viewers of a channel are nomadic. Watching the videos they come across. This is why it's best to be on the biggest platform. You've got the most people who can find your content. Switching to a different site is a risky move. How much of your audience will follow you to the new place? It will likely only be a portion of those dedicated viewers. Which means by doing so, you'll be decimating your audience by a single act. Most viewers probably won't follow you to the new site. And that site has far less viewers to discover your work there. It's not a beneficial change to make... yet. If you want to stop youtube from being the dominant video platform, use a different platform primarily. Content creators will follow the audience.",
"People won't necessarily follow you to a new platform. I used to religiously follow a particular author's weekly ESPN columns. Easy to do since I went to ESPN every day. He moved to another platform. Even though I liked his columns, I never bothered to find out which platform he was at. I went to URL_0 all the time, not whereever he ended up. Same thing with youtube. You may religiously watch a particular person's videos on youtube. One guy leaves to vimeo, you may or may not switch. But a lot of people are just people who see his videos on their youtube feed. If they switch to vimeo, only a subset of people will follow them. The rest will just watch other youtube videos instead.",
"Moving to a new platform would simply have the effect of moving the problem. The issue is not YouTube arbitrarily deciding to punish some people by demonetizing their videos: the issue is advertisers not wanting to have their products associated with contentious things like terrorism, political extremism, violence and so on. If content creators moved en masse to a new platform -- they'd have to do it en masse if they want to compete with YouTube -- advertisers would start telling that platform they don't want their products associated with those things.",
"It's like another search engine trying to beat Google. It just isn't going to happen. YouTube is too old and well known. People like what they know."
],
"score": [
19,
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[
"ESPN.com"
],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
757ied | Why does sticking your finger in your ear cavity slightly open up the ear if it's clogged, but then go right back to a clogged state when you take it out? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do429ey"
],
"text": [
"You're temporarily opening up your [Eustachian tubes]( URL_0 ) which connect from your middle ear to the back of your nose. If they're inflamed or gummed up, they'll quickly settle back. Swallowing can jiggle them the same way - used by divers to equalize the pressure in their ears to the water; also why if you have a cold, you can sometimes hear some squelching noises when you swallow - that's mucus moving around in those tubes."
],
"score": [
40
],
"text_urls": [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachian_tube"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
757lsl | What is it that makes us tap our feet along with music? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do43kqj"
],
"text": [
"This is a learned social behavior. Notice that children almost never do this. It's possible dancing is innately human (just like how music is a human only phenomenon)."
],
"score": [
7
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
757lxr | Why does your ear pop sometimes and sound becomes insanely clear and nice much better than normal but then doesn't stay around for long? | Edited to hopefully not break rule #2 I can hear at least twice as good on those random "special pops"*. *voted new technical term | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do43zv1",
"do47nvv",
"do45tiq",
"do43bvu",
"do4akm3",
"do455vq",
"do43hkc",
"do477wu",
"do47pvn"
],
"text": [
"An easy way to think of it is by imagining the ear drum as an actual drum. The pop in the ear is the pressure inside and outside the ear normalize and is equivalent to loosening a tightened or tightening a loosened drum diaphragm. A loose drum wouldn't be able to correctly reproduce the high frequency noise while the tight one wouldn't be able to reproduce lower ones. Fixing the pressure lets both extremes go back to normal. However, because your brain has been hearing suboptimal reproductions, it increases the sensitivity of what signals it gets. So when the ear goes back to normal everything is obviously very different and optimal making the crisp clear hearing. But then over time you get used to it, brain doesn't have to strain as much and it feels like it's back to normal Edit: [source] ( URL_0 ) for u/Wootery similar effect except in this case the pressure differential is due to altitude",
"Deep down in the bottom of your ear is a little drumskin. On the other side of that drumskin is a little room about the size of a lima bean. On the floor of that room is a little tunnel that leads to the back of your throat. That little tunnel opens occasionally to let fresh air in and flush out any moisture to the back of your throat. Sometimes, when you're sick, the little tunnel swells up or gets blocked. Air can't get into that little room so a little vacuum forms. That vacuum sucks in the drumskin making it tighter than normal. When the drumskin tightens, it doesn't work the same and it makes sounds seem dull. When something opens that tunnel, like when you get over your sickness or you pop your ears, air comes back to the room. The air can come back in slowly, so you barely notice, or it can rush in and make a \"pop\". The returning air relieves the drumskin and makes it easier to hear. If the problem with the tunnel isn't quite fixed, the vacuum and the \"pop\" might happen over and over until everything is fixed. **Bonus ELI-an-adult-redditor:** The eustachian tube (ET), which ventilates the middle ear space, may fail to function for a multitude of reasons. Often it's congestion of some type that temporarily blocks it or causes inflammation which impairs its function. Some individuals simply have dysfunctioning ETs and have chronic trouble equalizing middle ear pressure. In normal conditions, the ET opens frequently throughout the day before any significant pressure can build in the middle ear space. For this reason you don't really notice a change occur. When pressure has been allowed to change over time (e.g. in cases of cold or congestion) or pressure has changed suddenly (e.g. upon take-off or landing in an aircraft), a sudden opening of the ET is much more apparent and you get the classic \"pop\". If your congestion is ongoing, you get these prolonged periods of negative middle ear pressure with only brief moments of relief. Middle ear immittance is a story for a different day. The short end of it as it relates to this thread is that the negative middle ear pressure sucks in the tympanic membrane (TM; ear drum), changing its frequency response and reducing its ability to transduce acoustic energy (sound). As the ET opens, pressure within the middle ear approaches that of the surrounding atmosphere, which is typically ideal for normal transduction of sound. EDIT: **Source:** I'm a pediatric audiologist, so I've spelled this out a few times in the past. To everyone asking for one form of advice or another...If something is impacting your daily life, it may be worth your time to have a quick exam by an ENT. Might help, might not. But you will have checked off something.",
"Audiologist in training here. For you to hear, your eardrum needs to move in and out. If it's too far pushed in or out, it won't be able to move properly, so you can't hear so well. Your eardrum sits between your outer ear (connected to the outside world through your ear canal) and your middle ear (which exchanges air with the atmosphere through a tube that ends in your nasal cavity). That tube opens when you swallow, chew, blow your nose, etc. The pop you hear is the tube opening and the eardrum being centred again. It does sound like your tube isn't working well, which is causing your middle ear to not equalise in pressure normally, which causes your eardrum to push one way or the other. It could be caused by infection, age, or just how your body is built. This could indicate or cause problems, so if it is something that happened recently and hasn't gone away, I'd speak to a professional about it. I'd definitely speak to someone if I had a related sinus/nasal infection, pain in the ear, or persistent hearing loss.",
"The pop is from a tube which runs from inside your ear to your nasal cavity. You hear a pop when blockage is cleared and air pressure which has built up from breathing gets relieved. It's called a eustachian tube. If you have constant mucus in there from sinus issues it can block the tube and everything will sound dull compared to normal hearing because the built up pressure prevents your ear drum from moving enough to transmit sounds. You can try to fix the sinus trouble or they make stints which hold this tube open if its a non-mucus related problem.",
"So this is not normal - the pop is normal, but your hearing should be the same before and after. It sounds like something may be impeding the movement of your tympanic membrane or ossicles (hearing bones) most of the time and relived for a short time when you pop your ears. That could be wax outside the ear drum just touching it, or something deeper in the middle ear or maybe even something in your throat that is keeping your middle ear blocked (the Eustachian tube is what's responsible for equalising the pressure inside your middle ear and letting fluid drain out so that you can hear). A normal audiogram doesn't mean your hearing is perfect. You may be able to hear the full range of frequencies but that doesn't mean you can hear them clearly or perfectly, or all at the same volume. You could try wax removal drops like Otex or Olive oil first to see if it helps, but it's probably best to go and get a doctor to have a look inside your ear (and even throat) and decide how further to look in to this for you. I would NOT start randomly using medications like Flonase if I were you.",
"The nose,sinuses,and ears are all connected. Likely you have chronic sinus issues such a caused by cat, dust, pollen, or dairy allergy. The cheap way would be to get the nonprescription Flonase nasal spray and use it faithfully for a week or so. You will notice hearing, taste, and smell improve. Alternatively you could try a dairy free diet for three weeks. An ENT told me 50% of the kids he was sent to get \"tubes\" in their ears were cured instead by a dairy free diet.",
"You can replicate that effect by tightening your nose with two fingers and slowly build up some air pressure in it.",
"all the comments about your ear drum not allowing enough movement are correct. This happens alot when riding in an airplane or driving up into the mountains. the difference in air pressure cause the effect you described. Most chew gum or something similar, the jaw workout can relieve the pressure buildup. If you have trouble picturing this, imagine hitting a drum and the normal expected noise, then put your hand on the drum surface and press down on it some. If you strike it now the sound will be deadened. How much depends on the pressure you apply...",
"what is this \"ear pop\" thing? I have never experience such thing. Please ELI5."
],
"score": [
6035,
4016,
415,
253,
45,
19,
14,
5,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.entnet.org/content/ears-and-altitude"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
757o4y | Why is "sad" music so satisfying when someone is drinking? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do449hc"
],
"text": [
"No expert, but my guess is because alcohol is a depressant. Therefore sad, depressing music fits the mood of the person. Music also releases dopamine at certain emotional peaks, and it's also possible that this is where we get the pleasure from listening to sad tunes."
],
"score": [
5
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
757q2b | Hollywood Pedophilia | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do44886"
],
"text": [
"Not an expert. But my understanding is that they have easy access to actors - actors need to please to get good parts: this includes handsome guys, cute girls, teens and kids. They have parties with a lot of drugs. They are often creative, sometimes deviant. Omerta: no one says anything even if everyone knows."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
757rv7 | How are obscenely large digits of pi calculated and how do we know that they are accurate? | Google says we've calculated pi to 2.7 trillion digits, which is an inconceivably large number. | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do43x1p"
],
"text": [
"[Mathematicians eventually discovered that there are in fact exact formulas for calculating Pi (π). The only catch is that each formula requires you to do something an infinite number of times. (Which makes sense given that the digits of Pi (π) go on forever.) One of the amazing things which interests people about Pi (π) is that there isn’t just one formula, but a large number of different ones for people to study.]( URL_0 ) There are several ways to calculate Pi. When it is done several times in several different ways you assume it is true. Actually you know it is true if your formula is correct which you know is to be. We use computers to do the work. Set two or more computers to work using several different formulas. Compare the answers. When they are they same we know the computers are all working well."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[
"http://www.mathscareers.org.uk/article/calculating-pi/"
]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
757shv | How did homeopathy became so huge compared to other non-working alternative remedies? | There are several alternative theories and remedies for human health, but homeopathy is persistently #1 in revenues and acceptance, while it seems that often it is more educated people that seek the benefits of homeopathy. How did homeopathy beat say... acupuncture? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do445ly",
"do449pd"
],
"text": [
"I'd have to disagree with the statement about more intelligent people going with homeopathy. Any intelligent person should see it's a sham. Especially when presented with evidence of such.",
"A reason might be that is is simple to use for the customer only to take pill. That it is have no effect might be a reason for its success. It might not help you but it does not harm you like a bad intervention that have a physical effect."
],
"score": [
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
757tf3 | Why is there a stereotype about engineers being socially inept stem from? How true is it? | I've heard from numerous people that engineers tend to be somewhat socially awkward. Is this true of many engineers in the population and why? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do44lb3",
"do44ihi",
"do488ng"
],
"text": [
"Very technical fields tend to attract introverted people, and sometimes more socially inept people (not to mention those who fall on the autistic spectrum). This is prevalent, though not a golden rule) in engineering and other stem fields. Though as a chemical engineer, I blame the electrical engineers.",
"People like to talk to other people about things that interest them or things they have in common. Engineers get a reputation for being awkward because they commonly think about things differently and their isn't often a need to have a lot of them around so they try to make best of whatever situation they are in.Also they tend to be uptight.",
"Engineers are more prone to think 'logically', and they apply this to social interactions. But other logic/rules applies in 'normal' human contact so there's a mismatch. Engineers get along very well with other engineers."
],
"score": [
9,
7,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
7580va | Were humans meant to swim? Or did we just find a way and go with it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do45g6u"
],
"text": [
"That is the wrong way to look at it. Humans, animals and all other life on earth is not meant to do anything. We are all are result of evolution that has no goal and no specified direction. The changes are because of adaptation to the environment of genes in the gen pool and new mutation. A better question is to ask if the ability to swim a something that we have adapted to do or is it a indirect result of something else? The strange answer is that ability to swim is not something we have adapted to be able to do. All mammals except two groups can swim. Bats, cats, camels and other mammals that you done associate with swimming can swim. Giraffes will likely have problem because of their layout and will have problem to keep the nose above the water level but is has fortunately not been testes. The other group is great apes. The cant swim without training. Is looks like the reason is that for a foul footed animal you can swim with the same motion as walking but that is not the case for two leg walking. Humans, chimpanzees and orangutang can swim if they are train to do so by them self or by someone else. I have found no information about swimming gorillas, it is likly that they can if they have a chance to be taught that but there have been no test or obsevation in the wild. They are also quite rare so there will be less observation the for other apes."
],
"score": [
6
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
758f9p | why do your gums bleed if you don’t floss for awhile, but they’ll stop bleeding if you floss regularly? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do479lg"
],
"text": [
"It's a combination of things - and not all of them will be true for every individual. Firstly, people who don't floss have a higher incidence of gum disease. This can lead to the gums becoming inflamed and they will bleed when brushed or when eating. This is the most common cause of bleeding gums, and it can be at least partially treated by flossing, which removes food particles and tartar from between the teeth, reducing the likelihood of infection and allowing the gums to repair themselves. Secondly, flossing \"toughens\" the gums through repeated physical stimulation of the tissue. This results in the gums becoming firmer, and closer to the teeth, reducing the likelihood of bleeding or infection. There's a growing body of research that suggests flossing is in fact not as amazing as most dentists claim - interdental brushes are likely far more effective, and are actually easier to use."
],
"score": [
11
],
"text_urls": [
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
|
758h59 | If raising our body temperature is a means for the body to better combat bacteria/virus, how is lowering our body temperature going to help? | I’m currently having a 39.5°C fever right now so I apologize for any typing mistakes in advance. I’ve been taught since young that our body’s temperature rises for its immune system to work better. However how we usually treat fever is trying to lower our body temperature apart from sleeping and taking a lot rest etc. Are we doing against our immune system if we try to lower our body temperature? I’m totally aware how having a high fever can be dangerous to the brain, but it still makes me wonder how does the biology work. PS I’m also aware that my assumption, like how I’m asking questions on reddit instead of sleeping, might be wrong. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do47ixy",
"do47kkp",
"do47lvb"
],
"text": [
"High temperature \"fries\" your body, just like heat cooks an egg. It's protein. Anything over 40C I usually lower down with meds.",
"The body does raise its temperature to combat the infection, but unfortunately it can go too far, which you are aware is dangerous. Lowering your temperature does not help fight the infection; it just helps you to survive the battle.",
"Body temperature rising as a result of infection is driven by the hypothalamus, in response to pyrogens being released into the bloodstream. The raise in body temperature is thought to be a response intended to kill off bacteria and viruses that have sensitivity to minor temperature changes, so in theory, it could have a beneficial effect in some cases. However, the general consensus in the medical community is that fever is more dangerous overall than an underlying infection that can be treated with antibiotics or antivirals. As a result, the standard medical practise is to reduce fever. This could *possibly* result in the infection hanging around for longer, but it's only really in a tiny minority of cases that the bacteria or virus is susceptible enough to temperature changes for this to be a reality."
],
"score": [
5,
4,
3
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
758y5b | What makes some people more “jumpy” than others? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"do4s0w3",
"do4z8hi"
],
"text": [
"This would be determined by the sensitivity of that person to adrenaline. The more sensitive that person is, the more likely it will be he/she would get an overreaction to the situation that caused the adrenaline to flow.",
"A lot of our fears and phobias are genetic defense mechanisms. For example, spiders can be deadly and venomous, so ancestors who have had to survive many encounters with deadly spiders will presumably have developed a fight, flight, or freeze response to the sight of a spider. This can become distorted and make us fear anything that resembles the shape of a spider, for example, a leaf, or a ball of hair may make us jump as if we saw a spider. We’ve also been programmed to fear the shapes of snakes and jump when we see a hose or tree branch that resembles a snake. We also fear sharp teeth, sharp claws, animals that are bigger than us, or bright colors that could indicate venom or poison. Some fears are not genetic, but products of nurture. A person who experiences some sort of trauma like a public shooting, can develop a fight, flight or freeze response to.. say any loud bangs. The mind thinks, “last time I heard this loud bang, people started dropping dead and all hell broke loose” so now when a fire cracker goes off, the mind is tricked into thinking the shooting is happening again, and it goes into a sort of panic mode to prevent the trauma from happening again, even though its just the town fireworks display, not a real shooting. Sometimes the fears are rational: like fearing a gun, because you watched a gun kill someone. Sometimes the fears are irrational, like fearing a green bandana, because the shooter was wearing green when you watched someone die. Or fearing the smell of sulfur, because the gun powder smelled that way. We can also get so used to a dangerous thing that we no longer fear it. The first time you see a spider, you may scream! But if you become a bug breeder, and handle them enough, you can start making youtube videos of them crawling on your face and in your mouth to creep other people out. Because we all have different natural genetics, and different Nurtured environments, our levels of fear and bravery towards different things can be drastically different from one individual to the next."
],
"score": [
13,
5
],
"text_urls": [
[],
[]
]
} | [
"url"
] | [
"url"
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.