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772am1 | How is a nucleus stable? | ELI5: If the nucleus of an atom is made of protons and nutrons, with positive and neutral charges, since like charges repel than logically you shouldn't be able to have atoms with 2+ protons. Edit: Thanks yall. IDK anything about nuclear forces or strong force but I'll definitely be doing research on it. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The strong nuclear force, between protons and neutrons, neutrons and neutrons, and protons and protons, can often be stronger than the repulsive force from the same charges. That's why larger atomic nuclei require more neutrons in order to be stable - it adds more strong nuclear attractive force without adding more repulsive force.",
"If we consider the electromagnetic force alone, you're right - the protons should force the nucleus apart. However, protons and neutrons are also governed by the strong nuclear force. As the name implies, it's very strong at short distances, enough to overcome the repulsive effect of electromagnetic force if you have enough neutrons."
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772ezi | Why do your lips sometimes become chapped all of a sudden? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your lips become chapped primarily due to 2 reasons: 1. lack of humidity in air (that's why chapped lips generally occur in winter months) 2. licking lips too often (can actually dry out lips) The reason lips get chapped whereas skin doesn't is because skin has oil glands to moisturize whereas lips don't. Hope this helps!",
"Doesn't dehydration play a factor in this also?"
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772mtd | What's the difference between a 32 bit operating system and a 64 bit? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The difference is 32 bits... bah-da-boom.. Seriously, you are limited to 4G of RAM with only 32 bit OS (address limit 'cause you only have 32 bits to use). This also translates into how much info you can pass through the computer - like drinking a slurpy through a narrow straw. With 64 bits you get more memory to address and more info (or banana flavored slurpy) through your straw."
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772oer | Why, exactly, does stubbing your toes hurt so badly? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, my intuitive answer would go something like this: Our legs are long and powerful. When we are walking we are putting quite a bit of force behind each step. So, stubbing your toe hurts more than, say, stubbing your finger, because you typically move your hands will less force than your feet. I don't think there is anything anatomically special about feet; I have spammed my finger in a door, and that sucks..."
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772qa1 | Why do colds and flu symptoms feel worse at night? | I always wondered like why at night I don’t even have to be laying down I just feel sicker at night than I do in the daytime. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This has been answered many times before, but the long and the short of it (IIRC), is that the human body goes into \"rest and repair\" mode at nighttime, causing more blood to go to certain functions to help them heal and recover, which causes other bodily systems (like respiratory function, I'm guessing) to have to work harder to perform."
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772z78 | What are light waves, sound waves, etc. made of? If everything is made of atoms, how does that work? | Please geniunely explain as though I was five, I'm very dumb. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Light is made of [photons]( URL_0 ), a kind of elementary particle. Photons are odd in that they are both a wave and a particle. They do lots of fun quantum physics stuff that will hurt your brain if you try to understand it without a half dozen PhDs. Sound is a compression wave. There are no \"sound particles\" because what we experience as sound is a pressure wave through a medium (air, water, rock, etc). When that pressure wave hits your eardrum it causes the eardrum to vibrate, which stimulates nerves that send electrical signals to your brain. Your brain then processes those signals into what you experience as sound. Without a medium to travel through sound cannot exist. Thus, in space no one can hear you scream.",
"Basic idea of waves is that they're capable of transferring energy without having to transfer matter. They're why we can hear someone talking without the molecules that their vocal cords vibrate directly contacting our eardrums, and how we can feel the energy radiating from the sun without being hit by matter from the sun.",
"Waves are patterns of energy, which interacts with the atoms. Whether that's particles in the air, water 'droplets', a spring, membranes of a drum or speaker; or photons of light (that one is a bit more complicated): the principle is the same. Energy pushes stuff one way and then the energy goes back the other way after a while. * In a ocean wave, the energy comes from gravity. The water gets pulled up by the tides, and pulled down to the Earth. * In a sound wave, something vibrates, like vocal cords or a speaker. This vibrating energy pushes the air around. * A light wave is more complicated, but there's electric and magnetic energy which goes back and forth as the wave goes along. Hope that helps :)"
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7730xy | Why do very large meteors appear green when streaking across the sky and is it the same reason why the Aurora Borealis is green? | I've seen several videos, GIFs, and I was lucky enough to have seen it in person that when a very bright meteor flies across the sky, it is noticeably green. However, shooting stars are generally seen as white streaks (could be that they are tinted green but aren't large enough to notice). Is it something in the atmosphere? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think it has to do with the actual makeup up the meteor it self . Certain gases will burn a different color when entering the atmosphere ."
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7732ys | In most books I recall, there is a statement in the first pages that mentions selling the book without a cover may be unauthorized. What does it mean exactly, and why, if you’re trying to resell a stolen book, would it not have a cover, and if it didn’t why not just tear out this page too? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When bookstores dispose of damaged, misprinted, or unsold books they tear off the front cover to prevent the books being resold. This is because publishers will often credit the store for unsold copies of books in order to encourage retailers to stock new authors without an established readership. The publisher doesn't want to pay to ship the books back, but also doesn't want stores to cheat them by taking the credit and then selling the book. So they have the store remove the covers and return those and then throw away the rest of the book.",
"It is cheaper to throw away an unsold paperback than it is to ship it back to the publisher. But the publisher isn't going to take the booksellers word for it, they have to tear off the front cover to make the book unsellable then send the covers back to get credit. Those books are then known as stripped books and are supposed to be destroyed. Some unscrupulous booksellers will try to resell those stripped books to used book stores or individuals at a discount, violating their agreement with the publisher. Other times people will go dumpster diving to recover and resell them. That is not necessarily illegal, but failing to ensure the books have been destroyed is also can be a violation of the agreement with the publisher."
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77374l | What causes some people to gag when they see a graphic injury like Gordon Haywards? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For me it's that I have had injuries similar and can still remember the pain.Something in my brain just goes... Remember when we did that"
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7737cr | Why do bees have a defence mechanism that ends up killing them anyway? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A bee's stinger is meant to protect the hive from invading insects, not people or larger animals. If a bee stings a wasp or a beetle, chances are they're going to be fine. But people, bears, etc. are so large and so heavy that when their stinger punctures our skin it doesn't come out again.",
"Bees don't reproduce the way other things do. The bees that sting aren't going to be mating (other bees do that). So to the bees defending the colony is the way they ensure that more bees are made. Remember that evolution cares only about reproducing. When a bee dies defending the colony it is helping that goal.",
"All your defensive cells die when the kill invaders because they are a programmed part of a whole. Worker bees are part of a complex whole. They don't act as individuals. Funny thing o learned is that bees will bump before they sting. If they fly into you and you don't react, then their programming tells them you aren't something that cares about bees. If you do react then you are something that reacts to bees, therefore a possible threat, so sting.",
"Most bees are infertile, meaning from an evolutionary perspective, they are a dead end, no matter what, they are not going to pass their specific genes to the next generation. However, the fertile bees in the hive, like the queen, share most of their genes. Dying to save the hive ensure those genes, which is indirect their genes, will be passed on.",
"The thing about evolution is it doesn't always result in \"most efficient,\" it usually just results in \"good enough.\" A species will keep a trait if it leads to higher reproductive success, and will lose the trait if it negatively impacts reproductive success. The individual bee that stings you will die, yes. But if you know that bees sting, you'll stay away from them. One bee may die when it stings your dog, but the rest will live because your dog sure as hell isn't going to mess with bees anymore. If the sacrifice of a few bees to stings means the colony as a whole is more reproductively successful, then stingers are an evolutionarily advantageous trait. As for the individual bee's line of reasoning when it stings you, that I can't help you with; I don't know enough about bee logic."
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773eq4 | Auto Immune Diseases - what is so special about them.. and why are there so many people getting them all of a sudden? | What makes an auto-immune disease an auto-immune disease? I mean.. what do they have in common. I never really heard of most of these 40 years ago, but now know lots of people that have them, are they suddenly more common, if so, why? Or just better diagnosing? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is the theory that we are keeping things too sanitary today. It used to be, we took care of farm animals, and kids dug in the dirt, and our immune systems had to be active to fight off whatever came its way. Now with hand sanitizers and people staying indoors, we aren't testing our immune systems. Basically it gets bored and attacks whatever it sees, which is going to be something it shouldn't attack, causing allergies and auto-immune disorders. (auto-immune means the body's immune system attacks its own body in some way). There might also be bacteria we need in the gut that we aren't getting in our sanitary environment, causing things like celiac and Crohn's disease. This may even cause some cases of autism. That's a hard theory to really prove though.",
"Autoimmune diseases are, as the other commenter says, caused by your own body developing antibodies against yourself. Antibodies are molecules that are supposed to react to foreign substances, like an infecting bacteria, virus, etc. letting your body know it is there. You can have a genetic susceptibility to autoimmune diseases, but the disease itself won't necessarily manifest. Often, an environmental trigger will set it off. [More information]( URL_0 ), though it isn't super layman friendly. > why are there so many people getting them all of a sudden? Autoimmune diseases have indeed been increasing for decades. The increase is faster than what could be explained by genetic changes. It seems to have been [occurring for a while]( URL_1 ), although there is a lack of data if you go back too far. People tend to think a lot of diseases are more common because it's more common to hear about them now, but the internet makes it more common to hear about a lot of things. These diseases have been around as long as humanity (probably even longer), and they did not magically appear in the past few years. Some environmental causes of autoimmune disease have been identified, but tons more have not. For example, it used to be common to treat unpleasant menopause symptoms with hormone replacement therapy, but this was found to cause women with a genetic predisposition to some autoimmune diseases to get those diseases. [More info]( URL_2 ) A new hypothesis of why people get celiac diseases is [being infected by a particular virus]( URL_3 ).",
"An autoimmune disease is when the body's immune defenses start attacking normal tissues, as with lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. Family history of such disorders may be indicated, but there are plenty of people with various such conditions who have no family history."
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773gfx | Why can't computers use storage devices as RAM? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They can and do, it's called a swap space(unix)/paging file(windows). It can't be the main RAM source though due to speed limitations."
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773j51 | What causes speech impediments? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Variety of things. Sometimes it’s due to faulty wiring of the brain. Sometimes it’s due to weak muscles of the tongue or other oral muscles. Could be a combination of both."
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773otn | How do we know the power of a bomb in megatons like the Tsar bomba? Was there some kind of sensor used? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Was there some kind of sensor used? Yes, a seismograph, the same thing you measure earthquakes with. A nuclear bomb will cause a mini-earthquake, and by comparing the seismographic readings from multiple locations, you can get a good estimate of its strength."
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7741cp | How do firefighters determine the cause of a fire if it's something like a cigarette butt? Wouldn't the evidence be ashes by then? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm no expert, but there are fire forensics specialists who study the way fire spreads. These people can study remnants and take samples of ashes and whatnot to determine the cause of the fire. I watched a documentary not long ago about a man who was put to death for burning his children to death. After his execution, fire forensic experts proved definitively that he didn't start the fire. The fire fighters who weren't trained in studying these things claimed that the spider cracks in the Windows of his house proved there was an accelerator, like gasoline, present. This wasn't true. I think fire fighters are better trained in this now, and it may be that they have general knowledge to be able to tell the most likely cause. If a fire is believed to be arson, a specialist will take samples to know exactly how a fire was started.",
"A question I believe I can help with some. Fire behaves in a certain way and because we know how it behaves, we can trace it back to where it started. The starting location is often times in much better shape then where the fire has spread, this is because of how the fire behaves. Once you start looking at the starting location, there are different details that you look for to help you determine what it was that started it. The marks left by an electrical wire shorting looks different then say a cigarette left burning somewhere. These things along with some common sense and input for witnesses help make the determination. An example of this would be: say after a house fire, you find some wires in an attic that shorted out, it's a possibility that this caused the fire or they shorted out because of the fire. Now the home owner says that he was out back grilling and thinks that he forgot to turn the grill off, you check it out and the grill is still on and you find burn marks on the outside of the house going up to the attic where you found the wires. Now we know that fire likes to spread up and out, so the fire didn't start at the wires because the fire would have had to travel downward to reach the grill. Here is the 5 year old version: you know how if you sharpen a pencil and the lines you draw with it are thin but after a little while the pencil gets dull and your lines get fatter, I can tell where you sharpened your pencil based on your lines and I can pick out which pencil you used based on the color and how much it was used. Hope that helps a little. I've been a firefighter for 8 years and have had some classes in investigation, I have also helped some investigators a few times.",
"I can't answer directly, but I'll say there is a lot more science on building materials and furniture burning than I would've expected. I'm a structural engineer and fire rating is a huge part of the fire code. Everything we put in the building has a rating with how quickly it will catch and spread to make sure that the evaquation paths all keep fire out long enough for all the allowable occupants to get out. Since they're doing fire tests on all your building materials I can see someone being able to put the scene back together pretty well."
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7742jd | How do gambling odds work? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different types mean different things. You'll often see an American football game that has point spreads with both sides at -110. This means you have to bet 110 dollars to win 100. To win the bet you have to \"cover the spread\". If the Packers are favored by 4 over the Cowboys and you bet on the Packers, the Packers have to win by more than 4 for you to win that bet. If you bet on the Cowboys, they have to either win, or lose by less than 4 to win the bet. If the Packers win by exactly 4, the bet is off and you just get your money back. Then there is the moneyline. This is more common in baseball betting, but you can do it in basketball or football too if you want. With the moneyline there's no point spread, and you are just picking the winner. There will be a number listed that's the odds. If it is+200, you have to bet 100 to win 200, meaning if you bet 100 and you win, they'll give you your money back plus 200 bucks. A team with these odds would be an underdog. If it is -200, you have to bet 200 bucks to win 100. This team would be the favorite. In some contests where the two opponents are lopsided, and it's extremely likely one of them will win, you might see a line that's -1500 for the favorite, or +1500 for the underdog. Then you have regular odds bets. These are most common used for horse betting and futures bets. It might say 4/1, meaning you bet a dollar, and if you win you get your dollar back plus 4 bucks."
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7748xr | How do animals change color to their environment? | Just saw a video of an octopus change color to perfectly match its surroundings, how do animals do this? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I did a project on cuttlefish way back. Octopuses use the same mechanism. They have cells in their skin called chromatophores that contain a coloured pouch surrounded by tiny muscles like a star shape. When the creature changes colour, the cells receive a signal that black should show this intensely, red should show this intensely, blue, yellow, etc. The tiny muscles contract to stretch the pouch or relax to shrink the pouch depending on how much of that colour is called for. Different cells have different basic colours and together they can create many more colours."
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774cbm | Why do men sometimes vomit excessively when kicked in the nuts? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why do men sometimes vomit excessively when kicked in the nuts? Early in our development the testicles started out in the interior of the abdomen. In male humans they undergo sexual differentiation and descend outside the abdominal cavity, but due to their original location they have a different sort of innervation. Nerves for the outside of the body are typically sensitive to things like pressure, texture, temperature, and can experience the usual pain from injuries. The organs inside the body have different sorts of nerves that mainly respond to pressure; you can feel if you are gassy but someone running their finger along your intestines probably cannot be felt. The way your body processes the sensations is also very different. If someone kicks you in your leg muscle your body will register the pain and alert your body that the experience is something to avoid. It can damage the muscle, cause bruising, and generally is a bad but certainly not catastrophic thing to happen. On the other hand imagine if someone kicks you directly in your kidneys. Not just conveyed impact from outside the protective muscle layers of the abdominal cavity but somehow directly kicks a kidney. This *shouldn't happen* and your body processes this pain as **\"OMG I AM DYING!\"** That actually isn't too far from the truth because significant impacts on the critical organs which inhabit your abdominal cavity have the potential to kill you outright. The testicles are the only interior organ which is only separated from the outside world by a thin layer of skin, and when they experience an impact our bodies process not only the exterior pain of the damage to the skin but also through the abdominal organ pathway of \"Life-ending damage!!!\"."
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774d06 | Can someone break down to me the costs of making/running a website | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's start from the bottom: To be able to host a website, you need a website to host. User expectations are high nowadays, so unless you already are a professional webdesigner, you probably need to hire somebody. The median wage for web designers is 35$ an hour according to a quick google search. Let's say the designer needs an initial 40 hours to build the website and then another 4-8 hours, whenever incremental changes need to be made. Thats 1400$ and 140-280$ respectively. Now that you have a website, you still need to make it available to the people on the internet, otherwise, why have a website? There are 2 ways you can go for this: - Either buy the hosting hardware yourself, get the hardware you bought connected to a business internet access plan (private probably won't support all the incoming connections) with a static IP and pay for a DNS-Name so that your customers/readers/viewers can type \" URL_0 \" instead of \"127.0.0.1\" in the address bar of their browser. This is probably going to be far to much work and far to expensive for most people, with 300$ - 500$ if you want a server that can handle a decent amount of traffic (users connecting to your site), double, tripple or quadruple that if you want redundancy (1 server dies, users can still connect) + you would have to build all that redundancy. I don't know about American Internet Access prices, but for business access + static IP + DNS you can probably count on 100$-200$ a month. Solution 1: 300$-500$ initial + 100$-200$ a month. - Solution 2: You pay someone else to host your website for you (e.g. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, < insert local cloud/hosting provider here > ). Prices may vary and depend on the features you want. Redundancy and up-time guarantee cost extra, and the more traffic your site gets the more you need to pay. Very small websites may get away with 5$ a month, but that can change quickly. And there is a third way altogether depending on what you want to do: If you just want to have a simple website you could use SquareSpace or a similiar service. There you have a website building tool that may not allow websites as fancy as a professionally built website, but it'll get the job done for your family pictures. Their cheapest pricing plan is 132$ a year. Sorry for the wall of text, that's probably not ELI5 anymore but now it's already written and discarding it would feel bad.",
"The people who own the site pay for their site... obviously. Don't overthink this. Its up to them if they want to try to make money from the site, be it from ads, donations, subscriptions or whatever. They may choose not to monetize their site in anyway. It's their choice. But it doesn't stop them from having to pay to keep it up Its just like running a physical store, you set it up, and pay your bills to keep it open. If you're selling something in your store, thats nice, because you can try to make back some of the money it takes to keep the store open."
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774jj5 | What caused the 2008 Global Financial Crisis? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The world economy is comprised of the economies of every country that participates in world trade. If one economy falters, it impacts the larger world economy. America's economy took such a hit that it drastically impacted the economies of the countries America does business with.",
"You ever watch South Park? You know the guy at the bank who takes your money and says \"it's gone\"? Just like that.",
"LesterBangs41 pretty much summed it up. Watch some documentaries or even movies about it, it really is amazing, and terrible at the same time. My favorite movie that explains the U.S. crash is \"The Big Short\", but for your specific question [Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed the World]( URL_0 ) explains that."
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774k3d | How did sexual reproduction first develop in animals? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Forms of it developed first in bacteria long ago. So long that determining how is only speculation. What is more important is what happens. Bacteria mostly fission. One bacteria will grow. It will divide its DNA, then split so their are two. Each one has a copy of the DNA. Mistakes in copying happen sometime. These mistakes are mutations. Very rarely one of these mutations actually help the organism survive. So the survival and reproduction of one bacteria has improved. That trait is passed on to descendents. This is evolution and it occurs. But favorable traits, mutations, persist only in that cell line. Viruses have been hopping around cells for years. They invade bacterial cells with their DNA. Sometimes they get incorporated in the host DNA, get replicated, then finally break out again and invade another bacteria. Sometimes mistakes happen and they carry their old hosts DNA with them on this journey. It is rare. But it happens. Sometimes mutations are carried this way. They can get incorporated in the DNA of the new host bacteria. So bacterial mutations can spread. Bacterial pseudonsex probably developed this way. After that the spread of favorable mutations occurred much more often. Evolution occurred at a much faster rate. Sex means that favorable mutations can be concentrated in one individual. Evolution happens at a much faster rate. Species having sex, or psuedosex, evolve much faster than those who do not have it."
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774lu6 | Why is titanium flammable? | Specifically titanium shavings | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is not really something special about titanium. Many materials have pretty much the same thing going on. Metals like titanium can oxidize. When that happens to iron we call it rust. With most metal objects they automatically form a thin layer of oxidized material on the surface. If you scratch that layer you expose the unoxidized metal which on contact with oxygen oxidizes. The problem comes when the protective layer can not form quickly enough. If you create lots of metal shavings you end up with a really big amount of surface area per mass of metal and all that surface area is exposed to oxygen in the air. A single spark under this circumstances can set it all aflame and lead to a small (or not so small) explosion. This can also happen with materials that aren't metal but are at least somewhat flammable. Wood dust can explode too. A famous example of stuff becoming explosive when turned into powder/shavings/mist are grain silos which can explode in much the same way.",
"The oxidation of titanium gives off heat. When the titanium heats up, this reaction proceeds faster and faster. This produces a fire, one that is quite difficult to stop. As for why shavings and powder are flammable. It's the same reason why leaves are more flammable than a log. The oxidation reaction is limited by surface area. Making shavings from a block greatly increases the reaction speed.",
"The reaction with oxygen is exothermic. Finer flakes/shavings have more surface area for the reaction to take place. At some point, it becomes a self sustaining fire. And I have seen it in action - we made titanium sponge where I used to work. Some fool tried to use a Dremel to cut around 2 kg of sponge off the electrode on which it formed. It immediately caught fire - think of what magnesium burning looks like. It was that intense. They emptied two CO2 extinguishers on it, which only made it worse, so the idiot who started it tries to carry it outside - but it melted through the stainless steel tray he had it on (I still can't believe he could get near enough to pick it up, but he did)."
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774n47 | Why does ice help with injuries? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"After someone gets an injury the first step in healing is inflammation or swelling. During this process the blood vessels in the area become larger letting more blood into the area. When the vessels become larger they also are better able to let the cells responsible for repair (white blood cells and platelets etc) through their walls and into the injury site. Inflammation is a natural response but can cause discomfort and pain. Icing causes the blood vessels to contract reducing inflammation. Ice also slows down the speed at which sensory nerves send pain signals."
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774rnu | Why do humans like to travel? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"personally, I hate traveling. It is a pain in the ass. But if there is motivation for me to do so, like a new higher paying job, I will do it. If there is a more fertile land to go to, it might be worth the effort of trying to travel to it.",
"Well your assumption is wrong. Humans don't universally like to travel in fact there are many that hate traveling and avoid it at all costs. In fact from a biological view humans would actually tend to stay put if they have all of their needs met. Also being able to travel large distances safely and conveniently is realitively new thing.",
"our brains like novelty. some people like to watch new tv shows, some people like to read new books and stories, some people like to see new /r/woahdude's, other people like to see new places and cultures. the further away from your own culture you go, the more things are different and require your brain to calibrate itself to it's new surroundings",
"WHat do you mean by \"travel\". Just the casual toursit or the tribe of people looking for a place to settle? For the first case, it's because there are lots of interesting places around the world and being a tourist doesn't put your sedentary lifestyle in danger. Foe the second case, it is due to the fact that humans were so good at life when they became sedentary that the quick growth of population motivated hungry people to move to new lands in order to settle."
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7753y2 | what's the difference between the 3 degrees of murder? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First degree = planned and deliberate - ex. Planning on how to kill someone and hide their body Second degree = crime of passion / heat of the moment - ex. Find your wife in bed with another dude and you lose your shit and kill the guy Third degree = manslaughter (accident) - ex. Your punk ass was drifting in your shitty honda civic while trying to impress some highschool kids and you ran over one of them 'cause you can't fuckin drive",
"The precise answer depends on the laws of your jurisdiction. But theme is that different degrees of murder carry different sentences because they indicate the crime is less worthy of punishment. That has to do with the circumstances. Killing someone in a flight of passion is mitigated in a way--people have a sense that it's not the same as lying in wait and committing a premeditated murder. Sometimes the killer did not mean to cause death, but should still be punished for the reckless behavior that caused it, which is a crime usually called manslaughter. In some jurisdictions, it matters who is the victim; e.g. killing a police officer on duty is punished more severely because it is also an offense against public order.",
"1st - malice and forethought (planned) 2nd - malice but no forethought (crime of passion) 3rd - no malice, no forethought (accident/unintended) I'm not a lawyer.",
"The distinctions between types of criminal homicide are based upon what was in the killer’s head and what the killer actually did. Intending to kill after deliberation is worse than intending to kill in the heat of the moment after some triggering event which is worse than killing due to reckless behavior which is worse than killing due to negligent behavior."
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7755uq | How have human's developed to have habits? Why do we tend to keep doing these things over and over again? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Classical conditioning. We do something that we get a reward from we do it again. The reward reinforces the behaviour.",
"There are behaviours that are automatic mechanisms that you are born with - some of these are discussed as develelloped either over time (evolution) and some are epigenetic (genetic markers from one generation express in the next generation) - In the end it's not easy to say what you are born with, what is learned or to what degree which is responsible. For example there is a discussion about syntactic structures (rules of language) that we might be born with that enable us to speak/understand language. On the other hand you obviously have to learn it and develop different parts of the brain first. Then there are brain structures/networks like needs or gratification systems that make you prefer certain behaviours - like serotonin/dopamine that lead for example eating fat food or having sec etc. Man that's a really complex question with so many answers. Humans really iare complicated."
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775ba8 | Why do almost all girls have this "girl smell" and why does it smell so good? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I can't go into much depth, but one of the major reasons men and women smell different is hormone levels. Speaking from personal experience, the same person with normal male levels of testosterone vs the same person with normal female levels of estrogen/testosterone will smell very different and will have that 'girl smell'.",
"I was thinking it has to do with all the products we use. Everything is scented from the shampoo and body wash to deodorants and lotions. Even cosmetics and hair products have a scent.",
"I'm guessing it has something to do with pheromones. Most girls I know smell way different, and only one or two smell really attractive to me. iirc it's about your immune system, they smell good cos they have immunities you don't, and vice versa. Don't quote me on any of this, it's all half remembered from high school a million years ago",
"Pheromones and genetics. Different hormones in different amounts mean different smells. A [study]( URL_0 ) where women sniffed plain T shirts worn by men wearing no scented products of any kind and then ranked them showed that women prefer the smell of men who are genetically similar to their fathers. Also, people probably have positive associations between people they find physically attractive and the scents they choose to wear (if any)."
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775dqj | What is the sense of having "the right against self-incrimination"? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The whole premise of our legal system is that you're initially assumed to be innocent & the state must prove guilt. Ultimately, it's a protection against torture - if the authorities can force you to confess things, people will get hurt if they're giving the \"wrong\" answer.",
"The 5th amendment just means you don't have to testify against yourself. It's important because without it the government could theoretically force confessions. Coming from a tyrannical government the framers wanted to make sure the defendant had as many rights as possible.",
"Torture. If you don't have a legal right to refuse to speak, then the government can punish you for not speaking. It's a small step from there to being punished for not saying what they want, or tortured into admitting to anything, whether you are innocent or not. Feel free to google forced confessions in Japan for some examples.",
"It can cause a big problem if it wasn't there. If you're in court, and they just ask you if you did a crime (and let's assume you did), if you say you did it - bam, you're guilty. If you lie and say you didn't - bam, now you're guilty of perjury. It also stops you from being forced to confess to a crime via force or coercion. One of the fundamentals of the US legal system is that all suspects are (at least legally, if not culturally) considered innocent until *proven* guilty. The burden of proof of guilt is on the prosecutor and the accusatory party, not on the person being accused. It can also be used to stop someone from admitting to another crime that's unrelated to the current case. Let's say you're accused of murder. You're innocent, but only because at the time you were selling drugs. While you might be able to work something out with your lawyer, it prevents you from being forced to then admit to some other crime in court.",
"The basis is that the State cannot force you to convict yourself. The burden is on the state to prove your guilt - not on you to prove your own innocence. Torture is one explanation, but there are a number of others. The attorney-client, priest-penitent, and spousal privileges also derive from this principle.",
"Like so many other rights and rules, this is the result of [abuse by the English monarchy.]( URL_2 ) Basically, they were hunting for protestants, and when they found someone they thought was a protestant, he was given two options: Confess and be executed, or don't confess and be executed for lying. \"I'm not guilty\" wasn't an option. For the purpose of modern justice, however, this right makes a lot of sense even without the specter of torture. The government has a lot of options when it comes to putting people they want in jail, even when they cannot prove the crime they're investigating. The police can literally trick you into committing a felony for \"lying\" to them by asking you questions about obscure events that happened a long time ago. Did you talk about *this thing* with *that person* on *such and such a date* 3 years ago? No? We've got a recording, welcome to your felony under [18 U.S.C. section 1001.]( URL_1 ) The only way to protect yourself from manipulation during an interrogation like that is to not talk. Here's a lawyer explaining how [that exact thing]( URL_0 ) happened to one of his clients. That's how they put Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart in jail: They couldn't prove that either of them committed the crimes under investigation, but since they talked to the investigators and *something* they said turned out to be untrue they went to jail. Have you ever shaded the way you said something to make it sound like you weren't such a bad person? Welcome to federal prison on a felony conviction. It's human nature to not want to make yourself look bad, and the government will take ruthless advantage of that, so the Fifth gives you a chance to not screw yourself over and let the trained professionals work things out the way the system is designed to work."
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775e0h | How do programs that are not for commercial use detect that they are in fact being used for commercial purposes? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally they don't, in most cases it's a legal rather than technical restriction. If you violate the restriction, you would lose your legal access to the program and possibly (depending on where the restriction comes from, the laws of the particular jurisdiction, etc) open yourself up to getting sued for damages, and that's generally sufficient to keep people from misusing the program.",
"TeamViewer has a limit on the number of different computers you connect to - above a certain limit they claim it's no longer personal use. Most other programs don't know, but if their lobby group audits a company and finds their software running, or their lobby group's advertising convinces an employee to dob in their employer, then they demand payment.",
"It depends on the program. Some programs impose arbitrary limits that would be unlikely to effect personal use (for example, limiting the size of an outputted file, its resolution or duration), but would with commercial use others use watermarking to 'spoil' the files on non commercial/student versions A lot though, simply rely on honesty, or only offering differing levels of support and access to updates."
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775lza | why is the US government not able to negotiate prices with the drug industry for medicare? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't that they are *not able.* As a matter of policy they have chosen not to do this, because drug industry investors don't want them to. It's one of many, many things that seem broken or illogical about our system.",
"Federal law prohibits it, allegedly because some legislators believe in \"free market\" pricing. The reality is that the drug companies don't want the federal government to negotiate lower prices because it would cut WAY into their profits (due to the volume of drugs involved)."
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775mj7 | Why is it easier to balance on a bike that is moving, compared to a bike that isn't in motion? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A significant part of the balance you rely on on your bike is centripetal force - the same thing you lean against when you make a turn. While you're moving, you can turn the steering wheel to create a tiny tiny turn in a specific direction. Because you have forward momentum, this will cause your balance on your bike to tip ever so slightly in one direction, and by continually making these tiny adjustments, you help keep balance - then later counteracting the tiny turns with some of your own weight balance to keep you going forward, as far as I understand it. If you have trouble imaging this, think of a small kid learning to ride a bike. Typically, they'll go through a stage when there's a fairly wide swaying sideways of the forward wheel. These wild and brisk movements eventually smooth out to the controlled tiny adjustments we all make while we bike forward. You can see it exacerbated again if you drive really slow on your bike - you'll start swaying the wheel more wildly because you need to make much more of an adjustment to get that balancing force. And when you stop entirely, that force is just gone entirely, meaning you have only your own weight balance to rely on. And every time you want to move your own balance, inertia means that you'll kind of push the bike's balance the other way, which makes staying upright really hard. Gyroscopic force generated by the rotation of your bike wheels might also play into it, but I'm afraid I have no idea as to the strength of this effect."
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775x74 | How does an eSport organization make money beside of the sponsoring and prize money of tournaments? How can it be a sustainable business? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Same way any sports team will be profitable. Sponsorship, advertising, donations, merchandise selling, and tournament winnings. eSports is a very popular audience passtime, and good teams have a lot of fans that are willing to watch their matches. Sponsors are willing to pay a lot of money to get to advertise to such a very targeted audience of this size. The teams also sells merch, t-shirts, mugs, posters, whatever that are very popular with their fans and can make a fairly good supplemental income.",
"Same way a regular sports organization does. Ticket sales and ads. They sell ad space, get sponsors, then charge for admission. This makes them a good bit of money."
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7763s2 | Why can we listen to our favorite songs over and over again but not watch our favorite TV show episodes without eventually getting bored of it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You will only get theories on this question, and I'll give mine; we are attracted to beauty and there is more beauty in music than a TV show. The difference between music and other forms of art is that music showcases patterns in their very simplest form. Musical Notes are vibrations, and notes that are harmonious are simple ratios of each other. For example, the notes \"twinkle twinkle\" in \"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star\", the second twinkle note vibrates 3 times for every 2 vibrations of the first. The brain perceives all notes in the scale to be ratios of each other. The brain seems attracted to beauty, in finding this type of simplicity and purity (whole number pattern ratios) in information. Such equalities are the basis of symmetries, and we find them in faces, in roses, in simple and complex beats and rhythms, in everything beautiful. In comparison, an adult TV episode tends to have a storyline that is too specific and unique for such simple patterns of beauty or symmetry to be found. (That's not true for children's stories such as The 3 little bears, where Papa bear does something, then Mama bear, then baby bear, and the repeat - and children can listen to these again and again). Consider movies that *are* watchable again and again...such as Back to the Future, maybe Die Hard, Groundhog day, Indiana Jones. Still not as beautiful a natural medium as music, but I think these have a strong sense of patterning, references to earlier and later scenes, each smaller scene relating to the whole in some symmetrical way, strong beginning/middle/ends, build ups and climaxes. There is a rhythm to these movies."
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77668s | - Why don’t we ever see ourselves as other people see us? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The information we have is simply different. The information my mother has on me is: I am her offspring, and thus it is her priority to nurture and protect me. I graduated all my schooling, so I am able to achieve things. I needed a tutor after failing math, so I am shit at math. I did not need a tutor for at and english, so I was good at art and english. The information I have one me is: I spent 90% of my free time in bed on my laptop when people aren't around. I hated school and despite being happy that I completed my BA I hope I never have to take schooling ever again. I needed a tutor after failing math, so I am shit at math. I am lazy at reading but good at bullshitting, space-filling, and gleaning a few key facts from books and articles so that I can appear to be better at writing than I really am. My art teachers didn't care how good my art was as long as I completed the assignment on time. Because of these differences in information, my mother has a much higher opinion of some of my qualities than I do. It can go the opposite way too, it isn't always that you see yourself more negatively than others; I recently met a total dink of a person while travelling during the time that he knew me I was quite bored while stuck in a small town trying to work, and the house we shared with several other people had very little in the way of entertainment (no wifi or anything). So I smoked weed in my spare time because that suited my need for entertainment given the financial and geographical restrictions I had at the time. So he thinks I am a lazy stoner, because that is the only information he has on me. The type of information we have will change our opinions about anything; consider how quickly the world wen tfrom loving Bill Cosby, the hilarious family man, to hating Bill Cosby, the serial rapist. The person remains the same, but the opinions we have depend greatly on how much information we have about that person."
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776a9u | How were banks able to transfer large sums of money before the internet? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They had private computer networks for a long time before the Internet. Prior to that, they could send written instructions instead of electronic instructions. Prior to that, they could physically send currency or gold.",
"This is one of the things that the Federal Reserve system was made for. To make a large transfer, one bank will deposit money into the other bank's account at the closest Federal Reserve bank. The other bank then has access to that money by withdrawing it from their Fed account. (It doesn't have to be the Fed, smaller banks used bigger banks much the same way people use small banks. This was especially the case leading up to the Great Depression since banks were limited to having just one branch. So small banks would have accounts in large New York banks and would transfer funds to each other through those accounts. They could sent a telegraph to the bank telling it to transfer X dollars from their account to another bank's account.) This is similar to how checks work: When you deposit the check into your bank, that bank processes the check and sends the transaction to the Federal Reserve, who sends the transaction to the bank that the check was written from. That bank then transfers the money out of the writer's account, sends it to your bank's account in the Fed, and your bank then puts the money into your account. Cool fact: The system works the same way as it did a century ago. It's much more automated and much faster, but it's still the same flow of transactions."
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776afe | People can sometimes get sick after the flu shot. Are our immune systems temporarily weakened while they "form defenses" against the Flu? | I wasn't sure if getting a fever, chills, cold, etc. from the shot was simply a side effect of the shot itself or if it was related to our immune systems gearing up against the dead virus from the shot. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your immune system isn't weakened per say, but it is \"mounting\" an attack on the dead virus contained in the flu shot (ie. this is how a vaccine works), so you may develop flu-like symptoms in the process. This is especially apparent if this is your first time getting the flu shot.",
"Some people do get a mind illness - fever, etc. - from a flu vaccination. Many symptoms of disease are caused by our body's fight against it, after all. But it is more likely that they actually became infected with the flu - possibly in the surgery - before the shot could take effect, or they caught a flu strain that the year's shot didn't protect against."
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776d0t | can anyone learn to sing? What makes some people better singers than others? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I have no idea why this was put under biology. I placed it as other",
"To keep this answer short, Yes. You can train your voice, and musical ability to use that voice quite effectively.",
"Anyone can learn to sing \"better\" by training their voice and understanding their natural range and style, however there are physical/biological limits to how much better you can get at singing. Some people's vocal cords are just naturally designed to produce sounds we find pleasing, some people aren't, and some people can naturally achieve a wider range of sounds than other people which makes them naturally better singers.",
"Everyone can technically sing. Whether it sounds good is in the eyes of the beholder. It has to do with control over your vocal muscles, and that’s why people can learn how to sing. Now obviously, some people have nicer voices (again, up to the listener) and I bet that’s simply due to genetics. (This is just my opinion) I think singing a lot when your voice is still developing has some effect."
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776fny | what's in your bladder when it's empty of urine? Is it every empty? | So I was taking a pee today and thought about this. It can't just be a void, and don't think it should be air? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1st of all, your bladder never completely empties of urine, there is always some left. But assuming you could empty it completely, the space inside would be the same as many \"virtual\" spaces in your body (such as the pleural, or pericardial spaces). It would be the same as a flattened balloon with all the air squeezed out. The inside surfaces would all be compressed and touching each other with no space (except for a little moisture) between them.",
"ELI5: it's like a water baloon. it fills up with peepee and schrinks again when peeing. So no air Involved. Normal explenation: The inner walls have a series of ridges, thick mucosal folds known as rugae that allow for the expansion of the bladder.",
"Your bladder has special cells which can really stretch. They are interesting to see under a microscope.[Look here for lots of pictures]( URL_0 :) If you are male, (probably for females too but I do not worry about them) you have the delightful prospect of having diminished flow when you are old. If you retain a lot of urine when you void there is an increased chance of urinary infections. But do not worry yet. Since this is Reddit you probably have decades before you have this problem.",
"No. The muscles around it squeeze it down to practically nothing. There would remain a little fluid in it. If it ever contained air or other gas, then that gas would, at times, come out with the urine - similar to how the bowel often contains some gas."
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776hku | Why is Pancreatic Cancer so deadly? | People who have type 1 diabetes live fairly successfully with a non-functional pancreas. Is it because of the typical late stage discovery of it, and it's spread? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not all cancers are created equal. Remember, cancer, as such, doesn't actually kill you. You can live an arbitrary amount of time with an arbitrary number of tumors in your body. It's only when a tumor actively interferes with essential organs that you get sick and die. Some cancers don't really spread. They stick together in a single, coherent mass. Depending on where it is and how big it gets, it may be simpler and safer to just leave it in place. Take prostate cancer, for instance. In many cases, the cancer progresses so slowly that the patient dies of something completely unrelated before there are any meaningful cancer symptoms. In other cases it's a huge problem, but if it's not *hurting* anything. . . why have an unnecessary surgery? But other cancers? Other cancers spread themselves around like email spam. They go *everywhere*. And then they keep growing, to the point that they either just crowd out or actively eat away at surrounding, healthy tissue. That'll kill you, often sooner rather than later. It turns out that how any given cancer behaves is significantly dependent upon the *kind* of cancer. In particular, the rate at which the origin cells tend to replicate under normal circumstances makes a huge difference. The faster a given kind of cell tends to replicate, the vaster a cancerous form of that cell will spread and grow. So nerve cancers (\"neuromas\")? Hardly ever grow or spread very much, because nerve cells replicate *very* slowly. But skin cancers? Your entire skin will be replaced with new cells every month or so. Skin cells replicate more rapidly than almost any other kind of cell in the body. Which is why melanomas (certain skin cancers) can be so serious. If you catch them early, you'll be fine. If you catch them too late, you're just *dead*. Well, pancreatic cancer? The cells in your pancreas replicate *fiendishly* quickly. To the point that unless the cancer is discovered *before* it's spread throughout the body, you're pretty much dead. Often in less than a year. Unfortunately, and in no small part due to how quickly pancreatic cells replicate, most pancreatic cancers don't manifest any symptoms until after it's too late."
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776kdv | Why does our recorded voice sound different from our actual voice sometimes? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojdgx4",
"dojdnvt",
"dojxtuw"
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"text": [
"Mere-exposure effect: Basically, the more we hear something or see something, the more our brains get used to it and find it attractive. When you talk, you’re hearing the sound through the air, but you’re also hearing it through your head so it gets sort of muffled. Your brain gets really used to this so when it hears it in a recording without the muffle, it finds it really unattractive. This is the same reason you look “uglier” in inverted pictures and reflections.",
"You don't actually hear your true voice. You hear it travel through your head and facial tissue at the same time as hearing it out loud. This gives it a different sound than what someone else hears. It's sort of like how if you put your ear on the table, you could hear someone knock on the other side quietly. When you hear a recording of it, you're only hearing the audio that comes out of your mouth itself.",
"OP is asking why people's voices sound different when recorded through different mediums, not why your own voice sounds different to you when recorded, which is what everyone on here seems keen on answering."
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776kvr | Why can't we remove salt from seawater to solve water shortages? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojdft1",
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"dojdgk6",
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"we can, its called desalinization. huge pumps force water at super high pressures through special filters. Its very energy intensive though, and the plant is expensive to build, so typically, whenever there is a drought, it comes up, but then the drought ends before the project ramps up so it gets shelved.",
"We can but it requires a lot of energy which makes it expensive and water shortages usually happen in poorer area. The problem is not a matter of fresh water but of distribution.",
"There are desalination plants throughout the world. Like everythibg, it's a matter of cost- if other methods are cheaper those plants aren't going to be developed.",
"It's possible to do (it's called desalination), but it's an expensive process, doesn't generate enough water to fully supply a city, and it generates potentially harmful brine that is released back into the sea. San Diego fairly recently built a very large and expensive desalination plant. It cost over $1 billion, but it only supplies the city with 7% of the city's water."
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776oxu | Why are fungi considered neither plant nor animal? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojg4ih",
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"text": [
"Like plants, they have a cell wall, which is a durable framework that supports the cell, which animal cells do not have. Unlike plants, this cell wall is made of chitin rather than cellulose. Animals though use chitin to make hard shells, which is what insect exoskeletons are made of. Fungi reproduce similar to how simple plants do, by spores. Yet they cannot synthesize their own food like plants can. Like animals, they have to take in food. However, they are also immobile for the most part, like plants. They rely on the environment to move around, where as even simple animal cells can move on their own power. So they have attributes of both, but are not quite one or the other.",
"They aren't plants because they don't engage in photosynthesis and their genetic ancestry has them more closely related to animals. However, they are still sufficiently different from animals that they aren't animals either. Animal cells don't have cell walls (fungi do), animals have sensory organs and can move, fungi can't."
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776qzs | why do we have to take flu shot every year? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I study HIV Vaccines now, but my PhD work was in influenza. There are two main reasons you get the flu shot annually. The first and most major one is that there are multiple strains of Influenza. Influenza comes in three major species (A, B, and C), two of which commonly infect humans (A and B). For Influenza A, there are several common Influenza A subtypes that are defined by their surface markers, Hemaglutinin and Neuraminidase. Hemaglutinin type 1 combined with Neuraminidase type 1 makes a virus H1N1. There are differences between one strain of H1N1 and another strain, of H1N1, but these differences are generally less than the difference between H1N1 and H3N2. And both of these viruses are more closely related to eachother than they are to Influenza B strains (which are not called H-N- viruses). Every year, public health officials monitor flu circulation. During the Northern hemisphere's summer, flu virus circulates in the southern hemisphere. By examining which strains are common, public health officials give a recommendation for what strains should be in the flu vaccine for the fall. During the Northern hemisphere winter, they monitor northern hemisphere flu and make recommendations for the southern' hemisphere's influenza vaccine formulation. This recommendation is typically a trifecta:1 H1N1 virus, 1 H3N2 virus, and a B-virus. It represents their best estimate of what will keep you from getting healthy. And next year, it may be a different H1N1, different H3N2, different B virus, or some combination. The second reason you get it every year is that boosting periodically boosts your immunity, ensuring your best shot at not getting sick even if the virus circulating is the same as previous years.",
"The flu is not one virus, it is a bunch of them. The flu shot is formulated to protect against those that are considered to be most likely to be prominent in a given year. Sometimes they are right (or mostly right) and sometimes a unexpected strain gains steak.",
"The flu is a virus and mutates into different forms over time. The flu shot you get only protects you from a single type of flu. By the time the next year rolls around, it's a different flu requiring a different shot.",
"In short, the flu is caused by a virus and that virus comes in different forms. Sometimes our bodies don't recognize the form that infects us, and needs a bit of guidance in order to build up its defenses. Let's use an ice cream analogy: Imagine if you could only taste vanilla and chocolate ice cream because your body only made taste buds for vanilla and chocolate. If you ate mint ice cream, your body wouldn't recognize it. Your taste buds would \"ignore\" the mint ice cream, so to speak. But what if you could get a shot that made your body produce mint-tasting taste buds? Our immune systems are kind of like your tongue/taste buds in that scenario. They need to produce a set of molecules (antibodies) that recognize a specific \"flavor\" of invading flu virus, or else the immune system will ignore the threat. Unfortunately, instead of only missing out on a tasty mint treat, if your immune system ignores a virus like the flu, you get sick. So a flu shot will give your body the ability to recognize and fight off a type of flu that you may not be able to recognize on your own. You might be wondering, \"How do we know what \"flavor\" to get a shot for?\" Unlike ice cream, we can't choose what type of flu we want to encounter. However, we can use a branch of science called epidemiology to predict the type of flu that will be most common in a given year. The flu shots are then designed to protect particularly well against that type of flu, giving the maximum protection to our population. Since the most common type of flu might change each year, the flu shot does too."
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776sne | why is it so hard to cure autoimmune diseases? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojo2lm"
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"text": [
"Because autoimmune diseases are not examples of some foreign, infectious agent invading the body. They're a lot closer to cancer, i.e., the body's own functioning run amok. The disease vector is *the body itself*, so just like with cancer, any drug that targets the disease vector in an autoimmune disease targets the body itself. That's why chemotherapy is so unpleasant. It's basically poison designed to kill the cancer at least a *bit* faster than it kills you. Hopefully. Most of the time. Sometimes the only way to completely eradicate the cancer is to eradicate you along with it, which is hardly ideal. And sometimes things are so far long that even if the cancer dies more quickly than you do, you're so far gone that it doesn't matter. Either way, the basic idea is that the most common non-surgical treatment for cancer available is basically killing you right along with the cancer. Only with autoimmune diseases, there's not even *that* to work with. Cancer is an instance of uncontrolled cell growth. It can be either cut out surgically or targeted with a variety of therapies that affect cell replication/division. That's bad for you, but it's worse for the cancer. Autoimmune diseases are just the body's own immune system misfiring, attacking healthy parts of the body by mistake (as it were). There's no growth to target. Nor even any single *place* to target. The immune system is *everywhere*. You can't surgically remove individual cells scattered throughout your entire body. And even if you could, unlike with cancer, you actually kind of *want* your immune system. If the surgeon can cut an entire tumor out, great! Cancer cured! You'll be fine! Even if that were possible with autoimmune diseases (and it isn't), now you have no immune system. Not Cool. It's only an analogy, but think of the immune system as a computer that can be \"programmed\" to target basically anything. We can even \"program\" it a bit ourselves. That's what vaccines are. But other than allergy-related therapies, we really have no idea how to \"program\" it to *stop* targeting something. Hell, we don't even know why the immune system does this in the first place, so we're really at a loss as to how to get it to stop. And just nuking the immune system entirely will cause more problems than it solves. Great, you no longer have lupus! How's that hideously nasty fungal infection you've got instead? Not so good, is how. The closest we've come to any kind of \"reset\" for the immune system is a complete marrow transplant. This essentially destroys your own immune system entirely and jump starts it with someone else's marrow cells. Bone marrow transplants are incredibly promising, even if risky and expensive. They're basically all we've got for now though."
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776v4d | How does clearing browser cache fix a lot of website issues? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojhexd"
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"text": [
"In the case of a web browser, sometimes temp files and cookies are not current, or even become corrupted. Either way, if changes were made in the browser when trying to load, if the browser is attempting to use what is cached and it is conflicting with what the website currently has, then it can load screwy or not load at all. So clearing it forces the the browser to load it as if it were visiting the page for the first time. Also to note, sites that use a page count, such as newspapers who allow a limited number of articles to be read without a subscription, use cookies and temp files to show that this browser/pc has read x-number of articles, which would cause it to load that annoying screen prompting you to log in or subscribe. Clearing the cookies removes that reference point."
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13
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776zj0 | Why do we have a dominant eye? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojjd8p",
"dojmewd"
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"text": [
"One doesn't have a dominant eye but a dominant brain hemisphere so it naturally has a preference to take the other side's eye as reference while seeing.",
"Because brains are kind of made of two halves and in most people one half will be a little more important than the other one so the eye that it's hooked up to is, like, your main eye."
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7772zh | Can rainbows only be created with water? What visual effect would other substances produce? | I want to know specifically because I thought of blood rain, and blood rainbows. How cool is that? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojomx5",
"dojhsig"
],
"text": [
"The next time they freshly paint stripes in the road near you, if they sprinkle it with those tiny glass beads for reflectiveness, [try to see if you can see a glass bead rainbow]( URL_0 )!",
"A natural rainbow is produced whenever a substance refracts light in such a way that different wavelengths of light end up traveling slightly different directions, which we perceive as a rainbow of colors. The most obvious example other than a drop of water is a prism. Since blood is mostly water, there's no reason you couldn't produce a rainbow with it, but you'd probably have to dilute it even more in order to see the rainbow clearly, since normal human blood isn't that transparent."
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777bph | How come sound needs a medium to travel through, but you cant hear people through walls | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojny08"
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"text": [
"When a wave encounters a boundary between two materials, it can do one of two things - be reflected, or be transmitted. Generally, the more *different* these two media are, the more the wave will be reflected rather than transmitted. For sound waves, they key difference governing this is the density. As a wall is much more dense than air, the portion of an incident sound wave which is transmitted through the wall is very little. This means that the sound is not reproduced well on the other side."
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777dy8 | How does “after hours trading” work? | Can anyone do it? Is it unfair to anyone? Why do markets open and close if people can still trade? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojkicx",
"dojl34e"
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"text": [
"> Can anyone do it? Yes, you can sell stock any time. > Is it unfair to anyone? That is really subjective, anyone can think anything is \"unfair\". > Why do markets open and close if people can still trade? The markets are trading hubs, they can start and stop their own operations as they please.l",
"afterhours trading is open to anyone, its not unfair to anyone. there are no market makers, so things can be less liquid, it requires a buyer and seller to agree to a single price and the transaction is executed by a computer. In reality, the vast majority of trades are done this way anyway, market makers get involved in very large trades where there might be a negotiated price to facilitate the trade in a timely manner."
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777p5s | if water is tasteless then why does hot water taste so bad? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojmia5",
"dojnikt"
],
"text": [
"Plain hot water doesn't really taste of much at all. But hot tap water has gone through your home's water heater and hot-water pipes, where it often picks up dissolved minerals that don't taste good.",
"Water does have a taste though? Varies depending on the source. Different bottled waters taste different as they have different filtering processes. Tap water is affected by a variety of things, hard or soft water, from the mains or stored, age and cleanliness of the pipes etc. Hot water as in boiled water? Exact same but with added influence of the kettle or pot. Do you really not taste anything from water!?"
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777pyd | how does the Nintendo gun from Duck Hunt work? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojni94",
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"dojpwne"
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"text": [
"Think of the gun as a camera that is zoomed in all the way, and when you pull the trigger it turns the screen black for an instant, except for targets which are replaced with bright blocks, and then it takes the picture. If it captures light when it triggers, then it registers a hit. If it captures dark, then it's a miss. CRT displays are actually a single dot of electrons that strike the back of the picture tube, and are converted by a phosphor into a dot of light. In order to make that dot show an entire picture on screen, it has to be moved around rapidly, faster than the eye can see, to draw an image in. It does this by sweeping the dot across the display from top to bottom, left to right 60 times a second (59.97 times if you allow for the slight pauses as it resets) So if you can calculate the exact amount of time it takes this image to be drawn, then you can calculate the position of things on the screen. The NES and Sega Master system guns worked similarly to this by using a light sensor built into the gun, and a timer that kicked off the moment the trigger was squeezed. When you pull the trigger, the screen empties and becomes black, and that moving CRT dot lights up when it gets to the area where the duck, or whatever target you'e aiming at happens to be. Simultaneously, the gun waits a few milliseconds and then takes a measurement of the light level it's pointed at. If you're pointing at the target, the gun will see light at the exact moment the CRT is drawing the bright square where the target was, and it registers a hit. If you were aiming incorrectly, then the gun will see only darkness during that small window of time when it's measuring. This is why the screen appears to flash a split second, each time the trigger is pulled. If you could slow it down, you'd see the screen go black, and white boxes placed where the targets were, the gun measures the brightness of what it's aimed at, and then the screen goes back to normal.",
"The gun is a light detector with a long tube in front of it (so it can only detect light in a small area). When you squeezed the trigger, the screen would flash one frame (which is short enough that viewers can't consciously see it) that was black except for a small lit square where the target was. If the gun detected the light from the square, the gun would send the \"hit\" message to the system, and if it didn't it would send the \"miss\" message. That's why they don't work very well with LCD screens, which have a small processing delay, so the single frame isn't on the screen when the gun is attempting to detect it.",
"Others have given the technical answer, I'll give the fun one. Want to get a perfect score? Point the gun at a light bulb instead of the TV."
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777vni | what’s the fundamental difference between a CPU and A NPU? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojrkrm"
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"text": [
"Software developer here, A CPU has a fixed set of operations it can perform - there's physical circuitry for adding integers, for multiplying integers, for loading and storing, for shifting binary bits, etc. Each operation is enumerated, and a sequence of these enumerations is what we call a program. Data is read into and out of the CPU through a physical input/output interface called a register, which the CPU can have many - some serve a specific purpose, some just for instructions, some for different types of data, some are output only. Many CPUs have memory on the chip, what we call cache. And many have multiple \"cores\", or clusters of these circuits, so you effectively get multiple CPUs on a single chip. An NPU is *nothing like that*. They *don't have* fixed sets of operations, you don't feed it a sequence of instructions. It doesn't have something like registers, though it does have input and output mechanisms. It doesn't have cache, and it doesn't access memory the same way a CPU does. A CPU and GPU are designed for high levels of precision when it comes to decimal numbers, using 32, 64, 128, and in some cases 256 bits. When simulating neural nets, the notion of *data* or *values* kind of goes out the door; common designs use 16 or 8 bits, and IBM has a prototype that doesn't store numeric values at all - their notion of data are well timed electrical pulses, harkening back to delay-line memory of the 50s and 60s. Programming for these things consists of describing how the simulated neurons interconnect to form a network. There may be *some* ability to dictate how they operate, and some ability to observe their state, but really it's just give the network some input and read off the output. The purpose for these new class of processor is that they're really starting to see practical application, and you can run more neurons on one of these dedicated pieces of hardware than you can simulate in software on the worlds most powerful super computers."
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778416 | Why does turning on airplane mode and turning it back off help your phone reestablish a connection in an otherwise bad area for cell reception? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojq7xm"
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"text": [
"Phones establish linkages to specific cell towers and there's a cell tower 'handoff' when you move from one cell to another. What usually happens in this circumstance is that the handoff wasn't completed or was done improperly due to the bad reception, so your phone is still trying to connect to the old tower and getting awful throughput (3G or lower). Turning airplane mode on and off resets this fresh and causes your phone to simply look for the closest local cell to connect to. Usually your phone will eventually give up trying to contact the old tower and establish a connection to the new tower, but this manual reset will do it faster."
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778h8v | What is a lien on a property? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dojw9mm"
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"text": [
"There are two different kinds of rights you can have: personal rights, and property rights. The vast, vast, vast, majority of rights we have are personal. \"I owe YOU $2.00\", or \"YOU owe THE BANK $30,000.00\". However one of the interesting characters of law that developed hundreds, and hundreds, of years ago, is that some rights are not just personal, they are attached to property. For example, if I have a mortgage on your house, it doesn't matter whether you go bankrupt, whether you die, whether you get divorced, whether you kill someone and go to jail. I still get paid my mortgage (subject to the hundred and one exceptions that exist to any six word legal summary). On the other hand, if the value of the house goes down, and suddenly it is only worth 100K, but I have a 200K mortgage... well I might be in trouble there. Now, today, most property rights also have a personal right component. In Canada if the house goes down to 100K, and I'm owed 200K, I sell the house, and then sue you for the unpaid balance. A lien is the property component of one of these dual rights. Yes if you pay a guy to pave your driveway \"YOU owe HIM the contract amount.\" But at the same time if you don't pay he can generally get a lien on the property and then if it is going to be sold, or mortgaged, the buyer or lender will require the lien be paid out. *BTW OP, talk to a lawyer asap, you should know your rights and obligations from someone who can give you the details in your jurisdiction. Liens can expire for example."
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778j39 | Why are most of the world's deserts covered in sand and not just dry soil? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"doju17p",
"dojv5fe",
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"text": [
"Soil is largely made of sand (or other minerals), organic matter, water, and gas. When you don't have precipitation, you lose out on organic matter and water, so you're left with minerals and rocks that form sand.",
"Most of the world's deserts are actually covered in **snow or ice** (a subset of deserts called \"polar deserts\"). When deserts form, it is because of a lack of moisture. Over time, green grass and healthy topsoil erodes, which leads to a gradual drying out. This then leads to muddiness, then dryness, then cracking, then turning to sand. Sand is really just wind-eroded soil in hot climates.",
"Most deserts are not covered in sand and do have dry soil. But if your'e thinking of the specific deserts that have the vast sand dunes and nothing else, it is because the soil turned to sand. Soil is the minerals (sand, rock) and organic components (decaying matter, worms, microbes, smaller burrowing bugs, fungi, etc) that live in the upper layers, along with water and pockets of air. Take away all the water, and the living things end up dying. Then, the winds will erode the top layers and all the dead living things that have become dust blow away. And you're just left with the sand blowing about. If you rewind the clock to before life left the oceans, there was no soil. Just mud, sand, and rock (and all the sizes of minerals between sand and rock). And ice and snow, of course. But imagine a large river, coming down the mountains and spreading to a broad alluvial plain...and not a single green thing to be seen. Just rock, gravel, and sand. That was the earth before life moved out of the seas."
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778td6 | Certain erasers are hard and soft. What makes one hard, and another one soft? Second Question, are there different types of rubber used in erasers? | Another question in relation to my previous one of "Why are erasers made of rubber, and what makes them able to erase graphite?" After school today I am more intrigued about erasers (yet again during geometry class). | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dokigs2"
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"text": [
"Yes. A hard eraser like those white plastic ones lasts longer, erases cleaner and can maintain more of a point to erase finer detail, but it can tear the paper and doesn't self clean as well. Draftsmen typically use them because drafting paper is quite smooth and the hard pencils don't leave a lot of graphite. A soft eraser like an art gum doesn't last as long, doesn't erase as well (at least not in a single pass) and tends to end up with a larger flatter working area but it is much more gentle on soft surfaces and can be used to remove a lot of graphite very quickly (because the crumbling continuously exposes fresh rubber). Sketch artists typically use them because sketch paper is soft and the soft pencils they use deposit a lot of graphite."
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7799pg | Why are some pimples filled with liquid goo and some with like a piece of goo? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"clear goo is going to be mostly blood plasma, and white goo is pus or mostly white blood cells (they're dead after killing off the bacteria that got into your skin) \"safe\" is a relative word when you talk about squeezing them. the big problem with doing it is the pimple is there because that site was teeming with bacteria that got into your system and your immune system is fighting it off. If you pop it, there's still probably a lot of bacteria around there, so you risk infection (or prolonging the existing problem). If you don't mind using a pin or needle (that you've sterilized) and you've washed the area, you can pop them that way with less chances of scarring and greater infection. Putting something like neosporin on it will help too. If the choice is between just popping it with your fingers (and no other prep) and letting it go away on its own, you're probably better off letting it go away on its own. Most of the time, you'll not get an infection or scarring if you pop it, but this is the choice you have to make.",
"Once they get to the \"solid goo\" phase I've never had any issues with popping them. I've been doing it for over a decade with no infections or scarring. That's not to say it won't happen to you, but there are safer ways of doing it. Start with a clean, washed face and a clean, washed needle. Gently puncture the pimple. Take two fresh Q-tips and gently squeeze on both sides until the plug pops out. Wipe away the pus/blood with paper towel, swipe with alcohol or wash again with soap, dry again with paper towel then immediately place a [hydrocolloid bandage]( URL_0 ) over the dry pimple. Leave it overnight, remove in morning. This results in no scabbing, no scarring, no infections - for me, personally. It heals amazingly fast after the plug is removed and the hydrocolloid is left to do its magic. If the pimple is sore, swollen, warm or obviously filled with liquid, do not pop it. Wait until it has aged into a hard plug that isn't too tender.",
"The piece of goo is the soft stuff as it dries out. If you resist the urge of popping the liquid one the will mostly turn to the harder stuff that tends to come out while washing. Safety of popping, it depends on how. You risk causing a break in the skin that may not coincide with the pore, bleeding, infection, etc. The solid goo ones tend to pop out without causing as much injury, some even come out during a rub or scrubbing while washing.",
"I perused the thread and while the answers are correct there are a couple of other kinds of pimples that have a hard little bean thing in them that aren't related to bacteria. Black dot pimples are the oxidised oils that your skin naturally produces. It flows like it should until it gets too much air then turnes into hard black or dark colored spot. The other common kind is only for people that have ketosis pillaris, a pretty common thing where tje effected person's skin produces too much keratin. Those are just little balls or lumps of keritan.",
"Also pimples are caused by different things. Some “pimples” are caused by hormones. Some are caused by ingrown hairs. Some are caused by mild allergic reactions to food or topical ointments. Some are caused by dirt and bacteria. The type of pimple contents will vary depending on what the pimple is because sometimes the pimple is just your body trying to expel something from you and sometimes it’s inflammation.",
"Its a balance of the excess oils in your skin and the natural fatty buildup that occurs around hair follicles."
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779dq5 | The difference between migraines and headaches | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are many different types of headache. A migraine is just one of those. A common type of headache is known as a \"tension headache.\" This type of headache is generally experienced as a \"dull pressure\" which is constant, is not aggravated by light or exertion. It tends to respond to things like Tylenol or NSAIDs like Ibuprofen. A cluster headache is another type of headache. Attacks tend to occur in 'clusters'--for example, you might get a bunch of headaches every day during a certain part of the year. These headaches tend to be on one side of the head, are often sharp, stabbing pains and make you scream like you want to die. You might keep banging your head against the wall in agony. They tend to be associated with tearing, runny nose, etc. They tend to get better with oxygen, and certain drugs like sumatriptan. A migraine is often experienced as a \"throbbing\" headache, which is often on one side of the head. Light makes it worse. Activity makes it worse. This is like when you have a hangover, you want to hang out in the dark and move as little as possible. The pain tends to develop over a period of hours and may last as long as 3 days. Often, they may be associated with nausea and some have \"auras\" --like seeing spots or feeling tingling somewhere before the headache starts. They can also be associated with changes in alertness, appetite and other stuff. They tend to respond to different drugs than tension headaches do. There are other types of headaches and many medical conditions can create a different pattern of headache. A brain tumor or idiopathic intracranial hypertension will present with headaches that have different characteristics than a subarachnoid hemorrhage or a dural venous sinus thrombus or acute glaucoma or giant cell temporal arteritis or paroxysmal hemicrania or meningitis. What causes the headache can be different between the different types of headaches. There are theories as to what causes them but none of these explanations has been conclusively proven. For medical purposes, classifying them as \"migraines\" vs \"tension headache\" or whatever, is helpful as patients who have similar characteristics of their headache may have the same pathological process going on. This allows us to group them together for clinical studies in determining what treatments are more likely to work for different headache syndromes.",
"That;s like asking what's the difference between a dog and a dalmatian; There are lots of kinds of headaches, a migraine is a specific type of headache. The actual cause of migraines is not known. Migraines are severe, recurrent headaches that frequently involve nausea, visual symptoms (aura), and other specifics that separate them from run of the mill headache."
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779em0 | Why do police/fire radios sound so staticky? How do these departments that rely on radio communications understand each other? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cop here: The main reason is that we develop \"radio ear\". Basically we get used to the static, codes, shorthand, etc. It takes awhile and is something that Rookies have to overcome. In the academy we were encouraged to listen to the radio as much as possible. It's very much a learned skill. Another thing is that if you're listening to scanners, they're usually much worse quality than the actual radios are.",
"Audio quality isn’t the main priority. Connectivity is. Meaning if an officer is three floors below street level in a concrete parking structure he can still send/receive. An officer at dispatch can reach the dive team on a lake. It’s all about dependability and connectivity."
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779nzq | Why each house smells different? What determinates your body odor if you don’t use any perfume? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Why each house smells different: Very complex explanation, but to keep it short...specific spices in cooking, cleaning agents, mold growth, uncleaned surfaces, body odor, ventilation, and pets. Every house has a different number or variability of these. Body odor: Sweat that bacteria then metabolize and release volatile odor molecules. Such as Staphylococcus epidermidis, which makes your feet smell like vinegar when you sweat too much."
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779rm0 | Why does a stream of water make less noise than a bunch of drops of water? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The main reason is surface area. In water, the drops differ from the stream because they are disconnected from each other- they are not (completely) following the property of water called cohesion. In a stream, they are, and all H2O molecules are bonded with each other. This means the molecules in the stream touch the water it is falling into in a connected manner, with significantly less surface area making contact with the water than there would be if the water was in droplets. Less surface contact = less sound created by default."
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77a6b4 | Why are there multiple mirror images of the same thing if you adjust your rear mirror in the car too high/low? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think you need to understand how the manually dimming mirror works first. There are multiple mirrors inside the main mirror, so that the dimming feature can work for the full field of view (sorry, I'm not sure how to explain this better). All of these mirrors are reflective on both the front face and the rear face. In the day position, the image you see is reflected off the silvered surface on the back face of the mirror glass. The image is crisp and bright, because the silver provides an almost total reflection (80%) of the object. In the night position, the toggle mechanism tilts the mirror glass upward slightly. Now, the bright day image is deflected off the silvered surface and up into the vehicle's headliner. And the front (plain glass) surface of the mirror takes over, providing a 5% reflective image. Everything appears very dark, but you can still monitor traffic behind you. If you tilt the mirror too far up or down, then you see the reflection bounce back between the other mirrors.",
"Because there are three mirrors with different levels of reflectivity including the main mirror. One for the highbeams and one for the low beams of the cars that are traveling behind you. The main mirror also has reflectivity on the back so when you adjust the mirror alignment, with the multiple mirrors you'll see an image reflected back-and-forth multiple times. Much like standing in a hall of mirrors or viewing an 'infinity mirror' wall hanging. See below. URL_0"
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77a7lt | Fluid and electrolyte balance/imbalance in the human body. | I'm in nursing school and have to learn this. Throughout all my reading I still cannot understand it. Can someone dull it down for me? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Check out youtube channels Simple Nursing and EmpoweRN. I was having trouble before these and they helped me out a ton.",
"The human body requires a constant amount of fluid at specific concentrations to function efficiently. The outside environment does not offer this. Thus, the body has various mechanisms it uses to keep the internal environment as constant as possible. For instance, when you drink water, the body must accommodate this extra fluid and get rid of the excess. When you are low on water, the body must conserve the extra fluid. Throughout it all, it has to keep your electrolytes at a constant level. Fluid dynamics is a *huge* topic and I can't possibly fit it all in one post. What in particular are you having trouble understanding?"
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77a9v3 | Why do we have favorite foods? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have sometimes even explained: 1. [ELI5:Why do we have favorite foods? ]( URL_1 ) 1. [ELI5: What causes favorites? Favorite food, color, etc. Why do we have them? ]( URL_2 ) 1. [ELI5: The psychology behind a favorite food of one being a hated food for another and an acquired taste for some? ]( URL_5 ) 1. [ELI5: Why you like the taste of some foods and not others ]( URL_4 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do we like/dislike different foods? ]( URL_0 ) 1. [ELI5: Why do we like certain foods more than others? ]( URL_3 )"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kq8jq/eli5_why_do_we_like_certain_foods_more_than_others/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yl25k/eli5_why_you_like_the_taste_of_some_foods_and_not/",
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77ai4z | When stars create elements, are they going to be solid, liquid, or gas forms? | Like is there gold, lead, water, iron ,etc floating around space? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"None of those, they will be plasma at the time of their formation. Depending on their eventual environment they may change into the other states. > Like is there gold, lead, water, iron ,etc floating around space? Of course. I mean, Earth itself is just floating around in space."
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77aq3k | How do nuclear reactors harness energy? | Also, where is the energy coming from? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Where does the energy come from? Fission of atomic nuclei. How do they harness energy? They're basically giant water boilers. You circulate some sort of cooling fluid through the reactor to siphon off the heat generated by the nuclear reaction (that's often water, sometimes it's molten sodium, or other exotic materials). Then you take that heated fluid, run it through a heat exchanger so you can convert a bunch of water to steam (without making the steam radioactive). Then you take that high pressure steam and run it through a series of turbines to convert the steam's heat energy into rotational energy that you can use to run alternators and generators. Then you have to take that low-pressure steam, run it through some cooling towers to convert it back to water, and then you pump that water back into the heat exchangers and the cycle starts all over.",
"Steam! The nuclear reaction generates heat, heat boils water into super high pressure steam and then you turn turbine generators with the steam."
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77astu | How exactly is someone able to hold their breath underwater for so long, sometimes even longer than 10 minutes? What are they doing to prepare their lungs and body for it? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lots of practice. It's a process of training: Increasing lunch capacity Increasing efficiency of using available oxygen Producing less C02 per cycle Better controlling exhalation to keep \"clean\" air with available oxygen, while exhaling mostly waste gases",
"David Blaine did a TED talk on how he held his breath for 17 minutes: URL_1 Also, here's a Time article: URL_0 tl;dr: Blaine 1) trained himself to ignore the instinctive pain impulses you get to try to save yourself from drowning, 2) Blaine practiced forcing extra air into his lungs by swallowing, and 3) Blaine used pure oxygen; the record for holding one's breath without pure oxygen is about 15 minutes (vs. 24 minutes for pure O2)."
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77b0pl | What is the difference between "Equal" and "Stretch" tuning for pianos | In many piano sample libraries, I see the option to choose between "Equal" and "Stretch" tuning and I have no idea what they mean. I've switched between both and not noticed much difference. Thanks in advance. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In general it has to do with how far apart an ocative truly is.......central A oscillates at 440 oscillations per second. One ocative in equal tuning would be doubled or halved that so the A above is at 220 oscillations and the one below is at 880 oscillations. In stretched tunings that is changed or \"stretched\" so that the ratio isn't doubling, but slightly more than doubling . It is usually only done with non digital electric pianos like Rhodes and Wurlitzer."
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77bh5c | What is LIFO, FIFO & FISH in accounting? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"FIFO is First In, First Out. It means that your oldest transactions or items are to be processed first, to prevent overdue balances or spoiled stock (it is used very often in retail and billing) LIFO is Last In, First Out. It means that your newest transactions or items are to be processed first. This is usually only in accounting, where the age of a transaction is less important. FISH is First In, Still Here. It means that you have items that are stagnating and never being cleared because you keep piling in new items in front of it. It's mostly used in retail to describe inventory."
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77biy0 | Why are tight rings so much harder to take off than they are to put on? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lots of wrong answers here. It’s because of your skin and the shape of your joints. Putting on a ring you are basically pulling your skin tight against your fingertip and pushing it up over the cleft of the joint. It can’t go very far so it doesn’t form folds easily. Pulling off a ring your basically pulling on a lot more skin with no hard anchors nearby and it drops off over the cleft of your knuckle so it folds there and jams under the ring.",
"When you put a ring on, your joints are braced against all your other bones, giving you something solid to push the ring down against. When you go to take it off, joints have ligaments and such that allow them to stretch a bit, which makes it so that you’re basically pulling your finger off rather than the ring.",
"Two reasons I know of are; when something is tight to your skin, moisture is more likely to accumulate there. Sweat can make you a bit sticky, so a ring might stick down to the skin more easily. Because sweat is water-based, we will often resort to oil-based products such as grease or butter to loosen it up so the ring may slip off. The second reason, and more likely to get a ring stuck, is that having the finger even slightly restricted will cause it to swell with blood because the veins are being squished by the ring so the blood has a harder time returning to the heart. The more the finger swells, the more the veins are compressed, and so the more blood gets \"stuck\" in the finger. This increases the size of the finger so the ring is effectively tighter. Many people will use compression techniques in order to force the blood back out of the finger so that it may shrink down enough for the ring to slip off. [Here is an example of such compression.]( URL_0 ) edit: I should mention, the reason blood can be forced into the finger but not forced away from it is because the heart cannot suck blood into itself, it can only push blood out. It relies on the veins and arteries to retain clear passageways to allow the blood pressure to force blood to flow back toward the heart, by pushing the old blood out of the way with the new blood. This blood pressure is lost when the veins are squished by a ring so while the heart can pump blood into the finger by pushing it, it can not bring the blood back out of the finger quite as easily.",
"I always thought it was because when your outing a ring on your skin is more taunt then when you take it off. When you take it off your skin kind of folds over.",
"Slide on a ring, you are pushing excess fluid into your body (lymphatic system). When you try to take that same ring off, the excess fluid is pushed against your finger tips with nowhere to go. All of a sudden that tight ring has to be cut off before you lose blood flow, and you better hope your ring isnt tungsten",
"Jeweller here, maybe this will help someone: Windex or any similar glass cleaner can remove virtually any undersize ring from any finger.",
"When you put a ring on, your skin is stretching against the tip of the finger. There is only a few inches of skin, so it gets taut. So the ring slides in easily. When you take off the ring, the you are pulling the entire skin of your forehand. The skin doesn't get taut, because you are pulling from a from a big pool of skin. The skin gets bunched up under the ring, making it harder to slide it off."
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77btix | It seems like people are much more familiar with bytes rather than bits because we use them for data storage. Is there a push to use bytes to classify network speeds (i.e. 1MBps instead of 8Mbps), as opposed to bits? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your network cable doesn't know what a byte is. It doesn't care whether you are sending 8 bits at a time, or 8000, there is no inherent notion of a byte. Ethernet, for example, operates on octets, three bits at a time, so thinking in terms of bytes is unnatural in that context. In addition, 100 bytes of data on your hard drive probably isn't 100 bytes on your network. Your data is going to be put into groups, and that group will have header data, separators, error correction, etc. That group will be put into another group, with more data, that is put into another group, with more data. All that might be compressed, making it smaller again. The 800 kilobits on your network are not the same as the 100 kilobytes on your disk.",
"I wish there would be! But in reality, I don't think there will be a push to switch. Any company that has a business predicated on how quickly their internet speed can flow (ISPs, router manufacturers, etc.) can put a number that is 8x bigger than the actual amount of traffic it can withstand. It's pretty much Marketing 101, when you can put in some extremely small fine print what the actual speed is, or even just put \"Mbps\" instead of \"MBps\" in small print, knowing the general consumer public won't know the difference. Companies would willingly have to change their marketing style to push Bits out of contention for Bytes. The market dictates this will never happen, given that the first company to do so would see significantly less business due to everyone else having inflated numbers.",
"If you pay for internet service, the connection can transfer a certain number of bits per unit time at maximum speed. How many bytes that translates to is not necessarily constant. Start by reviewing the [OSI model]( URL_0 ). Your ISP provides a basic connection at the media layers: simply passing bits around, and routing. That is usually all. However, most people think in terms of the host layers. \"I am downloading this file in Chrome and it says I get X bytes/sec.\" That translates to 8X bits per second. However, that is using TCP/IP: the raw number of bits your connection can provide are not all dedicated to the contents of that file you are transferring. TCP adds overhead: each packet has timestamps and checksums, so the client knows if a packet is corrupt or was received out of order. Acknowledgement packets are sent in both directions. All of these consume bits. Going back to your question, this is more of a perception issue than anything. Data pipes are generally measured in the number of bits they can transfer because that is what they do. Even the concept of a \"byte\" may be foreign to the physical layer in OSI, for example. People think in terms of bytes, because that is what their web browsers report when transferring files. A byte is the smallest addressable entity in computer memory, and files on a disk are measured in bytes, not bits. Humans are trained to think in bytes. However, overhead ensures that the number of bits at the physical layer of the network is not simply eight times the number of bytes transferred at the application layer. If we started advertising speeds in bytes and classifying connections using bytes, it would _never_ match what people actually see in web browsers or SFTP clients. While it is possible to measure network speeds in terms of bytes, it would not really help anything and could add confusion.",
"Yes, but it's completely drowned out from the marketing department. Sadly, most people are idiots. They'll see service A selling 16MB for $20 and service B selling 2MB for $18 and they'll buy service A. Both of which ignore that it's a rate and ignoring the \"per second\" part of the unit, because while the guys from marketing might have a point, they're also kinda idiots. Where's my 32 nibbles per minute connection?"
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77bvdo | Why is CPR for drowning different than CPR for people who collapse from heart problems? e.g rescue breaths are recommended for one but not the other. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you drown, you're drastically decreasing the available oxygen in your body/lungs as it all gets spent as you suffocate. When you collapse from heart problems, you tend to have available oxygen still in your lungs, as well as in your blood, so the priority of CPR is to circulate the blood until emergency response gets there. Sometimes pausing and taking a breath burdens the effectiveness of the CPR, but it could be necessary in someone who drowns (or else you're circulating spent blood). So if there is oxygenated blood in the body already then breathing can do more harm by pausing CPR compressions",
"It depends on your level of training and the country/standards you are following. I'm a Medic first aid +CPR instructor and the most recent update of our standard (g2015) still recommends the use of rescue breaths for both cases. Compression only CPR is viewed as an alternative to standard CPR when a would be rescuer becomes apprehensive about doing the breaths. This can be especially effective in a witnessed arrest because it's likely the oxygen saturation of the blood is still high enough that circulation alone will benefit the patient for a period of time.",
"Short version: Current American Heart Association CPR teaching is NOT different for pulseless victims of drowning. People who drown generally aspirate water, and experience respiratory arrest which leads to cardiac arrest (death.) AHA guidelines for an adult with no pulse and \"death rattle\" (agonal) breathing or no breathing is the same every time - check for pulse and breathing simultaneously for no more than 10 seconds. Delegate someone else to call 911 and get an AED. Start compressions. Perform 30 compressions followed by 2 breaths. Continue until the AED arrives. Turn on the AED. Follow the instructions. Continue CPR. Follow the AED prompts until the patient responds or help arrives. In drowning, there is an obstruction (inhaled water) that isn't allowing gas to exchange in the lung tissue - this is why it is very important to get advanced life support as soon as possible. These patients need advanced airway management, ACLS (advanced cardiac life support), and to be kept warm. Source: EMT, CPR instructor",
"Excellent question. I'm a CPR / First Aid instructor. Typically when someone has a cardiac event that leads to their heart stopping, rescue breathing isn't recommended unless you are working as a team of paramedics. Chest compression alone will be sufficient to circulate oxygenated blood. A person who has drowned may have a closed throat. Breathing helps get air behind this so the throat opens. Two quick breaths and the chest compression helps to revive them. Interesting things that are not taught. If you happen to have mace on hand this stuff can elicit an adrenaline response even in an unconscious person. Also, crushing the nail of the pinky finger achieves the same response. These should only be used as a last resort... in addition to CPR.",
"Same for with children; the root cause of the arrest was it was first 'respiratory arrest' (typically) rather than a problem with the heart (cardiac arrest). The issue began in the lungs and a lack of oxygen getting to the tissues, muscles, organs.",
"Question has already been answered pretty well, but I can provide a relevant aside. The training I receive as a police officer in the UK differentiates not only between collapsed/drowned adults, but also between adults and kids. For *all* kids we begin with breaths. The rationale is just one of likely causes. If you look at the overall numbers, kids who collapse are more likely to be doing so because they are having difficulty breathing rather than because they have difficulty circulating their blood. ELI5: kids are more likely to swallow things and choke and don't normally have heart attacks, whereas adults are more likely to have heart attacks but don't tend to put things in their mouths and choke. For the typical kid, beginning compressions without breaths will just circulate blood that already has too little oxygen in it, so the first step is to get oxygen into the lungs. For the typical adult, there is already oxygen in the blood but it's not being circulated so the first step is to get that blood circulating before replenishing the oxygen."
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77by2q | Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar. | I'm doing a short presentation on Noam Chomsky for a college speech class, and in studying his work in linguistics, I came across his idea of transformational grammar. However, I'm no linguist. I have no bloody idea how to dissect the any of the definitions of this that I can find. Can someone please explain it like I'm five? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A grammar in the context of Chomsky can be described similar to algebraic rules. For example, the commutative rule of addition states that I can make the following transformation: a + b = b + a Furthermore, algebra allows us to do more than reorder an expression: a(b + c) = ab + ac The idea is that there are _rules_ that can take some expression and transform it into another expression that is equivalent. Grammars are similar, conceptually. First, let us define some symbols: N and V. Next, let us define production rules to transform them: N - > I N - > You V - > eat V - > sleep I can start with this sentence, which is nonsense in English: N V If I apply some of the production rules above, I can _transform_ the sentence into another one. Let us say I transform N into \"I\" and V into \"sleep\": I sleep In more precise terminology, my grammar has _symbols:_ N and V are _nonterminal_ symbols which may be substituted, while the other four are _terminal_ symbols which are the \"end state\" of the sentence. Chomsky defined several _classes_ of grammars: Regular: these can have a single nonterminal symbol on the left, which may be substituted with zero or one nonterminals and zero or one terminals. These grammars are fairly simple and easy to deal with. Context-free: like the regular grammars, there is a single nonterminal on the left, but any number of terminals and nonterminals on the right. These can produce more complex languages than regular grammars, but still not (most) human languages. These are useful for computer programming languages, for example. Context-sensitive: any number and type of symbols on the left and right sides. These exist in a no-man's land between grammars used by computers and humans. Recursively enumerable: pretty much any language that a computer can parse, including human languages (e.g. English). These tend to be extremely complex. Note that every grammar type also belongs to the classes after it: a regular grammar also meets the requirements of a context-free grammar, for example, although we typically do not call it context-free if it is regular. \"Transformational grammar\" simply refers to the idea of a grammar that uses production rules to generate sentences, as illustrated above. This is a more mathematical approach to language than other approaches, which I have little experience with."
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77by33 | How is cargo unloaded from extremely long trains? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They break off the cars that are making a local delivery, and the rest of the train moves on while these cars stay and get unloaded."
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77c15r | How do river kayakers launch off high waterfalls without sustaining massive back injuries at the bottom? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They usually hit the bottom at an angle (point first) rather than flat-bottomed, so their kayak doesn't decelerate too suddenly. They may get very wet -- may even submerge entirely, but just for a moment."
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77cdvv | What protects journalists from being interrogated by the government for information on illegal activity? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some jurisdictions have specific journalist shield laws that allow a journalist to claim privilege over the sources of information. Some law enforcement agencies, for free speech reasons, have official or unofficial policies that make targeting a journalist difficult outside of certain circumstances (like the journalist is part of the crime). This can also be done as a way of helping police more generally, since it's better for reporters to be able to get stories that alert the police of a danger (there is a factory making drugs) then it is for there to be no story and less understanding of the facts. Some of the details you are asking for (like magnitude) are already going to be in the story. But the real answer is that usually it's not worth very much to go after journalists like this. The drug facility might already have moved, or might have been staged in the first place. The subject of the reporting might not have allowed the journalist certain information or access, beyond what is already reported. And, even if they are holding information in confidence, having a hostile witness might not be that helpful.",
"Everyone is protected from being forced to talk to law enforcement, whether the local police or the FBI. The only time you can ever be forced to talk about anything is if you receive a subpoena. Say you were in a gas station getting a gas station taco and you witnessed a guy come in and rob the place. If for whatever reason you didn't want to cooperate, that is your right. They can't charge with obstruction of justice or anything else like you've seen on a police TV show. (If you lie to the police, intentionally deceive or stall them so the robber can get away, give any kind of aid to the robber whatsoever, or destroy evidence that's a different story, those are crimes) Even if it was a murder, you could say to the police \"I'm not going to speak with you\" and there is nothing they can do. Now if that robber is caught without your help and put on trial, and the judge signs a subpoena saying you're a witness, you are then obligated to come to court to testify. So all of this generally applies to journalists in the same way. Sometimes journalists have special privileges, but often they don't. They are never obligated to speak to law enforcement but if they refuse to testify in response to a legal subpoena that says they must identify their source, they sometimes do refuse and are jailed for contempt of court."
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77cems | How can our eyes adapt to follow fast-moving objects? | Baseball players, boxers, and the like seem to be able to see things like baseballs and fists coming at them better than non-athletes. Do their brains work differently or is it some combination of other things? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From a boxing perspective, the practice allows for instinctual movements. Eyes and neurons do not work any faster but there are fewer neurons between perception and reaction. When you're learning new skills it's your whole brain searching for solution. Once you have learned, you have a special neural sub-routine built that can react much, much faster. When you practice breathing meditation you realize it isn't \"you\" doing the breathing. It's an unconscious part of your brain that does it which you only very rarely take control of. It's similar in boxing: my hand will move for the block before I even consciously realize there is a punch coming for my face. It was rather uncanny, really, when I realized during practice that my hands were moving on their own. Sometimes I only realise I punched somebody after it happens: the whole process of block - dodge - counterpunch is so quick that the conscious mind can't keep up. Expert boxers, which I'm not one, can use this trained instincts against the owner. It's part of their pre-fight preparation to find and abuse their opponent's habits. Since they are automatic, the opponent can reliably trigger them and then be prepared to exploit their weak points. Especially in amateur sparring, it's possible to recognize and abuse those within a round or two, particularly when beginners have so little tricks in their repertoire that they keep repeating them again and again. Additionally, in boxing at least, you don't really react to fists coming at you. Part of the training and possibly the most important part is to recognize the opponents attacks before they happen. Things like feet movements, shifts in balance and shoulder twists give you split-second warnings before the punch. It's not something that can be explained really but it is a large part of that apparently superhuman reaction time of professionals."
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77cl6c | Why does soap feel slippery? | This is killing me! This is a deceptively hard question. Here are my thoughts on some of the explanations I've heard: This explanation suggests miscelles form. The hydrophobic part faces outwards, which repels water, which makes it feel slippery. I don't think this is correct because the hydrophilic end points outwards, not hydrophobic. After this correction, the same logic means the miscelle would instead attract water and would feel sticky. URL_3 Unanswered. URL_4 This explanation is the human body is positively charged and the detergent is anionic so the two repel. Aside from an anion being negatively charged and opposites attract, I don't think this is correct because the human body has a overall neutral charge (minus static electricity). The alternative interpretation is the oil on your fingers have the appearance of a positive charge, but I don't think this is correct either since skin oils are non-polar. URL_2 This explanation suggests soap forms miscelles, which is explained as being bubbles of fat, and that bubbles of fat feel slippery just like a chunk of fat/oil would. I think this is incorrect because the non-polar fat-like end is pointing inwards, so the fingers can't see the "fat". Similar confusion as in the first explanation above. URL_1 This question is why do bases (like soap) feel slippery. The answer is bases cause saponification (a chemical reaction from fat to soap). But there is no explanation for why the resulting soap is slippery. As an aside, my understanding is there are several cleaning mechanisms to soap. With lye soap, the cleaning action comes from the basicity which causes saponificiation of the fat on skin, converting it to a completely different molecule (soap). Whereas in the more gentle soaps, the soap molecules are already created in the manufacturing process and the cleaning action comes from the formation of miscilles that surround and carry the fat away. This lets the soap have a more neutral and gentler pH since there's less reliance on the saponification cleaning mechanism. In any case, I don't know why soap is slippery. URL_0 | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I guess I can try to answer my own question... Lubrication happens when there is a film of liquid separating two surfaces. Soap makes it possible for this film of water to separate rubbing fingers, whereas plain water does not. This happens by two mechanisms. The first being the non-polar end of soap attracts to skin oils forming a barrier over the skin with the hydrophilic end pointing outwards towards the water. This allows the water to attract to the barrier and fully wet the finger very easily. When there is no soap, the surfaces of two fingers rubbing squeeze out the water enough to have frictional contact between fingers, so it feels rough/sticky. With the soap barrier layer, the water doesn't squeeze out because it is attracted to the barrier layer, and thus the lubricating film of water remains to separate the fingers. The second mechanism is that soap reduces the surface tension physical property of the water. Similarly to above, the increased ease in ability for the water to penetrate tight locations causes water to more easily establish a film of water between rubbing fingers. In a way, the soap isn't what's causing the lubrication. It's the water."
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77ctfu | Why is there a pause during TV news when crossing between the studio and a live correspondent? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's usually a few moment delay from what the anchor says and the reporter hearing it due to the sat truck, microwave truck, or cell signal sending and receiving data. Source: anchor/reporter"
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77cvsn | Why benzodiazepines can cause terrible physical withdrawal syndrome which can last many month while alcohol physical withdrawal usually is a matter of days/weeks max? Both drugs acts on same receptors (GABA). | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's because a drugs half life strongly correlates to how long the withdrawal symptoms will last. Let's use an opiate example heroin has a half life of I believe ~6 hours, with withdrawals lasting around 7 days for the acute. Methsdone has a half life of like 24-48 hours and it's withdrawals will take months. Now let's compare alcohol which doesn't have a half life but a steady state metabolism and is metabolized in 3 hours. Compared that to diazepam (a benzo) which has a half life of 100 hours and you can see why the withdrawals are so long and drawn out. Source: BS in Biochemistry, work in Pharma, and ex poly drug addict"
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77cwlo | Is there a reason why there isn't a universal currency system? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sovereign accounting, or the ability to create currency, enables a nation state to create a financial relationship with citizens. Government requires citizens to pay tax, the government creates currency to make the process easier (they don't want to tax milk in terms of grain after all). So the citizens do things that the government pays them for, public works, subsidies, etc. Changing to a universal currency, or even a union currency (like the Euro), can have disastrous side effects for countries that make use of sovereign accounting. Because if you do not create the money, you are stuck with household accounting where you cannot run a deficit without debt. That's one reason at least.",
"Just reread my answer and realise that, while it's very long, it is not even scratching the surface of what is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Congratulations on asking such a good question, and apologies for the oversimplification that is to follow. There are a few reasons, and the best way to explain it is to see how currency has evolved. So there are at least 2 theories of how money evolves. The first is that, in any community beyond a certain size, barter becomes inconvenient. For example, maybe I'm an apple farmer and I want some pork. But I can't trade apples for pork because it's the middle of winter and I don't have any fresh apples around. So communities start using some form of currency like gold or beads or silver or whatever as money. Then I can sell my apples in autumn, and spend the money on pork in winter. The result of that is, if you have 2 communities that evolve more or less independently of each other (like separated by mountains or whatever), you would end up with different currencies. For example, cigarettes used to be a popular currency in USA prisons, but outside prison the currency was US dollars. The second theory is that, governments are responsible for deciding what currency their country uses. Imagine you're the king of a country called Alpha. You have a problem - you want to raise an army, but the army costs money, and you don't have any money. So what do you do? You can pass a new law. You can say, up till now, you have all been paying your taxes in kind - pig farmers give me pigs, apple farmers give me apples. But from now on, I want you all the pay your taxes in a new currency called Alpha Dollars. I won't accept anything else. Now your subjects are confused and worried. They have never even seen an Alpha Dollar before. Where would they get them to pay their taxes with? Luckily, you are the king. So you print Alpha Dollars, and you give them to people you employ. For example, you pay your brand new army in Alpha Dollars. Your army is keen to accept the Alpha Dollars because they want to be able to pay their taxes in Alpha Dollars. Now your soldiers start buying stuff like boots and food and drink and all the things soldiers need. All the shopkeepers want Alpha Dollars too, because they also have to pay their taxes. So Alpha Dollars have become your kingdom's currency. And that's very, very good for you, because whenever you feel like raising a new army, you just print more Alpha Dollars (which will lead to issues of its own, but more on that later). An example of this happening is casinos. Why is all gambling done in chips instead of US Dollars? Simply put, it's because the casino management says, we will only accept chips. So within the casino you can use chips to tip staff, play tables etc. Whenever the casino has a shortage of chips (maybe more people come to play the tables), they can always make more. Now imagine you're the king of a country called Beta. You also want to raise an army. You don't want to pay them in Alpha Dollars because you don't want to go crawling to the King of Alpha and beg him for Alpha Dollars. So you create your own currency, Beta Dollars. Before long, every king is printing his own currency, using the same trick - declare that they will only accept their own currency in taxes. (TBC)",
"Because it would be very bad for most nations' economies. Countries want to be able to control how much currency is in the circulation (technically called money supply). Too much money and you have inflation. Too little and you have recession and deflation. It constantly changes relative to the business cycle and natural economic growth. Thus countries (usually their central banks) want to be able to fine-tune it based on economic conditions. If countries join currencies, they lose that control. Euro is one attempt at creating a common currency at least in Europe. The results have been mixed so far. Some countries like Greece had their problems exacerbated because of their inability to control their own currency.",
"There is a possibility that cryptocurrency could take off and either supplement or replace fiat currency. Governments will have to get creative to find ways to tax the citizens, but I think it's a possibility. \"Bitcoin\" and things like it could be a universal currency. If there is a more intelligent species elsewhere in our Universe, I guarantee you they've transitioned past national government-issued currency into something like cryptocurrency and maybe beyond it.",
"Someone has to run the system That would give a lot of power to one government, and would mean that countries with conflicting political systems like Russia/North Korea and USA would actually have to agree to something and come to a conclusion. Those countries would never agree to anything except starting world war 3. Too much power for one entity to control. There's no way everyone would agree to that. You'd have USA saying 'my currency or I'll send nukes' and china saying 'I'll stop making McDonald's toys if you don't go with my currency' and Russia saying 'rush b' and no one would ever come to a conclusion. None of those entities would ever submit to another and hail them as the supreme ruler of earth. After all money is what controls the world. Controlling the universal currency system would be to control the world. In the case that one government does end up controlling the entire world then sure, there would be a universal system for sure. No reason not to.",
"Just a fun mythological standpoint; universal currency is one of the marks of the beast. A sign that the apocalypse is near.",
"It would be a huge gap between countries with different GDPs. Just imagine if an apple costs 1 unit in the us, the equivalent in a third world country would be a fraction of that. And it's hard to make a coin of every little fraction. Handbag in the us, 10 units. Handbag in Tanzania, 0.102 units. Local currency makes it easier to divvy up worth in manageable amounts compared to the cost of living. Unless you're Zimbabwe..",
"There is, sort of. But not the way ordinary citizens can participate in. The IMF's special drawing rights enable each country to take up an IOU with the IMF, usually to smoothen short-term liquidity problems, when one country has difficulties sourcing foreign exchange to settle its balances with another country. This is the closest we have to a \"universal\" currency. But if what you're looking for is a \"world dollar\" - then no, and there really shouldn't be one, as the amount of currency in circulation needs to \"reflect\" economic activity; and since economic activity is highly fragmented across the globe, this needs to be reflected in currency, specifically access to currency. And once you have different levels of access (i.e. levels of interest at which currencies need to be paid back) you get different values, and voila exchange rates.",
"All the answers seem to be confused about the relationship between money and wealth. Governments coin (print) money, but they rarely create wealth. Only actual living persons can do that. Money is only a kind of shorthand method for storing, transporting, and sharing wealth.",
"I think now we are moving to seeing a universal currency. Bitcoin is nice - and I believe a lot of Chinese day to day transactions are mainly though smartphone/cellular payments. Another type of bitcoin is the making? I believe we are not far from seeing this as a common practice",
"Look at what happened to Greece. If you can't inflate/deflate your own currency, then you lose the ability to pull certain key levers that keep the economy stable, and you can run into a debt crisis that essentially bankrupts a country. Different local economies will be in different points of the economic cycle, and so have different needs from their currency.",
"There are good economic explanations here that summarize it. The core reason, though, is that politicians in most countries have no incentive to agree to this. The US would probably be fine with the rest of the world using the dollar (therefore the US controls the money supply), but the US would most likely never agree to be on the Euro as that would be giving up power.",
"A localized currency system is necessary to make trade balances and regulate the economy. So when your econ is bad, you start printing money and help all those riches to bail out. When your econ is too hot, you hold up some money with some sneaky bastard policy trying to slow it down avoid a crash. That said, those econ policy are never too effective, just like pokeballs, because those who are behind the wheels have different agenda than being a proper leader. i.e. fuckers"
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77d4nr | is there an absolute zero point in size? Is there something so small it's the smallest thing in the universe? | I just read a ask Reddit thread where they said there's an Infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 0, is this the same withe size or is there an absolute zero point? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know about the smallest thing in the universe, but the [Planck length]( URL_0 ) is thought to be the smallest meaningful length in space. Meaning that nothing smaller can be concieved of within our understanding of physics in this universe.",
"According to string theory, Planck Length and Planck Time are taken to be the smallest units of space and time. Anything smaller or shorter than those are irrelevant from even a theoretical physics point of view."
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77d7ym | If we are what we eat, does that mean your diet can have an impact on your chemical composition? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, yes - for example, if you don't get enough calcium, your bone development will suffer. Your chemical composition as an adult largely consists of elements that you ate while growing up, and continue to eat to maintain your body. One of the concerns about nuclear fallout has to do with radioactive isotopes that mimic calcium, such as [Strontium-90] ( URL_0 ): if it gets in to your food, it can be absorbed in to bones like calcium, where it will sit emitting radiation and eventually causing bone cancer."
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77dexz | Why is it, that when there’s a spot on a mirror, there seems to be a gap between it and its own reflection? | I’ve always thought about mirrors having a reflective surface, but not a reflective depth? ( if that makes any sense). What is this gap anyway? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reflective material is on the back of the glass plate so you are seeing the distance between the front of the glass and the reflective material.",
"The glass isn't what is reflecting the image. It's the surface under the glass. The glass also has thickness so that's why there is a gap. So it is layered as spot, glass surface, glass thickness(gap), then reflective surface.",
"Mirrors are sheets of glass that have some depth, like 3/8 or 1/4 inch. The reflective surface is adhered to the back side so that it doesn’t chip or wear off, so that thickness of the glass is between the spot and actual reflective surface"
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77dfxu | Why does noise make a headache worse? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Headaches have a pretty broad range of causes. Certain headaches, such as migraines have been found to be partially caused by blood vessels in the brain dilating and becoming larger, which causes them to release chemicals that stimulate pain receptors in the vessels and tissues around the brain. Tension headaches can be somewhat similar, but their exact cause isn’t known. Crackpot science would suggest that blood vessels to the brain dilate as different parts of the brain begin to work harder during stressful situations, and the pain occurs because of the high blood flow or low blood sugar that occurs shortly after. There’s nothing conclusive though. With regards to your situation, it’s possible that your headache is stress-related, and the shrill pitch of several 7 year olds would cause your middle ear to work extra hard to prevent you from going deaf. This increased sensation would make you extra sensitive to pain signals, and would also make your headache worse, if it wasn’t already aggravated by the stress of hearing loud noises. TL;DR, a bit of noise causes stress, and stress also makes you more perceptive to threats. Both of these combine to increase sensitivity to pain and makes your headaches much worse than they have to be."
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77dgjm | ; Why do people who work in banks get so many advantages, perks and massive wages, whereas people who work in other sectors (like the health system) get so little? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know about world wide -- but in the US, banks have consolidated a great deal in the last several decades. The FTC has turned a blind eye. This has thwarted competition and allows the several behemoths to engage in cartel-like behavior. For example, ATM fees are uniformly enormous, and are, basically, a 2-3% tax banks collect on most consumers' cash transactions. Large investment banks have little oversight and have trillions of dollars of pension funds, university endowments, and even government money to play with. At the same time, they can invest their own capital. While they claim to compartmentalize information, there's nothing really stopping them from setting up investments where they bet against their own customers, transferring a chunk of the balance to their own coffers."
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77dmzh | Why is therapy effective? What is it about the brain that allows talking about your problems to help fix them? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There aren’t really good answers to this question. Therapists have a bunch of different approaches that all would answer the questions in different ways and yet all seem to work just as well. The part of therapy that has been shown to hold a positive correlation with the outcome of therapy is a concept called “therapeutic alliance” which is basically just a metric of the quality of the working relationship between client and counselor. The better their alliance, the better the outcome. This is true regardless of the therapists theoretical orientation which itself has a huge impact on the content of the treatment. Beyond that bit, therapy is consistently shown to be effective, so that’s not in doubt, but it’s hard to show good data about why it works. From my orientation, I see therapy as effective because it allows people to organize their thoughts and feeling so that they are comprehensible rather than nebulous and scary. But I also work really hard to maintain a good relationship where people feel safe to say whatever they want and feel anything they want. And honestly, I feel like if I can do that then the people will just heal by themselves, just by virtue of having someone they feel safe with.",
"Talking about ones problems can help fix them. In programming circles this is called rubber duck debugging, where by going over the smaller details of a problem helps one notice details in more depth. However, this is not what therapy is about. After all, if talking about your problems was enough, you could just start a journal and write about your problems to yourself, and that would have nearly, if not all, of the benefit of rubber duck debugging. A lot of therapy comes down to tools, either external or internal. Externally a therapist might guide a conversation in the right direction to uncover something that would never naturally be noticed, by moving the conversation in a direction that is beneficial. Internal tools in psychology are somewhat new, and most of the research is shown to be incredibly promising. The most common of these tools are meditation (which increases awareness of the thing being looked at, just like journaling), a combination of meditation and then journaling right after, and CBT. CBT takes thoughts about the present and the future that are pessimistic or neutral and then replaces these thoughts with their opposite. This seems like a sort of 'fake it till you make it' process, but in actuality, most thoughts that seem founded like, \"I hate my life.\" are not, so thinking, \"I like my life.\" is a valid replacement and not any less false than its negative counterpart.",
"(rewritten, shortened) See u/rocket_monkey's answer. None of the other answers are satisfying. It's not about understanding your problems. It's not about the tools you use. Its not about replacing bad thoughts with good thoughts (my depression says hi, no it doesn't work). It's the relationship you have with your therapist that's fundamental. I'll expand greatly here. It's necessary to understand how we learn first before we move on to therapy. Think about how you learnt how to ride your bike, for a moment. No doubt through trial and error, and a little help from a parent or guardian. You repeatedly exposed yourself to being on a bike, learning how to maintain your balance as you went. Your parent coached you through the process. That's basically what therapists do. They coach and help you deal with whatever you're struggling with. They're not advice givers, that's a common misconception. The brain creates pathways for learning anything through exposure. The more often you repeat something, the deeper that pathway becomes, the better you'll remember. People are social animals. We are a product of exposure. What we think, and how we feel, today, is largely dependent on whatever it is you were exposed to as a child. That means that if something went awry while growing up because you were exposed to awful parenting, horrible trauma, a combination of both, or whatever else, then you'll grow up maladjusted and possibly with (severe) mental illness. Relationships are at the core of a person's dysfunction. Either the relationship with the self, others, or both. It's thus the relationship you have with your therapist that's ultimately most transformative. Methodology is of little concern. It's a complicated mess and a difficult process. You can only develop a healthy relationship by talking to that person, hence the necessity for talk therapy. Exposure to a particular way of thinking and being shapes how you think and feel. That's why every new behavior requires consistent repetition. Talk therapy is one way to help with staying consistent. Your therapist coaches you through the process and helps you when you inevitably get stuck. You're exposed to a lot of things as a child over which you have no control. The relationship you have with your parents determines much of how you feel about yourself, your place in the world, the quality of your relationships, how well you deal with stress, how safe you feel and basically how you talk to yourself. If those foundational relationships were lacking in some way as a child, you'll end up maladjusted as an adult and you'd need a replacement to fix those issues. That's what therapists are for. Who you think you are, what you think, how you think, how you feel, all of that is under your parents' control, well technically anyone you spend considerable time with, until you hit puberty at age 11-13. You're meant to rebel against your parents. You're meant to reject their notion of who you are. You become an individual during the rebellious phase. So if you skipped puberty due to trauma, like I have, because you were forced to grow up fast to survive, you'll have difficulty functioning in every area of your life. You can safely go through puberty in a therapeutic setting. My therapist currently functions as a replacement for the mother I never had. My therapist will never leave me, no matter how awful I think I'm being, as someone with severe abandonment issues, this is a crucial matter. It would be too much for a spouse to handle that kind of pressure. My behavior would just look weird to them. Most would bail. Long-term therapy is a necessity for everyone who struggled with trauma and/or bad parenting. My number one recommendation to anyone seeking help is that if you don't vibe with your therapist, get another, no matter how difficult. I'm on my fourth and she's a gem.",
"It's not that talking about your problems helps someone fix them-- at least not from a therapy sense (though obviously some people do benefit from \"venting\" or whatnot, and there are cases where someone refusing to admit a problem can be alleviated by admitting it/talking about it) but more importantly, therapists help people *understand* their feelings and give them the tools to cope with them. It's not like a medical doctor where you go in for surgery and they fix you up and you're cured when you go leave. It's more like... a school where you go and the therapist helps you understand why you're feeling what you're feeling and how to handle it, but you still have to *use* that knowledge to better yourself even when you're not in the therapist's office. The most obvious example is the \"count to ten and take a deep breath\" for anger issues or if you have marital problems learning that it's more effective to say \"I am feeling ignored by you and that hurts me\" rather than saying \"IT'S FINE I'M FINE EVERYTHING IS FINE\" and then storming off, but those are extremely simplified answers. Therapy may be understanding grief or trauma, and that they shouldn't blame themselves for something, or learning how to handle grief in a healthy way (eg accepting it appropriately rather than ignoring it) A lot of times people may not even understand *why* they're feeling the way they're feeling or even what they're feeling. They may just go in to a therapist and say \"I had a breakdown at work and I have no idea why.\" Then, with the help of the therapist over many sessions, they'll try to learn what's been going on in their life, and potentially root problems and other factors that may have contributed to it (the stereotypical mommy/daddy issues that a patient may have never even realized they had would be one example). *Then* once they've uncovered why they might be having these feelings they can start learning healthy ways to handle them. honestly it's all very complicated because there are *so* many different problems and potential solutions-- there's a reason people have to go to school for a long time to learn about it. But yeah I guess to sum it up I'd reiterate that it's not that just talking about your problems helps solve them (again, from a therapy standpoint), it's that people need to learn how to identify and handle their emotions and problems.",
"This is a question of great interest to psychological researchers. We've known for many years that therapy is effective in helping people make various changes (weight loss, substance use, etc). We also know that many various therapies that operate according to vastly different principles are about equally effective. What we don't have a good handle on is why. And this lack of understanding is not for lack of trying. There have been several attempts to discern what unique ingredients various therapies have that makes them effective, but these efforts have often come up with little of substance. There are several ideas floating around. On the one hand, it could be that at their core, most/all therapies are fundamentally the same, albeit with different window dressing. On the other hand, it might be that although therapies do differ in their approach, they all activate the same mechanism in the patient that causes change. Finally, there might be many different routes to change, and each therapy activates one or a few of them. There is in fact a rather vigorous debate in psychology about which, if any of these is correct. I work for a group that studies the second possibility in various therapies and I am often disheartened by the mixed results we see in the literature. The one concept that we see coming up repeatedly is the idea of self-perception. That our attitudes and beliefs about ourselves are formed in part by what we observe of our own public behavior. In therapy, this idea manifests as the idea of 'change talk'. Therapists guide the client into vocalizing attitudes favorable to making a change, with the belief that if the client hears himself saying such things without coercion, he will believe them more strongly and thus be more motivated to make the change. It's a promising idea, but the results are often mixed. I favor the idea of resolving ambivalence and planning. That often, clients who come into therapy are on the fence about what they want to do. Skillful therapists help clients resolve their ambivalence about their goals and formulate a realistic plan to help achieve those goals. This is an idea without a lot of empirical support, but one that we are currently examining and that I'm hopeful about. TL;DR although we've been studying what makes therapy effective for about 30 years now, we still don't have a clear picture, but there are some possible explanations for at least part of the effect.",
"Same way talking about golf with a pro can make you a better golfer. A therapist doesn't just talk, they teach patients techniques to better deal with their problems, techniques they then go and practice in real life. If you have an anxiety or anger management problem, learning a relaxation technique to get yourself under control can make a big difference.",
"This is a highly specific answer to your question solely related to trauma healing and PTSD. I’m going to talk a little a neuropsychology and how using language works on a cognitive basis to change the neurobiology of trauma. This may help understand in general why talk therapy helps, but it’s not universally applicable to all mental health conditions. Think back to your earliest memories. As far back as you can go. Are they highly detailed chronological narratives of an event? Or are they more like impressions? Perhaps something sensory? Or a fleeting image? An object from your childhood. For most people, their early childhood memories are fragmented. And their is a reason behind this. The way you synthesize and recall memories changes as your brain begins to acquire language and deal with abstract concepts such as time. As you get older, your ability to form memories increases along with your ability to form narratives, to order impressions and sensations chronologically and give them sense and meaning. Things are remembered and given meaning by their relationship to other things and we order those relationships with language. No bear with me hear. I’m going to jump around a bit. I promise I’ll come back to the whole language and memory thing. But we are going to put that concept on hold for a bit to introduce another one. You’ve probably heard of the flight or fight response? It’s a specific type of reaction to your bodies stress response cycle, but in actuality your bodies stress response system is far more complex and robust. The autonomic nervous system (the part we can consciously control such as our internal organs and heart rate) along with the lymbic system of the brain are constantly screening incoming information for potential threats (this is by no means their only job, but it’s what’s relevant to this discussion). When it thinks it has found something, it will begin to secrete neurotransmitters and hormones signaling to the rest of the brain and the body “hey! Check this out? We should do something about this” Once something is done to alleviate the stress, the limbus system will then release different set of neurotransmitters and hormones to signal “everything is okay now. You can relax.” This happens many times throughout or day without our even noticing. Humor is a great example of this. Someone says or does something that doesn’t make sense, is awkward or weird or about a highly sensitive topic, and your stress response is activated. Your cerebral cortex goes about trying to explain what happened, until the punchline clicks and you realize it was “just a joke”, provoking a wave of positive emotions and laughter. Stress + response = release. But let’s say you didn’t get the joke, or you did but you didn’t appreciate it. Maybe you thought it was inappropriate or even mean spirited. Instead of experiencing release your lymbic and endocrine systems will continue to churn out stress chemicals until you do something. You might talk to them. You might withdraw from the situation. You might raise your voice, cry, might even punch them. Your brain will keep trying things until it’s satisfied you are no longer in danger. “Do something you are still in danger! Do something you are still in danger! Do something you are still in danger!” The more stressful the situation the bigger the release. Depending on how it goes, you might feel sad, tired, relieved, or even happy once the cycle has come to its conclusion. The release can be so enjoyable that people may intentionally trigger their stress response. That’s why we have things like sports, and movies and games and going outdoors and a whole number of other activities. But what happens when you can’t find a release, when you are stuck in terrifying or dangerous situation where there is nothing that can be done, no solution, no escape? Your body just keeps pumping out stress hormones and neurotransmitters. And at some point they reach a level that completely overwhelms the brain, in the same way a drug overdose might. The symptoms are highly unique to each person and each situation, but there are some reactions that are more common than others. Time may slow down, speed up, or even stop entirely. Your body may go numb, or sensory input including pain may be magnified or distorted. You may black out, leave your body, or lose your sense of self. You could panic, or freeze, or both simultaneously. And remember that relationship between language and memory that we talked about earlier? That goes completely out the window. If you survive, your recollection of the event can become highly fragmented in the same way. Only this time when you remember them they are aren’t the warm fuzzy recollections of childhood, they are deeply vivid and terrifying. They exist beyond time, or meaning, so much so that you may experience them as if you were in the moment again (what we like to call a flashback). And anything can bring them back. Sounds or smells, even just everyday stress can trigger these memories. And small stresses you could easily handle before might become so overwhelming that your body interprets them as trauma. Basically your Brain is on permanent high alert. We call this type of stress trauma, and we call these types of responses trauma responses. There are many things that can elicit a trauma: natural disaster, War, violence, assault, abuse, rape, car crashes, physical injuries, painful medical procedures. There are also many many different types of trauma responses, but here are some of the most common. Your brain may react to being on constant high alert by completely withdrawing. You may feel emotionally or even physically numb, you might even dissociate, derealize or depersonalize. (Fascinatingly, not only do an anaesthetic medications work on the same chemical pathways and cause the same reactions, they also work differently on trauma survivors) You can develop depression, anxiety, or phobias. Lose your ability to trust or form relationships. This is your brains “flight” response of trying to run from your memories. Or you could do the opposite and try to reactivate the stress response cycle. Only unlike activities like sports or movies this activation can actually make things worse. You may resort to drugs, violent outbursts, risky or self destructive behaviors to try and get release. You may even try and reenact the trauma but putting yourself in similar situations, in attempt to make sense of what happened and change the outcome. Usually these reactions do not help. Often they make things worse. So where does talk therapy come in to all of this? Remember what I said earlier about how language helps is synthesize memory? Talk therapy for trauma healing involves gathering all of the fragments of memory and emotion and sensation, and weaving them back together into a chronological narrative. The purpose of this is to require the brain to experience the trauma as a regular memory, and to use this memory to teach the brain that it is no longer in danger. It involves carefully and systematically unpacking and reliving the trauma, often multiple times in a safe setting with a trained mental health professional. Even after the initial healing process is complete you may need additional sessions in the future, as the body remembers and is likely to relapse from time to time (people who have experience physical injuries requiring physical therapy can testify to this). It’s amazing to think that something a simple as talking can heal trauma. But language is one to the most complex tasks the brain can do, and by using language as a therapeutic intervention therapists can use the all the different regions of the brain necessary to form language and use them in the healing process."
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77dovs | If trees are technically “hibernating” during winter, how are they continuing to turn our CO2 into oxygen? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends on what kind of trees you're talking about. Deciduous trees, i.e. those that lose their leaves during the winter, absolutely do not convert CO2 into O2 during the winter months. This is because photosynthesis is required for the carbon cycle, and that is not possible without chlorophyll, which is present only in the leaves. Deciduous trees truly do \"shut down\" during the winter. Fir and pine trees, and other evergreen plants, do continue to photosynthesise, but at a much reduced rate due to the low availability of sunlight. So they do convert CO2 into O2, but at a much reduced rate.",
"\"Hibernating\" does not mean \"dead\": normal activity is still going on, just a lot less of it."
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77dud1 | If the edge of a rotating disc moves faster than the center, is this accounted for when pressing a vinyl album? | Wouldn't the music have to be slowly sped up over time? Otherwise I feel like the music would sound slower and slower as the needle gets closer to the center. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. And this is pretty easy to cater for, because vinyl discs are created from being pressed in a mould, which is itself created by manually inscribing the tracks onto a spinning disc, rotating at the same speed as the eventual pressing.",
"In a vinyl album, the inner tracks are indeed more compressed than the outer tracks. But since this affects both the recording machine and the playback machine in exactly the same way, the music speed is unaffected. CDs and DVDs actually change speed to adjust for this, so they can fit more music per rotation on the outer tracks.",
"When designing a disc format, you have two choices: Constant *Angular* Velocity (CAV) or Constant *Linear* Velocity (CLV). Vinyl records are a CAV format - this means that the disc always makes the same numbers of RPMs, which is a much simple playback mechanism. The tradeoff is that the quality of the inner & outer tracks will differ slightly. Other formats, like DVD & Blu Ray are CLV - they change rotational speed so the same amount of \"stuff\" gets read over a period of time. This requires more complex hardware for spinning the disc but it makes the data encoding much simpler. In either case, the difference doesn't really matter because the recording is made with the same technique as the playback."
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77e4b6 | How do we know we are in a spiral shaped galaxy? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you look toward the Galactic Center with your eye, you see a long, thin strip. This suggests a disk seen edge-on, rather than a ellipsoid or another shape. We can also detect the bulge at the center. Since we see spiral galaxies which are disks with central bulges, this is a bit of a tipoff. :)",
"We can measure the distance from us to a star, as well as the direction (Right Ascension and Declination). If we do that with as much stars as possible from our galaxy we can create a 3D map (a bunch of points representing all the stars) of it and see the shape as well as our position in it. But there is a shadow cast by the centre of the galaxy, we can't see the stars in a cone at the other side of the galaxy. So for that small portion of the galaxy, we need extrapolate the shape."
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77e8tq | How do animated movies stay up to date when they take multiple years to complete? | I would imagine that, with technology constantly improving, an animated movie that started production five years ago, for example, would end with an outdated product. Are animated movies just a reflection of the technology we had when they started animating it? Or do they somehow update their equipment and programs so this isn’t a problem? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"All the other movies are \"outdated\" too, so everyone ends up on a level playing field. Just like with videogames. And yes, this means that if your schedule takes longer than usual, you'll be behind the curve. This is what stalled Duke Nukem Forever. I think the effect is somewhat lessened in movies where there's a greater focus on story rather than technical animation.",
"One important thing to note is the production cycle of films isn't linear. They don't finish 1% of the film one day, then move to the next percent. They write the whole story, make tons of sketches and storyboards, record dialogue, make animatics for certain sequences, etc, before moving on to previs CG, then better rigging, more texture work, etc. They eventually get roughly set sequences, then continuously polish the film and animation often for a long, long time. So a 3 or 4 year production cycle, but the last animation renders are only a month old when it is finished, and the last updates may include newer tech. So parts of the film may be technically dated, but other aspects may be cutting edge. Since EVERYONE does that anyway, everyone is an equal bit behind, so it doesn't matter much anyway.",
"To be honest, there's not that much difference in the quality of a cutting edge 2007 Pixar movie and a 2017 average animated kids film. If you start your movie in 2017 and don't finish until 2020, it's not like it will look out of date. The only example I can think of would be Foodfight! which started in 1996 I think and wasn't finshed until 2012. It looks terrible.",
"For me it is easier to answer this referring to video games than animated movies. But both the animated movies and a lot of games are innovating behind the scenes, trying to create the next generation of technology so what will be 'standard' in like 2020 is being worked on right now. When things get pushed back and take WAY too long, that is when they really show their age upon release. Like \"We started in 2010, creating the technology for 2012... but got released in 2017 due to issues so we look 5 years old\".",
"> Are animated movies just a reflection of the technology we had when they started animating it? To an extent, yes, but that is true for anything using an emerging technology. By the time Apple finishes their latest iGadget, there is some new technology out there they weren't able to use. This is is true for everyone making something big, so it really isn't outdated if you aren't falling behind. Also, these days animation technology is fairly stable, what is changing are better techniques, project management, and rendering hardware. The first two are just a matter of talent, experience, and organization, and the last one can be updated to the latest technology when it is needed towards the end of production. Finally, it doesn't really matter that much with animated movies. *Toy Story* is over 20 years old, and holds up reasonably well. The differences between 2017 technology and 2012 technology are subtle enough that no one is going to walk out of the movie because the animation sucked."
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77en1w | Why are some words pluralized with an "i"? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Those are words of Latin origin of male gender ending in -us. The ~~declination~~ declension of those words demands an -i in the plural. See [here]( URL_0 ) for a full list of all forms of the second ~~declination~~ declension in Latin.",
"They are words that came into English from other languages. Here are some common examples: | Singular | Plural | Origin | Plural pattern :---|:--:|---|--: cactus | cacti | Latin, from Greek kaktos, kaktoi | os- > oi / us- > i radius | radii | Latin | us- > i fungus | fungi | Latin | us- > i (originally spaghetto but not used in English) | spaghetti | Italian | o- > i mafioso | mafiosi | Italian | o- > i (originally blin but not used in English) | blini | Russian | nothing- > i Quite a few languages form plurals with \"-i\". Often you have to remove some letters from the singular form before adding the \"-i\". In Latin it's common to have \"-us\" in singular and \"-i\" in plural. Also Greek words would often form plurals in \"-oi\", but we ended up giving them a Latin plural form in English so they also end in \"-i\". Add to that the fact that Italian, which is descended from Latin, still forms many plurals in \"-i\", and you end up with a lot of Greek, Latin and Italian words in English that have this ending. I should point out that a lot of Italian words such as \"piano\" would have originally been \"piani\" etc but now have a regular English plural."
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77eu4i | breastfeeding and immune system | Breastfeeding provides a mother's antibodies to her baby based on the viruses and bacteria present in their saliva to give them the building blocks of an immune system, and temporary immunity. Other than societal taboos, is there a reason why a wet nurse isn't used to help those who are immunocompromised due to cancer, transplants, etc | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Only babies young enough that their digestive system hasn't started to its full capacity can get whole antibodies from breast milk. As soon as the child is capable of digesting solid food, its digestive system breaks down the antibodies before absorbing them. Antibodies are made of protein, so they are digested just like other proteins. We can intravenously administer antibodies to people, but the immunity only lasts as long as those antibodies are still floating around in them. Having to lug around a continuous IV drip of antibodies may be more trouble than it's worth to a lot of people.",
"In addition to what is posted above, people who are immunocompromised can be so for a variety of reasons. A transplant patient for example is put on immunosuppressant drugs to purposely immunocompromise them to reduce the likelihood that their body mounts an immune response to the organ which isn't native to their body. Cancer patients are immunocompromised because they often undergo incredible amounts of toxic therapy treatments (whether it be chemotherapy or radiation therapy) that kill their immune cells. Breast milk only has antibodies in it, and not the cells that make the antibodies. The antibodies will not last long in circulation if injected, and will be digested if swallowed. Replacing the cells that produce the antibodies will be destroyed during continuous radiation or chemotherapy. On top of that all, the immune system is an incredibly complicated series of cells, and antibodies only play one small (albeit important) roll in it."
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77f0d9 | Sometimes you have the urge to eat sweet or salty stuff. Is it because you lack a certain nutrient common in that food? (e.g. salt, sugar..) | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"(assuming no-one's posted it already) [This short but colourful, fascinating animation]( URL_0 ) explains it perfectly; it all boils down to each person's unique microbial colony intestinal bacteria which influence our brains into desiring a particular kind of food which the bacterial majority need for their own sustenance, growing or falling in number depending on whether you eat fatty, fast foods or healthy greens and shit.. anyway the video explains it *far* better. It's pretty in depth but still clear and comprehensible enough for your average Willy Loman or Joe Bloggs. Plus did I mention how awesome the animation style is? In 60FPS no less. I fucking love Kurzgesagt's videos.",
"Probably not, you may just be hungry. In nature, salt and carbs were both important parts of a diet, and hard to come by. Humans have been naturally drawn to those flavors forever. This worked out really nicely (devour sweets whenever possible) until the advent of cheap, refined sugar. I don't think, though, that my desire for something salt and sweet is because I'm nutriontionally low on either salt or sugar. The opposite is probably true.",
"I may be misinformed but I believe it's because of the bacteria in your gut. They live and thrive off of what you eat. If you feed them processed sugars and other things of the sort some will begin to multiply and depend on those sugars, while others will thrive off the healthier foods you eat. Some aerobic some anaerobic. The difference being some can survive without oxygen (I'm foggy on this part) and the others depend on it. So in short, these bacteria in your gut cause you to crave these after you haven't had some for such a long time.",
"Your body craves salt if it’s deficient in sodium. Sugar cravings are a whole other story. Everyone who eats products with glucose gets their blood sugar levels elevated and after a couple of hours the glucose levels plummet so you could say you’re experiencing “sugar withdrawals” and start craving sugar just like drugs. Oh! And your body doesn’t need glucose to survive, it can survive just on protein and fats.",
"It may be because you are under stress and experiencing emotional/stress eating. From - URL_0 > 'Stress – Ever notice how stress makes you hungry? It’s not just in your mind. When stress is chronic, your body produces as it so often is in our chaotic, fast-paced world, it leads to high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol triggers cravings for salty, sweet, and fried foods—foods that give you a burst of energy and pleasure. The more uncontrolled stress in your life, the more likely you are to turn to food for emotional relief.'",
"There's no one answer. It can be hormonal. High estrogen makes you crave sweet things like chocolate.",
"In my case it's just because I'm fat. Seriously though, your body does sometimes get cravings for certain foods when you are not getting enough of a particular resource in your diet. Just typically not salt or sugar.",
"I am going to disagree with most posters. Sure I get a driving fixation for a chocolate or piece of hard candy, but I also get driving urgers for random crap I would never eat. Last week I could not stop thinking about broccoli and I despise broccoli...I ate Okra instead. I do find a correlation to bowel problems and cravings. If I've not had a movement in 3 days, I will start craving cereal",
"What about salts? I often don't feel fed until I've eaten something salty.",
"No. You are craving homeostasis. For example, insulin cures high cortisol levels so when you are stressed you crave quick carbs which will spike your insulin and relax your cortisol.",
"I have a similar question... I tend to crave sour and vinegary things. I love fresh lemons, vinegary salads, douse Frank's Red Hot on just about everything, and sometimes even sip on a shot's worth of undiluted vinegar (various kinds). My SO thinks this is really weird. I've been doing this for many, many years, and I can never get enough it seems. Is there something wrong with me, or is this just a harmless preference?",
"A little bit out of context: there was a chart about what you should eat when you carve certain foods. And had explanations what means carving what food and what you need and how to fulfill that need the easiest.",
"For salt yes, but for sugar not. Because you need salt to survive and it isn't addictive, but sugar isn't essential, you can survive without it and it is very addictive. So your crqving for sugar is very different than your craving for salt.",
"Salt hunger is the only one I'm aware of that has a direct physiological cause, and you probably aren't running into it in day to day life. But if you are low enough on sodium, it will result in a distinct set of behaviors just like hunger and thirst do. URL_0",
"There's actually a really cool video done by \"in a nutshell\" that may help to explain just what your asking. Basically, there are a bunch of different microorganisms in your body that each want certain types of nutrients. It is theorized that some of those microorganisms may be able to send your brain signals to crave certain types of food that give them nutrients.",
"Human dietary habits were formed a million years ago in the forest. Salt is a rare commodity in nature, but we need it in our bodies, so we have developed a craving for it. Sugar is a high value food for hunter - gatherer tribes because of the caloric value. Now that these foods are abundant and easily available, which was not true in our evolutionary past, our bodies have not had enough time to evolve to deal with them properly and we tend to overeat them."
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77f6yh | Could someone explain privately owned toll roads and the reason toll costs are so high? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Civil Engineer, so I have a bit of knowledge on this. Where I am from, these type of toll roads are generally built on a DBFO contract from the government (Design, Build, Finance and Operate). Basically, the government issues an open tender for the scheme with a rough outline of what they want, companies will gather as 'Joint Ventures' or 'Consortium' and apply to build the road. The winner of the tender process will be chosen based on both the quality of their proposal and the price of the toll that they propose to charge. The group of companies who win the work initially have to finance the building of the road and the interest on a 40 year, 500 million pound loan is really expensive. Then they must design the road, which is expensive as hell and may take years. Then they have to build the damn thing, which again may take years. Once it is constructed and the road is operational the group can start to recoup come of their investment through the tolls ...... but the group of companies must also Operate the road for the contracted time period (could be 40 years). Operating a road is expensive; maintenance of the running surface, verge cutting, litter picking, maintaining the bridges, salting in winter, brushing leaves in Autumn .... it is expensive for a government to do works like this and they have plenty of tax dollars to help them but the consortium has to build all this maintenance cost into the Toll that you pay at the booth. So in short (as this has gone well beyond the comprehension of a 5-year-old): The toll you pay at the booth covers the financing, design, construction, operation and profit for numerous companies for a long period of time. The consortium that will have won the contract, will probably have done so because the toll that they promised to charge 1penny or cent less than their next nearest competitor for the duration of the contract."
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77fdje | Why do banana skins go brown hours after opening them, but stay yellow if you left them closed for the same amount of time? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The skins oxidize on each layer quicker when it's peeled. Think of it as rust. If more of an area can get rusted, the area will get rusted faster.",
"Bananas, and most (if not all) ripening fruit contain a plant hormone called [ethylene]( URL_0 ), which causes fruit to ripen, which also causes the release of more ethylene in a positive feedback loop. This is why fruits that are kept in plastic bags ripen much more quickly, as the ethylene concentration builds up in the enclosed environment. When the fruit is bruised, it releases more ethylene, which rapidly increases the fruit to ripen. This also explains why you can score the skin with a knife and draw [fancy patterns]( URL_1 )."
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77fxdu | Why is two neutron stars colliding considered important? What are the implications of this? | Other than sounding really bad-ass, my non-sciencey brain can't wrap around why two neutron stars colliding with each other billions of years ago is seen as a game changer. Unless just the mere fact that this awesome thing occurred is *why* people are excited about it. But I also wondered what other science/theories this event is going to spur. | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What's really cool about it is that it's something that we can see with one of our newest astronomy tools, gravity wave detectors. Gravity waves are super tiny, so you need ridiculously precise instruments to detect and measure them. The world recently got a third good one up and running, and so now when a big enough gravitational event passes the Earth, by measuring the time difference when each detector saw the event, we can triangulate where in the sky it came from, and then point regular telescopes at it pretty quickly. This is useful for something like a neutron star collision, because those start producing intense and detectable gravity waves before the actual collision occurs, so hopefully if we detect those waves we can point our other telescopes in the right direction to actually catch the entirety of the collision, and see how it goes from start to finish. Compare this to the 'old' way that it normally occurred, where we wouldn't know anything happened until we saw the star brighten, and by then we've already missed the actual collision."
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77g19k | Why are the twists in Cat V strands so important? Why can't they just be straight wires? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The twists reduce the \"magnetic flux\" caused by magnetic fields in the environment, reducing interference. Nearby electrical circuits will cause fluctuating magnetic fields in the region of the cable. These fields will create an \"induced voltage\" in the cable circuit: the induced voltage depends on the magnetic flux, which is the number of field lines which poke through the gap between the two strands. This induced voltage will interfere with the signal. So clearly you want the two strands close together to minimize the gap, but because of their physical size and insulation, you can only get them so close together. But if the wires cross over each other, the magnetic field pokes through in one direction for the first half-twist, then pokes through \"backwards\" for the other half-twist, and so on: each half-twist cancels out the previous one, so the total magnetic flux is much closer to zero. URL_0",
"Twisted strand uses the transmission of electricity to cancel out the noise in the cable. Without the twist the cable is more sensitive to interference and generally can cause transmission issues with reduced speed due to errors.",
"When an ethernet cable (or any wire) runs next to a run of power cables, the power cables will induce current into the ethernet cable. This is similar to the way that an inductive, or wireless, charger works for your phone. If your ethernet cable is not twisted, there's going to be one that is closer to the power cable, therefore getting more induced current. If they are twisted, the power cable will induce current more current to one wire, then the other, then back to the first... eventually averaging out so both wires in the twisted pair have the same amount of inducted current. The signal on the wire is the difference between the voltages on the 2 wires, rather than an absolute voltage. There are good reasons for this, relating to ground state differences, but that's for another time. The important thing is the devices are looking for the difference in voltage between the 2 wires. All this comes together to mean that the twists cause any added current to be added equally to both sides, thereby not corrupting the signal.",
"Alright so I'm going to make an attempt at an *actual* ELI5: Let's say you have two long roads right next to each other (a single pair). And there's no way for cars to go from one side, to the other side. These cars spell a word from front to back, so they need to stay in the order they're in. It's also crab mating season, so all the little crabs want to come onto land to breed. This means they have to cross the roads (outside interference). If we keep the roads as is, the crabs will flood the road, and cars will have to stop, they might crash, they might get passed by cars on the other side which will get to the end before them, messing everything up. BUT, if we add \"S\" turns into each road for the whole length(the twists in the pair), so they overlap creating many intersections, something cool happens: When crabs flood one side of the road, the cars can just split off to the other side. BUT THEN BOOM, MORE CRABS ON THAT SIDE! But it's cool, there's another intersection and we can just veer back to the other side and go around these crabs too! We don't want no crabs affecting our perfect line of cars. Twists keep the crabs from affecting what's happening on the roads.",
"Because moving ambient electromagnetic fields induce electrical current in wires. Current that's not your signal. Twisted pair makes two wires with opposite directions, making outside interference mostly cancel itself out",
"True ELI5: because it works better. Want some fruit chews or applesauce?",
"It takes 2 wires to transmit one signal in this setup. It is called a twisted differential pair. The 2 wires send exact opposite signals of each other, so that the electrical interference from the 2 wires cancels out. This prevents the pair from sending interference out. The cancellation works best when the wires are very close to each other. The twist keeps the wires tightly together. Also, the electronics look at the difference in signal on the two wires to decipher a signal. If there is outside interference acting on the wires, it will act equally on both wires because they are so close to each other, and they both will go up and down in voltage together. The difference in voltage between the two wires will stay the same even with outside interference acting on the wire pair.",
"My recollection of this is a little fuzzy but I feel like some of the existing comments are forgetting that in a proper twisted pair the signal is [differential]( URL_0 ). What that means is say you send a signal, you'd send it normally on one half of the pair and the inversion on the other. At the end a receiver then mixes them back together. If any noise happened on the line it would happen on both lines, and mixing process on the receiving end can now identify what is signal and what is noise, and remove the noise. If we think about the signals as numbers, say we sent the number 16. On the wire we send 16 as it is, no change. On the second half we send -16 (the inverse). Now say half way through transmission there is a big noise spike (we'll say it was a +3) from a nearby outlet, and it adds itself onto our twisted pair. Well at the end of the line the receiver gets a 19(16+3) and a -13 (-16+3). The receiver's mixer sees that they are different, and when it puts them back together can calculate the offset and bring us back to our original value. If you didn't have a differential signal pair, the noise would just affect our original signal (16 - > 19) and the receiver would have no way of knowing if 19 was the original signal or not. To answer your original question, the twist comes in to play in CAT5's case to help keep wires from running parallel to each other. Wires running parallel to each other over long distances allow for great inductive cross talk. CAT5 cable actually specifies different twist rates for each pair so that they without a doubt are not lying parallel with each other over the run of the cable."
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77g372 | What is a disjunctive syllogism? | Everywhere I go online to figure out this term "disjunctive syllogism" throws so much jargon at me I feel like a literal 5 year old. Would love an ELI5 | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First let's break down what the two words mean. \"Disjunctive\" just means it involves an \"or\" statement. The opposite would be \"conjunctive\", which means it involves an \"and\" statement. A syllogism is a type of argument where a conclusion is drawn from two or more premises which are considered to be true. In other words, you assume two statements are true and from that you conclude that a third statement must also be true. This is the most famous example of a syllogism: > All men are mortal. > Socrates is a man. > Therefore, Socrates is mortal. If the first two statements are true, then the third must follow. A disjunctive syllogism is a syllogism that involves an \"or\" statement. The first premise is that A or B is true. The second premise is either \"A is not true\" or \"B is not true.\" From that, you can conclude that the other thing must be true. For example: > The dog is either a poodle or a retriever. > The dog is not a poodle. > Therefore, the dog is a retriever. Basically, a disjunctive syllogism is a fancy way of saying if you know one thing or another must be true and you also know one of those things isn't true, then you can conclude that the other thing must be true."
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77ggoq | What are the biological advantagse and disadvantages of trees shedding their leaves vs keeping them all year round (deciduous vs coniferous)? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Deciduous trees shed their leaves in order to conserve energy. Leaves take energy to maintain, so it's advantageous for the tree if it does not have to deal with leaf upkeep when there is limited warmth and sunlight (in other words, winter). The downside of this is that deciduous trees have to regrow all their leaves the next year, which is something that evergreens do not have to deal with (by the way, I think the question should be deciduous vs evergreen, but that's another topic) For a non-ELI5 explanation of advantages vs disadvantages, Wikipedia has some pretty good information: URL_0",
"Deciduous trees would never survive a winter if they kept their leaves in area where it snows. Snow accumulates on leaves and gets very heavy, breaking branches and taking down entire trees, especially if it is snowy and windy.. or that heavy wet snow so common on warmer days. Snow does eventually accumulate on the thin needles of evergreen trees too, but their branches are usually slopped better to handle it, where as the upright branches of deciduous trees cannot cope. Snow does slide off the needles easier than it slides off leaves. In areas that get freak snow storms in the fall (before the leaves have fallen off deciduous trees) it is not uncommon to have a lot of branches down or trees fully knocked over.",
"Deciduous trees lose their leaves to conserve water and to survive winter. The roots of evergreen trees are deeper and are able to obtain water better than deciduous trees. Trees also lose their leaves as a form of self-protection, as tourists flock to see the leaves changing colors, thereby increasing the tourist revenue for that area, which in turn provides protection against being cut down. This is know as \"economic evolution\".",
"Leaves take energy to protect and keep alive, especially in the cold, dark days of winter. If they energy they make available to the try isn't enough to cover their cost, they are a net drain. If the difference between those two is great enough, it is can cost least energy overall to drop the leaves during fall or winter, and regrow them in the spring.",
"The advantages are that they conserve energy and water during winter months, have a chance to regrow damaged leaves, and are less appetizing to some types of predators. The disadvantages are the fact that they must expend a lot of energy to regrow new leaves from scratch.",
"There are three types of environmental conditions. 1. Wherever there is a seasonal lack of water (either via a dry season or snowy winter) **Deciduous** trees are advantaged because they don't need to spend water maintaining their leaves. 2. Where the soil is nutrient poor (making it costly to regrow the leaves each year) **Evergreen** trees are advantaged. 3. Where neither restriction is in effect **Evergreens** generally outcompete Deciduous trees due to natural leeching of nitrogen out of the soil favouring Evergreens.",
"Deciduous trees lose their leaves as they move energy from them into the roots in preparation of colder temperatures, sort of a tree hibernation. Their isn't enough sunlight in the winter for many species to photosynthesis effectively so by withdrawing energy and support for their leaves in favor of storage, they can outlast the cold and limited sunlight. Conifers on the other hand keep their needles all year because they can photosynthesis year round, even with the limited light in winter. It's also less energy they need to spend in the spring regrowing their leaves. As well winter can offer less competition depending on the forest type for conifers since many other dominant species won't be blocking light since they've shed their leaves already. Conifers also will shed their bottom branches throughout their lives if the lower leaves don't receive enough light. Many people mistake this for the tree dying, but it's just a method of energy conservation. There are odd balls in each tree type though. For instance, Tamaracks shed their needles in the fall while still scientifically being a conifer, and American beech doesn't lose its leaves after its withdrawn all the energy from the leaves."
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