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3awf6h | Why do cable companies give such wide and inconvenient timeslots for doing housecalls? | lets say that the tech has 8 trips to make. they don't know how long each appt will take. some could take 10 min. others could take an hour. so they give you a range. but 8-5 is rather unreasonable. i usually see 8-12 or 1-5. you can ask them to call you before they get there. some will, some won't... | ddda13ce-d9b8-4068-b0c8-f98cb32fb4d0 |
5r9pl1 | How does the National Security Council differ from other federal agencies? | The NSC is just a group of people, with other government jobs, to whom the President turns for national security advice and recommendations. They read the analysis (facts) written by experts and help the President evaluate public opinion and political factors (not facts). | 5c6539bf-c9ac-4108-b23e-4b525e66c599 |
841fde | What are transcendental equations | Transcendental equations usually lack analytical solutions. But a simple way to solve them numerically is to plot both sides of the equation and look where the lines intersect.
For example
* tan (x) = e^x
You cannot solve this analytically, but plot both functions (see link) and you'll see that solutions still exist since the plots intersect each other at multiple places (for example at x ≈ 1.3).
_URL_0_ | ab2c3e18-c50c-4ac1-8547-a4bdf0fb71fd |
2342cp | federal debt: why some people think it doesn't matter, and some do | First part of answering the question is to understand what federal debt or "Sovereign Debt" is.
_____
Sovereign Debt in the USA is created (mainly) through the use of *Treasury Bills* or "T-Bills". These are sold by the government to business, banks and individuals.
When you buy a T-Bill you pay the face value and the government promises to pay you that value plus some amount of interest when the bill matures (maturity rates are 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years). The longer your maturity the higher the interest rate.
_____
With an understanding of what the debt is, we can answer does it matter?
_____
**now whether it matters is a matter of opinion, but the general consensus among economists is that *at the moment* it doesn't**.
The reason it doesn't really matter consists of three main parts; Who is owed, the ability of the government to pay it back, and the interest rate.
1) Who is Owed? As of September 2013 the breakdown is as follows:
A) Total Debt: 16.738 Trillion
B) SOMA and Intragovernmental Holdings: 6.834 Trillion
C) Foreign and International: 5.653 Trillion
D) Mutual Funds: 1.083 Trillion
E) Other (Private owners, savings bonds, depository institutions, etc.: 3.168 Trillion
[Word Doc from US Treasury's site](_URL_3_)
So the Government itself holds ~40% of the debt, foreign investors (business, banks, and countries) hold ~ 33%, and everyone else holds ~27%.
[
Of the foreign holders the biggest two are China and Japan with ~1.3 and 1.2 Trillion \(respectively\)](_URL_1_)
2) Can the government pay it back?
Most likely, yes. The US government has *never* failed to pay its debts and some argue that the [14th Amendment requires the US to pay its debts](_URL_2_).
3) The interest rates.
Interest rates on T-Bills is *incredibly* low. Under 1% on the 1 year T-Bills. That means that if you buy a $100 T-Bill today, it will be worth $101 in a year. Compare this to the rate of inflation which[ since 2010 has fluctuated between 1.5% and 3.2%](_URL_0_).
This means that 1 year T-Bills are *effectively* free money for the government.
_____
Since the plurality of debt is held by the US Government and citizens, the US has never failed to pay its debts, and the interest rates are so low, the Debt is, for now and the foreseeable future, **not a problem**. | 77b53445-7431-4c2a-b1b4-28c60c34bfc9 |
1q59gz | Why do we capitalise all words except conjunctions and some prepositions in titles? | Convention, at heart.
It used to be that writers capitalized all letters. Then, some time passed, and they capitalized only nouns and beginnings of sentences. Then, more time passed, and they started capitalizing only proper nouns.
It's gotten to the point that we only capitalize more meaningful words in general and in titles. For instance, "the" isn't as meaningful as nouns and verbs are.
EDIT: Teotwaki69 correctly says in the below post that the convention is based on parts of speech. | 7b4908fc-62b3-4894-909b-2773e99bf81c |
2h2h9p | Why does toothpaste clean headlights so well? | Toothpaste is an abrasive.
If you imagine starting with a plank of rough wood, and wanted it to be really smooth, you'd start with really rough sandpaper. That would scrape out lots of (relatively) deep grooves in the wood. You'd now have something with a rough finish, and would repeat that with finer and finer grades of sandpaper. Going from 40 up to 250 or higher would leave you with a smooth surface, and the scratches get finer, and each time you're scraping away the smaller scratches.
For something see through it's harder, and the light gets bent more easily by even small scratches, so you'd have to use really really high grades of sandpaper, and it still might look foggy.
Now instead of sandpaper, imagine you took the abrasive off the paper and just rubbed it straight on with a cloth. This would be polishing compound, and it makes much smaller scratches. If you use very small abrasive particles, the scratches are too small to be that far off a flat surface. Toothpaste is a close approximation to a polishing compound like this. The scratches are so small the surface is almost completely flat. You've removed the bigger scratches and your headlights are clear. | 30f6e974-3d8b-427c-adb5-699087f2f662 |
1ndm8l | in World War 2, to go home did you have to become disabled and would you get paid straight away? | There were a number of qualifications needed to be sent home from the front during World War II as a discharged serviceman or woman -
1.) Contracting an illness that required long term recovery
2.) Amputations
3.) Wounds that interfered with stamina, agility, dexterity
4.) Loss of sight in at least one eye
5.) Capture and Interrment in a POW camp
There were other reasons, but those were the majority of the causes resulting in discharge from the military.
Compensation came in the forms of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the GI Bill of Rights. Under this Bill, servicemen who served in WWII were eligible to receive the following:
- four years of education or training. At the time, this consisted of $500 towards tuition, books and supplies, plus a monthly subsistence allowance.
- guaranteed home, farm and business loans up to $2,000
- unemployment benefits of $20 weekly for up to 52 weeks provided they served a minimum of 90 days prior to medical discharge. It was also understood that returning soldiers, if they were able, could resume their previous employment, vacated when they either enlisted or were drafted.
[ Taken from: _URL_0_ ]
As for disability payments? The answer is no. They were not paid straight away. Applications were reviewed and often delayed, temporary or in significantly smaller amounts than anticipated. To this day, there are WWII veterans who are still struggling to obtain disability compensation from their time in WWII. For some of these soldiers, their benefits were cut off, or were delayed, or otherwise ended precipitously.
Case in point: _URL_3_
The veterans were able to receive some rehabilitative services, and some additional health care services thanks to the 1943 LaFollette-Barden Vocational Rehabilitation Act, and then later, thanks to 1946 Hill-Burton Act, where hospitals, rehab centers and public health facilities, but at the time, the 1935 Social Security Act's disability clauses applied primarily to the blind and disabled children.
It wasn't until the 1950s that Social Security was expanded to include disability benefits.
Additional source information: _URL_2_, _URL_1_ | 7de5b96b-f312-488e-8b28-9a422605a3ca |
93a1rg | Why are crickets so hard to find? | It’s hard to pinpoint in on sounds that are loud enough to create an echo. Things like a smoke detector that beep, leave you clueless because it echos and the sound bounces all over and also it’s short. The beep only goes on for a few moments and then it stops. Sounds that are constant like for example a hissing sound of a leaking air line are easy to find because it’s constant and you can constantly adjust your perception of where it is. A cricket chirps and then it’s silent, leaving you with no ability to figure out where the noise came from and only for you to guess. | 938d3491-4f1a-434c-a8a7-8eadd4624a70 |
4d3pyu | How does machine learning work? Do computers experience cognitive dissonance where they have to weigh two conflicting ideas? | There's a bunch of variations, but a lot of them look like this:
The computer is given four things:
1. A bunch of pre-defined inputs that look like what it has to do (whether it's a medical diagnosis, the screen of an Atari game, or a Go board)
2. A program that processes the inputs
3. A bunch of knobs it can tweak on that program to change it's behavior.
4. A program that judges it and gives it a score based on the output.
The computer will then run millions of simulations, and tweak the knobs to try to get the best score overall for all of the inputs it gets.
There's a bunch of strategies the computer uses to try to figure out how to tweak the knobs. Sometimes, it does get stuck in a corner where tweaking any one knob makes the score get worse but tweaking multiple will make it get better. There are strategies to help the computer get out of that corner, but none of them are really "cognitive dissonance" because the computer still isn't really a brain. | 03a9195d-dc3f-4c54-b35e-b97c3fd8f6c7 |
2xhccm | Why does my dog choose so carefully where he pees? | Dogs actually communicate by peeing certain ways or places. If he pees on a place which had already been peed on, he is kinda respondibg the message by the previous dog. Also they can mark their terrotories or leave a message for other dogs. | 9960d81e-ca6a-42a5-b2ca-2c2a36f17a91 |
210tnu | why do news channels consider Twitter a reliable, relevant, and serious source for different things? | Newspaper reporter here. Proof: _URL_0_
Journalists use Twitter as a place for information the same way we talk to people as sources. There are a lot of people on Twitter who do and say newsworthy things. Barack Obama, Pope Francis, tons of politicians, scientists and business people all have Twitter accounts. Sometimes they post things that are relevant to larger audiences.
The other thing that's great about Twitter is when breaking news happens. During the Boston Marathon bombings manhunt, average citizens posted information about what streets police shut down and provided details about what they heard and saw from places journalists couldn't get to. The people on Twitter gave first-hand accounts that reporters used as leads to tell the rest of the country what was going on.
Social media in general made a huge impact on the Arab Spring, which started in 2010 when citizens took to the streets in protest against various governments throughout the Middle East. Average people's tweets and videos became the first recordings of history. It was an incredible moment that showed how social media could make such a profound impact on the world at large.
Good reporters take what they see on Twitter with a grain of salt just like we treat all information we receive with a bit of skepticism. Twitter is never used as the full story but it has become a major way people around the world share information. People in the media can't and shouldn't ignore it as a legitimate place to learn more about what is happening outside of our newsrooms. | 95b2386a-da9e-4303-ba29-76be79f3152f |
8ywoey | Why are mice associated with cheese? | Most mice prefer to feed on grains and nuts rather than cheese, but when they're hungry, they'll eat whatever they can find that is edible. Cheese tends to smell very strongly, especially when not refrigerated, and that makes it easier to find by mice, so when they're hungry, they'll go for whatever's easiest to find, i.e. cheese. Over time, this created the (incorrect) assumption that mice like cheese, and this in turn was used in cartoons and other media so often that some people assume that mice are inordinately fond of cheese. | 7e28e42e-f452-4ff7-b490-282517f4a748 |
28t9vy | How do speakers of tonal languages convey different degrees of emotion? | From experience (speaking Mandarin).
Before we start, let me try to explain a small bit about how the language works, since it's quite different from English. What most people call words in Mandarin, those single syllabic things with tones, apart from some very commonly used ones, are almost never used alone. They are almost used as part of a short "phrase", which work a lot more similarly to words in English. And because of this, those "phrases" are about as well known for a Mandarin speaker, as words are for an English speaker.
So you have a lot more freedom regarding emphasis and tone than you would imagine. There are only 4 tones in Mandarin (5 if you count no tone), flat, rising, falling then rising, and falling. These only apply to those single syllabic words and are quite distinct from each other, differentiating between them isn't too hard (usually).
A phrase as a whole may have a variety of "tones" itself, rising or falling within itself. If this is hard to imagine, picture a piece of music that has an overall rising melody, it may have small parts of it that rise or fall. And this combined with emphasis on words, stresses, etc can convey just as many nuances as English.
And as far as someone breaking down in tears, that's pretty hard to understand in any language. | d10aeace-4b8e-490f-a056-6ccacadda663 |
1k5goy | Why is self-plagiarism an issue in academics? | SOURCE: I am a college professor and published academic.
Several people have already said "you're not doing the work" to which OP is responding, "I did the work earlier and isn't the point just to be competent anyway?"
Well, yes and no.
The fact is, if you asked ten educators the purpose of education, you'd probably get fifteen different answers. Teaching you about specific subjects is one purpose. Teaching you "how to learn"--that is, how to approach new material in a self-beneficial way--is another. Yet another is economic: part of going to school is learning to deal with authority, to perform seemingly pointless tasks, and to jump through hoops (so to speak). Giving you a diploma or a degree is one way of telling employers, "this person can do assignments."
Setting aside the cynical explanation, though, and returning to the purely pedagogical one: there is value in repetition. If you learn to play a single song on the piano, you will get very good at that song, but you will never become a concert pianist. If you lift weights only one time, you will never get stronger. If you turn in the same paper two or three or four times, you have only "done the work" once, when the real educational value is to be found in "doing the work" over and over again.
That's why it's generally disallowed by teachers and professors: because it's "cheating" yourself out of the experience the class is supposed to provide. That said, as a graduate student I have (sparingly) quoted my own previous work in new papers, complete with citation, and have never been criticized for it. | ab04d5c3-ea17-468c-9581-a787ed9e1f2a |
4xwi28 | How does investment work? Why should I buy shares in a company? | Say you have a lot of money. Let's say $2 million. That's about as much as an average productive American worker might make in their lifetime. What do you do with that money? You could spend it, but that's kind of a waste. That money could support you for the rest of your life, without you having to work. So let's store it somewhere.
Great. Where do we store it?
You could just keep it in cash and store it under your mattress or in your backyard or something. But that's not the best idea. What if something happens? What if your house burns down? What if you dig up the money from the backyard and find that it all rotted or decayed or was eaten by worms? (This has actually happened to people, don't bury paper money) What's more, there's the problem of inflation. $2 million now probably won't buy as much stuff in forty years. Money gets less valuable over time. You want somewhere where your money will be safe, and where it will make more money, growing how much money you have faster than inflation makes it worthless.
A bank is an obvious answer. Banks make sense when you have only a little money, because the government will insure up to $250,000 if the bank fails, which they probably will at some point in your life. My bank failed in 2008. But if you have more than $250,000, then you might not be able to get the rest of your money. What's more, banks only give a little bit of interest on your savings. Like, one or two percent. We can probably do better than that.
So you invest it. Investing can be many things, but basically it's just taking money you have and buying something that will make you money in one way or another.
For a simple example, you could invest in something whose price will rise, like some sort of commodity. If you decided buy $2 million worth of gold, that would be an example of a commodity investment. You'd be betting that the price of gold would go up, and you could sell that gold later for more than the $2 million you bought it for.
You could also buy something you could extract some sort of continuous value out of. For instance, you could buy a house, and then rent it to people. Or buy something like a restaurant, retail store, factory, or mine and take the profit.
Buying shares in a company is a very common way to invest. Basically, a company divides ownership of itself into small pieces and sells those to investors. This means the company can get cash, and helps split up the risk. If someone owns 100% of a company, and the company folds, that guy is in a world of hurt. Stocks let many people only buy a little bit of the company, so if the company folds, they only lose a little bit of their money.
There are two main monetary benefits, and one indirect benefit to holding stock in a company. One, you can sell your shares later at a higher price like you would a commodity, making money that way. Also, when a company is doing well and makes a big profit, they'll often give out a "dividend" to their shareholders, giving everybody a little share of the profit for each share of stock they hold.
There's also the fact that at the end of the day you're buying part of a company. If you buy a lot of that company, you can influence it. Once you buy a certain amount, you can attend shareholder meetings, get information about how the company is performing, and vote on major courses of action. If you buy 51%, you essentially control it, because nobody can have a bigger share of it than you. There's no immediate monetary benefit, but it lets you control the corporation, which you can possibly influence to get more money, or at least to increase the share price, increasing how much money you'll get when you sell your shares. | 711c0ba6-c00a-4cde-a21d-c01831023b6b |
1e3pmk | How do football pools work | In the simplest form, you have a 10x10 grid of squares. Along one axis, you have a team name & each column gets the numbers 0-9. Along the other you have the other team's name & the rows are labeled 0-9.
When you buy into a pool, you buy a square ($1 per square is common for friendly pools) and put your name in it. If your square wins, you get all the money.
Each square represents a possible final score for the game, only looking at the final number. If a game is 24 to 14, the square at (4,4) would be the "winner"; if the game is 21 to 17, the winner would be (1,7). | b0c667b8-9a4f-49e5-8acb-840bb08b1f8e |
3g1lyw | Lobbying vs Bribery | Lobbying is convincing an elected official to vote or act in a way that is beneficial to your interests.
Bribery is giving money for personal use to an elected official to vote or act in a way that is beneficial to your interests. | 2401c3c9-db71-4b70-b2bc-58a8cd63faca |
wfke5 | The Second Postulate of Special Relativity. | The second postulate of special relativity is 'the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant, regardless of the frame from which it is measured'. That's really all there is to it...if you have a physical situation and you measure the speed of light in a vacuum, you'll get c.
> Also, its application in the question "If your space ship us moving at the speed of light (obviously theoretically, ignoring that humans are physically incapable of traveling at might speed) and you turn your headlights on, what happens?"
It's not that humans are physically incapable of travelling at light speed, but that anything with mass is incapable of doing so. And this isn't a 'can't stand the stress' problem or anything like that, it's that the laws of the universe are such that there *is no way* to accelerate a massive object to light speed. This is a fundamental limitation which is of the utmost importance, not something that you can ignore by saying things like 'but hypotetically what if'. Essentially, a consequence of measuring light the same in all frames turns out to be that there simply isn't a speed of light rest frame.
To put that another way, asking 'what if we travelled at light speed' is the same question as 'if physics is wrong, what is right?'. There is clearly no scientific answer to this question.
We *can* ask what would happen if you accelerated to 99.99999% of the speed of light and turned out your headlights. The answer is that you would see the light travel away at the speed of light, just as the second postulate states. However, an observer 'stationary' with respect to your pre-acceleration frame would see you moving at 99.99999% of c, with the light slowly moving away from you. | 1916d37b-087c-48eb-abf9-3b24b5599a47 |
1hssf6 | How are things sticky? | Adhesives and other sticky substances contain protein molecules that bond with the molecules of the surface they are spread upon by entering the pores and spaces of the material. Therefore, smooth surfaces such as glass are hard to attach to because there aren't any pores for molecules to enter. | 52715487-40f0-41f3-82b1-77a6cb2f960f |
1q3lvv | Twitter Valuation | It's an estimated value of the worth of the company. For instance, if BigAdvertisingFirm buys up Twitter, they instantly have access to all those millions of users. | 419ccd9b-ee98-4eb9-aa7e-843c4e52e2db |
5kpex8 | How does honey never expire? | Its acidity, the lack of water, and the presence of hydrogen peroxide are the factors that cause honey to be so incredibly shelf-stable for pretty much eternity.
Here's some reading on it:
_URL_0_ | c10b7e06-44ad-408c-aa9e-dde9c3a276c9 |
2o61q8 | What physically determines the way your voice sounds? | The allele pairs in your genes which influence the way your body is formed including vocal cords and throat shape size etc.
Unfortunately I do not have scientific proof to back anything up someone else will have a more professional answer but here is what I found.
_URL_0_ | 8c6ca64c-6dc8-4e20-97f8-84a085238846 |
72agfq | What happens to people who are insomniacs, and why do they struggle so much to fall asleep? | For one thing, there might be an underlying medical condition going on -- imagine trying to sleep well with chronic pain that's always happening. Or if you have an anxiety problem. Those things don't go away when you're trying to sleep.
People might also have poor sleep hygiene. This means keeping some good, consistent practices with your sleep the same way you would do with things like showering or brushing your teeth. Try to go to bed at the same time every day, and limit any activities in bed other than sleeping or having sex. If you spend a lot of time in bed watching TV or whatever, your brain learns to associate the space with things other than sleep. If your brain associates the space with only sleep, you'll be more likely to fall asleep well -- the same way you might start to feel hungry after walking past a restaurant, even if you weren't hungry before. Stuff like exercising and avoiding caffeine later in the day helps too. | f1c64f1f-3721-411e-b834-eb86544ee5f7 |
3kk2z9 | If cigarettes contain things like arsenic, butane, cadmium, ammonia, and formaldehyde, how can people smoke then everyday for years without dying within the first few weeks? | There is no such thing as lethal or safe substances. There are only lethal and safe doses. Water can be toxic if you drink enough of it. | 93a218ad-30ff-47e6-b5e1-f6d97bb0435f |
2l74oh | How exactly radiation affect human body? | Energetic neutrons, and gamma rays and x-rays (both forms of light), go blasting off and strike molecules in your cells. This has the effect of physically breaking them apart, a la the neutron, or breaking covalent bonds as the rays do. Enough of this can just kill your cell outright. But if you just get the occasional strike against a DNA molecule, now you have a physically broken piece of DNA. If it doesn't kill the cell, DNA has an interesting property in that it can reassemble itself. The problem is it doesn't always go back the right way. Often, this creates a cancerous cell and your body will identify and destroy it. Sometimes, your immune system can't "see" the cell as cancerous and it's accidentally allowed to run rampant. More radiation is used in chemotherapy to kill the cells in the same way they were made cancerous in the first place. | 71b062ba-46c9-4c3f-bc38-cbb66e06b6e9 |
2aupr8 | Why is flossing considered more important than brushing? | I'm not a dentist, but from what I've been told by my dentist, flossing reduces bleeding gums more than brushing. Bleeding gums are actually quite a problem, aside from being gross, because they add stress to the heart. So bleeding gums can actually contribute negatively, and sometimes severely, to the health of your circulatory system. Since you can live without teeth, but not a heart, I think that's the big point.
Less dramatic is that flossing does prevent cavities in places where cavities are more prone, like between teeth and in the very back. These places are cleaned less efficiently by a brush.
Also I've heard flossing does positive things for the health of your gums which brushing can't do.
I also have heard that what the other commenters have said about how everybody brushes but many people don't floss, so the dental industry makes flossing a bullet point, is true as well. | a6c1a0a3-11a1-466d-a7d6-cf8b3217b36e |
31xbtd | - Why taking long showers or brushing your teeth with the faucet open waste water? | The source of your clean water and the location where your wastewater ends up are rarely the same. Water treatment plants can recapture SOME wastewater, but the rest is lost, dumped into the sea (where we don't get drinking water from) or downstream for the very reason that we don't want sewage in our water supply. It depends greatly on where you live, but commonly fresh water comes from snow melt and rainfall replenishing natural or man-made aquifers, and not being drawn from a river. | 0316fcdf-78d9-4685-95d1-1d9a02c8990e |
2zpt7f | How are KFC's 11 secret herbs and spices still a secret? | It's not worth it. At this point, KFC could probably publish the exact recipe on the walls of their restaurants and it wouldn't make a difference. No one is going to create a chain restaurant to make the exact same thing that another chain restaurant does with no changes at all. If someone wanted to make money selling KFC fried chicken, it would be far easier and more cost efficient to just franchise a KFC. | a0b99583-3205-46ac-a976-5afc9043938c |
10jkg6 | How come educational channels like history and discovery do not show educational things anymore? | Educational shows no longer draw enough viewers to pay the bills for the upkeep of the channel. | cb5863fa-d742-421f-bf58-60abd18dd617 |
rvbrm | How CDs/DVDs Store and Read Data, and Why a Scratch Can Ruin Everything | CDs and DVDs are types of *optical discs*. The CD/DVD is covered with a large number of little holes, called pits. A tightly focused laser shines onto the surface of the CD, and depending on whether it hits a pit or a flat part, the intensity changes. A sensor reads that intensity change, and translates it into a 1 or a 0. That stream of 1's and 0's is then turned into music or video. | ebf93d2a-13df-4fba-9c89-9a9b2b6e9c8b |
2swvhe | what did ancient humans do with umbilical cords during birth? | The umbilical cord is connected to the placenta, the interface between the fetal and maternal bloodstreams, which is given the folksy name 'afterbirth' -- because the woman ejects it shortly after the birth, within the hour. Thing weighs about a pound too. Isn't giving birth beautiful?
Once that's out, the baby is entirely detached. The umbilical cord will fall off the baby's end in a few days, leaving behind the navel, or 'belly button', assuming you don't cut it.
Edit:
Did I mention [you can eat it?](_URL_0_)
Not Safe For...well...anything.
The real question is, is it vegan? | 369b81c8-d5cf-4a37-9a3b-3e9a8e108552 |
5vlb11 | Why do we use fresh water for our sewage? | It's easier and cheaper to have a single delivery system to all buildings than it is to develop and install a second identical system for non-potable water delivery.
You're also avoiding the inevitable mishaps when people confuse the two. | cb5487c6-bcc4-4c60-b7d3-228b9ff6f606 |
2ty5nk | I broke up with my GF yesterday, it was my own decision because the relationship was at a point we both were unsatisfied. Why do I want her back, even though my brain says it's better this way? (It lasted over 4 years) | Sorry to hear that. Going through a break up is hard.
Firstly, and its been mentioned is that love is a form of drug. I believe, going from memory its oxytocin but i may be wrong. Simply put, your body does get a 'high' from your partner and breaking up leads to 'withdrawal', unfortunately. There a lot of variables as well, ive read before that that when you form a relationship with somone, your personalities can start to blend to the extent where they become your other half so to speak. I personally found that i picked up a few traits, from my 5 year relationship, so that adds fuel to the fire.
I definitely feel for you and you partner. Not a good place to be. If you (or anyone else) need help, we're all here for ya. Take it easy champ. | 8a8d1bee-9225-4f40-8ac7-63b474dc0614 |
2gjbgg | Why do many email services charge per email address/account, while most Instant Messengers let you have unlimited users? | You want to charge a company as much as that company is willing to pay for a certain service, and this is usually directly proportional to how big that company is, and a great way to measure corporate size is how employee count, and a company usually has one email account per employee plus a few extra emails for departments, etc. A good rule of thumb is 1.05 * employee count. | 747394f7-40e1-44d7-bced-ee30cf67d42a |
5mnefw | What happens after someone escapes prision | The person who escaped tends to spend most of the time trying to get further from the prison while the police try and find them and then put them back in. | aef7358a-2b84-498b-89fd-1372de988468 |
3ewt4a | Why can't we build a giant heat proof bulldozer to put out forest fires? | The bulldozer would run into tress and quickly be unable to move.
Certainly they can mow down small trees but large trees are very hard to topple (consider the force of wind they must resist and you get a sense of it). | 76a9e12b-990d-4506-b489-5ec9ce3421fb |
12zccz | Why can't I become the President of the United States (I was born in Canada)? | The founders were nervous that a foreign power would attempt to control the country by getting one of their own elected president. Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers:
> Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?
Also, if we let, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger become president, and some Austrian rose to become a belligerent European dictator (unrealistic, I know), there'd be concern that he wouldn't necessarily act in the best interests of the United States. | 88b88e7a-f617-43d4-add9-1e008ce9f3b1 |
4zkfox | How do tempered glass screen protectors stop phone glass from breaking (cracking)? | It's kinda like how sidewalks and asphalt work. You've got this outside barrier that breaks first, which provides enough resistance to stop a deeper or more severe break from happening.
Most breaks are spiderweb fractures, a small part of the screen is damaged and it just keeps getting worse. Well, by using a screen protector, you can keep the actual screen from getting these surface cracks that weaken the glass, and so only the very cheap screen protector gets damaged and subsequently breaks. | 2d2d041f-59ce-420b-a229-68675606b7c0 |
r8vkr | How does the rule of 3 work? | [You're going to have to be more specific.](_URL_0_) | 8762545e-a505-454f-aefe-a22508134461 |
4jhq1c | Was there any form of birth control used at brothels in pre-moderrn times? How did women prevent getting pregnant? | There have been known herbs that can be used to induce abortions - such as Pennyroyal, that would be mixed with wine / tea. | 3610c353-2d44-4bc4-8c98-325a4144482b |
4uz8hw | Does the shape of the Pentagon actually help the U.S. military? | The design of it was to maximize office space while minimizing travel time on foot from one side to the other. The theory was for better reaction times and message delivery. | d1dba36c-cf6f-4f29-a51c-bd24cb9f7ec6 |
1jxsr1 | If I'm thinking in english, what were thoughts like before we developed language? | Here is a quote from Hellen Keller recalling what her thought processes were like before she was introduced to language. Sure, it's not *exactly* what you're looking for, but I think it provides some insight. [*The World I Live In* by Hellen Keller, Page 37](_URL_0_)
> Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire...
> When I wanted anything I liked,--ice-cream, for instance, of which I was very fond,--I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which, by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I "thought" and desired in my fingers.
Thought without language, at least from what can be gleaned from Hellen Keller's own observations, is made up of basic desires, habits, and emotions (anger and satisfaction). Complex thoughts aren't really possible without a language to build ideas out of. So thoughts like you're having, even by just asking a question such as the one you posted are really only possible because you have a language that you can think with. | 93730842-278d-40dd-acda-ef05478e1e77 |
4jtd0c | What is the Eastern philosophical concept of Wu? | The short version is that it's the concept of everything being interconnected and interdependent. This, in turn, is supposed to help people be more aware of how their actions affect others, because other people's actions affect them as well.
A similar concept is the "butterfly effect", where a tiny change leads to bigger and bigger consequences, often too big for the original actor to realize. | 30c01c80-33aa-4079-98cd-e44d45378be3 |
2zw33c | How are instincts inherited to the following generation and is it possible to modificate and/ or create them? | As far as I know, no one truly understands how instincts work. It is one thing to have a reflex, but there are complex behaviors (such as baby sea turtles crawling towards the ocean) are much tougher to explain.
There was a recent neuroscience paper that came out that may help. Basically, they fear conditioned some male animals to a certain smell (i.e. made them scared of the smell). They then had these males sire offspring. The offspring learned to be afraid of the smell much quicker than would normally be the case. They examined their olfactory system, and found that these offspring had increased receptors that were specific to the smell their Dad's had been made afraid of. Basically, making the Dad's afraid of a smell resulted in their offspring being particularly sensitive to that smell.
This is called epigenetics: when experiences result in altered gene expression. Therefore, it is indeed possible, in a sense, for a "memory" to be passed on, although it isn't the memory per se, it is altered gene expression. | 0643f2aa-d842-4727-bf0c-9995f7d95ab4 |
8dxpod | Why was 911 selected as the number to dial in case of emergency? | They wanted a short, easy to remember number, but also one that was not as likely to be accidentally dialed. It also needed to be fast to dial during the era of rotary phones when the system was first designed. So a 3 digit number starting with 9 and then using the fastest to dial numbers of 1 was chosen. | cda562f9-3d86-4c0e-80a7-501fe51b1683 |
2jw7xe | How do selective hiring companies not get sued? | Because their business model is built around having females. It's like how Hooters can hire only attractive women because they're technically hiring models who just happen to waitress, and being attractive is a job qualification for being a model. Or how a man can't claim discrimination that a strip club won't hire him. | a1cefa21-ce30-4e5e-b479-1d5d19676246 |
1s46e9 | Flashing a Verizon Phone to get Prepaid Unlimited 3G. | It is stealing a paid service, one way or another, likely by cloning one paid phone. | ef862c9d-b77d-4767-82ce-7056799dd5cf |
6g9zsj | Tourettes | I have Tourette's. First off - curse words are a very small minority. Most tics are physical. It's kind of like an itch, or a compulsion. It's like a heat in my joints that gets worse and worse until I give in. Being distracted helps a lot and it is much worse when I'm stressed or hyper,etc.
I do have some vocal tics but they have never been curse words, more like hums or whistles or that clucking sound with your tongue. Most of my tics involve popping joints, cracking knuckles, stretching limbs, "blinking hard" or other subtle movements.
I'm 30 now and pretty good at hiding most of these while still scratching that itch. There is medication that helps but the side effects are too much for me and I find it worse than just dealing with the tics. | 69307a53-9c73-4116-9c18-d46967b776bc |
4mfffb | Why is there urgency for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and why do recent jobs numbers prevent it? | [EDIT] tl;dr - Urgency to raise rates comes from the financial industry which stands to make money from higher rates. Job numbers prevent that by speaking directly to the legislative mandate of The Federal Reserve not the personal interests of bankers.
First of all, low and high are relative terms so when we say that rates are currently low what we mean is that, by historical standards, rates are lower than they typically have been.
We're better off asking the question "what should the rate be in our current economy?" The answer to that question is likely variable and changing over time. It's difficult to say what it should be, and different people are going to have different opinions. Often times those opinions are motivated or colored by personal interests and biases.
One method for identifying if rates are currently too low or too high is to look at inflation. If rates are too low, inflation begins to grow and run away at an increasing pace. If rates are too high inflation lowers and we start to see signs of potential deflation. Using inflation in this capacity helps to mitigate pre-existing bias that we might otherwise have about what we believe rates should be.
The "urgency" to raise rates is coming largely out of a single sector of the professional class, namely: people in the financial industry who would stand to gain (at least in the short term) from higher interest rates. They would get to charge more on the loans they're making and consequently enjoy higher profit margins. These individuals have a lot of money, power, influence, and most notably the ears of media personnel. Their opinion is often reported as near-fact with little to no contra-evidence printed.
(In defense of the media, economics is hard and confusing and reporting it earnestly and accurately ends up with boring publications like The Economist. It doesn't work well on the front page of _URL_1_).
It's not well reported in the news but their opinions are not widely held among the professional economic community. Here is a recent article by Paul Krugman highlighting exactly that (Krugman is a well respected, Nobel-winning economics professor. His opinion should carry at least as much weight as anyone else's in the industry). _URL_2_
His point is that inflation is still super low, in fact lower than the Fed's own stated inflationary target.
The simple fact is that there is little appetite outside of one vocal and influential group for raising rates. There is nothing in the empirical data suggesting that our economy or the global markets "want" rates higher. Inflation is low and US Bonds continue to perform well on the world markets. The only urgency comes from the fact that rates have been so much lower than historical standards, and for so long, people just feel like it's time to raise them.
The reason job numbers prevent it has to do with something known as the "dual mandate". _URL_0_.
Basically, the Federal agency in charge of these rates is the Federal Reserve (i.e. The Fed). The Fed has a legislative mandate to maximize employment while maintaining a moderate inflation rate (for economic reasons, minimizing inflation is bad. We want some small amount of inflation). Essentially, as is noted in the article above, they don't know what the employment rate should be so they do things to try to lower it until inflation starts to rise in response. At that point they know it's as low as the economy will allow and they stop stimulating to avoid run-away inflation.
Again, it ties back to inflation as the key indicator about what the Fed should be doing. As /u/mbilical noted, low rates generally means business borrowing, growing, and hiring more. If there is no inflationary pressure to slow that process then most economists feel the Fed should continue to keep rates low in order to stimulate economic growth and hiring. | 289a9efc-245f-45b7-94a9-0315836e91d4 |
601ok1 | why does the quick-E-mart on the corner sell copper scrubbers with the drug paraphernalia? | Copper scrubbers are an essential part of a homemade crack pipe.
You buy one of those little roses in a glass tube, take the ends off, toss the rose, shove a little copper scrubber in, insert crack, and light. | 455720ed-7408-43a9-b387-45e57462c637 |
4l9x1y | Why do we get shakey? | Electrolytes. Salt, magnesium, and the such... Like an engine will shudder on Empty with no fuel. | aa245b57-1bfb-4982-93ea-d98e74b96132 |
684mcd | How do they manage to find precise recordings to make those composite/mash-up videos, of hundreds of clips of a person speaking certain words, to make them sing a song, etc? | I've actually also wondered the same thing and I think I have an answer. I don't know this for certain but I imagine that what the people do is find several speeches by the figure they are using and then find the transcripts of the speeches. This is not normally very difficult particularly for public figures such as the president. They then just need to ctrl-f the speech to find the words they want and then go to that location of the video. They can then cut that part of the video out and rinse and repeat. It's still time-consuming but it's much faster than just blindly watching hundreds of videos. | d7f652d9-976e-4d1f-88ca-f88a0248f766 |
67hl5n | Why are we more attracted to a person when they're tan? | Are we? This seems much more like a personal preference than a universal truth. I searched for your question and found an answer [here](_URL_0_). | 0b5f1248-0cac-4c90-a751-47cb13cbee95 |
20io2q | What is happening in Turkey? | A lot. Maybe a bit of a non specific question that. | 269e9b2d-7e14-432f-a523-182080fdc54e |
2du109 | Why do we have accents? | Speech and how it's learned is basically the longest running game of telephone. Things get passed down and eventually someone hears something slightly wrong and says it slightly wrong or with different emphasis. It keeps going for generations and impacts the population.
Since populations of people (Southern, Texas, New York, etc) aren't in contact with each other as much as they are in contact with themselves, each one changes at different rates and in different ways.
Specifically for the US, since there are so many cultures, people tend to settle together. And they bring their language with them. That language has certain ways they pronounce letter combinations and vowels, so when they learn to speak English, they learn with a mix of their native language in it.
And it just keeps mutating like that over generations. | 97746826-80a3-4cf9-a18d-748941a0b720 |
651nu4 | Why can blank CD's hold the same length of music at different bitrates? | > why can a CD that can hold 80 minutes of 320 kbps not otherwise hold 200 minutes of 128 kbps?
Because CD audio doesn't have a bitrate the way MP3s do. It's raw, uncompressed audio (essentially the same as a .wav file on your computer). So both the 128 kbps mp3 and the 320 kbps mp3 will be uncompressed and converted to wav format before being written to the CD, at which point their equivalent bitrates are the same. | 30b9ceb9-7e39-4e0a-a297-44cfd3ad5e82 |
55f6da | Why is the presence of complex organic molecules discovered on Comet 67P and other objects not enough evidence to definitively say that life exists beyond Earth? | Complex organic molecules can form and exist without life. By complex, we are talking simple amino acids, nitrogenous bases, super-simple polycarbons. These are not the same as the long polymers you would get from carbon-based life. | b53e7637-de6a-4512-addc-78d1d35eec07 |
5ohdt3 | In video editing, what's the difference between Drop-Frame timecode, and Non-Drop-Frame timecode? | In non-drop-frame, there are exactly 30 frames in every second of footage, i.e., the timecode endings for every second go
:00, :01, :02, ... :29.
You should only use non-drop-frame timecodes if your footage is 30.000 frames per second.
In drop-frame, the first second of every minute not divisible by ten misses the first two frames, i.e., 54 seconds every hour have only 28 timecode endings like
;02, ;03, ;04, ... ;29
Thus 108 timecodes are missing per hour. Otherwise there would be 108,000 timecodes per hour so the drop-frame system removes exactly 1 in 1000 timecodes.
Note that no frames are dropped, just that some timecodes are missing so that frame 00;01;59;29 is followed by frame 00;02;00;02. Semicolons are used instead of colons to highlight what's going on.
This is done because NTSC has only about 29.97 frames per second. In fact NTSC is exactly 1 part in 1001 short of 30 frames per second so the drop-frame notation, using 1 part in 1000, is not exactly right, but it's close enough. | 0af9406d-e405-4592-961e-42fea9f462fc |
65kyq6 | Why is there is demand for high frames per second in video games, but it's ok for movies to stick to 24 fps? Is there a visible difference between the two mediums? | Movie motion isn't designed to feel completely real, it has a bigger than life dreamlike feel that comes from the motion blur that occurs at 24 frames per second. Most games on the other hand are trying to be immersive and give you the feeling of being there and that requires the motion to be smoother.
While not a direct game to movie comparison, watch a movie and then watch a soap opera or a late night talk show. You can clearly see and feel a difference and that is because the movie with its dreamy 24fps and the soap or talk show which is running at a more natural 30fps. | 60085704-cfbe-4967-b315-d95367e17e09 |
1mgn95 | What does it mean: "underwriting a security" in regards to banking and finance? | When corporation wants to raise money from the financial markets they contact an investment bank to issue a security (e.g. a stock or a bond). For example, if ACME corp wants to raise $1B of capital through a bond offering they will call up an investment bank or a group of investment banks (called a syndicate) and hire them to "underwrite that security". Here's what the transaction looks like.
1. ACME gets their $1B of cash up front directly from their Investment Bank
2. The Investment Bank Receives the securities, in this case, bond certificates from ACME corporation agreeing to pay back the $1B over a set period of time with pre-determined interest payments (coupons)
3. The bank uses its sales and trading network to re-sell the bonds to its network of institutional investors. They typically do this at a slight mark-up, but the bank also assumes the risk of the bonds not selling well and they will occasionally (read: very rarely, but still a very real possibility) lose money on the deal.
4. The bank also typically agrees to support the price of the debt offering in the secondary market by providing liquidity for investors up to a certain point.
There are lots of nuances to this process, but that covers the basics. | 607e5267-0df4-457a-93a1-3400963d25a3 |
8c1q4t | How fast are things moving in the human body? | it varies depending on what part of "everything" you're talking about.
The main things, though, are the impulses fired from the brain down through the nervous system, which take some fraction of a millisecond, and the time it takes for your muscles to move your hand, which depends on the strength of your muscles, mass of your arm, and a few other factors.
Most of the rest of your body isn't really involved beyond what's already going on; blood is pumping through your arm at what is probably a very-slightly-higher-than-resting rate due to the light activity, but it was pumping through there anyway, it just sped up a tiny bit since you weren't at a rest anymore.
The muscles in your legs likely don't move at all, nor the muscles in your abs. Your digestive tract will continue digesting whatever's in there at its normal rate under most circumstances, unless your fingernails cause you to panic and have an adrenal response that temporarily slows/stops digestion and potentially voids your bowels. | fcbd9325-f39c-4954-9dbf-cf8bd3ee6756 |
1zzljm | Can ship execute swift maneuvers in space if it has a lot of power? Or will it always move slowly? | More power can easily translate to faster maneuverability. Modern spaceships use small thrusters placed around the exterior of the ship to turn. When a thruster is facing anywhere other than directly towards or away from the center of mass, activating it will change the direction that the object is facing. You might compare this to a tugboat maneuvering a large cargo shop into a dock. The tugboat will push on say the back left of the shop turning the front left. Now if you replaced the tugboat with an aircraft carrier, the cargo ship is going to move faster when it hits. So yes more powerful manuvering thrusters will speed up your turning and execution speed. | 9471dc58-af21-4d07-bb54-3775d5a66af2 |
4fqt81 | How are we able to make an emergency call on a cellphone with no service or provider? | I studied a little bit of this in college, and the other answers I'm seeing may not be what you're looking for.
Your phone, sim card or no, is talking to all the towers around you all the time if its able to. Usually the conversation is something along the lines of:
* Cell Phone: "Hi Tower!"
* Tower: "Are you a Verizon/AT & T/Sprint/etc phone?"
* Cell Phone: "Nope!"
* Tower: "Then we have nothing more to talk about."
However, all towers are listening for a very specific packet of information a phone spits out when it tries to put through an emergency call. This packet precludes all the questions a tower might ask and means that if its at all possible, the tower will route that call. When you make an emergency call on a phone the conversation goes more like:
* Cell Phone: "Hi Tower!"
* Tower: "Are you a Verizon/AT & T/Sprint/etc phone?"
* Cell Phone: "This is an EMERGENCY!!"
* Tower: "Oh, ok let me put you through."
This also means that if a tower is heavily trafficked, like one in a big city, it will give priority to that emergency call.
Could calling be free? Functionally probably. You're seeing more plans that are dirt cheap and have unlimited calling and texting. Its the *data* thats the big money maker. But at the end of the day, the towers still need to be built, maintained, and connected to networks. So you still need to pay *something*.
TL;DR: When you make an emergency call the tower handles it very differently, bypassing a lot of artificial roadblocks that prevent you from making normal calls. | 10592ef8-7509-491d-97ab-2c5b029b669b |
43k6xa | Considering various backgrounds and experience differentiation, how would an Equal Wages - Gender Wage Gap law work? | The wages of every employee is publicly posted in the workplace. Everyone knows what everyone else makes.
The rest will sort itself out. | 6423d245-5c18-4c37-b943-bf707e79596c |
1wv3yn | Why and when exactly was the death penalty reinstated in the US after being abolished in 1972? Is it really because "murder rates soared" following its abolition, as some claim? | The death penalty wasn't abolished in 1972. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that certain *specific inconsistent applications* of the death penalty violated the "cruel and unusual punishment" portion of the constitution. So the states voluntarily suspended the death penalty while they worked to bring their policy in line with the requirements set forth in the justices' opinions. | 9a9e3e07-6f42-40d8-a96f-0739d266cb98 |
1r4lod | What happens if I use a top loader washing detergent in a front loader machine? | I did this by accident once a year or two ago and a giant meteor crashed into Russia. | 34d2198b-ff68-462d-b19f-75a85622d34d |
498s8p | How do scientists know there are x unknown animal species if they weren't discovered yet? | If I recall from ecology, basically what happens is that you can chart how many new species have been found each year (adjusted for how many people/man-hours were spent actively looking), and the resulting graph shows a gentle curve and leveling off over time - indicating a point in the future where it's flat (meaning we're not discovering any new species). So, the space between where we are and where that graph ends up going flat is a rough estimate of how many species we probably have left to find. | 14d8cca7-b084-48d2-b126-a31db31c25fd |
113060 | How do we remember tastes? | Our sense of taste is closely related with the sense of smell, so much in fact, that if you have stuffed nose, things will start tasting bland.
Haven't heard about link with memory. Do you mean this [article](_URL_0_)? If so, it explains that we have preference for things from our childhood because they didn't kill us. There is no need of risking new stuff, if old stuff managed to get us that far. | 9c890a05-a6ac-4de7-97b9-e19e31713664 |
2uttg4 | What's the difference between the Islamic State and the Taliban? | The answer is both yes and no. Both groups have religiously influenced ideologies that are fused with cultural/ethnic group identities.
The Taliban are ethnically [Pashtun](_URL_1_), a tribe that predates modern states but that currently exists in Afghanistan. From the beginning, they were outwardly quite religious. Many of the Taliban's leaders were clerics or teachers (the roles are often combined). Still, it would be wrong to describe the Taliban like al-Qaeda, which is an almost exclusively religious group. Yes, the Taliban are Muslim. Yes, they practice a hard-liner brand of Islam influenced by [Wahhabism](_URL_0_). But they are also a very ethnic group with local interests and motivations. For example, the Taliban is deeply involved in the Afghan drug trade, which is *haram* (forbidden) in Islam.
Then we have ISIL/ISIS/IS. Once again, it would be wrong to simply label them as religious terrorists. They do indeed practice terrorism, and they do espouse an especially noxious brand of religiously motivated hatred. But the interesting thing about ISIS is that they do not always attempt to justify their actions on the basis of religion. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, took pains to constantly rationalize their killings and atrocities through scripture. ISIS revels in its violence and brutality. There are exceptions, of course -- a recent IS pamphlet suggested that it would not be unlawful under sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence) to rape non-Muslim women.
IS is difficult to describe because it too is deeply influenced by secular elements in society. Many of the young men fighting with IS today are Sunni. That's significant because Saddam was Sunni, and marginalized Iraqi Shiites despite the fact that they were the overwhelming majority of Iraq. When the regime fell, the government purged their ranks of Sunnis altogether, leaving a large number of well-trained and dissatisfied Iraqis out on the streets. That was a recipe for the early years of the insurgency in Iraq. Sunnis were eventually reincorporated into Nouri Malaki's government, but then mostly expelled as Malaki tried to consolidate his power. As you can tell, there is a lot of sectarian, tribal, and local animosity in the society that transcends religious differences.
Both Iraq and Syria have relatively robust traditions of secularist regimes -- the Alawites and the Baathists (ruling parties of Syria and Iraq respectively) clamped down on religious government and emphasized nationalism and pan-Arabism. This is in stark contrast to the situation in Afghanistan, where the idea of a "state" per se never really took hold.
TL;DR: IS and the Taliban are two very different groups with very different compositions. They should not be understood as purely religious organizations, but groups that are influenced by their regional origins as well. | 96cc6678-a063-4caf-b73a-34ec8dc3236d |
1gz5c0 | How come on the show "Drugs Inc." they can interview a drug dealer without him getting arrested (when he clearly admits to his crimes) | Saying you've committed a crime at some point isn't enough evidence to convict you of a crime. He could just say in court that he was saying it for entertainment, or fun, or was joking, or any of a million things. | 0cd22074-4634-472f-bd9b-7da72dbe9ba1 |
3jeiwo | How did they send people into space in the early days of space exploration without computers and GPS technology? | Well, there were computers, though they were far more primitive. Often, this meant trajectories had to be calculated by hand.
Navigation was another matter. Though GPS didn't exist, ground stations could locate space probes based on radio signals, similar to Gps. Otherwise astronauts had to use a sextant to navigate by the stars. | 1dc18f89-bf0e-4ad2-89ce-56e3f1c6b05e |
6toksk | How people make a living off investing | 1. They don't make steady income off investments... it's an irregular earning pattern. They may have a great day and make thousands or they may have a bad day and lose thousands.
2. Options are contracts to buy or sell stock at a certain price on a certain day in the future. They go up and down in value depending on the value of the underlying stock and likelihood of the option being "in the money", ie. paying out on the expiration day. They can swing much more volatility than the underlying stock, and as a result can pay off big. But they can also move the other way and because of the limited time horizon can also very quickly lose everything invested.
3. No, it's not possible to start with $1000. Even $100,000 is virtually impossible to invest as a primary means of income. Making a living off investing is a classic "takes money to make money" endeavor. | 14a6b8c1-3f72-4844-913c-5892d264e59f |
1lpfht | Why does counting sheep help you go to sleep? | It is more a cliche about counting sheep being boring and tiring than actually being an effective sleep aid. | 7403d5b6-1fe2-4d56-94ea-07eb40b6ef2f |
53a9je | If diet coke has 0 calories and 0 sugar, why is it still unhealthy? | Because the citric acid in soft drinks deteriorates your teeth, and messes up your bodies natural acidity. As well as the sugar replacement Aspertame, which tricks not only your taste buds but your body into thinking it's real sugar, causing unnecessary insulin to be produced. Research is still inconclusive on how bad Aspertame really is though. | 91f692a0-6b5f-4e51-8647-3c93279c22c2 |
3eo2g0 | Are there cultures where marriage doesn't exist? | I'm hoping somebody will name one for you but my money is on "no" — see e.g. _URL_1_ — mainly because marriage can appear in [so many different forms](_URL_0_). | 864eaf05-86f2-428b-b13f-3e7e231165ea |
1esbm3 | Why aren't there hedge funds for middle class / poor people? | Hedge funds can only accept a certain number of customers by law, so they will generally only take wealthy people. A lot of them have minimum buy ins. | 881f88a8-d35e-4cc1-8a99-7c96fdf196e7 |
814v3h | . In the big picture what will raising the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 really accomplish? | To be perfectly honest, young people are dumb, impulsive & have a poor understanding of the consequences of their actions. The general principle behind gun control is to make it harder for impulsive people to get their hands on guns - if something is illegal to purchase and now costs 3x what it did when it was legal, you're less likely to buy it for stupid shit. | 9175697b-bc39-45b0-a3a7-60627fa65027 |
679htt | Why do Kenyans consistently outperform other nationalities in long distance running? | One thing to keep in mind is that the Kenyans who are winning are doing just a few minutes better than the top runners from other countries - it's not as though Kenyans are significantly faster.
But there are a lot of reasons they're good at marathons (Ethiopians too).
For one, Kenya is a relatively poor country. This means a lot of things:
1) Most of the jobs are subsistence farming, i.e. a very physical activity ([Wikipedia](_URL_0_) says 75% of working Kenyans made their living on the land). As such, the average Kenyan is in good physical shape.
2) Because it's a relatively poor country, there isn't a lot of obesity like there is in other countries. The average Kenyan has a lower BMI.
3) There isn't a lot of infrastructure, so they travel by foot. Running is faster than walking, and if you have a long distance to go, running saves time. So the average Kenyan has some experience with running to begin with.
4) Unrelated to their economy, Kenya has a higher altitude than many countries.
If you combine all of these things (better physical shape, lower BMI, plenty of physical activity, and a higher altitude), you end up with a group of folks with a high VO2 max. This means these folks can absorb more oxygen when breathing, which is key to marathoning, or doing any physical activity for an extended period of time.
So that explains why they're good long-distance runners.
As to why they compete in so many marathons, remember again that Kenya is a relatively poor country with very few non-farming jobs, and very little by way of secondary education. Not too many ways to make a better life for yourself. But if you know that you're a good runner, and other people from your country have gone off and won marathons (many of which have monetary prizes!), it sounds like a good thing to practice towards and be good at. | 3aabc62e-0c90-414e-ba57-3157f080d471 |
3x7x1k | How are naked four-legged mountain goats successfully able to traverse mountainous cliffs, while two-legged humans require climbing gear? | Well, they're not naked (they have hair) and they've got four feet instead of two... which is a help, not a hindrance.
They also have uniquely designed hooves to help them balance and climb over rough terrain, and they're far more dexterous than we are. They're also acclimated to the habitat. | db034c36-de6d-4ae4-9c70-21c386bc3518 |
8yxxi5 | Why aren't we able to mark SMS's as unread? | That would actually be very easy. All you need is a button that does the opposite of the function that marks the message as read.
I could try seeing if I can modify an open source messenger to mark the messages as unread.
One thing you have to think about though is how the unread property is stored: a developer could either store the read or unread property in each individual message or they could store the number of messages received from a contact since the last time their conversation was open and just tell the user the last (x) messages were unread. In that case, you have to either mark all those messages as unread or completely redesign the messenger. | 6179eddd-0962-46ef-8925-ae73b816b87c |
6dpexp | ELI5: Why are internet entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Evan Spiegel so much richer than major real estate developers? | One of the key things to remember is to exclude this bias for "internet entrepreneurs" and think of the businesses behind it.
Bezos (Amazon) operates a world wide insanely effective and complicated logistics company, perhaps the best in the world! They get tons of stuff from A to B, everywhere in the world, easy, cheaply, and fastly. Thats what Amazon is, its a logistics company. This has incredible value. Many consumers get confused about Amazon, they say "oh i buy stuff there, oh i watch amazon video or have a tablet by them". These companies have existed forever, there have been catalog companies and tech an entertainment companies. Amazon is none of those, its all just to support and use their incredible logistics business.
Snapchat is an ad platform. Just like say running an ad on the walking dead or billboard on the side of the road or during hot Beatz 106.3 FM's top 40 morning drive show. It's just a method to advertise products. Advertising is big businesses. | 8ce41451-8f2e-499b-8f4c-fddd80fefbaf |
86ch7f | How do laser guided missiles work? | The laser illuminates the target with a frequency of light not typically abundant in ambient light. The missile has sensors to detect this frequency and thus can look for the bright spot, adjusting its fins to aim for it. | c12d620f-17eb-4096-9fcd-fdc3912d4b47 |
4unqzb | How does lost money affect our economy? | The power of the dollar will increase, in what is essentially deflation. The quantity of goods and services produced hasn't changed, but the number of dollars circulating to purchase those goods and services has decreased. This means that each dollar will get you a greater quantity of goods and services.
While deflation seems good from an individual's standpoint, from the perspective of the overall market it is usually considered bad because it encourages people to hold on to their money rather than spend it. Thus, the government is likely to take corrective action to restore the money supply. | 2c41c117-988c-4aa5-88b5-6f6924b9d990 |
2qncc8 | how does scraping scissors/blade along a ribbon make it curl? | When you run a blade along a ribbon, you are using force to stretch the polymers beyond their elastic limit causing permanent deformation. (Think of pulling a spring too far, and it doesn't go back to it's original state.) This causes one side of the ribbon to be longer than the other. The shorter side appears to be "contracted" while the longer side appears to be "expanded" this causes a spiral, which is the curl. | 401f2d09-31b9-425b-b8ca-58ee7a605f31 |
oqw41 | What does it mean when someone "jailbreaks" a phone? | Jailbreaking is just gaining "root" access to the phone, giving you control over ALL files.
Once you have that, you can do a bunch of things. You can remove programs like the Blockbuster app, or you can go further by replacing the entire interface with another one, like CyanogenMod or whatever you happen to like.
It is not illegal (Apple tried to claim it was, and the courts ruled against them). Your phone provider won't touch your phone if it's jailbroken, because they have no idea what you've done to screw up your phone. But you can flash your phone back to its original state if you ever need to have it serviced, and they are unlikely to know (unless you totally kill it and don't have access to re-flash it).
Jailbreaking is popular, because people like to have control over their stuff and not be forced to take up limited storage for apps like Blockbuster, or they want Ice Cream Sandwich for their phone and their provider isn't going to give it to them, or they want to be able to provide a wireless hotspot without paying an outrageous $30/month, or whatever. | c61450b7-bfd4-482d-97e2-1c61a30041e5 |
3zygti | how is music and movies digitally remastered? | Older movies (pre-2002) were almost all on 35mm. 35mm when scanned has a max resolution around that of 4K. Plus, they also use Photoshop like programs to correct scratches and other imperfections, as well as the color, they might remaster the audio as well.
[Here is how they did it with Jaws.](_URL_0_) | a964b21c-ad7d-4f63-996d-d1a173589a09 |
1hk7mc | Why Ecuador gave Snowden travel pass and now says it was a mistake? | Most likely because the US government is putting pressure on them in the terms of trade restrictions | eb6d84f8-ba10-4cd3-aeaa-5a2c715facd3 |
3483hb | How long after birth do eyeballs grow, if at all? | > The vertical measure, generally less than the horizontal distance, is about 24 mm among adults, at birth about 16–17 millimeters (about 0.65 inch). The eyeball grows rapidly, increasing to 22.5–23 mm (approx. 0.89 in) by three years of age. By age 13, the eye attains its full size. The typical adult eye has an anterior to posterior diameter of 24 millimeters, a volume of six cubic centimeters (0.4 cu. in.),[3] and a mass of 7.5 grams (weight of 0.25 oz.).
Quoted off of Wikipedia: _URL_0_
tl;dr: Our eyes are generally 16-17 mm at birth, rapidly grow to about 22.5-23mm by age 3, and finish growing at about 24mm at age 13. | 09523b08-e2ec-4dc7-af5b-645f4c6fb758 |
1r2i5z | Why did silent films exist? Don't microphones pre-date the video camera? | Films were recorded on - you guessed it - *film*, which predates modern microphones. While the technology to record and replay sounds did predate film, you weren't able to record them from multiple sources and on editable media. The most you could do was record music and play it on a record player along with the film. | 15c3e96e-c8cb-438d-b613-69a30db26007 |
vl2s2 | How do painkillers know which part of my body is in pain? | They don't - they inhibit pain receptors everywhere. You only feel the pain relief in places where the pain receptors were firing, i.e. places that had pain. | 3dc4ba18-528d-440c-81ac-5be0a6ae7aa1 |
8linff | Why do video games rely on mega high resolution textures to appear more realistic, when a DVD movie can look far more realistic with a resolution of only 720x480? | **Professional video game environment artist here**
1.) Movies are recorded from a fixed camera angle for each shot. This means that 4000 pixels on screen are always 4000 pixels, regardless of how many objects you have in a shot or how close up you get to them.
2.) Video games are interactive 3d worlds that you can move 'through'. This means game designers need to find a way to make every object that you can conceivably get up close to, from the gun in your hand all the way to the tree on top of that far off mountain, look good up close. To exacerbate things further, the objects are 3d, which means that every surface needs to be covered with pixels even if you can't currently see it, because you 'might'.
*There are things that can be done to help this, like 'streaming' textures in and out of 'memory' when you don't see them, but as a general rule, unless there's a load screen, everything you can see in the world that you can reach must have an ultra HD texture in case you get right up close to it.
**Second edit: A lot of ppl have been asking about how I got into the industry or got this particular job, and even suggested I do an ama so I think that's what I'll do. That said, I'll give a brief summary here:
1. To be a game artist or 3d artist in general it helps 'a lot' to have a background in traditional art (drawing and painting mostly) I got a 4 year degree in Illustration myself, but at least some training in the fundamentals is needed.
2. Then you'll want to learn the tools and techniques specific to content creation for current games. This would include a suite of digital sculpting, modeling, and texturing tools, as well as a game 'engine' to bring all your content together. ZBrush, 3dsMax or Maya, Photoshop, and Substance Suite are the current standard, and either Unreal or Unity for your engine. I took a post grad in game art which can be helpful for those who learn better from a guided structure, but not mandatory as YouTube is full of good educational content, and there are numerous excellent online forums and programs taught by pros to choose from (Art Station is a must).
3. Work work work on your portfolio. Look at the pros and see where the bar's set, then aim for that. Don't work in a bubble! Developing a critical eye for your own work is key, but in order to do that you need feedback from those with a keener eye than you, so post you work online and ask for critiques. The importance of this can't be over stated.
4. Apply EVERYWHERE at first (Only for entry level jobs of course). We all have our dream companies and games, but we all gotta start somewhere, so don't be afraid to aim high but don't be too proud to aim low either. Getting your first job and getting your foot in the door is far more important, as it means you will be getting paid to gain valuable experience in the field. Think of it as the first step of your new career that will inevitably wind you up at Naughty Dog or Sony!
Ok, that's it for now. Hope that satisfies!** | a8f44e76-0496-483a-9bb8-d0a49d8ae013 |
2a2gq1 | Why is it that a temperature like 80°F seems really hot at the beginning of the Summer, but cool by the end? | *"Homeostasis : The ability of the body or a cell to seek and maintain a condition of equilibrium or stability within its internal environment when dealing with external changes"*
In the summer your body gets used to temperatures 90F+; The way it gets used to these temperatures is that your body tries to keep its core temperature as low as possible by releasing its internal heat - sweating more constantly, making you thirsty to drink more water, etc. In the winter the reverse is true; your body tries to keep all of its internal heat in as much as possible.
So 80F in the summer is cold because your body is releasing its internal heat making it cooler in an already cool environment (compared to 90 degree weather). 80F in the winter will feel hot because your body is retaining all of its internal heat, therefore making you feel hotter. | 7f37b5b5-4b1c-40a9-a219-dea4f5e814ad |
63zhjm | If I wake-up, have breakfast, and try to go back to sleep, my body resists by giving me fatigue, slight pain and an increased heart rate. Why does this happen? | Increased heart rate, sudden (little)burst of energy and wakefullness is normal. You just ate and you are starting the digestion process so your stomach needs more blood (Increased heart rate) for the cells to produces acids and do their stuff.
Now fatigue and slight pain? I'm no expert but I don't think it's usual
Discomfort maybe? If you lay down over a full stomach it can provoke some discomfort due to the pressure on it. I don't see other reason. | d78b3a9c-a825-4fd5-896c-06cf316dc0c5 |
or0go | Why don't fish freeze when the water above does? | The ice above forms an insulative barrier to keep in the heat from the Earth below and in a bizarre twist the water below the ice is actually slightly above freezing. Some fish, being cold blooded creatures adapt to this situation. | 626b3c30-b50c-42e7-a69f-7503049e06b6 |
juxqs | Why you need to put cold water/anything cold on a burn. | Your body is a piece of meat that is being cooked and you need to stop it from cooking. | 7358c361-dec0-4818-87e6-820dbe6485a1 |
2su42x | How do snipers account for wind and gravity on long-range shots? | Lots and lots of practise in differing conditions. Long shots require elevation to compensate for the drop due to gravity, also you need fire at where they will be and not where they are now. | 1695a6f3-1223-4d70-8f9f-3ca2ac15d022 |
72v1wd | Why Do Some Sites Require Credit Card CCV Numbers, and Others (like Amazon) Do Not? | The CVV2 number isn't *required* to charge the card, but it reduces the risk of fraud. If the transaction is fraudulent, the merchant might end up having to pay fees or fines to their payment processor, so merchants have an incentive to check CVV2s. But if they don't want to and are willing to risk more chargebacks, they can decide not to require it (which is what Amazon's done). | 1d58e586-2340-433a-860a-6f24d2e619a7 |
2h6q4n | How does a torrent ever get seeders if it can't be downloaded when it has 0 seeders? | The person that starts the torrent is the first seeder. | 2d49f858-c0d5-4c1e-b0b8-49847121fd84 |
1m7bio | If 12 years of war has cost us 6 trillion dollars, what have we GAINED financially? Is there a net gain or loss? | I am unable to provide a solid explanation on the 12 year war that you are referring to but, maybe I can provide a typical ELI5 explanation on war and whats the main benefit of it.
War is considered as a financial injection to a country that is one of the leading ones on the world. Why? Because every contry that achieved economical greateness inevitably faces overproduction. That basically means that the ammount of things a country produces exceeds the needs of its people. Once that happens, the overproduction should seize because keeping it going will result in loss of money. Limiting the production, means less employment, less investments and generaly leads to economic losses. War is one of the best solutions to that problem. War stimulates the need of various goods so basically you are getting rid of the overproduction. Now this is a very simplictic explanation in layman's language. If you research on the matter, things are far more complex. Overall, once a country gets to an economic standstill due to overproduction, war is one of the best alternatives as it plays the role of a stimulant. | 7e1cccba-c63f-4d38-a4f9-f33019913add |
2364sv | What is actually occurring in the brain during a seizure? | ELI5: As a person with epilepsy since October 23, 2001, and in the interest of keeping within the guidelines of ELI5, I can tell you you won't like the answer. To simply answer your question, the brain is randomly firing off electrical impulses throughout the brain. These impulses are triggering all the different reactions you would associate with those portions of the brain. If it's the part for a certain motor skill or muscle, then that part of the body will freeze or jerk, if it's in the part where the person's memories of scents are stored, they will think they smell something, if it's in the hippocampus then there's a good chance their short -term memory will get affected. So on and so forth.
Now, the part you might not, and I especially don't, like: They don't really know WHY it happens. Sure, they can associate it with certain things, like "Oh, you've had physical trauma to the brain and now you have seizures" or "Well your family has a history of epilepsy and therefore it's not surprising that you do" or as in my case "Well, you're a 9/11 survivor and you went through a great deal of trauma and that caused an imbalance in your brain". But in the end they don't really know what causes it. All they know is that for some reason, the brain decides to put on its own little light show of electrical impulses and when it does you can go from staring off for a few seconds, to doing the harlem shake on your back while pissing yourself, to actually dying (like my uncle two months ago). Now there are some instances where they can say, there are specific imbalances in a person's makeup that will trigger a seizure, and they can treat these, but for many epileptics, the condition is idiopathic.
The even better kicker is, that they're not even sure how some of the medicine they use to treat seizures work, just that they do.
EDIT: I originally posted that I had Epilepsy since 1999, which was the year my son was born and did NOT cause me to have seizures. They began in 2001, a little more than a month after 9/11. Sorry! | 3dcb4bcd-18ce-4577-82f6-fddf10361e2a |
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