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p113t | How music is stored on CD's and then played back | like ur a pretty smart 5yo:
a recording machine listens to the music as it's being played, and turns it into numbers. it records thousands of different numbers every second to represent the changing volume of the music.
these numbers are written down very small on a CD, in a spiral that goes around and around and from the inside of the CD near the hole to the outside edge. your CD player reads the numbers that are written on the disk, and using a speaker it pushes air around to those places at those times. the speaker makes a similar vibration like the original sound, and the vibrating air reaches your ear and sounds like music! | 9bcb2b05-b84c-4914-8e1d-5124a9779089 |
3e3z40 | Why do people support Bruce* Jenner and despise Rachel Dolezal? | Please search. You'll find the answer [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_ ) | 4648b4c2-b644-4240-8137-cfe18eafeb19 |
778jm4 | Why can't current be defined as co-directional with the flow of electrons? | Because current is the flow of charge, not electrons. The particles that allow for the flow of charge are called "charge carriers" and electrons happen to have a negative charge, so current flows in the opposite direction of electrons.
Electrons aren't the only charge carriers. In semiconductors for example, you have both free electrons and places for electrons to go (called "holes") which can act as charge carriers. In your body, positively charged potassium ions act as charge carriers.
Essentially electric current is defined without caring about what carries the charge, just the direction the charge moves. | 31488960-79ac-4cbc-9857-133f915e0f23 |
7qig5a | Why can the aging process of alcoholic beverages not be artificially sped up or completely skipped? | Often alcoholic beverages are aged in wooden barrels. During the aging, the beverage is infused with flavour from the wood of the barrel. While theoretically it would be possible to artificially add those flavours, it is difficult to know exactly what and how much to add since those flavours are very subtle and depend on a lot of things, including the wood used, the specific beverage and the time it is aged for. There is also little incentive to do so, as often aged beverages are enthusiast products, and enthusiasts usually aren't very appreciative of artificial flavours. The long aged products are a status symbol as well, and skipping the aging process would diminish their value and prestige as a status symbol. | 14d51fc4-1999-4bb4-b27e-a2ab8afeb0aa |
3p63yj | How does the heart send more blood to one area when needed if all the veins are one "circle" system? | The heart pumps faster to send blood faster during these times, but the vessels dilating and contracting are what determines where the "more" blood goes (really just a higher volume to one area and lower volumes everywhere else, not actually more). This is done by nerve signals from the area that needs it to the brain telling the brain (autonomic nervous system) "hey we need more blood here stat!" Heart pumps faster, vessels dilate in the area you need the blood and contract elsewhere. Voila! More blood. | 970be54b-06f0-4882-80af-6ef86f8cbe6f |
1x9xr8 | how come an HD Youtube video can load in a reasonable amount of time but a GIF an exceptionally long time? | GIF was never meant for video and people that post them don't optimize them so they are huge and slow. | 9f4614d8-7511-48f2-845c-29983ecb4a62 |
3kybnt | Why can a human limb not sense its own weight? | You can feel its weight. However you just get used to it after years.
Think about it externally: if you never wear a watch, and then you put on a big heavy one your arm feels heavy because of that extra weight.
Now let's say you wear that watch every day. You even sleep and shower in it. Eventually, wearing the watch feels normal and your arm no longer feels like it is moving weight.
Now the watch breaks and you have to leave it at a repair shop for a few days. Your arm suddenly feels much lighter and naked. | 567daed2-7f6a-4e68-95ab-227f926eac12 |
7ky06f | Why do some working Americans believe their money they earn goes to welfare/foodstamps/govt assistance? | Because it does. All taxes go into the general fund and are distributed from there so on the ELI5 level anybody who pays taxes, pays a percentage of everything the government pays out as the government does not make its own money. | 6abaa623-ff0e-47fc-818a-ff5168eeeeb7 |
7ax6me | How exactly does a nail keep two wooden planks together? | Friction. The nail breaks the wood fivers apart causing mini sized splintery pieces around the nail that when they try to return to their original position, grip onto the nail tightly. | de565e74-fe23-42e7-bcfb-eab3a4c2f50a |
2i4fy0 | How did the first person with HIV/AIDS become infected? | This is impossible to accurately answer because obviously nobody can be 100% certain. But the most likely vector would be from somebody coming into contact with infected monkey blood, which then entered that person's bloodstream, presumably through a pre-existing cut or abrasion.
Many species of monkeys and apes are common food animals in parts of Africa, so it's highly likely that people would be regularly encountering monkey blood. Although HIV doesn't live for long once its host dies, if a freshly-slaughtered monkey bled onto a human being, that human could then become infected with the virus. | 68aec574-e0d6-4e87-90d1-4f20e5adb897 |
3ch4k9 | China just lost about 3.2$ trillion in the last three weeks, where did all that money go? | There is no "first law of thermodynamics" for wealth. Wealth can certainly be created and can certainly be destroyed. The value lost in the chinese equity markets isn't "found" by someone else. The value of all those companies has decreased, or rather, markets realized that they were being overvalued and responded. It is bad for all of us (except for any who may have correctly gauged when this crash was coming and gotten out of the market at a fortuitous time). | bba88769-9bac-45f6-835f-0c328c806664 |
2vj6x2 | My popcorn is listed as 240 calories unpopped, 220 calories popped. Where do those 20 calories go? | Some of the moisture, oils, and husk escape when the kernels pop. Not eating the husk or oils would reduce the calories vs the unpopped kernels since part of them is basically missing. | 96c293c6-279c-4399-84af-ef88675f956b |
5xk6iv | How come many people think cilantro has no taste or tastes good, but a lot of people think cilantro has an extremely strong and disgusting taste? | There's actually a genetic mutation that causes some people to taste cilantro as soapy.
_URL_0_ | a3465c75-013a-4f97-b02b-8f88203b4e8a |
8loqyf | How do hypodermic needles penetrate your skin without punching out a "core" of flesh? | They are cut on a slant, so they slice a slit instead of cutting a core. | 373ecbd7-d3c3-4d41-b090-df99f2362a7b |
1qq3su | What is the difference between the estimated 120,000 libraries in the US and Google making all books freely available online in their entirety? | Libraries own, and allow use of, only one copy of a book at a time. They have the right to do this because they physically own one copy of the book, which is the right to use one copy of the book. Because objects.
Google also owns only one copy of each book, but is making snippets available to possibly thousands of people simultaneously. The argument, in its simplest form, is that this is copying the book, which is illegal. | 014b7cd3-0df9-441c-8987-76e99440adb5 |
2kghqc | Describe Hinduism and its principles to me. | This is a large subject to which I cannot entirely do justice, but I will mention some of the more distinguishing features of Hinduism. Hinduism is a very ancient, polytheistic religion having a large number of deities. There are 3 particularly important dieties, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. All other deities are aspects of those 3. One curious aspect of Hinduism is that not only do human beings live many life times, dying and then being reincarnated, but so do the gods; new incarnations of deities are known as avatars. A central concept of Hinduism is that people accrue a spiritual characteristic known as karma, by virtue of the good or bad things that they do. People with good karma will consequently be reincarnated in a more favorable circumstance (such as, in a wealthier family) than in their present life, while people with bad karma will be punished by being reincarnated in worse circumstance, which can go to the extreme of being reincarnated as an animal rather than as a person. This concept is also the basis of the caste system. High caste people are thought to deserve their special privileges because it is their good karma which caused them to be born into a high caste family, while people of low caste deserve their less privileged existence because that is their karma. It is a very clever justification for a very abusive social practice, and it can be compared to the argument made by European monarchs, that they rule by divine right. Obvious, if God did not want them to be monarchs, they wouldn't be, so therefore they must be entitled to their lives of absolute power and privilege. | 4691a80a-f36a-470a-b815-cadc3d419e9f |
1s119i | Why is creating a male contraceptive pill so challenging? | I literally heard about this on the radio yesterday so i may be able to help.
A male one is in development currently in Australia (I think) and has had effective trials on mice in labs showing that it is able to be effective with no major (maybe any) side effects.
The difficulty is that a male pill has to stop every single sperm, which males produce millions of, from entering the female's egg, if one gets through, the pill can be redundant, however, a female contraceptive needs to simply stop one egg.
So its much easier to stop one egg then millions of sperm through a pill, which is why the female pill has been around since the 60s while the male one is still being developed.
Additionally, there is a lot of negative feedback from consumers on it currently. | 06362d54-4685-4d70-b844-b4410f9c354d |
5dspo7 | NASA's new EM Drive, why is it significant, and does it break the laws of physics? | Basically it is a container that bounces around electromagnetic waves, which generates movement. This requires no fuel, and seemingly doesn't make sense.
Normally when you have an engine/drive, you will have some sort of waste product or emission. Think of a rocket engine, you have flames shooting out of the back. The stuff being blown out is what makes it move. Remember that any force has an equal and opposite reaction, which is why the rocket moves. The key thing about the EM drive there is no measurable stuff coming out of it.
Does it break the laws of physics? No. If it broke the laws of physics it wouldn't work. This just proves that our current understanding of either the EM drive or our understanding of physics is wrong. | 736b49b8-89e9-4105-a275-e892d321f796 |
70b6bl | Why do crickets get quiet around humans, considering we aren't one of their predators? | When a lumbering monstrosity twenty thousand times your size clomps past, you may want to hush for a second and let the beast pass without trouble.
Sure a human is unlikely to stoop down and eat a cricket these days, but that's not true for all animals. Laying low while unfathomably bigger animals pass is a good survival strategy that most flightless insects have adopted. | 1e4dffbf-98c7-4101-a1e3-c2fa22121ca9 |
1tb3la | }What is it that causes hair to turn gray? | The reason is that, the older you get, more hydrogen peroxide (a strong bleach) builds up in your body because it can't break it down that fast anymore.
The hydrogen peroxide, in turn, destroys an enzyme that builds up melanine, the chemical compound that colors your hair, skin etc.
Your body hair does not grow as fast as head hair does, which might be the reason for head hair to lose color faster. | 24b65609-6d83-4767-9a02-958b8aaa5751 |
y4ln0 | Why you only get caught for illegally downloading some things, but not others? | Pure luck. You just happened to be downloading the file at a time when the copyright police (basically a bunch of people at the big media companies) were tracking you. | 041357d0-7b0b-4092-aabd-f5710c009372 |
63f7cr | why do we put our hands over our mouth when we eat something hot? [psychology] | Because we tend to open our mouths to breathe when we eat something hot, and we're already conditioned to cover our open mouths (yawning, etc). | 40313168-2610-4827-84ff-6f1b2ecc2831 |
2oiejl | Why don't humans go into heat? | Most animals have evolved this behavior so that their young one's growth coincides with the seasonal availability of food/resources. This also creates a cycle of birth and deaths that overlap so that the young can grow. This seasonal cycle is what we call being in heat.
Humans don't have to because we are smart and make use of what we can to survive. So sex is more recreational than utilitarian. | 40b8214d-5706-411b-988f-d05b6a4969cd |
4xhtp2 | How exactly does an acne cream like 'Neutrogena On the Spot' work to help heal and diminish pimples and what does it really do? | There are two types of medications used in these.
Benzoyl peroxide. This helps dry out junk clogging the pore so that the environment inside the pore is less awesome for bacteria because it lets in oxygen. BP also dries up everything not pore, making your face a wasteland of dead skin chunks and redness that *may for some people* make skin more prone to further infection. Go with lowest %.
Salicylic acid. Breaks down the bonds that hold gunk over the pores, making the outer 'shell' of the pimple separate so oxygen can get in and make the pore less awesome for bacteria. Helps reduce fluid and swelling - so the size of the pimple may go down. A dab on the spot overnight works quite well. 2% is pretty good for a face/body wash that many like for preventing breakouts without drying out their skin.
I use other stuff because these two (and Rx exfoliants) have wrecked the acid mantle of my skin in the past. The acid mantle is the true hero. Exfoliate and lubricate. Oil is not the enemy.
_URL_0_ | fe83d7cc-35a6-4632-ac4e-eafa3c4d4763 |
lyh3e | Simpson's paradox | Imagine you and your friend are comparing your GPAs. You took 5 hard classes and 2 easy classes, whereas he took 6 easy classes and 1 hard class. You got higher grades in both the easy classes and the hard classes like 5 Cs and 2 As whereas he got a D in the hard class and Bs in the easy classes. Obviously you are the better student but his GPA will be higher overall because the amount of Bs due to his easy classes.
Edit: A simpler example would be you and your friend are comparing basketball shots. He made 40 out of 80 free throws and made no shots out of 20 half court. You on the other hand made 10 out of 10 free throws and 25 out of 90 half courts. He would have the higher shooting percentage even though you are arguably the better shooter. This is because you did more difficult things and he did more easy things. In the end however they have the same weight in the weighted average. | 0522e6a3-7196-4edb-89e3-d8ce895cd042 |
1twfww | Why do dogs hate it when you blow in their faces, but love sticking their heads out the window? | Dogs stick their head out the windows of moving vehicles because of the abundance of new, wonderful smells. Dogs can't resist new, unfamiliar smells, and the open road is full of them!
Contrast that will blowing your concentrated blast of breath into a dogs nostril! :) | 5f4c66a5-5abb-47e9-9fc7-0fd7c17c4987 |
146byr | What is a leap year, and why do we have it? | Because the rotation of the Earth (a day) is not related to the orbit around the sun (a year) we get some discrepancies in our calender when we try to use one to count the other. Our calender has 365 days in a year but it actually takes the Earth about 365.25 days to complete one year. So ever year the days and seasons get roughly .25 days out of sync with our calender. To fix this we add an extra day to the calender every four years (.25 X 4=1) to try and fix the error and realign our calender to the actual orbit of the Earth. But even this isn't good enough as it isn't exactly 365.25 days there are some hanging decimals that build up and over the course of about 400 years we have to do another correction. So every year that ends in 00 doesn't get a leap year unless it is divisible by 400. so 1900 and 2100 did not have leap years but 2000 did. This fixes the accuracy of the calender for another 8000 or so years and since that is longer than recorded history we haven't bothered to fix it for future inaccuracies. | 7c82c1cc-dc5b-4b7a-9889-450cfdc0ec91 |
1lqd4l | When one company buys another, where does that money go? | A company is either owned privatly (typically a family or group of banks) or publicly (stock holders).
If its a private company, the owners get the money paid into their bank accounts which they will then use to go and buy big houses and speed boats. If its a public company, the owners of the shares get the value of their shares paid into their accounts in exchange for their share(s) - the smaller share holders will smile at making a nice profit, the bigger share holders will go and buy big houses and speed boats.
Sometimes it wont be a cash only deal, often it will be cash plus stock. In which case, the guy selling gets the cash and also gets signed over a load of shares which they can do with as they please. Either way, someone somewhere will be buying big houses and speedboats. | a3ab7c75-c3df-4b7b-a52b-7b0084f22bba |
2v5neq | Why are our brains really good at noticing bizarre circumstances while awake, but not while asleep? | When you are asleep, a specific part of you brain is not used. That part of your brain(correct me if im wrong. Neocortex) is what controls things as common sense and spotting the abstract. I remember studying this in my psychology class but its been a while so i might be off. | bc59b276-9908-46b5-9b48-d0103f9f4042 |
5648e3 | If I practice normal motor skills with my non-dominant hand, will it ever be as good as my dominant is naturally? | It depends a bit. A lot of us lefties are pretty much forced to use our right hand in various situations (ever laid eyes on a pair of seamstress scissors? They are ridiculous hard to use with the hand that doesn't properly fit the grip) and as a result we are sometimes better with some tools using our right hand.
I write with my left hand, use scissors with my left hand but prefer to hold a screwdriver in my right hand. Probably because the tool pockets on my first pair of workshop pants were all on the right side and it made more sense to use the hand I already held the tool in.
Ironically, I prefer I hold my Hitachi power tools in my left hand.
This suggests that all it takes is to teach yourself well enough with the non-dominant hand is a lot of practice.
In reality, you have a lot of use for it if you work in a mechanical field, so if you really need it often you probably already have *some* of this ability honed to usefulness. | 425b9f63-9789-45f4-bb1c-b5ab6bac3609 |
5jo236 | Potato electricity | Any battery is just a chemical reaction that releases electricity.
A potato contains phosphoric acid, which will react with several types of metal. You would get a similar reaction if you obtained a beaker filled with diluted phosphoric acid (or many other acids), and inserted the metal rods into the beaker.
The type of metals you choose will determine the voltage of the potato battery. Most of the kits you find on Amazon will have one zinc and one copper rod. | 1aeaab92-0844-4e27-9f00-7d59712dd374 |
723vky | If alcohol is supposed to impair judgement, why do politicians and businessmen drink during meetings? | I do not know of any formal meetings where politicians imbibe.
Businessmen do it for the same reason anyone else does: it makes you relaxed, and less confrontation, unless you imbibe too much.
But that is kind of old school business. Yes, it does still happen, but most companies have policies against any sort or alcohol intake during company time. | 1be8f8c2-df21-4a70-b280-3058cd829408 |
1raunj | How do football players not get sick when they play sleeveless in really cold/wet weather? | The body heat thing doesn't seem far-fetched to me because I have experienced it. I like to ice skate, and if you exercise enough at very cold temperatures, you will not be cold. I can comfortably skate in a t-shirt. However, this is an anecdote, and thus of limited usefulness.
[Here](_URL_0_) is an explanation of how the body "gets used to" cold. When you are in the same temperature for a while, your body will eventually 'ignore' the input in order to focus on other things. | fa7aec7e-4013-4aac-8b9c-46a1657c09f1 |
55qr9u | What is Front End and Back End Web Development? | Front end - stuff the end user sees. When you go on eBay and use the search bar to find the thing you want, that's front end.
Back end - how it all works. When you type something into the search bar it sends information to a server that pulls the information you need, that's all back end. When you buy a thing on eBay, and you actually pay for it there is a lot of back end going on, it has to talk to your financial institution, etc | 68f0a4e0-37b4-4edd-a5d5-eb41497d86a4 |
8pet2v | Why is it acceptable for smokers to take additional breaks at work? | It isnt! I found out that as a non-smoker, if you start hanging out with the smokers during their "breaks", it will cast a negative light on their excessive breaks and bring about enforcement of established times for said breaks. It should be just as acceptable for a non-smoker to take 10 minute breaks every hour as it is for a smoker. If management has a problem with you as a non-smoker taking these breaks, you have a case for discrimination. A person's habit should not make them above company or workplace policy. | a2677406-5aba-4a8e-9a2f-0ed4beb17c2c |
6icy5c | Was the catalyst for the YouTube revenue/clean content issue caused by the Wall Street Journal articles on YouTube? Do major papers hold this amount of power? | Regarding the Wall Street Journal, it's one of the most read papers in the US (currently leading USA Today and NYT as I understand it) with a subscriber count of 2.4M, [according to wiki](_URL_0_).
Additionally many businesspeople, including those at YT and Google and the companies that pulled ads from the Youtubers, read WSJ because it has a reputation of being *the* source of business news in the US. It has a reputation of having extremely rigorous and analytical reporting and investigations so if they're printing something in the news section, they're sure of it. And when it's a hot-button issue like the controversial content on Youtube, readers have a lot of faith that WSJ is telling it straight and has looked at all sides of the situation.
It's actually really hard to overstate WSJ's reach. I'm in an MBA program right now and virtually every class has WSJ listed as an optional/recommended reading material, and some professors explicitly send us some of their old articles to read. Every graduate from my business school is conditioned to follow and trust WSJ's reporting and we're probably not the only school like that. | 047bbc79-d39d-42c3-bee3-efd85b211667 |
117z2f | Why doesn't a pistol shrimp's snap boil water? | Not enough energy to. It's like lighting a match in a snow storm and expecting it to melt everything. Sure, the match is hot, but theres a lot more cold than there is hot. | c8cf7100-213a-4256-a8b6-9c0ab23235d7 |
1hae3w | Lightning | This is actually a very complicated question, so I'm going to gloss over some detail, but hopefully the explanation will be comprehensive enough. The only "prerequisites" I'll assume are that you know that charges repel and attract, ie negative charges repel other negative charges and attract positive charges, and that electricity needs a conductor to flow.
So, we start with a cloud. What tends to happen with large enough clouds is that negative charge builds up at the bottom of the cloud. We actually don't fully understand why that happens, though there are lots of very good educated guesses. Suffice to say that we know that negative charge tends to accumulate at the bottom of clouds.
Compared to the bottom of the cloud, the ground is positively charged. Thus, the negative charge in the cloud wants to get to the ground, because it's attracted by the "positive" charge (and repelled by all the other negative charges hanging around). There isn't really a clear path for it to flow, though; air doesn't conduct particularly well.
So, what happens is that a "packet" of negative charge called a "step leader" gets ejected from the cloud once there's enough charge. Basically, there's a breaking point of sorts where some of the charge just gets kicked out of the cloud. The step leader shoots down to the ground, because it's attracted/repelled downwards, and it leaves a path of ionized air behind.
Put more simply, the step leader "leaves behind" some of its charge on its way down in the air, which makes the air on the path it followed ionized. An ionized molecule is just a molecule that doesn't have a neutral charge, so basically a molecule that has one or more extra electrons (or has had some of its electrons taken away). Ionized air conducts reasonably well, so, in essence, the step leader makes a "wire" of ionized air.
Once the step leader reaches the ground, it's made a pretty good connection between cloud and ground, and the rest of the charge in the cloud realizes that there's now a "wire" to travel through, and it all rushes down to the ground. That's when the flash happens; it's when the step leader has hit the ground, and all the other charge follows. The reason that happens is that accelerating charge produces electromagnetic radiation like light, which happens because of another complicated process that I don't want to explain here.
Now, I just told you that the charge travels *downward*, so why do some people say that lightning goes up? The reason they say that is that the charge closest to the ground starts traveling first, so the light gets produced near the ground initially, and then the flash "travels upwards" as the charge higher-up "realizes" that there's a connection. In other words, the *charge* goes downwards, but the *flash* travels upwards.
The reason that lightning tends to (but doesn't always) hit things that are higher up follows from this explanation. The step leader is attracted to positive (technically, neutral) charge, so if it "sees" something closer to it with neutral charge, it'll rush in that direction. Obviously, things that are higher up will be closer to the step leader, so it'll go towards them. Once it makes the connection... boom, lightning. | a2d329cb-0d9f-4e1e-9a4f-0685e0a5044a |
2c2zaq | How come a man can rent a tux from somewhere or buy a suit and use it for multiple special occasions but a woman has too buy a new dress for every event that comes up. | They *can*, but just generally don't *want* to. | 94073df5-cbc2-443d-a169-99b5a0c4fc65 |
5hflif | How did people get water to drink in ancient Venice? | Venice has a complex system that catches rainwater putting it into cisterns that are then accessed by various city wells and fountains. | 04050120-3c1b-443b-bc50-fd060693442a |
7uvhn6 | If two perfect singers sing the same song and can sing the same octaves and notes, how do those two singing voices still sound different? | Every person, and every instrument, plays each note slightly differently. If you take A over middle C, it will always be 440 Hz no matter whether you sing it, play it on a piano, play it on a saxophone, etc. But just because the note itself is 440 Hz doesn't mean that all of those 440 Hz notes sound the same. Each instrument is playing a 440 Hz fundamental frequency, but it's also playing a bunch of other significant frequencies that are multiples or fractions of the fundamental frequency. The overall sound produced by the fundamental frequency, and all of the other frequencies, is distinct for the different instruments - and that's what we call the "timbre." | 3c008227-94b0-406e-b928-17774f228a37 |
3hxj3v | Who funds the chocolate milk commercials on ESPN? | Lobby or industry groups mostly, basiclly the MPAA of the milk or egg businesses.
According to this
_URL_0_
The add is paid for by The Milk Processor Education Program aka MilkPEP.
According to their website MilkPEP is funded by the nation's milk processors.
The egg commercials were paid for by the American Egg Board, they are what's known as a marketing board. Marketing boards are common in agricultural products, basiclly every egg producer pays a fee to the American Egg Board and in exchange the board markets all of the products of the producers.
Basically the American Egg Board is responsible for encouraging americans to eat eggs. | 5fae50fb-6ffd-43dc-bc01-b0c68c9c603d |
4t6bn3 | why can't some people wink? | Your facial muscles, including your eyelids, are controlled by the facial motor nucleus. This is a cluster of neurons in the brainstem. But it's not a uniform thing, it's split up into smaller parts.
The upper half of your face gets sent mostly weak, bilateral signals. A lateral signal means that the signal is sent to each half of the body individually. Bilateral means it's sent to both sides at once. Because of this, controlling both sides of the upper half of your face is hard, and thus it can cause difficulty in winking, or raising a single eyebrow. If your friend's was weaker than normal, it might've made it impossible for him to do so. | 5460d432-42ba-49e2-bb5d-10fc223b0f46 |
40jyg0 | Why do humans have a bellybutton? | Your belly button is where the umbilical cord connects when you're in the womb. That's what provides you with food and oxygen. It has no purpose as an adult, it's just a leftover. | 7780d327-654e-44ae-8c88-079cb21ef558 |
1i6eau | The ability to be vague in the "ingredients" list on certain foods | The FDA has very specific rules on labeling, as can be found [here](_URL_0_)
The rules specifically address 'spices' and indicate they can be listed very generically, as "spices" or variations thereof.
As for why they did it that way, one can only conjecture. Industry lobbying, for one, because spices (as the example at hand) may be secret, or may change frequently, or are otherwise just too difficult to keep updated. They also make up a very small part of the product, not enough to affect anyone, and so there's really no point in listing them. | 0d8d2225-c06a-4e12-b3b1-29ed3c2863e7 |
1s0yvg | The difference between transsexual, transgender, and hermaphrodite, options those people have for reproduction, and what it means to "Identify" as fe/male. | A hermaphrodite is a person with a rare condition that causes them to be born with fully functional male AND female parts. Today, it is usually the case that parents will make a choice and have the other parts surgically removed.
Transgender has to do with gender identity, specifically, identifying as the opposite gender from your physical sex.
Transsexual is a person who has surgically become or is surgically becoming the opposite sex.
As to the latter part of your question, regarding gender identity, I refer you to a [more knowledgeable source](_URL_0_), but to sum up, sex is your physical equipment, and gender is what you feel yourself to be. | bcf7e704-53d9-446d-89e4-d43beecbb3ca |
3jtyhm | Why do we find massages relaxing and soothing? | Massages stimulate a lot of nerve endings in ways that they typically aren't stimulated. It also increase blood flow in those areas which is good for you body. | b0cbea0b-1981-4404-8777-6fbf84fc2724 |
56yhqp | Why are we trying to colonize Mars? | Some facts about Mars: It has 24.5 hour days, 144 trillion square meters of land area (roughly equivalent to the land area of Earth), and an average temperature of -85F. That's cold, but better than any of our other options.
First, a self sustaining martian colony is a Plan B for Earth, should a catastrophe occur that wipes out humanity.
Second, rare and valuable metals are abundant on Mars, and Deuterium is 5x more abundant, the fuel of choice should we ever achieve nuclear fusion as a power source. There is commercial and economic motivations to mine and manufacture on Mars. Because gravity is 2.4x less than on Earth, escape velocity is thusly lower and exporting of world to Earth is cheaper than going from Earth to Mars.
Third, there is substantial opportunity for scientific research on Mars, looking for martian life and furthering our understanding of the creation of our solar system. There is also materials science and pharmaceutical chemistry that is achievable on Mars due to the lower gravity than here on Earth. For example, did you know you can make aluminum more transparent than your typical silicon glass? The problem is gravitational shear as the metal cools. There are methods to get around this but it's extremely expensive, reserved for high end optics and bulletproof US fighter jet cockpit domes because it's a government contract so fuck it. But in space or on Mars, if the gravity is low enough, they can mass produce aluminum glass; never again will you shatter your phone screen by dropping it. Or shooting it, apparently.
And one that ties economics and science together is the amount of innovation that has to go into successfully establishing such a colony. As Neal deGrasse Tyson said, for every dollar invested in NASA, there is a $14 economic return just from the innovation that comes out of solving problems. Pyrex bakeware came out of trying to develop rocket noses, WD-40 was the 40th attempt at making a compound that would Displace Water, that's Water Displacement attempt #40, the internet as a whole came out of a scientists who wanted a better way of linking scientific papers to the documents they cite in their bibliographies. Just attempting to get to Mars would be a huge economic boom, and we're seeing this already, with the birth of the commercial space flight industry, with Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, and Boeing - specifically Boeing working beyond NASA and military contracts.
Finally, there are political motivations. Just look how the US rallied behind the space race of the 50s. Imagine if you can motivate whole nations or an entire planet behind a similar cause.
Edit: To quote Tyson again, who wants to build a jet engine that is 20% more fuel efficient? No one that isn't an aviation executive. Who wants to go to Mars? He had more to say in this thread I'm paraphrasing, but basically he was saying frontier science and engineering inspires the next generation, and they get involved and end up solving other problems while trying to achieve the goal in front of them. | a90ce0d7-7a25-4a26-ba50-621cb63a95b0 |
1483aa | How does a computer processor "turbo-boost"? | A computer processor (CPU) has an internal clock. It "ticks" so many times per second. A CPU running at 3.2 Ghz ticks 3.2 billion times per second. This is **very** roughly how many calculations it can make per second. You can make the CPU run faster by turning up the clock so that it ticks more times per second. The downside to this is that it creates more heat.
Modern CPUs very carefully monitor how much heat is being put out. If the CPU is currently fairly cool and it has a lot of work to do, it can temporarily boost the clock speed. That's the turbo boost. If it gets too hot it will slow back down so as not to damage itself. | 22c2c18f-db2c-4fb3-92f2-574a35dfef6b |
363dij | Why is a college degree now required for many jobs when some of those same jobs used to be operated by people with only a high school education? | Because there are far too many interested. Diploma is a way to reduce the people applying for a job plus the degree is a way to understand that they know something. | a1423f9b-159c-4660-ad35-92aa3a9a59d5 |
2iqg6y | How and why do styluses work on touch screens? | There are two major types of touch screen, resistive and capacitive.
Resistive touch screens work basically by having two layers of flexible plastic over the screen. When something pushes down on the top layer, the layers touch, and this is detected. Resistive touch screens are responsive to basically anything: fingers, pencils, styli, etc. Typically you can tell something is a resistive touch screen since you will clearly feel the flexible plastic, and you can see the action of pushing down if you view the screen at an angle.
Capacitive touch screens work by detecting a property of the body called "body capacitance." Capacitance is a strange concept, but basically the body naturally carries a certain amount of electrical charge in the same way that rubbing a balloon against fabric causes it to have static electricity. These touch screens work by detecting this charge. They don't work with just anything (i.e. your finger or toe [try it] would work but a pencil wouldn't), so you need to get a special stylus (which is made of a material which produces a similar electrical signature to the body) to be registered. Phone touch screens are capacitive because you don't want random things jumbling around in your pockets to inadvertently call someone. | b12604f4-6979-401d-b346-b145826966c6 |
2bt3ff | Why is it so easy to notice bad acting? What are good actors doing that makes them seem more natural? Is there a scientific explanation for how we tell the difference? | Humans are social animals. If you want to have a cushy life in the group, you have to pick up on lots of little cues. Body language, tone of voice, facial expression, every little detail is important and we are trained to pick up on discrepencies. A good actor has to fool you on all of these fronts. A bad actor might only fuck up on one. His smile dloesnt reach his eyes. His voice doesnt sound as angry as his face looks. His face is scared but his body language says hes calm. He fucks a line or his voice cracks. Theres a million ways for his act to be off in just a tiny way, but you pick up on it because social cues are important.
Edit: to address ops additional clarification/questions.
training to be a good actor: method acting is the big one going around, but in truth a lot of great actors use it, and a lot of great ones dont. Everyones different, some things work better for some people than others, but essentially its a feedback system: an actor in training tries something, gets feedback and fixes it based on the feedback. Even the really good actors do this a lot. a movie isnt just a bunch of scenes stitched together, theres outtakes and bloopers and redos galore, though there are scenes done in one take. "Try it again with FEEELING!".
As for the brain section I imagine its a bit complicated there, primarily involved with language processing and emotional processing, but I dont know enough to pinpoint any particular areas beyond conjecture that it would be heavily biased towards the "limbic brain" which processes emotional decisions.
I dont have any idea about the director bit except to say that maybe with a bad director the actors care less about the acting, or are more stressed or riled up emotionally and it bleeds into the performance.
On detecting it with a computer, I can say pretty definitively that we cant currently detect any but the worst examples by voice. We cant even tell when people are lying definitively without reading scans directly from their brain. But we're getting there. as technology advances im sure we'll develop software that can analyse everything we as humans do, (body language, facial cues, etc.) Its just not there yet. | 1df460cd-2826-4528-a6b5-bf0c400b045b |
6slnym | How does laundering money through expenses work? | As a general rule, you can't. Laundering money requires that you inflate _revenues_ so that you can pretend your dirty money was earned through legitimate sources, thus "washing" it.
Now, that said, you can't just inflate revenues forever. If you run a business and suddenly double revenue without _any_ increase in expenses, it is going to look very suspect to the IRS. You need to also increase expenses to make it look like you are spending the cash required to generate the revenue you are claiming.
It is also possible that those fraudulent expenses are how they are getting the laundered money out of the business. If the cartel boss _owns_ the business that is getting payments for the fraudulent expenses, you are able to send him the laundered profits from the business and have it look like a legitimate business transaction. | aec31fbc-f42e-4f29-ab58-1f73a1fb1e81 |
2dp5kp | Why do we often get so entertained just by sitting looking at a bonfire? | Fire is a powerful tool, and is/was one of mans most prized inventions. The dancing of the flames on the wood can be quite serene. The crackling creates a background filter to help you focus. (username kind of relevant) | 9b8625d6-178a-4c67-b85b-263675a77467 |
218lgt | The difference between cisgender, transgender, and intersex | Cisgender is what most people are. Their physical sex, and gender identity are mostly in sync, so they feel 'normal' with themselves for the most part.
Transgender -as can be assumed by the prefix 'trans' being the opposite of the prefix 'cis', is the exact opposite. Their physical sex does not match how their gender identity, so they feel like they're in the wrong body. This is a depressing, often dysphoric situation for most transgender folks, and modern society's view on transgenderism as a mental illness comes with a lot of stigma.
Then, there are things like genderfluidity, being genderqueer, and being agendered. Things things, as their names suggest; someone whose mental gender identity has a tendency to shift between one and the other; someone whose gender identity does not conform with either male or female, and don't really have a specific category; and someone who don't identify with any gender whatsoever.
Being intersex is a completely different issue to being transgender... sort of.
A person is intersex when their visible, physical sex is not one of the two 'typical' sexes. This is the case in individuals born with atypical genitalia, hermaphroditic(both sexes) genital expression, or in some human chimeras (individuals who are the result of a merging of twin embryos very early on in development).
All of these things are separate from sexual orientation, and should not be treated as one and the same. | 8c8f1d69-e0d0-4d40-afe5-29af57b623b3 |
6b0dq8 | What causes the body to get addicted to a certain drug, and why does it form a reliance off of it? | Drugs affect many parts / processes of your body, but the addiction part is largely neurological.
**Addiction Process:**
User takes drug - > Brain gives big reward and starts positive association with the drug - > User takes drug - > Association increases - > Repeat
After the user goes clean, this association remains. Of course addiction involves a lot of things like psychology, past issues, etc. But since you asked specifically about the "body", the addiction part of it is largely neurological.
**Basic overview of addiction process:** The drug floods your brain with endorphins / opiates. This results in a positive association with the drug and your brain, that increases the way you use it. The worst part about it is it never goes away, once that neurological connection is made it never breaks down and can only grow stronger. This is why it's so hard for addicts to quit. As the association with the drug increases it becomes increases the desire to use it and there's no way to naturally reverse that association. An addict will always have that neurological association with the drug for the rest of their life. The only thing an addict can do is try to resist the neurologically enhanced desire to use and prevent it from getting worse.
It's basically like [Pavlov's Experiment](_URL_0_), where addiction is a neurologically learned behavior. In this experiment, a bell was rang, and dogs were fed at the same time. After a while, dogs would salivate at the sound of the bell even without the food. This was because they associated the bell with the food. In the case of the addiction, the bell is the drug and the food is the endorphin reward.
Hope that helps! | 13963517-ddc1-4c45-9c6b-c37302d3e674 |
34tbgw | when you exhale, why is your breath warm with your mouth open & cool when your mouth is almost closed? | When your mouth is open wide you feel the air that has been warmed in your lungs. When it is barely open like blowing out a candle the air from your mouth is moving faster and pulls more of the cool surrounding air into the air stream, this combined with increased air speed makes it feel cooler. | 21683a0a-5de1-415f-bf3d-7472a069c184 |
5ztjiu | Why do our feet have arches? Wouldn't it be more advantageous to have your weight distributed over the entire surface of the foot? | The entire purpose of the arch is to act as a spring to help absorb the impact from walking. Walking puts a ton of stress on your bones and if you run, it's worse. Imagine driving a car without it's springs. Every bump would be slamming into the frame basically. Eventually, you'll wear things out much faster.
Also, it may help store up a little energy in your step and 'spring' you forward. | b252eadc-0930-4803-b28a-0800528b27dd |
4ntjh6 | How did different languages develop? | Think of it like a giant game of telephone, but instead of a message passing from person to person, it's a language passing from village to village, region to region.
One group branches off from the main group, and finds a new place to hang out. They take the language with them. But their knowledge of the main language is limited to the group members; that is, if they encounter a new concept, idea, trend, animal, whatever, and they don't know what the group they left called it, they'll find *something* to call it, which will be particular to that region.
The local accent will also be limited to the people that are in the group - and important people who speak in public, teach, write, etc. will contribute to that group's concept of what *good* speech/writing is. Children growing up won't mimic their parents, unless they have no communication with anyone else. The result is a sort of "averaging" of the accents they encounter on a daily basis.
Over time, people get lazy with their speech. They might run syllables together, drop consonants, gradually morph vowel sounds into something else. And they teach these mannerisms to their children, who make their own "mistakes" which deviate from the original group's norms, and then that generation passes it on to the next, and so on and so forth.
Maybe they'll have contact with other groups who speak different languages, and they'll pick up words and pronunciations from them, which aren't present in the original group's dialect
Repeat over dozens of generations.
Take a smaller group from this new village, and send them out into the world to create their own new homestead. Now they take this sub-language (I don't mean that in any inferior way, just that it branched off from the original language), and start making it their own.
It's really easy to see a progression like this with the romance languages. Castillian Spanish, for instance, streamlines Latin grammar, and differs in consistent ways from, say, Mexican Spanish, where the accent has changed, new words have been adopted, existing words are used in different ways and with different frequencies, and loanwords have come from local languages. But if you sit down and comb through it, it's easy to trace many vocabulary words and grammatical constructions all the way back to Rome. | 99c14217-fcb7-46d2-887c-5d911b90d986 |
4sawod | Infrared remote controllers | The different buttons prompt the remote to emit a different sequence of 'flashes,' which are interpreted by the receiver to the corresponding action. Think how you can communicate between two ships at sea with a single lantern and a shutter. | 1712b583-2b3b-44c0-8bb7-382e4063df2b |
2v6jvg | Why do pigs go through a big transformation if they're introduced into the wild? | A creatures phenotype (physical manifestation) is dictated by its genetic code. There are actually different ways in which genetic code will be expressed depending on the environment that the creature finds itself; this phenomenon is called epigenetics. There is another phenomenon called neoteny in which creatures retain juvenile characteristics depending on their environment, and will quickly mature given certain conditions.
So just as an example to illustrate the point, say that a pig is in a farm and is fed and shielded from predators. The chemical profile of this pig might show low levels of testosterone because there had not been any circumstances that would have precipitated the production of excess testosterone. When the pig is let out into the wild, it is suddenly in danger of predators and starved of nutrients, so the relevant chemical cascades kick in which will be conducive to its survival, and these may actually change the way it physically appears (testosterone -- > greater hair production, etc). | 7926bc3e-bc21-466e-9630-12de94646ad4 |
228xy2 | Why does my nose run when I eat food with cayenne or similar pepper spices? | Chili peppers, used in spicy foods, contain capsaicin. Other spicy foods, such as horseradish and wasabi, contain allyl isothiocyanate. Both capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate stimulate a reaction in your nervous system, causing your nose to run.
Your nose runs when eating spicy foods because both capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate irritate the mucous membranes in your nose, thus producing mucus in your nasal passages. This is a defense mechanism your body has to keep out unwanted particles, such as dust. Thus, the more irritated your mucous membranes become, the more your nose will continue to run. | 35cf977e-f1ec-453c-ad51-d222788a53f4 |
70e5ta | Why don't bugs adapt to not hit my windshield? | By percentage, so few bugs are killed in this way that it doesn't create much evolutionary pressure. | acd44584-f903-43d7-bfef-ae673d4ce137 |
8oie8s | Why are the planets named after Roman Pagan gods? | The planets out as far as Saturn can be seen without a telescope. The Romans had names for them, and our civilization kept using those names even after the Romans were gone. Uranus and Neptune got their names to continue the pattern.
Oh, and the moons of the planets are named for minor gods and heroes associated with Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc. Jupiter's biggest moons are named for women he slept with. | d1dc1091-a4f8-4ec3-ba20-7b112b240fc8 |
19jacy | Why does my stomach growl when I am hungry? What is going in inside and why does it make a sound? | They are called borborygmi - such a wonderful word.... | 04fe5888-3a14-4374-9c0b-3ee5e75d6f31 |
7rvp5w | Why does your nose run when you east spicy things? | Nasal irrigation is a way for the body to protect sensitive and vulnerable tissues in the sinuses. Spicy foods trigger a feeling of actual heat (like real fire), even though it's not actually hot. The best way to cool spicy foods (at least from chili peppers) is with milk or some other dairy product. Fats in milk bind to the oily spice and carry it away, and sugars bind too. | f839190c-f2fb-4f64-9505-83df2cc14df7 |
20v761 | What is happening under the hood my car that makes it "go" when I press the gas pedal? | Basically controlled explosions. Each car had a certain amount of cylinders ( v6 v8 4 banger etc) that's what people mean when they say that. In each cylinder their is a piston connected to a shaft (crank shaft). Fuel and air are mixed into the cylinder and ignited by a spark plug. The explosion forces the piston downwards and turns the shaft. The shaft is connected to the Transmission which is connect to the wheels. Now this happens thousands of times in a few seconds. There is more too it but that is the basics... | af6d7c43-f96a-44e7-bd28-64f237a43179 |
35mvq2 | Why does ice stick to your fingers when you're holding it? | Basically, the ice is so cold that it can freeze the thin layer of moisture on your hands. As the ice warms up, then it doesn't happen anymore.
Your skin has a small bit of moisture on it. Fresh ice is usually below the freezing point meaning it has some "room" to absorb more energy before it becomes water. So, the ice is freezing that thin layer of moisture on your skin causing it to stick.
This is also why the ice sticks worse if you have just recently washed your hands as there is more moisture available. How much it sticks also depends on the temperature of the freezer that the ice is in. | fda2ffe5-9a0e-486c-af63-4faaf432c914 |
2t1ag8 | How are Criminal Disenfranchisement Laws constitutionally legal?? | SCOTUS has decided that disenfranchisement laws are constitutional based on Section 2 of the 14th amendment. | 720f44d7-2293-4e4a-a2f4-d8fb4a3e774f |
2q0vqz | How come if there is an advertisement on TV, it's called a commercial, but anywhere else, they're just called ads/advertisements? | Commercials are ads too, they're just a specific type of ad that happens to have a specific name. Calling them advertisements wouldn't be incorrect. | 8a444527-d352-451e-b286-c836097b338a |
1oruf5 | Why is it that battery powered wall clocks leave a stain after a period of time? | That's where the battery case was. When batteries are in use they generate a slight amount of heat. That mark is just a very very slight 'burn' of the paint where it was pressed against the wall. It's not dangerous, because it's a very low-grade burn. | b5d639ab-ce16-42e2-91dd-1743b1d1c366 |
5wsu17 | In the cave paintings in France and Spain from 20,000 years ago, there are rinos, lions, gazelles, etc. Why did these animals go extinct in Europe but not in Africa? | Climate change dealt Europe an ice age -- it just became too cold for some of these animals.
Human population density limited the amount of space for these animals to live, eat, and not be hunted by humans. | 719696f7-b6b6-4da3-8df1-557fbb459339 |
6v40a5 | What's the difference between college, community college and university in the US in terms of the credibility of one's degree? Do all of these even end with one getting a degree? | Community Colleges are 2 year colleges that offer trade certificates and Associates degrees. Sometimes, they'll cooperate with a state college or university in order to offer higher degrees in specific programs. These are run by the county (usually) or city (sometimes) and designed to offer a wide variety of education.
Colleges are 4 year institutions that offer up to Bachelor's degrees, as well as trade certificates and Associates degrees. They're typically state funded or private institutions. These are smaller institutions which offer a smaller number of degrees, and are generally specialized. An art college, or a STEM college, for example.
Universities are 8 year institutions that offer all the way up to Doctorate degrees. These are either funded by the state or privately. Universities have many colleges within them, and can offer a wide variety of degrees. Think about places like Harvard, that have a Law college, a Medical college, a Business college, a Divinity college, etc, etc. | db15c434-56d5-4fc4-b150-5f2a0dd8e592 |
6tptuh | Hot air rises on earth but what happens to hot air on the space station? | There might be some movement due to the different densities of air creating different pressures, but it wouldn't move much compared to hot air on Earth.
An interesting side effect of this is lighting a candle in zero-g. The flame itself doesn't rise into the shape we're accustomed to seeing. Instead it ends up making a dull, spherical glow. And then it extinguishes itself as the oxygen is consumed and not replaced by cool, fresh air as a flame in gravity would do. | bfc8a8a8-4c56-4854-a7bd-90f278707021 |
52vol2 | If we were to make a armor out of modern day materials what it would be made of and how much protection it could provide agaisnt medival weapons such as swords and early gunpowdered weapons? | If? We already do. Boron carbide. Ultra-hard, light weight ceramic. | 9d90bc12-a4aa-4e23-8b51-66091c634a8b |
7i9btb | Why are state boundaries on the western side of the USA much cleaner/straighter than those on the east? | There was a lot of land to divide up, and very few people to worry about keeping communities together for.
Thus, in the Eastern US you tend to get more natural boundaries such as ridges and rivers, things that might have naturally divided a territory into separate areas that people would spend most of their time on one side of, use for personal property boundaries, etc.
And in the Western US you get more boundaries based on latitude and longitude, which were more faster to assign and didn't need to be surveyed to the same degree of detail. | f85eb96d-5bab-4c6a-86b1-160aa5e2b782 |
3awg8q | How do the major mail deliver services (FedEx, UPS) handle people who don't pay for the faster shipping? do they literally sit on the packages? | They ship it by truck, instead of by air. Much cheaper for them. If the truck's not full for a particular regional destination, then it doesn't go. So your package will sit in one hub until the truck is full enough to send to the hub near you. | 9a13625a-790b-4d05-a348-8011ce4941d1 |
3dwaqx | Why can't we just have synthetic teeth? | We do, but they have to be screwed in to your jawbone with titanium screws.
Natural teeth are glued in place by a layer around the base of the tooth called the periodontal ligament. It acts as a cushion and can heal itself so it doesn't wear out. Tooth implants have no shock absorber or have shock absorbers which eventually wear out. The screws can also work loose...
People get implants anyway but it's a last-ditch thing and expensive. You're arguably better off living with dentures. Back when I wanted to do something with my life I was going to invent a bioengineered lab-grown periodontal ligament to solve this exact problem so people could have tooth implants with cushioning but then I went crazy and wound up working menial jobs and commenting on Reddit for the rest of my life. | e839efb9-3d49-428f-b061-b4fec106a37b |
4oscib | How do cuts work? | Your skin is made out of a bunch of molecules that are linked together. When something pushes hard enough the pushing force is greater than the strength of the links and it breaks.
Now a blunt object spreads out the force on a bunch of different places, so all these places share the strength of their links, so it doesn't break.
But a sharp object concentrates the force on very few places, so there is enough force for the links to break and you get cut. | b34cf7c2-c25d-47f7-ba2c-617b82e03718 |
1rxzew | Why do senators and representatives rarely represent the state that they are born in? | Americans tend to move quite a bit. This puts us in the position of being able to choose where we want to run for office from. A politician may not have views that align exactly with their "home" state, and make a strategic determination to move to a location where they have better odds of winning. | 4b814d6f-6e95-4626-941b-19e8ca203bd5 |
3d9qtw | Why do balloons stop floating after a while, even though they still have helium? | Yes, the remaining helium still provides buoyancy, but there comes a tipping point where that buoyancy isn't enough any more to carry the weight of the balloon's casing. | 2952edf0-561f-4e8a-859b-b6aa29f9d94f |
1tlqwb | How was it possible for us to view the moon landing when the astronauts hadn't returned to Earth yet? (those were the days of "film at 11") | For Apollo 11 it was sent by radio signal back to Earth which was picked up by receivers in Australia and then broadcast worldwide. A camera was attached to the lander to film it. | 2e2d44fb-2dee-4dcb-bae1-1fcfaf1c4bb8 |
235x04 | Why does it seem as though as I grow older, time and life speeds up? | Dude I am 30 and still raving like mad!
Bring your self together! | fad435c3-bd60-40e3-baeb-7ef621cf2def |
34at7g | Why are PC digital downloads cheaper than console digital downloads? | Console downloads are a closed market. You have exactly one source for your downloads.
PC digital downloads have competition, so there are more market forces at play. | 2d4bda4a-3133-4377-bbf3-c3120623e448 |
3sty3o | Why can you stream from Netflix/Hulu/HBOGo with no problem, but your laptop heats up and the video lags if you try to watch from the AMC/CBS/NBC website? | Netflix' player is based on HTML5, I can't say anything about the others. But I'm assuming that AMC, etc. have Flash-based players... and Flash has terrible performance when it comes to video decoding. | 556ee1fb-6867-4bc1-953a-b4e1ee529d6a |
2a2qnf | How are street numbers assigned? | Its based on a grid. If you ever look along the top and sides of a map there will be number indicating that certain areas go along with certain addresses. So when you look up a street you find roughly where the address is. Usually each city/county/township has their own way of deciding which addresses get assigned and where. I know for where I live in Columbus, Ohio it goes off of High St and Broad St, which intersect. So the further you go away from High St heading east or west the numbers will in turn get larger, and the same for Broad St for north and south. | f001299c-456e-4fa1-9ccd-6ab84c62d99d |
27wrzn | Why do big game developers and publishers not listen to their community and continue making mistakes? | Because they still make money regardless of how many mistakes they make. Despite all the disappointment with those games, they still sold millions of copies. | bb23adf4-aabe-4972-be5e-35ae92437365 |
1z66ja | Why is cyber-bullying such a problem? Can't people just step away from their computers? | I imagine that for lots of people, social networking has become an integral part of their life. In fact, it is part of their social circle. I hang out with dudes over Teamspeak that I play games with. Sometimes we meet IRL and hang out, it is also great when you can drive to another country and have a place to sleep etc.
So basically, someone is bullying you in your social circle, and it is not easy to step away from all that and the connections you have through it. | 47daf72e-5e90-45df-8ae2-42caa5c1b945 |
162qsd | Where do cranes come from? | [A big crane is assembled using ground level, flexible length cranes that are mobile but can't carry as big a load as the main crane](_URL_0_) | ddbd9c61-5a27-4b9a-a81b-986fa3b1a9d1 |
39le7k | Pornography censorship in Japan. | It comes from an old Japanese law that came from the Meiji Era (1868-1912) where content "injurious to public morals" was forbidden. This law was influenced by Western Victorian morals. Over time the law was relaxed in other cultures but Japan was more conservative and kept the law around.
The law was eventually reinterpreted to allow you to show breasts and pixelated genitals, but fully uncensored genitals is still illegal under the old law. | 943bdf3f-986d-4fd9-a182-eabf28303dc3 |
3zghr5 | How are the costs of reality makeover tv shows like Home Improvement and Hoarders paid for and why? | Same way all TV shows work. People watch show because they enjoy the content. Then TV network shows adverts to those people. The advertisers pay the TV network who in turn pay the show creators who then have some more money so they can make more shows.
There isn't a TV around that doesn't have costs and a budget. Whether or not your budget includes "building some asshat a new house" isn't really relevant. | e64f758d-d361-4c49-ac45-4935a99fbfc2 |
2b8iid | How does a computer keep track of the date/time while unplugged from power and the internet? | Theres a flat battery on motherboards. You gotta change em like every 6 or 7 years. | d0eedf80-d04e-4bff-ab4f-8e3ce8394615 |
2r4mqu | How does a Government body censor the internet of its people? | There are various ways. The most basic of which is simply manually removing the server from the internet (i.e. trace the location of the server hosting the webpage via its IP address and then simply seize it). | ad3550ef-5791-4d83-be93-625fc8387f3c |
5cdicq | Why do neon signs have a buzzing noise to them? | I think the most likely culprit is the transformer for the neon sign. The transformer takes the 120V or 240V 60Hz from the outlet and steps it up to several kV. The way it works is by running current through a coil of wire to create a magnetic field, and then converting that field back to a current in a secondary coil of wire with a different number of turns. The oscillating magnetic field can cause vibrations of any magnetic material in the vicinity (casing, core, etc). | 4df83f53-530d-4783-9c29-a73ef73924be |
2ssho0 | How come movie companies do not do much about pirated movies on the internet? | Because you can never remove something from the internet.
You can only restrict access to it. | e666dafa-83a1-4662-82d4-7b29a8cdd02e |
36ay7t | Why does coiled wire serve as a good inductor? | When you have current running through a wire it induces a magnetic field. This magnetic field is circular and encircles the wire. If you point your right thumb in the direction of the current then your fingers are curled in the direction of the magnetic field.
If you take a wire and coil it up then the magnetic field of the wire gets superimposed with the magnetic field of the next wrap of wire, and the next, and the next, and so on. This means you get a much higher magnetic field in the center of the coil.
If you have a loop of wire and change the magnetic field passing through that loop then you get a current induced in the wire (with a direction that would generate an opposing magnetic field). With a coil you are able to have the same magnetic field passing through a bunch of loops at once.
A straight wire doesn't get any inductance (at least in theory). It generates a magnetic field which doesn't interact with the wire in any substantial way. A single loop of wire gets a weak magnetic field which interacts with that one loop. A bunch of loops of wire produces a stronger magnetic field which interacts with many loops. | 30f04d94-b48b-43f5-9625-46f45bf1bbbc |
3e00lb | What is a "trigger" on Reddit, and is it a term used outside of Reddit? | When some people undergo severe psychological trauma, like rape victims or soldiers, they're left with something called PTSD. Sometimes, things that remind them of the traumatic event can give them a panic attack or other unpleasant things.
In some online communities, it's considered polite to warn people if you might be talking about sexual abuse/violence.
On Reddit, it's almost always used in a way that's meant to be condescending or insulting to those communities. The implication is that the communities are too sensitive to offending people and label everything as a "trigger".
They say it's a "joke". It really falls flat on that point - it's a no effort, content free bit of circlejerkery. | cff9c6b9-ccb6-4baf-8c12-22eb0e2147ff |
1la0de | How do non profit companies make money? | This was explained a few days ago on reddit, so let me see if i can reguritate it.
Non profit means the company isn't making profit. That still means they need qualified persons to fill their jobs. These people are paid, sometimes very competitively, to keep this organization afloat.
What Non-Profit means is that the extra money that's not spent at the end of the fiscal year is invested into their cause, and not divided among the shareholders. So a profit organization would give dividends, but a non-profit would, for example, use the money to build another theatre/stage if the organization was helping the mute and deaf perform on stage.
Just because they're non-profit doesn't mean they're a charity. | 7f5358b4-479c-44e4-8f31-0bc74476067b |
32thri | How does gut flora work and how can probiotics help? | Gut flora refer to the billions of bacteria that live in your intestines. They serve multiple purposes.
1. They help with digestion. E. Coli, for example, helps you by producing Vitamin K, which you cannot produce yourself.
2. They compete for space with bad, pathogenic bacteria. If bad bacteria can't find a space to colonize, they won't be able to infect you and make you sick. A common secondary infection of antibiotics is infection with a bacteria called Clostridium Difficile, more commonly called C. Diff. This bacteria is normally kept in check by your gut microflora, but when you wipe out a bunch of your microflora with antibiotics, C. Diff is able to colonize and give you some horrific diarrhea.
Probiotics work by helping your body to regenerate the beneficial bacteria. Probiotics are especially important after taking a course of antibiotics because antibiotics, as I said earlier, will wipe out some of your gut flora. Probiotics will help you avoid things like C. Diff. | d21426a8-6b36-4c02-971c-b6d40848dfc0 |
1cnp0n | What happens when you call into a talk radio station? | You call the station and someone answers, they ask you what you're planning to say. If they decide your story is acceptable they will usually put you through to a point where you say your thing and it's recorded. The recording will then be played on-air and the hosts will talk about it. If it's a conversation type show you'll instead talk to the hosts and then the recording of that conversation will be played.
I've only ever had a 'live' conversation happen once, and I was asked to turn my radio off because the slight delay between speaking and the broadcast would have made an echo. I assume they delay it a bit so they can bleep you if you swear.
Either way it's not that bad. Go for it next time. | 79325a7f-6b7f-485b-ac35-68cb5d31fa9b |
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