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c1zi9k | Why does printer ink use magenta and cyan instead of red and blue? | Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are the negative colour bases. When you mix ink, you will get the negative sum of both colours (mixing all colours perfectly will result in black) because more light colours are absorbed.
Red, Green and Blue are the positive colour bases and need to be used when the positive sum is needed, like when mixing light (mixing all will result in white)
These are anticolour pairs. When you invert colours Red will turn Cyan, Green will turn Magenta (you have propably seen an inverted colour picture) | caa95472-d2ef-436b-a354-f4a0c5abb7f0 |
c20ahk | why does your body get itchy when you're over tired? | Actually, it is.probably a sign of tension. When you are tense, capillaries near your skin surface can contract and that can lead to itching. Some.people are more sensitive to that than others. The tension doesn't have to be psychological, it could be due to heat or cold, recent exercise or anything that would create physical tension. The only solution I can think is to practice some meditation or relaxation techniques and see if you can cause your body to relax (probably good before.sleeping anyhow). | 3e631ee1-b15d-4c6f-b333-a26367e61eaf |
c20du1 | How do they measure the age of a very old shark for example? | I believe that, specifically for sharks, there are indications of age in their teeth. They shed and grow teeth constantly. They grow a new row of teeth so often, and that new growth leaves some sort of tell in their mouth.
I could also be dead wrong. | a45d5d66-7cc3-41d0-b7a3-f09ad0491bcb |
c20gil | - why do people post pictures of themselves to be roasted? What are they getting out of that-besides some humiliating comments about themselves? | Some people have a high enough level of self confidence that it's just amusing to them seeing how people try to insult them based off one photo. It's just for entertainment really.
At least that's how I see it. | 27f32890-c6f5-44bb-95f4-1219044b71c6 |
c20her | Where do ruminants (cows, sheep, etc) get their protein? | Grass or microbes. Plants have proteins too, and usually have all the amino acids but in varying amounts.
Some plants might have very Low amounts of lysine, but if you eat large amounts of grass you will still meet the requirements
Also, microbes can synthesize amino acids from the raw feedstock (grass). If the right mix of microbes are available there should be sufficient essential amino acids. | c05f01c1-c0fb-44ed-9aa0-5015790f2a9b |
c20pkp | how does washing detergent work? | All soaps are surfactants. A surfactant is a molecule of which one end is attract to water (hydrophilic) and the other end doesn't like water (hydrophobic) but likes oils and dirt. Oils and dirt stick to the hydrophobic end and are washed away by water which attached to the hydrophobic end. | 15a80b14-cb27-47ad-b3bf-e64957eb1c4a |
c20xh9 | Differences between putting some 87, 89 or 91 octane gas in a car | Gasoline is not a single chemical; it’s a mix of lots of different components. There is no universal recipe for the ideal blend of components for all engines. Different blends or recipes for gasoline might all work OK across a range of engines, but each engine is designed for a blend with specific properties. All engines are designed to squeeze or compress gasoline with air in the cylinder, then ignite the compressed mix at just the right time with a spark. The octane number of a gasoline blend describes how much compression the gasoline can take before it detonates (ignites) on its own without needing a spark. Some engines, usually high performance ones, are designed to compress the fuel/air mix extra hard; these engines need gasoline with a higher octane number, or else the fuel will detonate early and not produce power smoothly for the car. You can use gasoline with a higher octane number than it was designed for, but people seldom do that because in engines designed for “regular” gas, high-octane fuel doesn’t provide significant benefits but costs more than lower-octane gas. | 7ee99f5d-14e5-4f1c-aa45-67edcb2e9a13 |
c214x1 | Does restarting a computer actually do anything or is it just a placebo? | Just a related note,unplugging and plugging something back in again is an actual repair step as well.
Besides pulling all power from a device it corrects a condition known as terminal fretting common to connectors and plugs.
Unplugging and plugging back in creates new contact points between the terminals or pins in a connector.
Actually a really common issue in vehicles and basic electrical classes teach you to always use dielectric grease in every connector which helps combat the condition. | f4f6c456-6a9c-4d8c-8ade-0c812698acb8 |
c21wzb | Why haven’t nuclear weapons been used in war since WW2? | The doctrine of mutually assured destruction. In WWII, only one side had nukes. Nowdays, everyone's got them, so using a nuke is asking to get nuked yourself. | 618b119f-c3e6-4a4f-bec7-0720e79ccf9e |
c21y4n | In those tourist bazaars where every stall is selling the same souvenirs, how do they all make money? | Some of them are owned by the same people, some are not. It depends.
& #x200B;
However, the thing you're missing is that you're paying tourist prices. There is huge mark up on these items and they multiply the price by two or three hundred if you're even slightly foreign looking. | 88885657-9453-4bf0-9b28-48270d1a9f67 |
c220el | what's the big deal with people being against genetically modified porn / soy beans ? | Genetically modified porn? You’re going to have to explain to me about that. | bc7db0a5-8f09-4d09-9e8a-391c7a97c023 |
c220f7 | "the medium is the message" | It‘s a phrase made famous by a book called “Understanding Media“ by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. He was writing about modern ways of communication and how they influence people, their behavior, their opinions of themselves and others, not because of what is being said/communicated but how it is being said/communicated. He wrote in the 1960s but you can easily apply this to eg social media: the fact that Twitter or Facebook exist as media of communication is arguably more revolutionary to society than what is being communicated through them. Their very way of existing as media is changing us - so, to put it in a provocative phrase, “the medium is the message.” | 2a1ab89a-2efd-4915-85b2-32e3e64e3f83 |
c221ei | Why European restaurants run your credit card at the table and American restaurants run your credit card at a terminal in the back? | It is far easier to have your card skimmed if your card leaves the table so customers generally prefer it is done in their sight with a handheld terminal where they pay by PIN. | 96bee803-8f42-4422-affb-558297d9f922 |
c223vo | How did old settlements get physically buried underground | Many possible causes. A few examples:
- Volcanic eruption, with lava flows
- Volcanic eruption, creating massive ash deposits (Pompeii)
- Flooding, causing buildup of silt and debris
- Subsidence into a body of water
- "Man made" burial, in which a new settlement is built over the top of another one
- Landslides | 6ad033fd-54e2-4c30-8f7f-ac191d7a67d1 |
c227m3 | Why do people faint and What happens in thier body, just before fainting? | It can be for a number of reasons however all causes share the same root which is the ability of the brain to send signals between neurons. In cases of low blood sugar for instance, not enough sugar is being turned into energy via respiration within brain cells. Therefore, you faint to increase blood flow (oxygen) to the brain so that cellular respiration (turning food into energy with the help of oxygen) can occur at a higher rate. | b08e8de0-bcb5-43ef-9ac2-30ed30d2ee77 |
c22bkx | How does the limited presence and production of petroleum keeps up with its enormous consumption? | Well it's limited but the limit is really enormously high. There is no conflict in your statement/question only a misconception of scale.
Edit: Quick google search tells me there are around 1.5 trillion barrels of oil reserves left and around 93 million barrels are extracted per day, so at current rates enough for roughly 44 years. Could be more with oil sands, fracking and arctic extraction possibly. | f4dfecd0-c767-409c-8969-65da139acb24 |
c22h88 | Why is insider trading so bad? | Some people think it's bad. Other people think it's good. They argue a lot.
Bad:
* People wouldn't invest in the stock market as much. It's like gambling on a taped football game. Other people already know the outcome. You never know if the person you are trading with knows something you don't know.
* Say I own $100 of Coca-Cola. The Coke employee knows that the stock is going up to $150 next week so they buy it from me for $100. They got $50 that otherwise would have gone to me. So they robbed me of that money, in a sense.
Good:
* The stock market is valuable for society because it gives money to good companies and takes it away from bad companies. The sooner the stock price reflects the value of the company, the better. Right now bad companies whose stock price should be lower are protected because they haven't made that information public yet. But insider traders would be able to more quickly sell stock, drop the value of the company, and invest in a company that needs more money.
* If there is good news about a company that is still private, the stock value will increase when it becomes public. But people might sell stock before the information becomes public and miss out on the increased in value. It's not because they got unlucky, it's because information was purposefully withheld from them.
* The cost of enforcing insider trading laws is arguably not worth the benefit. There are murderers walking free because a ton of resources are devoted to insider trading.
* There is no victim in the traditional sense. All losses are based on opportunity cost. Say I have a garage sale. Someone shows up and steals a painting. I'm the victim. But say they recognize the painting is by Picasso and buy the painting from me for $100. Then they turn around and sell the painting for millions of dollars. I'm not the victim here, even though I lost out on millions of dollars in value because they had information that I didn't.
Personally, I think insider trading is bad. | fda61074-a567-40b0-8445-4b47deb7e1d3 |
c22hqi | How come you can always travel east or west, but north will eventually become south and vice versa? | Moving "north/south" means "moving towards the North/South pole". You're traveling towards a specific point.
Moving "east/west" means "moving in the direction of/in the opposite direction of the Earth's rotation". Or "moving with North directly to your left/right".
East and west are not defined as leading to a specific point, therefore they're "never-ending" | 8629760d-cbb3-4d01-896e-5e42b64e4545 |
c22p97 | Why can’t we remember the moment we fall asleep? | Going to sleep occurs in stages, as your brain parts and body step-by-step slow down and rest. The part of our brain that would record these memories 'goes to sleep' before the part of our brain that records consciousness does. You know you're awake, but you wont remember it. Its called being Hypnogogic, being in the state just before sleep. | 3d291da6-e1f6-472e-855e-683d90935490 |
c22rk0 | How come acid containers does not disintegrate when in contact with its super acidic contents? | Acids can't dissolve everything, they can only react with chemicals susceptible to chemical attack by that acid.
So while they'd have no trouble disintegrating a container made of steel or cheap polyethylene, highly chemically resistant materials like glass or polytetrafluoroethylene (teflon) can shrug off most acids. | 56b128f8-45b0-4072-b18c-ef542fda5ea0 |
c22se8 | Why are women more likely to be obese than men (WHO statistics says so but doesn't explain why) | Women put on fat easier than men as a mechanism to make them better able to carry a baby. In an environment with surplus food that means they are more likely to become obese. | 58cb4d59-3e72-4c38-a5e7-c8cc7b1937cf |
c22w0w | Why does squinting make you see better? | Squinting reduces the aperture of the eye. Smaller apertures have larger depth-of-field. This increases the region in focus for a given curvature of the eye lens. Your perception of "better" comes from additional elements in the scene being properly focused. It also reduces light, so it works best in bright daylight. | 75683e96-f637-4639-845c-bdc8bfdd5b2e |
c22zq8 | How do gas stations make money, or account for the volatility when oil prices are falling? Do they "buy" the gas when the fuel trucks refill the station or are their profits calculated at a spot price each day based on how much gas they sell? | Just for clarity—gas stations make minimal profits of actually selling gas. That’s not the business they are in. Yup, sounds odd, but gas stations aren’t really in the gas business
Gas stations make almost all of their profit in their convenience store—not gas! Cigarettes are particularly major for their profits.
The gas just gets customers to go into their convenience store is all. They make their money because their margins in the store are big and they sell lots of cigarettes and alcohol. | beb43d90-c96b-476e-95f3-066506207475 |
c2321j | How does compressing and decompressing a file with GBs of space work. | File compression works by representing big repeating patterns with little ones. The classic example would be "aaaaabb", which you could condense down to "5a2b" or "5abb" since changing the b's doesn't save size, so why bother? Streaming compression algorithms work this way. This is in contrast to block compression, where we would make a table, "1 = aaaaa, 2 = bb", and then our data would be "12". You need the table and the data to decompress.
& #x200B;
Then we get real clever. What if you arranged your data in a 2D grid, rows and columns, and then you rotated the rows and columns like a Rubix cube? You could arrange your data to make bigger patterns - if you had a bunch of a' all over your data, you could line them all up, and that would be one entry in your table. You could compress the table, too, so instead it would look like, "1 = 5a, 2 = bb". So if you had GB worth of just a's, you could reduce it to a count, a symbol, an entry into a table, and then a list of steps you used to reorganize the original content, so you could play it in reverse and get it back.
& #x200B;
That's lossless compression. Lossy compression intentionally throws away information. Less information, less to compress. What was lost can be deduced and reconstituted from the remaining information, though it's an approximation. This compression is best suited to audio and video, because the approximation is indistinguishable from the original by any way you measure it with your eyes, ears, or through computation. | 717c8c5b-a474-402f-827a-ac147473f94d |
c23743 | Why are some electrical sparks blue while some are yellow? | Same reason a hot object glows red, but an even hotter object glows orange.
The shorter the wave is, the higher the energy is. If the spark transfers more energy, it will be blue, if it transfers less it will be yellow. | cde137ad-5cdb-44a6-afe5-ea677f821808 |
c23e68 | why is glass uneffected by hard core acids. | Because no chemical reaction is taking place. It all depends on the acid. If the material in question can react with a certain acid, it will. It’s like asking why sugar and salt don’t react if you put them together on a dry surface, they simply don’t chemically react with each other.
Metals and organic material are pretty reactive, so they are affected by acid. While glass is a fairly unreactive material.
Also, some acids do effect glass. Hydrofluoric acid, for example, does react with glass, so it is kept in plastic containers.
Edit: If you’d like a more scientific answer:
Acids dissolve things by moving electrons and breaking bonds. The bonds in metals are chemically weak (even though the physical material is strong). Glass on the other hand has very strong Si-O2 (silicon-oxygen) bonds. | e5e07545-449b-42e7-8e5c-5224182c0cdc |
c23mol | Why in the world of mobile payments is Visa/MC/Amex still popular when other low fee systems like Venmo/PayPal exist and would save merchants and users more money? | 1) Network effects. If you're only going to have one thing in your wallet, you should have a credit card, because that's what most merchants accept, especially offline merchants. Venmo and Paypal are trending towards having this much coverage, but they still don't have enough that people are going to be abandoning their credit cards, and until they do, online merchants still have an incentive to accept credit cards as a default.
2) Many consumers don't "pay" anything to use a credit card, or do so in a very roundabout way. The fees are all paid on the merchant side. This may raise prices in stores that accept credit cards, but it's impossible to tell by how much. On the flipside, many credit cards pour some of those fees back into rewards for their users, so a clever consumer could possibly come out ahead.
3) The "credit" part is actually important. Some people use the cards as credit instruments (to spend more money than they have at that particular time). Even the people who regularly pay off their balance only need to attend to that once a month no matter how much they spend, as opposed to having to monitor and top-up a Paypal or Venmo balance. Credit cards also help people demonstrate creditworthiness and build up their credit score.
4) Credit cards are backed by banks, and these banks have a lot invested in preventing fraud and making consumers feel like they can use their card without identity thieves putting them on the hook for thousands. Venmo and Paypal don't have the same trust built up (whether or not they're better at dealing with fraud or experience it less often). | f1b4a376-1382-4d7d-947d-575aecc22d47 |
c23ol6 | what exactly is happening when a volume dial breaks and starts turning the volume up instead of down or vice versa? | Do you mean a rotating volume dial, like found on an AV reciever/amplifier?
They are rotary encoders. They're supposed to repeatedly count +1 or - 1 when you turn up or down.
When they get dirty, they can count all sorts of things instead.
Here's [a video](_URL_0_) of a guy dismantling and cleaning such a dial, to fix an erratic volume control | 1a195a38-5f98-415a-ac54-32b987841a82 |
c23p3h | What is cancer exactly ? | At it's most basic, Cancer is a cell or a group of cells that no longer abide by the rules of that cell.
They continue to grow after they are supposed to die, they ignore chemical signals your body sends telling them to not get larger, not change shape or to simply die.
This causes a lot of problems because they are still considered by your immune system as a part of your body, so your immune system does not recognize them as something it needs to eliminate. This allows them to continue to grow and spread to other cells.
There is no *one* cancer. There is no *single* cause. There is no one *cure* for Cancer because they are not all the same. | 4667e223-b45b-4d22-88fa-b33536813136 |
c23qim | Why is drinking more the most effective cure to a hangover? | Not 100% true that it is the most effective although if I remember my physiology prof's input on the subject it had to do with the body's breakdown of alcohol in the liver and the enzymes responsible for removing it from the bloodstream tend to cause the "hung over" effect. Best cure to a hangover is actually drinking an 8oz glass of water (or more) before bed after a night of heavy alcohol consumption. That way you allow those enzymes the ability to be flushed from the body via sweat and urine without causing dehydration. Alcohol is a diuretic (makes you pee/sweat) so give your body the ability to flush it and any other stuff (like all the sugar in those fruity drinks/beer) out. | badbdd5e-3f16-4da6-a795-95948a930f7d |
c23zar | Why are fraternities/sororities considered important? I keep reading bios that say person X was in Delta Kappa Blah like it's a thing worth mentioning. Why is this a thing that's important enough to include in a bio? | Because when you get right down to it, if you are going to college with the intent of getting an education, you are fooling yourself. An education is a part of it, but by far the most important part of the college experience is forming interpersonal ties that you can use for business contacts later.
Fraternities and sororities are some of the most direct ways to form those ties. As somebody who was stupid enough to go to college and focus on education, please take my advice and do not even bother with college unless you are planning to make friends with as many wealthy people as you can. Even if you have to sacrifice grades to do so. | e4400028-b028-45d1-832f-f852cfe199cc |
c245qu | What is the original cause for the apparent deep rooted and centuries old antisemitism in some parts of the west? | Basically the Jews are one of the only groups to have survived from antiquity to today. You exist long enough, and you'll make some enemies. Keep existing, even outliving your enemies, and their stereotypes and prejudices will morph through the ages.
The real beginnings of it seem to be split between ancient Greece with it's multiple Gods and wild party culture being at odds with a "1 god" culture that classified all the fun stuff as a sin, and early Christianity rebelling against the establishment that they think crucified their messiah.
_URL_0_ | 3bfb75f5-02e1-4a4f-86b3-bf4b351fe058 |
c24guf | Why do the colors on a computer screen change depending on the angle at which you look at them? | This only occurs on TN (Twisted Nematic) LCD Panels. It is due to the method in which the LCD twists light through a group of horizontal and vertical lines in order to block or allow light to pass. When you look at it at sharp angles, you're seeing the light that is between the two layers. This light is not seen when looking at it straight on.
Higher quality TN panels typically do not exhibit this behavior except at extreme angles. Lower quality ones, especially those found in laptops, tend to show this very easily.
& #x200B;
The reason TN panels are still used is that they're both energy efficient and cheap to manufacture. This is why they're often found on laptops and TV's. Computer monitors and phones tend to use IPS for better viewing angles and picture quality. | 3ccc3bbe-fc89-47e3-ad07-32983adb99b3 |
c24knq | How come running on the treadmill is easier than outside | Its not easier for everybody, but alot of it comes down to it being a controlled environment, you decide the pace, you have no obstacles, no changes in elevation, a stable base. But, for some people it is harder to run on a treadmill, as they lack the visual proof of them excersising. | 73ff216c-3e6c-4f40-a8c9-1e7ed966f1c7 |
c252af | What specifically stops my bank from being able to alter my account balances? | If they lower your balance, that's stealing from you. You have records showing how much you put in. It's a crime and they can go to prison.
If they raise your balance, they're giving you a gift. They have no motivation to do that. | 035522d2-8c97-43cb-b591-115aac50051b |
c25afd | How are "mesh" WiFi setups different than a single router with WiFi extenders? | WiFi range extenders are basically just wireless routers without the 'Router part' (AKA: Wireless Access Points). They plug in to your router using a wired connection and create a separate wireless network. If it connects to your main WiFi wirelessly, then it becomes a Wireless repeater, which doesn't work as efficiently. - With range extenders, your device (Phone, laptop, etc.) must determine which access point to connect to, this usually isn't very reliable as most devices will want to stay connected to their current AP for as long as possible.
& #x200B;
WiFi Mesh systems more closely resemble enterprise WiFi systems, in which a single device controls all of the wireless access points and it creates one single network. This controller will monitor all of the wirelessly connected devices (IE: Your phone, or laptop) and determine which access point they should connect to. This means you can walk around your house and your device will seamlessly connect between multiple access points to maintain the strongest possible signal. Some WiFi mesh systems will connect their access points through wireless signals, but these will still be vulnerable to interference just like range extenders. The best way is to connect them using wires.
& #x200B;
**TLDR:** WiFi mesh works better because the router will control which access point your device connects to in order to maintain the strongest possible signal. Both mesh and range extenders suffer from interference if you connect them using wireless instead of wires. | 5381792f-1302-4230-a48f-4a7f138af774 |
c25mou | Carnivorous plants | Most carnivorous plants evolved their adaptations as way of gaining more nitrogen or phosphorus than what the soil would provide. They often occur in wetland areas where the water will constantly wash away any nutrition that would normally be in the soil. Nepenthes (Tropical Pitcher Plants) do not prefer to eat small mammals. They only catch them when the mouse, shrew, or occasional monkey try to fish out the insects and get stuck in the pitcher (which is filled with digestive fluid, that drowns the poor animal). Almost every other species of carnivorous plant is specialized in catching small insects. Some carnivorous species (mostly nepenthes) have even adapted themselves to producing a laxative in their nectar to cause bats and shrews to "feed" them as they eat the nectar. These plants are called "crapivores". If you or anyone else has any questions, I'll respond for the next few hours. I grow \~65 different species of carnivorous plants.
BONUS FACT :: Venus Flytraps are misnamed. They commonly eat spiders as their main prey item in outdoor environments due to how close to the ground they grow, and only occasionally catch flies. They should be known as Venus Spidertraps. | 01f4ee72-87eb-472a-a8b8-c10fedd02a17 |
c25nkp | Why is the shingles vaccine only recommended for use on patients 50 years or older? | Because 50 is when your odds of getting shingles starts to increase.
This is important because if you develop a drug you need to run studies to show it's effectiveness. Since you want to make things easy when you're running your first study you concentrate on groups that are most susceptible to the condition you're trying to fight (because then you can keep your studies small and still get a meaningful amount of 'signal' in your data). In the case of the new "Shingrix" shingles vaccine GlaxoSmithKline ran
studies like [this one targeting the 70+ age group](_URL_0_), and [this one targeting the 50+ age group](_URL_1_). This means that the effectiveness of this vaccine has only been proven in the 50+ age group, so that's all that groups like the CDC will recommend. | 9915c1c0-46fb-4a5e-89b3-75247965613c |
c25rts | Why is turning a computer off and on again an effective way of solving problems? | Computers have a lot of running processes, and those processes share data/results with one another. If one process has a glitch, it will share bad data/results with the other processes, and that bad data/result will cause the other processes to produce bad data/results. This will perpetuate until programs start hanging or crashing because the data/results are just too bad to work with. Restarting the computer clears out all the data/results - good and bad - and starts over from scratch.
Think of it like the old game of telephone you use to play in grade school - one person would tell someone a message, who would tell someone else a message, who would tell someone else a message, etc. until it got to the end. Little mistakes along the way would perpetuate and magnify, until the message at the end was so different from the original you had no idea what the message was supposed to be. | a0e4fd93-949a-4329-8925-2cb0eb2da46d |
c25xk8 | Why do red and white wine need to be stored in different temperatures? What is the allure of aged wine? What are the different types of wine? | r/wine is that way. They might know better. | ca4cacdf-e0ad-40f7-a83d-465e389099d4 |
c264gl | how does one do a reverse image search, and how does this technology work? | Let’s look at drinks. For each drink, we’ll keep a running total of ‘points.’ If it’s hot, it gets one point. If it’s cold, it loses a point.
- Coffee is hot, +1
- Tea is hot, +1
- Milk is cold, -1
So we can see coffee and tea are more similar to one another than to milk, using this system, right?
We could make a similar system vastly more complicated, using hundreds of properties so that only a computer could check them all - color, shade, shape, texture, etc, anything you can name that makes an image unique and recognizable - to relate images to one another. You upload your image, the computer checks the image, gets the score, and then cross references that with the scores of other images - and it shows you those images under the assumption that they are similar. | 61fc2eab-a1c2-41bc-b5ea-83d8f5587e58 |
c26hn3 | When you feel emotions of sorrow, sadness, regret, etc why does it have a physical sensation in your heart or stomach. | Your brain and your guts talk to eachother, you have neurons in both places, in addition to this your brain and the rest of your body talk with eachother too. All emotions have physical sensations with them, we call them feelings because we FEEL them. Our body signals pain sensations to alert us so we can prepare to protect ourselves from perceived danger.
I hope that made sense.
My brain is mush atm and my ability to ELI5 is somewhere I can’t seem to locate 😝 | bc699551-f891-449e-ab24-1037c5dc394e |
c26kjn | Why does bone-in meat take significantly more time to cook than deboned meat, although they are roughly the same size? | The bone doesn't heat as fast as the meat. If you cooked a turkey stuffed with ice cubes, you need to wait for the ice cubes to melt before the inside of the turkey world start to cook. | aef9eb12-26d2-4cb2-ab3c-190bbab6456d |
c26rc3 | Why when i'm trying to sleep, sometimes my body do the fake fall thing ? | So it’s my understanding that as you fall asleep, your brain paralyzes the rest of your body to prevent yourself from acting out your dreams.
Before your brain can give the rest of your body the all clear to fall asleep, it checks to see if your body is actually paralyzed, and when you feel that falling/jolting feeling, it was just a result of your body not being completely paralyzed when your brain “checked”
Sleep paralysis works much in the same way, just the other way around. ( Your body is still paralyzed but your conscious brain turns on)
Sorry in advance for formatting | 77ec2a95-9677-4603-b4b3-2dd521f99b53 |
c271es | Why do most of the humans crave so much validation from other humans? | Humans evolved over millions of years to live in tight-knit kin groups where they personally knew and were probably related by blood everyone, and were certain of their position and role in the community. Nowadays, people are quite disconnected from each other. We are surrounded mostly by strangers, and we are therefore always at least a little uncertain of our position relative to the many strangers we encounter in life. This is a disconcerting situation. Validation fulfills the need we have to feel like we belong where we are. | 6d83dcdc-8a82-4d92-b9a0-51002339f804 |
c271g7 | How can people on the phone not hear themselves when on speaker? | As the phone broadcasts your voice, it add a inverse sound wave of your voice to the recording of the person you are calling to cancel your voice out. Like noise cancellation technology. | a3bb527d-ab27-43a4-b95a-5bf51f1036cb |
c277f0 | How do slap bracelets work? | Have you ever used one of those roll up tape measures? You can see a very similar behaviour in them if you press in the middle. It's due to the metal being bent upwards in the middle, causing the bracelet to stiffen, but as soon as you pop the middle the entire thing curls up on itself. | 25459387-5e46-4029-8711-858348e7e61d |
c27ed2 | Why does San Francisco have so many homeless people? | It's down to the cost of housing, which is shockingly high in that area; the climate, in which a homeless person can live without freezing; and the permissive culture, in which homeless people are not treated too badly. | 37214859-c122-4c8a-9749-808177962219 |
c27n0e | Why does it feel more appropriate to answer ‘thinking’ when asked ‘what are you doing’ even when that’s a lie, and you’re literally just staring into space just because? | I guess that you think people will judge you if you tell them the truth. You'd rather them think that you were thinking and therefore thoughtful and smart rather than empty headed | a2912165-0bd1-4de0-a358-d7376c6b140b |
c27yqd | Could humans achieve the power of flight through the use of Transgenics and other scientific gene editing? | Technically your teacher is right. We might reach a day and age where genetic engineering can alter a person into a flying creature, but that creature would certainly no longer be human in either genetics or appearance.
The problem is the physics of it. For an average 180 pound man to gain flight, he would need a 40-50 foot wingspan just to generate lift, and 60-75% of that man’s body mass would have to be held in the muscles of his upper back and chest just to move those wings. This, of course, would make the rest of the man’s body non-functional, and would result in his death by being unable to to anything but fly. | 37b61b88-0262-48fb-af46-ce31a3901392 |
c27zfq | How does animation work? I thought they drew every single frame up until a month ago. I know that 3D animation is done on a computer with models and what not but the whole concept of animation still blows my mind. | Historically, animation has been drawn one frame at a time. The primary artists might draw out key frames then hand them off to a group of animators who draw the frames in between. These days, you can have a computer interpolate the from and to and generate the frames in between.
With 3D animation, you can do it in the same manner with the animator positioning the meshes of moving things for each frame. But it's sometimes more practical to use cameras to follow a real actor making the movements which are then mapped on to the 3D mesh to make it move. | 57309fdf-420b-4f6c-b1c1-2f335e0c1c00 |
c2819n | How is glass always so stable for seemingly all various chemical reactions? | 1: _URL_1_
2: _URL_0_
3: _URL_2_
4: _URL_3_
You should search before posting. Anyways from 1:
> Glass aka silica aka silicon dioxide is very stable. The reason why glass seems inert is because most common elements and molecules in nature don't have the attraction needed to take electrons from the silica and disrupt the electron bonds between the silicon and the oxygen
Edits: added more links | 137f5adb-6437-442d-8404-08bd0924aa66 |
c28361 | How come scolding hot showers feel so good on a Poision Ivy rash? | The itchiness is caused by a protein, proteines denture under heat, which is why hot water provides a great relief from itching sores. Works for mosquito bites as well. | d87dd68e-d25b-4dca-a6d3-7f7727539723 |
c286vh | Why are we able to see heat radiate off of things like cars and pavement. | It's because of light [refracting](_URL_0_) through the heated air just above the surface of the road.
Refraction causes light (as well as other things like sound and waves) to bend when they move from one material to another. The heated air is different enough from the cooler air above it (due to density and heat expansion, etc) that the light refracts. It looks wavy like water because the way the light is being refracted changes as the boundary of the hot layer shifts due to wind and heating and stuff. | d8c9e65e-87d1-4db7-88b1-c2bad47ff5e6 |
c28gix | How the scientists know what is happening inside the Large Hadron Collider? | Part of what's going on is the genius of the scientific method, and physics (and mathematics). The math describes a model (the physics) of phenomena we've observed. We can then use the model to reason and make predictions. We observe those predictions, strengthening faith in the model, or we don't, weakening it.
& #x200B;
So we've managed to observe enough phenomena to make some astounding deductions about the nature and behavior of subatomic particles. If THIS is true then THAT - MUST - be true...
& #x200B;
Anyway, onto the LHC. I actually have a small piece of it I use as a conversation starter. It's nothing special, it's a piece scintillation plastic - if you hit it with a high-energy particle, the molecules in the plastic get excited and emit light. There's a little channel to glue a fiber optic cable, and the plastic is wrapped in film to keep the light from registering in an adjacent tile. These pieces are small enough to fit in your pocket.
& #x200B;
Now wrap a collision point in the LHC in these tiles - 4 stories tall and a couple hundred feet long. Each tile is an individual sensor, and each fiber optic wire goes to a detector capable of measuring the 10s of photons emitted by the collision. Each tile's position known, and the timing of these events, and the time it takes light to travel down each fiber is each individually accounted for and all of this computation is synchronized to a single atomic clock.
& #x200B;
So when you have a particle rip through 4 stories of sensors, and decay along the way into other particles, the trajectories and speeds can be measured with high precision, and deductions can be made about what happened.
& #x200B;
What you have is essentially a 3D camera.
& #x200B;
And as we ramp up energy levels, what we're doing is imparting more energy into the underlying fields that make up these particles, making them by-definition more massive. Put enough energy in a field, and it'll manifest a real, physical, tangible particle in reality. | 2cbe7657-5063-4591-a85c-828f9d07847e |
c28max | How is data conveyed over waves such as WiFi? | > one wave
One wave *frequency* travelling at the speed of light. By changing either the frequency or the amplitude of waves, you can convey ideas like "on" and "off". For example: you can program an antenna to understand that a wave peak above X volts is a 1, and below X volts is a 0, over a given period of time (typically miniscule fractions of a second). Because light is fast [source required], you can communicate a LOT of 1s and 0s over a short period of time. Those 1s and 0s are translated and compiled as code which executes as whatever data the application is trying to run, like a movie.
Edited to fix mobile autocorrect | 1d6d719f-d397-4fac-8818-2794bd5298cf |
c28tjm | What determines the average sleep required for an adult/child etc? | How you feel when you wake up:
Tired: not enough sleep, go back to bed!
Good: enough sleep, you are well rested
Groggy: too much sleep, you were starting to hibernate
Remember the amount of sleep that made you feel good, and then do that all the time. | d63f0907-ab22-4939-85ec-dd2cf28bfe07 |
c290w8 | Why can you do a nap on the couch and immediately drift off while going to sleep after that is hard? | Long day produces more adrenaline in you due to the stresses you accumulate all day so your body needs to take a while to take those levels down.
If you're just relaxing, your adrenaline levels are fairly normal and this might cause you too drift to sleep faster | 71d1e01f-73f2-4651-9804-56b44155ab62 |
c29cit | How are videos compressed to decrease their size ? | The first thing you need to understand is that computers don't store the video specifically, they store instructions on how to re-reproduce a video.
For example each frame can be thought of as a picture. To reproduce a picture on your screen the file would contain instructions such as:
Pixel 1,1 - 255,0,0 Pixel 1,2 - 255,0,0 Pixel 1,3 - 255,0,0 etc...
(255,0,0 in RGB is Red)
Even though these instructions are simple, they add up and can take up a lot of space.
Compression basically works by summarizing and removing repeated data. For instance if the first 20 pixels in a picture are the same color you could write an instruction like:
Pixel 1,1 > 1,20 - 255,0,0
Which would take us less space.
This is what we call lossless compression, or compression that can reproduce an image exactly without any dataloss.
Video however often uses lossfull compression, meaning that it is willing to sacrifice some quality in exchange for taking up less space.
In the same example imagine the first 20 pixels are not the same color but they are very similar.
255,0,0 and 255,2,0 for example (the second one has slightly more Green in it.)
The algorithm can smooth out these pixels so that they are the same color 255,0,0. You lose a bit of quality in the process, but the data gets smaller as a result. | bb233778-ed0d-4fb2-a3bd-d3ea84eb6790 |
c29eaf | Why is ice cream always so soft when you first open the container and gets so hard over time with the lid closed in the freezer? | Ice cream is flash frozen which prevents ice crystals from forming and keeps it soft and smooth.
When you open the container the ice cream melts a little then refreezes slowly. Water in the icecream and surrounding air crystallizes making the ice cream hard and icey. | 4c539241-3833-4f3b-989c-0690ee45525d |
c29ia7 | Why do bees work? | Instinctual biological programming. Millennia of evolution has produced a creature with a combination of sensory organs (inputs), neurons (processors) and appendages (output) that causes the creature to instinctively react to a set of inputs by producing a given output. There is no need for reward and deterrence - that is done at the evolutionary level. If the program tends to produce more offspring generation after generation, that program persists (the "reward"). If it fails to produce sufficient offspring, that program dies off (the "deterrence"). On an individual level, bees act as automatons - they don't stop to consider rewards or question their role in the collective. They just do what they do. | a220ae45-be48-4d3b-9167-76259bfd69e7 |
c29iwl | How does lane assist in cars work? | The car has a camera that points towards the front of the car (at the road). It scans for the markings on the road that show where the lane is, and then if it notices that the car is shifting to an angle where the markings don't line up, it does its thing (makes a sound or pushes back on the steering wheel - different systems have different functions).
It won't work well on roads that don't have markings or where the markings are worn down, or in some types of weather. | bdaed9ae-51da-49c1-af51-048095221d41 |
c29s6h | Why do monitors display more things on the screen while they have the same resolution as laptop screens? | Laptop screen resolutions can indeed show as much content as desktops, but they are physically smaller. Condensing to that scale would work, but everyone would be squinting at their laptops. | 617de7d9-373f-49c4-8ef2-b20306289484 |
c29sfa | How does the carbonation in a soda/beer 'settle' after you shake it? How isn't it always pressurized in a way that makes it overflow? | Movement makes gas leave the water.
When you don't move for a while the gas has time to go back in.
As for the second part, companies know the right amount of pressure for their concentration. | 47cd547f-9ab9-4e9b-9612-fa34fb25718c |
c29tum | - Our bodies signal us that we are hungry but we generally have a lot of energy stored as fat. Why is that? What is the hungry feeling is telling us in fact? | Hunger is triggered by the Hunger Hormone called Ghrelin. Ghrelin is produced by the body during times you usually eat. So if you always eat at 8am, 1pm, 6pm, you'll always feel hungry at those times.
When you eat, the food becomes short-term energy which lasts around 6-24 hours. Excess short-term energy not used is converted to long-term energy (fat). Since you're always refilling that short-term energy tank, your body doesnt need to use your long-term energy. | 328e14e2-ec00-41b5-b23f-9ae978d12ab9 |
c2a4ee | Why do sunburns feel warm to the touch hours after being exposed to the sun? | It's part of the healing process. When cells are damaged, your body sends more blood to the area to do repairs and/or clean-up of dead cells. Since that blood's coming from your core, it's warmer than the surface of your skin usually is. | 6deed5aa-24b9-483e-a0c5-40dbec8beb52 |
c2aj88 | Why does it hurt when you bite something you weren't expecting to be hard? | Because your jaw muscles are extremely strong, and can exert enough force to actually hurt you if you aren't expecting it.
If you're expecting it, you'll automatically adjust the strength of the bite. | 1ebb6c8f-554c-4ad8-9bcc-919d656432ab |
c2axts | What makes staph infections like MRSA so dangerous compared to other types of infections? | It's in the name MRSA -- Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which means it's resistant to the common treatments of infection. | 4d5ca389-51b6-4dd0-a55d-6a581c461245 |
c2aymi | How do taxes work for the United States and why are they so unnecessarily complicated? | They aren't complicated if you have one job, no deductions and no one to claim.
The shit gets real when you run a business, have medical expenses/insurance, kids, own a house, got dividends and lots of other stuff.
Most people will just pay a CPA to figure everything out for them. The end goal is to see how much much tax liability you have vs. how much you can shave off of it. Example: i paid $5000 in federal tax but my deductions and my tax bracket say my tax liability is only $4000. I get the difference back as a refund.
If my business owes $25000 in tax, i will combine all my expenses and qualified deductions to reduce that number as much as possible. Say i spent $20000 in that same year on tax deductible items. Now i only owe $5000.
It can get extremely convoluted. Hope this helps. | 548e6cce-c4f9-457e-a9de-6eabc06ad680 |
c2b7so | How does the "harvesting" if renewable energy work? How do windmills get power from spinning? How do solar panels make energy from the sun? How does the conversion of the energy from one to another work? | This is all ELI5 levels of course. I don't know enough detail to ELI10
Windmills are blown by wind - the wind collides with the blades and causes them to turn. The windmill is linked to a big-ass magnet, and that big-ass magnet is inside a big-ass coil of wire. When the big-ass magnet rotates, it energises electrons within the wires, creating electricity.
In solar panels, photons from sunlight bash into electrons within the solar panel. This gives them energy and causes them to become free from their host atoms. They run into metal 'collection' plates, and then into wires from there. | c676a21d-1f2b-452a-a460-d36cf3be69bb |
c2bi0j | When your phone is ringing, why are the electronics around it buzzing? | I don't think that's what OP is asking. You can have a phone on silent, sitting next to other electronic devices, and you'll often hear very distinct electronic buzzing type noises from the other devices specifically when the cell phone is ringing. | 4037653a-ba02-4aa5-9aba-2842afefca92 |
c2bnua | Why are bad words bad to use and why are people who use them often considered "uncivilized" and "uneducated"? | Most societies will have words that are “taboo”. I believe cross-culturally taboo words usually deal with sex or bodily functions (eg. “fuck” or “shit” in English), but I may be wrong.
We speak differently in different social situations. You generally wouldn’t speak to your boss of college professor the same way you speak to your best friend in private. As we learn language, we also learn what language is appropriate in different setting (casual vs. formal).
While it is usually acceptable to swear in a casual setting, it’s not expected in a more formal setting. For example, when I give a presentation in front of my coworkers I speak very differently then when I talk to my friends, both in tone and in the words I choose. So, people who swear in formal settings tend to stand out as odd, and might be considered uneducated because they have not learned the “proper” way to speak in these settings. | 4ff32c14-a48a-45fd-97ce-82267c7992fc |
c2bydd | Why it's not recommended to cool down a heated up smartphone in a fridge? Isn't this the same as taking out your working smartphone in a winter (from warm room to cold street)? | Kinda, And ive seen companies say "Yeah, our phones werent designed for this. Now you got water damage. And water damage isnt covered under warranty, so pay up!" | 5dee2965-4a04-4797-8265-4bae568bb9c1 |
c2c126 | why do we need new electrons in our body? Why do we need a flow of any element who's sole purpose is to provide an electron? Why can we not just have x amounts of sodium, potassium and other? Is it purely a side effect of fluid balance? | Because the body is not a closed system. You lose salts when you sweat; certain molecules break in ways that metabolism can't fix and therefore have to be removed. Of the molecules that break, some can be reforged using internal resources, and some can't. We call the ones that can't be reforged essential vitamins, proteins, and fats. Certain chemicals that can be reforged aren't reforged at optimal levels - creatine is one example. These are called pseudovitamins, because the body benefits healthwise from supraphysiological levels.
Bottom line though, the body has to purify itself to remain optimally functional. This means that it needs intake to replace lost resources. Absent such intake, the body will eventually fail because it will run out of internal stockpiles of such materials, and either be completely *out* of them - this happens with simple things like sodium - or lack the chemical processes to remake other parts of itself into those nutrients - vitamins, the "essentials".
Even if the body could make vitamins and the "essentials" it would have to make them out of other parts of itself. Those molecules would eventually become irreparably damaged and excreted. Eventually, the body would reach the point that further self-canabalism would damage the organs. It also does this in its current state - this is why people die of death by malnutrition. | 3f811928-a931-4a2f-bcb1-6aca9a377179 |
c2c7l0 | - Why do bugs squirm when they are being hurt, but don’t limp when a leg is cut off? Do they feel pain? Or do they just have a protective reaction to harm that is being done to them? | I once saw a wildlife program, which showed a closeup of a bug. As the camera pulled out, it became apparent that the bug was being eaten by a larger bug. The camera pulled back more, and this bug was itself being eaten by an even larger one.
Now, any creature that will carry on eating while its own rear end is being chewed to bits is, as far as I can see, not conscious or experiencing pain. | 1baeb90b-9090-4cd4-ad81-0f531f9f145c |
c2ctt8 | Why does very cold water feel so refreshing, even if you’re not necessarily warm and when warmer water is easier to absorb? | The cold water is refreshing because of the temperature difference and because the water is cooling our body.
Warm water requires less heat energy to be transfered to the water when digesting the water. When water goes through our bodies some heat from our body naturally is transfered to the water because heat energy goes from hot to cold areas. So when the water is warm then less energy is transfered.
The thing I don't know is the cost benefit ratio between cold water cooling affects of cold water and the energy saving affects of warmer water.
I'm not an expert but this is what I remember from taking thermodynamics. I don't know if this helped but it's all heat energy transfer related. | 16f6dd94-3ec2-4e05-9b62-ff60e5890569 |
c2d6vo | If body cells always attack to foreign objects, how come they don't attack food? | They don't attack "foreign objects". They attack things that the immune system recognizes as harmful. This is what an allergic reaction is, your immune system mistakes something benign for something harmful. This is also why immunizations work, it trains your immune system that something is harmful without it being exposed to it before.
& #x200B;
The immune system has an incredibly complex network of cells that have the sole purpose of recognizing a harmful presence.
& #x200B;
We have trillions of foreign objects within us but are essential to our survival. | 90e29703-d419-454c-8c6f-c7a06b91a061 |
c2dvu8 | What influences the color of snot? | As far as I know is the bacteria-dead cells and how intense the cold is or flu. The stronger the infection..the greener the snot and thicker. | 76a8d495-ea34-4ec7-8f60-7a2f872e063f |
c2emcl | How can a wound infection get chronic? | It could be an issue of an infection that doesn’t respond fully to antibiotics, like MRSA. Some
Of the bacteria are killed, but not all. It could also be an area that has poor circulation, like certain people have, such as diabetics. The body can’t get the stuff needed to heal you there fast enough. So it’s a battle where the enemy has more resources and your own supply lines have been cut. | f94bb869-3df6-4430-805a-c73a71b1d72c |
c2f1oq | Why do our bodies subconciously respond to music with, for example, foot stomping or head bobbing? | Because I believe the mind has an instinctual reaction to tempo and patterns. You know when you hear someone shut off a car alarm or a phone alarm and for a few seconds after you hear it ringing in your head? | bee05756-c91a-4c48-8022-216e2a2879d8 |
c2f9qg | How come humans have low relative strength, compared to other animals? | Muscles are expensive. Even when you're not using them, each kg of skeletal muscle requires 13kcal per day, and when you're using them that energy requirement goes through the roof.
Since humans have mostly relied on travelling great distances, sweating to allow continuous use of our muscles, having a lot of them has been actively detrimental.
Add in the fact that our ability to make knives, slings, spears, and atlatls made *any* muscle - even that of a small child - absolutely deadly to most flying and land-based lifeforms and excessive muscle was evolutionarily selected against for hundreds of generations when food was scarce. | 0dee353a-f164-4f2d-939e-de0e0790862c |
c2fo3n | how come doctors and nurses (or anyone working in the health care environment) are not constantly sick or catching stuff from infected patients. | They are usually the first to get a flu vaccine.
But also high hygiene standards, and proper measures when dealing with highly contagious patients | 10c0ae41-b77a-4238-a8f6-e4a870f4b163 |
c2g5co | - What is a meme? | A meme is a shared cultural artefact or joke that propagates through a population by people sharing it.
Memes aren’t funny unless you understand the meme.
Memes were named by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s, as a piece of cultural information that self-propagates through a population. They go from mind to mind and “evolve” like genes do, in his analogy.
There is evidence of memes dating back to the Romans. Graffiti found in Pompeii that is seemingly meaningless seems to appear all over the city, exhibiting meme like characteristics.
Things like “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt’s being commonly worn in the 1980s are examples of memes.
Anything can be a meme, as long as enough people get the meme.
Your understanding of what a meme is seems to be based on a format of internet memes known as “advice animals”. | 707a1bbd-b557-40eb-9ab8-8508476440a5 |
c2giil | why do our eyes suddenly go blurry and get “stuck” looking at something? | Basically the muscles that allow your eyes to focus relax as your not actually 'looking' at anything so it goes out of focus. Almost like you go onto standby mode lol | c44ef21d-f886-42bd-916b-36559696ee69 |
c2gklj | The difference between paraphilia and fetish | A paraphilia is something that is harmful to oneself or others and is needed to achieve orgasm. Paraphilias and fetishes are similar, but not every fetish is harmful, and all paraphilias are in some way. These disorders can cause distress or impairment (and those are the only kind recognized in the DSM), and are harmful overall for the individual and/or society.
Some paraphilias are criminal, such as pedophilia and necrophelia, while others are just weird. There isn't any known working treatment or cure. It's kind of a mystery how these things form. | a182fb61-d655-4cc8-89ad-5132e11e1200 |
c2gmnu | Why are some food with lower calories make our stomatch feels fuller than others with higher calories? | Generally, we feel full when our stomach is full of food. Fibre fills up the stomach but doesn't really have much calories so makes us feel fuller. (vegetables have alot of fibre)
There are however foods that 'hack' our fullness mechanism. For example, food that are rich in both fat and sugar (at roughly 50/50 ratio) stop us from feeling full so we eat alot more calories before we feel full.
So most 'bingeable' foods are those that have a 50/50 fat and carbs content (ice cream, cakes, donuts, pizza, crisps etc
Fat or carbs on their own don't do this and we feel full quickly after eating them separately.
The combination of fat and carbs in modern foods is supposed to be one of the biggest contributing factors to the obesity epidemic. | cd0bbe3f-62c8-4a2c-a73d-9753ad9ddfae |
c2gwsh | Negative Equity - Property | Essentially you got the math right. You are liable for the mortgage balance when you sell regardless of what the home is worth. So, in your example, if you sold the home for the £250k it was valued at, you’d use that to pay off the balance of your mortgage and essentially be starting from zero when you go to buy your new home. The reverse is also true, if the home were to appreciate, you’d actually make money on the deal. To answer your follow on question, if you were in a situation where you own half of the home it can work several ways: if you’re both listed on a single mortgage and one of you defaults or walks away, the bank will come after the other for the full mortgage value. If you have two different loans, then you’d only be liable for your loan (though I’ve never actually seen this done is practice).
This is precisely what led to the financial crisis of 2009 in the US. Many people found themselves in an “upside down” situation where they owed more than their home has worth at the time. These people simply walked away from their mortgages and mailed the keys back to the bank. The banks foreclosed on the properties, but were stuck with foreclosed properties they couldn’t sell and they also had loans that weren’t getting repaid. | 0bba715d-43ac-4b65-90b9-6eb7afb13777 |
c2h3g5 | - if non-human animals experience consciousness, how is human consciousness different from non-human consciousness? | :shrug: We don't even know what consciousness is or what causes it, so we don't have a good answer to this kind of question. Even basic definitions of consciousness vary depending on who you ask. The only way to start answering this question is to break consciousness down into its component parts, see which animals experience which parts, and put it all together to figure out which parts are missing. The missing parts are then the things human consciousness possesses that animal consciousness doesn't. We know so little about what consciousness is that we're even still letting philosophers in on the debate. | 77fb09ee-6c0d-43fd-92dc-2dccc87a967b |
c2hacv | Why are there multiple methods for measuring electricity? (Volts, amps, watts, etc.) | They mean different things. Instead of electrons, imagine you're measuring a water pipe.
How wide is it? That's resistance.
How much pressure is inside? That's voltage.
How fast is the water flowing? That's amperage.
The water is turning a waterwheel as it passes, how much energy is that using? That's wattage. | 14ec34ec-c404-48fe-a23b-270b92fc5a24 |
c2hct0 | Suicide is listed as a side effect of over 200 common medications. How, specifically, do these medications increase the risk of suicide? | People imagine themselves dying quite often- [it's a normal and healthy thing to do](_URL_6_). We unconciously make up hypothetical scenarios all the time, in order to gauge cause and effect. Sometimes referred to as ['the call of the void'](_URL_1_). Step near the edge of a cliff, and you'll probably imagine what would happen if you jumped or fell. That's your brain warning you about potential danger, and telling you back the truck up.
But sometimes, that process takes a dark turn. Suicidal ideation- imagining what would happen if you killed yourself- is also normal and healthy. It's the brain being curious about the broader scope of our place in life, or the physical outcome of certain lethal actions. All of that is fine, totally fine, we have [a little clump of meat in our brains](_URL_7_) that allows us to distinguish between the things we are pretending (or hypothesizing about) what we might want to do, and what we actually intend on doing.
But every once in a while, the signals get crossed. We take one of these hypotheticals and it moves from curious consideration into serious business. It jumps the filter. For a moment, you become convinced that that ideation is something you might want to do. [This isn't the same thing at all as struggling with suicidal tendencies](_URL_5_), which are long processes of many interwoven thoughts all bunched up with rationalizations and a common theme, no, this one is essentially a glitch in an otherwise healthy filter.
Mostly, humans end up weighing their options and through intense consideration realize that this thought isn't really as serious as it first seemed to be. The thought itself begins to dissolve, and soon it's all but gone. We have thoughts all the time that lead nowhere, and usually this kind of aberrant thought [is discarded like the others](_URL_13_).
[Unless it has old friends](_URL_11_). Maybe you went through a suicidal patch in high school, like so many do. Or maybe as an early adult, or a new parent, or whatever. Because of that, you have a portion of memory and thinking that takes suicide very very seriously and contains a lot of connections to other realms of thought. Perhaps youve set those thoughts aside, perhaps you haven't. Let's say for this example, that you have. You've gotten through it, or over it, or bottled it up- you've coped.
So. Now it seems like you've got a touch of asthma, or a very bad cough, and your doctor has prescribed you Prednisone. It's a classic corticosteriod, and basically strengthens your body's fighting stance to work through this little weak spot youve developed. It does that, in part, by [imitating your adrenal glands](_URL_14_), as though they were pumping full blast.
You know what also pumps up your adrenal glands? [Stress](_URL_2_). A shiton of stress, like the kind of crap you used to feel back the day when you wanted to clock yourself out. The elevated, often erratic hormone levels mimic high stress points, [especially in puberty](_URL_9_), and even later at any point when your hormones were going up and down. [Big relationships. Parenthood](_URL_10_) Life-affecting [career choices](_URL_0_). All of those big-time events where, when people get down, they get really, really down.
Collectively, your brain picks up this hormone trail, because it's job is to respond to hormones and [create effective strategies for dealing with the outside situations producing them](_URL_3_). This new hormone wash is very reminiscent of the batch being pumped out in the Dark Days, and so it revisits (reactivates) the [sections of your brain that were the most active during those times](_URL_4_).
Now that original, random ideation, has a home to go to instead of being left out in the cold to die. Not just a home, there are tons of thoughts, memories, feelings, that welcome that filter-jumping thought like an old friend, that connect with it. [Welcome it](_URL_8_). And your very efficient brain, always willing to use an old, [familiar framework](_URL_12_) instead of creating a new one says, well, perhaps this thought isn't such a weirdo after all, it seems to be valid, and makes a very good point. Well alright then, THE DARK DAYS HAVE RETURNED, EMERGENCY STATIONS, PREPARE THE ESCAPE PODS!
And that is why, occasionally, when taking drugs that affect or simulate stress hormones, there is an increase in suicidal ideation and tendencies, even if that drug was designed to alleviate them. Changes in your body, even helpful ones, can affect your thinking in profound and often unpredictable ways. The brain is just doing its best, and a pharmaceutical curveball can really pack a wallop.
.
Edit: Sources. | 9cf4e945-e36f-4421-9e0d-d92e59d449e7 |
c2hemo | What exactly is dirt? | A smorgasbord of one or more of the following:
- Rotted plant matter (this makes up the bulk)
- Processed (and unprocessed) fecal matter
- Rock dust / rocks
- Decayed animals, insects and other organisms
Various creatures that live in soil, including worms, springtails, snails, slugs etc etc "process" stuff into other stuff, and eventually that turns into dirt. | 23a15c93-dd16-483f-827c-a68c6791a71a |
c2hmj2 | The current Hong Kong protests | This is going to be a little long-winded...
In 1899, Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain by China in exchange for the ending of hostilities during the first Opium War. Great Britain (and subsequently the United Kingdom) then governed Hong Kong as a democracy from that point on.
Slightly less than 100 years later, Hong Kong was "returned" to Chinese rule, under a system known as "one country, two systems". This effectively was an agreement that Hong Kong would continue to act as a democracy, and retain the rights and freedoms that the citizens had within that system.
In recent years, China has been trying to tighten the noose, and change laws in Hong Kong to allow China to take more control over the country and exert its own will on the citizens. The most recent change along these lines was a new amendment, proposed by the Chief Executive (equivalent of president) of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, who is known to be a Chinese sympathiser. The amendment basically stated that people could be extradited from Hong Kong, no matter what the nationality of the person, and put on trial in a Chinese court.
This amendment, if passed, would basically put all people at odds with China at enormous risk of being extradited over anything that China disagreed with - including protesting, mocking China, mocking the Chinese leadership, etc etc. The Hong Kongers have inevitably taken a dim view of this, and are now protesting en masse to prevent the amendment from being passed. | a5c2847e-4961-4766-a8e8-63e91de380b7 |
c2i3nl | What is the difference between sievert, roentgen, and gray? Why is radiation measured with different units? What other units are used to measure radiation? | These aren't direct measures of radiation, but measures of impacts of radiation. The roentgen is a measure of how much gamma and xray radiation ionises air, but isn't a measure of anything else. Gray is a measure of how much energy is absorbed by a thing, and is useful in measuring doses of radiation (different things absorb radiation in different amounts, so will receive different doses of radiation even when the amount of radiation you fire at the thing is the same for each). Sievert is a measure of the health effects of radiation, ie, how much damage this much radiation does to people. They're different units because they measure different things. | 0e25a37a-14d0-48e5-b721-9abee6bdc633 |
c2j43l | Why is water (H2O) effective at putting out fires when fire requires oxygen to keep burning? | there are four things that make a fire: heat, oxygen, fuel, and an ongoing chemical reaction.
take out any one of these, and the fire goes out.
one quality of water is that it has a very high thermal density. this means it takes a lot of energy to change its temperature.
when we put water on a fire, the heat of the fire goes into changing the water from liquid to steam. this uses up the heat of the fire, so the fire goes out.
the oxygen that a fire needs is atmospheric oxygen (O2). the process of burning is the rapid oxidation of things. the chemical reaction part of the fire ties oxygen to parts of the fuel.
the oxygen in water is already tied to the hydrogen, so the fire can't use it to continue burning. | c801bb0d-68d0-4e48-86f0-206fc342aa74 |
c2j5xy | - can I rely only on drug store vitemens and supplements to give me the benefits my body needs? | Yes and No.
If you have a deficiency, you should take a supplement.
That being said, most supplements contain WAAAAY more nutrients than your body can actually process. Those multi-vitamins you see that say "6,000% of your vitamin C daily allowance" are a gimmick. Your body cannot process that much Vitamin C and the majority of it will be discarded via your urine.
I would consult a doctor, or a certified dietitian and see just what your body needs and the best way to introduce it. | 8f1429f1-38a2-4a98-b4f3-e1975659f45f |
c2j80o | Why do so many things in California cause cancer? | The warning labels are mandated by Californian law. The state legislature came up with a list of chemicals and passed a law that said if your produce has that chemical, it must have that warning. It has nothing to do with the properties of those chemicals being different in California than anywhere else. | 2a8340fe-029b-4405-b7b9-7fd7ff7befd5 |
c2ja49 | How do undocumented people in the United States pay federal and state income taxes? | You can just file for the taxes. You dont need a SSN, you can use a ITIN. Basically, the IRS will assign you a number they use to track your taxes.
You can just list the wages as other and pay the tax on them. As a rule the IRS doesnt monitor to send people to ICE or such for this. They just care that you paid.
Just like technically, money you make from criminal activities are required to have taxes paid to the IRS. | 125b39d8-54d6-4268-b327-712dd5df2e5f |
c2jd91 | - How do we burn fat? Where does it go? How is it released? | Your fat cells will release fatty acids which will be converted into food energy for your other cells. The principle waste product is mostly exhaled as carbon dioxide. You breathe out your fat when you lose weight. | 26c05bc4-ef63-421c-81e9-83fb070e2dd3 |
c2jdqm | - Why is rocking ourselves on a rocking chair so relaxing ? | As I understand it, it has to do with vestibular stimulation. Your vestibular sense has to do with where your body is in space, and how your weight is balanced. Your inner ear governs this sense, and communicates the sensations through the nervous system.
It takes some effort to maintain vestibular equilibrium (standing, moving, but not falling down). It's relaxing to have your vestibular sense stimulated WITHOUT having to put effort into it. In other words, the body likes to be moving gently and safely (without feeling like you're about to fall) without having to consciously initiate or maintain the motion. It's also why people find floating in water or swinging in a hammock to be relaxing. It goes without saying that's why babies like to be rocked or bounced. | 18aca067-742d-486b-a28d-720d7b0cc04f |
c2jmb8 | Archaeologists/ historians sometimes move apparently simple historical items like tapestries and etc. It often takes "several years" to prepare those items for the move. What kinds of preparations take several years? | With something so invaluable, and irreplaceable you have to have a process in place that will completely ensure that the integrity of the piece is maintained throughout the journey. A custom container needs to be built, every detail of travel needs to be mapped, security needs to be in place, a chain of custody needs to be designed and secured, all of the customs paper work, insurance forms, etc.
The list of activities around moving something like that is enormous. Planning the process itself takes months. Executing the plan takes even longer.
As far as some sort of process to physically prepare the item for being moved/manipulated I am not sure, but I would imagine there is something to it. However I would imagine the bulk of the time is spent on planning and executing the surrounding activities. | fc1c78f4-4b38-46b9-9768-bbb5f2aaf036 |
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