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c2zfpv | How do fruit flies start? | Fruit flies don't come from expired food, they are only attracted by it, so when they smell it, they come rushing for it. They dont come FROM the food, they come FOR the food. | b8fcfd18-5492-424a-830b-e8223b50345c |
c2zkra | Batteries... If a battery provides 1Ah, then it provides one amp for one hour, 2 amps for half an hour, or 500mAh for 2 hours, right? So how does one control that number of amps? | You use various resistors. Think of a resistor like a water dam. The higher the resistance, the slower the water flow is. In this case, water flow is current flow (measured in amps) | 1e99e0e2-11b4-4b5c-9f77-bc9f6e5bfeb2 |
c2zqpv | How do life insurance companies make money? | Simple - By never selling a policy like the one you described.
Most policies will have limitations built in. They might expire at a certain age, or after a certain time. If they don't expire then the monthly payment is calculated to cover their expenses *on average*.
And that is where their business happens - on the *average*. They have literally mountains of data about how long people live in basically every conceivable lifestyle, situation or group. They crunch that data down and use it to determine how long you are going to live *on average* and price accordingly. So while they might lose money on you *individually* they will make money *on the average*. | 9586c71a-22de-4f8e-aa6d-e738350011b3 |
c2ztyf | why does some spicies burn the mouth and some goes straight to your nose? | Different chemicals that interact with different receptors in your cells. Those receptors trigger nerve impulses that your brain interprets as hot or spicy or pungent.
Chili peppers contain a chemical called capsaicin that interacts with the TRPV1 receptors in certain cells.
Wasabi contains a chemical called allyl isothiocyanate that interacts with a related, but different, receptor called TRPA1.
Both TRPV1 and TRPA1 receptors are in your mucus membranes --mouth, nose, eyes and ... *ahem* ... nether regions. (Pro tip: don't take a piss after cutting habaneros; you'll regret it.) But the allyl isothiocyanate molecule is larger and more volatile than capsaicin, so it's less likely to get snagged by those TRPV1 receptors in your mouth; instead it floats up your nasal cavity and comes to rest in the nostrils or sinuses, giving you that nose-burning feeling, whereas capsaicin, the smaller molecule, gets captured more quickly by the cells in your mouth.
For the record, none of these chemicals "go to the brain." | 913e2f77-4344-4761-879a-2ef877267904 |
c3051a | What are those tiny little numbers on the bezel of my wristwatch and why do some of them rotate? | That depends on the type of watch that you have.
If the numbers go from 0 to 60 (and usually those are the spinning type), it is intended for keeping track of time since you started something. They’re called dive watches, used by divers to keep track of how long they’ve been underwater. You spin the arrow to the minute hand of when you started, and when you look you can easily read the difference without remembering any numbers.
Other types have a tachometer. These go from 60 to anywhere from 240-500. If you are racing a car (or any other vehicle) you start your timer and stop it one mile later. The second hand will point at your average speed in miles per hour (also works for kilometers and kilometers per hour)
There are probably other niche watches with different numbers, but these are by far the two most common ones. | 64639759-58ad-4412-b17d-3d218318f5ff |
c3067h | Is there any reason to worry about products like silicon food storage and baking mats leeching chemicals into food? | Your concerns are valid about baking. At reasonable temperatures, silicone won’t create an issue, but at around 300F, siloxane can transfer to food, and just before 400F, it can start releasing formaldehyde (although the amount is not a huge concern). Silicone is still better than non-stock bakeware, but glass, ceramic, and cast iron are the safe options. | 069d5b41-e2c9-46bd-8520-f71b0bd6c8b6 |
c309cq | How does black tea help a sunburn? | Worse burns, and frequently with sunburns, the area gives off heat for a good while. With average kitchen burns, I agree the skin feels back to normal pretty quickly, but it’s still giving off at least some warmth. I think the teabags work in two steps. The bag itself should be cool, so it’s helping to transfer the heat out that way, and the heat goes deeper into your skin than you can feel by touch. The second part is the theobromine, which is a vasodilator and anti-histamine, and will both help the area cool down from the extra resources your body is sending to the wound. | 1678dc1e-ed05-43c8-b72d-fb1bb9e51c1f |
c30ek2 | - Why is it better to eat several smaller meals rather than a few big meals? If it equals the same amount of food why does it matter what each meal size is? | I think the answer to this question depends on what your specific considerations are. For example, one major advantage of eating many smaller meals is that it helps keep your blood sugar levels consistent throughout the day. If you only eat three big meals, your blood sugar will be extremely high soon after you eat a meal, but will end up being extremely low by the time you're getting around to your next meal. If you eat a small snack every hour (that adds up to the same number of calories you would have gotten from the three big meals), your blood sugar will only go up a little bit after that snack, but won't have had time to fall too low before you have your next snack. This isn't necessarily a concern for everybody, but for someone who is at risk of developing diabetes, informally managing your blood sugar like this can reduce the stress on your body's insulin patterns and reduce the likelihood that you'll develop diabetes. | ea9cd7a6-cdaf-4af5-a10b-df266c44ed20 |
c30gex | How come certain plant species and animals, etc can reproduce asexually with no issues developing in the offspring, but when creatures like us reproduce sexually, inbreeding with someone close to us results in lots of health issues and deformity? | First, the dangers of inbreeding is greatly overstated. For most of human history we lived in small tribes and villages and... you know. You have to inbreed consistently for many generations to see a real problem.
Species that clone themselves *do* have this problem, and it's precisely why reproductive solutions that recombine DNA evolved in the first place. When the entire population is clones, you risk excessive propagation of genetic defects and have a severe risk of infectious attack decimating the species.
But, it's also super easy so some species opt to live with the risk and just brute force their way through with a gazillion clones. | a9bd7718-9b86-43f3-a185-a1bbb2fa8611 |
c30jc2 | How come is possible to have different versions of extremely high level stuff made for the same purpose ? | You are describing *mature technology.* When a problem has been understood for a very long time, and the situation has not changed, everyone arrives at a best solution that doesn't vary much. For example, the concrete used to pave streets is fairly similar in most places.
But things like moon rockets have only been done a few times, and even during that period the available tools (like computers) and materials (like metal alloys) have advanced. So the perfecting is just not done. | 1cf62b69-e1df-4817-a6c1-3286c26ab946 |
c30l2b | Riemannian manifold | What kind of answer are you looking for here? in particular, what relevant math knowledge do you already have? | dd0faab9-fba5-476f-9d51-47cd71d01dc8 |
c30ltj | What makes adult teeth shift out of order? Why can’t they eventually shift back into place by themselves? | As I understand it, your teeth are held in place by some kind of fibrous structure. They're not, as a lot of people believe, embedded in the bone. Your gums tend to swell and reduce as you apply stress to them. And you get stuff caught between them. Also, if your clench your jaws and/or grind your teeth, this can cause then to move.
So there's a lot of factors in why your teeth may or may not move about in your head.
to repeat, I'm not a dentist, I'm only stating what I've heard. | cb14b2d0-6504-41c2-a472-202e2f5aa4f7 |
c30pi1 | What is the electric universe theory? | It's basically pseudoscience that postulates that electricity describes most of the features of the universe. It's generally said to be at odds with modern Physics though, and tends to be popular among the conspiracy types. | 6d814a74-32c5-47c5-aa30-c259502218f9 |
c30qmy | Does being in hotter weather cause me to tan faster? As in if I sit in the same spot at the same time with no clouds will I tan faster in 90 degree weather vs 75 degree weather? | The thing which impacts your tanning rate is the amount of UV radiation coming from the sun. UV radiation *also* makes the air temperature higher, but air temperature is also dependent on weather and other factors. It's possible for a day with high UV index to be chilly, or for a day with low UV index to be hot; however, on average a day with high UV index will be hotter than a day with low UV index. | d29186df-a5a6-444e-a856-ce396538dc17 |
c30zrb | Why do gas prices fluctuate so frequently? | people are unusually sensitive to gas prices. Maybe because they get no enjoyment from it, they just treat having gas as normal and buying gas as a problem.
So gas stations compete on price by selling as low as they think they can. As global commodity prices fluctuate the gas stations adjust their prices.
Also, normally the cost of an item in a store is almost unrelated to the cost of the ingredients. Bread has something like 25 cents worth of wheat in a loaf. So a fluctuating price of wheat does not change the cost of bread.
McRib from McDonald's has an odd variant on this. Mcdonalds has a set price for mcribs, what they think the market will pay. When the price of oork drops low enough that they can make a profit on mcribs they bring them back. So rather than fluctuating orice they fluctuate availability | ace1efea-ba56-4234-9277-bb132b4959b5 |
c313z6 | Why is it whenever its foggy I see better through my smartphone camera than in real life? | Your phone adjusts to reduce glare. Fog reflects a lot of light. Turning on high beams in fog blinds you because the light is reflected back. A camera adjusts to take in less light when it is bright so it has less glare | 89688a85-50e9-445c-8683-96308926e290 |
c31bjp | Does your ability to see things far away change how you perceive perspective (relative apparent size)? | The question is, from the way it’s worded is, “does your ability to see things far away change how you see the way you see things?”
I think what they meant was, does being able to see further, make a difference? In comparison to someone who is nearsighted, does the world look differently? Does it change the subjective reality?
The answer is yes. Take a hawk, for example. The way they perceive the world is vastly different than the way we see the world due to their vision being so good. In the other direction, a dog perceives the world vastly different, not only due to their keen sense of smell, but their poor eyesight changes their perception. So, subjective reality for everything is different due to variations within the senses. | f1041cf2-18be-4338-8973-8729ffc0a4ad |
c31byr | Why and how are paradoxical statements expressed mathematically? | Paradoxical statements are frequently used when trying to prove that some mathematical fact must be true. In order to prove something must be true mathematicians assume the opposite is true. If the opposite of what you want to prove somehow leads to a paradox that means logically the thing you tried to prove must be true. This kind of proof is called a proof by contradiction.
Basically if you show that the opposite of what you believe leads to paradoxes the thing you want to show is true must be true. | 39617c58-0961-47e9-8c31-fb8e6d9bb4ec |
c31nre | Why does beer get a 'head' when it is poured, whilst other fizzy drinks such as cider and soda do not? | The foam on beer is stable because of the proteins in it, so the bubbles break less easily and a head can form. Fizzy drinks like soda contain much less protein so the bubbles formed are less stable, pop more easily, and are therefore much harder to foam. | 7dfbbdd5-5b5d-4157-a78c-32c33cfc5112 |
c31tfq | Why does inflation occur? | Currency is just a reprentation of wealth to make trade easier. Wealth usually grow overtime through human work, you cut down a tree, you transform that into plank, you make an house. At this point it's the law of supply and demand. The more wealtht here is, the more demand for currency there is, because people want to trade more stuff. So if you don't increase the amount of currency in your economy, the value of that currency will go up and that's deflation. It's not a good idea for your economy in the long term. Since it's impossible to pin point the exact growth in wealth, you can't really print the exact amount of currency you need to add to keep the value. So instead we target 2% inflation, that way we can reduce the risk of deflation and a small amount of inflation make it more interesting for people to invest, which make the economy growth. But too much inflation is really bad, so we always need to keep an eye on the economy and balance things out. That's the job of a central bank. | 205d9264-06aa-463f-ae39-496b16ed315b |
c31wpx | Why sitting is more relaxing and comfortable than standing? | Standing requires balance, which is a constant sense requiring the shifting of muscles so we don't fall over. This is why leaning on something while standing is easier than standing. While we're good at maintaining balance, it's something that isn't necessary while sitting. | 5db6cd98-e9bf-4ba2-a510-1e44fcd3d85c |
c328wx | What happens to ants and their nests when it rains? is there any damage with weather? | Yes they can get damaged or flood with whole sections collapsing. But ants have power in numbers. As long as the queen is ok she can keep pumping out workers. | d7f1e981-62a5-4323-b450-fb176c7e3261 |
c32avh | Why are there so many more islands in the Pacific than Atlantic? | The Atlantic ocean is on two tectonic plates which is divided north to south down the middle known as the mid-Atlantic ridge. This plate boundary is divergent which means the plates are moving away from each other with molten rock creating new sea bed at the boundary. When these tectonic plates run into the continental plates they are convergent. The oceanic plates go underneath the continental plates and disintegrate back into the molten rock below. Because of this the sea bed is never really there long enough for islands to form.
In the Pacific the tectonic plates run against each other a lot more than they diverge or converge, so the seabed is there long enough to be impacted by volcanoes long enough for islands to form. | ad3b92f8-a1f3-440b-af15-130d63409910 |
c32y29 | ELI: in coding, how is a randomizer itself actually coded? | Yes this is a big problem. Since nearly everything in a computer is essentially a function, and multiple functions put in sequence or parallel are still functions, then mathematically the concept of random doesn't really exist, you cannot have a function whose known input produces a "random" output.
There are a few ways around this. There are a number of functions that help generate random data from random data known as a "seed," known as pseudo random number generators but at some point along the line we need to initially feed it some random data to get more random data. And these functions aren't ideal either.
So anyways there are mainly two solutions.
1. Ask the operating system. Most operating systems tend to have some scheme of producing random data. They often collect mouse clicks, keyboard strokes, some files, and toss all of that into one of those pseudo random number generator functions. If you have a mac or a linux device, generally speaking the operating system's random data cache is in a "file" /dev/random or /dev/urandom depending on your use case. This still isn't ideal as we use nonrandom input to generate random input but the idea is that there is that there is just a lot of data that no attacker will be able to get, like keyboard strokes and their exact timings, and that in theory secures this from attackers.
2. Hardware random number generators. Most modern CPUs come with a section of chip responsible for generating random data. This chip is often known as a ring oscillator, basically as it turns out if you have an odd number of NOT gates chained together in a ring, wacky stuff happens and the electricity in this device spazes out, with spazzing changing depending on environmental factors such as temperature. For instance, most recent desktop computer CPUs come with the command RDRAND which can be executed to produce random data. This is also added to the random input pool of the software RNG from 1, which adds security to its randomness. | 1e72c05d-5e40-49fa-bcc1-60d1753ed53f |
c32yqq | Why don’t I notice American Accents On TV Shows/Movies? | Nothing I'm saying has scientific backing, but I think the midwest American accent has become standard in the film industry.
You don't recognize likely because of the amount of exposure to it? | 9178b739-247f-4eca-b0a0-85471f2f027a |
c32zmh | We use redshifting to determine expansion rate of the universe, but how can we know expansion rate if we only have a snapshot of a "moment" (our 100 years of space observation)? | Ok, so, here's the deal:
Starting in 1919, there was a guy working at Mount Wilson observatory in California named Edwin Hubble. You might recognize his name from a certain orbital telescope, but he has a list of discoveries to his credit about as long as my forearm. He's considered one of the most inportant astronomers in history.
Anyway, in 1924, Hubble was looking at a faint, fuzzy patch of light in the constellation Andromeda that was then called the Andromeda Nebula , and another in Triangulum, when he noticed something interesting: some of the dots of light in these nebulae were chamgimg in brightness in exactly the same way as a type of stars called Cepheid Variables do.
What was significant about this is that the way a Cepheid Variable changes in brigjtness is dorectly related to how much light it puts out: timr how long it takes to go from maximum to minimum and back to maximum, do a straightforward calculation, and BAM! you know how bright the star really is. Compare that to how bright it looks, and with an even simpler calculation that any high school algebra student can perform, you know how far away the star is.
Well, Hubnle found out that the stars were unbelievably far away; the one in Andromeda, for instance, was two and a half million light years away, and the one in triangulum was even further out. He very quickly realized thst these fuzzy patches of light were whole galaxies in their own right, millions of light years away. He went on to calculate distances to 24 galaxies in total.
Ok, so, we have distances. What about redshift?
Well, Hubble got that one, too. In 1929. hubble took these 24 galaxies and looked at their spectra. When he had another "Huh, that's funny..." moment: the further away a galaxy was, the more its light was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, and in a simple linear relationship (except for the very closest one, Andromeda, which is blueshifted).
Ok, so, what does that mean? Well, it meand thst all those galaxies (except Andromeda) were moving aeay from Earth, and the farther away they are, the faster they're receeding (except Andromeda).
The implication is thst, when you look at long distances, the space between galaxies os expanding. The more space there is between galaxies, the faster that expansion makes them move.
The sole exception is Andromeda. It's actualky moving *toward* the Milky Way, because it's close enough that the mutual pull of the two galaxies moves them togethet faster than expanding space is trying to carry them apart. | 98275dab-2ec9-4478-b48d-abe5496fbf50 |
c33hlb | Do amphibians or reptiles live together? | It depends on each species. "Other animals" don't always have "a proper family"; wolves form packs, bears are usually solo.
Reptiles and amphibians reproduce via eggs, so often the case is the "couple" mates and then separate, and the female lays eggs somewhere and leaves them.
Here's [an article](_URL_0_). | 342d77e9-a455-467a-9aec-e4b0ec788cdb |
c33lj5 | Why can diarrhea be so painful? | Your digestive tract is basically just one long series of muscles and sometimes diarrhea causes those muscles to spasm or even cramp up just like what happens to your legs sometimes, causing very acute pain and discomfort. | 2bef0fc4-ca45-4c75-a80a-8aed180978b5 |
c33o1f | how did we manage to discover bread and other pastries? | Bread is just mushed up grain and water left to sit for a while and then heated. Over time, the process has been refined to produce better results.
Pastry follows the same path but adds refined animal fats - probably after people realized how good bread dipped in roasted meat drippings tasted. | 6aa5ff04-8e52-44cb-9e15-abacd4e20e75 |
c343mr | when watching a live sports broadcast, why does radio tend to deliver audio feeds a few seconds before transmitted via television? Why are they not equally quick? | _URL_0_
Gives the broadcaster time to delete nudity, profanity, or anything else they don't want going to air.
With radio, it's just the play by play guys on the microphone. Far less likely for something unwanted to go to air, so they don't need to worry about it. | 1dd0e697-4c6a-4d52-bad1-b4849c8d4765 |
c34lo7 | when you put a speaker next to a microphone, why is the feedback always really high notes and not whatever pitch the microphone heard last? | Suppose you have a sound with a certain frequency of its wave. The speaker, microphone, amplifier, etc. don't operate instantly so when what the microphone hears comes out it is going to be combined with whatever the current ambient sound waves are. Even with a constant tone it is unlikely to be precisely synchronized or on some even multiple.
So now you have the two waves combined which tends to result in more peaks and valleys per sample period. Keep looping and it continues to increase the overall frequency of the wave. | 055ca418-fc36-4fd6-897f-b288b33b71c8 |
c34lta | Why are animals and fauna no longer as large as they once were? What has changed about our world that mega fauna and mega animals no longer exist? | We don’t *actually* know but some theories are that temperature of the earth was the major factor for mammals getting so big. If the ambient temperature is lower, the heat/energy of a larger mammal is much easier.
For insects (and maybe plants), there was a much higher concentrations of oxygen in the atmosphere that helped produce gigantic bugs (we think) and when birds were getting bigger and preying on them (we think) they started to die off (we think) | 169d8b69-119c-4a9c-b17e-071873e36cff |
c34moc | Can we use science to create a “poopless” food? | No. A significant amount of the waste you expel comes from processes in the body such as the death of blood cells which give poop it's characteristic brown color. No amount of nutritional tailoring is going to stop the death and discarding of body cells and metabolic waste. | 71c1abcc-c292-4e71-97a4-7b1ed8e9dd66 |
c355l3 | Why can’t hybrid animals (e.g liger) reproduce? | Female ligers can reproduce. There is a documented example of a female liger that produced healthy offspring with a male lion. All the males are sterile.
Big cat sex (male or female), like human sex, is determined by presence of sex chromosomes. The individuals with XY are male sex. The difficulty is that the X and Y chromosomes have to work together to enable viable sperm production, but cannot co-ordinate together properly due to being from different species. There isn't this problem with females. | ae20fe0c-912f-40ef-8afc-884cc59fd5af |
c35dhi | ; why do commercials say something will be aired live, but they show previews of said live event that hasn’t happened yet? | They often show rehearsals so you have an idea what it will be like, or sometimes just an earlier performance by the same artist. | 83837f47-51a1-4cc0-8db0-713b1de18ad2 |
c35dz7 | airplanes cruising altitude when flying over mountains | So I'm not a commercial pilot, but a private pilot. Mountains come with eddies, also known as mechanical turbulence. Basically, as the air passes over and around the mountains, it is disrupted and so causes swirling action that can affect planes.
I don't believe that altitude changes much over high mountain ranges, as cruising altitudes are actually set by a standardized law, but I'm pretty sure they're avoided if possible. There's no reason to subject the pilot and the passengers to additional stress. | dfb78944-be2a-4d1a-839f-2f49355d63f9 |
c35k0q | How do zippers work? | Organized tangles is how I've heard it described. The tracks are malleable and have 2 positions that are forced to change shape by the little car that runs along them, basically making the tracks 'tangled' and untangled in an orderly way | 1d3c8ae8-48bc-4ce2-9753-6a7f72254289 |
c35pza | What is the specific reasoning for teaching a lot about the industrial revolution in school? Why don’t they cover more topics related to war and peace? | It's a singular unique event that massively shaped society like nothing ever before it. It also even reshaped war itself in huge ways
Vs.
War. War never changes
Jokes aside, war is lots of the same shiza repeated over and over for slightly different reasons and outcomes. So only the most important/impactful are covered | 4f5a0963-f1cf-4ee1-ae7e-a782e02a03af |
c35y76 | Why as an adult do I still get scared like a little kid? | Seems like you just have an active imagination. As people grow more mature, they simply learn to ignore or focus on other thoughts opposed to those creepy scenes, whereas children have a tendency to focus on their most forefront emotions. This is likely a primal instinct which would allow for them to stay safer around their guardians if a possible threat was apparent.
Really it just comes down to your control of your thoughts and how well you manage to differ your mental representation of your surroundings to what's actually there. | ae63ec3f-3e36-43af-8042-ed16da0135c8 |
c35zxu | Why do attachments from email much safer to open in protected view? What does editing a document do to make it dangerous? | depends on the document but word, excel, ppt, etc can run script/macros that mess with your computer. protected mode disables all of that so it can't mess with your computer. | 4801e6e8-156c-4891-82bc-22690577fe5d |
c36698 | How do forces (like tension, compression, etc.) work on an atomic level? What is actually happening? | The vast majority of them are electrostatic interactions between charged particles, typically the electrons (which are arranged in clouds around positive nuclei). Like particles repel, so electrons repel other electrons
When you grab something, you're pushing electrons closer until that repulsion is too much. It goes like 1/r^2, so it grows rapidly at small distances | 9d20bc5b-fb27-4343-900b-60f7670d44dd |
c36fq2 | why do MRIs not burn patients with titanium plates internally from eddy current? | Had to look up the [answer](_URL_0_), but yeah, it seems that eddy currents generally aren't sufficient to cause sufficient heating concerns in most cases. (Although a few articles did have warnings)
They don't give many details (nor does the citation), but it seems to be a combination of two things:
a) implants often don't form a nice large conducting path. Interruptions in the path can reduce eddy current effects
b) the body in general (or saline solution) is generally pretty good at transferring heat. It's actually an issue in things like heat treatments, things like blood dissipate local heat pretty effectively, especially near large arteries and the like.
Neat question, since it seems that contact burns are actually fairly common. From what i found, that's because things like outside wires often do form large conducting paths that are nice for eddy currents, and are also fairly thermally isolated (being in air) | db3bc21a-17b8-4761-ba2d-4fbab5625c27 |
c36jfm | Why do human teeth get infected and die off so easily? | Because we didn't evolve to eat so much sugar and sweetened processed food, which leads to tooth decay
also we didn't evolve to live to be 70 either, that's just a side effect of our many modern comforts we've invented. | d46faa77-1609-4746-a3e5-c84584d861aa |
c36ke2 | When it comes to pain, why is our initial reaction to grab/hold the affected area despite the possibility of causing more pain? | There's a theory that the mechanoreceptors (pressure receptors) can overpower the nociceptors (pain receptors) in your skin. Hence the scientific fact that we all want someone to give kissy kissies our boo boos wah wahs. | 8ba3473a-ca8b-46a8-8267-b724b988baf5 |
c36nfn | What exactly is a Ddos attack, why is it dangerous, and how does it work? | It’s like if you wanted to play a prank on your teacher so you got everyone in your class to call your teacher’s phone number at the same time so that they wouldn’t be able to use their phone for anything else for the time being.
It’s dangerous because then they might miss out on some important phone calls.
It works by infecting other computers (phones) with malware that makes them call the “phone number” unwillingly. That’s where the first ‘d’ comes from—distributed denial of service attack, as in the sources of the “calls” are distributed/spread out. An ordinary denial of service attack would just use one “phone” | 145de52e-f86e-4d90-a253-861dd2e3ea4b |
c36nke | why is leap year a thing? | A year is one revolution of the earth around the sun. That takes 365.25 days. Because you can't put .25 of a day on the calender, one day gets added every for years. That day is Leap Day and the whole year is referred to as a leap year | 9b10e670-f496-4cdf-9269-10df4257dee7 |
c36p3p | Why is the last name "Smith" so common? | Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was once told that in certain cultures last names were frequently related to your job. The Smiths were the local blacksmiths, the Bakers were the local bakers, the Potter's were pottery makers, etc.
And that is why these names are fairly common even if they aren't all related. | a530a94d-0a90-40bb-95bf-79ca56c570c7 |
c36y0s | Why isn’t overpopulation a hot-button political issue/household word? Is it actually not as big a deal as movies and books would claim? | It used to be a bigger issue. But the rate of global population growth has been declining for fifty years. It is half of what it was in 1963. Also, predictions made decades ago about what would happen when world reached certain population levels (mass starvation, etc.) have not come true - mostly because agricultural productivity has grown much faster than the demand for food. | ae77db0a-34fd-4b11-8400-80e1a6531010 |
c379va | How do we know it takes plastic hundreds of years to decompose when it has only been around since last century? | We can track its decomposition, calculate the speed it’s decomposing at, and extrapolate how long it will take until there is nothing left. | 1ca24ddf-e6b9-478e-bb16-5bffec428452 |
c37c12 | Why does the word "hour" get get an "an" in front of it instead of an "a" . I thought "an" was used before a vowel? | Whether or not you say “an” or “a” is determined by the sound of the first letter not the letter itself. In “hour” it makes an “o” sound so the correct thing to say would be “an”. | e74b53b2-c558-465d-afc9-b07299f60991 |
c37gt3 | The difference betweens cars that are V4, V6, V8, etc. | V is the layout style. the number is the # of cylinders. V means that the cylinders form a V shape with equal number on both sides of the V in pairs of 2. the other common engine designs is the inline "l" where all cylinders are vertical in a line. the flat/boxer "h" where all cylinders are mounted horizontally towards each other in pairs of 2, or the "W" which uses two rows of "V" that is used in designs with larger number of cylinders, ie 8/12 cylinders. each design has it's tradeoffs and advantages. | 0d113d51-6cbf-4347-9b8a-7191af675e53 |
c37ub7 | why can’t one device connect to two Bluetooth devices at once? Could this be made possible in the future? | My iPhone constantly connects to my Apple Watch and my Bluetooth headphones at the same time. | 4c92ae7e-7fe7-414b-9860-6dd87adb291e |
c38c1k | How does the stomach let fluids through without the stomach acid flowing out with it | It doesn’t. The stomach’s digestive secretions pass into the intestines with whatever food / fluids you’ve ingested. This usually takes about 2 hours for fluids and 6 for solid food.
As someone else has already said, the acids are then neutralised by secretions from other organs | ba3b1447-5388-4718-9d6e-c943139cd90c |
c38fvw | Bayesian Optimization | In machine learning, there are parameters which are the weights and biases and hyperparameters which are the number of nodes in each layer and how many layers. Bayesian Optimization is when an external function, meaning it exists outside of the neural network, initially assigns random values for the hyperparameters and sees the resulting accuracies. The function remembers the values assigned and the accuracy of the neural network and looks to see what gives the best possible result. The function continues to hone in on the best possible accuracy given some condition from the programmer, resulting in a satisfactory neural network that suits the programmer's needs. | d79373a8-f023-4fa0-8914-7920064b8efc |
c38q1p | When organizations do those “ run for the cure“ cancer run fundraisers aimed at finding the cure to different types of cancers, where does that money go? | Research is inherently expensive - you need to buy expensive scientific equipment as well as pay specialist scientists to work on potential routes to a cure, most of which will not be successful. The money raised is usually donated to a charity, who will spend it in different ways. Some will spend it on hospice care (ie, making life easier for people afflicted with cancer) but others will combine that money with other charities raising money and then fund research.
Usually what might happen is that a company or more likely, a university or research hospital, will submit a proposal to whoever has the money. in the proposal, they will describe what they want to research (or continue to research) and why/how it will help find the cure to cancer. These proposals are evaluated by cancer specialists who work for the charity/whoever has the money. if the proposal is deemed to have merit, they will give them some money (say, 300,000 USD). the same proposal can be sent to numerous charities/research grant providers. This money is all pooled (so in the end, they might have a 2,000,000 USD), and is used to pay the salary of the researchers, the consumables for research (test tubes arent free!), utilities, adminstrative costs etc.
Usually, every year whoever is doing the research needs to present their findings to whoever provided the cash, and prove that the money is being put to good use. If they agree it is, the next years funding is released. otherwise, the river runs dry.
& #x200B;
The nature of research is that most of the research that takes place will not result in anything useful, or only marginally useful. But, it helps to build the overall knowledge on cancer, so that research might be used by other researchers in future, who might *actually* find the cure. This is why research takes so long, is so expensive, is usually not productive, but nonetheless must still be financed. | c819f99f-2da6-49ee-a837-1b6ff555cf8c |
c38yrv | why is rainbow curved? | Rainbows are actually circular, you just usually don't see the lower part of them because the ground is in the way.
You know how a prism can split up light into a spectrum?
The same thing can happen with a rain drop. If you have lots and lots of water drops in the air for some reason their combined effects is such that you get the optical illusion of a rainbow circle with its theoretical center being in the opposite direction of the sun from your head. | ee5501f7-26a2-475d-aaaf-745235a68e93 |
c38zlc | What is happening when you get the spins? | To expand on the other answer, there are complex interactions in the brain between the input form your senses. In this case, the interaction is between your sense of balance (from your inner ear), your vision, and proprioception (your sense of where the parts of your body are in space). These interactions let you know that if you, say, move your head, that the world isn't moving, or if you move your eyes, your head isn't moving. If something throws those processes off in the brain or nerves, such as inflammation from an infection or drinking, then voila, it seems like your head is spinning or your eyes are moving when they're not. | 9b1f41d1-0b98-40c5-a8c2-8b49e0dc6334 |
c3967a | Where are expirement results posted to? | What you are talking about bugs me to no end. Most of the time those news articles fail to capture all the nuances.
They are published on scientific journals like Nature. Use Google Scholar to search for information instead of just Google to find what you are looking for. | 562da823-4021-4271-8a56-995e08eab8a8 |
c398rz | how do we know when our bodies are burning fat? Is it when we’re hungry and our tummies have the rumblies? | We don't "know" ourselves. Hunger doesn't necessarily mean we're burning fat, it just means our stomachs are empty. We will first use up other resources, like ketones, and then we'll move on to fat burning, but that will be some time after we start to feel hungry, generally speaking. | 5419a983-7b1a-47b6-b5df-891babc9c30e |
c39gs5 | Why does frozen food taste different to fresh? | When water freezes it takes more space than when it’s liquid.
Most food is composed of living cells. These cells are filled mainly with water.
When the food is frozen, some cells are damaged because they are stretched out due to the water inside them freezing.
This causes the food to be a little different and can sometimes change slightly the taste of certain foods. | 828b7c18-e7be-40dc-ac91-6e7755d81f3b |
c39j7n | Why can birds stand freely on the train’s electric wires, while a human can start an electric just by standing close to any. | Electricity likes to travel along the easiest possible path (like a really good conductor of electricity) to its target.
When the bird stands on the wire, the electricity would much rather continue traveling along the cables (which conducts well) than take a detour up one of the bird’s leg, through its body and down the other.
When a human touches the wires, the electricity decides that it takes much less effort to go through the human straight to the earth where it’s journey ‘ends’, rather than continue along the long cables.
That’s as ELI5 as I can phrase things! | ccaed08c-f498-4f35-ba44-55c1c8cc51e9 |
c39mw9 | What are the main arguments of holocaust deniers? | Arguments?
They mostly just say it was propaganda to make the nazis appear evil, and/or claim that it was much smaller than it was.
It's not really about bringing up own arguments but rather calling every proof for it fabricated. | 86b724fd-b4e3-4b84-9b0b-765185e4ed66 |
c39pg5 | How does your lip differ from your face or your skin, and why? | They still have all the layers of skin, but the outermost layer is thinner. Lips also have no sebaceous glands, so saliva is the only natural way to moisten lips. And lastly, lips have no melanin, so the color you see is from blood vessels. | 54ff50d7-bb0b-45f4-95e5-66f0988c0865 |
c39zht | Why does gold run in veins? All heavy metals like this come from supernovas. Why would they concentrate in some position when they eventually make it to Earth? | It's not like gold is formed in a supernova or some other celestial process and then slowly makes its way to an already existing Earth. What happens is that billions and billions and billions of years ago, certain elements were formed in supernova and widely dispersed. These elements ended up intermixed in giant clouds of mostly hydrogen gas, which coalesced into a rotating disk of matter, which further coalesced into our sun at its center and lots of dust and small rocky objects orbiting what would become the sun. Over millennia, the smaller rocky objects, some of which contained gold, coalesced into larger and larger objects. The heat of the collisions of these bodies melted them, and heavier elements tended to clumped together, and some of it sunk toward the interior of the molten ball of Rock. Plate tectonics, subduction, and volcanism, provided ongoing mixing and melting of these materials. Gold tended to clump together since it was denser than most of the surrounding materials, and as it cooled, it did so in clumps, or veins. In mountain forming regions, these veins and the surrounding rock was pushed up into the spots we find it today. This is an ongoing process, but it happens on geological time scales.
/edited for typos | 3798e8c5-1c7c-44fc-a879-eb2e56add3a5 |
c3a7py | Does higher population lead to better technology or does better technology lead to higher population? | There’s no straightforward relationship here.
Better technology for healthcare, production and distribution of food, etc. will generally increase population growth. Provided people actually have access to them. For example, some of the best maternal healthcare in the world is available in the US, but the US has comparatively poor infant mortality partly because so many people don’t have access to it.
On the other hand, better technology for birth control generally decreases population growth. Again, provided people have access to it.
Lots of other technology has little impact, or very complicated impacts.
In the same way, a larger population means more people to do science and technology. But that's not going to happen without a good education system, universities, R & D labs, etc.. | 2e8fcd87-697e-41ca-8fb2-f9d1d110d355 |
c3ac83 | If lightning is drawn to metal and the tallest objects in a given area, why doesn’t it always strike airplanes? | It does often strike airplanes. Lightning is trying to find the best path to go from a negative area to a positive area (charge wise). Generally the earth is a big positive area so it likes to go down.
It finds air hard to travel through (and metal easy to travel through) so it finds something else to crawl down to get there.
There can exist positive areas in clouds and a bunch of lightning does go from cloud to cloud.
Airplanes tend to try to avoid being in thunderstorms though, thats more so the reason that lightning doesn’t always hit planes, because the planes aren’t there often. | 838dbdb5-3690-4d38-bfe9-015059d13d41 |
c3aqiv | How is the universe infinite? | Think of the observable universe as a bubble. With you in the very center.
We can only see to the edge of the bubble which keeps getting further away due to the speed of light only having so long to reach us since the universe began.
But, just because we can only see to the edge of the bubble from our place does not mean that somewhere outside the bubble there is no other place with it's own view of the infinite space outside our bubble. | edfa4cda-fa3e-4060-ac84-47acbf752fb9 |
c3auf8 | How does the tide increase/decrease the water level when the net amount of water stays the same? | The moon's gravity causes the tide rise and fall. As it move around the earth it pushes and pulls the water. The pushing effect, or high tide, is just water displacement. The earth ocean is usually in the shape of an oval figuratively speaking. | 3bf0cc7c-3a5b-4b14-9911-099af9903d3d |
c3b69r | what is the afternoon crash? | I went to a sleep specialist and he told be people have two times during a 24hr period when your body tries to shut down and rest. ~10pm and 2pm. Nothing you can do about it, although having a 30min nap helps because you go through a complete sleep cycle including deep sleep and you'll wake up refreshed. | 2ee0759c-49bc-4489-84ab-682e7bfc68a8 |
c3ba5o | What makes apple juice able to be stored without refrigeration before opening, while orange juice must stay refrigerated? | Marketing!!
These other posers talking out their ass about pasteurization and safety process aren't "wrong" they just are well, totally wrong about why its done, as nearly all juices are pasteurized and shelf stable in the right packaging as just the normal process for making and storing juice, doesn't matter the juice type, apple/orange/pineapple, whatever
So just **marketing**! Juices and items kept cold in the "cold" section of markets are viewed as higher quality products (and and can sell for more and are perceived to be "fresh" (even if they are not!). Next time you go to the store, you'll notice there will be some high priced apple juice in that area too. Perception is exceptionally important when a customer walks down an aisle in the supermarket, you want your item perceived as a high quality item.
When juice is containerized/stored in sealed plastic or specialized containers for resale, these are quite shelf stable and need not be refrigerated!
There is apple juice out of the cold area because most apple juice is insanely cheap to make, and they offer the product at a lower price point--- so as a retailer and producer, you don't want a low price product taking up space in the "high price" cold area, so you put the cheap apple juice on the regular shelf, and the "expensive" juices in the cold section | f2876c01-b877-4754-8bea-6828f68d4953 |
c3bdvk | If the meteors are disintegrated as they enter the atmosphere, how can spacecrafts get in and out of the atmosphere? | Meteors disintegrate because they enter the atmosphere with such high speeds that the friction from passing through the air heats it up enough to vaporize the rock itself.
Spacecraft get out of our atmosphere because they are going slow enough that they don't really have to worry about getting superheated, however they have special insulation to protect from any heat generated ad well.
Finally on reentry their goal is to enter slow enough that they don't disintegrate, as such they enter with the flat and largest part of the spacecraft or reentry module hitting the atmosphere to give it as much drag as possible to try and slow it down. On the bottom is a thick plate of ceramic insulators which don't conduct heat so that they can heat up without passing it to the rest of the module. Once the module has gone down far enough and is travelling slow enough it uses some low powered rockets to slow it down even more until it reaches a certain altitude where parachutes are engaged which allow it to "safely" fall down to the earth. Some reentry modules, like the NASA shuttle program, was shaped like a plane such that when it was travelling slow enough they could changer their angle and basically just glide down onto a runway safely such that we didn't have to fly out into the ocean to find where the module is floating because its safer to land the module in the ocean and let it float over landing on land.
This is simplified remember. | 26aa813d-70c0-4f8f-a21f-b9dd240c7702 |
c3bh9f | Why do you imagine hearing a sound from a purely visual stimulus? | Your brain stores data in a really fascinating way. Everything stored inside your brain is not just for example a simple block, its a small part of a puzzle. Every little piece has connections with other pieces (that is different data inside your head) and because you are used to hearing a "thud" each time something pounds to the ground, your brain simulates that sound. | fdb33037-e879-43f7-85ec-2ba860cb62f9 |
c3bqq9 | Why do fans make rooms colder? Wouldn’t faster moving air molecules make a room warmer? | They don't, but they allow more air to come in contact with skin, otherwise there will be some warmer air that sits around your skin as it was warmed by your body heat and can't escape immediately. | 3a474398-2fca-4928-af6d-930a33440c75 |
c3bqxm | Why are (in some countries) sexual activities allowed from the age of 15 but watching pornography is from the age of 18? | One part prudishness, one part child safety. Without some form of government-mandated rating system for pornography, softcore porn and tentacle rape scat fetish porn are basically all the same. You can definitely argue that a developing mind is not going to be harmed by watching some porn, however there's a lot of messed up stuff out there as well that could be harmful to children. As a result, it's a one size fits all approach.
Why not for sex? One part "teenagers are gonna do it anyways" (which, teenagers are gonna look at porn too, but keep in mind that the internet is still new in the context of the law), one part it being easier to regulate a product than it is the behavior of two consenting individuals. | 556e2148-338d-4447-bd6d-a29ff298c7ef |
c3bvm4 | How do sound - cancelling headphones work? | They have a microphone that picks up sounds external to the headphones. They then calculate the inverse waveform and play it as close to the same timeframe as they can manage. The two waveforms cancel each other out, resulting in silence. The ‘pressure’ sensation is due to the minute differences in time between the real and calculated waveforms. | 4819b9dc-83ed-4931-b8e3-16c2db37d1d8 |
c3cjiu | Why is it rude to ask how much someone’s salary is? | Companies don't want their employees talking about how much they make amongst one another so they can negotiate wages rather than giving specified pay per position. That kind of drilled in mindset primarily to the benefit of employers has made discussing wages a faux pas culturally. There should be more discussion about compensation to ensure that compensation is education and experience based to leave less opportunity for employees to be low balled or over compensansated. | c140da47-16be-45ad-bf72-f166d194fe88 |
c3crr7 | how does a device know what to play for AR? Like those business cards that start playing when you point a camera at it... | The card has a machine-readable address pointing to somewhere on the internet. That address contains all the information required to display whatever is supposed to be on the card, and the reading phone needs to download it through its data connection. | 5b8aad11-0a43-43fa-8c16-d4e4c636c059 |
c3dli0 | On some websites it says that Venus is hotter than Mercury because it has an atmosphere, however where does that heat energy transfer to if space is a vacuum? | Planets can also emit excess heat through *radiation,* typically by emitting infrared light. | ec59ea9c-317f-4e97-af3b-3a322effaaf0 |
c3dm3r | Why is lead used to protect yourself from radiation | Imagine holding a flash light next to tissue paper, and then same light through a wall. Notice some light goes through in tissue but nothing in wall? Basically gamma radiation (most dangerous) can go through a lot of things like a light through tissue.but lead or other heavy materials are too dense and no gamma particles go through to hurt us. Different radiation has different penetration abilities, alpha can not pass skin, beta bare through a few layers of the body, and gamma goes through as if the human didnt even get in it's way and it will destroy our precious DNA. | 4e91b536-c3df-45d2-90e1-b2e50db55971 |
c3e17h | How Does a Town's Water Supply Become Decontaminated of E Coli? | There's two major category of tests that are done for water safety.
The first tests what is called the microbial quality. This is a measure of the total number of microorganisms (although really only those that grow under certain conditions). Water always has *some* microroganisms in it, which doesn't mean it's unsafe.
The other category tests for signs of animal fecal contamination. The proxy for this is *E. coli*. *E. coli* does not grow "in the wild" for the most part. If it's in water, it is presumed to have come from animal waste (this isn't necessarily scientifically true, but it is how we base our water quality policy). The problem is the features which distinguish *E. coli* from "wild-growing" bacteria are somewhat subtle, so the classic test relies on the ability of the bacteria to grow in bile. Health departments will usually issue a boil order anytime something meets certain conditions (basically: Gram negative rods that grow in bile). This is presumed to be positive for fecal contamination and *E. coli*, even though this is not actually a positive ID of *E. coli*. (A positive ID typically involves a DNA test, but it is bad policy to wait for these results).
Interestingly, the vast majority of *E. coli* you might encounter from animal feces is quite harmless to humans when found in the water supply, mainly because there's just so little of it even after "substantial" contamination. It is just very uncommon for someone to actually get sick *from E. coli* from contaminated water. The *E. coli* is instead a proxy for much more dangerous animal gut microorganisms.
But, yea, it's from feces. Decontamination is some combination of identifying the source of contamination and treating the water. if the contamination occurs after processing, then it's a simple matter of stopping the contamination and letting the water run the contamination out. The volume of water is huge, and *E. coli* and other gut contaminants don't last in the supply for long without a constant new source.
I taught microbiology to college students, and we always replicated these water quality tests. They fortunately always came back clean for tap water in our area! | 974e2d91-35ff-44a5-8ba4-a9f5da77dd75 |
c3e1de | Why dont British people ever complain about the royal family being a waste of tax dollars? | Here is a lovely YouTube video by cpg grey from a few years ago that I found helpfully and entertaining about this subject less than 10min
"The true cost of the royal family explained"
_URL_0_
Thanks hope that helps | 993c4103-abfd-4f7a-9cc9-a275717a81a7 |
c3e8zx | How does an international debit/credit transaction work? | There are 5 parties in any card transaction: the purchaser, the issuing bank (the bank who issues the purchasers card), the payment network (Visa, MasterCard, etc.), the merchant's bank, and the merchant.
The merchant and the purchaser approve the transaction.
The point-of-sale system, using the payment network, sends a request for money to the issuing bank.
The issuing bank then sends money to the acquiring bank. The banks take care of any currency conversion and the issuing bank decides on the exchange rate/fees | 0db49820-0fed-44ef-bd71-96c9977a6d8d |
c3ee5b | Why a wobbling ceiling fan never balances itself | It wobbles because it is out of balance. That won't change without human intervention. You can tape a penny to the top of a blade to fix it. Some trial & error will be needed. | 4dcf29c1-6e57-4217-a06f-d99af72f7f34 |
c3eflj | How does CPU cache mapping works? | There are varying different levels of associativity, but on the extremes are direct and fully associated. Direct cache requires the address space of the cache directly map the address of the real device. This is faster and less complex, but the cache is fixed to that direct address space.
Fully associated on the other hand, allows you to map each word of memory to a space in the cache. This is slower and more unwieldy, but allows you (or a cache controller) to cache exactly the memory you need. | bf1018b8-ff0f-4030-a3bf-1f07a57352d7 |
c3eh5x | Where does dust come from and what is it's purpose in nature? | Dust is very fine particles of things that decompose... inside homes, much of it is skin cells. It's also dead, dried plant material, rocks and minerals, etc. anything that can be broken down small enough to become airborn. It doesn't necessarily serve a purpose, it's just a byproduct | f70e9c78-41ab-434a-8edf-3339fb0c085d |
c3ekv9 | What does the (United States) government do with all of the drugs it confiscates? | It's destroyed in a trash incinerator. Exactly when and where this occurs changes frequently and is fairly secret, and there are a lot of monitoring steps in place to make sure none of it goes missing. | 380e524f-f405-4ea6-913d-aa8fa8ddbfed |
c3f5cy | Why doesn’t the penis get stretch marks? | There’s enough skin to accommodate the penis at its fully erect state. That’s why flaccid penises look all wrinkly and smooshed. | 68becc13-cf78-4533-b486-3016368210bf |
c3fbbt | How did Berlin work post WW2? | Okay, so we're gonna have to make a discourse into post-WW2 Germany here. Bear with me this might get a little bit longer.
Germany was occupied in 1945 and controlled by the 4 allied forces - UK, US, France and the USSR. For a while they got along until the USSR basically said *"fuck this"* and started doing their own thing. Thus, in 1949, East Germany was created. Berlin was split in half, with one part going to East Germany and the other part going to West Germany.
But already before that, starting in 1948, the USSR did a blockade on West Berlin, not allowing anything in or out. This lead the US to supply it by air. See [Raisin Bombers](_URL_1_) and [the Berlin blockade](_URL_0_) for that. This was a huge success and worked and there were enough supplies. So eventually the USSR gave up. For the most part after that West Berlin was supplied by rail and by truck convoys.
Fast forward: the East was poorer than than West and basically had worse conditions of living all around, That caused a lot of people to move from East Germany to West Germany. This included people living in East Berlin to work in West Berlin. This was very much to the discontent of the Soviet-backed East German dictatorship. And in 1961 they decided to just build a wall around West Berlin to separate it. What is known little is that the regular border between East and West Germany was also heavily guarded with walls, fences, automatic weapons, watch towers, and other terrible things. Moving obviously needed a permit which was rarely ever given out. Leaving people only with fleeing which was drastically complicated with such measures. People still tried and those who did were either killed or imprisoned as traitors.
Fast forward again: in 1989 the Berlin Wall was basically torn down and the borders opened. Some time after that East Germany became part of the West.
During all that time West Berlin citizens were regular citizens of West Germany. To my knowledge they weren't exactly special. They had a few difficulties for sure but it was sovereign from the East and to my knowledge people there could live a pretty normal life. | b2a4438b-d5c2-4f13-ae04-e9d367c73ffd |
c3fbpt | what does a surveyors camera do? | It’s not a camera- it’s called a theodolite. When you look through it, it’s like using a protractor to measure the angles and elevations of the terrain | 8cc71b76-039e-4966-8bbf-e608497cee7b |
c3fc9k | with slow internet, why do ads load without fail but content is stagnant? | Because ads are stored on seperate special servers, requiring less time to load and search for the video ID. Source- a post from a few days ago where this same question was asked. | 4957cb9b-fa9b-4617-b69c-42d0f5c4f89b |
c3flt0 | Why sleeping too much makes us feel even more tired? | You can think of the body having two states, a state of being awake and a state of being asleep. It can be hard to fall asleep at night because your body has been in awake mode all day. It’s hard to wake up in the morning because you’re body has been in sleep mode for the past couple hours, so sleeping for long periods only makes it harder for the body to transition. | 9f4a540e-c6a3-435f-9a7b-d8414a57fda2 |
c3g0jx | There are tons of British actors playing American characters in popular movies but you rarely see Americans playing British characters, why is that? | For the accents:
American people in general are not greatly exposed to British media. That means, Americans aren’t often exposed to the full gamut of British accents (there are thousands). So, when Americans try to imitate British accents it ends up sounding like a butchered parody of Received Pronunciation and Cockney, accents not many people actually have.
British people, on the other hand, are massively exposed to American media, and with it the full gamut of American accents. Maybe not Appalachian or Minnesota dialects, but “General American” is something we hear absolutely all the time.
It makes sense then that a trained British actor has some semblance of being able to do a convincing “General American” accent. Even if it’s not that true to a specific region. Many British actors like Hugh Laurie, Kate Winslet and Benedict Cumberbatch have been so convincing that Americans don’t believe that they’re British.
When unexposed American actors try to do a “general British” accent, it sounds so bad and gets the nuances completely wrong.
Also, just physically speaking, with phonetics, British accents use more sounds than American accents. We use more front vowels, we don’t talk at the back of our throat. That means our vocal apparatus is better set up for physically learning the sounds required to do American accents. Especially British actors who more often than not have been taking elocution lessons in tandem with their training since they were teenagers. They have very very astutely trained voices.
Because Americans necessarily have to train muscles that don’t get used in their natural speech, it’s far harder for Americans to physically learn to talk in a British accent. It’s very hard for adults to learn to pronounce new sounds.
That’s not to say it can’t be done, some American actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Renee Zellweger have managed to do a very convincing job. But, they had to get elocution lessons from a British person to achieve it.
Addendum: A non-native speaker of English on Quora once described Americans as “speaking with a potato in their mouth”. I thought that was hilarious, and since reading that I’ve not been able to un-hear it. You really *do* have a potato in your mouth. | dfd08787-6108-43ca-a9fb-78281444ce7a |
c3g3tx | when resting or going to sleep, why does it feel like bliss when you switch positions, but then a minute later it is uncomfortable again? | It’s about the structure of your skeleton, and blood circulation.
Your legs and feet are really good at carrying the weight of your torso. And they’re built to handle that weight, and also prevent blood from pooling down there because of gravity.
When you lay down, some part of your body other than your legs is taking the weight of your torso. That means it’s getting squeezed, maybe put in an awkward position, and you might be constricting the blood flow to that area. (Blood pooling isn’t really an issue, because when you’re laying down, your heart isn’t as far above other body parts as when you’re standing.)
But some part of your body is still taking a lot more weight when you’re laying down, depending on the position. Eventually, fatigue, or inadequate blood-flow, will set in. So, it also feels amazing when that pressure gets relieved after a while.
This is also why people tend to change positions every 60-90 minutes when they’re sleeping. It’s a deep instinct, so you don’t accidentally pinch a major blood vessel in your arm for 8 hours, and then wake up with a dead finger or something. | 3d3a015b-36d6-4e7a-921e-24e0e07f66c2 |
c3g8o5 | Why are Beds elevated off the floor? | It's easier to get in and out of a bed which is around 18-24 inches high. While getting out, you want to turn to get your legs off and get your feet on the ground and then be able to stand up while getting out of a chair. But you don't want it too high, or it is too much effort when climbing into bed.
If you are young and fit, it doesn't matter too much. Ideal bed height becomes more important when you get older. | 3f697f00-bc7f-492c-9545-d2dee86580dc |
c3gcts | how does a particle accelerator work and what is its purpose? | According to our best laws of physics, the fundamental building blocks of Nature are not discrete particles, but continuous fluid-like substances, spread throughout all of space. We call these objects *fields*.
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The most familiar examples of fields are the electric and magnetic field. The ripples in these fields give rise to what we call light or, more generally, electromagnetic waves.
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A slightly more technical explanation of a field is that every infinitesimal point in space has a number value, per field, and there are many overlapping fields. A field might interact with adjacent fields it overlaps with, it might not. There is also a quark field, a gluon field, an electron field, and a Higgs field. For example, light doesn't interact with the Higgs field, so it doesn't have mass. There are others, but my understanding of fields is layman.
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So, if you concentrate enough energy in a small enough region of space, you're putting a big number value in a field - that's what energy \*is\*. If you concentrate enough of this, those values will grow big enough that a physical particle will pop into existence. You see illustrations of this with 3D graphs that have a big bump in it, like a peak in a blanket.
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And that's what matter is, it's energy in a field that's big enough and stable enough to make a particle. That's why matter and energy are interchangable, because matter is made out of energy in a field.
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So, what do particle accelerators do? There are definite speed limits to the universe. You can't move matter as fast as light, but you can get close. Another curious thing about that, is just because you can't go faster, doesn't mean you can't push harder. What happens at that point is the energy in the field \*grows\*. Instead of being a little energetic bump, you have a BIG energetic bump. You used to have a tennis ball under the blanket, now you have a flag pole. This makes matter HEAVER, more massive, because we're talking about what the fundamental concept of mass is.
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Remember how I said fields interact with each other? Well, we don't have good methods of interacting with some fields. They don't make protons, neutrons, or electrons - well, they CAN make particles, but they're not stable in nature, which is why they aren't part of our typical chemistry and science classes.
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So what we hope to do is concentrate SO MUCH energy in ONE PLACE that excess SPILLS over into an adjacent field. And hopefully, enough energy spills over that a particle pops into existence!
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And that's just what happens when we accelerate two particles, in opposite directions, to the point where they stop accelerating, and start getting more massive, then we collide them into each other, head on. The energy spills over into adjacent fields, particles pop into existence, and they do weird things. Because they have mass, because they interact with other fields, they have predictable behavior.
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We've been accelerating particles since the turn of the last century or so, and we've discovered all sorts of fields and the particles they make. We got all the low hanging fruit. The Standard Model had one big hole in it, though, the Higgs particle. We needed to build the LHC to accelerate particles enough to spill energy over into more distant fields, enough to finally make the damn thing pop into existence, and we did that pretty quickly after the LHC started colliding.
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Now days, they're colliding particles trying to get a finer understanding, at higher resolution than we've ever had before. No one is predicting new particles in the power range the LHC is capable of.
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But there's always the future, the unknown. New "wake field" accelerators are like turbo-chargers you can bolt onto the side of existing accelerators. The way we accelerate particles now is with magnetic fields from gigantic iron electromagnets and radio frequencies and some other science shit... And these new accelerators still rely on magnets. But you know what else is magnetic? Plasma. So fill a tube with super heated plasma ions, which conduct electricity and thus make a magnetic field. Then you shoot a beam of atoms into it. You time it right so you have two bundles. The first bundle is sacrificial, because the plasma will erode it away. But it'll make a wake, and behind it is a small pocket vacuum. In there you have a second bundle, not touching the plasma, but affected by the magnetic field. Remember, these particles are already moving as fast as possible, they're just getting more massive.
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Somehow, these things impart much more energy into the bundle, and we'll be colliding at way higher energy levels. Let's see what we find.
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And these new energy levels of these future accelerators still utterly pale in comparison to some of the cosmic rays that slam right through our entire planet like we're literally not even there. | db19a4da-88d0-4558-8606-9d472ed16965 |
c3gd6j | Does being able to function well mentally while you're high make you better able to function well when you're not? | No. Many people take cannabis so they can function better mentally, it’s not a boost, it’s a correction. | 77528729-cb07-4112-bc8a-5445c5f1d18e |
c3gdl2 | What is the difference between 3rd and 4th wave feminism? | Super short version?
1st Wave focused on enfranchisement (the vote)
2nd wave on equality (workplace rules, legal independence, etc)
3rd wave on empowerment (sexual freedoms, personal autonomy)
And the 4th wave on intersectionality (how are all of the above also impacted by things like race, religion, class, ability, etc) | 66baddfa-13b1-4b67-a3c1-95a9b05175eb |
c3ge3i | What is it that a step up transformer does to increase voltage? (please correct me if I'm wrong) | Think of it like the electromagnetic equivalent of a gear ratio. Two gears of different sizes will rotate at different speeds when connected. Anyone who has ridden a bike or driven a car understands this.
If you place a few coils carrying low voltage as the input, near *many more* coils of the output wire, that will induce a higher voltage in the output.
Here come the numbers: Let’s say we want to build a step-up transformer. You wrap the input wire around the core 5 times. On the other side of the core, you wrap the output wire 20 times. (The core is basically 2 bars very close to each other.) The ratio is 1:4. To make the math easy, our input is 100 volts, 10 amps, 1,000 watts. In that case, the output will be 400 volts, 2.5 amps, and still 1,000 watts. (If you ignore resistance, Volts * Amps = Watts)
So, it doesn’t violate conservation of energy because it has less current in the output (lower Amps), and the power (watts) remains the same.
Edit: An important detail: Most transformers do this process several times inside one machine. So it’s not just two bars with coils on them, it’s like 50 sets of two bars, wired to one another. So the transformers you see on the street are more like 50 transformers wired together, each one multiplying the voltage from the one before it.
Tl;dr: Step-up transformers are trading amps for volts, maintaining the same wattage. | 4125661f-3f90-4110-9383-3aa5b55d8621 |
c3ghjb | What stops your heart from getting enlarged from exercise? | The heart muscle responds to the type of load to which it's exposed.
If you have high blood pressure, that means it has to pump out against that high pressure. **Afterload** is the force against which the heart has to pump. Increased afterload is bad for the heart, it will cause the muscles to thicken and take over much of the space inside the heart that's used to pump. The thickness will also make it much more difficult to get blood flow through the heart muscle itself which can result in heart attack.
If you have a defect in the heart valves or in the muscle itself, such as regurgitation of a valve (blood flowing backwards through the valve), it can result in excessive amounts of blood in the heart that gets pumped with every beat. This causes the walls to stretch. **Preload** is the amount of blood that fills the ventricles before contraction. Increased preload in isolation like this is bad for the heart, it will cause the walls to stretch, become weak and stiff, and not pump adequately which can result in heart failure.
The trick with exercise is that **contractility** of the muscle is increased in addition to the increased preload caused by vasoconstriction of large veins that hold most of the blood during rest (squeezing more blood into the heart, increasing preload) and the afterload is decreased by vasodilation of the arteries that feed the muscles. The result is your heart squeezes harder than normal, with more blood than normal. Raising your blood pressure with volume instead of resistance. This is the perfect mix, the physiological exercise that the heart desires and the muscles will respond by making this action more efficient and powerful. Increasing the strength and capacity of the heart so it doesn't have to beat as much to fill your muscles with blood. The heart will get a bit larger, but in a healthy way.
If you have isolated changes in preload or afterload in absence of the sympathetic signaling that causes all those changes mentioned above in the exercise section, your heart muscle will be remodeled but not physiologically, it will lead to problems like heart attack or failure.
I guess not really ELI5, but the heart is an extremely complex organ. Cardiologists spend decades learning about it and still we don't fully understand all of the interactions with the body's various systems. If you have further questions please feel free to ask :P | 508225a7-52d6-49f1-a154-b23293a01c82 |
c3glew | What physically happens to your brain high on marijuana | Your brain is filled with little sockets, called receptors, that certain chemicals can fit into. Think of it like legos. There are different types, and only certain chemicals can fit into certain receptors. If you try to fit a dopamine molecule into a serotonin receptor, it won't work, much like trying to use duplo blocks with normal legos. But, often times there are chemicals that can still fit into the receptor, even though they aren't exactly the same. Think of it like the Tyco blocks, they still fit the brand-name legos, even though they weren't made by lego.
Your brain has a specific set of receptors called the cannibinoid receptors. These primarily work with a specific chemical produced in the body called anandamide. This chemical/receptor combination regulates a number of brain/body functions notably, the ability to feel pleasure, the hunger response, and the body's motivation/reward system.
Cannabis contains a number of different chemicals that can fit into those receptors, primarily THC. However, even though they fit, they fit just a little differently from natural anandamide and cause the receptors to function a little differently, increasing pleasure and creating the bodily sensations associated with being high. | 5fe9ae33-d14a-4b53-8d64-7994417414dc |
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