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23gtr7 | Why does 76 F/24 C with the heat running feel different from the same temperature with air conditioning? | There are lots of things going on with how you think a temperature feels but the basic idea is that we don't really sense the absolute temperature. We sense differences in temperature.
The simplest way to see that is being outside on a hot day vs. coming inside from a cold day. When you come in from a hot day you sense a large drop in temperature so it feels cold. If you come in from a hot day you sense a large increase in temperature so it feels hot.
If that doesn't cover a case you are thinking of let me know and I can add more complications. | b4413124-64ca-468c-944a-080318ec243e |
5deezo | How does sleep restore energy and what causes your brain to signal you to become exhausted? | Sleep doesn't really restore energy, your body is actually kind of tricking you into resting by producing chemicals that make you feel exhausted.
Make no mistake, you need sleep to avoid long term damage to most of your systems; feeling tired is an illusion though. | f0e80544-a853-4575-b3c4-024681f27dde |
2jx1to | Why do some companies have different names for different countries? Like Lynx/Axe or Asda/Walmart | In the case of Asda/Walmart, Asda was already an established chain of stores - Walmart buys it to a) gain presence in the UK where it has none... and quickly b) instantly gain Asda's customer loyalty and logistics (instead of establishing its own stores, its own infrastructure and THEN trying to win customers over. Once you've bought it, you don't want to immediately change the name, because that might confuse existing customers. Or indeed, if you're making money, why bother changing it? (in Europe, the Walmart brand might even have negative "cheap American schlock" connotations)
In the case of Lynx/Axe, those are brand/tradmark issues. Essentially Unilever (the company) couldn't register Axe as a trademark in the UK so they had to call it something else. Brand trademarks are a regional thing. (I couldn't find what company/product owns the "Axe" trademark in the UK) | ea4d26f4-14c0-4d36-bc4c-1d78bfd0f653 |
385tiv | How come people can use quotes in movies without citing the source and it's fine, but if you don't do it in writing it's plagiarism? | It depends on the type of writing. If you're writing a novel you can use quotes as see fit. In academic writing you need to cite anything that isn't your own original work which includes quote. | 4cc8adb2-d769-4630-a665-17552ff0c01c |
3vhqq8 | Why is there an obvious difference between girl and boy handwriting? | Handwriting style is formed during penmanship practice in grade-school homework assignments. Girls are not just more fastidious about their penmanship homework, they are notably more fastidious about all graded assignments in grade school than boys are. There are lots of different explanations for why this is... more obedient, stronger identification with their (usually female) teachers, more ability to focus on repetitive tasks for a long period of time... but I don't think it is conclusively known. | 4691c29a-be5f-4f0b-b0ad-96fe67f0f93e |
1r7y4v | How did we get from the "Golden Age" of Air Travel to the current state of air travel? | The golden age of air travel was also the golden age of family road trip vacations. The services were caused by minimum price regulations that placed a very high minimum price for a flight (a low priced flight across the country cost the equivalent of about $1500 today). Because it costs far less than $1500 to fly across the country, airlines competed for travellers by offering services.
When the regulations requiring very high minimum prices were removed, airlines began removing services and lowering prices to find that most people prefer lower prices to bundled services, so they deliver the services for which the most people will pay.
Edit: Corporate greed means selling the most profitable services for the most money. It's foolish and not greedy to cut services people want at prices higher than the cost of providing them. | d6cecd02-c122-4cc7-80d4-91e894102dc8 |
7zynj3 | How does sleep debt/build up work? | The first question to answer is, what is the point of sleep?
Among some other functions, the primary purpose of sleep is for the brain to enter into a maintenance mode. Think of it as that 2am hard drive defragging that runs when you wouldn't otherwise be on your computer. Instead of space reallocation, however, the brain's process is biochemical and serves to "wash and replenish" the brain's cellular machinery, something that can't happen when the individual is in a waking state. This process is both reactive (meaning it doesn't do any good to do it before there's a mess to clean) and rate limited (which means that it takes X amount of time to achieve Y results). As such, the normal waking/sleeping cycle maintains an equilibrium of building up a mess and cleaning it up.
You can't bank sleep. That would be similar to cleaning an already clean house for the sake of cleaning it and expecting any mess that you make in the future to come out of the extra work you did. It just doesn't work like that. | 485e9b0d-dda4-4643-8fd3-5b1c4d42bf4d |
1ohm3c | When you create a new object in Java, why do you have to say what kind of object it is and then repeat it as new? | Because you're first defining the object. You're telling the computer that 'Hey, there's a thing, and it looks like this.'
But that thing doesn't exist yet.
That's what the *new* keyword is for. You're allocating memory by telling the computer 'Hey, you remember that thing I told you about? Make room for one.'
E: Also, you should check out /r/learnprogramming | c2f3531d-b323-4c7f-8aa6-f9a2d0f56c0b |
2wsrtx | Myspace came first, but Facebook is more successful. What happened and why? | People thought Facebook was better, then everyone switched over almost at once. MySpace wasn't first either; before that there was something called Friendster, and before that I personally used something called AsianAvenue, which was social networking for Asians. Each time, everyone switched almost at once.
In fact, these switches happened with enough regularity that I'm sort of surprised that Facebook has held on for this long.
source: I'm an old fart. | 3ac57398-753b-43fb-b461-4a3dc64e76e3 |
8hh7tf | How come we can't change the volume of the voice in our head? | Because they are thoughts; it’s not a literal voice that is creating vibrations against our eardrums. | c09bc6c4-51ab-474b-b795-b85eec16b5f7 |
1pl1cw | Going along with the trash to energy question - Why arent we using the methane produced from decommissioned, sealed landfills as energy? | we are. some outfits do this already. however this is a SMALL SMALL portion of total power output of the nation. | cbae5251-63e7-4b15-a0f2-3a0508a743a6 |
1z262p | Why are states on the east coast so much smaller than the states on the west coast? | The states on the east coast were populated first (European population that is...). State lines (colony lines initially) were devised in various ways, but all dependent on much of the east coast being populated very early. In other words, there were lots of people clumped up into various areas on the east coast and they divided themselves into colonies and then states.
It took longer for Euro-Americans to go further west, and when they did the populations were very small at first. So the western territories were much larger areas, with very low populations, and many of those whole territories later became states.
That's actually the way it remains to this day. If you rank the states by population density, California is the only western state in the top half, and it's only #11. Little Rhode Island has almost four times the population density as California. | c3a7f4c8-497e-42d2-b441-17456f764ccc |
5srowe | How can gorillas and other herbavores get so big and muscular from a diet of essentially leaves and plants, while vegan humans tend to loose muscle mass on plant based diets? | Nobody here has addressed the genetic basis and control of muscle mass and buildup in response to testosterone levels. One reason for example that a male gorilla simply builds muscle easily is because their muscles do not atrophy as easily and "build" with much less limitation for little exercise. | 0764e244-7b0d-44d4-991d-4b90b87e6c65 |
271t1i | Why can't game streamers have music playing in their videos, but there are countless music videos and songs on youtube already? | If you post a Youtube video of somebody elses song, an advertisement will pop up on the video and the ad money would go to the artist/company, not you. So basically they are claiming your video as soon as it's posted to Youtube. A stream is harder to monitor like that considering it's live and the people who own the website where you stream probably don't want to get sued. lol | 9b363b05-2323-4ca0-9c01-8b1f5f01e410 |
4yzruu | Does the start/stop feature in modern cars actually save fuel or is it just a gimmick? | Modern cars with direct injection are very easy to start up. They require less RPM and are much more reliable than they used to, so it takes far less energy to start up the car, especially once it's already warmed up. This means that it only takes a couple of seconds of idling to be worth it, even though it's not very much.
Cars which come with start/stop also usually come with a more reliable and more powerful ignition system, which can last a lot more cycles. | 11f3271e-bc6d-4915-ab64-7bb7a9ba2406 |
5qnb0h | How come when we look at something bright, we can see the image burned into our eyelids when we close our eyes? | The way we see is that photons (light particles) from objects stimulate cells in the back of our eyes. This stimulation takes the form of light-sensitive molecules changing their shape as a photon hits them. When they are in this changed shape, they send a message to the brain saying "I'm activated", which the brain interprets as us seeing something.
Now, the fact that something is really bright means that it gives off a lot of photons, and thus it activates a lot of your cells. Now, it takes some time for the light-receiving molecules to fold back to their deactivated state; so if you look at a bright object and close your eyes, there is a time period where the molecules are still activated and sending messages to your brain, so your brain thinks you're still seeing the thing until all of the molecules deactivate. | b3a879eb-8fd6-4a53-8b37-5021068a0fe5 |
30cywr | why do we have (driving) wheels in four wheelers and (handle) bars on two wheelers only? | 4 wheel ATVs have handlebars and not steering wheels... so I'm confused by this question. | 19accd45-6e04-4bf6-86b0-d769c1714b51 |
5tvg5f | Why do some humans feel lonely, despite having people around them such as friends and family? | Having people around is not the same as connecting with them. Lonely is an emotional response; proximity is physical. | 1f19f6db-0010-46b1-b42e-69158e3960a2 |
5o5yfc | What is the US Gun Lobby and how does it have such a large political influence? | The gun lobby is just a group of organizations and activists who believe in protecting and expanding legal access to firearms. The largest and most powerful organization is the National Rifle Association (NRA). The reason they're so powerful is because they're incredibly well-funded, which gives them deep pockets to wage media campaigns against politicians they don't like.
As far as acquiring a gun, the laws vary state-by-state. If you go through a licensed store, you can walk up to the counter, pick out a gun, pay for it, and then after a waiting period of a few days and a background check to ensure you're not a criminal, you can pick it up. In some instances it might be easier to purchase a gun, and in some it might be harder.
For guns to actually be banned would require a repeal of our Second Amendment to the Constitution. For that to happen, the overwhelming majority of Americans would have to come around to a change of heart and believe that guns should be banned. Even if that happened, there is likely to remain a small part of the population that would refuse to comply and give up their firearms. Whether this segment would be wiling to actually fight over it is an unknown question. A lot of people say they would go to war if someone tried to take away their guns, but we have no real way of knowing what would actually happen. | e1ea7732-1223-44e7-af76-a34901205e23 |
2v2mru | I am not an American and don't know why John F Kennedy was/is so highly thought of | Honestly, mostly because he was young (by politician standards), handsome, charismatic, and he was assassinated before his time. In short, he was perfect martyr material.
Also, people looked to the young president as the symbol of hope for a better future. After his death, we instead got the Vietnam War and the general chaos of the 1960s. I suppose baby boomers look to him as a symbol of the future we were *supposed* to have and see his assassination as the moment when we went "wrong". | 4017da95-ed3d-490e-80f7-a0d41ae291c6 |
2b2q96 | What is Discordianism? | It's a joke. It's a religion. It's a joke about religion. It's a religion about jokes.
You can learn everything you need to know by [reading the Principia Discordia](_URL_0_). | f5643c90-a807-4961-8877-3b5474aec114 |
4vqjnu | how does drinking water coming into NYC not get dirty from the pipes? | Why would the pipes be dirty?
Water utility workers will occasionally open valves and hydrants to blow sediment out of the mains, but for the most part they stay pretty clean unless there's a major break. | 457291ea-1e78-4493-80ed-b50d2ef3a10c |
1xjnw6 | How can the law restrict us to so many work breaks but smokers can take how ever many they'd like? | > Why is it that if I were a smoker I would have no problem taking several breaks throughout the shift?
Because your employer is treating people unfairly. There's no law about smoke breaks. This is entirely an issue with your employer's break policy. | bce2294d-daab-4b91-bbdd-ff62e3af9bd7 |
826jch | Why do humans scream when scared? | To signal others about the danger. It's typical for social species to instinctively let out cries or other ways of warning the others of the tribe about approaching predators or enemies. Such collective defense makes both the group and its individual members safer. | e076e235-1be9-4449-9eb5-b92f95a15e2d |
1qveab | What does music sound like to animals? | I actually think this is a really good question. I enjoy some pretty heavy music and I've played it around animals before. It seems to me that if you had an actual person in the room screaming his lungs out a dog or cat would respond to it, but they seem pretty indifferent toward that kind of thing coming out of a stereo. Makes me wonder if they process it differently somehow? Maybe they require a visual cue to clue in that it's actually a human voice. | a59afb8d-9cc7-463a-a24f-ad38ce2723aa |
lsj5p | Corporate & Top 5% Tax Loopholes. | They're not loopholes. That's just a propaganda word people use to confuse things.
There are basically two different things that people sometimes erroneously call loopholes: There are tax deductions, and then there are standard accounting practices.
A tax deduction is anything that you can *spend* money on that *reduces* your taxable income. So say you're an individual — this applies equally well to corporations; we're just keeping it simple — who earns $100,000 in a year. You spend a quarter of that, let's say, on *stuff*, stuff like your mortgage and food and whatever. That leaves you with $75,000 at the end of the year.
Let's *pretend* — this is not how it works, but this is just an example — that your tax rate is a flat 10% of your taxable income, and your taxable income is everything you make in a year. That means in this year, your taxable income is $100,000, and ten percent of that is $10,000, meaning at the end of the year you owe the government $10,000, out of the $75,000 you have on hand.
But the government allows you to *deduct* charitable contributions from your taxable income. Meaning anything you give to charity is *subtracted from* your taxable income for the year. Since you have $75,000 left over at the end of the year, you can write a $50,000 check to your local soup kitchen, let's say. That $50,000 gets *subtracted* from your taxable income, making your taxable income just $50,000, rather than $100,000. Since your tax is 10% of your taxable income, you just reduced your tax bill from $10,000 to $5,000, which is only 5% of your gross income.
Some people just look at the last sentence — you only paid 5% of your gross income in taxes — and think that's unfair, so they call deductions a loophole. In truth, we give tax deductions *hoping people will take advantage of them.* They're *incentives* to get people to do certain things with their money, things like give to charity, or save for their retirement or future health-care needs, or put a kid through college.
The other thing people sometimes mistakenly call "loopholes" are just standard accounting practices. One thing that's been in the news kind of recently is the question of personal income from hedge fund managers. A hedge fund is a type of investment that's managed by a person. That person doesn't get paid a salary; instead, he gets a percentage of the profits the hedge fund makes under his management. Makes sense, right? You're tying the manager's compensation directly to his job performance.
Well, since the hedge fund manager draws no salary and instead takes a percentage from the fund's gain, all his income is taxed at the capital gains tax rate of 15%, not at the income tax rate of (up to) 35%. Some people call this a loophole, but that's just propaganda. Accounting for your income that way is what you're *supposed to do.* It's not a cheat. It's how the system is set up. We can talk about whether the system *should be* set up that way or not, but the fact is that *is* how the system is set up, and the hedge fund manager who reports his income as capital gain is following the rules. If he did it any *other* way he'd be *breaking* the rules, and he'd get in trouble for it.
So basically, whenever you hear somebody say "tax loophole", understand that they're almost certainly talking about things that are built into the system for good reason and which people do because they're supposed to. The phrase does *not* imply that people are cheating the system and getting away with it; it's just supposed make you *think* it implies that, so you can get mad at those dirty cheats … who are in reality just doing exactly and nothing other than what the tax code tells them they're supposed to do. | f607f187-0490-4ccc-87c2-d4a68279d9d2 |
j2jz3 | What does it mean to be an offside player in soccer? | A player has crossed the other teams defensive line, past the last defender before the ball has. So there is an unfair advantage, it prevents goal camping from the offense. | cb2530bd-d4d5-47d0-8b3b-1591a717e605 |
1fodxh | Why does earthquake depth matter | AHA! I *knew* my oceanography could help someone!
The Earth is unique among a lot of planets due to our *plate tectonics*. This is basically stating that Earth is like a giant puzzle, with HUGE pieces (like the North American plate) constantly being moved, where they are pulling apart/sub-ducting under/grinding against one another.
California rests on the North American plate, which is currently clashing with the Pacific plate. The Pacific plate subducts under th e North American plate. You don't "feel" the plate moving all the time because the when one plate subducts under another, it isn't a gradual process. Tension builds, builds, builds until it finally *snaps!* And energy is released from this event.
Now, all this information has been leading up to answer your question; if a subduction event happens closer to the surface, it will almost always be more powerful and destructive. The deeper the depth, the less intense it will be. The closer to the surface, the more you'll wish you were either out at sea or in the air. This is because of how energy "dissipates" or scatters out as it passes through matter. If energy didn't dissipate as it traveled through matter, then earthquakes that happened in Tokyo would be felt over here! Every single earthquake (which the Earth experiences *a lot* of each day) would be a catastrophic event! | 572595b9-4825-492b-8823-fce7e48297ff |
3hwmj6 | How does calorie counting make you lose weight if you eat the extra calories gained by exercising? | Wow - you seem confused.
First of all: Check out _URL_1_
Second: Work out your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) here: _URL_0_
If you want to lose weight, then eat 500kcal below this value CONSISTENTLY.
Note that the TDEE calculation takes exercise into account.
You can absolutely lose weight without exercising, I will just not be very healthy. Then you'll just be a thinner person, not necessarily a healthier person. | f0d0b794-2dfc-42b3-ac4a-8e7bba45d6c3 |
5emg84 | What is the internet? | At first glance, that might look like a stupid question, but it's actually very good, and the answer has varied over time.
In the beginning, the internet consisted of relatively few computers, more or less directly connected to other computers on the network, passing messages between them so they reached the correct destination.
Now, of course, this doesn't scale well. Security is an issue of you have no idea which computer your message will bounce through. Performance quickly becomes an issue as bottlenecks develops. You rely on people supplying you with their (expensive) bandwidth for transferring your messages.
So, some organizations started setting up strong connections between each other, to create more powerful direct links. After a while this turned into a network more like the telephone network, where we have dedicated carriers who do the back bones, and then local service providers to connect the customers to the backbones.
So, now, we basically have a network of very fast high capacity connections moving the data over long distances, and at the ends of those connections, there are smaller networks connecting the customers.
This is a big question, and I don't know if I answered the part of it you wanted an answer to. If not, clarify, and I'll make another try. | edd9ab85-08b3-40cf-8608-9a43ca74059e |
2958q9 | Why does cheese taste so much better when it's melted? | It doesn't. You just like it better.
Also, 'cheese' is not all the same, there are probably hundreds of varieties... | 73dc4cb6-2df4-4ff5-998c-ee13157addb3 |
1cjgm9 | Why does my 21 inch LED monitor support 1080p but my 32 inch LED tv only does 720p? | You are meant to sit closer to your monitor than you are to your TV, therefore resolution matters more on a monitor than it does on a TV.
That being said, there are several models of 32" TVs that support 1080p perfectly fine. One that only goes up to 720p is a cheaper model, or several years old. | f0fe7590-8764-4fd7-aa7e-23a8f4335372 |
27cgzu | Why do all artificial flavors taste the same, e.g. watermelon, but nothing like the actual fruit? | Not a complete answer by any means, but banana flavor is actually super interesting. The current banana we are all familiar with has zero genetic diversity. In fact they are pretty much all genetically the same plant. They can't even be grown from seeds any more since, well, when was the last time you found a seed in your banana? They're all grown by transplanting parts of existing plants.
This means though that bananas are very susceptible to disease and way back a few decades ago there was a different type of banana that got wiped out and we never changed it. This was the banana that artificial banana flavor is based on and is why banana candy tastes nothing like the bananas we are familiar with. | f620615f-a176-424b-bdfd-e658bd008bac |
92t05j | What gives milk its white colour? | The white stuff it contains:
* [Butterfat](_URL_0_), which is a bright yellow color
* [Lactose](_URL_2_) (sugar), which is white.
* Proteins, mainly [casein](_URL_1_) which is rich in calcium. | 53a8e925-c898-43fb-9b31-544e860173ba |
8ygbi8 | How was hydrofluoric acid contained or used before plastic was invented if it eats glass containers? | It was held in glass bottles that had a coating of wax inside.
*”And, like many other acids, it also reacts with metals, so storing it is a bit tricky. Where do you put something that eats through its container? Well, these days it’s stored in special plastic bottles, but in the 17th century when it was first discovered chemists had to use glass bottles coated inside with wax, and hope the coating was a good one.”*
[source](_URL_0_) | 4eb33481-4ef5-4e39-a582-f47427596300 |
1b1l9o | Amanda Knox trial | Since this is a dupe, I'll repost my comment from [here](_URL_0_):
---
Amanda Knox was an American studying in Italy. She lived with a British roommate, Meredith Kercher, and was dating an Italian man, Raffaele Sollecito. In November 2007, while Knox and Sollecito were out together, a man named Rudy Guede broke into Knox and Kercher's apartment and raped and murdered Kercher.
Guede's guilt was thoroughly and irrefutably established by ample physical evidence. He protested that he had simply been burglarizing the apartment when someone else broke in and murdered Kercher. He later changed his story to some kind of bizarre sex game involving both Knox and Sollecito in which he himself was blameless.
The evidence against Knox and Sollecito is essentially nil. Prosecutors claimed to have found DNA evidence implicating them, but the alleged evidence was contaminated and mistreated, and to get any traces of DNA, the lab needed to perform experimental (and questionable) amplification procedures that they were not qualified for. There were also footprints that tested negative for blood, "proving" that someone had cleaned up the scene to conceal their involvement.
In addition to the "physical" evidence, the prosecution claimed that their conduct had been suspicious. You can google this if you want, but it's all inconsequential given that there was never any reason to suspect them to begin with. Much of it is ordinary character assassination – painting Knox as "loose" and a partier, that sort of thing, as though that were evidence of murder.
All three of them were convicted, Guede because he was clearly, unambiguously guilty and Knox and Sollecito because people are stupid and make stupid decisions when confronted with violent murder, sex, and international tensions. An appeals court overturned that verdict, largely citing a report pointing out that the alleged physical evidence was garbage. That court freed the two and ordered a new trial.
---
I did a bit more reading, to catch up with what's happened in the last couple of years. Addenda:
- One of the "suspicious" things that Knox did was falsely implicate her boss. This occurred during an extended high-pressure interrogation during which Knox claims to have been mistreated. It turns out that the whole idea of her boss being involved was fed to her by the police based on their misunderstanding of the phrase "see you later" in a text message. Knox retracted the implication the next day. She was convicted of slander, and the appeals court did not overturn this, setting her sentence as three of the years she had already served.
- Guede did change his story to implicate Knox and Sollecito after hearing that they were suspects, but the wild orgy-murder scenario was dreamed up by the prosecutor. Also, alleged Satanism. Yeah.
- There will be another trial because the prosecution appealed. This is a thing that can happen in Italy. Knox will not return to stand trial, and it is unlikely that she would be extradited even if (somehow) found guilty. | 84ad67f6-aa3f-4c62-be1a-d84ace6c5a2d |
2f4vuq | Why is it that so much fundraising is targeted at cancer related diseases while heart disease is continually the leading cause of death in Western cultures? | Isn’t it because generally, a healthy lifestyle prevents heart diseases whereas cancer is unpredictable. | 883106bd-c920-484f-8d26-a35946d44200 |
3e80hi | Role of Food preservative. How do some processed food claims 0% preservative added, and yet they could be used for a whole year? | That food might naturally be that shelf-stable; the only claim is that they don't *add* preservatives. It's like how fruit juices advertise "no sugar added" because all the sugar came from the fruit themselves.
Of course, without a specific example this is just guesswork. | ae0a5666-8878-4c18-b718-fa2cfd3a9018 |
5wprdn | How does someone with the name 'Jose Torres' become a white supremacist? | I know, right? I was wondering that, too. I guess we're products of our environment. Throw a Jose in a pack of white supremacists, and he can turn out racist too (sometimes) | 963a0a0a-6664-4dea-a752-474313abc818 |
2exs3m | Why do i dream more when i sleep after I have been reading? | Actually, you dream about the same amount every night (REM is your brain organizing your memories); it just depends on how much of the dream you remember. Memories are kept more often if they're important, vivid, or recent. Considering books are only successful if they satisfy both former characteristics, then your memory will contain more recent and memorable memories from which your dreams grab, making them more vivid and interesting, making you more likely to remember them. | 6f1b760f-70ce-4b86-9da5-edaa61223372 |
63u6l3 | How does a woman's body know to sync menstrual cycles with other women that are frequently around? | This doesn't actually happen, though it is a commonly cited myth. Multiples studies have shown that there isn't much truth to the "menstrual sync" hypothesis, though it can *seem* that way. In any group of adult women, chances are that 1/4 of them will be bleeding at any given time. If they're living in close proximity enough to notice each other's cycles, it's easy to notice overlap with each other and it can easily seem like you are moving in some sort of synchronized fashion.
But you don't ever get a case where all the women have moved to be on the same cycle, like they're jumping rope together. That just doesn't happen. | bd6bd5ef-7092-46e7-8f96-7855e77ed6b1 |
298ufp | Why is the defense budget in the USA so high? | Several people have talked about corruption and that's certainly a factor, but in ELI5 terms it's important to understand that the military goals of the US are different from the goals of many other countries.
Many countries are interested in protecting themselves from invasion. Even in extreme cases (like Switzerland booby trapping every route into the country and building underground shelters to house the entire national population) the cost is relatively capped. There is only so much you can spend on self-defense.
The US, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with *projecting power*. This is a very different goal. The US has only been invaded once in 1812 and due to its geographic location faces no plausible threat of invasion now or in the future. So, for the first item, any military action by the US is likely to take place *far away*. Transporting troops, keeping them supplied and armed away from home is vastly more expensive than rallying troops to protect their home from invasion.
Along similar lines, the US has a political goal of projecting power *anywhere in the world on very short notice*. Not only do they want to be able to take military action anywhere on the planet, the want to do so *quickly*. The idea behind this is that it is a powerful deterrent to anyone who might want to attack or act against the US. The many bases around the world, the enormously expensive infrastructure of maintaining missiles, in-flight refueling for combat aircraft, etc is all undertaken in support of this goal.
Third, the US is highly risk averse when it comes to risking the lives of military personnel. While the US public sees military *service* as highly admirable, there is no corresponding enthusiasm for loss of personnel in battle. In other societies throughout human history, losing a son in battle was an indicator of social status. There is an argument that contemporary suicide bombers are an extension of this idea. Reducing the number of troops in harms way through the use of long distance weapons is enormously expensive.
Finally, the US currently sees its primary military adversaries as non-state actors. This may be somewhat counterintuitive, but it can be more difficult (and certainly much more expensive) to prepare for war against small terrorist organizations than it is against nation states. The huge escalation of surveillance falls into this category. If you want to spy on another country, they have obvious places to start: government buildings, military installations, embassies, etc. If you believe your enemy could be anyone anywhere in the world, it only makes sense to surveil everyone everywhere all the time. This (as the US is finding) is an endlessly expensive undertaking.
TL;DR: Unlike most other countries, the US wants to be able to fight anyone anywhere at any time. This costs more. Also, corruption. | 3c39ddda-cc11-45c5-945f-0acd17b59a3a |
5m6m9q | Why are knives and swords curved? | It gives the blade a point to drive forward, if that makes sense. Imagine you have a big juicy steak in front of you. You grab your fork and knife and get ready to cut a bite. Your knife is perfectly straight from the handle to the tip. As you try to cut your steak, the tip of the knife keeps stabbing at the meat and it's taking quite a lot of energy to get through the meat.
So you set down that knife and pick up a slightly curved one. Instead of the straight downward pressure you used before, you can now start with a higher angle and drive the curved edge through the steak with ease.
The same goes for swords. You're in a war and you're running at your enemy with a sword. It's got a straight sharp blade. You swing it at him and you land a nice deep cut, but your blade got stuck. You struggle to get it out while your enemy swings at you. Now imagine the same scenario with a curved blade like a scimitar. You swing and hit your enemy; although you may not have landed quite as deep of a blow, the curved blade had less of a chance to get stuck. | a2ca10d4-27a7-4c95-984d-88b5b2b2bf70 |
7ument | How do planes avoid collisions above the Atlantic where there is no radar? | There are airplane “highways” usually separated by 10 000 ft. East you fly odd (ie 30 000ft) and west you fly even(ie 40 000ft) | f93c1189-d101-4337-88ad-177d93c54807 |
2c31zu | Why do flies and most flying insects seem to intentionally keep bothering you after swiping at them multiple times? | That's a bit like asking you why when it's hot out three days in a row you don't just move to another UNIVERSE. They aren't smart, their worldview is about 1 bazillionth of a second in front of them and a foot around them. They are running on auto-pilot and the auto-pilot programmer was a mouse, who was in a coma. | 1d2700be-3fe3-4300-b46e-a89e3923b74d |
2mhniv | Why does healthcare in the USA cost so much more than elsewhere, is it better than treatment elsewhere? | In the UK everyone contributes to healthcare via taxes. More people contributing to a communal pool means lower overall costs for everyone.
In the US everyone has to buy their own insurance and many people don't/can't. Smaller amount of people contributing to a communal pool means higher overall prices for everyone.
Added to that people with insurance are technically covering those without because it's illegal for a hospital to turn down patients. If someone comes in with a broken leg or gunshot wound or whatever, the hospital is required to care for them. If they don't have insurance the hospital has to write it off as a loss and the prices for everyone else's care goes up as a result. | 45b22c36-e2f0-423a-9c72-5c5134d7d20d |
5h8c8e | Please explain climate change proof like I am 5 | In the last 650k years, Earth has gone through 7 periods of glacial advance and retreat. The last was 7k years ago, marking the end of the Ice Age.
CO2 was demonstrated to trap heat in the mid 19th century. In the course of the last 650k years, Earth atmospheric CO2 levels has never been above 300ppm, and we know that through mineral deposits, fossils, and arctic ice leaving telltale predictable signs of how much CO2 must have been in the air at the time. Today, CO2 is over 400ppm. Not only have we kept fantastic records pre-industrial revolution, especially the Swedes for centuries, but arctic ice has acted as a more recent history of the last several dozen centuries. CO2 levels has been growing at unprecedented rates and achieving levels higher than we've ever known to occur that wasn't in the wake of planetary disaster and mass extinction. It follows that if CO2 traps heat, and there's more CO2 in the atmosphere than ever before, it's going to trap more heat than ever before.
Sea levels are rising. 17cm over the last century. The last decade alone has seen twice the rise of the previous century. So not only are the oceans rising, but the rate of rise is increasing *exponentially*.
The Earth's average temperature has increased since 1880, most of that has been in the last 35 years. 15 of the 16 hottest years have been since 2001. We're in a period of solar decline, where the output of the sun cycles every 11 or so years. Despite the sun putting out less energy, the average continues to rise and in 2015 the Earth's average was 1C hotter on average than in 1890. That doesn't sound like much, but if we go some 0.7C hotter, we'll match the age of the dinosaurs when the whole planet was a tropical jungle. That's not a good thing.
The ice caps are losing mass. While we've seen cycles of recession and growth, you have to consider ice is more than area, it's also thickness and density. Yes, we've seen big sheets of ice form, but A) they didn't stay, and B) how thick were they? Greenland has lost 60 cubic miles of ice and Antarctica has lost at least 30 cubic miles, both in the last decade. Greenland is not denying global warming, they're feverishly building ports to poise themselves as one of the most valuable ocean trading hubs in the world as the northern pass is opening, and it's projected you'll be able to sail across the north pole, a place you can currently stand, year-round.
Glacier ice is retreating all over the world, in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.
The number of unprecedented intense weather events has been increasing since 1950 in the US. The number of record highs has been increasing, and record lows decreasing.
The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 and water makes carbonic acid, - seltzer water! The oceans are 30% more acidic since the industrial revolution. 93% of The Great Barrier Reef has been bleeched and 22% and rising is dead as a consequence. The ocean currently absorbs 9.3 billion tons of CO2 a year and is currently absorbing an additional 2 billion tons annually. Not because the ocean is suddenly getting better at it, but because there's more saturation in the atmosphere.
---
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5
B.D. Santer _URL_6_., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46
Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306
V. Ramaswamy _URL_6_., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141
B.D. Santer _URL_6_., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.
In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.
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T.C. Peterson _URL_6_., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.
I. Allison _URL_6_., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11
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Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).
L. Polyak, _URL_6_., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7
R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009
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National Snow and Ice Data Center
World Glacier Monitoring Service
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C. L. Sabine _URL_6_., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371
Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.
National Snow and Ice Data Center
C. Derksen and R. Brown, "Spring snow cover extent reductions in the 2008-2012 period exceeding climate model projections," GRL, 39:L19504
_URL_4_
Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, Data History Accessed August 29, 2011. | 1635e7a3-0db9-4446-8699-8e5a53bcf67d |
4019pb | In the Star Wars Universe, are lightsaber duels decided by whoever is the stronger force user or is it more of a skill based battle? | It is a mixture of the two since the force effects your reflexes, physical strength, focus and predicting your opponents moves. Rey may well have been just as strong in the force as Kylo but she also likely had some skill with physical weapons based off the fact she carried a staff most of the time leading to an even-ish match up. | 0b22b79e-77f7-4a0f-a24e-e8af41d5c883 |
78k561 | Why do we feel sleepy in warm temperature rather than cold temperature ? | I learned at least one of the reasons for this from a professor last semester. He's a kineticist (that's a field of chemistry) and very into endurance running -- and he told us just exactly why the perfect running temperature (high 60s to low 70s) is what it is: Pyruvate kinase
Essentially, the heat outside actually interferes with the body's ability to make ATP, the energy molecule, out of the food we digest. This happens because pyruvate kinase, a crucial enzyme in ATP synthesis, is concerted mostly into a biologically inactive conformer at around 85 degrees F.
This conformer is present in some portion at 70 degrees, but it's mostly the active form that dominates. After about 85 or so, you have a 60/40 ratio of the inactive to active forms.
TL;DR heat slows down your metabolism and you run out of energy. | fae6a13b-9e3e-470b-b580-c3d19f90d69b |
3i1uqc | why do ebooks cost more than paperback? | I have never seen an eBook cost more than a physical version of the same book. What makes you think this is a thing that happens? | f0bf4ea9-d713-468d-8b09-50c061701d09 |
2gf7ng | Why do most toilets have handles and not pedals? | I believe this problem has been erradicated with the installation of, the bathroom sink, in which to wash your hands afterwards. | eaf9a492-0ce0-4de5-a4bb-e54fefdc382c |
73pvtx | If the House always wins, how come most casinos go broke? | Casinos have tremendous fixed costs. They are in A+ locations that require huge loans for land and building. They have to purchase furniture, televisions etc. They also have to purchase gaming tables, electronics, and systems. They also have to pay more labor than most service industries. There is cleaning staff, management, floor staff etc. Casinos are heavily regulated by the government and their winning percentages are recorded. They cannot for example 'tweak' the electronics for higher payouts. Everything is done on percentages and casinos win more than they lose but not by much. People have to feel like they can win. Customer acquisition costs are tremendous because a customer can simply walk out the door if they feel like they are losing. To entice gamblers to stay and reduce customer turnover they provide costly amenities like low priced food and free alcohol.
As casisnos age they become less popular. Customers are often attracted to newer, better, larger aspect of casinos. A new casino down the street can easily pull a large percentage of customers from older casinos. Considering that they need to be remodeled frequently and heavily advertised.
Often whales define a casinos profits. Those gamblers that can come in and drop large amounts of money at a time. A few whales a month can make or break an operating statement. This is why they comp rooms and roll out the red carpet.
They are also seasonal in nature.
The ELI5 answer is that they spend more than they bring in. | 67fc6eee-310c-4f28-863e-721f7fb6a351 |
2a9ur0 | What do radical terrorists hope to accomplish? What draws people into such groups as Al Qaeda? | Actually, Al Qaeda had a published 20-year plan. It called for engaging the infidel in countless small conflicts, dividing their forces and wearing them down economically and in public support by attrition. It hoped that the government would become oppressive in the face of the threat, resulting in more Muslims rising up and joining the cause, and more loss of support from the general public. And so on.
Wow. Lucky for us that TOTALLY didn't happen, eh? | f5b6f85e-12aa-40c2-9f39-70e3b7d1ec14 |
7ymnca | Why is a recent (less than a year) prescription required to order replacement contact lenses or glasses when it's OK to wear existing lenses or glasses for over a year? | I get my eyes checked every year and because of my health insurance, I only pay a small copay for new glasses/contacts. You should be wearing the best corrective lenses for your eyes so if you have not gone to see your ophthalmologist in over a year, you should. Its not really OK to wear existing ones if your eyes have changed in that time as they can lead to headaches and damaging your eyesight even more. Which is why you should make it a point to get your eyes checked at least once a year. | feacfdf5-1f07-4bc1-a13e-0cf903dac2dc |
5zb3u5 | if a human embryo isn't viable, by what mechanism does the body decide to terminate? What is it that goes "this isn't working, scrap it"? | A precise answer probably wouldn't be really eli5 but basically there will be some chemical signal if the embryo isn't viable on a cellular level. When cells die they release a lot of different chemicals that signal for other cells to recover and destroy the remnants. Also, when the embryo dies it stops secreting hormones that make the uterine wall grow into the placenta which will then start to die and detach like during a regular cycle.
On the other hand, if there is some major genetic defect the blastocyst won't even implant into the uterine wall from the start and after a certain point if the fetus dies in utero the body won't necessarily terminate the pregnancy which can be very dangerous for the mother. | 3b0ac532-611e-4952-baf1-4c4b1f780046 |
36am51 | why did detroit fail? | In the 50s and 60s, the United States was the only country producing reliable, quality vehicles meant for a middle class population. BMW existed in Germany, and Rolls Royce in Britain, but neither company made affordable vehicles. In the 70s and 80s, however, this changed as Japan and South Korea finished rebuilding and Toyota and Honda started producing reliable vehicles themselves. In response to this competition, Detroit did...nothing. In fact, their vehicles steadily decreased in quality as Asia's improved. The behemoths of Michigan were arrogant, and thought they would always have a market, no matter how inferior their products. American consumers proved them wrong. | a911318f-4f08-4376-aacc-49d3ee3ae907 |
1zjqfh | How prominent does a person have to be for killing them to be assassination rather than murder? | Assassination is murder but murder is not necessarily assassination.
Assassination is usually connected with killing someone for cause not personal or even necessarily related to the killer in any way.
It tends to be a job usually done for others. The term "assassinated" is usually used with the killing of people of public notoriety or fame. An assassination is when the victim has been selected for the express purpose of achieving a political aim.
There is a difference, for example Tupac was shot and that was murder but Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinted. | 10c1ca64-a85d-4941-953d-797e55de40a3 |
40aw8l | songs getting stuck in your head | You can call it an "earworm".
We don't fully understand that yet, because it's part of the brain and we don't know the brain that well. And there're many theories about those, even others names than "earworm".
My thinks about it (i'm not a expert in the domain, not even am I good at it):
You can see the song as a puzzle in your memory (a dog face by example). You have a stimulus which remind you of a piece of the puzzle (the dog's eyes), which you liked especially. But because you don't have a good memory of the puzzle (because you don't have a good memory at all, or you didn't watch it well, you didn't learnt it by heart) you don't remember it all.
*(just note that earworms touch about 98% of the population, so you're not stupid or crazy, it's even pretty normal, and also you can have "earworm" (so not earworm in the case) with visual memory of something, like when you know you saw that guy but don't remember where)*
So you'll have to find others pieces of the puzzle to remember the dog's face (because with only eyes, you can't guess if it was a labrador or a german sheperd, or even a cat). In order to find those pieces you should remember when and where, the circumstances in which you got them (which can be hard because your brain can't learn everything and you didn't care about that moment when and where you saw the puzzle, only the puzzle you liked and especially the eyes, which is why you remembered them more than the rest).
Why it's annoying ? That's the difficult part and I guess it can be different in different people (but you can find a resemblance because we're all human and at more than 99% alike).
I would say because you liked that puzzle, or it was catchy at least, or maybe that puzzle reminded you of a piece of another puzzle which you liked a lot (your dog when you were a child, but you don't think about it mindful). So it's happy memory, and you would like to feel happiness again (listening to music can give you pleasure like sex or eating something you like). Or maybe you're a person with high vanity and you hate not remembering something because you're more clever than other people and you remember everything and not remembering it hurt your vanity and you do'nt like being hurt.
**tl;dr:** Human memory can't store a lot, you won't remember everything, even a catchy song, exept if you dedicate time to learn it. So you remember only the easiest parts (the rythm or the bass or the voice or the lyrics maybe) It can be annoying for multiple reasons, you don't like not remembering, you heard it during a pleasuring moment or the song itself is pleasuring and you would like to feel that pleasure again....
A source:
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3xaeq0 | Why do passengers have to open airplane windows during takeoff and landing? | It's so the flight personnel can see the engines/wings to ensure no issues.
However, I've never heard an attendant say to open windows for landing/takeoff. | b042cd41-b597-4496-b344-044ee5bd496a |
4tw176 | Why do servers crash during a big launch? Wouldn't the company have countermeasures to prevent that before the launch? | It can be really hard to correctly estimate how much strain a big launch will put on servers. How many people will really be playing? If you could accurately predict that for each major launch, you have a very lucrative skill. Mostly it cannot be done. Oh, companies can get rough figures (part of the reason they love pre-orders, it helps them make a better guess) but you never truly know until you throw the servers online and it actually happens. And because servers costs money, management especially will be prone to lowballing the figure as much as they can. Might that lose them some customers? Yes, but it is harder to prove the value of the customers lost, than to prove overspending on servers.
Additionally, you have the issue that it isn't necessarily a smart business move to be able to handle every peak if that means your equipment will go unused most of the time. Look at Reddit at their servers. Yes, sometimes you will get a 'server not available' error if everybody is posting all at once. And yeah, that can be a bit obnoxious. But for Reddit, financially, it is better to have those short periods of annoyance, than to buy many more servers and have those sit idle a lot of the time because normal usage lies far below those rare peaks. | 30217e7f-5513-4788-990b-1b00d7c9a252 |
2f12mt | Why don't American coins have numbers? | So back in the day a dollar was a silver certificate that you could exchange for a dollar worth of silver. Coins used to be made mostly of silver, so a quarter had 25¢ worth of silver and a dime 10¢. There used to be a half dime, but it was deemed to impractical because of how small it was, so the nickel came out in a larger size made with cheaper metal. | 43d63d11-f032-4d93-b1da-ff4994854432 |
w7n3f | Why did something that costs $45 dollars at Walgreens cost me almost $2000 at a hospital? | You're not just paying for materials. You're paying for a whole host of services. For one thing, a medical professional was available for you. Having a staff of residents, nurses, doctors, etc. isn't cheap. After all, they're not like potential cashiers or janitors where anyone can perform the job. Rather these people spent decades of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get where they are. Hiring them isn't cheap. Not only that, but they're available around the clock. If a hospital employs professionals to be on call at 3 in the morning, that's going to call for even higher salaries. Additionally, there is maintenance of the facility itself. Hospitals have to deal with utility costs (electricity, heat, etc.). However, unlike a Walgreens, they also need to keep the building extra clean and certain things sterile. (I guarantee you that a hospital room gets cleaned more thoroughly than any Walgreens.) Not only that, but you used up a room in the building for some period of time. Another relevant aspect of an ER is that people must be treated regardless of their ability to pay. As a result, the hospital gets screwed over whenever an uninsured, poor person has a medical issue. To make up for this, hospitals recoup money elsewhere. The last thing I can think of is malpractice insurance. Simply put, lots of sick people who don't recover sue the hospital. This costs hospitals lots of money. There are probably other factors as well.
In short, it's expensive to maintain an ultra-clean building, treat patients regardless of their inability to pay, and have trained professionals available 24/7 year-round. | 5225d4a4-43fa-444c-a4f9-8dd848d578ff |
5mbhgi | Why does hot water feel significantly hotter on my face than on other parts of my body? | A more sensitive and dense pattern of nerves and minute vascularisation in your face. Your back/thigh/arm doesn't have the same amount or type of nerves as your face.
Your head is highly vascular as well, and is the warmest appendage from the core. You regulate your skull temperature quicker to keep your brain in its happy stasis. Feeling hotter heat on your face is a sensory warning to protect your noggin. | b048c04d-05f2-4ab8-93e9-88d7caafec73 |
1r1zf2 | If illicit substances such as drugs were legalised, what would become of the black market? Would there be demand for something else? | If there is way to make a profit the black market will find it. Take cigarettes, they are legal but because of the high taxes placed upon them it is possible to buy them in places that have low or no taxes and then sell them to retailers in areas with high taxes making profit for the black marketeer and a little more profit for the retailer. Legalized drugs would likely fall into a similar situation. If there is a way to make a profit there are always people willing to skirt the law or openly break it to take that profit. | 00a47f06-4176-46be-8196-5b3d8dafc0c0 |
6tqx2h | Different Types of Baseball Pitches | Books have been written. Oversimplified:
Fastball: straight off the fingers. Ball rotates downward from 0 degrees to 180 degrees back toward the pitcher, point of view pitcher. Though it drops, as all pitches do because of gravity it can appear (optical illusion) to rise because spin (and resulting air pressure differential) causes it to drop less than expected.
Changeup: variety of spins. Main characteristic is that because it is thrown with a "loose" arm, or held back into the palm, or held with 2 opposed fingers or other grip deliberately inefficient in transferring power, travels much more slowly (10 mph avg) than the pitcher's standard fastball motion suggests so the batter tends to swing early.
Curveball (from right-hander): Thrown with a pronounced outward so the ball spins from nominal 270 degrees to 90 degrees pov pitcher. Air pressure creates motion down and away from a right handed batter. Because the power of the pitcher is partly sideways, the ball travels slower than a fastball but does not have the full deception of a changeup.
Knuckleball is held with the fingertips, not the knuckles, and "pushed" toward the plate with nominally no spin at all. The air in front of the ball is not aided in flowing around the ball by a spin so pressure builds up in front of the ball and resists it's forward progress and causes it to flutter. A slow pitch because the power of the pitcher is not efficient.
Slider is a hard curve thrown with a sharper but less pronounced side motion or/and even with the fingers offset slightly to the right (right hand pitcher). Tends to have a sharper and later break and is usually more difficult for a batter to distinguish from a fastball.
Those are what you asked about. A fastball can be either a 2 or 4 seamer depending on how the ball is held and has different effects. Most fastballs are not exactly true 0 to 180 spin and so have "movement" one way or the other. Counter-intuitively a fastball thrown straight over the top (over the pitcher's head) (rarely thrown these days) *can't* be a straight rotation and is going to spin one way or the other depending on which way it slips off the fingers. A classic screwball (not used much these days) is rotated opposite to the curve and breaks from a rh pitcher towards a rh batter, opposite from a curve though usually with less break because it's awkward to get a full spin in that direction.
This is way over-simplified and illustrative of some principles; although very long, it's only a very basic start to build a discussion on. | 743ec3b1-3553-412a-9d9d-d5e0ac2ebccf |
3bewxh | In theory, could an object with the mass of a grain of sand hitting the earth cause the same damage as a huge asteroid, if it were traveling at a fast enough velocity? | First of all,
> Energy = Mass times Acceleration
This is wrong. Force=mass\*acceleration. Energy = 1/2 mass\*velocity^2 .
To answer the question, if you were to ignore the atmosphere, *maybe*. In real life, earth is surrounded by an oxygen rich atmosphere. As soon as that grain of sand hits the atmosphere, it would compress the air a lot, immediately start burning, and then be gone. Super-high velocity very small meteoroids hit the atmosphere like this all the time. If they're bigger than a baseball, you see a neat little flash and call it a meteor. Smaller things just flash and gone.
If the earth didn't have an atmosphere, then the answer is maybe, probably not. When the difference in size between two objects colliding gets to a certain point, you stop getting a collision and start getting a penetration. The result would be similar to shooting a bullet into the ground, there's no big "smash", it just drills a grain-of-sand-sized hole at the point of impact. | 7c236461-a810-45a7-8da9-a679af59b04e |
4544av | why can company's like U.S. Cellular claim to have 4G coverage everywhere but in reality, only have it in very few places? | They absolutely never claimed that. That would be a complete lie. They always publish maps showing where they have 4G coverage. | b072bc25-029b-4399-941b-8a885bf5e6d5 |
605rq9 | Why are so many Americans afraid of having voter id laws? | Some 10% of Americans don't have photo-ID, and that group tends to be the elderly and the poor | f69f8f4d-4f0c-455c-8345-8e7a95386034 |
5she3a | What does a runny nose actually do for recovery, like from a flu? | It prevents additional viruses from entering. As the immune system is busy handling one virus it leaves the body open to attack from another virus. To prevent this there are several other defense mechanisms that turn on like increased mucus production, lack of hunger and tiredness. The flu virus and influenza virus does take advantage of this as it spreads though mucus that gets airborne after you cough. So it will also stimulate mucus production. | 7b7dc0f3-52e5-47ed-b759-606b95806589 |
21qbre | Why do we no longer use supersonic commercial flight? | It's not profitable. This has been discussed several times today -- if you want more info, the search bar will help you out. | 31ac9e78-cbdb-4b48-b3ae-171662e03111 |
86y94t | How do DVD players remember where you left off on a movie you haven't had in your DVD player in years? | Some DVD players have storage.
They basically save a unique identifier that is tied to a specific disc image and time point in the film. If that disc is played again, the player knows what point to resume play from.
It's not really a matter of how long it's been since you last played the disc, but rather how many discs you have played since.
Your average player can remember about 10-15 discs at a time. So if you stop one halfway through, then proceed to watch 15 different movies, you won't be able to resume the first one anymore.
Then you get to more specialized players such as gaming consoles, which are computers with DVD drives. They have way more storage space/capabilities than a standalone player, so they'll store playback info for just about every movie you've ever played. | b096a8f4-5408-47fb-9d77-59ff0a6ba580 |
3pbm0q | What are sinkholes? | In general a sinkhole is caused by water underground eroding a hole below the surface, and when the surface becomes too heavy, it falls into the hole. The water can come from a number of different sources including underground rivers or aquifers. If the area you're in is known to have sinkholes, this can mean at any time the ground will basically fall in on itself causing serious damage to person or property. Depending on the conditions, you may have a lot of time to evacuate the area, or you might have just seconds before the ground isn't where it ought to be. | 4f41b081-73d6-4bb3-862e-0dbb448c24ac |
315d1u | Is it bad to hold back sneezes? Like pinching your nose to block the sneeze etc. | Every time I hold in a sneeze (like when I'm in a very quiet place and don't want to draw attention) I almost shit my pants.
I literally can picture the sneeze working in reverse and trying to come out the other end. | 1a56c800-5c05-47cf-bf6c-17a1223021c0 |
63hz4n | Positions and Payouts in The Big Short | Michael Burrey ended up walking away with $100 million personally and $700 million for his investors ($800 million total) which worked out to a 490% return on their investment.
The small guys, Geller and Shipley, turned $15 million into $120 million.
Mark Baum (real name is Steve Eisman) and his crew turned $100 million into $1.5 billion.
At the end, Mark Baum discovers that Morgan Stanley had been issuing Credit Default Swaps, the investment vehicle he was using to short the housing market. Essentially, Morgan was on the losing side of the bet. Mark was mad because his firm was a subsidiary of Morgan and now Morgan was going to lose billions and ironically could cause his firm to collapse as well as many of the banks who issued him credit default swaps were collapsing and might not be able to pay out what they owed Baum. In the final scene, where Baum finally gives his guys to ok selling the position, he has a financial and a moral dilemma. On one hand he is mad that the banks are only able to offer a fraction of what they owe him, but ends up settling for what they offer, still making over $1 billion. The moral dilemma is that he was becoming what he had always hated, a Wall Street fat cat making billions off the suffering of the general population. | 5a2f978f-c2e5-40fc-abb0-095bcad5cc7b |
5sba32 | How were the lights synchronized in Lady Gaga's halftime show? | The drones use Intel's realsense technology combined with infrared LEDs, allowing the drones to know where each other are and form a sort of wireless mesh network.
Once the drones know where they are and where they are supposed to be, you can program them.
Example of drone formation from 5 years ago: _URL_0_ | 26bef8c5-199b-4b81-8829-da0c3cb0ea22 |
4d4x5w | Why two signals at different frequencies can coexist? | It's just like sound. If you press two keys on a piano, you hear a sound that is different from the sound either key makes by itself. The combined waveform has components of each note's frequency.
A more selective receiver, the kind that only hear's one note, like the kind your radio uses, works differently than your ear. It internally generates a signal with the one frequency it detects. It uses a circuit called a phase locked loop to align itself with that frequency even when it's mixed with other signals. Once it syncs up, it can detect when the signal is there, what it's amplitude is (for AM) or measure small chages in frequency (for FM). | ffdbd0e2-1ce8-41bf-826e-faca07b293d4 |
7g5hap | How many color combinations are possible with choosing 4 out of 7 colors if colors can be repeated and which formula is applied in this instance? | 7^^4 = **2041** of possible combinations
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this should be it
E: Wrong, it's **35**, see below | dbed3a7f-867d-4d99-8753-00e2cc7ef356 |
5ssqtu | What causes alkaline batteries to leak when mixed with other types of batteries? | All batteries of the same size pretty much always put out the same voltage regardless of what they're made of, so I think it may be a case of the other batteries may leak and they just copy-pasted the same safety warning.
Those cheap "Heavy Duty" batteries you see in dollar stores are I believe Carbon-Zinc or Zinc Chloride batteries, an older, cheaper battery technology that has a lower capacity, and, more importantly, leaks when it is fully discharged.
If you mix alkaline cells with these cheaper ones, because their capacity is lower, they will deplete first, but because the alkaline batteries will still have power left, your TV remote might still work, but one of the batteries is rotting it's guts out and is a out to spray acid all over your lap because, of course, you lost the battery cover.
Its most likely a warning because if you mix battend types, one type may start leaking when it dies, but you won't be warned by all the batteries running down. | 1565941d-f318-4f4d-932d-f93c38ec5aa2 |
90j39f | If I fall asleep at 12:30am and naturally wake up at 6:30am, will I be better or worse off then getting 2 more hours of sleep, but waking up to an alarm? | I heard it's best if you get up the first time you wake up naturally. It's your natural cycle. Majority of people need around 8 hours but there are people who just need 6. some might need 10, it depends. I've noticed myself that I'm less tired if I get up the first time I wake! You should try it :) | 4b61212b-2e88-4063-a438-8382d22deeca |
49i807 | How do computers remember the time even after they are shutdown/ plug pulled? | Tiny battery in a component known as an RTC, or real time clock.
These components use so little power the battery will usually last the lifetime of the computer. | a2b0b6ad-e061-4d4e-ac64-031e0c4c8c6f |
7nybkn | How can they tell how many people watched certain TV show? | They use Nielsen ratings. Certain households, called Nielsen families, participate in a program where they log everything they watch. These statistics are extrapolated to the whole country. So the viewership numbers you hear are estimates based off the number of Nielsen families that watched that show. | 96336d84-ad37-4d7b-9573-f8a0122fc96c |
8v9u3p | Why can mayo remove water stains from finished wood? | The combination of fat and mild acids penetrates the top layer of the finish to replace the water with nourishing oil.
At least that's what it says on
_URL_0_ | f8886924-b788-457c-8020-f0c00e86fa23 |
zbn8v | Why do red objects and text appear blurrier than other colours in low-quality digital videos? | Digital sensors use what's called a [Bayer Filter](_URL_0_) over the sensor to filter out the colours.
As you can see in the images on that page, red pixels are only a quarter of the total number of pixels. This actually roughly matches the sensitivity of your eye, providing a more accurate colour balance.
A side effect of this is that pure red and pure blue can sometimes appear 'bitty'. | 51c349c0-eeb9-455c-b139-643656d9d3e0 |
7ckxeu | The American transplant system | Well, this is a super broad question but I'll answer where I can.
1. Not all donations are taken from dead people. Those that are require the body to still be technically alive. Back in my surgery days (scrub tech) I was only unfortunate enough to have to assist in one harvest. The patient was a young male that had shot himself in his family home. EMTs rushed him to the hospital and he was declared dead on arrival (DOA). The gunshot was a head injury with less than an hours time upon infliction. Many organs can survive longer than that without a functional brain. The patient was rushed to the operating room and a crudely placed ventilator established oxygen flow to the body while any viable organs were removed and immediately taken by laboratory staff for rudimentary preservation. That is worst case scenario. Many patients simply go brain dead. Those can stay viable on a ventilator almost indefinitely.
2. Matching depends on the organs and the donor/recipient similarity. Things like ligaments or tendons without a lot of blood flow don't need to be typed as exactly. Bone segments often don't have to be typed at all since there is no living tissue left after a wash. More sensitive organs with more blood contact have to compensate for the possible reactions with the recipient immune system and blood cell antigens. Otherwise, the organ will be recognized as foreign and treated like an infection.
3. The recipient list is at least based on need of the recipient (disease the patient has and prognosis). Rarity of certain immune factors (type AB patients are ~1% of population) can slow down the process of finding suitable donors. Risks of an organ failing due to outside influences (alcoholics can't receive new livers because they *chose* to destroy the first one) also lower your position on the list.
I wish I could provide more, but especially since I'm not in medicine anymore, that's all I've got. Still feel free to ask any questions. | d8aa62fb-7366-4917-8ccf-634ca3fa65d5 |
2n6833 | It has been a few years since the big boom of the "Occupy" movement. Did any major changes result from those protests? It seemed like every major city had an "Occupy" at one point. Did we ever ever see a shift in wealth (99% vs 1%)? | No, there wasn't a shift of wealth. Occupy never managed to really push a mechanism for changing that.
What one can say Occupy did accomplish in a very real way was to shift the national dialogue. Pre-Occupy very few people were talking about the wealth dispairity except in lofty academic circles. The whole 99% thing wasn't even in the common national discourse. Occupy made people aware of the issue, but wasn't able to effect much change on it. | 0d9648be-f1f5-4aba-a787-73b67ea02209 |
4aivne | r/KotakuInAction and "Gamergate" | KIA and gamergate is anti SJW.
GamerGate began due to the accusation of a female game developer of sleeping around with game reviewers, which was partially true and partially false. So, the internet rioted and began to demand ethics in game journalism, while some attacked her directly on the internet. She accused her accusers of attacking her because she is a woman in a male dominated industry, claimed they were harassing her, and others came to her aid. The gaming journalist sites sided with them, and basically it has been like this for half a year now. GG claims it is trying to find ethics in journalism, anti - GG claims this is really a group trying to fight against women in the gaming industry.
r/kotakuinaction is the largest pro GamerGate subreddit.
My suggestion to you is to tread no further. I once got wound up in this conflict and now I see that the conflict in general is very vile basically cancer. | a0373d30-4a51-44c9-99cf-026815dbd70b |
5de3xf | why do we say aww when we see something cute or feel bad for someone? | Possibly because of social norms, in which we learn from others that we say "aww" when we see something cute or feel bad for someone.
Perhaps the origin is that actually, humans react aggressively when we see something cute...perhaps there might be some explanation there... | 74e0060d-b1f8-42e9-982c-1a3867f17bdd |
1rta6m | Why are all videos not available on mobile youtube? | Uploaders can choose for each of their videos whether or not to enable mobile viewing. Google implemented this choice because the mobile Youtube apps used to not be able to display ads, and some uploaders might not want to lose out on that ad revenue. That reasoning is obsolete now, since ads are shown during mobile viewing. Maybe Google hasn't removed it yet because there are other reasons. One guess that comes to mind is for channels like Vevo which have ads on the webpage all around the video player. | 5465d1d4-77c5-4810-9fb4-c4ac08c79bce |
2pr5kr | How can businessmen get prosecuted for things like insider trading and securities fraud when their businesses have limited liability? | Limited liability protects members from debts, liabilities, and tort claims -- not crimes. For example, if you're a member of an LLC that goes bankrupt, you are not responsible for those debts. If someone slips on a puddle of coffee inside your office and sues you, you are not personally responsible for paying that judgement (if there is one).
Limited liability does not protect you from being prosecuted for a crime, whether you committed the crime as an owner of the company or in your own interest. | e4dc2cbc-cda1-47f6-a493-93816b41050d |
80u46b | How do clouds stay up in the sky? | Air also has weight. Remember that clouds are totally gigantic. The amount of air that would take up that space actually weighs more than that. Since the cloud is lighter, it floats on top of the air. As the cloud gets denser, it can sink down. As it gets less dense, it can rise up. That's why fog, stratus clouds, cumulous clouds, and cirrus clouds hang out at different heights. | 9150b00c-62ef-4d4b-83b6-27c2bc74e9f8 |
1g7160 | Why drugs have the stigma that they possess today? | Well... it's obvious there have been enormous negative social impacts from drug use. I think it'd be ridiculous to say it's "purely" because of corrupt governments or money. Obviously the War on Drugs didn't help their public image, and some-not-quite-as-bad drugs were caught in the "drugs are terrible" crossfire, but it just doesn't make sense to discount the actual harmful issues they cause to society (as a general class, including legal drugs). | c457f582-0f36-446e-aae0-a736ae3d9613 |
j2ebq | Can some please explain to me how computer programming works? | I learned all of this shit in college but it's been a few years so forgive me if I'm rusty, but I'll break it down as best I can. Let me know if any of this is too complicated, I'm going to avoid trying to use analogies and just explain how it all works as simply as possible.
You've done some programming so you're already ahead of the curve a bit. Pretty much anything you'd have used (Java, C, C++, C#, whatever) is what's referred to as a "high-level" programming language. High level programming languages cannot be directly interpreted by the computer's processor, so they must be translated into a low-level form that CAN be. There are some low level languages that people can program in directly (such as "Assembly language"), but usually only in very specific circumstances (direct programmatic access to hardware without having to going through other layers, as an example).
Anyway, remember when you needed to "compile" your program before it could do anything? Compilers simply translate high level programming languages into low level ones. So your C# code to display "Hello world!" on the screen was being broken down and turned into a simpler language that the computer can understand, but you would have a tough time programming yourself.
Ultimately through the compilation process your code was turned into "machine code" or "machine language" or whatever you want to call it. Basically, binary. It's binary for a very specific reason: electricity. That hardware sitting in the computer case runs off of electricity. All of the little pathways that carry it all over the circuit boards in there. Between the processor and the RAM, etc. So how does this all tie together? Binary is a 1 or a 0, which translates to the presence or absence of voltage. Something is being charged or it isn't.
Processors have architectures (for example, x86) that basically tell it what do to when certain patterns of 1's and 0's arrives to it. It gets a certain pattern of voltage spikes and will always do the same thing when that pattern arrives to it. In another architecture (like PowerPC - remember the old Macs?) these same patterns will tell it to do something completely different. You can go from one architecture to another, though, that's what an "emulator" is (your NES did not have an x86 processor).
If you want to get into how processor architecture works you'll delve into logic gates. Basically allows for manipulation of these 1's and 0's to achieve a desired result. One very easy example to understand is an "OR" gate. The logic is: If A *OR* B is 1, the result is 1. So 0+0=0, 0+1=1, 1+0=1, and 1+1=1. You string enough of these into one another (the result of one gate is the A or B for another gate) you can create a very complex series of possibilities.
Think of processors like really complicated calculators. You feed in something you understand (5+10) and in the background it will break this down into something it understands and spit out a result to you in a way that you understand (15). Perhaps you want to be really clever (because you'll forget "15" later) and you hit that MEM+ button to store a result into memory, so you can later use it in another calculation. This is more or less what's happening with computer memory, but it's done automatically instead of you having to explicitly hit a button. When the results of a processor's commands are finished, it has to do something with them (it can't remember) so it stores them into memory.
RAM (random access memory) is basically a cluster of things that can hold voltage, on a stick. There is a direct path between the memory and the processor since the processor will be frequently reading from and writing to memory. Memory holds the data directly in a form that the processor can read directly, being parts that hold voltage on them (1's) and spots without any voltage (0s'). When memory loses any external power source (you lose power to the PC in a storm outage or something) you lose anything you have in memory (since now everything in your memory is effectively all 0's).
As a side note about storage, the reason you can permanently lose things during power outages is because EVERYTHING (no exceptions!) must be loaded into memory before the processor can do anything with it. Nothing ever gets directly read from a hard drive. Data has to go from the hard drive to memory to be loaded or from memory to the hard drive to be saved permanently. If something was loaded into memory and modified but then never saved back to the hard drive and the power is then cut to memory, you've lost your changes.
So that's pretty much it. Your "print text to screen" command in that programming language was compiled, broken down into binary, and then fed into the processor where it recognized the patterns given to it and acted accordingly. Phew, hope I didn't screw anything up. :D | 50f98936-88e1-4ef3-9efc-8a45d4a2f6bd |
36qztf | Why Does My Spoon Taste Metallic After It Touches Aluminum Foil? | Some of the aluminum oxide, which **always** coats the aluminum, rubs off. It tastes metallic because you are tasting aluminum rust. | ffb74960-8ef7-4ccb-9e9e-bc317262e0f3 |
1w6imt | How can our brains allow us to kill ourselves? | They try really hard to stop us, but sometimes they're too damaged. | 9205f71e-a017-4cc7-b8af-53ce774b2203 |
5swe9n | Why is a president commenting on a judicial procedure not a violation of the separation of powers? | He is allowed to comment all he likes. He is even allowed (and often expected) to fight judicial procedures in court. What he can't do is order his executive branch to directly violate the court findings. | 24d1e17a-9b37-435b-a2ac-2618087c2b1c |
10qj1t | The inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance during 1954. | one of the main points of propaganda against the soviet union was that the soviet union was atheist and godless, while the US was strong under the protection and guidence of god.
The pledge of allegiance was written by a baptist flag salesman to increase sales anyways. | e681209a-1cb3-4efc-b41f-d7c567f8ba48 |
2yp0jx | Why do I often get calls from random numbers with nobody on the other line? | They're likely scammy telemarketing calls. Outbound call centers typically use a "power dialer" that calls a bunch of numbers at once, and if the line picks up, instantly connects it to an operator. In legit call centers, they're tuned so that you rarely get enough people picking up at once that there are no operators available.
But scammy telemarketers? They don't care, they want 100% of the scammers working 100% of the time, and if that means you get woken up 3 times to a dead line, so be it. | 2e1eefd7-b86e-49f0-8ca6-8f56a7254dc2 |
3rc7dz | How can you have multiple Channels on the same frequency!(e.g. In Walkie-Talkies)? | On the [Family Radio Service](_URL_2_), which is the more common radio band as it does not require an operator's license, you have multiple channels spaced 12.5 kHz apart. On each of those channels, the radio uses something called CDCSS ([Continuous Digital-Coded Squelch System](_URL_1_)) or CTCSS ([Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch System](_URL_0_)) to provide the sub-channels you're talking about.
How this works is actually fairly simple; in addition to the audio that you can hear, the radio adds a specific digital code (in the case of CDCSS) or an inaudible sound (CTCSS) that the radio circuitry picks up and uses to ignore transmissions that do not use the code or tone that the radio is listening to. | 05db0e38-2cb8-4c04-aaa0-9dfe3a52b1c6 |
2lpbdq | Why are most road kill on the side of the road? | State trooper move the carcass to aide of the road if it's blocking or endangering traffic. Later on, animal services comes by and takes the carcass if animals haven't eaten it already. If healthy itll be butchered and donated to local animal shelters | d49b6bd0-bcb7-47cb-8e34-9815dafbf5d5 |
2yhtfk | What are the pros and cons of "right to work" laws? | > A "right-to-work" law is a statute in the UnitedStates that prohibits union security agreements, or agreements between labor unions and employers, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment.
Pros: employees that don't want to be in a union cannot be forced to as a condition of their employment.
Cons: The functional power of a union is reduced. Strikes are less powerful, as nonunion employees can still work without fear of retribution. | 5c0843c9-bf80-4457-aae7-a80f14cf1576 |
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