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63fd9m | How do Large Bubbles Form on Potato Chips? | There is an air pocket that expands during the frying of the chip. However it does not expand enough to break the elasticity of the potato creating a bubble that solidifies when the starches cool down. | ff11a54f-e374-4547-8b82-9e8f0e0789d1 |
3302r5 | How can I swat a fly with all my might, yet it still comes back to annoy me? | You are using the wrong technique, boy. Might will not rid you of the fly. You need speed, agility and intelligence. You don't need to crush the fly, you need to capture him. Flies are not smart, surely you can think better than him. Use your brain, not just your muscles, boy, and catch the fly. | 16194e1c-97c6-464b-9e33-e5682e05f447 |
6gfwxc | When is a plant considered officially dead? | I don't know that there is any official legal or technical declaration of plant death which is consistently followed. Usually individuals will consider a plant to be dead when as a whole it isn't able to recover from its current state even if some clippings may be viable. | c5aac438-85fe-40a9-94ab-2985907dfe6e |
46zl5r | How come when the Reddit servers are down, they can still provide the Failure message? | The server in question is most likely the database server. When you access a page, reddit's web server needs to ask the database for the data. The database has a limited number of available connections, so if too many are currently in progress, it will refuse more connections. The web server will then get an error message from the database, and will return a simple error page to the user. | ad17e034-d2e1-4c36-bf69-df5829f319f1 |
31x38l | How does anonymous hack into websites and how are they structured if they are all completely anonymous? | 'Anonymous' isn't really a single group, it's a generic identity for 'hacktivists'. Anybody can claim to belong, and people that don't claim to belong might get lumped in with them anyway.
How one can crack into any website or network is a lot like asking how someone can break into a building: there's a huge collection of ways, and not all of them would work on all targets. Indeed often it's more varied in the computer security world because very often it takes a string of security breaches before the hacker gets what they're looking for.
The generic answer is they exploit security flaws they find. There exist companies and freelancers that do 'whitehat' hacking on contract and tell you about the flaws they find without exploiting them as a service, but many, many companies are pretty lax about their security and never bother with security audits or the like. | 3a2c8892-468c-4b49-a29c-a742e2cd60b5 |
4gl9ni | How do medical examiners/other forensic analysts determine the time frame in which a person died? | The liver cools at a fairly constant rate, as it is so well insulated within the body, so they measure the temperature of the liver and the ambient temperature of the room, and from these numbers they can estimate a time of death.
This only works if it was a recent death, for longer times they have to take into account decomposition, and their estimates are far less accurate. | 75d94abf-7d44-4e44-8164-79b900c79695 |
4ttfi7 | One Degree of Separation for movie making | It means always making sure every scene is directly connected to the main plot line and main character. It is a way to trim extra fluff and bullshit from your movie. | 17ee103c-bd21-477e-9787-b521b6cd2308 |
jip0t | Why can't we do brain transplants like other organs? | When we transplant other organs, we mainly have to reconnect tubes (blood vessels, intestine, etc.). If we were to replace the brain, we need to reconnect the nerves which we don't know how to do on such a large scale.
At least that is my current understanding. | bbd75d3d-b272-46ce-883d-c76e17c07ebe |
1wuqix | What causes an itch on my body? | To add on to this question, especially the nose? | 1881fce1-df37-4ff9-934f-f9b75a3ec56c |
3rnmql | Why do most kids go through a phase in which they hate their parents? | Well it's usually around the age that they start forming their own opinions and wanting to have some control over their own lives. Of course their parents still have the majority of control and expect their children to obey their every word.
I think it's definitely understandable to hate or resent somebody who has absolute power over you. | 04fab579-f615-4139-97fd-041c8af74d38 |
36dukk | How can Comcast can charge me a ridiculous price for 30mbs internet but at best I get 3mbs down or up? | Well I'm. Pretty sure you're paying for 30 MegaBits where as your download is MegaBytes.... The mathematics and how it's measured or how that works is still beyond me and I'd like to know how those numbers correlate and what a megabit really is | 6c9aacd1-30b4-46aa-b72a-fffd63705bf3 |
37ulg4 | Why do we remember some skills (e.g swimming and cycling) our whole lives? | It's called procedural memory. More specifically, it's 'muscle memory' or 'motor learning' which is a type of procedural memory.
Your brain's cerebellum, in particular, is very good at encoding sequences of muscle movements into long-term memory storage.
Procedural memory is very robust. Even people with dementia and amnesia often still retain procedural memories for skills like playing a musical instrument or riding a bicycle without any conscious effort.
Interestingly, for people with anterograde amnesia (a condition characterized by the inability to form new memories), it's still possible for them to learn new motor skills and encode them as procedural memories.
In other words, you can have someone with anterograde amnesia learn to ride a bicycle (as just an example) for the first time in their life and each day you get them to ride they will have no recollection of ever riding before, but each day they will continue to get better and better at riding the bike. | 466b357c-4b8d-4eac-986b-1a224b8e26b2 |
52uak4 | why do only loans and credit cards show in your credit reports and not other types of accounts | Information cannot show up on your credit report if it is not reported to the credit agency. If your utility company doesn't report payment history to, for example, Experian (one of the three major agencies that create and monitor your credit score), then that information will not show up on your credit report.
Most utility companies do not report this information to credit agencies. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) mandates a few things about companies reporting your payment history. The two big ones that tend to present hurdles for utility companies are that 1.) payment history must be reported promptly, and it must be reported regularly; and 2.) discrepancies on the report must be settled in a timely manner. Most utility companies are either not able or not willing to meet those criteria, and so your payment history cannot be counted against (or for) your credit score. In the long run, this is actually intended to be better for the consumer. | f2befac4-238f-442a-b484-ce34f0ad1127 |
2lnzbq | If Blue LEDs just have been invented (nobel price '14), how come my smartphone's notification LED can shine blue since a couple of years? | The nobel price was awarded in 2014 for the discovery that happened about 20ish years ago | b4c24a9f-9790-4a9b-b00b-1482859f127e |
5qtlxx | Why do your allergies flare up when you wake up? I never recall being woken up from sneezing but as soon as I wake up it starts. | When you are sleeping your body is producing antihistimine so it can function quietly whilst you sleep. Wake up and it allocates those hormones elsewhere. | 1cbd38c6-d8af-4004-b611-855db8a7861d |
6l30rw | Are internet and cable ads confusing on purpose? Or are cable and internet companies just bad at their jobs. | They are well thought and confusing on purpose:
1) they don't want you to be able to compare their product to the competition.
2) they try to give a sense of urgency "buy now" even the product is on the shelves for a long time. They frequently create fake sales, fooling people into believing they get a great deal.
3) they see that one fixed price has limitations. For example, a hotel that sold 50% of their occupancy. What will they do with the empty rooms? They gradually start reducing price in a way customers think they got a bargain. Same with cellphone carriers. They speak about deals, but in reality, they are all very much alike. Nobody is significantly cheaper than others. | 1d3a73d7-2efc-45d7-92eb-3d4cbd516a80 |
5llx01 | How are my headphones playing a "ghost station"? | A nearby AM radio station is being picked up and rectified by the TV.
A simple AM receiver can be made with a junction of two dissimilar metals or a metal needle point on a crystal. I suspect the electronics in the TV are performing the rectification and the headphone cable is the antenna. | 33f168c6-6d09-491b-91db-234a308461a0 |
5spi5b | How do interplanetary spacecraft (and in the future interstellar), protect against collisions with space debris? | They don't and they don't need to. Space is incredibly big and empty. Despite how visuals like the one on the [Asteroid Belt Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) makes it seem, the majority of the asteroids are very small and the distance between them is enormous. The odds of our probes to the outer planets hitting anything are astronomically slim and they have been flying directly through it without any collisions so far. Once you get out of the solar system into interstellar space the distances between things just becomes even larger. | abf5aadd-0608-4aa0-9711-258e9e9bf3c9 |
nx0p1 | Cyclic Groups & Examples | The integers, start with 1 and keep adding or subtracting 1, you get all the integers that way.
A clock, take 1 o'clock and keep adding or subtracting 1 hour... you will get all the possible times on a clock.
All cyclic groups are really either clock groups or are the integers.
With a 12 hour clock you can also get all the times by using 5 (then add or subtract 5), 7 (add or subtract 7), and 11 (add or subtract 11).
If you a 15 hour clock you could use 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14.
In general if you have an n-hour clock you can use any number g so that the fraction n/g is does not reduce. | a0933520-2708-4b67-8c0e-6e41869921df |
7b7s32 | How is it possible for us to know if a sound comes from the top or the bottom given that we only have two ears aligned horizontally? | The shape of your ears directs sound into your ear canals difforently based on the angle it comes in at. If you change the shape of your ears with something like play dough you lose this ablilty all togeather. Other animals like dogs aren't as good st this and so tilt their heads to get a better idea of what virtical angle the sound is coming from. Here is a great video by Smarter Every Day all about it: _URL_0_ | 6de04092-9d05-4d3b-96fa-b8d804873572 |
3llq94 | Why do we have morning wood, does females have something similar or not at all ? | There are many factors.
1) Your body will give you a partial erection to help prevent you from emptying your bladder while you are asleep.
2) Your body goes through cycles that raise and lower your blood pressure while you sleep. These happen numerous times during the night and each time they happen you are likely to get a partial erection.
3) Contact on your genitals by clothing or bedding while you sleep can stimulate you enough to get an erection.
4) Erotic dreams can cause you to get an erection. | e2a1edfb-9d99-47fd-9e78-64c5080e3dd8 |
8hbgwp | the E meme | us teenagers have lost all sense of humor and now make memes as bizarre and esoteric as possible. basically all the memes on r/deepfriedmemes are a great example, or the zuckerbot meme. i still find it funny tho lmao
tl;dr: were fuckin dumb | 87c902f6-b55a-4550-a210-269e318d7e5e |
rtw4o | The formation of storms during the "Dust Bowl" | A dust storm is formed when high velocity winds pick up loose sand and dirt of a flat surface and carries it over a distance. Besides the Dust Bowl, dust storms are very common in dry sandy areas and in deserts; a dust storm is the same thing as a sand storm, and they occur all the time.
There wasn't a meteorological phenomena taking place during the Dust Bowl. High winds are quite common in the American prairies. In fact, dust storms still take place today. The reason why the Dust Bowl had plenty of storms was because, as you mentioned, the agricultural practices. If they're wasn't any agriculture in the area, there would have been less loose soil and dirt. To make things worse, there was a drought in the early 1930's. So, all the loose soil and dirt became really dry, and was easily picked up by the wind.
TL/DR: To create a dust storm, you need heavy wind and a lot of dust. A combination of agriculture and drought created a ton of dust that was picked up by the naturally occurring wind. | e07e92c0-7e78-4464-afd8-7259d353a3f1 |
2mq969 | What is the difference between "Sell By", "Best By", "Use By"... etc. dates on food? | Employer must sell this item by : dd/mm/yy ;
This item is best consumed if by : dd/mm/yy ;
Consumer should finish (use) this item by : dd/mm/yy | e43597f0-06d6-4786-867a-c966e6952901 |
o81iq | Why does the moon appear larger at the horizon? | It's believed to simply be an optical [illusion](_URL_0_). | 16cc26b1-79b0-471a-a53e-3ed8c51e2fae |
4xwyed | How are built bases and platforms in the sea? | The majority of offshore oil platforms actually float or are on "legs".
[Here's the legs of one, being towed out to sea.](_URL_0_) - in the case of these, footings or foundations on the sea bed - obviously its not that deep - are poured by highly skilled deep sea divers. One of the cool things about concrete is that - depending on the mix - yes, you can "pour" concrete under water and it sets. Although its possible that the "footings" are just level spots graded by a dredger if the bottom is sound enough (rock, not sand).
[Here's one that floats being transported.](_URL_2_). Once it gets to where its going, they fill the base and legs with sea-water to create ballast. There's enough air left in the legs to create bouyancy and it floats. They anchor the platform with either literal anchors, but more likely big blocks of concrete cast on land and then dropped where they need to be, and connected to the platform with cables.
For bridges and stuff, your support structures have to be mounted to the sea floor. While "floating" bridges do exist, they tend to be temporary. Although [Norway is currently planning a "floating tunnel" across a fjord, where the tunnel is suspended by floating islands that ships can sail between.](_URL_1_) | 34a13235-d4bb-42f8-b361-9a5ecdea01e1 |
32xg3n | Why do big companies care about geoblocking so much? | It depends on the company I suppose. In many cases it has to do with marketing. If you are releasing products on a regional scale (eg you cannot ship out all at once to the whole world), then allowing your website, advertising, and other marketing to penetrate and build demand in a market where the product may not be released for months or years, is very counter productive.
It will build popularity at a time when people cannot purchase the product, and when the product is finally released, it will be old news, the initial excitement having already passed.
Other industries do it simply because that is the way they have done it in the past (see point above) and are resistant to change (even though the origional reasons for doing it have been resolved).
For other companies it may be an issue with keeping their brand at top quality. Changing a marketing campaign for other countries takes ALOT of work and time, which even when companies take the time to do it can still cause major issues. Simply releasing an unfinished product can do a lot more harm than good. | 185004a2-0cbf-43fc-9fae-0638a097b519 |
6wfdbo | With all the advancements in technology, how are there still places that have no service? | Money and physics, mostly the former. It costs a pretty penny to build cell towers and expand the network, if you can't justify the cost to build it with the amount of income you'd get by new subscriptions covered by the new infrastructure, it won't be built. That is unless the government subsidizes the construction, which they have done in the past but people complain about it.
From a physics perspective there are a few places where it's notoriously difficult to get service, like in a valley or in an extremely crowded cell. The solution is to build more cells, which brings you back to the point on money. | 896f1c0c-7f02-4573-93fe-b37bd53ea39d |
3mlb4o | If we used nuclear power for everything, how long until we run out? Could we get more uranium by then? | Fissionable materials are infinite for all practical purposes.
Uranium can be extracted from seawater in vast quantities because it comprises a significant portion of the Earth's crust. | dfb029a6-7dc3-4bce-86b8-e43c024338e9 |
4zz0n5 | How does a quartz clock work? | Yarr, ['twas asked by those what sailed in before ye!](_URL_1_)
Enjoy yon older explanations, and remember [rule 7](_URL_0_) says search to avoid repostin'. | ed2ac231-43df-4e3d-b19e-6e77bd0a150e |
2pkug0 | What is the big deal with the movie The Interview? | This is so completely ridiculous. As a nation, the US (supposedly) prides itself on not (usually) crumbling to terrorists threats. If we alter our way of life, based on fear, terrorists win. It is a goddamn movie. The people of North Korea do not even know of it's existence. They have no connection to the civilized world. So, what is the matter? Who does it hurt? Do people really think that a comedy starring a Canadian stonner Seth Rogen and squinty eyed James Franco will result in global uprising? Come on....
Where was the hostility when Team America came out? What made that so different? Puppets? Shit, I mean, The Interview is probably going to be just dick jokes the whole time.
When it comes to comedy the point is clear: either everything can be lampooned and joked about or nothing at all. It is that simple. This is the school of Mel Brooks. Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Seth McFarlene abide by the code (with a few executives pulling material). Stand-Up Comedians like Dave Attell, Lisa Lampanelli, and many others also abide by this. Once we filter and censor comedy, then it loses all meaning. We lose basic human will to decide.
This does not mean that comedy cannot be tasteless; it most certainly can be! Months after the Boston Marathon bombing a naive girl dressed up as a victim for Halloween. She trended hard on the web and in a very negative way. It got to the point that she lost her job over it; absurd. She did nothing wrong. She found humor in a somber place that was relatively still new on peoples minds. She had the right to make fun of it. The issue that it comes down to is - taste ... Tasteless? Most likely. She did not dress up as a victim to maliciously attack victims, their families, or anyone in the city who was affected one way or another. She was a girl who turned relevancy of the world around her into a Halloween Costume. Years ago, when I was 8, I was a HOBO for Halloween. I essentially lampooned homeless vagrants who abuse the rail system. No one batted an eye. Where is the outrage there?
It is just a damn shame that over time the human races strongest trait is FEAR ... we place more stock into fear than anything else. We do not place nearly enough emphasis on education, love, or understating.
If the human race were Jedi's ... most of us would have succumbed to the Dark Side by now; within the past few decades alone. | a0732428-158a-43fc-9788-bea263506372 |
2tmwic | If the Big Bang happened, what events preceded it? | The honest answer is that we don't know. There are some conceptual ideas, but none with any evidence as of now. The after effects of big bang itself cuts us off from data gathering at a certain point, and going back any further than than the singularity is outside the realm of what we know as existence so we wouldn't even know what data to look for (if there is any).
Suggestion: A better way to ask this is "What is the origin of the singularity in the big bang and what caused it to expand?" Asking it that way will avoid people saying, "There was no 'before' because time did not emerge until the big bang. "
Most people (like me) know what you meant by your question, but some people are just difficult and don't answer what you mean, instead defer the question. | 0e28c8d1-5f10-4fe0-aec0-7271da40666a |
3xavx9 | How are highway light pole bulbs changed? | Tall hydraulic lifts with a guy in the basket. It really is that simple, they cone off the lane, the guy gets in his safety harness and gets lifted all the way up there in the basket with the new bulb. I knew a guy who collected street light bulbs, don't ask me why, he was a bit odd. But he showed me them and the bulbs are actually quite large and expensive. | d6804197-6fa0-4984-863a-5f32495c07e8 |
1ph10p | How can people survive a lighting strike but will almost certainly die at a 220v home socket. | I'd suspect "almost certainly" is quite a bit of an overstatement. I've shocked myself at least two dozen times with the current coming from my wall, and while it hurts like a bitch, i've never come close to dying.
And while people *can* survive lightning strikes, I also suspect you have an overestimated view of how many people survive direct lightning strikes.
It all depends on *how* you're being electrocuted; proximity, how the current flows through your body, etc.
tl;dr: Your adjectives seem backwards | fc4e98b5-5591-4422-a06d-2cdea2c9a571 |
2cxysa | Why do scientists think space isn't spherical? | First of all, we have to define some terms. Instead of spherical, it is more correct to say that something is positively curved (ie. that if the curvature continues indefinitely then it will eventually enclose some space bounded by the curve). Hence, a sphere. A quick way to determine this is if the angles on a triangle drawn on the surface of the curvature add up to **more than 180 degrees**.
Negatively curved space looks basically like a saddle. If you extend this infinitely then the edges don't actually ever meet up so it doesn't bound some finite zone. A quick way to determine this is if the angles of a triangle drawn on the surface of the curvature add up to **less than 180 degrees**.
The last option is flat. That is, the triangle's angles add up to **exactly 180 degrees**.
So, using the triangle idea, we measure incredibly huge triangles in space using known reference points like quasars. We have to use huge triangles (the larger the better) because a sufficiently big sphere or saddle would look flat on a small scale.
It turns out that, when you do those meaurements, the universe is flat to significantly less than 1%. That is, the angles of the triangle add to somewhere between 179.5 degrees and 180.5 degrees.
That's it in a nutshell. This method works because space, on very large scales, is homogenous and isotropic. That is, it looks virtually the same no matter what direction and how far we look. So we can take those huge triangles and be pretty certain that what we're seeing is a good approximation of "everywhere". | a97523b0-33ff-4b69-b9b5-d088b2d93d10 |
3gpbyu | Why has China devalued its currency, and what will that mean for other countries? | When your currency becomes stronger, it becomes much harder for you to export your country's goods, because your goods become more expensive for other countries. China doesn't want that because they are the biggest export nation that there is. | d2ef84cd-013c-4c0e-9e9b-e973a8174cf4 |
1aqumd | Why do plastic bags make so much noise? | Well as far as i know, its because the polymers are stretched and crystalized to make the bag cheap and sturdy. This makes it more resistant to physical manipulation and when you overcome the resistance when you change the shape, the energy is released as sound.
**eli5: Sound is vibrations. Crumpling a plastic bag releases vibrations into the air.** | abc602b6-448d-4f5a-a910-ce50b5a19731 |
4gvgag | How do human crushes even happen? | You're thinking about it from the perspective of the people at the front, not the people at the back.
When the people at the front reach a barrier, they stop. Seems simple. You would expect the people behind them to stop too. The people behind them will stop, and so will the people behind ***them***.
But then you get to 100 rows back, and the people back there have no idea why the crowd has stopped moving. All they know is that they want to move forward (to see the match, reach the fire escape, or whatever) and the people in front of them have stopped. They see a small gap in front of them and try to squeeze into it to get further forward.
Multiply this by 1000 and you've got a huge force pushing against the people at the front. People at the front are dying and those at the back are completely unaware that there is a problem. | 298f3b59-545e-4a5c-aace-b053d209fb43 |
qrmpd | How they determine the length of time to wait between airing a movie in theaters, and premiering it on TV. | I say once they've felt they've squeezed as much money as they can out of dvd sales from rentals and purchases. Most likely they wait til after after a holiday event where they know they'll get alot of sales. Also, It won't go on tv unless someone wants it. If someone wants it the "industry" again get paid for licensing out the movie. | 2f0a2285-cf82-4312-b128-ceb6e7e94c61 |
1kj364 | About health insurance, what happens when you reach the age of 26? | Obamacare made it possible to keep your health insurance if you're insured under your parent's plan until you're 26 years of age (previously, I believe it was 22).
After you turn 26 you will no longer have insurance unless you've obtained a plan through your own employer/institution/whatever.
Let's say you had a stable career by age 24, and that employer provided you with healthcare benefits, you would no longer need to be insured under your parent's plan: you'd have your own.
Basically your parents are telling you that if you want to receive healthcare when you're 26, you need to find some way to get your own insurance. Finding a job that provides good benefits is the way to do it.
ETA: It's never free, though. It comes out of your paycheck. | ef4b6320-1326-485d-b089-18b97bd68d81 |
1rid4r | How are cell phones able to find each other if they are constantly moving between different cell phone towers? | A cell phone is actually a radio -- an extremely sophisticated radio, but a radio nonetheless.
Before cell phones, trucks would talk to each other using CBs, however, this was limited to the number of people that could talk at the same time due to the range and the fact these typically only had about 25 channels.
The genius of the cellular system is the division of a city into small cells. This allows extensive frequency reuse across a city, so that millions of people can use cell phones simultaneously.
In a typical analog cell-phone system in the United States, the cell-phone carrier receives about 800 frequencies to use across the city. The carrier chops up the city into cells. Each cell is typically sized at about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers).
Because cell phones and base stations use low-power transmitters, the same frequencies can be reused in non-adjacent cells.
Here are the basics:
- As you drive through the city areas are divided into cells
- The cells read a unique ID on your phone to identify you and what carrier you are with.
- If your ID matches that of the tower, you will be considered in your home network.
- Along with your ID, your phone also transmits a registration request, and the cell tower keeps track of your phone's location in a database -- this way, the tower knows which cell you are in when it wants to ring your phone.
- The cell tower gets the call, and it tries to find you. It looks in its database to see which cell you are in.
- The cell tower picks a frequency pair that your phone will use in that cell to take the call.
- The cell tower communicates with your phone over the control channel to tell it which frequencies to use, and once your phone and the tower switch on those frequencies, the call is connected. Now, you are talking by two-way radio to a friend.
- As you move toward the edge of your cell, your cell's base station notes that your signal strength is diminishing. Meanwhile, the base station in the cell you are moving toward (which is listening and measuring signal strength on all frequencies, not just its own one-seventh) sees your phone's signal strength increasing. The two base stations coordinate with each other through the cell tower, and at some point, your phone gets a signal on a control channel telling it to change frequencies. This hand off switches your phone to the new cell.
tl;dr - Your phone acts as a radio and cell towers communicate with your phone and each other to automatically transfer your call. | ee504403-c07b-4292-bf2d-59f3ceecc002 |
wgu8p | How the "feels like" measurement of the temperature is taken? | They take measurements of the humidity, wind speed, and temperature, then they put them into a formula and they get roughly what it will feel like. The formula and some more information about it are available [here](_URL_0_). I guess I could have copy-pasted it, but I'm too lazy. | 2cab926d-bc0a-40bf-8a24-d1538bac7c15 |
366zn5 | Why do people KEEP pressing the button in /r/button. Is it reward gratification or some other motivation | People want to push it as close to zero as possible to get the rarest color.
Take heart though, you had to be registered by April 1st to press it, so eventually there won't be anyone else to press it and we'll all be disappointed at the outcome together. | 1763d02c-f227-41f6-a671-9778dd810894 |
2s3w8j | why is my earliest memory not from birth or a little after birth? | Your brain is not finished developing until further age. By the time of your birth your brain still lack the cognitive ability to store memories. It is not until further age you get some of the brain abilities that might seem obvious to you now.
You should watch this video about [cognitive development among children](_URL_0_) - Its quite interesting. | f8c31fdb-f7d3-41f0-96c2-b37d053f1cfc |
1yyx3e | How come I get pimples everywhere except on my hands or feet? | Pimples are caused by sebaceous glands, which produce an oil-type substance to coat our hair follicles (even the barely visible ones on our foreheads and noses).
The skin of our palms and soles are special. The epidermis of the rest of the body has only four layers, and also has lots of hair follicles (and thus lots of sebaceous glands). The epidermis on the palms and soles have five layers and have no hair (so no sebaceous glands at all). | 60b89e3e-f3a2-4757-93bd-9107bff48b7d |
26qc31 | How does unemployment insurance work? | So unemployment is basically a pot of money funded by the federal and state unemployment taxes that businesses pay. The more workers a business has file for unemployment, the higher their unemployment tax rate. You don't have to contact the employer at all - the state will do that part.
The rules for whether you qualify to receive unemployment benefits vary by state. You'll need to contact your local unemployment office to find out if you qualify.
A voluntary quit scenario is generally harder to get approved (though certainly not impossible), so you'll want to gather any supporting documentation you had (complaints you filed about sexual harassment and theft, requests for additional time, etc.) | 087208ad-ab9e-45e2-b554-ffd2d88ee101 |
tmgdc | Lisps | You have a form of [rhotacism](_URL_3_). Just from some googling, it appears [Arabic does not have](_URL_4_) a [/ɹ/](_URL_1_) sound like English does. Instead, you only have [غ](_URL_2_), which is pronounced as a [/ɣ/](_URL_5_) (or [/ʁ/](_URL_0_) in Classical Arabic). It would make sense, then, that you have a hard time pronouncing a sound you didn't grow up with. This is normal, just like English speakers have a hard time picking up the ability to roll their Rs. | 6ac783a0-3d5b-40c6-8547-32122cb39c92 |
8w53u2 | What is the difference between an originalist interpretation and a "living document" interpretation when it comes to the U.S. Supreme Court? | The idea is a debate about whether the founders wrote the thing to be specific, rigid, and amendable only through the amendment process...
or whether the founders wrote the thing with deliberately looser language to take shifting societal norms into account.
For example, the 8th amendment prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishments but neglects to define those terms. An originalist would argue that we need to research what "cruel and unusual" meant to the founders. A proponent of living document theory would argue that "cruel and unusual" is deliberately vague so that the boundaries of cruel and unusual can shift as society progresses. | 91f10483-d721-42b1-8b54-383a7b2b11e4 |
776ucj | Why are the players more prone to breaking out into fights in some sports compared to others? | Certain sports are more 'aggressive' than others...When the sport is physically demanding where the opponents are, in a sense, battling each other (a combat sport – combat = war), then the aggression level of the players is heighten as if they are in war or predator vs pray…this makes the players more prone to fight where as a physically demanding endurance sport like cycling is the opposite – the endurance sport is a race from point A to B, not combative. | ab8929a3-4010-4808-a977-2bbd41898c68 |
41zhg0 | How does doing more exercise give you more energy? | Energy the body produces isn't a "static pool" that is only filled with so much water. It's like a big reservoir with an input valve (your food) and an electricity-producing hydroelectric dam (the body process called "metabolism" that creates the energy to run your body), and discharge shoots for the exiting water (your... uh... hoo-hah and wiggly bits).
When you exercise, you're tuning up that hydroelectric dam. The body is getting into a mode where it is realizing "hey I have work to do here! I better maintain my energy production facility", so it knocks the rust off of the old turbines and maybe throws some new ones in there too (i.e. starts getting into the mode of growing muscle). All that tuning and extra capacity creates more available energy during the times when you're not working out. | f5828533-c2e9-4068-8319-70848972f377 |
1strs5 | Why do most US schools have children get up before the crack of dawn to go to school? | The American workday is typically 9-5, and parents need to get their children fed/clothed/etc and on the bus or dropped off and still able to get to work on time. | dc96382f-1061-4bd1-a233-b2182d9a50ff |
1q1ffj | What does the discovery of the knee's anterolateral ligament mean for us, and why did it take so long to confirm it's existence? | Seriously! How did we just now discover this? Wouldn't it be noticed during the countless autopsies performed? | cdf67edb-8b26-42f0-8b61-fb7900b65584 |
7p9v7p | How do military aircraft intercept hijacked commercial planes? | Former navy, we did flight ops with helos to intercept subs and track em. Intercept is kind of a blanket term. You can "intercept" the plane or boat and guide it to a destination of your choice but that is a gentle hand approach. Imagine two bouncers at a bar standing next to you...you will prob listen if they are willing to beat your ass. This is especially true when you look at US policy for hijacked planes.
Tldr: shoot that bitch down.
[Source](_URL_0_)
If they don't comply I am unaware of any way to take over the air craft while it's in flight. The call then is to disable it risking casualties or destroy it. Maybe some one with pilot experience can weigh in. | a98304d3-f872-4dab-bb06-cc419b7529d0 |
7ykx9c | What are the rules for driving off-road in America? | It is illegal to drive on other people's property without their permission. It is trespassing and could be destruction of property if you tear up the land or hurt crops. If you own the property you can drive as much as you want and you do not even need a license to do so.
It can be illegal to drive on public lands outside of designated driving paths, but it is not always. You will have to check with the park.
Pulling onto the shoulder of the road, or into the culvert if you have car trouble is expected, and often required in most States and you can get a ticket for failing to get your car safely off the road.
There are many places (particularly in rural areas) that have parking areas that are basically just patches of dirt or open fields. It is generally only illegal to park here if you abandon the vehicle, park there without permission of the owner, or are in some ways impeding traffic.
But overall it varies by State, county, and city so there can be a lot of variation.
Edit: Also how can you have lived in a rural suburb? A suburb by definition is physically attached to a city so is far more urban that it is rural. | f18dcad2-d56b-40fd-81a6-37be7a0d5ec8 |
4dbol2 | Why can light travel through some solids (e.g. water bottle) but not all? | Some molecules have a tendency to crystal structures: if you look at a piece of material very closely (with an electron microscope), you can see that the molecules form repetitive, organised structures. A famous example of this is [diamond](_URL_0_) .
In the picture, you can see the pattern that is repeated millions of times in all 3 directions, which eventually creates a touchable diamond.
Some molecules tend to form a strucure that is essentially one gigantic crystal strucure (e.g. sapphire). Because all the atoms are very nicele ordened in a pattern, photons can often fly through whithout boucing off an atom.y
A polycristalline structure is also possible. This can occur when the same type of atoms 'decide' to form clusters of different crystal structures, or because there are different atoms with different structures etc. In this case it is sometimes possible that the materials are still semi-transparent, but in e.g. metals (which form crystal structures) light cannot pass through.
Materials can also be amorphous, which means the material is just a mish-mash of unordened atoms. In this case, light cannot pass through the material (the material is opaque). Light bouncing through will always hit an atom after a small distance. An example of this is silicon.
You can compare the photons to a straight flying football going through a stll-standing batallion of soldiers in formation vs. going through the mass at times square during New Year's Eve.
**TL;DR**: Sometimes atoms are nicely ordened which makes it easy for photons to pass trough the material.
**SOURCE**: I have a material science course.
**EDIT**: spelling | 2ff4b535-387c-4d86-8ab8-822c9386e0fa |
1qszwn | Why isn't charging the mound in baseball considered assault? | It's assumption of the risk. You, by playing baseball, consent to all of the risks inherent in the game. One of those things is fighting that may happen from time to time. | 5ea5deec-5dc9-4fcb-988a-d796d4dd0317 |
39gx3x | How did tithing come to be a requirement for members of the church? | Tithing goes back to the earliest days of Judaism (Abraham offered a tithe to Melchizedek and it was required in [Jewish law](_URL_2_)). However, in the earliest Christian church records, the church appears much more like a [commune](_URL_1_) where there were few things held individually.
The earliest mention of giving a tithe by a Christian is [Cyprian](_URL_0_) who lived from 200 to 258, and argued that too many Christians were not giving 10% but were increasing their wealth. By the 6th century it was part of [Church law](_URL_3_), and by the 8th enforced by secular law. | f1f43c47-2220-4a85-921c-69674e5f065b |
7b7osa | Why do stovetops measure temps from LO-HI (with numbers) instead of temps? | The temperature of your cooking element doesn't really give you an indication of your food's temperature. Just because I set my stove to 200 degrees doesn't mean that the food is 200 degrees.
Why not just use a food thermometer like everyone? | 920823ee-cba3-489d-bb5a-3f8d376e57b2 |
6due5k | Why are we able to see shockwaves? | refraction
changes in air density (aka shockwaves) act like lenses made out of air
more or less the same effect can be observed over candles, only there it is hot air and not compressed air | 35a6c46c-009f-45ba-a81e-e0d868b1ad80 |
6haqks | Why is it unwise for a lawyer to represent himself/herself after being arrested? | Well, because you are emotionally invested. It is basically the same principle why a doctor shouldn't tread his own family. As a party of this investigation / conflict, you are bias, you have your own opinion that is not necessarily reflected by law, but by your own feelings toward the case.
As such, it prevents you from really taking a step back and look at the case in whole, keeping your mind clear to analyse it as a professional. | 61c358d9-ffc6-4553-b673-24cc43996220 |
3xhc5c | Why serial killers tend to be white, male, and 30's? | It's a mix of factors.
Most people in the US are white. So that's the first third of your answer.
The most common motivation or reason why serial killers do what they do is because it gives them personal gratification which outweighs any voice in their head that tells them not to.
How they got this way could be any number of reasons - child or sexual abuse, bullying, not adhering to social norms, horrible family life, and so on. Some of those factors like bullying might affect men more than women, and guys are generally less likely to listen to that little cautionary voice in their head in general (which is why male drivers have more accidents than female ones as a trend). So that's the guy part.
When they're in their 30's, they have a combination of money to pay for their "hobby", high social and sexual drive, and three decades for their psychological disorder to seat itself. Couple this with that being the age where they're also gaining independence, and that's around the time they're most able and wanting to do bad things, making the 30's the age part. | a502d76d-b706-49e2-9093-2e0534839958 |
8hu1ge | what is the meaning of true positve ,true negative ,false positive and false negative? | Imagine you are subjected to a lie detector test. You are innocent of the crime. When the examiner asks whether you committed the crime, you say “No.” But the needle jumps anyway. The examiner says, “AHA! You’re lying!” Even thought you are actually telling the truth. This is a false positive.
Then they bring in the real criminal. They hook him up and ask if he committed the crime. He says, “No.” The needle doesn’t move. The examiner says, “You’re honest. That’s all we need. Have a nice day.” This was a false negative. The instrument failed to detect the lie, even though it should have.
I use polygraphy as an example because it is really, really unreliable. | eb3cf159-18fa-4fd2-be2e-101a6160396e |
7bfiur | How do old animated films get digitally remastered to make them HD? ie: old Disney movies. | They were always well beyond HD. Do you think the version that was sent to theaters back in the day was equivalent to SD? It was on a film reel that was even higher effective resolution than 4K for the most part.
The film master is put through a scanner that saves the movie in a digital format. We have much better scanners now, and we still have the film master. You just gotta rescan it. | c3d4a498-b50b-48fe-acb0-1ec93b5ae0c6 |
2dnyic | Why do school teachers need a fundraiser every year for school supplies? | The taxpayer doesn't like to actually pay money for services provided. | 65eadd9d-0962-478a-b808-e733de6589bc |
3gd2zk | how are movies like the Parent Trap made when one actor plays multiple roles and their faces are seen together in the same shot? | One way of doing it is to shoot the scene twice without moving the camera. The first time, they shoot the scene when the actor plays the first role, the second time the second role. These two versions of the scene are then blended over each other.
Another version uses blue-screen in which one of the takes (or both) are shot in front of a blue canvas (or green), which is then replaced by a real background.
In these cases, the actor never touches the other character because it's, well, impossible. There is, however, techniques that allow this. One way is to compose the picture in a way that cuts the arm (usually around the elbow), and another actor is touching the character. The blend-over scene fades out the fact that there's just a "magic hand" there. | cc40dbf2-d523-4131-ba5c-84e84de327b6 |
4n43ho | Why do healthier versions of a food items cost much more than the unhealthy versions? | The comments here are all good but miss one point; 'healthier' foods generally do not have very long shelf lives thus increasing the likelihood of waste for the store. To balance this, they increase the price. This is just one factor, the others have already been mentioned. | b14033b2-ee0e-471f-80de-58359bddb684 |
3ddge5 | How does someone like 50 Cent go broke? | As /u/Dieniekes pointed out the other day in another thread he isn't exactly broke, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and not the common Chapter 7.
> This filing buys him the time he wants/needs to pay his debts. He's not "bankrupt" in the typical usage of the term.
He's filing chapter 11 bankruptcy; this is not bankruptcy as most citizens know it. The bankruptcy that most people know is Chapter 7 bankruptcy (or chapter 13 under certain conditions) and is a total reset where you are left with no assets and no debts.
> Chapter 11 bankruptcy is typically known as a "restructuring" bankruptcy. Given the lawsuits they quote in the article, I would assume he does not have immediate access to the liquid assets necessary to pay his immediate debts. This filing is to protect his investments while his financial team develops the most appropriate plan to pay his lawsuit debts. Paying $20mm is not an emergency for someone worth $500mm; paying $20mm in the next 30 days for most people of significant wealth is an emergency--most of their wealth is in investments. Think Zuckerberg here... Net worth of ~40 billion. 24 billion of that is in Facebook stock. It's not easy to free up mass units of stock for their fair market value because selling off large units of stock tanks the stock value. | b7761cfb-ed86-40c8-8be9-47e6abdefd78 |
1mxbik | How do insects function brain wise, they're so small. How do they know how to do anything. | Think of a very basic program. It's like they have several subroutines going:
Function See()
Function Hear()
Function Feel()
Function ReactToStimuli()
Function FleeAwayFromThreat()
Function FindAndProcureFood()
Function Procreate()
It does not take a lot of cells in a brain to do these things. | 6c57b774-137f-4a90-ba73-17b1b51214ce |
22dlfx | Why do we sometimes flinch in our sleep? | If im reading the question right and you are talking about that jerk right before you fall asleep. The theory behind it is that it's a basic instinct that we learned when were we less evolved than we are now.
It was for when we slept in trees and we felt a falling motion we would be jerked awake to try and grab a branch to catch ourselves before we hit the ground and got hurt. And from the studies I saw this has even been recorded in infants you can watch lunge their arms/hands out as if they are reaching to catch themselves.
So when we fall asleep our brain thinks we are literally falling so we get a basic instinct that kicks in to help us even though its just a false positive.
Edit damn autocorrect | f49569c8-3a1e-43db-8666-b815a9159186 |
4k8vy0 | What is the difference between fuel grades at gas station pumps? What do the more expensive ones provide? | Higher grades of gas have a higher octane rating, which is important because octane is less volatile than cetane (which means it won't ignite when compressed more). High compression engines or forced induction (which both usually mean higher performance engines) require higher octane ratings to prevent the fuel igniting earlier in the cycle than it's supposed to ignite. For engines with lower compression, there's essentially no difference (and paying the higher price is a waste of money). | 5dc89588-7ac5-4479-bc1b-88a8ee245311 |
6v0q0r | Why are news headlines in the present tense and not past? | It's all about conveying the sense of immediacy and urgency. When you read a headline it conveys the feeling that this is fresh news. | a8ae3877-0487-4543-b2d8-a278facb1a27 |
2yfioq | The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates low for several years to stimulate economic growth during the Recession. What benefits are there to them raising the rates ever if low rates strengthen the markets? | Raising rates can prevent a boom or bubble, where previously cheap interest rates would allow people to borrow money cheaply on high risk speculation. | 16bdcadf-fb1c-411c-9db9-c9cea3a742e7 |
649yxb | Why does no other animal have their own language like humans? | Some do, mostly whales and dolphins are thought to have some of the most complex languages other than humans. Bottlenosed Dolphins for example, have been shown to have "name clicks," sounds other dolphins use to get their attention. Human researchers have reproduced these sounds and can still get the same dolphins attention. | e91a378d-4e5e-45ff-b7fb-a9c94111d37e |
1dudha | How did the first complex organisms learn to mate? Same question for animals that must physically have sex. | Instinct. A similar question you might ask is why do 4-legged animals seem to know and be capable of walking shortly after they are born? It's not very easy to answer because you have to think about what it might have been like if, millions of years ago or whatever, they didn't know how to walk right away. Evolution has a funny way of dealing out random mutations as a kind of trial and error way of blindly creating random genetic advantages (and disadvantages). Sometimes the dice are rolled in the species' favor and descendants of that lucky dice roller gain the benefits and have a better chance at survival and out-breed those who weren't so lucky. In this case I would imagine that at some point in history 4-legged animals who couldn't walk shortly after they were born were hunted to extinction quickly by predators and those who just happened to be able to walk soon after birth reproduced with each other and that characteristic was passed down and perhaps even enhanced by further mutations. I am not saying a few animals were pressured into giving birth to babies with talents their ancestors didn't have before, but that just by chance a few were born with such beneficial traits (traits could could have began in a more subtle way, like learning to walk in 2 days instead of 4) that gave it and its offspring a better chance at survival.
So, to answer your question, how did they learn to mate? Well, they just knew, instinctively (and later institutionally) because if there was a species of animals that had no idea how to reproduce they would have gone extinct almost immediately, while the lucky few who figured it out by accident stayed alive and out-breed everybody else. I should mention though that, probably for a long long while hundreds of thousands of years ago, people were having sex and had little if any notion of the connection between doing that and it resulting in a baby. For all we know people had these orgies where everybody piled into a gang bang under a full moon and next thing you know all the females are pregnant, most of the babies probably died for a variety of health reasons (no one was a doctor, much less capable of starting a fire or inventing a wheel) and the nomadic tribe population grew very gradually (if they were lucky). So who started the gang bang ritual? Probably a couple who had sex in front of others, were visibly enjoying themselves piquing the curiosity of others, and then went off to have sex with other people; thus having sex became popular fast because it obviously felt great and there was little in the way of reasons to avoid it at that time. Eventually everybody was having sex, dumb as a tomato but having a good time, and the species stood to benefit from it because they needed to population to increase in order to survive. Monogamy wasn't important, tribes were small, tight knit, everybody knew each other and the children were everybody's children and cared for equally which makes sense when you have no understanding of science or know for a fact that sperm actually fertilize eggs and for all they knew babies "just happened whenever for no apparent reason, and may not have anything to do with everybody having a group shag because it feels good."
I mentioned earlier that small tribes like this think of all their offspring as though the children are children of the entire tribe, not just children of a specific pair of parents. The same thing kind of went that way when it came to personal possessions; there really weren't any that weren't shared equally. It was more "ours" instead of "yours and mine". But at some point someone noticed by chance that having sex with a woman produced a child and decided to think, "This is my child, this is my woman, this is my land, this is my house, this is my this, my that" and that kind of thinking spread quickly in concert with the dawn of agriculture which made living a nomadic lifestyle obsolete. But that's another story. | c5d5d5fb-ad7e-40f5-94f4-b9de849c81fa |
7dvc9e | When a baby is getting its first teeth, you're supposed to give them something to chew on to dull down the pain. How come when a teenager is growing in their wisdom teeth, they don't feel it until they start to disrupt the other teeth? | Don’t quote me on this, but you could flick a baby’s wrist and it would most likely hurt. A lot of stuff with them is due to their lack of pain tolerance. They simply can’t handle being uncomfortable. But that may not be completely right. | fafd4ca3-dc53-41c5-847a-e673e012f84b |
21c9ta | Putting down animals in zoo | Did you read the rest of the article? They explained exactly why they did it.
They didn't have the money to relocate the animals, and the new animals they were getting would have killed the old animals -- euthanasia makes a little more sense than a zoo snuff show.
It's more important to look at the population of the species as a whole than any one individual animal -- with regards to the species as a whole, the zoo was doing exactly what it should. | 6015be22-c87c-4999-802f-381cd0406f54 |
3ankd2 | Trademarks: How can there be a DC comics and a DC shoes? | They're in two completely different lines of business. DC Comics isn't trying to sell shoes and DC Shoes isn't trying to sell comics, so there's not likely to be confusion between customers of the two companies.
So if you wanted to trademark McDonald's and sell, say, cement, you could, but you couldn't sell food under that trademark.
The key question is whether a consumer is likely to be confused and think that one XYZ company is affiliated with another. XYZ Widgets and XYZ Books aren't likely to be confused. XYZ Clothing and XYZ Lingerie probably would be. | cea75828-e1e3-4b67-b1ae-52458ed48b30 |
1euxaz | Fiber optics | Fiberoptic communications uses light passing through specially design cables to transfer information. The data gets encoded as pulses of light, travels from one end of the connection to the other, then decoded at the other end.
Because light doesn't leak and isn't subject to interference, fiberoptic cables can be used to span huge distances. And because light travels very very quickly, data transfer using fiberoptics is much faster than old cables that used copper. | 327cbe32-52fc-4ee6-b746-f9a41b4d16df |
ug1iw | Why is international calling so much more expensive than domestic calling? | Let us assume you have to send a note to your friend in another country. There is no postal service. So what you do is pass it to your friend who is travelling to the city to take it up. So your friend travels to the city and there he sees another friend who is in fact travelling to the other country your friend lives in. So when this person reaches the other country, what he does is gets one of his people travelling to the town your friend lives in to deliver the message.
So now imagine if you have to pay a penny to each of those people who helped you out. Wouldn't this be more expensive than asking your friend to deliver it to someone in the city? Something similar happens in case of international calling. Your network does not have a presence throughout your country. So when you have to call another country, they connect your call to a network who links to a partner network in the other country who in turn pass it to your friend's network. Since this is business, each of them in the chain has to make money and there you have the expensive rates. | 5fd42573-ec44-45ef-ad1f-4a0f04e4a3e6 |
21agng | Would there be any downside if it was daylight 24/7? | We would turn into a copy of mercury. Baked in the sun with no water or life. Imagine the moon under a lamp hot enough to turn it to glass, or burn it down to the core/bare rock. Nothing good. | 837153b8-1253-43bd-8f17-693ce6ee61a2 |
1vuxvk | What do nurses actually do specifically? Why does it require an advanced degree? | Nurses do pretty much everything. They are typically as knowledgeable as the doctors they "assist" and often perform the tests that doctors prescribe. Plus nurses need to be able to help patients, which requires knowing a great deal about medicine.
New doctors out of school are usually advised to listen to their nurses. Odds are high they will know more than they do, even with their fancy degree. | 346019c5-030c-483f-8987-b8ced3a86520 |
49qywg | Why is stem-cell research so hated and funded so little? | The controversy over stem cell research is essentially an extension of the debate over abortion--one source of stem cells for research are aborted fetuses. Naturally, people who oppose abortion are opposed to research methods that profit from it. The results and concept are not that controversial, just this particular source. | 375342e8-b8ca-4120-ba9b-68eea80fe32d |
5af6xs | Why sunglasses makes someone looking more charismatic/elegant/cool? | Since not had any responses, a few reasons I would rationalise it down to:
* Positive association - it's used in a lot of films/movies/books as a way of signalling that someone is cool. As a result it's now associated with coolness
* Psychologically it might add a bit of 'mystery' to the person - you don't know where they are looking, you can't 'read' them as easily (a huge amount of our emotions are shown through our eyes)
* At a basic level it can just hide tired/saggy eyes, thus lifting the face and making it look better | a40ac82c-986b-4daa-9298-f605705cbfb3 |
1cgvqp | Why are virus websites such as "_URL_0_" allowed to have commercials on television, knowing well they are dangerous? | Because technically they aren't dangerous. If you pay the fee, they do what they advertise to do.
The catch is how they hook you into paying, by claiming that you have issues, and they spam the hell out of you if you don't pay. They are annoying nagware, but they don't cause damage to your machine beyond the annoyance (usually) so technically they aren't lying.
The lie is when they tell you that you have 200 errors, you pay the $20, and it "fixes" them. Technically though, as long as it does what it says (which is fix the "errors") they aren't technically lying.
They however do not destroy data, so technically they are not viruses. They are nagware of the highest order, they slow down the computer, but they don't allow remote access or destroy/allow access to your data remotely. At least the ones advertised on TV.
There are other that ARE viruses though that are similar, but are not the ones you see advertised. They are often a digit off on the website, etc etc.
The ones on TV though don't cause any damage, so they are nagware. Technically since they slow the computer down, its "damaging" but not in the sense that you lose precious files or expose your personal data to the internet with them. At least the ones advertised.
Obviously you shouldn't run any of them, but technically they do as advertised. Technically. You and I both know its BS. | a15fef7b-7fb8-4b19-aead-e040abd2466b |
2alf1u | Why can't we make batteries that hold dozens of small batteries, then make high amperage chargers to charge them in seconds? | Batteries are made up of smaller batteries or cells. The problem is regardless how you make a battery, you need to deal with heat when charging a battery. The only way to overcome the problem is to spread the cells out further apart so what you have is a very large, low capacity battery. It's better to have a very dense small battery that takes longer to charge. | a4f8d002-138a-4cb4-95c3-7052f1180333 |
7jj5dy | The Alabama Senate Election | Alabama has been a deeply red state (republican) for the last 25 years, and it showed no sign of changing.
So by all accounts, it looked like the election between Roy Moore(R) and Doug Jones(D) was all but a formality.
Until the news broke that Roy Moore had a unhealthy fascination with girls on the younger side. (Think 14-18) and was at one point banned from a local mall, that had warned the local security to keep Moore away from the cheerleaders.
Since this happened during the height of the #MeToo movement, it got tons of attention in the media. and Doug Jones started surging in the polls.
In the end, it was close election, but Doug Jones (D) managed to squeeze out a win, in a state, that he has really no business winning, had any other republican candidate faced him he wouldn't have had a chance. | 31eeac5f-635e-430f-8aa9-9af222c889d9 |
56g09b | Wouldn't one third of something go on forever? | No. You've fallen into the trap of thinking that base 10 is the only way to measure things.
We count in 10s because we have ten fingers. But imagine that humans had evolved with five fingers on one hand, and only four on the other.
In that case we'd count in base 9, and then your question becomes simple to answer, as one-third is simple to calculate in base 9. In that kind of world nobody would cut out 3/10th of the pie, throw away 6/10th, and repeat the process with the remaining 1/10th, because it would be as pointless as us (base-10 people) trying to cut something into 1/11th.
A pie can be cut instantly into perfect thirds. It's only our numbering system that doesn't fall easily into perfect thirds. If we choose a different numbering system, thirds are perfectly sane, rational, and simple to create. | 4782afe4-567a-4115-99b0-b3a913ddc5b4 |
2ltscf | Why do doctors have such bad hand writing? | Here's my 2 cents from a med student's perspective. I've always found the handwriting thing strange. I personally think I have crappy handwriting, but compared to some of my classmates mine looks like a work of art. Any yet compared to others (usually girls) mine is horrible.
I don't know if there is an actual explanation for it but I've heard many things tossed around... and this is probably my favorite - we have to take so many notes in class that in order to keep up we don't worry about making the writing nice. After doing this for a couple of years we just get stuck with the bad handwriting.
Now, I don't know how true it is any more because most of our notes are powerpoint handouts but its at least a theory.
Also, to comment on the shorthand thing..... even after learning the shorthand some Dr's handwriting is still impossible to decipher. | 74b3f85c-601d-43d2-8280-315799ffe123 |
1lrolb | Why do some things taste good to some people but bad to others? | Basically taste buds differ in density in each person. This impacts how the brain reacts to taste. Each body is unique. | 7a19fc21-fd7e-46c6-93b0-a36a077f7af4 |
24ogj8 | How come when I poop my legs go numb, but I can sit at a desk or in a chair for hours with no problem? | I'm not sure, but maybe you could carry out a control experiment by pooping at your desk.
EDIT: Like, maybe the descending poop compresses a nerve. I was being (partly) serious, guys! | 2c919925-2c00-4395-92e5-cc43742f5e55 |
46pvnx | What causes some people to be more tolerant to extremely cold or hot temperatures? | Some of it also has to do with what you are used to. Here's an anecdote...
I am from the frozen part of the northern midwest. In the winter, it rarely gets above 15 degrees F, and wind chills are often below zero. I lived in this area for 13 years before I went to college in the mid-south (Kentucky). During the first January I was down there, there was a light dusting of snow - not even measurable by our northern standards - and the temperature dipped down to about 35 degrees. I walked to class that morning in shorts and a sweatshirt because the warmth, to me, was glorious. I got about a hundred crazy-stares of people wearing snow pants, heavy coats, gloves, stocking caps, boots... all kinds of stuff. It truly wasn't cold to me at all.
Caveat: I was slightly overweight in college, though I know plenty of people around here (living back in my hometown) that break out the spring/summer clothes the moment it hits 40 degrees. | 12fe7281-bb1f-41a0-a755-68b3911744dc |
3xtql4 | Why can't you tickle yourself successfully? | A "tickle" is a pain response which is created by the brain when the nerve sensors receive unexpected stimulation, and it is generally impossible for you to do something unexpected to yourself, and thus normally you can't tickle yourself. | dba97838-cc66-4a6b-864b-67b28f84c7d6 |
4jrda4 | What's so special about the money printing process that can't be replicated? | There are quite a few anti-counterfeiting measures for US money that make it hard to replicate bills at home. To start, bills are printed on paper that is about 25% linen and 75% cotton. You could obtain paper like that, but paper for bills also has tiny red and blue fibers embedded in it, which I don't think you can buy. There's also a security thread that has the currency amount printed on it and which glows red under UV light. On larger bills (at least the $100 - I'm not sure aobut others) the treasury uses color shifting ink, which changes color depending on the angle you view it from. The treasury also uses microprinting, which is where some lines are printed in such small bits that they appear solid without magnification, but the tiny printed components can be seen when viewed under magnification.
While it would theoretically be possible to replicate all the security features, it would take a lot of expensive machinery and a place to store it. Buying the machinery (if you can even buy it on the open market) would probably raise some flags. And printing enough money to pay for the machinery would raise even more flags.
What some small-time criminals do is take five dollar bills, use solvents to wipe all the ink off of them, and then use an inkjet to print them as $100 bills. This makes sure that the paper is the right type and will pass the pen test, but you still have issues with matching the exact colors, microprinting, and the security thread. | 5ec4a04d-fe3f-4dca-abb7-36857c7dbeaa |
3v12pr | Why don't girls go bald? | Testosterone is the culprit which makes men go bald. One anti-baldness drug (Propecia) acts by decreasing the amount of available testosterone. Since women have less testosterone they don't go bald as often. | 50d3988b-ac08-4df1-bec5-2c9acce9c2a7 |
6u80ti | with skyscrapers being built so high, is the air inside them pressurized? And what happens if a window is broken? | No the air is not pressurized, some of those windows even open. You have to go significantly higher than the worlds tallest building to have pressure be an issue. Its not even an issue on most mountains. Cold is a lot more of an issue.
But no they are fine. | 14c477ae-b687-4a37-9eeb-23639b32e36d |
3fpxyp | Why does current culture/ideas differ so much compared to a 100 years ago? Was it also like this in the past, say when you compare 1500 AD and 1600 AD? | From 1500 to 1600, you have a pretty thorough revolution of agriculture in Europe as the first contact with the Americas was less than a decade before the start of the century; there was never a tomato in Italy or a potato in Ireland before this time period. The Renaissance was at its most transformative. This lead to the beginnings of the scientific method. It also transformed music in Europe, laying the groundwork for everything you think of as classical music. And I'm leaving out a LOT of Renaissance.
[This is a world map from 1500](_URL_0_). [This is one from 1570](_URL_1_).
Change happens all the time. Measuring which changes end up being more important tends to take a long time. | 116bd124-9db4-4cf6-9217-e44425a4f824 |
1rfri7 | How does public key encryption actually work? | Oh god... this is almost not an ELI5 concept, because you must have the concepts of math and logic available, and no amount of simplifying will change that....
With that said, here goes. There are two main kinds of encryption: symmetric, and asymmetric.
Everyone knows *symmetric*; if you put a password on a Word document, that's symmetric encryption. The password encrypts it, the same password decrypts it. Useful, but vulnerable to a lot of things, including someone else finding out the password.
Asymmetric, which public key encryption is the best-known example, doesn't use a password. It uses *keys*. The relationship between the keys is simple and straightforward: they do the opposite of each other.
There are two things you want to do to a document: *encrypt* it, or make it unreadable, and *decrypt* it, or make it readable again. In symmetric encryption, the "password" does both tasks. In public key encryption, you have two keys, and each does one at a time, and **only one at a time**, of those operations. If you use Key A to encrypt a document, you can't use Key A to *decrypt* it, it won't work. You can only use Key B to decrypt it. And vice versa; if you encrypt with Key B, then only Key A will decrypt. **Never ever ever can you use just one key to do both things.**
So smart people worked out that if you keep one of the keys secret, or *Private*, and expose the other key to everyone, or *Public*, you can accomplish two cool things:
* You can invite people to send you secret things. They encrypt with your Public key, and the encrypted file is safe. The public key can't do *both* things at once... if you use it to encrypt, it's useless to decrypt. So any sneaky spy bastards can steal the encrypted file but they can't decrypt it, only the other key, the Private key, can do that.
* You can send out messages encrypted with your private key. The message is NOT secret, because the public key is... public. Anyone can decrypt it. But that public key can *only* decrypt things coded by the private key, so they know it's from you. And remember, it can't do both things! If they change your message and try to encode it again, with the public key, well, that public key can't then decode it (it can never do both things), so everyone knows it's *not* from you. This is the basis for **electronic signature**.
Now, as for "how does it actually work," there are two answers: logic and math. The logic answer is, there are some problems that are very easy to solve, but very hard to *unsolve*; we call these one-way functions. The simplest, classic case is prime factoring (there's a fantastic little algebra equation that lets you do a cool trick with prime numbers). It's very easy to multiply 67 x 107 and get 7169. But because 67 and 107 are prime numbers, they are the ONLY numbers that divide evenly into 7169. It's challenging for a human to look at 7169 and realize it's 67 x 107. It's even challenging for a computer, though computers are so fast they'd brute-force it instantly.
When you start looking at numbers like 8080031, and wondering what two numbers it factors into, it gets daunting for a human, though a computer still doesn't care. Where the computer cares is when the number looks like 77546620056920588113012600033948388271650013, and you have to figure out what two numbers it factors into, even computers start sweating. And numbers get much bigger than that.
Even so, we're getting too good at teaching computers to do it, and quantum computers will practically spit out the answer, so we are finding other one-way functions...elliptic curves, for instance, are very promising.
I'd add links, but a) other posters have already done so, and b) there is absolutely no such thing as ELI5 for the actual math. Good luck! | cba5e6d5-10fb-4c8f-978d-a0e1e9bb4166 |
48e5e1 | Why does urinating feel different when you are sick? | For a multitude of reasons, among them:
+ When sick your system is generating different chemicals from the immunologic system fight, which generate different contents, pH and even smell for your pee, the different contents and pH can irritate the urethra and be painful
+ Your sensibility usually is higher due to the disease, so you can not only feel more intensively the urine pass, but also the above mentioned irritation
+ Your urination frequency messes up due to the sickness and you end up going to the bathroom at unusual (for your normal daily routine) times, which can also feel different | 1feeee09-88e3-4782-8633-11d44997f409 |
2yyxfy | Cricket. As an American, I'm so confused by it. | Like baseball, you have a team at bat and a team in the field. When at bat, the team sends out two batsmen instead of one. One batsmen stands at one wicket (a wicket is like a base in baseball), and the other one stands on the opposite wicket. The bowler (a pitcher in cricket) bowls the ball to the batsmen, and the batsman tries try to hit it. Unlike in baseball, they can hit the ball in any direction; there are no foul balls. When the ball is hit, the two batsman run back and forth between the wickets. However, they don't have to. If they feel that the ball wasn't hit well enough, they don't have to move. Every time they run to the other end, that's a point. If the batsman hits the ball, and it rolls out of the field of play (kinda like ground rule double), that's an automatic four points. If the ball goes straight out of the field (home run) that's six points.
The fielding team tries to prevent the batsmen from scoring. Similar to baseball, they can retire the batsman by catching the ball in the air, by breaking a wicket before the batsman runs to hit (like tagging out at a base), or they bowl over the wicket (like the pitcher throwing a strike, but one strike and you're out). There are a few other ways to retire the batsman, but they are more technical and I don't know them all. In cricket, the batting team has 10 wickets (outs), then the teams switch places. Depending on the type of game, each team has one or more turns at bat.
The other thing to know about cricket are overs. Overs are like innings, kinda. One over is six bowled balls. When an over is finished, the team switches bowlers, and they bowl to the other side of the field. Some games have limited amounts of overs. So, even if you don't get out ten times, you would still lose your turn at bat if you run out of overs. | dc38b217-987c-42f3-96da-4b189fe4756d |
zy50i | Why are they called "Checks?" | As in a cheque?
There have been suggestions that the word chek comes from ancient Pahlavi language which was used in the Achaemenid Empire in Persia. It may have spread from there to Arabic where saqq means a promise to pay a certain amount of money for delivered goods.
(_URL_0_ ) | 103cb3af-1f16-4b18-8bed-fa332b3f59c9 |
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