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1h2nkm | I have heard that the Xbox One and PS4 are like high end gaming PCs. Why do they cost so much less? | * Bulk discounts: manufacturers specify one type of component and buy millions of them.
* Consoles also have predictable ordering cycles: this means you can order parts many months in advance, parts manufacturers love this since they can order raw materials way ahead of time which makes them cheaper.
* Consoles are designed as a complete system: this means you don't have to make nearly as many components user-serviceable, which adds to cost. (RAM, CPU, GPU all soldered to the motherboard instead of being removeable components.) Cooling systems are designed for the whole console, so you get better performance with fewer, lower quality parts.
* Interface control: since they make the console, console manufacturers get to be gatekeepers as to what runs on the console, that means they don't have to test **every** combination of power supply, RAM, processor, graphics card, sound card, webcam, keyboard, and on and on that could potentially cause issues. Software only has to run at a couple display resolutions instead of every resolution known to man like PCs have to deal with. | 89e56abd-b206-42b5-a6d0-0aff70c2c3fa |
15ahf7 | how come so many shows on Fox make fun of Fox so much? Why does Fox keep them on the channel? Shows like Simpsons and Family Guy. | Aside from the fact that the shows are very popular and make the company a lot of money, letting shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy make fun of Fox boosts the company's corporate image. By letting shows poke fun at the company, Fox seems like a "good sport" and like they don't take themselves to seriously (even if they do).
You'll notice that when these shows make fun of Fox, they often pick on easy targets. For example, there is that one Family Guy joke when Peter lists off all of the "successful" (i.e. unsuccessful and cancelled) Fox shows (Titus, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, etc.) These shows have been cancelled and there really isn't any chance of them coming back. Sure it makes fun of Fox' decision making, but it isn't maliciously attacking the network.
What you don't see is Family Guy or the Simpsons calling Glenn Beck out as a moron, stating that Bill O'Reilly is an asshole, or claiming that Rupert Murdoch is a corrupt chauvinist. Fox shows poke fun at, but don't openly defame their parent company because without the company, they wouldn't be on TV. It is like making fun of your boss; posting a "Dilbert" comic with the Pointy-Haired Boss on his door is ok, but calling him a fascist is crossing the line. | 81bdb49e-3c04-450a-b1f3-beb0e8cae051 |
2nt2fh | How do PC games have "bad ports" when the games themselves were made on them? | Games made for consoles:
* Are using different technologies, so a lot of code has to be rewritten for PC.
* Have fixed hardware that developers can optimize for. On the other side, PCs have a variety of different hardware with different performance, and software can vary too (operating systems, drivers, etc.)
* Have fixed screen resolution and FPS, computer games that have to support many different monitors usually do not.
* Have different controls. For PC version, keyboard+mouse must be added and it often sucks, because developers focus on gamepad (Dark Souls, I'm looking at you).
In addition:
* Many game studios do not care and they outsource ports to cheaper external companies, some of them really suck.
* Ports often have to be done quick and have lower priority then console versions due to different revenues on platforms. But it is an infinite circle, revenues on PC are low because many ports suck. | e2b0b77c-fdb5-4a16-a19a-ddd2bebd7826 |
7n9p3g | with glasses, can e.g. watching tv worsen your eyes? | No. The reason your vision goes bad is because they grow into an incorrect shape. Looking at a television isn't going to cause that to happen, and incorrect glasses are just going to cause eye strain. | 9db5fe12-f7c9-4d5d-bf7f-d8196bf31bb1 |
5bklwb | Why is it so easy to work yourself into an anxious tizzy, but it isn't as easy to calm down again. | My guess is that it's evolutionarily advantageous to be more scared and anxious than calm and happy. Fear can motivate you to do something now to save your life. Calming down quickly doesn't appear to benefit humans enough to have been favorably pressured by evolution. | 1cf214b6-0cf2-44da-9f41-b40960a75505 |
qtf60 | What happens when you reinstall your Windows OS over your computer? | The only risks you're really running are in deleting files you don't want to delete; re-installing Windows works best when you erase your hard drive and start over from scratch.
Think of it like this: you buy some tropical fish, and every few weeks you scrub the gunk off the inside of the fish tank with a brush. This helps, but once in a while you've got to take the fish out, drain the water, scrub the tank and refill it with clean water before you put the fish back in.
Back to your computer, your best bet is to get a friend who knows this better than you to come spend an afternoon helping. Basically, you're going to (1) move your personal files onto a USB drive, (2) reformat your hard drive, (3) reinstall Windows and all your software like Office and iTunes, and (4) move your personal files from the USB drive back onto the computer.
On Windows computers I do this at least once a year, and the performance increase is usually pretty dramatic. | add312d8-fed5-4220-91ed-5c5da9e32872 |
2y22e8 | Why are drinks like coffee and tea gross when they are between luke warm and cold, but delicious when they are hot or iced? | I actually like the flavor of both at any temperature. It's probably just because I need the caffeine.
According to [this](_URL_0_) we have certain "channels" in our taste buds that affect the way we perceive flavor at different temperatures. These channels are called TRPM5.
There was a scientific study done on the topic. Look it up - "Influence of Stimulus Temperature on Orosensory Perception and Variation with Taste Phenotype" | c06211b6-485e-4585-8e23-4f43f40fc465 |
56as5w | Why do many herbivore's horns point backwards instead of forwards? | Many herbivores with horns such as those use them to show who the better mate between the males is. Or would be better to lead the pack. It is a show of dominance, but the intent is usually not to kill. You are right, horns facing forward would be better for killing, but that isn't what they are intended for to begin with | d4289b9a-be5a-4e13-b817-b40d47c477ca |
3ydzmh | What is philosophy? | Philosophy is asking yourself BIG questions. What is good and evil? Is there a god? What is justice? How do you live a good life? What is the meaning of life? How can we define truth? How can I assume that everything I see is real? Why do we dream?
These are all questions that are very hard or may even be impossible to answer but philosophy does not need the answers. When you think about these questions, you are doing philosophy and it helps you grow as a person and it helps you figure out what life is to YOU. | b2f4cfc6-24d0-4ddb-a0b4-c3d92f8fd12a |
6bmjan | Why did people lose their retirement funds during the recession? Wasn't it protected or guaranteed? | Sensible investors didn't lose anything.
The proper way to save for retirement is to automatically rebalance your portfolio as you get closer to retirement age.
Basically there are some investments that grow faster, but can also lose faster in a recession - like stocks.
Then other investments grow more slowly, but they're much safer and don't go down in a recession - like bonds.
Finally there are other investments that tend to have different cycles than the stock market - like real estate and commodities.
A correctly-set-up retirement account will be mostly stocks when you're young (so your account can grow the most) and then converted to mostly bonds by the time you're close to retirement age.
When you hit retirement age, your account should be 100% safe investments like bonds
Unfortunately, millions of people didn't invest this way - so if they had their retirement in stocks they gained more as they approached retirement but then suddenly saw their portfolio lose half its value. | 8b858504-1ac4-4515-b01f-6b83d17796b8 |
1ldxjp | Do musicians get paid everytime one of their songs is played on any radio station at any given time? | They do get paid royalties, but it's not a one-to-one pay out (i.e. you typically do not get paid in relation to each time your song is played). Basically radio stations report which songs they've played during what programs to performing rights organizations which then decide how to divide up the royalties appropriately and give each (registered) composer/publisher/author a fair share based on play-time of their music during a given period. | 45b7c082-40ff-49d1-ae21-99aa902facc7 |
2r50p7 | Why is the word ignorant used as an insult, when everyone is ignorant. | Ignorant is used as an insult regarding things you are supposed to know. | 31bf1478-cb5a-43a2-8bbc-bd8194a46bc1 |
3iv6ei | Why we dont forget how to talk when they erase our memories? | When who erases our memories? At the moment we don't really know enough about the brain to *intentionally* remove memories from one without also causing severe damage to other systems.
But if we're talking in terms of accidental memory loss (from head trauma, etc) then it's very common for one to lose more than just memory -- challenges interpreting or experiencing emotions or the loss of linguistic abilities are also common in cases of severe head trauma. So I guess the answer to your question is "We do!".
Generally speaking, retrograde amnesia (the loss of one's existing memories) is actually relatively rare, and sometimes it's even temporary. What's far more common (from my reading, at least) is anterograde amnesia, which is when the mind loses the ability for form *new* long-term memories. But in either case, loss of language skills isn't at all rare, just less widely featured in media. Memory loss stories are common in a lot of fiction, especially science fiction (and soap operas). In such stories, it would usually be far too inconvenient for a character to lose their memories AND their ability to participate in dialogue. | ebf9f2a7-5e4d-47ec-a44c-c5ecf7827ed3 |
zkknz | Why don't people sense the pressure of the atmosphere? | It isn't our brain filtering out something constant. Everything on Earth, including inanimate objects, is being pushed on by that pressure, all the time. All that air above you weighs a lot. It's exerting a force on you, a huge one. So you, and everything else, need to push back. Your body is pushing out constantly with a huge force against the atmosphere, as is everything here on Earth. We don't feel it because the forces balance each other out. | c0b36f54-a14d-4bac-87a1-ee409a27b073 |
2xo3u0 | If nature is so jagged, colorful, and seemingly random (yes, I know all about the golden ratio), why do us humans find straight lines, clean edges, and muted colors so aesthetically pleasing? | 2 things most likely.
1) We like these things because they are different from nature. We can get all the other stuff from nature easy enough, but we have to work at making a straight line.
2) Nature is dangerous. Disease, predators, poisons, and natural disasters are all natural, so why should we necessarily desire natural? Appeal to Nature is a fallacy. | 94089e77-1aba-4dda-8733-85e4f46c6837 |
2gsy4p | How does the 3DS work? | I assume you mean the 3D aspect? when the 3d is activated, the screen disaplays two slightly different images visible at different angles. one image is seen by your left eye, the other by your right. the images are such that they create the illusion of depth. | 406860ba-499f-496f-bc84-8fdf4b6a58d8 |
1j9mts | how could the Romans build 220 ships in 45 days? | You really have to take into perspective of how massive the roman populations expanded to at that time. And it's not exactly to say they built cruise ships, but smaller more manageable ships and boats; *as well as* the high level of slave driving and forced prisoner labor that took place. | c3cb0366-6e7c-43d1-8862-17ec897fb9d0 |
3pnm0j | Why do people tends to shift to the right (ie - adopt more conservative views) as they age? | The way it was put to me was somewhere along the lines of "You don't become conservative until you have something to conserve". | 6f52ff66-e05e-443e-9057-3e70826bacf1 |
7ns0mf | What exactly gets lost when mass gets converted into energy? | Nothing gets 'lost' per se, that mass represents the energy (and some other stuff) that was originally bound up in the Hydrogen atoms. Helium atoms use less energy to keep everything together than two Hydrogen atoms, so some of that energy gets ejected from the newly minted helium atom. And that's how our sun shines. That little bit of mass that gets transferred into energy, times a very large number, per second.
Bonus: [Why does the Sun Shine](_URL_0_) | c678f830-0722-4694-ab43-d204571bded9 |
238vnu | The theory we are all colorblind in our own way. | I don't believe it's color blindness, just difference of interpretation | d88b6af2-c655-4845-9bd3-f464b57302eb |
6mhdnc | Why is it a bad idea to put dental glue for braces all over your teeth to prevent damage or for less maintenance? | It's easier and less expensive to just brush and floss, but even if you could encase your teeth in a protective shell, you would still need to brush and floss to protect your gums from disease. People with crowns, which cover the exposed tooth and cannot get cavities, can still develop cavities around the edge of the crown near the gumline. | a4228481-6ffe-44ac-91ac-9f3d8695f6b4 |
80mrk2 | What should I go to school for if I want the knowledge to fix audio equipment and gear? ( like synths, receivers, etc.) | Engineering, specifically electrical or electronic engineering. Luckily, Electrical engineering is a very broad field, so you could get your degree there and then decide later that you aren't super interested in audio equipment, but you'll still have a really great degree to fall back on in order to further your career goals.
This is a question for Google, not for ELI5. | 54136ab0-f045-4a6a-8c36-bad6138b5a7a |
2k8zsa | Why is that when we flick an ant with our finger, it continues to walk around unharmed, where as if a human were reduced to the size of an ant and flicked the same way, it would end up being killed by the physical damage alone? | Square-cube law. Ants have a sturdy structure which would immediately collapse if they were human-sized. | 89fcd066-a0ac-4f5d-858c-a712743660f2 |
2r5t5o | How do they get the ketchup into those little drive-thru packages? | [Like this](_URL_0_).
^This ^useless ^sentence ^brought ^to ^you ^by ^AutoModerator's ^Nazi ^length ^requirements. | ecc90fa7-e743-4536-b266-c49f479cd4fc |
757q2b | Hollywood Pedophilia | Not an expert. But my understanding is that they have easy access to actors - actors need to please to get good parts: this includes handsome guys, cute girls, teens and kids.
They have parties with a lot of drugs. They are often creative, sometimes deviant.
Omerta: no one says anything even if everyone knows. | 719a231a-f515-45c4-95f0-aa44e57d31b1 |
3q25dc | Why does the human eye see more shades of green than any other colour? | this is due to the Spectral sensitivity of the eye it perceve a larger intencity of green and red light than it does for blue, the eye has 3 type of colour receptors called cones and rods that are associated to the 3 primary colours, the amount of cones and rods for the 3 colours are not equal so you might perceve more green than you would for blue. | 83673326-da16-4918-b927-c3a68b21ab1e |
5q5whi | What exactly would it be like to live or visit the fourth dimension (4D)? | A dimension is not a place you can visit. A dimension is a direction. For example, on a straight line, there is only one possible direction of motion, namely forward/backward, so a line is a one-dimensional space. In a flat plane, you can move forward/backward or left/right, so a plane is two-dimensional. Similarly, the earth's surface is two-dimensional because you can move east/west or north/south. Keep in mind we don't need to use east/west or north/south specifically; we could use northeast/southwest and northwest/southeast, for example, and still be able to measure distances and directions just as accurately. So there isn't really a fixed "first dimension" or "second dimension"; you can choose any combination of directions you want, but in the end you will always need 2 directions to specify motion on the earth's surface. No single direction can encompass all possible movements, and any third direction you try to add will just be redundant. The *number* of dimensions a particular space has is fixed; which directions correspond to which dimensions are not.
Similarly, if you take all of space, not just earth's surface, there are now 3 independent directions to move in: not just east/west and north/south but also up/down. Again, up/down is not "the third dimension" in any meaningful sense, since we can choose any combination of 3 directions we want in any order we want to label the dimensions. A fourth spatial dimension would be exactly the same sort of thing: just take ordinary space and add another direction to travel in. Of course it's impossible to visualize this, since human brains evolved to deal with three-dimensional objects, but it's not fundamentally any different than two-, three-, or seventeen-dimensional space.
Some confusion can arise in physics because in relativity there are in fact two kinds of dimensions/directions: ones that act like space and ones that act like time. As far as we can tell, the universe has three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time (since there's only one direction to time: forwards/backwards), but some theories postulate more dimensions which are not apparent on the macro scale. So while space itself is three-dimensional, the full structure of space-time is four-dimensional. | ecde200a-b4c3-4605-95f7-b62ea750b0b2 |
8jxgz9 | How can a telescope detect oxygen? | Spectroscopy. Different atoms and molecules absorb/emit light at different wavelengths. Spectroscopy is basically an analysis of the light we see coming from an object (an emission spectrum). We can compare that light to the emission patterns of elements and tell what a planet or star is made of. | 5b62936b-a2f5-4b72-bc4b-2419a7385403 |
juqv7 | What are the origins of the Baptist church? | The original baptist church was started by a minister who had split from the Anglican church (the Church of England). From there it grew and spread, came to the new world, and became very diverse. Today it is not a guarantee that two baptists from different congregations (this means a church community) will believe the same thing.
The most unifying theology (belief) of baptists, and what they get their name from, is their believe in "believer's baptism". In the Catholic church a person is baptized as a baby, here the belief is that the act of being baptized forgives the original sin that human beings are born with. The belief of many protestants, including baptists, is that one should be baptized after they are old enough to express personal belief in the church's teachings. | 2a01052b-ef36-4a69-88b0-610eb352022c |
1kzlta | How does Albert Einstein's equation E=MC^2 relate to the creation of the atomic bomb? | When a nucleus of uranium-235 or plutonium-239 absorbs an additional neutron, it makes it wobble significantly. This wobbling causes it to break into two more or less equal-sized chunks. These chunks are then repelled away from each other by their electrostatic charges — it is like trying to hold two magnets so that their positive poles touch the other positive poles.
(Why don't they fly apart prior to the neutron? The nuclear force holds them together. The wobbling puts the pieces just outside the range of the nuclear force, and the electrostatic forces take over.)
This violent repelling releases about 200 MeV of energy. By itself, that isn't much from a human scale — maybe enough to kick a speck of dust. But if every fission releases 2-3 neutrons, and those go on to do more fission reactions, then you can create an exponential chain reaction. And 80 or so generations of that (~2^80 fission reactions) is enough dust kicking to level a city.
OK, so what does this have to do with E=mc^2 ? The above description avoids it entirely — you don't actually need the equation to make sense of an atomic explosion. But it can be another way to understand where that 200 MeV comes from — it's energy that was "bound" up in the nucleus when it was formed, in the same way that energy is bound in a compressed spring. When you unhook the system, you end up releasing some of that pent-up energy. As with a spring, that energy has a mass equivalent (yes, springs get heavier when you compress them — but only infinitesimally so). Because the scale that we're dealing with is so tiny (an atomic nucleus) it does constitute a significant portion of the total mass of the system.
I find talking about E=mc^2 and atomic bombs somewhat misleading. It makes for good journalistic fodder. But it overstates the importance of the equation. All energy releases involve the conversion of a tiny bit of mass into energy — it's not unique to atomic bombs. It's just easier to measure with atomic bombs, because the amount of energy is very large in proportion to the size of the system we're talking about. | e83d9a2e-463d-4628-8e48-e5aac9237491 |
1jabp1 | Why can I never remember falling asleep? | Here's the scary thing: This must be what it's like to die, except you never wake up and have the memory of attempting to go to sleep. | 32b86885-ceee-4f83-af96-5dda5cfe8a69 |
pfazz | why we get goosebumps when we hear a particularly beautiful voice or a certain scene in a movie? | The human brain is pretty amazing; it doesn't have to actually experience something to respond to it. Some external stimuli (e.g. a scene in a movie) can lead your brain to start acting like you are experiencing that scene in real life. This leads to the release of chemicals in the brain (neurotransmitters, hormones) which cause the body to physically react.
The reason you get goosebumps comes down to evolution. A common response to fear, surprise, danger, and other strong emotions in mammals is to "puff up" their fur. This makes the mammal appear larger, and therefore more intimidating to what ever is making it afraid, surprised, etc. Do you have a cat nearby? Go scare it and you can see this in action.
Now, humans have lost most of our hair, but we still have the brain pathways that say "strong emotion = raise hair." So when we expose ourselves to something the evokes strong feelings, our body tries to puff us up like a terrified cat. | 6e40f1a1-bf6a-4755-bea2-d0e520654f17 |
679r40 | How do we know that a machine isn't deceiving us during a Turing test by simulating detectable machine answers so the AI remains undetected? | In general, many people give too much credit to Artificial Intelligence in its current state of advancement. Most Artificial Intelligence is simply a very complex rule based system. If x than y. If not x than z. While the situations become much more complicated and the algorithms used to make these decisions could make your head spin, the rules and algorithms still create very binary decisions which could not lead to a machine "deceiving" humans during a Turing Test.
A specific type of Artificial Intelligence known as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is where I think your question more directly applies. ANNs are unique as humans have to "teach" these systems versus creating rules. The way humans "teach" ANNs is through data training sets where the ANN derives what it perceives as meaningful patterns. An ANN (hahaha) is only as smart as the data set you have chosen to teach it and selecting the data to teach the ANN is not an exact science.
For example, there was a study done where an ANN was designed to identify helicopters in images. The study complied 100's of photos with helicopters in the image and then 100's of photos without a helicopter in the image. The ANN was confirmed to have learned the data set through various validation methods with a 90%+ success rate. However, when given new photos failed to correctly identify helicopters less than 50% of the time. What's the deal?!? Well, the difficult part about ANNs is the way it arrives at a decision cannot be easily determined or traced. What the study found out was that all of the photos with the helicopters in the image were taken on days where there were clouds in the sky. So instead of actually identifying the helicopter itself, the ANN made the conclusion that if there was a cloud there was a helicopter which worked for the very small data set but failed when presented with new data.
So how do we chose the perfect data set to train ANNs to perform a specific task? Who knows... not to mention the issues encountered when dealing with large volumes of structured and unstructured data with missing or incomplete data sets.
The most notable feature about an ANN though is the fact that it still does not make "new decisions" as it uses patterns it has already been taught based on training data sets to reach decisions. As shown in the example above, even if we generated a data set which would aim to "deceive humans during a Turing Test" the ANN could draw a completely irrelevant conclusion not to mention the fact that humans would have to generate a data set which would teach it to have actual intelligence or enough to learn how to decieve...
Soo I guess the answer is until humans can figure out how to "teach" something to have genuine intelligence/deceive humans any AI will be unable to deceive humans in a Turing Test because the AI makes rule based decisions or in the case of an ANN makes decisions based on a small representative portion of data (that may not even be appropriate) where it would already have to have been "taught" to deceive humans during a Turing Test.
As mentioned in other comments, the Turing Test is actually not a great standard to measure machine intelligence and better standards need to be created as AI advances. | b72041ef-d446-458f-b858-5694693c45f7 |
5ll438 | How can radio waves go through walls, but visible light can't? | Depends what the wall is made of. Various chemicals are transparent to various frequencies of light. Typically we also prefer walls people can't see through so we avoid materials that are transparent but you could choose the opposite. | 9ee9330b-1771-405a-8ad5-bce7adc9d63d |
3gnbgq | why do your pupils dilate when you take Psychedelic drugs? | depends on the drugs or your definition of psychedelic. if you mean sensory hallucinations (drugs known as hallucinogens) then its because they generally act as stimulants (another word for drugs that overclock your brain) and since your eyes are now processing more light back at the cerebral end and your heart rate is up to feed your brain (as well as your eyes coincidentally), then you dilate (vasodilator and pupillary dilate)
this dilation is therefore twofold - your eyes are literally able to take more light on, and also the nerves that stimulate your heart are closely related to the nerves that dilate your eyes.
i would go so far as to say that the phrase "you need to open up" has a very literal meaning here, because your emotional openness is almost a gradient of how much you can activate and control/digest the info from this cluster of nerves, called your sympathetic and parasymphatetic nerves | de9d667b-adb3-4dd2-8904-7c69cbe4d812 |
pxj0e | how wells work. | The dirt, rock, silt, etc filter the salt and impurities from the sea water. So the water you drill down to tends to be much cleaner than the ocean it comes from around your island. | cfb72080-d740-4f52-9818-72abc374af2f |
78o7l6 | How much effect does Central Park have on New York City's air quality? | Ever spit into the ocean? It's about that much effect. | e9e12f93-a949-4f51-85b6-eb043d9875a9 |
143vex | Why are some former presidents referred to as former President and some referred to as President? | "President" is an official title, but it is also a job. If you were ever the President of the United States, you are entitled to use the title President for the rest of your life. Thus, everyone who was ever President is titled "President", but every one except Barack Obama is also a "former President". | f03cb7b8-6dc1-4e26-a3dc-59711ac205a4 |
84xtam | Why do sounds become 'distant' when you hang upside down? | Probably because gravity lets blood pool in some of the areas of your inner ear that normally aren't so full of blood, which slightly dampens how effective your ear drums are. Guessing. | 7f416a53-2b1d-4497-a5e2-7d687c195699 |
6rr5j3 | Why is that when someone sentenced to 20-30 year in court but sometime only need to serve a year or so? | Judges usually don't give a simple sentence, they usually give a fixed term over a variable term (kind of like a mortgage).
The news reads "sentenced to 20 years", but really it is "sentenced to 20 years with parole eligibility after 8".
There is a fucking colossal variation in the behavior patterns and temperaments of people sentenced for the same crime. Some people are psychopaths who society was lucky enough to catch on a relatively small charge, some people commit heinous crimes but are mostly normal people who had one bad day.
The gap between minimum and maximum sentencing are a mechanism to let manageable people out earlier and keep dangerous people in longer, with the fixed sentence being a kind of observation period where therapists and C.O.'s can document behavior so parole-board can decide if they can be trusted for early release or need to be kept out of society for as long as possible. | 7cb780d3-81fd-4416-8e20-7e1340157d3b |
6feey8 | How do divers that don't have an oxygen tank not get brain damage from lack of air? | Mammals have bodily reflexes to being underwater known as [mammalian diving reflex](_URL_0_). Heart rates are reduced and our bodies let the outer layers cool(by not delivering blood) so that it can conserve oxygen.
As babies fresh out of the womb this reflex is generally very strong but we lose it overtime, free divers train to build this back up. Having said that, there is still a lot of risk involved. People blackout before they start to suffer brain damage and blacking out underwater can very quickly be a death sentence. | 64b2e59e-ee0a-4219-900f-f95a9c675dd5 |
52da31 | Why do some businesses say no photos? | There could be many reasons.
1) Taking photos is discrating to the people working. This is common for performance venues.
2) Taking photos may capture information that the business is keeping secret.
3) The business may make their money by having people come into it to see what they have. You get this a lot with art galleries and museums.
4) Flash photography can degrade the objects. This is also common with museums and art galleries.
5) The business owners simply do not like pictures. | bfbfebab-82b9-43e2-8aaa-d6e6cf5bdc10 |
2emi4a | Why must an FCC approved device accept interference that may cause "undesired operation"? | It means that the device has a low priority on the hierarchy of communications, so if something is interfering with it, tough titty.
As an example posted on a thread I found about this, someone pointed out that amateur radio and wireless LANs share a frequency band. Because amateur radio is on a higher priority than your wireless LAN, if your LAN gets shut down by the radio transmitter, you have no recourse. If your LAN is malfunctioning and messes up the radio transmitter, however, they can petition the FCC to order your WLAN shut down, because a lower-priority system is interfering with a higher-priority one. | a55c2692-29e1-404d-94e6-4f6d6ec61f15 |
tpuvd | Government bonds | It's pretty straight forward. You are not so much "investing in the government" - you are loaning the government money for a profit.
The government sometimes needs to raise cash. To do this, they issue bonds. A bond is essentially a loan agreement between the buyer and the government. If I buy a bond for $100 today, I am buying a promise from the government that they will give me $105 in 30 days. I earned $5!
They are viewed as very safe investments because governments will always pay them back as promised if they can. If they don't pay as promised, people will become afraid to loan them money. The governments don't want that, so they make sure to always pay them on time. But, every once in a while, a government gets in trouble and can't pay back the loans. This causes big problems for the government and the economy. It happened to Russia in the 80's, and it could happen any day in Greece right now. They are probably one of the safest investments you can make, but they are by no means 100% safe - no investment really is. | 4e79e81f-e720-4c8d-95e5-cb85958231fb |
5x13n1 | Why is bureaucracy in India so stifling, and why does it seem to be accepted by everyday people? | A lot of things in India are blamed on the British (including the 1000+ year old caste system). When it can't be blamed on the British it's blamed on Pakistan. When it can't be blamed on Pakistan it's blamed on India's less developed/poor states. When not them then it's the next village over, or the other political party, or that guy eating a hamburger. While in mainland China a man will vigorously deny that his kitchen is on fire even as smoke pours out the windows, in India the man will easily admit it but also be very quick tell you who is to blame for it (and it certainly wasn't him despite the fact that he was the only person home at the time).
After independence the new Indian government almost immediately chose to adopt a communist-lite system for its economy. The country would retain private ownership but the government would directly manage a centrally planned economy like the USSR.
To accomplish this feat a system was setup (later dubbed the Licence Raj by critics) to tightly control what businesses could do based on the licence they had. If the government decided the country should grow more suger and less beans then the number of licences for growing suger would be increased while bean growing licences would be cut. This created a vast, corrupt and ultimately self-sustaining bureaucracy to handle all those licences. Imagine the DMV applied to nearly everything. Even though the system was ended in the 90s its legacy remains as it is essentially the only form of goverment most in India have ever known. | 9814b1a5-64c6-4021-98fe-840222747a4a |
676e9a | what does it mean to wear your heart on your sleeve? | It is a metaphor. It means that you allow your emotions to show- people can tell easily if you are happy, sad, angry, etc- ether by what you say, or how you act/compose yourself. | 94043ecf-9d6d-4391-aa6d-46a2ea4c5d36 |
uwdtm | If water makes up 70% of our earth and we have things such as water purifiers, why are we running out of drinking water on our planet? | We're *not* running out.
The problem isn't the amount of drinking water, it's the *distribution* of the water.
Most developed countries could probably hydrate their population 50 times over, if they wanted (assuming there's no drought). Whereas, for example, in hot African countries where water is scarce, contains diseases and there is little technology available to purify the water, *then* you get dehydration problems.. | db5e682c-0d49-4ef0-86c4-cbf5476045d2 |
tz2fz | What would happen if the Yellowstone super volcano erupted? | Since this is a science question, I figured I'd use the search function of r/askscience to find you some relevant submissions there.
Look what I found!
- [This thread](_URL_0_).
- [This thread](_URL_2_).
- [This thread](_URL_1_).
And you know what? None of them are complicated. Enjoy your reading. :-) | 3a3facc8-1f66-494a-83da-1e8b7434cfe2 |
6kkx4a | why is it that we are able to subconsciously control our bladders when we sleep? How is it that we manage not to piss ourselves? | Your body releases a hormone while you sleep called vasopressin which inhibits the production of urine. You produce less urine while you sleep, and it's a thicker, more dense liquid (partly because of the hormone, partly because you're not drinking while you're asleep).
People who have lower naturally occurring levels of vasopressin have to take a synthetic form of it called desmopressin before they go to sleep. And that's why we don't piss ourselves! | 2a8341fc-7d45-4c56-bcf1-454fb7227ab9 |
6h26em | Why are dinosaurs marketed so much toward kids instead of other animals? | Dinosaurs only exist in the toy aisle of the store.
For contrast, ponies are a real thing. You can actually buy your kid a pony, and teach it all about how much a pony eats and the work involved in picking up after a pony. There is a mix of upside and downside with a pony.
Where I grew up, many kids had a "pet" cow as part of a 4H project. They took wonderful care of their cow, and showed them off in competitions. Then their took their cow down to the slaughterhouse and saw it converted into sides of beef they could sell or bring home and eat.
That last step is a bittersweet experience for most young ranch children. It's an essential aspect of why cows are so numerous in the area, but it's very different that their relationship with the family dog.
With dinos you never have to risk breaking the fantasy. | 09660bd0-cc11-4819-9b5e-020f53864382 |
8px5si | How do basic circuits work, what is voltage, resistance and current? | I think of it in terms of water.
Water flows from high ground to low ground. Electricity flows from negative to positive.
A river is when you have a channel for the water to move through. A circuit is when you have a conductor for the electricity to move through. Damn the river, the flow stops. Break the continuity of the circuit, the flow stops.
Voltage would be the pressure in a water line.
Your amperage or current would be how much water is moving.
Resistance would be like debri in the river. The more debri, the more the river has to push.
In a circuit you’re going to have a place with a negative charge connected to a place with a positive charge by a conductor, like a copper wire. The negative and positive want to balance out, so electrons flow from the negative to the positive to make it happen.
But flowing can be hard because of the resistance in the conductor. You need voltage to push against the resistance, and the higher the resistance the harder you have to push. Some things like gold have almost no resistance and you can push very easily. Other things like rubber you will need a metric fuckton of voltage to push through. | 1c4773a2-f2a0-430a-a1e0-b0261135c696 |
1y748x | Rugby and how its played | As an American, I hope someone will answer this question seriously. I'd like to be able to comment on that ludicrous display last night. | 0970be95-ac48-4e62-b6da-c40f5bfa73a8 |
8b204p | why do oceans exist? | Oceans cannot be absorbed into the sea bed because below the sea bed there is bedrock and the water is already saturated within the sea bed. Open water sits on top of the water within the sea bed. | 8a7ec7cf-bbf2-41e4-a986-84fe2ca00b98 |
5r2caj | Why do Americas call "Back Bacon", "Canadian Bacon" and when did that start? | It is called both Canadian Bacon and to a far lesser degree Irish Bacon or Back Bacon in the US. This is because they are the cuts that the Canadians and Irish (as well as the UK) call bacon. They are from the pork loin which is the back muscles toward the rear of the pig.
But what we Americans call bacon is from the belly of the pig. Canada, Ireland, and the UK call it "American Bacon", "Streaky Bacon", and sometimes "Belly Bacon". But they call "Back Bacon" just Bacon there.
Edit: correcting stringy to streaky. | 85e85b14-ee21-4a33-bd2f-6f76ec20354e |
273h1o | Why is Xbox in competition with PCs? If most gaming PCs run on Microsoft Windows what do they gain by releasing a "console only" game? | Delving into this is going to take awhile.
Historically, (i.e the past two console generations) game consoles used pretty different API's to PC's - the current batch is standardised so that it's incredibly easy to port games from one console to the PC. The attraction of game consoles was with ease of running and made use of the often expensive setup for television and audio already present, whereas PC's were their own thing in offices - not usually set up with standard televisions. The switch with televisions to a digital audio setup has made using a TV for a computer monitor or a computer monitor for a TV pretty easy if not necessarily built for purpose.
Nowadays, where PC gaming has shifted largely to steam as a DRM format over copy protected discs, steam can work with developers to ensure the games work for a wide erray of systems - necessary when you have on-demand purchases that are delivered immediately to the consumer. As a result, games a much less hassle to get running on PC these days and so PC gaming as a whole, is only a matter of initial purchase in terms of ease of use. This is compounded by the fact that consoles often have hard drives, take time to install, and in some cases take time to download as well. The advantage of a PC is you can do other things with it as well while installs happen, while things download. I suspect this is why consoles have begun trying to switch to media entertainment platforms rather than just straight gaming machines - see Xbox one's capacity to stream TV etc. Sony's playstation network which is more of a social network than XBlive is. In recent years the shift from dedicated gaming platforms to machines that can multitask, as evidenced by the large amount of indie games for mobile operating systems, has begun taking over and I suspect the consoles themselves are driving this shift in an effort to maintain relevancy.
What does this have to do with competition with PC's? Essentially, the xbox line started out with a different market as PC, now the market is very similar - almost identical, as the cost of PC hardware has dropped and so has the cost of PC games. The reason for console exclusives now, is to try and encourage console adopters to use their console over the competitors, but they're both becoming more and more like a PC is. The only real difference at this point is standardised hardware, developers can guarantee that the hardware in a console is able to run the game marketed for the platform, and the fact that the PC is still far and away the best all-in-one platform.
I'd make the argument that current batch of consoles are slipping further and further into irrelevancy, that's not to say they can't recover and define a market niche for themselves, but this generation doesn't do itself any favours. I don't know many PC gamers who buy a single console, if they can afford a PC and a games console, as well as games for both, they can usually afford a third or fourth console too. Historically PC games used to have their own niche market over console games, but not so much anymore and exclusives are really only used to try and grab sales from the competitor, though I'd wager with the explosion in popularity gaming has seen, even that is un-necessary. | 5be5d309-2915-4e71-a800-324a0fc0d29a |
5pw11g | Why do we use the word "late" when talking about deceased people? | One lesser-known meaning of "late" is "recently, but not any more". If, for example, you say, "A man late of London," you mean he used to live in London until just a short time ago, but now he lives somewhere else.
From that came the expression "The late Mrs Smith," which was used as a euphemism to avoid using the word "dead". It basically means: "Mrs Smith, who used to exist until just a short time ago, but now no longer does." | f29d1f70-5643-4e88-bc7b-43af718b3d84 |
56dlql | Why isn't a Bluetooth connection instant? | Whenever two electronic devices talk to each other they go through what's called a "handshake" - basically it's the two devices trying to negotiate a common ground and make sure they can continue speaking in a stable fashion.
> Device A: "Hey! Hey is anyone there?"
> Device B: "Yeah, I'm here. Hi, I'm B. Wanna talk?"
> Device A: "Hey B. Yeah I want to talk... I'm on Bluetooth v. 2 and can talk at 2.1Mbit/s, how about you?"
> Device B: "oooh... no I can't do that... I'm on Bluetooth v. 1.2 and can only talk at .7Mbit/s, is that ok?"
> Device A: "Yeah that's not a problem I can handle that. Ok so we'll use v1.2 and talk at .7Mbit/s, deal?"
> Device B: "Deal."
> Devices are now officially connected. | 5de76b86-184f-4661-a3f3-9dda79d3de00 |
6p4ird | Why is shampoo almost always colored but conditioner is almost always white? | Hm, I guess that hasn't been my experience. Besides white I've had pink, blue, and yellow conditioner. Maybe it's just the brand you're buying? | 1ae9ac08-d72d-4f80-8f58-a85c3e0eb52b |
59cz8u | Who notifies Google about newly made roads for their maps? | There are companies specialized in this sort of thing. They monitor local government announcements, planning permissions, etc., and when they see a new road is being constructed, they will go and collect the data.
Google's maps business is big enough for them to own some companies like that as a subsidiary, but sometimes they might just hire external companies to gather the data and provide it in a format that's easy to plug into the Maps database. | cc57b024-4a2b-4360-ab45-0f7992aa4075 |
1o0xfv | What is the difference between being a line cook and a chef? | Cool, that makes sense. I recently became the kitchen manager of my restaurant six months ago, the only reason why is because everyone else who worked there quit. But I make new recipes constantly and everyone calls me chef, but it feels weird. | 60bcb5b3-acc8-48f5-bec5-23162a7dd78d |
2j08j7 | What's the difference between the words 'Muslim' and 'Islamic'? | "Muslim" refers to people. "Islamic" refers to everything *but* people: "Islamic art" "Islamic architecture" "the Islamic world." Like that. | 4c5f58f4-a3f5-458c-9c34-3769f320e631 |
47wu3j | Why does the U.S. always side with Israel over Palestine? | There's no diplomatic way to say this — Israel is considered to be culturally similar to the US, it has a representative government with stable political institutions, and American Jews (who tend to support Israel) are an important domestic political constituency. | 96057226-6dd2-4b37-946a-082b1c7829d6 |
39treh | Why do those cheesy pictures that get shared on Facebook always looks so grainy and pixelated? | They tend to pick up artifacts because the original image has gone through a chain of hundreds of computing devices which used different file formats and resolutions and so on. People do stupid shit with their files like opening them in Paint to edit them (adding/removing watermarks, resizing, adding/removing text, messing with color depth) and then saving them in a different format.
A lot of image formats, like jpeg, are "lossy." To save file size, a jpeg will essentially smooth out some of the fine details of the image, which gives you [artifacting](_URL_0_).
If you pass an image around from one lossy file format to the next, it will artifact more and more each time its format changes, so the quality gets worse and worse. | bf214ac2-53c1-4240-911e-c949960f7f67 |
1bmvr4 | "Magic eye" images | One of the depth cues your brain uses to determine where things are located is called binocular disparity. Binocular disparity works by comparing the image of the world in the left eye to the image of the world in the right eye. Depending on how different the two images of an object are in the two eyes (the binocular disparity), that can be used by your brain to calculate exactly how far away an object is.
When you see a magic eye picture, it contains many elements that repeat over and over again. To see the magic eye picture, you have to focus behind the page in order to create a double image. Then, you slowly bring the two images back together. The magic eye image has been constructed such that when you do this, it will match up each spot on the image in the left eye with a < < different > > spot on the image in the right eye. The magic eye image has been constructed so that the binocular disparities between all the points in the image create a new picture that usually is recessed into or pops out of depth.
Notice, because of the way it works, you can make it go away by tilting the page. The magic eye image only works when it is horizontal. | 77a7c192-11a1-451e-9d62-c51d339b56fa |
6iqtu2 | Does Marijuana really makes you slower? | It seems like it at first, but that's because when you are stoned, you are a different "you" and you have to learn to do things over again. For example: you smoke a bunch of weed then decide to go to the munchy store, you get outside and start walking, and it's totally awkward, you feel wobbly, your legs feel crooked, and you get all conscientious. But if you make it a point to go out for a walk after a bong rip, then your stoned body will learn how to walk and it will become easy and natural for you to walk stoned. The same applies to just about everything; you just need to learn how to do it stoned.
Edit: Since I just saw your edit. As far as programming goes, it can help you and hinder you. It can actually give you an edge if you smoke a small amount. I find it makes more conscientious and so I notice extra little things when learning a language, that I might otherwise skip over. Also, programming means that you are using your creative facilities to come up solutions to achieve the desired results in your scripts and apps. A tiny bit will lend you a certain amount of lucidity that may help in those endeavors.
I definitely wouldn't be able to program if I smoked a lot. I'm sure I would mess my code up and not be able to figure out how to fix it.
Moderation is key. | 5de68f57-8f78-45fd-8ac1-e62a87f103db |
1baxy4 | why progress bars always hang on 99/100% | Progress bar values are basically made up by the developer. For some things they work pretty good. If you are downloading a 100MB file and have finished downloading 70MB then saying you are 70% done is pretty easy. For things like installing a game, where you have a huge number of files of different sizes it gets a little trickier, and for some things you can't really know ahead of time how long individual parts of the process will take, so you are really just guessing. This is why you will get stuck on a random number like 37% for a while, the instantly jump to 52%.
Now in all cases though, developers will often have some sort of main execution section and when they finish that they are "pretty much done". So they set the progress bar to 99% or 100% and then they "just do some cleanup". Where cleanup are some usually small tasks they need to complete to really be finished with everything. Sometimes the developer simply underestimates exactly how much stuff they need to get done with (just this one more little thing, then I'll be done...) or he has to wait on the OS for something that takes some time he didn't account for. If they were expecting the main work to take a significant amount of time, then maybe this cleanup really is 1% of the total time, but if the main work gets done fast it appears to lag here. There is also a "watch pot doesn't boil" effect since you are just waiting for that final %.
TL;DR Because the percents are made up by programmers, and programmers are bad at estimating how long things will take | f6d578d2-d8e6-4f71-9361-45f397e57559 |
64e483 | What is the mechanism that wireless devices use to generate electromagnetic waves, millions per second? | Electromagnetic waves generated by our current generation wireless technology (what are called "transverse electromagnetic waves" or TEM), are thought to be alternating areas of (relatively) strong electric field followed by strong magnetic field followed by strong electric field, etc. The change of intensity of one type of field leads to the creation of the other type like ripples of water on a pond (this phenomenon was explored by Michael Faraday, and described mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell, Oliver Heaviside etc.)
It follows from their discoveries that charging up a metal conductor (like an antenna) and discharging it rapidly can lead to these TEM waves rippling outwards. Charging and discharging is actually just another way to say "electrons moving back and forth" (though they actually move quite slowly), and every time these electrons change direction, another wave ripples outward.
How do you charge up and discharge an antenna rapidly? Well you need some way to connect it to the positive side and then negative side of a battery (or other source of voltage) millions of times per second. The positive side will suck electrons off the antenna, and the negative side will pump them back on the antenna (this may sound backwards but isn't, electrons are negatively charged and hang out in greater numbers at the negative terminal of a battery).
Modern transistors (essentially electrically controlled switches) can switch on and off millions (and billions) of times per seconds, and so are great for this. To do this switching, they only need a small electrical control signal, which is changing exactly as fast as you want the antenna to charge and discharge. These transistors that do the actual charging/discharging are called "amplifiers", because they amplify the power of the small control signal to give the antenna a stiff charging and discharging with each cycle.
But how do you make a small electrical signal change millions of times per second? For that you need what we call an "oscillator".
In modern radios this is usually a special arrangement of transistor amplifiers put in feedback with each other to create an electrical "ringing". You know how putting a microphone up to a speaker causes a screeching sound? That's what we call feedback. Same idea, just a much higher pitch screech. We can even change the pitch of the screech electrically by using neat tricks. One circuit that does this is called a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (or VCO), and it uses a neat trick with a diode that lets us easily pick different "channels" to broadcast on (you know, all those different spots on your radio dial).
VCOs are not known for making really pure and pitch-perfect tones however, so like a singer before a performance we tune them up. In the radio world, our electrical tuning forks are made from precisely cut pieces of quartz crystal surrounded by yet more transistors. The transistors help keep the fork ringing as long as there is power in the battery. We use precisely cut quartz for this, because when tickled properly it can "ring" electrically with a very pure tone (and pure tones are very important - they help the cell tower pick your phone out from the crowd).
So there you have it. Today's wireless devices start with a pure tone generated by a quartz crystal tuning fork, that is used to tune a screeching-feedback VCO. The (now much cleaner) tone from that VCO is then used to control amplifying transistors, that charge and discharge a piece of metal, that causes ripples of electromagnetism to radiate outwards. | 46344cf2-06cf-4c17-b52a-5ea24a85503a |
6xorbw | What is the scientific reason behind why pedophilia exists? | Rather than postulate about sexual advantage, I would say the main factor is that human sexual desire, like most other elements of human sexuality, exists on a spectrum rather than clear and discrete values. The main biological default is that one will be most strongly sexually attracted to those who show general youthfulness but are otherwise sexually at full maturity (which basically means roughly late-teens through early 30s, where both women and men are most likely to be healthy, sexually active, and virile, and where women in particular will have bodies fully developed for bearing a pregnancy but not dealing with age-related issues that make pregnancy more difficult/dangerous), but because of that spectrum some people exist at the tails of the distribution and thus are attracted to older individuals, or alternately to those who have barely reached the limits of sexual maturity.
Pedophilia has a formal definition that is slightly different than its common definition. Clinically, attraction by an otherwise fully adult individual to those near full maturity but not quite there (~16-20) is "ephebophilia", whereas attraction to younger people still going through the earlier stages of puberty (~12-16) is "hebephilia" and attraction to those who have not yet entered puberty (~ < 12) is "pedophilia." Culturally, anything before legal adulthood (all 3 sub-categories) or age of consent (the latter 2 categories) is often generically called pedophilia, and often considered both a taboo in general and unlawful in particular.
None of this discussion so far deals with any moral question over the condition, beyond discussing generically the issue of something being taboo; instead it merely deals with the technical question of why it exists. When you start dealing with the moral questions of what is acceptable and why society deals with it in certain ways, it usually settles to some question of the exploitative nature of the arrangement, which increases further with younger age of the individual (hence the difference in age of consent versus legal adulthood), an argument that has substantial evidence backing it but about which people have a myriad of different opinions (which is a major factor in considerations such as "Romeo and Juliet" laws).
I hope that helps. I feel kind of dirty just thinking about the topic... | e74833e7-6922-4fee-ac49-7d9fda750402 |
3z6vic | How do spark plugs break car windows while rocks can't? | concentration of force.
a nail can break a window. a palm doesn't, even if there's more force applied. | 69d03271-c7c0-47db-b5de-5a961a175a43 |
54fmg1 | . Why is voltage proportional to resistance when voltage drops after going through a resistor | It's not perfect, but the water analogy is a reasonable one.
You can think of resistance as the size of a pipe, with larger resistances meaning smaller pipes. Voltage is proportional to resistance as long as current is kept constant. Constant current is analogous to constant flow, so that means that if you take two pipes of different sizes and ensure the flow rate is the same through both of them, you'll have to have a higher pressure on the smaller pipe. In practice (in both electricity and water systems), you tend to have pressure/voltage as the variable you can control and then the other two are inversely proportional, and expressing it that way is more intuitive. | 66e76229-d583-4595-80e5-83586ed824b2 |
4bmmbg | I need a very 5 year old explanation of what happens when normal poor people file bankruptcy. | Most poor people will file what is called a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. First, you list all of the debts you owe and who you owe them to. The fact that you're applying for bankruptcy is published, so any creditors who were unaware can come forward. First, the court stops everyone from being able to sue you or otherwise trying to collect the debt--they will have to go through the court.The court appoints an administrator who tries to determine who has priority in getting paid.
Then, an administrator starts distributing your property and assets to creditors, except the law allows you to keep a certain amount. For example, if your house is below a certain value it can't be sold, and your retirement funds are protected as well.
Once all of the excess assets you had are distributed, the remainder of your debt is cleared. Any creditors who didn't get back all of the money you owed them are out of luck. So you come out of the bankruptcy process poor, but debt-free. | 80547d49-6c1e-46e8-9a9c-70fe981ea1ee |
3uz3ju | How come video compression is getting better all the time, but sound files are still the same size as ever? | Audio compression is already really good, and has been for ages. People tend to be a bit more picky about audio quality (real or perceived) than they are about video quality, for some reason.
The bottom line is we don't really need better compression for audio files. | b66f0a18-df62-4b24-8329-7eb665e1192d |
13w269 | How does lumens work? | Let's look at what a "40W" light bulb means first.
"40W" means that the bulb consumes 40 Watts of power. Exactly what a "Watt" is doesn't much matter. The point is that it measures how much power the bulb *uses*. Incandescent bulbs waste about 90% of their energy as heat (which makes Easy Bake Ovens work). This makes about as much sense as comparing car engines based on how much gas they use, rather than how much horsepower they have.
Lumens, however, are an actual measurement of how much light a bulb emits. It doesn't matter if you're a wasteful fluorescent bulb or a super-efficient LED - rating the bulb in lumens gives you the same result.
The problem is that saying "40W equivalent" is a meaningless term and has no basis in reality - it doesn't measure the power consumption *OR* the actual light output. Just assume that they're lying to you. A 40W bulb generally puts out 4-500 lumens of light. Claiming a 100 lumen light is close to that is just **wrong**. | be42cc20-b675-42ca-b135-106785178ac2 |
1n6596 | Online Universities and their value over a traditional degree. Is a degree from one just as good from the other? | In the UK this depends entirely on the reputation of the University. We have the Open University, which was established in 1969 specifically for distance learning regardless of previous qualifications. In 2009/10 it enrolled 250,000 students and in 2011 was ranked in the top 40 UK Universities and top 500 globally - quite an achievement for such a junior establishment.
As a result degrees from the OU are well thought of and, because they are often taken by students in full time work, are indicative of good self discipline, organisation, motivation and dedication. | 419d4e27-f52a-4072-a748-b644ea792462 |
jhsqp | What is the IMF and what does it do? | The International Monetary Fund deals with money problems on a world-wide scale. Think of them like a bank, but for countries not people. It started by a bunch of countries putting in money, and other countries could borrow this money if they promised to change their economies to be more 'effective'. I put this in quotes because lots of people criticize the IMF's required changes (to get a loan) as being just in the interest of Western powers like the USA. | 55362386-19b2-416e-ad18-b9e07d9f64a3 |
1np7y8 | Why should we keep funding NASA? | > So, what makes these investments worth while?
We don't know ahead of time, which is the biggest reason. Advances made in the space program are both obvious (satellites) and subtle (enriched baby food, or structural analysis software). It leads to detecting threats to our infrastructure (solar storms) and insight into our environment (runaway greenhouse effect).
The point of exploration is that we don't know what is out there. The USA was founded by explorers, everything we have is the result of someone forging into the unknown. If your friend cannot see the potential gain from exploration then they are simply shortsighted. | 86dccbf5-f813-405d-bc95-6e22ae93e509 |
38iwj3 | What makes PewDiePie so popular? | The reason you find him childish and pointless is because his videos aren't made for you. PewDiePie is actually something of a genius because he knows his audience inside and out and knows how to entertain them. His target? Teenagers. They eat his stuff up because they're still at the stage where randomness is the funniest thing around. Sure, they'll grow out of it when they get a bit older, but there will always be more teenagers to take their place.
EDIT: Had to do a bit of cleanup, but I also want to add that teenagers can be some of the most loyal fans around. My younger cousin (she's 14) loves PewDiePie and talks about him to anyone who is willing to listen. That kind of rabid word of mouth isn't usually something you get from adults, and since PewDiePie is so good at making these kids laugh, they're singing his praises in schools all across the world. That's some seriously powerful marketing.
EDIT #2: Guys, replying to me and saying "I'm a teenager and I don't like PewDiePie" means nothing. I'm in my mid twenties and I don't like nor do I use Twitter. Just as well, very few of my friends - who are in their mid-to-late twenties too - use it. However, the fact remains that millions upon millions of people in my age group use and enjoy Twitter. Your personal preference is not necessarily representative of your entire age group. | 6f248cd5-cb2b-482d-ab56-cf279197a7a9 |
2t6z2e | Physicist James Gates claims that you can find computer code in the equations that we use to describe our universe in string theory. | You're asking for a hell of a lot!
So, the "computer codes" he is talking about are, on the one hand, representations of complex algebraic systems in superstring theory, and on the other hand (in the computer system) they're Shannon codes — creating a set of unique, compact symbols that point to larger, less compact things. Shannon coding was discovered and then used to do things like create zip files, image compression, audio compression, and modem protocols and digital transmission protocols.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem … wouldn't necessarily touch on shannon coding, except that they both depend on the same underlying phenomenon, which in information theory is called Shannon coding and in mathematics is called Gödel numbers —
Gödel did something very important in formal mathematics, logic, and information theory.
First, he hypothesised (and then proved) that, for every entity in a sufficiently complex universe of discourse (including much of mathematics and logic), there is a unique symbol (shannon coding intersection here) which he called a Gödel number.
In plain english: in math, everything — every algebra, every calculus, every equation, every geometric figure, every system of manipulating symbols, every rule set, *everything* — has a Gödel number that identifies with it.
The second thing he did was use those Gödel numbers to prove that in any formal logical system of sufficient complexity, that system may be consistent, or complete, *but not both*.
He did this by creating a minimal formal logical representation of the idea represented by the plain English sentence "this sentence is false" — which is either consistent as a nonsense string of data that isn't evaluated, or complete as part of a system that is evaluated, but cannot be both.
I don't know how the Incompleteness theorem intersects with James Gates' works, as I'm not *that* familiar with what his work precisely claims regarding superstrings, supersymmetry and supergravity, etcetera. My knowledge is limited to what he's discussing as regards information theory. I don't know how he arrived at deciding that there were binary strings in these mathematical structures, either.
So, they're not exactly computer code. They're highly efficient methods of representing systems that mirror Shannon coding and jibe with information theory regarding Shannon efficiency (how far data can be compressed).
EDIT: it occurs to me that there is a kind of relationship between shannon codes and "computer coding" — every instruction for RISC CPUs (the instruction sets for most CPUs, really) have an attribute that they share with shannon coding, in that they are unambiguous, and unique — put four of them together in a line and start reading the line at any given point, and you'll be able to always identify the start of the instructions. The last half of one and the first half of another, pit together, can't possibly be confused for the first and last half of an instruction. It's called prefix coding. _URL_1_
Which ties back around to Gödel's incompleteness theorem — prefix codes allow for the transmission of a message completely and consistently without out-of-band markers; Gödel's reason for formulating the Incompleteness theorem was to demonstrate that self-reference is, or necessitates, a kind of out-of-band marker.
Edit edit: in this presentation _URL_0_
He seems to be saying that the mathematical systems he sees that represent the way quantum systems behave, behave in the same way as block-linear self-dual error correcting codes (specific type of shannon codes) — have similar attributes.
BLECC — That's not algorithms, that's the way information is formatted for transmission in order to prevent corruption during transmission, by introducing special redundancies that allow the computer on the other side of the comms link to recreate corrupted parts. He seems to be analogising this to the "spooky action at a distance" seen with quantum entangled particles.
EDIT EDIT EDIT: his actual paper: _URL_2_
Abstract, emphases mine:
------------
**Relating** Doubly-Even Error-Correcting Codes, Graphs, and Irreducible Representations of N-Extended Supersymmetry
C.F. Doran, M.G. Faux, S.J. Gates Jr, T. Hubsch, K.M. Iga, G.D. Landweber
(Submitted on 31 May 2008)
Previous work has shown that the *classification* of indecomposable off-shell representations of N-supersymmetry, depicted as Adinkras, may be factored into specifying the topologies available to Adinkras, and then the height-assignments for each topological type. The latter problem being solved by a recursive mechanism that generates all height-assignments within a topology, it remains to classify the former. Herein we show that this problem is *equivalent to* classifying certain (1) graphs and (2) error-correcting codes.
---------------
What you need to know is in the emphasised words — he is asserting a *relationship*, by showing that the solution to his *classification* of (indecomposable off-shell representations of N-supersymmetry) ("Adinkras") is *equivalent* to the classification of certain types of error-correcting codes in information theory.
This doesn't prove a relationship, but it is highly compelling. They're not algorithms, just information structures that allow algorithms to reconstruct missing parts of those structures, and that is the attribute he observes in the Adinkras, and seems to see that as responsible for quantum entanglement behaviour, among other attributes.
Does that answer the question? | 92a2df2a-0add-40cd-b9a7-17eb58726167 |
435sez | Why are emulators so tricky to make? | Emulation does not improve as the technology gets older.
Emulation's difficulty depends on how different the platform is that is being emulated from the platform you want to emulate on. In the end it all comes down to the fact that emulators are non-profit, unofficial projects. Creators don't have the necessary documentation and they also have to avoid using copyright methods. This is the reason why emulators usually don't come with a BIOS.
That's why they never work perfectly and their development takes a lóng time. If Sony, for example, would make an official PS2/PS3 emulator for the PC, they could get it to work perfectly. | 02bca15f-48f3-41b7-b208-f48a61ab662d |
5jat6s | With an inherently limited number of sources from past centuries to examine, will there come a time that we "run out of history?" | It's doubtful. The more we find out about history the more wrong we tend to discover we were about things. Even very recent history is full of misconceptions, falsehoods, and propaganda to dig through. | 73c6363f-9a5d-43d3-91dd-30263121a088 |
1nzy6i | Why do kittens go into a state of paralysis when grabbed by the scruff? | you can also use scruff training for teaching discipline, but only for kittens not adult cats. I wish I'd known this when I adopted mine as kittens. My 3 cats are all rescues, grew up with no mum so they have a bad habit of biting, nipping & generally bratty behavior that kitty mom would discipline out of them. _URL_0_ | ef79b7f2-f0f7-4864-81d9-b550b723c420 |
1o31k2 | why did the fur on our bodies dissapear if some humans moved to colder climates? | Humans originated in the hot savannah of Africa. The leading theory on how people back then hunted was running down animals for many miles. This was reliant on tiring the animal out from constantly running to where the human could get close and kill it. Because of the heat generated by running in the 100+ degree savanah, humans evolved to dump heat as efficiently as possible. This meant that we lost a lot of fur (except for some around the head and other places to shield from UV exposure)
[Here's a video of modern African tribesman hunting using the techniques described above.](_URL_0_)
Fast forward couple hundred thousand years and people moved north. By this time people were intelligent and instead of waiting for evolution to take place which would have happened over thousands of years. The people realized they can take the fur of other animals and use it for themselves. This caused body heat preserving fur to no longer be an evolutionary variable. In essence, someone who was furrier than another wouldn't necessarily be more suited to survive and pass on their genes than someone who was hairless because both a furry person and a non furry person would both survive because of fur coats. | 3b5628b6-3b64-4687-996f-bc441a935b45 |
23w4fz | What causes bioluminescent plankton to ONLY light up when agitated? | chemical reaction of luciferins in the plankton which reacts with luciferase to create light and oxyluciferin. | c85fe66a-b298-4d3d-a654-894c016edef7 |
4h8m57 | Why are batteries charge measured in mAh instead of Coulombs? | No real reason. It's just because that if you know that your circuit draws 100mA and your battery has a 1000mAh capacity then you know that your battery is going to last 10 hours. Easier than using C and then diving by 3600 second to get the number of hours. | 43ee8a7c-3128-4f10-9c4f-99edc3a433bd |
nan | nan | nan | 3cf846a7-e309-44a0-883c-0c23884ee370 |
1wxv56 | Does exercise and eating healthy "unclog" our arteries? Or do our arteries build up plaque permanently? | Yes. Having a diet that's higher in HDL cholesterol and low in LDL cholesterol will see the macrophages that make up atherosclerosis (plaque) lose their LDL cholesterol and have it transported back to the liver to be excreted in bile. This will slowly reduce the volume of the plaque and start to bring the artery back to normal. | d3814e5d-0ebe-4d74-8fe3-e5227f8c53d8 |
4nvqds | How are phobias acquired? | It's kinda like a psychological allergy. With an allergy, your immune system is overdoing a normal healthy response. A phobia is when generally healthy fears are exaggerated.
When you have a phobia of something you shouldn't be scared of, there's normally a situational association. Like if you got lost when you were young and when trying to find your mom you got really scared by a cat. Now your scared of cats. These phobias can often be treated with exposure therapy.
Most interesting are non-associative phobias, which are thought to be genetic because they establish themselves the very first time you're exposed to something. | 20f19b7b-7cd5-4aec-b45f-0c253d6ea4d7 |
44eik6 | What is this bizarre intersection? | It's called a [diverging diamond interchange](_URL_1_). It's considered one of the best recent innovations in interchange design because of all the [benefits it provides](_URL_0_).
> It seems to make interchanging with I-77 easier
Yep. That's just one of the benefits.
> I imagine that it's super confusing for those unfamiliar with the intersection
The first few times, maybe. But once you see them once or twice they're really no more complicated or confusing than any other intersection. | 4b965a24-de96-4b16-8528-720ca2f47108 |
1yg7ub | In times of severe to hyperinflation, why can't the government mandate a price ceiling to counteract? | Hyperinflation comes almost always because of a specific supply-shock problem. Something has increased uncertainty of the economy so so much that goods do not have any sort of reliable delivery in adequate amounts.
Severe uncertainty can come from people hoarding in fear of a war or in fear of supplies cut off. It can also come from government printers of paper cash "degrading" the value of the cash by giving it to their friends. Everyone starts to mistrust the value of cash in their pocket ... believes that things won't be the same price tomorrow ... and may change to bartering or the black market.
If sellers must slow down sales until something is always available and they use high prices to get more goods imported or made. This means raising prices over and over to make sure you are getting the best profit and can survive another day as a useful place to buy. Running out is an absolute failure and changes the prices from "high" to infinite... or basically a complete failure. Paying for empty shelves can ruin and disappoint everyone and hyperinflation is a time when many businesses simply fail and must close.
If a government mandates prices be locked in place, then stores will simply run out because those with goods to sell upstream of the markets will set prices on their own ...and send them to the black markets instead... or sell them in another country for other types of money. | 98018a79-0a57-4f82-b8c0-c523a4ec7824 |
5unj9v | using coffee grounds to filter out lead ions from water. | scientists tested whether or not coffee grounds could be used to filter lead out of water. they found some interesting things out, firstly if more coffee grounds are being used more lead is removed from the water. Secondly neither water temperature nor bean type have any effect on the amount of lead removed. If the coffee grounds were used first though they worked better than fresh grounds, and finally this method was made less effective if the beans were treated with perchloric acid and if the treatment solution contained 10% or more of the acid the grounds stopped absorbing lead at all. and while this study does suggest at some point that grounds can be used in home filtration systems at this point odds are it would be very risky as you don't know how much lead is in the water or how much is being absorbed. | ee39f850-136e-4a0c-b47d-d999ba680c97 |
6ev3nm | Why is there such a growing anti-intellectual sentiment growing around the world? | Where to even begin? There is simply so much to discuss with this question. It can be broken down into 2 main facets.
The first is that intellectuals are generally in charge of policy. It may be politicians that make the rules, but the rules are only as strong as the enforcement of said rules. With that in mind, intellectuals/bureaucrats often have a great deal of influence in what goes on. As a result of this, there is a feeling that the crisis of 08, loss of manufacturing jobs, etc; all happened under the watch of intellectuals. Of course, the intellectuals didn't directly cause either of those things, but with our magical hindsight vision we find ways to blame them for all the shit that went wrong.
The second is that there is a perception intellectuals are far removed from the consequences of their mistakes. While intellectuals don't make as many mistakes as non intellectuals in the same positions, they are less effected by them because they are highly skilled and can bounce back far easier. Non-intellectuals on the other hand often face unemployment or they need to take on a completely different job/accept benefits from the government in the wake of a change in whatever industry they worked in. | 333e7ed7-5da3-4902-8293-3d3073140fc6 |
4lluru | How do we know life on other planets will be of the same type as life on Earth? | I took a class in college about this actually, it had nothing to do with my major, but you don't pass up the chance to take a college class on aliens.
It's been a few years, but from what I can remember, you're right, we don't know that life would be exactly like ours, but based on what we know now, that seems the most likely. As we understand it, life needs to have a solvent fluid. On Earth, this means water. There's a few other options that would work in theory (liquid methane if memory serves), but there's problems with each of these that seem to make water the best option.
Because we have such limited resources dedicated to the search for ET intelligence, we pretty well limit our search to those places and conditions that seem the most likely. | 7e160f61-29a2-4dd3-9320-4cf1d7b7ffb0 |
620rft | Why does the World Cup have varying competition formats for different regions? | > South America only has 1 round
South America (CONMEBOL) only has ten members. Their qualifying tournament is a full round-robin with 18 games. They can do their entire qualifying process in one step.
Most of the members are relatively strong, and there aren't any 'big gaps' between the best and worst teams. By _URL_0_, the best team is ranked #1 (Brazil), and the lowest ranked team is #55 Bolivia.
> Asia has 4 rounds before the play-off.
Asia (AFC) has a lot of teams, 50 by my count. And only 7 out of the 50 teams in Asia have as high a ranking as the lowest South American team. So there are several rounds to eliminate many of the lower ranking teams, before introducing the higher ranked teams. This also helps with fewer disruptions for players and their club teams.
Round 1 of AFC was only teams ranked #171 - #209 by FIFA. Round 2, to help budgets of Asian teams, was agreed to be both a World Cup qualifying and an Asian Championship qualifying. The teams were broken into eight groups of five. However, there needed to be a 3rd round (two groups of six) to narrow the field down to the four world Cup spots (top two teams), and a playoff for the 3rd place teams to go through to the "half-qualifier" match with a CONCACAF team.
> Europe has no play-offs and only has 2 rounds.
Europe has a lot of teams, and most are fairly high in quality. A lot of teams have players with large club commitments, so they want to minimize the matches. So more groups with fewer teams. However, it's hard to get thirteen qualifying teams from nine groups, so they take all the group winners, and 'half' the 2nd place finishers, narrowed by a playoff.
> CONCACAF
I'm an American, and our qualifying is similar to Asia, but we have a special situation, where a few teams (Mexico, US) have been very powerful, and a large number of teams (especially in the Caribbean) are very weak. So we use *three rounds* to lower the number of teams, and then a round of group stages (3 groups of 4) lead to 'the hex' of six teams in one group, which decides the three qualifiers and the one 'half-qualifier'. | b98a48ec-158c-4b0f-abe5-5245968bcb09 |
2mnejc | Why do I always feel like I need to piss right after I cum? | Because its your body's natural reflex to return your urethra to the proper pH to avoid bacteria growth and also to clean out and residual semen. If you fap, don't pee and go to bed. When you wake up to pee you might notice it splits in two streams, that's cause your piss is being blocked by a little bit of jism | 1c3739da-7bcb-4f25-8c92-b1acec51f3f1 |
4299w4 | Why is when my body is freezing (like making snow balls without gloves) and I go and put them under a hot sink they ich like crazy? | When your hands get cold the blood vessels in them contract. When you run them under *hot* water they expand rapidly, stretching them and the area around them, causing discomfort. | 38e8d2b6-a1ad-4494-aea0-ce601696bdb2 |
1ubkuo | How did Britain come to command such a vast empire in the early 1900's? | The English started colonising other countries very early on. We could say that England itself is a result of being colonised as the Normans invaded in 1066 and conquered England.
England went on to colonise Wales, Ireland and then Scotland. From the 17th century, England went on to colonise North America. The English were very successful at driving out the Swedish, the Dutch and the French from North America.
The English then put much effort into populating the 13 colonies. Much of this population came from slave labour, which is still known as "indentured servants" in North America. It was a convenient method for the English to get rid of vagrants and other anti-social elements in society, while providing the colonies with cheap labour.
Then the English colonised Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The English also set up many colonies in Africa and colonised a very divided South Asia in the 19th century.
One of the strongest attributes which the English had was the strategic funding of their colonies. Whereas other European powers treated their colonies as "quick-get-rich" schemes, the English had more long term goals in mind. | b0ca4e10-43f2-4fd4-8e77-46b2ee0fc5fc |
6b9bw3 | Can animals recognize music as music? | Apparently the part of the human brain that's stimulated by melody is left untouched by just about every other animal. According to brain imaging, your dog has no sense of rhythm. Your cat certainly doesn't "get" that CD you're listening to, and your hamster can't even remember and recognise a simple melody played over and over.
Perhaps it's because animals live more "in the moment", so the fact that we introduce time from our observation is what enables us to take the isolated notes and see them as a bigger picture - but that's taking us into quantum physics and not really explaining it like you're five.
If you're really interested, think about an arrow in flight. If you were to freeze time, you would know where the arrow was, but you couldn't say how fast it was travelling, or where it would land. In any given moment, the arrow is frozen in its point. You can search for more on this if you're bothered. But my suggestion would be that dogs (for example) only hear the notes that are being played "now", rather than making sense of the whole musical bar or getting the underlying rhythm from 16 repeated sounds.
I agree that some birds can mimic other sounds, but they are just as likely to mimic the sound of a car starting or aircon fans powering up as they are to mimic a tune.
TLDR - No. | 2c6084b9-68ac-4bd2-96aa-8193395ff29c |
j2fep | Explain e=mc^2. | Energy and mass are the exact same thing, in different forms. You can take a heavy atom and split it into two smaller atoms that have a combined weight less than the original. The missing mass is converted to energy. This is how a nuclear reactor creates electricity. On the other hand, if you take two particles and accelerate them to near the speed of light, they gain massive amounts of kinetic energy. If you then collide them into each other, all sorts of short-lived particles pop into existence from nowhere. This is what happens in a particle collider like the large hadron collider. | 1dcdc7c6-f29c-4491-bf35-416c0e16cacf |
1vp06c | Why is it worthwhile to separate colors from whites in laundry? | In the past, you would often add bleach to whites to help clean them. However, it would destroy colored dyes, so you would need to separate them first. | e5398b9a-5d49-4749-9e3f-6e9767bdd32c |
1kjkjn | Why does the TSA require a max limit per bottle of liquid/gel but no limit on the number of bottles? | Because the TSA's rules are arbitrary and meaningless. | ca6036dd-e941-4db5-8120-73278f3b629d |
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