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420lta | Help me understand networking protocols and ports | nitpick -- UDP is a network layer protocol, as it's best-effort. TCP is a transport layer protocol, as orderly delivery is guaranteed. | 31030fd1-e23f-43a7-91ea-7aeac1c63cdf |
5g3318 | Why does Santa Claus go by so many names (St. Nicholas, Kris Kringle, etc)? | Santa Claus is an amalgam of dozens if not hundreds of different mythical/religious characters and a few actual historical figures. As such some of the names of those separate figures carried through to modernity as alternate names for Santa Claus. | 524477c9-955f-46f0-a6f9-42b73e554d23 |
2rm0ot | If marriage is a spiritual Union, why does the government offer benefits if there's separation of church/state? | because not all marriages are a spiritual union. My first marriage, when i was more of an atheist, was to another more or less atheist done at city hall with no mention of god.
and it was still a marriage.
The problem i have with the "spiritual union" claim about marriage is that that is just what SOME people, not all people, think about it.
Millions of people in the US are in such marriages. By your definition, if it is a religious spiritual union, they are not married. but yet they are. so clearly that definition is lacking. | ebe290b0-943e-416e-a8dd-933e5a349135 |
4syw1n | Why do your fingernails grow so much faster than your toenails? | Partially, it's because of circulation. Your fingertips are generally warmer and get more nutrients than your toes. | f531083d-607c-4722-a5ef-530c6b3749ae |
2khkmz | Is there anywhere on the planet that naturally desalinates ocean water besides evaporation and formation of icebergs? | Many living organisms are able to separate water from its solutes on the cellular level through osmosis. | 76a7ff52-ef73-4e83-b54e-0fd80e1ef5cf |
3cywe2 | How does "shadow banning" work? | So it's kinda like I'm back in high school then? | d70b2ba0-7dc0-48be-b515-7e731afcb73b |
2bwutm | How do medically induced coma's work. | The Doctor's essentially give you anesthesia to make you go to sleep and keep you asleep.
This is generally done for people who have suffered severe trauma; such as severe burns, several broken bones, head injuries, etc. In order to reduce pain, aid healing and just make everything more smooth.
There are many of the same risks as a normal coma, you might not wake up, you may suffer brain damage, your muscles with atrophy, stuff like that. | 300ab61a-4cb4-429c-aaf7-80ad50c54bbb |
3cwzc9 | Why don't PGA professionals repair their divots? | You do see caddies do it occasionally, but frankly it's a waste unless it's the right kind of grass. (You don't replace certain kinds of divots because it's more effective to use sand to level the surface and allow the surrounding grass to knit together.)
The proper repair, in any case, is done by the huge groundskeeping crew brought in to care for the course at every tournament. | 51a0773a-0b44-4551-a5f4-83d6c9d6b728 |
88t460 | How did homo sapiens differ from the Homo species right before modern extant Human Species (i.e. homo sapiens)? | > But which one was right before us in this chain and how did it differ from us i.e. sapiens.
Currently *Homo heidelbergensis* holds this position.
> How did their body structure differ from us (any different organs)
The differences, relatively speaking are very slight. Nothing so drastic as having completely different organs. They are one of the many transitional steps leading up to *Homo sapiens.*
> and what caused their extinction, was it us?
They evolved. The speciated into Neanderthals and *Homo sapiens*. | 689f97a3-d535-475b-ab10-8f2c1246e379 |
3o55zh | Why is the rapist from the front page not waiting in jail for a trial? | I treat 2x posts like that as victimization fanfiction. You could probably post a summary of a lifetime original movie there and get 1000 karma.
Not saying this story in particular is fabricated, but it's unverifiable, and some have to be.
EDIT: just read the update and I definitely don't believe OP. | 7faefa8b-b76d-45b4-8ff4-c78d8fb9c2cf |
2vuswd | why has California not legalized pot beyond medicinal use? | Some of the most well funded anti-legalization lobbies in the state are sponsored by the legal dispensaries and co-ops. They would hate to have inexpensive, high-quality, locally and responsibly sourced cannabis flood the market and ruin their racket. | dc0e7267-2ec4-4184-8d4f-6657e6c72f32 |
2nzsdu | how come animals dont know that the tail theyre after is theirs? | I giggle like a child every time I fart and it makes a funny noise. There's no reason, really. Often times younger animals chase their tales, while older ones tend not to. I think it's a playfull quality | 31c49591-57ac-4e9c-9b5b-667cefa6ccfa |
2hcylg | Phil Spector's Wall of Sound Technique | The purpose was to maximize the amount of sound per second. The effect, when done right, was startling compared to other kinds of music. For pop music, where you are competing for people's attention continuously, the technique proved to be very commercially successful.
Imagine that you are looking at a graph of the amount of sound energy being produced by a recording. Let's start with just the drum. On beats, the energy graph hits a peak. Between beats, the energy graph is at zero.
Now you layer in the bass. The bass notes create more peaks on the graph so there's less time when the graph is at zero.
Layer in the guitars and the vocals. There's a lot more time when the graph is above zero, and relatively few places where the graph is at zero. Maybe it never goes all the way to zero, but instead just shows a variance between a high point and a low point. That's what most pop music looked like before the Wall of Sound.
The Wall of Sound is an engineering technique that seeks to keep the sound graph at the peak as much as possible. By controlling all the aspects of the recording using multiple tracks, overdubbing, and other techniques, the Wall of Sound produces a recording where there are very few low points on that sound energy graph. The result is that the sound is distinctly more "powerful" than the average piece of recorded music.
The trick is that if you just turned up all the microphones used in the recording session or had the guitarists play endless chords, you end up with a muddled sonic mess. It's like mixing all the colors on a paint palette - you'll end up with an unappetizing brown color. Spector's genius was figuring out how to put all the pieces of the sound together so that what emerged was still recognizably a piece of pop music and not just a droning muddled mess. | eb6a46f1-e74d-4f8a-b3c2-fefd2380519a |
5j40t7 | Through the laws of probability, how are no one's fingerprints alike? | It's 11pm and I'm on my second glass of wine, so I can't be bothered to do the math.
There are three types of fingerprints: whorl, loop and arch. Most people have 10 fingers, and can have any combination of those three fingerprints. There are also three different ways you can take a fingerprint: flat, slap or roll. Each method carries its own number of exact or "sort of, pretty close" matches.
There's [a paper/presentation by Michigan State](_URL_0_) that discusses the probability of fingerprint configuration, and each source in the table has a number to the power of at least 11, which far exceeds the world's population estimate of about 7 billion.
But it's sort of like lottery numbers. The odds may be incredibly small that you draw the winning ones, but that doesn't necessarily exclude other people from having the exact same combination as you.
So it's possible, just not very likely. | 237c4c06-6901-413f-be38-b158e20451a5 |
82gzyc | how does adding a third polarizing filter allow more light to pass through, not less? | The polarizing filter doesn't only block the wrong-polarized light, but it also forces all the light that passes through it to now be polarized in the direction of the filter.
Also as you've noticed, polarizing filters will let through some differently-polarized light depending on *how* different the polarization is. 0 degree light will partially get through a 45 degree filter, but not at all through a 90 degree filter.
So when you have two filters at right angles (90 degrees) no light gets through because after the first filter, the polarization is totally wrong for the second filter.
When you have three filters at 45 degree angles, all of the light after the first filter is polarized at 0 degrees. Then some of the 0 degree light gets through the 45 degree filter, which resets it to 45 degrees, then some of the 45 degree light gets through the 90 degree filter (which also resets it to 90 degrees). | 3b807572-0ab4-4e10-afff-9caad1daad07 |
5gcr6a | Why is there an absolute zero, but not really an exact maximum temperature? | At Absolute Zero, molecular motion comes to a complete stop.
You can't get lower than that.
A maximum amount of molecular motion has yet to be established, so no maximum temperature has yet been determined.. | 7de0252b-705d-49d1-a0bc-42b3b0028c54 |
233p3d | How does a particle accelerator work? | Despite what might be said elsewhere magnets have nothing to do with making particles speed up in a particle accelerator. Magnets are used to steer the particles (for instance if you want to have the particles go in a circle you use many magnets that each slightly bend the path of the particle) they also serve to focus the particles so that they do not become too spread out from each other and collide with the vacuum pipe they are in.
To actually boost a particle up to close to the speed of light there are a lot of different methods you can use. You mention electromagnetic waves in your question and this is normally the move common method these days. Before I got into how an electromagnetic wave can accelerate a particle, the reason you need a charged particle in the first place is that electricity and magnetism only have an effect on things that have 'charge'. This is analogous to mass and gravity. If something is going to be effected by gravity it needs to have mass. The more mass it has the more strongly it is effected. The same holds for charge and electromagnetic fields, no charge, no interaction with the electromagnetic field.
Now, to actually use an electromagnetic field to accelerate a particle (increase its speed in this case). I'm going to talk about one specific way that is probably the easiest to visualize. An electromagnetic wave consists of both an electric and magnetic component (its in the name afterall) what we care about is the electric part since it can actually do work on the particle and increase its speed. If you solve a few rather complicated equations you find out that for an electromagnetic wave inside a conducting structure (say a copper pipe) if you set up the size of the pipe correctly you can get the electric wave to always point along one axis. So all you need to do then is send your charged particle along this same direction and the electric field will 'push' on the particle, increasing its speed. You can imagine this like a surfer riding on a wave. If he sits at the right place on the wave he will be pushed along, otherwise he just ends up falling behind and falling over. This is a very basic picture of how an accelerator operates. | df750bca-e7b6-4a8f-bc05-2223ebf4187f |
2njdn7 | If alcohol is considered a drug why do people call it being drunk instead of being high? | I am not sure but I do know that if you go back to at least the 50's calling someone high was synonymous with drunk. Same with "Stoned" but I think over time society takes broader terms for inebriation and stick them to a specific method. | 77a1b939-c181-4ff6-85db-0b16b5f1f3ff |
8e7qu9 | why does it feel so warm when you sit where someone else has been sitting, versus sitting back in your own seat? | It feels warm to sit where anyone else was sitting, including where you were sitting, if your butt is colder than the seat.
But if you were just sitting there, then your butt is the same temperature as the seat, so it won't feel warm. However, if you were standing, your butt gets a bit colder because you're not sitting, which causes the spot where someone else was sitting to feel warmer.
There's a third option that makes it all become clear. Be sitting for a while, and when someone gets up, go sit in their seat. It won't feel very warm, because your butt is already warm from sitting. | 526e2298-c23f-44bf-9cfc-e572ae3ed77e |
3vpckv | Why do men bald more than women? | Levels of DHT. You can actually get a shampoo that contains DHT blockers that hang out on your scalp and in your hair folicles to make it so don't go as bald. | 820a356b-07b0-4c34-b350-ade25ecdb9b8 |
5aqxnq | Some people say calories are all that matter so what would happen to someone if they ate a diet of only 2000 calories of refined sugar? | The "calories are all that matter" is in reference to weight gain/loss. You still need vitamins and minerals in your diet. And fiber is good for keeping your GI track healthy. If you only ate empty calories for an extended amount of time, you would star to suffer various vitamin deficiencies. | eb27eda0-1ea5-496f-af8e-90a547a20fba |
133qmj | Why do we yawn when others yawn near us? | A few people think differently about why this happens.
One idea is that when we see another person yawn, our brain tells our body that the area we are in has a low oxygen level.
Another is the relationship of being tired, we see another person yawn and then become tired as a result.
Lastly, there is an idea that yawning cools down the brain and allows it to work better, when one person yawns it makes other people's brains think they need to work better as a consequence.
That is the extent of my limited knowledge, hope it helps | adfa0f73-7748-4e8a-bbc2-49ccfd767c88 |
2a5msz | When I get zapped/electrocuted for a fraction of a second, but feel the tingle for much longer, what is happening? | Shock can result in muscular spasms and tissue death from overheating, both of which can result in physical sensation.
Somewhat unrelated, but 'electrocution' is actually a portmanteau of electric and execution, and refers explicitly to a fatal scenario, a non-lethal experience would be more properly called an electric shock. | ea5540b6-5449-4c33-9502-e285ffc60ee7 |
4ig83s | Why do people hate to agree with people they don't like? | Because agreeing with someone you don't like might imply that you've incorrectly evaluated the person. This can feel threatening to some people who will then choose to stick to their previous opinion; that removes the feeling of threat, it keeps things "consistent".
People sometimes prefer to invalidate whatever made them agree with the disliked person because it's less of an effort than changing your mind about someone you don't like.
Also, if you've decided for any reason that "person X is bad", you can set yourself up so that anything X does or thinks *has* to be bad, by judging the actions/thoughts based on who performed them, instead of judging the actions or thoughts independently. That's also a mechanism to keep things consistent and make decision-making about a person "easy". It's how stereotypes are perpetuated; "X belongs to Y place/culture/gender/association, and Y is bad/does crappy things, therefore X is bad because they belong to Y". | 687f77af-9e68-4af1-8346-37924a104482 |
qdk8w | What's with all the hype with Raspberry Pi? | it's a charitable organization that makes a barebones computer that is the size of a deck of cards, yet has the power and capabilities or processing and outputting 1080p video all for $35. What's not to like? | 5da14e75-d230-42e9-b61b-30d56be74ab9 |
ok8qs | The oil-drop experiment by Robert Millikan. | I actually did this experiment last year, and it was a lot more complex than I had thought, but the underlying principles are mostly straightforward:
Oil is sprayed into a chamber in a fine mist. The particles (droplets) are pretty small, but you can see them. Then, the droplets are exposed to radiation which will quite literally knock electrons off of the oil drops, leaving them with a net charge (same idea as static electricity).
Next, an electric field is applied and you watch the droplets and see how fast they move (they will move since they have a net charge, since you knocked electrons off). The idea is that you will see droplets move only at certain speeds, because you can only knock whole numbers of electrons away from the drops.
Now suppose you see drops moving at 3 mph, 6 mph, 9 mph, etc. If you watch long enough to conclude that the drops will only move at these speeds (never at 5 mph), you can say, "Hey, if I knock off one electron, then it will go 3 mph, if two get knocked off, then it will go 6 mph, so the effect of one electron of charge is 3 mph!"
Then you can use what you know about the electric field you used, the size of the drops and all that to figure out the charge of that one electron.
This experiment is very hard because the charge of one electron is tiny, and experimental error will not give you perfectly spaced speeds, so you need to observe for a long time to conclude what that smallest possible charge is (Milikan took data for over 2 years). | 14cd8a71-f3ab-426b-92f1-7d5784880407 |
2mayvz | Why is NASA using the Delta IV Heavy instead of building more Saturn V's? | Actually, NASA is redeveloping the Saturn V AS WE SPEAK. [Dynetics has a contract](_URL_0_) to redevelop the Saturn's F1 rocket engine, now reclassified the F1-A, into the new F1-B. They've taken the original schematics, and even disassembled and 3D scanned a few remaining engines from storage. The original F1-A had some +5k parts, either bolted, bonded, or welded together. The new F1-B has < 100. There were some problems we just didn't have the technology in the 60s to solve; for example, the thrust would oscillate at an increasing rate until the test engines would explode. To solve it, they welded damper plates on the inside of the mixer plate and cone. It solved the problem "good enough", but they couldn't figure out why it was happening or why the dampers worked as well as they did. Many parts were bespoke, hand made, because they didn't have the manufacture technology we do now.
EDIT: [Another link](_URL_1_) telling more of the beginning. Somewhere in there is a link to the test fire of an original F1-A fuel pump. It's a 31k ft/lb thrust rocket engine, 55k HORSEPOWER, *just to run the fuel pump*. | 3510f811-9774-4109-931d-9bf9f3378d9f |
29csp8 | How does the FCC choose which words/phrases to censor? | > Comedy Central
The FCC has zero control over content on Comedy Central. They only have control of content for over the air broadcasts (such has CBS,NBC, etc.) NOT cable.
The network's own censors aka "standard's and practices" decide what they want to censor, generally to appease their sponsors/advertisers | eecb8f85-053e-4d19-a36c-93a08aa4dec6 |
6bealt | Does the velocity of light compound on top of the velocity of of our galaxy's movement? | Your mistake is that you are thinking of a light as a particle, while in reality, it acts more like a wave. The ball in your example needs to be accelerated up to a speed relative to your car before it is shot out of your theoretical bowling ball cannon. Light, on the other hand, leaves a flashlight beginning at the speed of light and it doesn't need any distance to "accelerate" to the speed of light. Think instead of the light moving like sound, which also behaves like a wave. The sound of you honking the horn in your car reaches me at the same speed regardless of if you are driving towards me, or away from me.
This sound comparison can bring us a step further. A moving source of sound can display the Doppler Effect. Even though the speed of sound isn't affected, the PITCH of the sound is, when you and the source are moving relative to one another. Think of standing on the sidewalk as an ambulance siren goes flying buy. You'll notice that the siren's pitch sounds higher when driving towards you, but as it flies by and speeds off down the street the pitch suddenly drops lower. The actual pitch the siren is making doesn't change, and is actually the one you hear at the instant when the ambulance is closest to you. If you now imagine driving in a car next to the ambulance at the same speed, the pitch of the siren would be constant.
The Doppler Effect occurs because the time it takes each wave of the sound to reach you is affected by how far away it is. As the siren is coming towards you, the waves of sound compress closer towards one another, and you perceive a higher pitch. Since each new soundwave is being produced closer to you, it will arrive with slightly less delay than the one before it. When the ambulance is moving away from you, the sound waves are spread out more, and you hear a lower pitch. Since now, each new wave has a longer delay to get to you.
Light does the same thing. As you may know, the further away an object in space is, the faster it is moving away from us. (Hence why we think the Universe is expanding.) Light undergoes the same "pitch shift" in its waves based on this relative motion, except the "pitch" of light waves is really the color. In this case, we refer to the effect we see as "redshift" since the frequency of a light is moved lower based on how fast its source is moving away from us (red being the lowest wavelength color we see.) (we don't see this as often in the night sky, but a star racing towards us would undergo blueshift.) There are stars that you could maybe see with the naked eye beyond the ones we see in the night sky, but the light they produce is turned infrared because they are moving too quickly away from us.
Something I also just learned from google that I thought of writing this: UV light can be redshifted down into the visible spectrum for you to see! | 25a6ed97-9e38-45f9-89ea-128e8e0f3a68 |
42pk36 | Why is the common cold worse in the morning and at night but usually milder during the day? | There are a couple reasons:
1. Gravity- When you're standing during the day gravity is pulling the mucus down and it gets cleared away by things like coughing. At night, you're lying down more and gravity causes mucus to pool towards the back of our throats and it's harder to get rid of that way. We then wake up with that pooled mucus still clogging our nose and increasing congestion.
2. Awareness- During the day we are thinking about work and school and family and friends and how the medicine we just took should help us. We have things to take our mind off of our cold. We have less distractions at night and the morning so it feels like the cold is getting worse.
3. Our immune system- The inflammatory response in our immune system changes at night, which causes congestion and headaches to get worse.
So it's mix of physical things like gravity pooling our mucus and our immune system having different functions at night, but it's also a mental thing as we are constantly thinking about how our cold is getting worse. | 0e024d6f-c793-41b5-98b7-32bcd0fdfef5 |
2rfnai | What is the difference between Drive, D2, and D3 in a car and how should they each be used? | Gears on a car are tricky. The power of the engine is the same regardless of what gear you are in, the difference is power vs speed. Think of a bicycle. At one far end of the spectrum there's low gear where you peddle and peddle but never really go anywhere. It's mostly used for going up hills. Then there's high gear, where it's very hard to peddle but the bike can go super fast if it's already moving. It's the same in a car.
Low gears are for when you are starting to move. As you have more and more momentum the car is no longer so difficult to get moving so you want to use more of your engine to make the car go faster. So you shift into a higher gear.
An automatic transmission does that for you. But it makes some assumptions and those additional setting are for when the assumptions are not true.
When you tow a trailer the weight of your car is well outside the normal range. An automatic transmission does not know this and will select the wrong gear as a result. So you put it in D3, this tells the transmission not to shift into 4th because the car is to heavy for 4th to ever be useful.
D2 limits the car to second gear. Most commonly this is used when the car is stuck (so the wheels spin fast but the car is not moving). It's also used in winter climates to slow down (it's easier to maintain control of the car when engine breaking vs using the breaks).
Most people can drive an automatic for the entire life of the car and never use D2 or D3, and some newer cars don't even have them. | b2b8ff6d-e6af-482d-8b39-63111e1c2a2c |
3hnzy0 | What is the Hillary email scandal and what is taking the investigation so long? | The Secretary of State is an employee of the US Government. All US Government employees must follow specific records retention rules, for historians and to keep their official actions "on the record". The training for employees is clear, but Ms. Clinton, a lawyer, decided not to follow it. She knew that folks who were still mad at her from her time as First Lady would want to dig up dirt and embarrass her, thereby embarrassing the US. (She was probably right.) She decided that if she ran her own email server, where she alone had total control of data retention, she could delete anything that in hindsight turned out to be embarrassing. This would protect her political career, and also protect the US (arguably the job of the Secretary of State). When Congress threatened to hold hearings and ordered her to preserve all records, she and her lawyer went through all the email on the server and decided what was important "government records" and what was "personal". They then turned the records over to the Dept of State and "erased" the server, in hopes of destroying all the evidence. The FBI employs smart people to do data forensics, and perhaps they can "undelete" the emails not turned over to the Dept of State. Should that happen and should there be government business in the deleted emails, then Ms. Clinton will be in some trouble. Those are **really big IFs**. Suppression of evidence under subpoena from Congress is a federal crime, and you can go to jail. Her lawyer, and the IT guy, are also potential criminals; but that's much less likely. All in all, the whole thing is not that likely to be a crime, but the optics look bad for someone running for President. | da804df6-b37e-40d6-b4fe-0b52abe2f768 |
37m9wh | In American football the ball is held in a players' hand for most of the game, then why is it called football? | All the codes of football - American, association (soccer), Australian, rugby, Gaelic - descend from the same sport (called football). Well, it wasn't really a single sport, it was a game that'd have slightly different rules from town to town, some which allowed people to carry the ball and others that didn't, but the idea was roughly the same: two teams trying to get a ball from one end of a field to the other into a designated area. To make it so that people from different areas could play each other, different codified rules were drawn up in the 19th century, resulting in the various codes, and they've gone through changes since then.
American football is a later development being an offshoot of rugby, which has more kicking, but does involve a lot of carrying. | 76d04599-d1ed-493e-bf0f-c4d0c0fa1dd7 |
8k9ccr | When rock climbers use the hardware to climb and they nail them into the side of the mountain, are they retrievable or lost after use? | There are three main types of hardware used.
**Pitons** are hammered in, and left there. You can't re-use old pitons that you find, because they suck, and may have started to work their way out from freeze-thaw. In any case, almost nobody uses them anymore.
**Bolts** (with hangers) are permanent fixtures. They are re-useable, but they are drilled into the rock.
**"Trad" protection** is temporary, and consists of things that get jammed into cracks in such a way that falling won't pull them out. This includes cams, hexes, nuts, and a couple varieties of specialty hardware.
EDIT: I forgot that pitons are still used in "aid climbing", where one actually puts weight on the gear, rather than using it only to protect against a possible fall. I don't know anybody who does it; I suspect that aid climbing is sufficiently rarified as to fall into the "hardly anyone" category. :-) | ab26d9b3-0f23-401a-9e12-642f0c008848 |
1m3u7n | A Women's Studies degree. (Seriously replies only) | As far as I'm aware it's essentially a specialized history (possibly also political science) degree.
Like many degrees (history in general, political science, art, theater, sociology) there isn't a huge market looking explicitly for it, but simply completing a degree that requires research and writing (like this one and others I mention) is valuable to many organizations which mostly just want smart people they can easily train to do some job.
It's not the best way to get a job, but liberal arts degrees are rarely praised for how easy they are to get jobs with. | 3fecd0e3-4dae-4189-8f37-dfd54c22d81c |
30vg9s | Why do some viruses look like robots? | Are you talking about the ones that look like spiders? The "claws" attach them to the cell and the "head" contains the infectious nucleic acids. The "mouth" injects the infectious material into the cell. | 32c7a436-6bae-47b3-9c4b-c0c461cd1810 |
m3uad | How does water get from its source to coming out of my taps? | Here is how it is done where I'm from.
Pumps pull water from wells around the region, we have about 10 to serve a population of about 18k.
As the water comes out of the wells it is mixed with chlorine to help clean it.
The pressure from these pumps feeds the water to what's called a Lift Station. These lift stations are basically large pumps which pump the water uphill to tanks on higher ground than the rest of the region.
Because some of our wells have arsenic in them the lift stations pump that water to an arsenic treatment plant first. After getting treated for arsenic the water then makes it's way to the tanks.
Once the water is in the tanks gravity takes over. Pipes carry the water downhill to homes and businesses. This is the source of pressure people get when they open their tap. | fd89ff87-474c-42b8-ac61-8aaaee5ccdce |
n5xsd | What is the difference between Stalinism, and Trotsky-ism? | Okay, So this is the story of communism.
**Marxism**
In the beginning there was Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They were German philosophers who were concerned about the plight of the working class man. The wrote books called The Communist Manifesto and Capital where they explained how a few rich people, the bourgeoisie, owned all the factories and mines. They then forced the poor working class people, the proletarians, to work in these places for low wages and exploited that work to make profit.
Marx thought that the profit made should belong to the workers, as they're the ones doing all the work, it's not fair that just because someone happens to be born into a rich land-owning family that they get all the profit of these other people's works.
So Marxism is the theory that there will eventually be a worker's revolution, where the workers will be fed up with being exploited, and take back what is theirs. This will lead to a Socialist society where the workers, as cooperatives, will own the "means of production" (factories, mines etc) and work not for the purposes of gaining Capital, but for satisfying human needs.
Eventually Marxism thinks that this socialist society will transform into a communist society, which is a stateless society were everyone is the same and everything is commonly owned, and freely available to those who need it.
**Marxism–Leninism**
Vladimir Lenin liked Marx's theories but and started considering how they could be applied to Russia, where he was born. He thought that there was no way for communism to come about by gradual reformist means, and thought that their definitely had to be a revolution. So he started considering how such a revolution would actually work in real life, and how it could lead to Marx's worker-controlled society. He had this idea of a "Dictatorship of the proletariat". This would mean that the state would be run by direct democracy via councils called Soviets. These soviets would be made up of representatives of factory workers, etc, and would vote together as basically a parliament.
This dictatorship was supposed to be there to help implement the socialism stage of Marx's theory and eventually it was supposed to basically dissolve as the society moved towards the communist stage.
**Trotskyism**
Leon Trotsky was an important figure in the Russian revolution. He thought that it was impossible to have a single communist country, and it would be necessary to spread revolution around the world. This was called "Permanent revolution". Trotsky was most concerned about what we call "Third World" countries, ie countries who had not yet established an advanced capitalist system. He thought it was important to spread revolution to these countries before capitalism took a foot-hold. He also worried that Russia as an independent communist country wouldn't be able to hold-out against the capitalist forces of the rest of the world combined and he saw Permanent revolution as the only way communism could survive.
**Stalinism**
Joseph Stalin was elected to the position of General Secretary in 1922, at the time this wasn't considered the top spot in the hierarchy of the communist party, however when Lenin died in 1924 Stalin managed to get more and more power and became the effective leader of the communist party. Stalin thought the opposite of Trotsky, he saw that communist revolutions in other European countries such as Germany had failed and he thought the best plan was for Russia to consolidate its position, and become stronger, then they could worry about other countries. He called this "Socialism in One Country". He planned to make Russia stronger through what were called Five Year Plans, which were plans that set about very rapid industrialisation. First he launched "collectivization" which grouped farmers together into large collective farms which was to help improve the efficiency of the farming system. Next he focused on increasing industry, etc.
The high amount of centralization in Stalinism however basically lead to near totalitarianism and a "cult of personality" around Stalin. This lead to various purges of other communist leaders when Stalin wasn't getting what he wanted, and really the whole thing ended unpleasantly. "Stalinism" is basically what alot of Westerns imagine when they think of communism. When Stalin died Nikita Khrushchev issued what was called "Destalinisation" which removed things like the Gualgs (Forced Labour camps) and re-named places such as Stalingrad.
It also should be noted that Trotsky was exiled by Stalin, they were bitter enemies. Trotsky thought Stalin's all-powerful political class had become a sort of bourgeoisie of its own, controlling the workers from above for its own goals. Trotsky wanted to bring the communist party back to its roots as a Workers Collective, where the workers had the power, and weren't bossed around by the all-powerful leadership. | 04dc7927-534f-4b5e-9990-f386e489c6be |
34zc90 | How did white men come to be dominant on earth? | It helps to start by asking, "Why did Eurasians become so dominant on Earth?" Because the history of civilizations in Europe, Mesopotamia, South Asia, and China are very, very similar; even if you were looking at the facts about these four regions in 1700, you might not be certain that the Europeans were going to dominate the world, and you would have to be very clever to predict it in 1400.
Basically, the Eurasian landmass is oriented East-West, at (mostly) temperate latitudes, with a large number of rivers running through floodplains. This meant that any plant or mammal that could be domesticated anywhere in Eurasia could be introduced along an entire band of Eurasia that shared the climate suitable to raising that plant/animal. As a result every river valley in Eurasia quickly had the endowment of domesticated species it needed to support intensive (for the stone age) agriculture, which lead both to a population explosion and to the first civilizations. Specialization and urbanization lead to more advances, which can be shared more and more easily as time goes on, because the expanding agricultural civilizations start to form an unbroken band of settlement from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and soon this band connected up to Chinese civilization via land and sea routes, and expand deeper into Europe. This not only meant that these were very technologically and culturally sophisticated societies, but that they were pretty experienced when it came to trading with one another, fighting one another, converting one another, and infecting one another. This last point is especially important - Eurasians civilizations kept reaching points where high population density and interconnected trading networks caused wave after wave of epidemics, carried by humans, their domestic animals, and rodents, which would spread back and forth across all Eurasia... but then people would start to develop childhood immunities, people would learn (medically, culturally) how to slow the spread, survivors would pass on genetic adaptations, and population would start growing all over again.
The inhabitants of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa didn't have the same advantages. They knocked themselves out trying to domesticate different species, but they didn't spread as well from North to South. The growth of agriculture was slower, the growth of urbanization and specialization were slower, the development of indigenous writing systems was slower, and as a result of a slower progress towards the Eurasian-style developments overall, there was no chain of overlapping literate urban civilizations to spread developments.
So it would be clear that if anyone dominated the Earth, it would be Eurasians. [Edit: I left out a transition here which might be obvious. So, of all the Eurasian civilizations, what would make the Europeans different?] There are three essential arguments as to why this is, which may all be true to different degrees:
1. Most societies in the world, from hunter-gatherer tribes to the oldest of literate, urban civilizations, tend to have a fairly powerful clan structure. For complicated reasons, the Christian church and above all the Western (Roman Catholic) Christian church applied itself aggressively to policies that ended up taking apart this clan structure. Less clan loyalty seems to permit the development of some institutions we consider modern.
2. Before the 20th century and to a large extent even today, *water* was the main thing that held societies together, rather than dividing them. Moving goods overland is *incredibly, incredibly expensive*, before modern roads, rail-roads, and the use of fossil fuels in transport. The number of rivers, the amount of coastline, and the short distances involved in some important routes put Europe in a unique position.
3. Finally, and possibly most importantly, was European disunity. People disagree about why, but for whatever reason, Europe has never been under the military/political control over a single political entity for more than a year or so at a time since civilization started to spread beyond the Mediterranean basin. This had an enormous consequence: no sovereign in Europe had a veto over any sort of ideology, social policy, or other project. This wasn't the case, for example, in China: the Chinese had the technology and the resources to send fleets to the Americas in the fifteenth century, but they intentionally abandoned the maritime exploration project because it was a project controlled by one court faction that the rival faction desired to undermine and discredit as soon as they gained power. In Europe, on the other hand, Columbus was dismissed by multiple heads of state before finally, the Spanish decided to take a gamble on his expedition. Other European explorers did the same thing (moving from state to state until they found someone who was interested), as did the metaphorical explorers of the intellectual world, like Giordano Bruno, Luther, Descartes, and so on.
(A final, and older, theory was that the form of European feudalism was somehow uniquely advantageous to the growth of the industrial revolution. Others don't think feudalism had direct economic effects, but do think it was important either to the long-term political disunity of Europe, or to the breakdown of the clan system. But this is long enough already.)
So the geographic details of the Eurasian continent meant that Eurasian civilizations started developing sooner and more rapidly, and their interconnection allowed them to develop all the attributes of civilization much more quickly by communicating with one another. It was bound to be a Eurasian culture, if it were anyone. For unclear reasons (but I have provided some likely factors above) the Europeans hit multiple stages first - they arrived in the Americas, millions of indigenous people died of Eurasian diseases they had never experienced, they began regular trading missions across the Atlantic and around the two capes, and so on and so forth. Once the Europeans had a lead in empire-building and various forms of intellectual life, the advantages started compounding over time. | 5cebbded-dd38-4412-94f0-4ed9076212c4 |
705bma | How do peepholes work? | So basically the peephole is fitted with a special type of convex lens, some call it a fish hook lens that takes a wide view on one side and condenses it. By nature a lens takes light rays and creates a fake image or real image depending on distance and other factors. The reason you are able to see clearly is because the light rays are actually intersecting on your side whereas for the guy on the outside, they aren't so the result is a distorted and blurry image. | f2090402-d00e-4330-bc5e-ecd74452c707 |
1jp6cz | On some electronic devices, it will say something like "16GB of internal, expandable to 32GB" with a microSD card. Why the cap? | It's likely because they didn't bother writing the software to index to that much memory.
Meaning, on any given operating system it takes some thought as to how to store things in memory and get them back our again. It's a bit more complicated than just putting someone in a bin and getting it back out.
It's likely that they simply didn't bother writing the software to use more than 32GB | 24f8a85b-4bea-4815-a083-2224debe026a |
2hwc0c | Why is CNN perceived as a bad network? | CNN has a 24-hour news channel, and in order to get the ratings necessary to justify its existence, it has to do more than just repeat major headlines every ten minutes. So they try to find whatever they can to fill time and entice people to tune in multiple times a day for more than just a few minutes. What this means, though, is that they often have to stretch to find enough "news" to fill their time, and then their anchors have to talk about it, even if it's completely boring, uninteresting, and ridiculous. And they do this so much that it starts becoming habit to just blurt out stuff about a news story because they're afraid of having nothing to say and having dead-air. So despite the fact CNN has some good news anchors and often does a decent job of reporting, there are too many instances of gaffes, mistakes, and ridiculousness for people to take the whole network seriously. And it gives comedy shows enough material to make great jokes at their expense. | 26c5e937-074a-4f35-86c7-31abbff08a81 |
4ojkl0 | Why do voices and some instruments vibrato? | Why?
Vibrato adds a lot of warmth to a musical note. By very slightly fluctuating your pitch, you are able to include more audio frequencies than just the single note's frequency by itself. So, the note you're projecting sounds a lot louder, warmer, fuller, etc.
Also, vibrato is a clever way for many singers to slightly "auto-correct" their pitch. If you're slightly flat or sharp at the beginning of a longer note, you can use vibrato to sort of "shimmy" your voice into the right pitch before anyone really notices.
Some people just have a great natural vibrato in their singing voice. Maybe they learned it as a kid by imitating other singers and unknowingly practiced it, but generally, it's a skill that's taught just like any other aspect of playing an instrument.
With most musical instruments, they start teaching vibrato techniques as an intermediate-level skill. | c266856d-ca14-42a2-a78e-6846346d7363 |
1toetj | The Legend Of Zelda | So basically, three goddesses. Din, the Goddess of Power, Nayru, the Goddess of Wisdom, and Farore, the Goddess of Courage. These are the three sacred goddesses who created the land known as Hyrule (and Lorule, technically.) So these goddesses, after creating Hyrule, the Godesses left behind a physical manifestation of themselves, known as the **Triforce**. Each piece, or triangle, in the Triangle represents one Goddess. Therefore, one triangle represents Courage, (Farore), another represents Wisdom, (Nayru), and finally Power. (Din.) Whoever touches the Sacred Triforce will have one wish granted to them. **However.** In order to make a valid wish onto the Sacred Triforce, one must contain an equal balance of Power, Wisdom, and Courage. If not, the pieces of the Sacred Triforce will split, and the piece which best represents the person who made the wish, will be the only piece they posses. When this happens, the other two pieces will flock to the people that best represent them. So what happened in the game, is that Ganon (who didn't posses an equal balance of Power, Wisdom, and Courage) attempted to make a wish on the Sacred Triforce. The Triforce split, and since Power mostly represents Ganondorf, the triforce of Power was imprinted on his hand. So the Triforces of Wisdom and Courage were gone. The Triforce of Wisdom typically belongs to Zelda, and the Triforce of Courage typically belongs to Link. So that's why in Ocarina of Time they made such a big fuss over the Triforces imprinted on their hands.
Whew, sorry for the long explanation. If I missed anything just tell me! | 0b872c16-c4b9-433d-b488-e13151cd5707 |
1t8bnz | Why does a cold feel worse in the morning when you wake up? | Mucus pooling in your head. Once you're upright it will start to drain out and your symptoms will diminish. Try sleeping on an incline (e.g. using a husband pillow) and it may mitigate some of the morning effect. | 2939e883-e5f5-4673-8d6e-03ac14bb3259 |
7kndo6 | Why does mail polish dry quicker on false nails as opposed to natural nails? | Nail polish (as well as many paints) dry by the solvent evaporating. The surface should not affect this drying time. I bet if you did a test where you painted a fake and real nail simultaneously you'd find they dried at the same time. | a0d3c2a5-f93e-4b7f-9f2f-b12c9fa5a7a2 |
52w69h | how is "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." A correct sentence? | First, it's "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." The capitals are important.
Buffalo has three meanings in American English; the adjunct noun "Buffalo" is the city in New York, the noun "buffalo" is the plural and singular name of the American bison, and the verb "buffalo" means "to outwit or confuse".
The sentence itself uses some trickery in order to remain grammatically correct. It uses two clauses in grammar, the reduced relative clause and the restrictive clause, that allow it to go without commas or joining words.
The sentence means that the Buffalo buffalo (the bison in the city of Buffalo, New York) are intimidating other bison in their city through the use of bullying, and are in turn being bullied back.
A more accurate sentence might be; "Buffalo buffalo, that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo." Or "Bison from the city, that bully bison from the city, are being bullied by Bison in the city." | e0e198ba-8012-430a-81d1-5991f1045fbc |
4zhy9w | How to calculate how high will the sea level rise because of global warming... | The Earth is a geoid, not a sphere. Bringing this up means I am telling you that the math is really beyond ELI5. Another way to say it is that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, fat at the middle.
The calculation will involve the expansion of the sea water in the oceans as the temperature rises. This is part of the volume of the oceans which fill the low places of the Earth. Ocean depth ranges from miles deep at the trenches to zero at the beach. All of this water will expand with rising temperatures.
It is simpler to look at the geological record, the old bathtub rings. The ocean has been higher before but never covering Mt. Everest. Yes Mt. Everest is old seabed. But that is another story. There is a range of sea levels depending on how much ice is frozen at the poles. The sea level will never rise above that achieved when all the polar ice is melted. This has happened in the past. | d8c5000b-be35-4fcf-ad4e-cfdb8e6fbf37 |
jht04 | The Sects of Different Religions | There are people who think god is the sun in the morning. They don't play with people who think god is the moon at night. | ec73a8da-c225-4383-bb78-49edd9b1f842 |
7clg1q | How do Nyquil and other sleep aids work? | NyQuil is not a sleep aid. ZzzQuil is a sleep aid, while Nyquil is intended to reduce pain, fever, cough, and histamine response.
NyQuil does have a side effect of drowsiness due to the action of diphenhydramine that binds to the histamine H1 receptor in the brain and acts as an inverse agonist. This means it binds to the receptor but does the opposite thing. The doxylamine in ZzzQuil is also an antihistamine which acts on the H1 receptor.
Do not take NyQuil just for the sedative effects, there is a bunch of other stuff in it that you shouldn't be taking just because you want to feel sleepy. | 8f59f7e1-d51a-4b3f-8293-b2a5dabcbf67 |
5by72n | Why is the 2 party system so dominant in US politics? Will it change in the foreseeable future? | The two party outcome is pretty much unavoidable in a "first past the post" system, and pretty much unavoidable when you have a small number of seats being contested (in this case, 1).
CGP Grey to the rescue:
_URL_0_ | c7964a0b-ad22-4854-9043-e1a573cb4623 |
1xv835 | How exactly does a capacitor work? | A capacitor is very simple. It is 2 conductive plates, with an insulator between them. If you push electrons onto one plate, they will repel electrons from the other. But as electrons have moved on to one plate, that plate will have a negative charge. As electrons have been removed from the other, that will have a negative charge. This means that the device can store electric charge.
So, when you connect it across a voltage that is changing, that charge will flow in to the capacitor as the voltage rises, and back out again as it falls. This creates a smoothing effect. Another similar use is 'decoupling'. Digital circuits use bursts of current. By placing a capacitor right beside the power connections to a chip, that capacitor provides those bursts, and is steadily recharged from the devices power supply.
You can also use them for timing. You connect the capacitor to a supply, through a resistor. The resistor allows current to flow into the capacitor slowly, charging it up. You can then measure that voltage, and do something when it reaches a certain voltage. | b24dcf14-19ff-443e-8d95-96ad9715a2eb |
4xbwx5 | Why is gamma radiation (or, all type of radiation) so dangerous to living things? | This might be a bit long-winded but bear with me, the first part is just to provide some background:
There are basically 3 types of radiation that people are commonly exposed to, they are called alpha, beta and gamma/XRay (these technically aren't the same, they consist of the same particles but are spit out from different parts of the radioactive atom, we'll consider them together for this though). They differ based on what particles they consist of, and this helps us determine how much energy they have. If you're interested in the details, alpha radiation consists of particles containing 2 neutrons and 2 protons (basically a helium nucleus without electrons), beta radiation most commonly consists of electron particles (though it can also be positrons - a discussion for another time) and gamma radiation/x-ray is made up of electromagnetic waves (photons) and is most commonly the highest energy type - which is what makes it more dangerous than the others. (As a side note, there are other types of radiation, i/e/ neutron radiation which is basically just neutrons flying around, but you wouldn't commonly be exposed to that unless you like hanging around leaky nuclear reactors).
The reason the radiation is dangerous to humans is because all three types stated above are classified as "ionizing radiation". That means that when these particles hit other particles they do so with enough energy that they can basically knock off electrons and change those particles from neutral atoms/molecules into ions/charged molecules. This can be a big problem in the human body for a couple of reasons. First of all, changing the charge of a molecule can change the way it behaves as well as change what its able to bind to. For example, if you hit a strand of DNA you could make it so that the DNA breaks or folds in weird directions because the atoms that make it up can no longer bind together in the same way.
The second, and probably more important reason, is that when ionizing radiation hits water it can create a particle called a hydroxyl radical which is basically an oxygen atom bound to a hydrogen atom with one less electron than its supposed to have. These particles are EXTREMELY reactive, and they actually react in ways that create a chain reaction causing more of these radicals, and other radicals that all fall into the category called **reactive oxygen species** to form. When these reactive oxygen species come in contact with other molecules, like those in DNA, they wreak absolute havoc and can cause those molecules to break down or change structure. Unfortunately for us, or rather people who come into contact with lots of radiation, humans are about ~70% water. This means that theres a whole lot of water for that radiation to hit and change from that nice neutral compound that we require to live into evil greedy radicals that will break everything in sight. The body has some protective mechanisms in place to help neutralize small amounts of reactive oxygen species before they cause too much damage, which is why small amounts of radiation are normally tolerable. However, the DNA damage caused by radical formation and reactions after exposure to higher than recommended amounts of radiation are the most likely cause of radiation-induced cancer.
Sorry for the long response but I hope that answers your question! | 2ca9f8ff-d1aa-4186-a6a5-4fd6a8ae2ec3 |
6cb8wj | Why do all bubbles eventually burst? | All other potential reasons aside:
Evaporation and surface tension will get any bubble that survives the other effects. A bubble is a very thin layer of liquid, and holds its shape with surface tension.
When you blow a bubble and it pops off the stick, all the bubble molecules are bound to each other. Each molecule pulls on its neighbors, and their neighbors pull on their neighbors, so on. Eventually everything's just holding itself in place by little tiny pulling.
Now, once you break even one of those bonds, it all falls apart.
As the liquid bubble just floats around, it's getting a lot of heat, and air flow, passing over its surface. This slowly evaporates the liquid, putting more and more strain on the bonds. Eventually they snap. The same happens in the cold, though that's because the cold begins to freeze the liquid and break the bond. | 1dd07433-78ee-4f4e-a1c3-e1314e33492d |
66imgn | Why/when did we start calling Emoticons Emojis? | They're actually different!
Emoticons are ~technically~ just these: :) :( < 3 etc. Made **just** with punctuation symbols. Some software **may** convert those symbols into pictures...but there is no defined standard. < 3 might become a heart, it might stay a less than three.
Emojis have a defined standard in Unicode (the big rulebook of how computer treat and keep track of text). So if your computer supports full unicode, and it gets told to show character number U+1F618, it should show a smoochy emoji face. | b3c52041-6384-43e9-b8e2-fd2102c82c0c |
2dupvx | Why can't I run fast in my dreams? | It's a very common thing for people to experience in their dreams, and we don't really know why (dreams are not very well understood at all).
One possible explanation I've read before, however, is that your sense of how fast you are moving is dependent upon sensory input which your brain is not receiving (for example, seeing objects "moving" past your vision at an increased speed).
When you're in REM sleep (the periods of sleep associated with dreaming which also features the most frantic activity in the brain), parts of your brain responsible for receiving sensory information picks up on the chaotic subconscious "noise" going on elsewhere. The brain then has to interpret that information into something that makes sense to your conscious self.
So say your brain gets phony information that says your muscles are moving in a manner consistent with running, so that's what you experience in "conscious" reality of the dream. However you aren't getting other information associated with running (your breathing and heart rate hasn't increased, you don't feel the ground beneath you, your vision isn't seeing things moving relative to you at an increased rate etc, which is all consistent with being still or slow). So the brain translates this as "I'm running, but also still", which is what you experience. | dd249af9-3262-4272-8d07-1ca473eac68e |
5rugfo | Why do car batteries last a long time, but go flat if you leave the lights on over night? | It's a rechargeable battery. When the engine is running, the alternator is able to use the power from the gasoline engine to recharge the battery. If the engine if off, the alternator is off, and the battery drains without being recharged. | 62c13467-22a0-4609-9387-1c66afd0a843 |
1lb0ex | Why do professional fighters "hug"? Is that any kind of defense? Does that have something to do with any rule? | I think you're referring to the clinch. In most forms of karate, the clinch is a position from which you perform a lot of throws or strikes (such as knees to the head, or elbows to the head). In boxing, it is a defensive move to make sure that you do not get an uppercut or hook to the face. | 5615acb9-5a47-48bc-9a2f-9da71771cc80 |
46i0ml | Why do we blink in response to loud sounds we anticipate? | A loud, sudden noise would indicate something has fallen, exploded, or occurred that could possibly cause you harm, many of times from shards or debris. Your eyes are delicate, and that's your body's response to keeping your eyesight functioning as well as possible - which was even more essential to surviving and thriving in earlier humans. | c831c5b9-bd96-431f-8672-83ee1532e557 |
1lm3u7 | How do physicists know that time exists? | Thought experiment: if suddenly everything in the universe stopped moving, no atoms smashing into each other, no synaptic exchange in our minds -- would time still be moving?
Probably not. Time is just a way to measure change. A label for motion. | dc4c9158-f5b1-41cb-81f2-382e6a1a3251 |
6l1rqf | What make heart muscles different from leg muscles, et al. so that they never get fatigued? | Practice. Repetition. The heart muscles are accustomed to their regular activity -- they've been doing that all their life, and although it doesn't seem like much of a rest to us, they get a bit of rest between each and every beat.
Heart muscles do fatigue when they're asked to do more than normal. When your heart rate increases for some time, or when your blood pressure increases for some time... this is your heart working harder than normal, and it will fatigue.
Your leg muscles just aren't used to the kind of regular work that the heart muscles do. | 69175732-b1cf-4455-9381-1d865488f868 |
4e7sl6 | Why is a repetitive motion, such as drumming a finger on the table, annoying for others but not for ourselves? | Those type of actions are about soothing or entertaining yourself. You get positive feedback from the noise or motion. Other people just get an annoying click, tap, or track suit rustling as you bounce your leg up and down in 3rd period noise. Great for you as it works out your nerves, not for others because it's just a noise or motion. | bada5b33-d9a4-43e9-b4a1-1a8cc7a94736 |
48omm2 | Why do people like to lean backwards in a chair to just before the point of tipping over? | When you lean back in your chair you change your center of gravity. At the point just before falling forwards or backwards you are perfectly balanced over the central part of your body. This makes us feel centered, balanced, and grounded. So ultimately we are chasing the feeling of being stable when we'll most likely end up flat on our backs. | 929bdbfa-5bc0-4f63-a7c6-70c37b0ed1cd |
1rhz0o | Why is the new World Central Airport Dubai expected to be the world's busiest airport? How and why does Emirates need 150 Airbus A380s? How and why are these Middle Eastern airlines so much more massive than Chinese airlines? | Location, location, location.
Dubai is more or less between the most populous parts of Europe and Asia. It's also located in a good spot on the Persian Gulf, a tremendously busy area for shipping. In addition, it's considered to be one of the more stable countries in the region, and the government is *extremely* committed to attracting foreign investment.
The DWC is situated in a nearly perfect spot to take advantage of accelerating business in the developing world. The government has made massive investments in infrastructure, including the airport and container port, in the hopes that if they build it, shipping will come. And it seems to be coming.
Source: worked for a freight forwarder that flew a lot of cargo through DWC and DXB. | 12059c03-7985-4b11-8dea-c520f5c79bd3 |
jnipe | According to my understanding, at some point in the future (because of the rate of expansion of the universe), the earth and many other planets will lose the ability to "detect" the big bang.... | I think what you may be referring to is the continual red shifting of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Before I go any further an honest question. Should I explain this? or *explain it like you're five*, because this isn't really the kind of question a five year old asks. | 338060a5-4456-46b6-a2a6-456faf46126d |
3dh8ku | Why did US Congress pass a law to ensure all helium in the US National Helium Reserve is sold by 2015? What benefit does this have? | In 1995 We had gathered a stockpile of over 1 billion cubic meters but had also racked up a debt of $1.4 billion doing so. The law was not to sell off all stockpiles, it was to start selling off the stockpile until that debt was covered. It was all part of a plan to privatize the harvesting of helium and get the control of it out of government hands. | 642eab1f-ae57-4c75-af7a-384307f1cce9 |
jdu0e | How does hacking work? | There are countless different techniques used for hacking, so there's no way to explain everything, but I can try one. One of the most common techniques used in hacking is called a buffer overflow, which exploits a poorly-written piece of software by telling it to alter parts of the computer's memory in ways that it shouldn't.
Let's try an analogy.
Suppose you have a whiteboard. The whiteboard gets used for two separate things. The left half of the whiteboard is a list of names of race cars, and the right half of the whiteboard is a shopping list. Unfortunately, the person in charge of the whiteboard is a little slow to learn and forgets to keep these separate...
Suppose the whiteboard maintainer also has a prankster friend, who tells him that a new race car just came out called the "ULTRA-MEGA A-2000 FRX DEATH RAY". This is a very long name for a race car, much longer than the maintainer person is used to having to write, but they try anyway. As they are writing the name on the board, they run out of room at "ULTRA-MEGA A-2000 FRX", hitting the border between the race car space and the grocery list. But remember, this person is bad at following the rules, and they end up writing "DEATH RAY" on the right-hand side of the whiteboard, right underneath the shopping list.
Later on, someone else in charge of actually buying the groceries mistakenly buys a death ray, not knowing any better because it was on their shopping list.
The prankster friend is the hacker, the person using the whiteboard is the poorly-written software, the whiteboard itself is the computer's RAM (memory), and the person buying groceries is the computer's processor. | bc666c03-af42-42ca-9efb-8c0d676d1a1e |
60g86e | the concept of the dark web. I understand that you need certain software etc, but is it like the regular net? Do you just type in wed adresses, and is there a dark google or something? [Other] | The dark web refers to anything that can not be gotten to by any common web search engine. This includes a lot of networks that is not connected to the regular Internet such as banking networks, government networks, medical networks, military networks, private home networks, etc. There is also a lot of big sites with not much interesting in them that the search engines do not bother indexing. There are tons of wikipedia clones out there that is just skipped by the search indexers. And what about _URL_0_ with its huge data storage that itself contain more data then is available on the rest of the "white" web? And then there is private storage hosting services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Everything is available on the Internet but not in a public fashion. This also include your private facebook images and your reddit DM messages. So the dark web is huge and contains a lot of things that is not easily available for a good reason.
There is some sites that are hidden to avoid prosecution as their content would be illegal. Of course the common web search engines do not index these. One popular way to hide your identity is Tor Onion Router which is a project to help people stay anonymous online which is helping oppressed people around the world including in China, Libya and Russia. Of course they can not distinguish between people using the service for planning demonstrations against their oppressive governments and people who want to score some weed or even child prostitution. If you have a web site hosted on Tor you get a randomly chosen web address in the .onion domain. There is no search engine for it and it only composes a tiny portion of the dark web but this is where you usually find those websites that the creators do not want you to find. | 268f9364-9dbf-488a-8a88-a7152ec2aee2 |
6jbk7w | If U.S. Currency isn't backed by anything, how does it hold any value? | because we all agree it has value.
at this point, no currency is backed by anything. not a single currency still in use that is backed by gold or anything tangible. They exist on the credibility of their govt and society. Its convenient to have an intangible unit of trade, and as long as you have critical mass of people that agree to a common unit, it works. | 6bb7c6f9-3082-4ce6-bcae-bd5295bc4b21 |
1rdkdp | why do my eyes appear to 'change color' depending on my mood? | Eye color does not change based on mood. The way the eye reflects light off of the iris does though. Although it is somewhat possible over time based on light activating pigments in your eye, short and quick changes in color (like mood) is usually just an illusion. | 40deaa11-06aa-4bca-9194-4115d4b1ccac |
3kolei | Why do objects, like my couch or a coin, feel bigger than they look if my eyes are closed? | Your hands are not 'tricked' by distance, like your eyes.
On top of that, your field of view tricks your mind into processing an object within an entire scene - a couch is viewed in the living room - which is larger. | c70bbac6-fd37-47be-aec2-d6868ccaef2c |
1dr1dn | Why is medical knowledge not part of the standard educational curriculum? | Next you will want to teach them about budgets, savings, diets, exercise and sex. It is hard enough to get them to learn the basics like greek gods, cursive and algebra I am not sure we can squeeze in your pet projects. Sorry. | 762a8765-9a19-42b5-b0d1-2c5cb4a516f1 |
10pp0x | The Mormon religion | Basically, the Mormon (or LDS faith) believes that God is our Heavenly Father and he sent us to earth to receive physical bodies and gain experiences. Throughout history, God has sent prophets to his children to teach them his will (people like Abraham, Moses, and Noah) and that sometimes people are willfully disobedient and God will take his prophets from the earth. But that God will always restore his gospel to the earth, even after times of apostasy, when no one has God's authority to speak for him.
Mormons believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, sent to earth to perform the atonement and save mankind from their sins. Christ organized his church while on the earth by calling twelve apostles and making Peter the new prophet after Christ died. After Christ's death, Peter and the apostles continued to spread Christ's teachings, but once again, God took his prophet from the earth and although Christianity flourished, it lacked God's true authority, which was never passed down from Peter.
And then in upstate New York in the 1800s, a young boy named Joseph Smith was confused about all of the different christian churches that existed, wondering which was the correct or "true" church. This lead him to pray to God, and he claimed that God and Jesus appeared to him in a vision. Joseph Smith went on (through the inspiration of God) to find and translate an ancient record, the translation is known as the Book of Mormon and covers the history of ancient Israelites that sailed to the Americas and founded nations here.
Joseph Smith was called by God to be his new prophet and organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, dubbed the Mormons, because of the Book of Mormon. After Joseph Smith was killed, a new prophet was called, and a line of "legitimate" prophets continues today with the current LDS prophet Thomas S. Monson.
Because the LDS church has always been headed by a living prophet, the LDS church claims legitimacy as God's "true" church, claiming authority to receive revelations from God and act in his name.
There's obviously a lot more to it, but this is ELI5. You can find out a lot more from the LDS point of view at _URL_0_ and I'm sure that there'll be some more negative (though no less valid) views posted shortly.
But I tried my best to give you an ELI5 explanation as described from the viewpoint of the Mormons. Seriously, this is the sort of thing that a 5-year-old would be taught.
*edited for clarity. | bcadd9bb-b6a5-4a42-98b9-ae90e4750276 |
1phvvy | Orcs, goblins and Uruk-Hai. What are the differences? | An interesting question with a complex, if not interesting answer.
Orcs were created by Melkor who was himself a sort of god. It is thought that they were created through the capture, torture, and eventual breaking of Elves which resulted in the Orc. Another theory is that Melkor decided to create a race himself in resemblance or in mockery of the Elves.
Goblins are in fact Orcs. The Hobbit called the Orcs in the story Goblins, but they are one and the same. In The Lord of the Rings, Goblins can be seen as a race of Orc that is smaller, more slender, and which live in caves. So I suppose you can think of a Goblin as an evolution to live in a cave-like environment.
Uruk-Hai are quite different from their cousins. One theory is that Uruks are a crossbreed between Orcs and Humans. As a result they have the mind and cunning of man with the strength and longevity of the Orc. Now the interesting bit about the Uruk is that there are two species. There is the Mordor variety and those from Isengard. The Uruk from Mordor were not immune to the sun (much like orcs) and are more slouched. Those from Isengard stood tall and broad, were extremely strong, almost fearless, and resistant to the sunlight.
Hope this helps! | 3552f2d2-dfed-49dd-9195-30fe06c624ae |
1ek7cn | Why do porn sites/tubes have to only have 18+ girls, when in many US states and Europe the age of consent is 16 or 17? | Pornography or prostitution is usually considered a more radical life choice than simply having sex and they want people to be more mature before making such a choice. Therefore it's usually 18 for both regardless of age of consent. | e101fee8-dcb1-4633-83d2-3f310476cf50 |
2qou7d | How were the pigeons that carried messages in the old days trained? How did they know where to go to deliver the message? | You raise the birds at the destination. You have a roost for them, let them fly for exercise, etc. Then you carry them to the place you want to send messages from. When you let them go, they fly back to their roost. | 099addd9-a32c-4e81-988a-c77199b33fc6 |
6fmcf3 | I just got checked by a nurse practitioner and I looked up their schooling. Most of their programs are only 2 years online degree, how are they allowed to practice independently with so little schooling? | You must be looking up the wrong info. A nurse practitioner must first earn their registered nursing (RN) license and have a 4-year bachelor's degree in Nursing. Then they must earn a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN). Then they have to pass their certification exam. It's possible that there are accelerated 2-year programs to earn your master's degree though. | 8d61786c-b4af-417c-bd23-b559864c35f4 |
zov1e | Our knowledge about atoms | Tons of complex experiments. It started of with Rutherfords gold-foil experiment that revealed that atoms are largely empty space, by shooting helium nuclei to a gold foil and measuring how they bounce of. Then Bohr was able to show how it comes that each element has specific spectral lines when heated up enough. The explanation was that you had a couple of electron shells. This was later refined by further observation, showing it was all a little bit more complex.
De Broglie showed with experiments that matter is at the same time wave and particle, then Schrödinger did something called the Schrödinger equation which then lead to the orbital theory.
A device called mass spectrometer was build and with that you are able to measure the mass of nuclei by basically measuring inertia. Interestingly enough, it was found that the mass of nuclei is a whole number multiple of the hydrogen nuclei. Rutherford therefore said it was possible that nuclei are made up out of smaller particles, called neutrons and protons.
Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn later discovered nuclear fission which confirmed Rutherfords idea. Even later, with better equipment and higher energies, it was discovered that protons and neutrons are made up out of smaller things called quarks. | 495c4b38-72df-40f3-a01c-8ba132909141 |
2wa0dz | Why is the theory of relativity so famous in pop culture? Why do so many people (of nearly all ages) know about it? | General relativity, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalency are truly revolutionary ideas. We're talking more revolutionary to our understanding of what the universe is than saying "what if we pre-sliced the bread?" was to consumerism. Essentially, Einstein took all of classical physics with time, matter, and spatial dependencies and turned it upside down. Light is both a wave and a particle, time runs at different speeds and space is different sizes depending on your reference frame, mass and energy are identical, so are gravity and acceleration - at face value, these statements are nuts with what we could observe of the universe at the time. And yet, he stated that they were true through thought experiments and mathematics, and as they became possible they were confirmed through astounding physical experiments.
E=mc2 is simply symbolic in popular culture of this scientific revolution, even if the vast majority of people don't truly understand its implications, derivations and paradigm-shifting novelty at the time it was first written down. | e85d420b-8af6-4f4c-981d-ae9477b423ea |
1osgmy | Blackjack. No seriously, as if you were teaching your five year old child to play, from scratch. | You already have the basic rule: Closest to 21 without going over wins.
Cards are worth their value, face cards are worth 10, the Ace is worth 11 or 1, whichever gets the player closer to 21 without going over.
Because there are a lot of cards valued at 10 in the deck, a lot of the betting and hitting is based on the assumption that the card you're getting will be worth 10.
Hitting: When you say "Hit me," it means you want another card. Normally you can take as many as you want as long as you don't go over 21.
Stay: If you say "I'll stay," that means you're done taking cards.
Bust: Busting is when you go over 21.
Push: If your score ties the dealers score. You get your bet back.
Black Jack: When you hit 21 with the two cards you're dealt at the beginning. This is different than hitting 21 by taking extra cards because you automatically win, regardless of what the dealer gets. Many tables also pay out extra for a black jack.
Insurance: If the dealer's card shows an Ace, you can make an additional bet that the dealer has a black jack. If you're right, you get your bet back like a push. This bet is normally considered a sucker's bet.
Doubling Down: Normally you can only make one single bet right before the cards are dealt. However, after you get your first two cards you can do something called "Doubling Down." This means that you're going to double your bet, and you're going to take one more card. Most people will only double down if their cards add up to 10 or 11, because the chance of getting a 10 is high which would put you at 20 or 21.
Splitting: In addition to Doubling Down, you have the option to split your two cards into two new hands and place a second bet for the new hand. For example, if you get two Aces, those add up to 12. This is not a particularly strong hand because if you take another card, it will probably be a 10 and you'll bust with 22. Instead, you can split. Now you have two separate hands, each with their own bet. You can hit for each hand and hope you pull a 21 for both.
Those are all of the rules I can remember at the moment. Casinos use multiple decks because it makes it harder to count cards. Card counting is when you keep track of how many face cards and how many non-face cards have been used. This gives you an idea of which cards are left in the deck and helps you determine which bets you should make. | bff92c0e-3fc8-46c5-aa5c-c71eef051da9 |
8li6ew | In bright light, why is it easier to shut off one eye and have the other wide open? | I'm not sure. Used to work in visual neuroscience, and this is my best guess. I'd love if someone has a definite answer though!
I think the main culprit is visual glare. Light travels in straight lines, but you get glare when light is scattered in a disorganised pattern \(usually strong light, like car headlights in rain\).
Your brain has to process everything you see, and its less work if you can see everything clearly. If you have to perceive an indistinct shape, your higher visual processing areas have to work harder. Glare from bright light will make it harder to perceive things around you.
So what I think might be going on is that glare \(which again is disorganised, scattered light\) means that you're perceiving a different pattern of scattered light from each eye. Your brain has to interpret and combine both images, which is a lot of work \(this is normally easy because they're usually the same\). Shutting off one eye \(half the signal\) means you have less work to do, and might make it easier to see.
Either that or its something really simple that I've missed, like shutting one eye makes it easier to decrease the pupil size in your open eye! | 04d2420d-9640-413e-84f3-b7ea5d944673 |
n1jjf | why al qaeda chose to target the united states? | I'm by no means an expert on this topic, but I'll see if I can shed a bit of light on the topic.
In Al Qaeda's early years still part of the mujahideen they were actually funded by the U.S. (funneled through pakistan's equivalent of a CIA agency of course) to fight the soviets who were helping the afghani governments (who were pro soviet) tighten their grip over the region against these rebels. At the time mujahideen was pretty loosely aligned, and although they were jihadist they weren't opposed to one group or another, with the exception being the soviets. Afghanistan's government wasn't all that bad, but because it was pro-soviet the Americans didn't have any of that.
Near the end of the war versus the soviet union, the mujahideen began operations in other parts of the region, such as Israel. During a later conflict in which Iraq invaded Kuwait (ruled by the House of Saud), Bin Laden offered the King of Saudi Arabia protection against the Iraqi army through his mujahideen troops. The King refused, instead allowing U.S. protection (they wanted to secure oil fields, of course), which angered Bin Laden. He saw Saudi Arabia as an extremely sacred Islamic sovereignty and couldn't stand the thought of U.S. troops there. Bin Laden later works for Sudan, opposes peace between Palestine and Israel, and does plenty of other dickish things against other countries.
Of course Al Qaeda doesn't JUST terrorize the USA, but they are the most colourfully painted target out there. They invade sovereign countries like a rash, which allows Al Qaeda to easily recruit by justifying the repulsion of these 'foreign devils'. The USA provides a picture perfect antithesis of modesty required to condemn them by sharia standards. Furthermore, if you were to ask any run of the mill illiterate farmer's child if they could name one other country in the western world, odds are that country would be the USA, due to it's presence, both positive and negative, world wide. | 5d18f51e-55ec-4eec-9a90-4f43464a29f5 |
4p81gz | When does a negative personality trait become a mental problem? | There is indeed a lot of subjectivity and discretion when it comes to diagnosing mental illnesses and it's very much done on a case-by-case basis.
Unfortunately, there isn't a simple test to definitively determine whether someone is suffering from a mental illness or personality disorder; it's mostly based on the subjective judgement and analysis by a qualified professional (such as a Clinical Psychologist [PhD] or a Psychiatrist [MD]).
Fortunately, there is a standardized manual used by these professionals—namely the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in North America and International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in other countries—which basically provides symptom checklists and specific definitions and requirements for every mental illness/disorder someone can be diagnosed with.
The primary criticism of these manuals (in relation to mental illnesses/disorders) is:
1. They leave a lot of room for professional discretion
2. There is a lot of symptom overlap between different mental disorders and not every patient fits neatly into one disorder classification or category
3. A lot of the mental disorders are arbitrarily defined (a panel of experts have simply decided that a particular group of symptoms should be classified as X disorder)
4. In practice, different mental health professionals will often assign slightly different (and in some cases majorly different) diagnoses to the same patient.
Anyway, the general rule of thumb is that unusual or abnormal personality traits or social behaviors do not automatically constitute a mental illness or disorder.
In order for something to be considered worthy of the mental illness/disorder label, it basically has to be a behavior which either severely compromises one's ability to perform regular every-day activities or prevents one from developing healthy/reciprocal social relationships with other humans. | 763b8cd4-b5b5-4367-b10d-377bb9849146 |
5nggxe | Why can we recognize so many celebrities and fictional characters if the human mind is only supposed to be able to know about 200-250 people? | So the first thing you have to understand is that it's not about 'knowing who they are'. It's about maintaining a certain level of relationship with people.
The numbers were actually 100-250 initially (150 on average) and were called Dunbar numbers named after the psychologist who studied the phenomenon later other researchers, mostly anthropologists like Bernard-Killworth doubled the number but they are not as famous.
This however is not the same as acquaintanceship volume; people you can recognise or name nor does this include fictional characters or celebrities either.
To learn more about acquaintanceship volume click [here](_URL_2_)
To learn more about Dunbar and his numbers click [here](_URL_0_)
To understand more about how you recognise faces and recall people click [here](_URL_1_) | eb07067f-3f1a-4036-9bbb-e62092ddd63d |
4qa2c9 | Why are mixed blacks in the US considered black no matter how much they are mixed while this does not apply to other races? | The answer is all political.
For some though, it depends on how they grow up. I had a friend who was half black but grew up with this mothers side of the family who is white. He didn't really identify as black.
Currently its very political. Black community don't like when half black people identify with a different race. These people tend to be the victims of black on black verbal hate, calling them race traitors or uncle Toms. | 0d5f9d3e-0838-44d3-bb0b-5c47bbc19c53 |
4mcgee | Where did the stereotype that Canadians are always saying "sorry" come from? | From Canadians saying sorry in places where it isn't needed.
The Prime Minister just spent a week apologizing for accidentally brushing up against some member of Parliament. It dominated their news for the whole friggin' week. That is some serious 'Sorry' energy.
Edit: typos. | 46c36a35-a9c9-4861-a6ef-9702f248c056 |
2gh9xd | If child molesters or killer of children have a tougher time once in prison, why can't they lie about what they when asked by inmates? | Word gets around. Criminal convictions are public records in most places, and it's not hard to get a friend outside to look up what a guy is in for if you're suspicious of him. A lot of people do try to lie about it, but if anyone really gets suspicious, it won't work well. | d883dba9-db2a-443d-9905-00108e92d601 |
6hey2c | How can eating half a pound of chocolate make you gain 2 pounds of fat? | > How can eating x weight in food produce a greater number of weight gained in fat.
Fat is made up of cells, and those cells are filled with water in order for their bits to move around and function. The chocolate bar isn't going to be stored as a raw chocolate deposit in your flesh.
Chocolate is pretty complex a snack item but imagine if I was making a primative energy bar from suet or raw fat. We would take a big, jiggly portion of animal fat and break it apart into a smooth paste, then dehydrate that paste until we had a solid, soft bar. The resulting bar is much lighter than the fat from which it came and if you ate it and converted everything to fat, you would gain weight. But some of that weight is from retained water. | 6b6b5005-9cb6-420d-b327-a5fae230b236 |
lgfas | What is a company valuation? | It doesn't mean the company has $4 billion in the bank. It means the **estimated price of the whole company** is $4B.
Another way of putting it is, the valuation is the sum of:
* all the things the company currently owns: money in the bank, computers, office stuff, inventory, etc. This is fairly easy to calculate, but in the case of software companies it's not so important.
* all the estimated future profits of the company. This is more important but it's harder to estimate.
So if you're mega-rich and wants to buy Dropbox from its current owners, you'd have to pay about U$4 billion.
However, even if you're a fund manager you aren't allowed to spend that much money in one shot, and at this point the Dropbox owners don't want to sell everything anyway. But guessing a valuation is still useful when an investor wants to:
1. buy a part of the company or
2. more likely in this stage, increase the capitalization of the company, i.e. putting money into the company in exchange of receiving shares of the company.
So if you want to buy 0.1% of Dropbox, you'd have to pay about U$4 million. | 3ae7d181-6edf-4ed0-8291-5e1d29520286 |
1ia974 | Why the cost of manufacturing products (namely electronics), go down so quickly. | Keep in mind that a lower manufacturing cost is not the same thing as a lower retail price.
1. Economics. Things are priced high when they're new because people are often willing to pay more for the "hot new thing." This is because newness has some intrinsic value and some social value. A PS3 gets its price cut in half not because it's half as costly to produce, but because once the newness has worn off, people are less willing to pay so much for it. So retailers actually cut prices to make more money!
2. Technology. Technology is advancing, in terms of processing power, manufacturing efficiency, etc. Smart people are working hard to find out how to make things more efficiently. This leads to actual decreases in manufacturing costs in many electronics, but this generally happens over the course of years, not months. | 0a2858c9-7730-4061-90c4-10e168e9df67 |
5c66wh | Why is it that when you speed a video up, it gets higher pitched? | Sound is vibration of the air interpreted by your eardrum.
Fast frequencies are interpreted as being high pitched. Low frequencies are interpreted as low pitch. Speeding up a video increases the frequency of vibration relative to unsped up and raises the pitch. | 0e9e9a91-3253-4648-808a-50677aa0f9ee |
2tsu5w | Why do they have to shut the subway down when there's a snowstorm, shouldn't the underground portions still be able to keep going? | For one, you need people to drive the trains. You can't keep the subways running if you tell the drivers they can have the day off.
For two, if you shut down the mass transit, you tend to keep people home. Keep people home, and you have less of a need to have cops, ambulance drivers, taxis, etc on the street. | 4eec4b79-1dce-4ec7-8239-4403f9478757 |
32g6v2 | What is happening to our bodies when we see something that makes us "cringe"? | Cringing is a form of empathy. If you see a child crying on the street because he lost his parents you feel bad, sometimes even physically, because you can imagine how it feels for the child. Empathy is our instinct to put ourself in somebody else's position. Watching a movie where something incredibly sad can make you cry. Watching a movie where something really embarrassing happens makes you cringe. It's a different reaction to the same thing, empathy. | f2638081-dd32-4a6a-8d86-e907fb736b87 |
3fcw81 | ...I saw a news story tonight where a child had a double hand transplant; as a Biochemistry major in college I struggle to understand how is this possible? | Arm transplants have happened as well, in general we haven't done a lot of limb transplants but conceptually it's just the same technology that lets us do any organ transplant plus the technique we use to reattach severed limbs in accidents.
It's unlikely we will do any foot transplants any time soon, because the drugs you have to take after a transplant have a lot of serious side effects and most people wouldn't find the medical risks worth it for feet, or even a case where a person still has one hand. It's basically only worth the costs for a person that has no hands at all because of how debilitating that is. | 76d92452-49e8-42a4-8a8c-88be195f0695 |
1tio8z | 4K quality (what seems to be the next step up from 1080p from what I have seen) | It's the next-gen HD resolution. You had it right. Its not particularly important yet though as there is almost no 4K content being made, and very few things are capable of displaying 4K currently. In 5-10 years it'll probably be much more relevant. | 4ac5c8ca-c722-44ee-81ea-f88c73521cd7 |
69apqa | What happens when we generate more electricity than the grid is using? | When too much electricity is being produced one of the first things done is reducing the amount of electricity used by scaling back "quick reacting" plants. Imagine angling the blades of a windmill so they aren't catching the wind anymore and supply is reduced. There aren't traditional batteries big enough to hold the amount of electricity produced by power plants. However, "non-traditional" batteries can be used. Some power plants have experimented with using excess power produced to pump water uphill or into a dam, where electricity would be "stored" as potential energy. When the energy is needed again the water is allowed to run back down the hill or out of a dam to power a turbine. | 420a7f43-29ac-4aac-a8b7-11b88ca0d109 |
546ons | How do different languages share the internet? Is there a Russian language internet, Chinese language internet, or is everything translated from one page? | No, a website will be the same no matter where you load it (usually, and not talking about region specific sites like Google.ra or even _URL_0_ (Canada)). If you search through Reddit, you will find many subreddits where people communicate in their own languages, like Russian Cyrillic or Kanji.
However, some sites have built-in translation (even Instagram does) and Google Translate can translate an entire webpage, just enter the URL into it. | b0bb905e-b3dc-4f72-98d1-273bfdfe4aa0 |
32phl7 | How do people who fast/don't eat or drink for longer than usual people not die? | > Eg: like that indian bloke that didn't eat for 70 years.
Spoiler alert: He eats just like anyone else. He *claims* not to eat, but that claim is ridiculous. There were two "tests" performed, but the first showed that he lost weight during the 10 days that he was being monitored, and the second test allowed him to gargle water and bathe, neither of which were sufficiently monitored to prevent him from drinking and urinating (which he also claims not to do).
In short, the claim to not have eaten in 70 years is a lie. | 8390c1dd-7df2-48c6-810d-90de46f92de5 |
5lefn5 | how does someone like bill gates keep all of his money? | His net worth is largely tied to his investment holdings with Microsoft, although he more than likely has investments elsewhere. As the share price of Microsoft fluctuates daily on the market, his net worth fluctuates with it. If Microsoft has a particularly bad quarter, he publicly lost a lot of money. | 75cb4a70-fdba-4927-b104-d8be879882a6 |
3nvpdx | How are special effects (CGI) in movies created? | What kind of effects, specifically?
The eli5 version is that you use computers to animate something. There are very sophisticated programs that can help calculate exactly how those animations move to make them appear realistic. They don't draw it in frame by frame, they essentially animate all the parts and then use the computer programs to calculate how those parts should move and how quickly they should move.
Depending on how much cgi there is it can take a few days to several months to animate a few minutes. I believe Gollum took something like twenty six hours to calculate the animations for *each frame.*
If you ever wondered why you hear about a movie finishing shooting, and then it's like eight months later before it's released, now you know. | 4123f2f9-ed1e-4204-a7fd-5ed351b2f3f8 |
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