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5adlud | If underage sex is illegal and murder is illegal then why is viewing underage sex illegal but viewing murder is not? | People don't murder other people in order to create videos and profit from people watching them.
But some adults do sexual things to children in order to create videos and make money.
So when someone watches that underage sex video, they're creating an industry that hurts underage people, who by definition can't consent to sex. | d1f061b6-3628-4cad-b010-8b5d56991359 |
7jvf5t | why aren't faucet pipes straight? | Well, for THAT pipe I would imagine the bend helps slow the waterfall so it doesn't splash too much. But for the ones with the S-bend, like in the USA and other places, it traps water so smells and gas doesn't come back up the pipes. | 2f4c41dd-8869-44ed-9dcf-b37ee7168b6c |
1o0exp | Newton's Second Law? | Slap a ball and it'll move in the direction you slapped it. Slap it harder and it'll move faster. | e7d7bd6b-ff5a-44e5-bfba-999f51deec13 |
vq874 | How can fluids be incompressible? | Fluids aren't completely incompressible; they're generally more compressible than solids, for sure. It's just that, under the kind of conditions normally studied in fluid dynamics, they will only compress a little tiny bit. So we can simplify a *lot* of things if we just say "okay, pretend they can't be compressed". | d119089f-f472-4245-8f89-36b0ab349d70 |
4m309y | When a casino brings in a cooler, what exactly is the cooler doing? | Nothing because it's superstitious nonsense.
If someone is counting cards at a blackjack table and the casino doesn't want to/can't kick them out for some reason, a new dealer will burn a card before they start, which makes it closer to time to shuffle and adds an additional unknown card which makes the count less accurate/useful. But this doesn't happen in practice. | 291867a3-3bfe-4317-b5ee-d4b2bb17a009 |
31aomu | Why is it so difficult for Iran to build nuclear weapons today, if the US could build them in the 40's? | [The Manhattan Project](_URL_2_) was a tremendous project. It [ grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2015[1] dollars). Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissile materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.](_URL_2_) Sanctions have been put in place by other countries to prevent Iran from building atomic bombs. [Enriched uranium](_URL_0_) is needed. Iran has been producing this but not enough yet. Iran has just agreed to [reduce its current stockpile](_URL_1_) of enriched uranium. | 0eaecb04-542c-4a17-8b91-211880de71bd |
1r7rts | What exactly is happening when we taste food? | Its your taste buds that pick up certain chemicals in your food. Your taste buds then send electric pulses to your brain and tells it this is what this thing tastes like, and this is the sensation you should release. That's why the natural human reaction is to pull away from spicy food. | cbb7e1ce-943a-404c-b114-bf4e6f13d590 |
3zxfi7 | Would "station spinning" (the "rotating wheel") really create a sensation of gravity in a space station? | It works, and the best part is that you don't have to rotate the station to see the effect. If you move around a stationary circular station the result is pretty similar; NASA played around with this during Skylab: _URL_0_ | 18a29998-ae41-4bf7-995a-7bf02ef0b506 |
51rgog | If everything in the universe disappeared except Earth, our moon, and the Sun, would it be self-sufficient? | In the short term, probably. The loss of the other planets would have a small but non-negligible effect on the orbits of the three remaining bodies, so eventually something would likely start to go wrong there.
That aside, the Earth-Moon system is pretty much self-sufficient. There isn't really anything that the Earth receives from celestial bodies that aren't the Moon or Sun that have any significant impact on day to day life. | 6c3d3f39-9f49-4c74-8f8d-1b9c15f115b8 |
5av9f3 | What's so great about Chicago Cubs winning the world series? | Toronto fan here. I found myself really happy for the Cubs winning. I guess to put it really into words it starts with the 108 year drought of them not winning a championship - it is just so notorious. There is no longer drought between Championships for any other team not just in baseball, but in the NBA/NHL/NFL, a friend big into football/soccer says no Premier League/EUFA teams have that long a streak either. So it transcends just North American pro sports. So for them to break that streak is completely unprecedented. Generations have lived and died several times without seeing the Cubs win it all.
The bigger thing also was coming from behind in a 3-1 deficit in the series, especially when the final two games would be played in Cleveland, not Chicago.
Add also the fact that the Cubs are a pretty well liked club and organization I'd say overall. Unlike say the Yankees or Red Sox who are hugely iconic BUT you do get fans who HATE those teams, you don't tend to hear a lot about people who have some huge disdain for the Cubs. The players on the team are a pretty likable mix of veterans like Ross, Lester, Arrieta and young guys like Bryant. They also feature one of the most exciting pitchers imaginable Aroldis Chapman. They have one of the smartest guys running their front office in Theo Epstein who previously led the Red Sox to break their own World Series dought in 2004 and Joe Maddon one of the most respected managers in the game who had never won a championship.
So add a truly monumental stream of bad luck with the team not winning for over a century and add their current likeable team, likable mix of players, good organization, fans who have suffered long enough plus unbelievably exciting comeback in the series and then truly memorable Game 7 and it makes this a big deal.
I'm not from Chicago, I've never visited the city, I live in a different country and my own team the Jays suffered a heartbreaking loss in the playoffs recently but I'm still really happy for the Cubbies and their fans.
So that's why it's a big deal. | 528378ea-4905-497a-b5c4-a19d7ddb95dc |
2zy14n | Humans have a limited audio and visual range. Do we also have a limited range of taste? | Taste is basically the ability to detect the chemical makeup of a substance.
So yeah, pretty much any chemical we can't taste counts. | 74bd043b-58db-4cbb-b2f4-827163fc3f48 |
4ezuzg | What are the Credit Derivatives on the US Debt Clock? Are those simply bets? A type of credit? Or an enormous market that is separate from our GDP? | Derivatives are mostly like insurance policies, and this is ELI5... I'm going to start with a story.
John buys an old comic book at an auction for $1000. John expects that the value of that comic book will go up in the future. If John was worried that the comic might get damaged (and the value of the comic might go down), he might buy an insurance policy for that comic. John would pay a small amount of money, say $2.00 monthly, for as long as he holds onto the comic, with the understanding that he be able to get $1000 from the insurance company if the comic book meets an accident.
The $1000 value of the insurance policy is *derived* from the $1000 value of the comic book. The insurance company is now carrying a risk of $1000 for John.
This insurance company has 550 policies for different people (but all for $1000 each for $2 per month). This would mean that the insurance company is holding $550,000 of risk. That is the risk-value of 550 insurance policies for $1000 each. Keep in mind that accidents are relatively rare (and there are fraud investigators for accidents that are not actually accidents). At $2 per month, per policy, the insurance company can pay out one policy per month and still make a profit. This is the way Insurance is supposed to work. All the people paying for protection of their own possessions end up paying to replace the possessions of the few people who are unfortunate to experience a loss of value.
So, even though the insurance company has a potential debt of $550,000, the reality is that they are likely to make a profit.
--
John and the 449 other insurance customers above had all purchased their comic books with a bank loan. The bank is literally handing $550,000 over to 550 different people. The bank itself now has a $550,000 bundle of debt. This debt is built on the credit of the 550 customers. The debt is not direct value, it is potential value based on the promises of 550 individuals. The bank will charge interest on these loans, where each person has to pay $100 per month for a year to pay that money back. If everyone pays the money back, the bank gets a nice profit of $200 per person. 20%. If more than 20% of the borrowers don't pay the money back, the bank would then lose value on the debt it holds.
Note: *Those borrowers have also gotten insurance for $550,000. This is the same $550,000 debt but now "counted" twice. Once on the customers, where money actually switched hands, and again at the insurance company. There's not really $1,100,000 of actual debt here.*
The bank itself might want to look for an insurance policy against these loans. It would use some of that expected profit to pay, say a $2.00 per month insurance premium for each $1000 of debt they want to insure. **Such an insurance policy is a credit derivative**.
The $550,000 value of the insurance policy is *derived* from the *credit* of 550 individual borrowers.
Note: *This is again a re-counting of that exact same $550,000 as a risk held by yet another insurance company. Once again, there is not really $1,650,000 of actual debt here. Just three different places holding a risk balance for the same money.*
--
A Credit Default Swap (CDS) is the next level of insurance. It is the insurance that the insurance company can take out against the risk (debt) that the company holds.
--
If everyone pays everything back, then the bank keeps their 20% profit, and each Insurance company keeps their $1100 per month, and everyone is happy. Most importantly, the $550,000 ends up back in the bank.
The actual answer: **The only thing that is taxable here is the $1100 per month insurance premiums and the 20% profit from the original bank loan. All of that is already taxed.**
--
If somehow half of those comic buyers cannot pay their loan, everyone pays out insurance (but only for the amount lost - half of it) until the last insurance company that had offered a CDS against that debt. Even here, everything is fine. The insurance company that holds the last CDS pays out $275,000, and hopefully the payments from other things they insure will cover that cost.
When insurance companies cross-sell CDS to each other, AND start selling CDS to customers who do not even own the debt they are insuring, the risk multiplier can get very, very high. But that is the story of the 2008 financial crisis.
--
I am a software development manager for a company that curates and sells financial data on various types of debt (including bank loans and credit default swaps). I am not a finance person, but I've been working with the data for over a decade. Please note that in ELI5 tradition, I have simplified some things, and left out lots of useful details that do not directly affect the answer to this specific question. | b0be0e41-5457-4aca-9e87-226a2cd08f5a |
31gvxa | Why do so many countries simply have 3 vertical or horizontal stripes as a flag? | For most of history, flags were considerably more complex. Back then, a noble house would make a flag that symbolized their wealth and power, so they would go all out, spending on it like a modern wealthy family spends on cars or gardens.
The tricolor comes from the needs of the French Revolution. Before that, nobles had banners, and they could afford to spend considerable money on each. But a peasant revolution needs it's flags on the cheap.
Once your nation needs to make a flag for every household, having an ornate crown, some lions, a coat of arms, and a hundred fleur de lis on your flag becomes financially impossible. | 8e239341-4e4b-4723-9709-57d8a30512bf |
24i89w | If all dogs are the same species, how can there be so many different and diverse breeds? | We've spent thousands of years breeding dogs for specific purposes, leading to a wide diversity of shapes suited to those purposes. Then in the last hundred years or so we've started "ultra typing" these dogs, picking those traits that we think define a breed and selecting them to the extreme.
They are all the same species because they are all still very similar physically and genetically, despite some major external differences. Most importantly they can all still interbreed. | 7fc74c43-90e4-49c8-bc22-56f3be5e32d9 |
5p4yom | Near Sighted and Far sighted | Take a set of binoculars and look at something far away and focus them properly. Now put a book in front of the binoculars and try to read it. You can't because it's blurry.
Similarly, if you are far-sighted, the lens in your eye does not focus properly on things that are close to it. | b920d64c-c663-429f-824a-bc21c0464126 |
3wsp1c | Why is it that most people write in blue, but we print all books etc. in black? | As a lawyer, I always want my clients to sign documents in blue. It is a carry over from photocopying - photocopy is black & white, so a blue signature is "original". Of course this doesn't really apply as much now that everyone has color copiers but we still maintain the practice.
But, because of this practice, all of my writing in done in blue - I don't even have a black pen in my office. | 1aa88298-4001-4238-96db-d5744aa287b8 |
3zwbbs | What happens in the body when you get swollen and how does the swelling go away? | Swelling is interstital fluid entering the area. It's different than bruising which is blood underneath the area of injury. The lymphatic system regulates the swelling and pulls that fluid out of the area eventually. However, in some cases it doesn't happen in certain spots as well which is why you see people with ankles that are permanently swollen | 02db3a71-23cd-4aa2-8c0e-f8be63b43174 |
1mdm8y | How do trains stay on their tracks? | Basically because the wheels aren't perfectly cylindrical, they are cone shaped, the outer side is a smaller diameter than the inner side. This means that the weight of the train and the difference in rotation speeds between matched wheels forces continuous position adjustments that keep the train centered between the rails.
Also, when a train is coming to a corner the speed is carefully controlled to prevent excessive lateral g-forces that would cause the train to tip and the rails are very carefully banked in curves, just like you see on highway ramps. | 7d93324b-9e5b-4916-bde6-4e61dc5d4c23 |
27f9ko | Why do medicine commercials list all the bad/crazy side effects on TV? | They have to. They are required by law (how much they have to say depends on where you live though). | c9daac11-62e2-4bd6-82dc-daadb3b6c706 |
18os3g | why my computer speakers go spastic every time i get a call on my phone | Your mobile phone communicates with the phone network using electromagnetic radio waves.
One feature of electromagnetic waves is that when they pass through a wire, they create an electric current in the wire.
This is what's happening. The phone is generating electromagnetic waves so it can communicate with the phone network. These waves are creating electric currents in the wires that go to your speakers - only small currents, but they are there. Your speakers amplify these currents and convert them into sounds. | c0b94a56-61c5-4c12-a963-2b6ced8f1230 |
1lregb | Two people with no knowledge of each others language learning each others languages. | So I read a book that had something like this involved. It was about an American family going into their cabin, the son and father go first to make sure everything is ok. Then, the mom, daughter and baby get sick so the father goes bak home to help them, anyway, the boy met a Native American "tribe" or "family" I don't quite remember. They would communicate by first doing sign language (not really but hand signals) then pick up items and objects and say their names. Basically teaching each other from scratch. That's how I believe they would
TL;DR: using objects, hand gestures and emotions to learn their language.
Hope I could help | 586d8e51-d5c3-40f7-83ba-0fef59636d20 |
5o2n1x | How to build a good bridge? | before building anything physical you'd want to run all the math to make sure no details are missed about what parts are built and what forces will be endured.
There's also vibration, oscillation. That can cause forces other than what's planned which bend and strain the bridge materials.
Metals will be alloyed to change the force they can endure for tension or compression. Equations will show what factors are involved like length and surface area and the specific cross-sectional area matters too. A square-ended beam won't be the same as a flat-slender beam , same that you'll get a different profile out of an I-beam for how it can bend or twist or resist bending or twisting.
For bridges there's specific equations but there's also something called finite element analysis : FEA. With FEA you break down the structure into much tinier elements in 3D.
There's some complicated reasons to decide on what those little shapes will be, like a prism, a tetrahedron, a cube, but when the computer's done it will figure out the strain all around the bridge so you can verify if it's in safe limits or not safe.
Something else interesting is the connecting joints. Are they welded? Are they riveted? Are they bolted?
If a connection fails the bridge fails. There's all sorts of dynamics about how a bolted connection of beams could fail because the bolts are too weak or a plate is pushing at an angle and putting far too much strain on just 1 bolt or 1 row of them... or the plate rips or buckles because it is not thick enough even though all the beams are actually totally fine, and bolts too. There's an equation for that too.
Those plates are called gusset-plates.
On your way to figuring out forces on each beam and then at/through each joint is called the "method of joints" but there's a lot more going on.
Best I can understand the vibration stuff has to do with something called "eigenfrequencies" and you need to figure it out, somehow, so you know the forces of tortion, standing waves, is either small enough not to break your bridge or big enough you have to add more structure support to damp the vibration or directly oppose it.
Check this out: _URL_0_
I'm no expert but it looks like there was insufficient support to keep the under-surface "rigid enough" and also the suspension bridge may have been very able to lift UP the bridge (opposing force in equilibrium for a stable road) but if the road is lifted higher by something else (strong wind, and standing wave) there's nothing (or almost nothing) to hold the road DOWN (no opposing force) | 2c17f9d6-0630-4b06-a096-831d41f6c3fd |
2io9h4 | where does the expression "you only use 10% of your brain" come from? | I learned just yesterday that this myth comes from a misunderstanding of a William James quote. Here's a pretty interesting [TedTalk] (_URL_0_) that explains! | a2ed0b58-8447-4f49-a6ab-5463a49a4198 |
5r15j2 | I know penny auctions are a rip but why are they a rip off? | Let's say you and 10 other people have 500 pennies.
Up for auction is a pack of bubble gum with a retail value of $1.00.
The bidding starts at 1 penny.
You have a legitimate chance to buy the gum for 1/100 of its retail value.
You bid a penny. Someone else bids two pennies. Ok, now you can outbid the last guy if you bid three pennies. $0.03 for something that has a value of $1.00 is a pretty good deal. So, you bid 3 pennies.
Two things have also happened that are not the "norm" for auctions. The first is that win or lose, you will not get either bid back. You have surrendered 3 pennies. The second, your competition has also surrendered their bids.
Let's say this goes on for a while and the current high bid is now at $0.49. The psychology of it all starts kicking in. $0.50 is still a good deal, but nothing like the price you were told you could "win" that gum for. But you've already handed over a bunch of your pennies, so you might as well play to win. So you do one more bid. You're then outbid and you give up. Someone else "wins" the gum for $0.51.
Now the company can advertise that they have members "winning" consumer products at half off retail. And it's true.....sorta.
If you bid 1, 3, 15, 35 and 50 pennies (and still lost), you've surrendered $1.04 for the CHANCE to get a deal. Even if 50 pennies won you the gum, you still aid $1.04 for $1.00 gum.
The auction site just raked in multiples over what they paid for that gum.
Also, it's widely believed these sites simply lie. They have automated systems to simply win most or all the auctions. | 8c2f2c5b-050f-4d85-9738-ae1411951277 |
ycqyj | Zero-Determinant Strategies vs. Tit-for-Tat in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma | There are multiple levels you can strategize on.
You can strategize just based on the current round. The optimal strategy is then to always defect. This might make my opponent defect more in future rounds, but I don't care.
You can strategize based on the outcome of the previous round. Then the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat; if I demonstrate that I intend to go tit-for-tat, I force my opponent to cooperate more often.
What these guys did is go one step further. They're not strategizing to make their opponent give a certain result; they're strategizing to make their opponent *use a certain strategy*. The original paper claims that this strategy is better.
The article author disagrees with that claim, because if you play the new strategy against tit-for-tat it can only win by dragging down the total number of points. The new strategy does win against some suboptimal strategies, while tit-for-tat still only goes even, but the article author doesn't think that's too important, because the *amount* of points tit-for-tat gets is still often larger. | 9f46b020-81f9-43f7-ae4b-ff626638bf12 |
3e07ta | Why haven't animals learnt to stay the fuck away from humans considering how often we kill them? | Those animal populations that are actively hunted do. You can tell this easily by observing deer. Deer who live in an area long enough learn when hunting season is and are much more skittish during that season. Deer also seem know when they are on land that is safe. I have often seen deer run like maniac to get away from hunters, jump a fence into non-hunting land, look back at the hunters and then calmly walk away.
Animals are also hunted by other predators all the time. To them humans are just one more predator. | b8533be3-2a3d-4c3f-b6b6-f53c611b96ef |
7zh5ed | How do matches work? | The tip of a match is dipped in phosphorus. Phosphorus burns when it is really hot.
You swipe a match on a rough strip, which creates friction. Friction becomes heat.
The heat causes the phosphorus to burn. The fire then uses the wooden matchstick as fuel, so it doesn’t stop burning. | e65ed580-18f0-49fa-9852-e8ecd27a7a9e |
25uee3 | How does LTE/4G/3G data signals go through walls to a phone? Why is coverage "stronger" in different parts of a house? | You know how you can see through glass? That's because light waves in the visible range (430-790THz) can pass through glass. You know how you have some glass that looks green? That's because it lets green light through but not red, orange, yellow, blue, or violet.
Radio waves are light waves too. They just happen to be a different frequency- one you can't see. Walls block the frequencies of light that we can see, but they (for the most part) let radio waves through. Think of it sort of light the green glass- they block some colors (all the ones we can see) but not all of them.
Of course, we don't exactly choose building materials based on how well they let radio waves through. So some materials block some of the signal (think of it like a dirty plastic- it lets some of the light through, but not all of it). If you have enough of materials like that between you and the cell tower, the signal gets so week that the cell phone can't distinguish it from the noise in the air. Imagine someone is trying to communicate with morse code by shining a flashlight at you. Now imagine there's some foggy glass between you and them, and it's a sunny day out- now you can't tell the difference between their light flashes and the sunlight. That's why some areas get good signal and some get worse. | 9bdeb9cb-531d-4eb8-befd-8a877609d53f |
3m796y | What is the difference between crystal and glass? | Crystal is a structure where atoms / molecules are ordered in a self-similar repeating structure. Glass is a solid substance when atoms/molecules don't form any ordered repeating structure, and the substance can be heated so it becomes more runny/~~elastic~~ less viscous, and then cooled back into a solid form.
The difference in the atom/molecule structure looks [like this](_URL_1_). (EDIT: both quartz and pure glass are the same chemical, but quartz is in crystal form and glass is not.)
When it comes to *crystal glass*, it is not actually crystal material, but it is just a variety of glass which has lead added in it so it is more shiny. Crystal glass is widely used in decorative objects [like this](_URL_0_) and in fancy glassware and chandeliers.
EDIT: Changed elasticity to viscosity as corrected by u/belortik. | ce72e182-7e8b-43af-a804-5a6a62c1573e |
3tb0sl | Why is Islam the only religion that has to defend itself against allegations of it prompting believers to violence? | Former muslim here.
The life of Muhammed is divided into 2 phases: Mecca, & Medina.
Back when he was in Mecca he didn't have much support, hence the verses of Quran were tolerant & accepting, like "Al-Nahl" "The Bees" verse number 125 **Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good instruction, and argue with them in a way that is best.**
Then, Muhammed left Mecca to Al-Madina "The City" A.K.A Yathreb. There, he gathered followers & formed a small army, so the verses of Quran began to get a little harsher & harsher. The verses gradually began to become "different" in a bad way, till the Quran ended by a sura called "Al-Tawba"/"Repentance" that was so violent, that Muslims don't say "In the name of Allah the merciful" before it. One verses of that sura is **O you who have believed, fight those adjacent to you of the disbelievers and let them find in you harshness. And know that Allah is with the righteous.** & also **And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al- Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers.**
Now, which way should Muslims follow, is it the kind verses or the killing verses?
A famous rule in Islam is *"Abrogated verses"/"Copied verses"* (that's the most approximate translation I could think of for the rule title). The rule states "If 2 verses have 2 different judgments in the same topic, then follow the latter in order of date of revelation" i,e. if you a verse telling you wine is alright, & another telling you it's forbidden. See which is newer (which is latter) & follow it.
So, in the case of violence, many imams state that violence replaced kindness, but most say that in secrecy because that looks bad.
TL;DR, ELI5 Islam defends itself against allegations of violence because it contains violence.
I'd like to apologize to any muslim who would feel offence, but I'm only answering the question above.
Edit: Added the word "Abrogated" | cd87fe72-8f0b-4b1a-892b-f70376f56523 |
ji3r2 | Explain LI5 what is beyond Internet Service Providers | It's all about *peering agreements.*
Basically, two ISPs have an agreement along the lines of "I'll carry your traffic if you carry mine" and connect themselves to each other. Of course, there are two many ISPs for every ISP to have an agreement with every other ISP, but if you just have connections to a few major networks, they will have connections of their own which will eventually lead to anywhere on the internet.
Often, there are clearing houses for this sort of thing, like the London Internet Exchange (LINX.) These exchanges act sort of like ISPs for ISPs: in exchange for a service fee, you get a connection to LINX, which means you have a connection to everyone else who is on LINX.
For more (above ten year old level) information on how this is accomplished, try looking up *routing tables*. | 5a12aa78-7763-4518-8677-986a627a9d87 |
1omxuv | Why does the Fukushima plant still leak so much contaminated water into the sea? | The more important questions are what is your concept of "so much"? And does it matter? How much does it matter? [Beta radiation has the weakest penetration power](_URL_0_). | eb944807-149a-4caa-8689-65658d2ac3a4 |
50l84c | How can the DEA make the decision to ban Kratom in 30 days with no legislation passed by the US government? | > With no legislation passed by the US government
But there was - **in 1970** when Nixon declared his "War on Drugs" and Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act
_URL_0_
3 years later the DEA was established with an amazing amount of unregulated power to decide what people are and are not legally allowed to put in their bodies.
And they continue to have such wide ranging powers because in the almost 50 years since the war on drugs was officially started the US has failed to elect a Congress with the courage to end the "war". | f64236f5-e4bc-4072-8872-3698bb167ce0 |
1rj2k2 | If a movie does well in the box office, who gets all of the money/profit? | The company that produced it (Paramount, Warner Bros., etc). The people involved with making the film are generally paid by this company, and the company gets the profit from the actual output (the movie). I'm sure some actors and such have contracts that state that they'll get part of the profits from the film though. | 074b4ee9-d829-47d7-98b1-c91e86e2addf |
8fmh9b | why do Muslims take issue with depictions of Prophet Muhammad, but seem okay with movies such as the Passion of the Christ which depict other major prophets of Islam? | We are not okay with movies such as the passion of Christ. As Muslims, we shouldn't depict any prophets, but we shouldn't get violent over it. | 2b91e078-13ce-44d2-a131-e1c347381f94 |
338mbc | Are the garbled words/spelling when viewing CC (Closed Caption) TV and online videos fixable? | If you're talking about closed captioning of live TV, no, it can't be fixed. They can barely keep up with typing everything the first time; no way could they go back.
Anything that's recorded for later playback *could* be fixed, but the time and expense is rarely considered worth it, assuming you're just asking about fixing mistakes on a live show for people watching it on demand the next day or something along those lines. CC for prerecorded dramas, sitcoms, etc are usually done right the first time since they have plenty of time to do it. | 0da52df5-f175-4f14-9873-5054196caab7 |
3ar3ud | How do modern pop bands/pop stars start their careers? for instance lady Gaga, Katey Perry, or Imagine Dragons | I'm going to be interested in what other people here have to say, since this is a question I've been thinking about recently too.
Some things I do recall: Katy Perry supposedly started out playing shitty acoustic shows in LA, and Lady Gaga did a variety of things to start out - burlesque shows, shows in small NYC clubs, musical theatre, etc. She also fronted a rock band for a while and on her earliest demos and even some tracks on The Fame you can still hear the rock influence - that record has a ton of guitar riffs and funky basslines (played on the actual bass), more than anything else she's done since.
I imagine both of these artists got managers as they got bigger. Lady Gaga probably had some connections and knew like-minded individuals since she went to NYU. And both took more time than you'd think to really develop a marketable image.
I don't know anything about Imagine Dragons though. | 5195a0d8-e4dc-4167-abac-e1f8c853c723 |
2ueu4w | Why is 0% brightness on smartphones still so bright? | I think the real reason is so that you can't turn the brightness down so low that you can't see the screen to turn it back up. | c2d3fd0f-234b-48be-8806-46ae75ef33d5 |
5mllc2 | How is a piece of software like "Scan/Check Disk" able to fix a piece of hardware being your "Hard Drive"? What is going on behind the scenes here and why can't the OS just fix these errors on-the-fly? | Your hard drive uses an organization system. Think of it like the index of a book, it's page numbers and table of contents too. There's way too much data to ever keep track of otherwise.
As it's working, it's constantly updating and editing this index to reflect the drive's contents. Pulling the plug before it can finish it's work leaves it potentially inaccurate, which will screw up something down the line when it tries to locate a resource and can't. So when starting up from a hard shutdown, it needs to take the time to figure stuff out and have everything organized and documented again.
Fixing those issues on-the-fly is possible in theory, but it means that a lot of applications would probably quit or time-out and throw an error message because the OS is cleaning up the mess before getting the application the data it needs. So it's better to just do it up front. | a26f2683-03c0-4f0d-bdca-2271e31c6adb |
6me5wp | Why are American cities so 'Manhattanised'? | While the population of those two cities (and many other examples) seems on the smaller size on paper, that's because you're looking at the population of only the municipality proper. This is usually a smallish area that consists of the downtown/CBD and then older neighbourhoods around it, while not accounting for the continuous urban areas directly bordering it that all function as the same city.
When you take that metropolitan area into account then the population of Boston is really 4.8 million and the population of Cincinnati is 2.1 million. Birmingham is the same way- the city itself is 1.1 million, the urban population is 2.4 million, and the metro population is 3.6 million. So these seemingly small cities with large skylines really aren't that small.
The second thing to consider is the age of the cities. US cities developed later than cities in the UK- when the post war boom occurred, blocks and blocks of 50-75 year old buildings were levelled to build parking lots, office towers, and highways. The buildings that were demolished weren't considered historic enough to preserve and the skyscraper and automobile were the way of the future. Looking back now, demolishing all of those older buildings was a disaster as they provided a rich urban environment with active frontages, a diversity of uses, pedestrian friendly scale, etc. The UK's city centres are still mostly filled with that type of structure as they were considered old and historic enough to keep around in the post war era, and the allure of the automobile did not have quite as large of an impact (although it still left its mark in many ways, such as all of the Beeching cuts to railways in the 1960s).
That brings me to my final point. While from far away mid-sized US cities may look bigger and more impressive than similarly sized UK and European counterparts, there is no question that in general they are not nearly as urban and vibrant. Those few blocks of office towers usually give way to very low density rather quickly, and are often surrounded by areas of parking lots, sports stadiums, and highway ramps. The office districts are busy during the day, but after 5 pm everyone goes home to the suburbs and downtowns become ghost towns. Certainly nowhere close to bustling. Mid-sized European cities are usually more consistently built up, just with lower buildings. There you will be find people at all hours of the day, working, shopping, living.
This is slowly changing in the US as of late, but the planning ideals of building huge buildings in mid sized cities surrounded by a lot of nothing is something that severely impacted urban life in many places.
Edit: a word | 5710516c-4b94-4993-8c09-df693df3a62e |
2aq068 | How did North Korea become the dictatorship it is today? | After the fall of Nazi Germany the USSR began a military campaign against Japan (the last remaining Axis power).
Soviet military forces seized Pyongyang and Kim Il-sung was installed as the leader of the Communist party.
North Korea declared itself a sovereign entity in 1948 and has been a dictatorship ever since. | ea08cff5-ef7b-4005-8436-35de07c6d17d |
212p81 | Are sweatshop workers better off if their factories close down? | If you're in a third world country, your other options might include:
* Farm work: You vs. the elements, back breaking work
* Mining: Sometimes in dangerous, unregulated, illegal conditions
* Waste management: Possibly dealing with dangerous waste from first-world nations such as electronics which can contain highly toxic substances
* Prostitution: STDs, possible abuse, elevated chance of being targeted for severe crime such as murder
* Crime: Well, it's illegal
Sweatshops are terrible but that's coming from a first world perspective. Many in third world countries wouldn't be able to get by that well without them.
You'd rather work in a sweatshop than in the other dangerous, even worse work conditions you could be in. | c56f5fb4-15e2-44f2-8c51-b9daf4eaba4c |
51gk2m | Why do most people's faces swell up after crying for a long time or crying hard? | Your body is flooding your system with histamines causing inflamation, congestion, etc. in response to stress. | e193d7d5-5ba8-4bce-ab3e-1c5c6047acf0 |
1t52w1 | How do trees know how long a year is? | Every plant has a time of year when they do the most growing. It's unimaginatively known as the "growing season". We can measure time using tree rings because for each species of tree there's a time of year when they start growing, and their growth is very fast, compared to a time of year when their growth is very slow or halts altogether (like in winter, deciduous trees shed their leaves and reign in energy expenditure).
The change in growth speed between seasons (usually spring to winter) results in differences in the colour of the wood, so each "layer" of wood represents a year's growth. | c3d8fdab-fa3b-4a65-bb09-67803f6b7ff1 |
2pi5jp | Why is it that in animated series, objects that can move around are drawn differently than static objects? | Drawn differently? Like the classic Wile E Coyote where you can tell that THAT rock right there is going to squish him because it's a different color? That's because when those were done animation was still printed on cels and those cels were [layered on top of each other](_URL_0_). So you'd have a background static layer that doesn't animate, you'd have a props layer, and you'd have a layer per character. The same color on different layers showed up slightly differently just because that's how it works. In some cartoons you can even see when the object is switched from one layer to another.
This effect is substantially reduced in modern fully computer animation. However, props are still often drawn at a different level of detail, because they may have to be redrawn over and over again instead of the really fancy background you only have to draw once. | 21b00211-ed9a-4d22-8416-7cb8142c27f6 |
6qw94g | Why do people stop and look when there is a traffic accident ? | When we do the same mundane task over and over and over, our brain basically shuts off. We just continue doing the mundane task as a brain "sub routine" and we drift out.
Car accidents are exciting and different, it wakes your brain up. Something is happening so now you're active in your involvement in driving.
So you look at it.
Plus we are social animals and pay attention to humans in extreme situations. Just regular humanity stuff. | 45e1079e-4bcb-4ae4-8440-5bcb9afb337f |
8gryzh | How does swarm intelligence work? How are ants or bees smarter as a group than an individual? | Each individual has a very short list of rules. For an ant, it might read something like, “When outside, look for food. When you have food, release scent. If you have no food, follow the scent.” For any individual, these instinctive behaviors don’t appear very intelligent. The average ant wanders around at random until he finds food and begins laying a scent trail. But when you have a thousand of them, those individual behaviors add up so that you have a network of ants running back and forth along scent trails. At the micro level it is chaos, but at the macro level it looks almost planned.
There is no single individual responsible for making plans or coordinating the activity. They have just learned or inherited a set of behaviors that resemble “If/Then/Else” statements. They are like tiny robots, and each one only makes a very simple decision. Each individual probably has no idea what the overall goal is. They just repeat their programmed behavior and the next generation inherits it. If the behavior was ineffective, they die and that failed strategy does not get passed to the next generation. | 36c7e5c4-139d-40fe-8ae2-730bce0c06d9 |
2sj3e5 | What do people in big corporate legal departments do all day? | It totally depends on the corporation and the lawyer, but activities might include:
* Writing or reviewing contracts between one corporation and another
* Responding to subpoenas or information requests from the government or law enforcement - for example if the FBI is tracking a criminal, they may ask Google and Facebook for information about the person's communication, FedEx for their shipping history, United Airlines for the flights they searched for, and so on - and the legal department of the corporation may review those
* Reviewing new inventions from the corporation and filing patents on them
* Responding to cases of trademark infringement to protect the corporation's brand - i.e. by threatening another company with a lawsuit
* Defending the company in court when it's been sued | d1d68673-b28e-42ca-b164-3773350a39f8 |
14ywrf | Is it true that America does not negotiate with terrorists? Why not? | If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk.
If you negotiate with terrorists, it feeds the cycle that people can manipulate you by being terrorists. Hence you get more terrorists. | 825818e5-f5e8-43d9-9f8d-5786b1ab4500 |
2yy7fs | Why do all SUVs have a rear windshield wiper while almost every sedan doesn't? | I think it has to do with the rear window of SUV's/minivans being more vertical compared to a car which usually has a more angled back window.
Passing air wont blow the water off the suv back window the same way it would in a car. | 39573a53-18cf-47a0-97fb-d239cfe4b3e7 |
1zoknp | Why are aboriginal boobies not blurred on TV when other boobs in the USA are blurred? | In the United States, the government isn't normally allowed to restrict speech, including what people put on television. There are a number of ways to get around this, but the biggest one is that free speech doesn't cover "obscenity." What this means, though, is that the ability to block someone from, say, putting boobs on TV, is based on an argument that it is obscene. The regulators in charge of this have basically said that showing naked people in certain contexts, like a nature special, isn't the kind of nudity that is rightly considered obscene. It's not done just to thrill the viewers sexual appetites, and it has educational value. It's a case by case thing, though, which is why you don't see networks trying to push the envelope, because the fines can be big. | d315ee1f-9848-4f15-9f80-356e3002071c |
4eb4i2 | How is a game made from a totally new engine (like overwatch)? | Likely your first step is going to be how to display something, so you would code an interface to the graphics systems (we're going broad here) that tells it you want a square on the screen. Then you want to apply a specific color. Then you may want to be able to put a specific design on it. You slowly (and painfully) build up the different things you can do.
Add the option to click on it with your mouse, resize it, transform it (move one or more corners so it isn't a perfect square anymore). Have it pass through another square, slowly change it's color. Each of these are incremental steps, and takes time and effort, but once done you have an engine.
At this point you have some basic display components. But when it comes to building a full engine there are so many different components that it is a very complicated job.
The next step is actually to figure out the rules you want to live by, and there is almost always some give and take. The decisions are usually made with a thought to processing power.
Do you want to have 20,000 moderately detailed objects on screen or do you want to have 1,000 very detailed objects?
Do you want to be able to interact (shoot/see/hear) objects from miles away or just the closer ones?
How realistic do you want your lighting? Should light reflect of different surfaces based on the material of that object? Do you want some items to be fully or even partially transparent?
Are sounds limited in volume by distance only or does architecture and walls make a difference? Just like lighting, do you have certain materials muffle noise more or less than others?
Do you want realistic physics or a more relaxed system? For example do you want objects to have terminal velocity at different rates due to air resistance/mass restrictions or just assume they all reach the same terminal velocity.
Do you want weather effects? Curved surfaces? line of effect or just line of sight?
Each decision adjusts both the processing power needed and the complexity of the code.
For many games the type of game (as mentioned by FuzzyCats) can help with these decisions. A racing game will probably need better physics modelling than a platformer.
Once these are decided, it boils down to programming, you have a series of problems and you find solutions to them. | 5dbb3258-5c97-4405-8211-849f029f4c64 |
1qzkm5 | How can companies not have nutritional information on their food? | There are a few exceptions to the rules about labeling. If you're buying it from the company that makes it, then it probably falls under the "Delicatessen-type food, bakery products and confections that are sold directly to consumers from the location where prepared" exclusion.
There are a few other exclusions, including items that are given away rather than being sold, and items marked "Not labeled for individual sale."
[More info here.](_URL_0_) | b374a666-290a-4fe3-a74b-23bef96cde9c |
1rbufl | Why has Iran so quickly reversed its footing on its nuclear program? | The latest sanctions on the Iranians have effectively crippled the countries economy to a point that is essentially unsustainable and will only get worse if they continue on their current course. The Iranians have come to the table and accepted very large concessions about their nuclear program in order to ease these sanctions temporarily.
There also is a growing shift in Iran away from actually creating the bomb and instead just becoming nuclear-latent which means just getting to a point where they could quickly create one if they ever would need to. | 713d7e2a-91de-4990-b48e-a4f7ee441b70 |
2r3s94 | Aren't Christian faith healers and self-proclaimed "prophets" blaspheming? Is it not against Christianity to claim to be able to personally provide access to God and salvation? | Well, blasphemy means either insulting a god, or claiming to have the powers of a god. Those wouldn't necessarily apply: the Christian Bible has many stories of people with powers of prophecy and healing.
But from a religious point of view, the obvious question is: Do they actually have the gifts of healing and prophecy? The answer is: Pretty much definitely not, and in any case many of these people have been exposed as frauds. They deliberately lie, in other words: they use simple conjuring tricks to make it appear as if they are performing miracles, and they know full well that they don't really have the gifts they claim to have.
This makes them not blasphemers, but false prophets. And the Bible has nasty things to say about false prophets: Deuteronomy 13:1-5 says such people must be put to death (surprise, surprise).
The New Testament also contains warnings about false prophets, who will try to deceive the faithful. The best-known passage is Matthew 7:15-23 which calls them "wolves in sheep's clothing" (that is, outwardly they appear to be your friend, but in fact they will destroy you), and suggests that you look at their deeds: "Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?" Basically, if a self-proclaimed prophet turns out to be a philandering tax dodger, he's probably a false prophet (assuming you didn't already guess that from the very fact that he claimed divine powers in the first place). | 48f77720-081a-4bf0-8b61-ab4b064eaa23 |
4eoyv3 | Genetic Dominance | An allele is a particular version or form of a gene. Dominant alleles usually are the version of a gene that codes for a particular protein, and recessive alleles are usually coding for an absent or non-functional protein.
So consider something like lactose intolerance. You only need a few lactase enzyme proteins to digest milk sugar, so it doesn't matter whether 100% or 50% of your cells have the allele that makes lactase (i.e. doesn't matter if you're LL, lL or Ll), as long as some cells can do it. But if you have no copies of that allele that makes lactase as an adult (i.e. if you're ll), you are intolerant to milk sugars. So we say lactase tolerance is dominant and lactase intolerance is recessive.
But not all traits work like this. Sometimes (actually most of the time) it *does* matter if only 50% of your cells have the dominant allele and make that protein. Like in the snapdragon flower, if you have two alleles for making red pigment (RR) then the flower is red, if you have none the flower is white (rr), but if you have one (Rr or rR) the flower is halfway between white and red - it's pink! This is called **incomplete dominance**.
Some other genes have alleles that both make different but still working versions of a protein. For instance, human blood types are determined by a gene that has three different alleles, one that makes a functional *I^A* version of the protein, one that makes a different but still functional *I^B* version and one which is recessive (doesn't make anything functional) so is given the lowercase letter symbol *i*. So you can say that *I^A* and *I^B* are **co-dominant** because they're both doing things, which means people can have AB bloodtype (*I^A I^B*) as well as A bloodtype (*I^A I^A*) or B bloodtype (*I^B I^B*) or O bloodtype (*ii*).
I hope that answers your question. Feel free to ask me for clarification. | b9a72603-b25e-4c19-be16-ba351b5aa7cf |
7ru6c8 | Our body fight diseases by increasing the temperature, why betraying it by cooling ourselves down? | Your body is a house, pathogens are a thousand and thousand of cockroaches ramping on the floor.
Fever is basically the house habitant (immune system) being like "Oh fuck it, let's burn the fucking house down".
It's super effective but it can be very damaging, when a fever isn't really high, doctors usually advice to let it go and wait for it to decrease, when it raises to 103°F (40°c) and keeps increasing, it's time to stop the fever because it's going to do more harm than good (I think you start getting convulsion around 105 °F or 41°c and risk brain damage if it increases further). | db67779c-7118-45f1-a073-691af7b39c6e |
6egyao | How does too much salt increase blood pressure? | [It's not entirely clear that it does.](_URL_0_) High levels of sodium consumption (sodium being the half of the table salt molecule, NaCl, that's relevant here) have traditionally been associated with hypertension (i.e., high blood pressure). But recent research indicates that the relationship between sodium intake and hypertension is not nearly so straightforward as once believed. | 95ee5c5e-11e4-499c-b3c9-24ef917dfff5 |
3bw05a | Why do people in movies automatically bleed through the mouth when they are injured in the belly area? It's something that happens in real life? | It's possible but not too common. If someone is stabbed or shot in the stomach, most of the blood would drain down, not be coughed up.
However, if someone is stabbed in the lungs, it's definitely more possible. There's a lot of blood vessels in your lungs and you could definitely see people coughing up blood in that case | 0aa1ad4c-3974-4a77-8ed7-a6d32f980517 |
38ab9d | When and why did humans begin to wear clothing? | When is tricky. Clothing is unlikely to survive as long as other tools, so we can't say with certainty that the earliest tool-users (Australopithecus) didn't wear furs or other clothing.
As to why? That's also tricky. There's no historical or archaeological record of early clothing, so your guess is as good as anyone's. Common guesses include for warmth, for religious ceremonies, or to display dominance by wearing furs as trophies. | 7bb40058-31e4-41ac-9ccd-91fc0a1d3276 |
13cjd6 | Why is it rude to ask people how old they are? | Society seems to have an ideal age to look like (somewhere around 21-25), and everyone is always trying to look as close to that age as possible. Asking someone their age destroys any and all effort they've put into that attempt to appear closer to that ideal age. | 3479d738-938b-47cb-8843-3b9ae8331838 |
2bkvr3 | why to we have a divot beneath our noses and above our mouths. | It is a seam left over from when you were formed in your mothers womb. | 452fb4ef-cc18-4289-8362-491dd6f8805e |
69994c | ELI5: What are the best explanations of how to visualize an atom? | How about:-
A small fuzzy ball that you can't quite see surrounded by a larger fuzzy cloud of stuff that you also can't quite get a fix on. | b3173a63-0dd3-4062-a291-1b402f763e4f |
1dfhk8 | - Why do my teeth get a funny feeling when I have to pee really badly? | I definately have experienced this and ive talked to many other people who have as well. Ive even heard it refferred to in a book, i cant remember the book at all unfortunately. I remember character used the phrase "i have to pee so bad my teeth are floating" or something to that effect. Ur def not alone dude | ead7cfe2-e93c-404e-9758-9553b588463b |
2490t3 | What is lag? | Every time you move your avatar you push a button. It takes time for the button push to register from your keyboard to your computer, from your computer to the internet, from the internet to the game servers, the change in avatar location takes time to go from the server to the internet, to others computers.
There are thousands of changes going on at any instant, some peoples internet connections are not fast enough to send and receive all changes. The inability causes lag, not all changes are sent or received. Instead of seeing an avatar take four steps, you get jumps, only showing two steps.
People causing these jumps slow down the game for everyone else, so if there is too much lag, the server kicks you for everyone else's benefit. This is lagging out. | e157e081-5d20-43a8-89db-75dddd9248b3 |
2e2kj3 | why the US and many other western countries were not on Bashar al-Assads side, but rather wanted to take him down, when his enemies are apparently ISIS. Shouldn't the west support the enemies of ISIS?! | The Syrian Civil War isn't simply Assad vs. ISIS. There are many other factions involved, including Hezbollah, Kurdish forces, many (small, disorganized) various anti-Assad rebels, and Israel.
[This map](_URL_0_) might help.
That's why the west struggled with how to handle Syria - none of the opposition groups were organized and moderate enough to choose a side. Unlike Libya, where there was a single moderate/organized resistance army. | ba01a226-7de5-403f-8104-504bd417b77f |
1ok1qi | If the United States got invaded today, what would happen? | By who, aliens?
There is no country in the world that has the projective military power of the US. With their air and missile defenses, it is unlikely any country besides Mexico or Canada could get military forces anywhere near the mainland.
Without being more specific, it is not a question that can be answered. | 2d578b15-ecfb-4cdf-b289-7a650540be14 |
34nlr5 | What does "Depraved Heart Murder" mean? | You may be interested in the following thread. There are some bad answers in there, but a few comprehensive ones and discussion following.
_URL_0_ | 30cd6c71-f7a1-45a7-9392-c48a4c944564 |
j78lq | The difference between private healthcare and public healthcare | I'm not 100% on the Australian system, but this should basically explain it:
Public healthcare is a hospital. Lots of different patients, many doctors and nurses. Partially paid for by the government.
Private healthcare is a called a practice. It's a lot smaller, and often targets one specific type of patient, e.g. those who need a knee replacement.
#
## Warning: complicated stuff below that explains the underlying 'problem' with private practice.
#
To understand why private practitioners make so much money, it's important to understand the following.
Hospitals can do two types of treatment: treatment that makes them money and that costs them money. Insurance companies are not willing to pay the huge costs for cancer treatment for a patient directly. It'd mess up their statistics or something. So if that treatment costs 10X money, they get 2X from the insurance and have to pay the rest themselves. To be able to pay that treatment they need money, so they 'overcharge' the insurance companies for the 'cheap' treatments (note: this is all regulated and consensual). So instead of charging X (the cost), they charge 2X. So they make 1X profit per treatment to cover for the expenses of cancer treatment.
A private practice offers only specific types of treatment- and you guessed it- those who make money. Since they don't need the excess amount to cover for radiation therapy, they can charge less than 2X and still more than 1X. Result: they make more money, whilst being cheaper for the insurance companies. That results in more patients being sent there, and less 'cheap' patients to the hospital. Eventually the hospitals will no longer be able to pay for the expensive treatment if this continues.
That's why doctors often dislike private practitioners- they're money wolves and mes sup the system at the same time. | 90190ae6-b801-4ecf-b7bb-3dff25bff8f6 |
4ccs3z | what is going on in your body when you get paranoid/anxiety attacks/vomitting when you smoke too much weed? | If you were 21 instead of 5, and happened to be visiting a state like mine with legal recreational cannabis, I might recommend you try an indica instead of a sativa. | a2983997-5339-44d0-a552-11a3d545887f |
4ub0ly | Academic Probation, and University transferring help | Just pointing out that questions like these are *exactly* why your school has assigned you an advisor. They are very helpful and can usually answer questions about specific universities in your area and offer advise on how to tailor your studies towards transferring to the program you want at the school you're looking into. | 08966791-88f4-47d5-be25-a92167db6ad0 |
66koau | Glasses | Glasses are just lenses. What lenses do is they change the direction of light (which travels in a straight line) that passes through them. Specifically, light that passes through different parts of the lens has it's direction changed by a different amount. When light is coming from more or less the same direction (like from an object you are looking at), the light from different parts of the object passes through different parts of the lens, and the direction changes. The **image** of the object (what you see when the light finally hits your eyes and goes to your brain) looks different because the lens changed the direction of the light. You can see this easily if you hold a magnifying glass up and look around you, and see that some objects look different, or distorted or smaller, or even upside down or far away. But also some objects that are close look bigger, or closer than they really are. This is all because the light coming from these objects is being changed by a different amount, which changes the image you see.
Your eyes have lenses. Their job is to project the **image** of what you are looking at to the correct part of your eye so the sensors can take the light and send it to the brain which makes sense of what you are looking at. If someone needs glasses, it means the lens in their eye, for one reason or another, is not projecting the image onto the correct part of the eye, which means that things look out of focus. This is corrected by using glasses which change the direction of the light before it reaches the lenses in your eye, so that when it hits the lenses in your eye it the light is redirected to the correct parts again. However, if your glasses are not in the correct position (not in front of your eyes) then the light that enters your eyes from the glasses is no longer in the correct direction again, making the objects seem different, or smaller, or out of focus.
TL;DR: Glasses change the direction of light that passes through them, which changes the image you see of objects behind them. | a740f589-5974-4359-9724-aab269e03166 |
3sw3m6 | Why do children instinctively like cartoons ? | I think it's less that kids 'instinctively' like cartoons, but rather that producers understand what kids will like and cater to that. Cartoons are a big part of that, obviously, but also live action shows like teletubbies, yo gabba gabba, and sesame street, for example. | 4a7785c1-df51-44f9-9020-cce9cf592b82 |
s3ibp | What is happening in C# when I call a method? | By "out" value, do you mean the return value of a method, or the `out` variable created by something like `Int32.TryParse()`? They are not the same: `TryParse` does not return the parsed integer, but a boolean (`True` or `False`) depending on if the parsing of the string entered as the first argument was successful or not. So in the following example:
int number;
result = Int32.TryParse("1337", out number);
`result` will be equal to `True` and `number` will be an `int` with a value of 1337, whereas in this example:
int number;
result = Int32.TryParse("nifty kittens!", out number);
`result` will be `False` and `number` will be 0.
So, the method *sets* the value of an `int` (the "out" value), but *returns* a boolean to reflect success or failure of the parsing. Make sense?
As for your problem of pasting code, you need to *read* the code first. Maybe you haven't declared a variable that you are using? Try an IDE if you aren't using one already, either [MonoDevelop](_URL_0_) (for Mac/Linux/Windows) or [Visual C# Express](_URL_1_) (Windows only, or VMWare/Parallels/VirtualBox, though YMMV with that. I use it's big sister, Visual Studio, in Parallels, works reasonably well). Either program will tell you what is missing. Both free (beer), though naturally only MonoDevelop is open source, if you care about that, which you should. (I only use VS because I have to. :/) | 2ec2efd8-50d8-4e1e-b5f3-4c65f6536040 |
8j7r22 | what exactly is vibrational and chassis tuning when automakers are testing vehicles and concepts? | Everything has a resonant frequency, the pitch where the whole structure will vibrate and generally cause problems for people in or near the thing.
Bridges sometimes collapse (for example) because the wind or the people walking across it match the resonant frequency and amplify it until the structure fails.
In cars, there are certain predictable speeds and engine settings and yadda yadda yadda corresponding to city, highway, neighborhood driving conditions. If those conditions produce vibration in the chassis, it will be heard (and disliked) by the people in the car, and in truly bad cases, it could cause bolts or other pieces to shake loose, creating a hazard on the road. | 40234fa0-4d3c-4815-9d33-025da73d278c |
35v7cn | Why do most drones have four spinning instead of three? | I'm assuming you are talking about the rotors here and not the wheels or anything else, since you haven't stated it.
With rotor aircraft the ideal set up is to have an even number of rotors, be that 2 or 4 or 8. The reason for this is gyroscopic torque, the same reason a helicopter (1 rotor, odd number) needs a tail rotor.
If you have an even number of rotors, you can set them to rotate in opposite directions and the torque forces will cancel each other out. With an uneven number you need a tailrotor to counteract the uneven torque forces. | 71b1039b-cde9-4b15-b7ad-7c59f0ca5ff7 |
4i5yj0 | How does someone end up owing thousands in back taxes? | Easy. Your W-2 was't filled out right and didn't automatically withdraw enough taxes. Then come tax time you owe thousands of dollars because you didnt pay enough during the year. However you didnt realize this was happening and don't have the money to pay right away.
Boom back taxes. | 0927240a-a4f2-4dcc-91ca-fce96512525e |
6dx7g0 | why is there a calm before the storm? | There isn't always, but when there is it is because when the warm, dry, stable air rolls in it 'calms down' the rest of the air.
Source:[how stuff works](_URL_0_) | e1c7745b-541b-41ee-bfcf-542b222ebfd7 |
25lok7 | Dyslexia | First, disclaimer if I am not doing this right. But I just created a reddit account and this is my first comment. I had/have dyslexia too. I had a very difficult time learning how to speak, read, and write (in that order). From 2-12 grade, I had to study for hours after school (w a tutor up to grade 6). With extreme repetition repetition repetition and tenacity, I pulled it together, and now it's almost like I never had dyslexia in the first place. So I would classify my dyslexia as "regular" and not "severe." Btw, I think you might mean "severe," rather than "sever." But I knew what you meant. Us dyslexics often make those mistakes. I used to use the word "pacific" to mean "specific." I was in 10th grade before I figured that one out. | c64bac5a-b311-416e-a88f-7fc525eb52e0 |
7fhnlt | How does our brain create a mind? | This is a question no one knows the answer to, there are plenty of theories about what it could be though. | 1166d8ea-a48c-44f5-a841-86a1f1da172a |
6bucr6 | Where does deleted data go? | Imagine the device you are saving your data to as a library with a special place for each book and an index list that tells you in which book you have to look for a specific information (piece of data). Now when you delete data, usually only the entry on the index list is removed, the book is still in place. If, in the future, a new book is brought into the library (new piece of data, e.g. installing a new game) a new book might be placed where the old book is, overwriting it. Then the old data is actually gone.
Now you have to know that there are special librarians who can go into the library without an index list, look at all the books that are there and build a new index list, including books (pieces of data) that you thought to be deleted. (Which means if you accidentally delete something and empty your trash bin, you may still be able to recover it!)
If on the other hand you want to make sure that it is unrecoverable, you will need to hire another special librarian (another program) to go into the library and explicitly place a new book full of nonsense where the old book used to be. (just search for true delete software or something similar to find something).
Still, even the deletion librarian can leave traces that can be interpreted by special forces librarians. If you want to truely make sure that no data can be read ever again, you will have to go full library of alexandria on your harddrive and destroy it (strong magnets for HDDS, physical force and shredding for SSDs) | 2e4f7fa4-bc8f-4756-a7aa-b79f991cf5ef |
35xxc2 | lack of guilt | Could be any number of things, such as:
1. The way they were raised. If "white lies" were seen as okay when they were growing up, they are unlikely to feel guilty about them later in life.
2. Habit. If they do something "wrong" a lot, the mind adjusts to it and no longer causes feelings of guilt. That is why some people can do a bad thing once and feel guilty, but do the same thing later and feel fine.
3. Self-justification. This is probably the biggest one. Humans do not like to feel guilty, it's uncomfortable. So, instead of realizing we did something wrong, we explain our way out of feeling bad. (e.g. Telling someone you'll meet them for lunch and then not showing up. "I really would have gone if x, y, or z hadn't come up. I was just too busy. I don't like them that much anyway.")
Also, don't forget that people often "lie" unintentionally. People *mean* to do a lot of things that they don't accomplish. I can promise and swear to do something for you at a certain time, but if something more important comes up or there's an emergency, that promise is likely to be broken. I had every intention of doing the thing I said, it just didn't happen for whatever reason. | f4a62ae5-eccb-4279-a382-0c35816d3cfe |
5a6qjy | How are random product/reward codes generated? | Lets assume for a moment the key is comprised of just uppercase letters. This allows for 26 options for each character of the key, giving a total of 26^25 possible combinations. 26^25 is about 2.3\*10^(35) total, or about 3.2\*10^(25) (that's 32,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible combinations *for every living person on Earth*. So no, we probably won't run out of codes soon.
Sometimes the keys follow a certain pattern, that allow the program to validate them (so that not every 25 character combination is valid). For example, the last 5 characters in the key might be created using a function of the first 20, so it's easy to check whether the key is valid by applying this function and comparing the result. This reduces the possible number of combinations, but there's still a lot of them ("just" 26^(20) instead of 26^(25)).
The code is produced by a pseudorandom number generator. As to how these work, well that's another question altogether, [which has been asked here many times](_URL_0_). | f4a1ae0c-502a-42c8-8b3b-dd794e00b6a0 |
4i237r | Can you get a computer virus if you go to a site but don't click anything? Or stream a video but don't download it? | Yes. A site could have javascript that downloads or installs things, or if it uses flash, you could have an out of date version that's susceptible to an exploit in what you're watching.
To stream something, you have to download it. Think of a download like going and buying a book to take home, and a stream as getting pages in the mail, reading them, and throwing them out as soon as they're read. You're still getting the content. If it's a reputable site, you're usually pretty safe, though. | ab3ac530-a7be-4cc7-ac28-8034f93b0620 |
2lc2ct | If my allergy to dust has evolved to make me sneeze/cough/runny nose why should I take drugs to counter that? Does it not serve a similar function of pain or smell in letting me know of something that is harmful? | Allergies occur when the immune system responds to a stimulus which does not require an immune response. It's essentially an error, or, maybe more accurately, an overreaction to something that is not actually harmful. You take the medicine to alleviate the symptoms you are suffering from something that shouldn't occur. | a3759e8b-f734-47a7-b199-640508658b8e |
48s5rt | How is it someone can do 100 squats but can't run but a few miles? | ELI5: bulldozers can lift tons of weight but can't go fast. They are built for one thing and they do other things not as well. Race cars can go fast but can't lift tons. | abb0464d-110d-435f-8d24-c38fbf999a0f |
2p7z0d | Situation in Yemen right now. | The situation in Yemen is a bit crazy and alliances are changing in a very unexpected way. I'll try to make this as short as possible since I'm only taking a break from studying for finals.
**Before the Arab Spring:**
* The Ali Abdullah Saleh Regime is an ally of Saudi Arabia
* The Houthi movement is an ally of Iran
* Saleh regime and the Houthi had multiple wars in which both of them were supported by their allies
* Also, the houthi had a short-lived war with Saudi Arabia (on the southern border of SA)
* *Conclusion: Saudi Arabia & Saleh are against Houthi & Iran*
**Arab Spring Outcome:**
* Saleh regime was thrown and replaced by a new government (honestly I don't remember what this government is called so new government will do for now)
* *Conclusion: the situation is still the same as the previous conclusion, but the twist is that a new player was thrown in, the new government. This player is not best friends with Saleh and Saud Arabia (the latter because they just lost an ally). Houthi was kinda okay with the new government (they threw Houthi's enemy at least).*
**Present Time:**
Depending on the side you ask, the Houthi might have taken control of the capital because *either* (a) they believe the new government is not making any progress in bettering the conditions in Yemen *or* (b) it is part of the Irani plan to get more control in yet another Arab country. Anyway, though the post-Arab-Spring government is still in power, Houthi is the de facto ruler. Finally, I do not believe Houthi was mainly fighting AlQaeda (assuming that's what you mean by AQ), AlQaeda didn't play a huge part in this story.
**The question is, why is not Saudi Arabia saying, let alone doing, anything about their 'enemy' the Houthi taking over the Yemeni capital, which meant Iran (another 'enemy') is on the Saudi southern border now?**
It seems to be a situation of "my enemies enemy is my friend." Their have been talks about the Saleh regime and Saudi Arabia 'letting' and helping Houthi get rid of the post-Arab-spring government in hope that Saleh regime comes back to power soon.
This is much longer than I expected it to be lol hope it helps clarify the situation more to you though I know I didn't answer all your questions.
Edit: formatting (a lot of it ;) ) | cefd8f4a-9ff2-401f-8a26-279264044264 |
1z35fy | Why is there no tri-core processor (3x)? | /u/shawnaroo almost had it right. Integrated Circuits (ICs), due to the way they are manufactured, are *rectangular* in shape. And when you put multiple copies of something as big as a core on a chip, you essentially do a "cut and paste" (almost). You also don't (usually) want to make a chip a lot longer than it is wide, or vice versa. So it is easy to see that you are usually going to try to make *even* numbers, since they are going to be arranged in rows and columns. (Not necessarily powers of 2.) Although sometimes (if the cores are fairly small) you might put some of the overhead circuitry in place of one of the cores, so your total number of cores would be an even number minus 1.
As someone else mentioned, you might do various numbers when you try to make an even number of cores but one or more have manufacturing defects and are disabled.
There's another trend going on right now for multi-core parts for mobile applications. Some chips use one "wimpy" core and multiple "strong" cores. That way, when the phone isn't doing much it can just use the wimpy core and conserved battery power, but when it needs more "ooph" it can utilize some of the higher performance cores.
There are chips available right now for things like network processing that have a lot of cores. For example, Tilera has a 72-core processor. | f64e5ae9-5487-4aec-ba2b-39b5f458d0ec |
5vplbf | What laws prevent the majority stockholder of a corporation from just giving away the corporation's assets? | They're not her property. You can't give away property belonging to someone else. Even if that person is a legal fiction you have majority control over.
The majority stockholder *could* push the board to give away assets, but that would likely be a breach of the board's [fiduciary duty](_URL_0_) to the minority stockholders. The board should overrule the majority stockholder on those grounds.
To do it legally, the majority stockholder should vote to disband/liquidate the corporation. Assuming the motion passes the net assets will be distributed among the stockholders, and now that some of them are her property the majority owner can give those away at will. | 1b416596-3b97-44a7-a515-79441a86b4d0 |
3tc0a0 | where does that style of writing that graffiti artists always use come from, and why do so many of them use it? | Grab a can of spray paint and start trying to write. With very thick lines created by the wide spray you are limited in the legibility if you don't write like that. | bb45782b-80b7-4b5e-8595-41b6e2c0ea0f |
59fgh2 | What are undeclinable requests like, 'Could you get the door for me?' called and how do they work from a linguistic or sociological standpoint? | This type of language is used in sales pitches and marketing around the world. Opinion polls and surveys and questionnaires too.
It's called a "Leading Question".
It's a form of persuasion and it's something we just pick up - we all do it, subconsciously. Some people (stage magicians, salespeople etc) study it and make use of it.
So you have open ended questions like "How was your day?" That could be a simple "Fine, thanks" through to a long conversation. You have closed questions like "Is your favourite colour red?" That's either a yes or a no.
Once you agree with someone over something, you're more likely to be agreeable to other suggestions. So you start off with "Do you have a minute?" - yes. So you're already opened up and more likely to be receptive to them.
Then they ask for a favour. If they just came up to you and said "can you pick up that dead lizard?" you might say no and walk away.
By you already stopping and acknowledging them, you're already more likely to assist. And they don't just ask you to pick up a dead lizard, they explain that they can't - they need *your* help.
Now you feel special, even subconsciously - wanted and appreciated - so you do the good deed.
That's the psychology behind it - it's not always planned out as intricately as that of course - I doubt the co-worker went through that line of reasoning in their head before asking.
These links may be of interest to you and somewhat related:
_URL_1_
_URL_2_
_URL_0_
A more comedic example (and a slight TL; DR) of leading questions and persuasion can be found here: _URL_3_
We learn this as kids in a very basic way:
"Mummy, I love you a lot can you buy me some chocolate?"
"Mummy" - get's mum's attention. "Yes?"
"I love you a lot" - comes out robotic but mothers are programmed to respond :D
"Can you buy me some chocolate?" - might still get a no, but more likely to say yes.
It's a form of bribery. Pay the compliment, Clean your room, Do the Dishes, then ask for the increase in allowance.
As we get older it becomes more subtle to the point of the OP - "Do you have a minute?" or "Hey how's it going?" - they don't expect an answer anything other than "yes" or "fine" but the underlying psychology is still that of a kid that wants chocolate (lizard removed).
OP talks about an "undeclinable request" - well, asking for someone to remove a dead lizard is very declinable, if they come up to you and just flat out ask. Put in the leading question at the start and it's a very different social dynamic. And it's something we learn as babies :)
HTH.
Source - I'm stoned.
EDIT: u/cat-penis also has a further explanation in his reply | 06daf2da-2e62-48e2-ac97-d8b5d8fa4b2e |
3k3n3t | The Maccabees | A rebellion against Greek rule by Jews in the 160s BC. The Greek king wanted to have a statue of himself in the Holy of Holies in the Tenple, the most holy place in Judaism. The Jewish population was having none of that, and managed to fight off the Greek king's army. A lantern in the Temple which was meant to never go out was running low on oil, and the remaining oil "miraculously" lasted 8 days when it should have lasted 1. This was the origin of Chanuka. | d58c4c3e-f6ac-4350-a0b6-033a5876035e |
29twb9 | What is the difference between cheap 35-49p energy drinks and red bull? | That brand costs a lot of money. They advertise the fuck out of their sugar water and sponsor crazy shit left and right.
In addition to that, RB charges more to keep the impression that the brand is better than others. There's really no reason it should cost any more than Coca Cola. | dec5bda9-8d72-4208-b7d9-4cf37d60142a |
8sfv9i | what does the symmetrical group of n letters (and more specifically the alternating group of n letters) actually mean? | Hey, I sent this to you as part of our message thread, but just in case anyone else wants to see it:
Okay, so we can start with symmetric groups. Let's say you have an ordered "tuple" of n things. We'll just use 3 for brevity. We can use symbols as the things:
(a, b, c)
A *permutation* over n things is just a function whose input is a tuple of size n (or an n-tuple) and whose output is another n-tuple where all the same symbols are there, but they can be in a different order.
The most basic permutation is the identity - given a tuple (a, b, c) it returns (a, b, c). Another permutation might reverse the order:
(a, b, c) - > (c, b, a).
There are n! possible permutations for an n-tuple. For 3, we have 3! = 6 permutations:
(a, b, c) - the identity
(a, c, b)
(b, a, c)
(b, c, a)
(c, a, b)
(c, b, a)
There are lots of ways to write permutations. Here's an example of a way. We can just write a list of numbers that shows what position each element ends up at. So the identity permutation on 3-tuples is [1, 2, 3] because the first element (a) goes to 1, and so forth. Using this notation, the list above is:
[1, 2, 3]
[1, 3, 2]
[2, 1, 3]
[3, 1, 2]
[2, 3, 1]
[3, 2, 1]
& nbsp;
So for the symmetric group. Recall that a group is just a collection of elements, with an operation (+), that satisfies the rules of being a group. These rules are
closure: if X and Y are in the group, X+Y is in the group
associativity: (X+Y)+Z = X+(Y+Z)
identity: the group has an element E such that X+E = E+X = X for all X in the group
inverse: Each element X has an element Y (sometimes written X^(-1)) such that X+Y = Y+X = E
& nbsp;
We can create a group *out of these 6 permutations* (for n = 3). The "+" operation is *composition*, which just means X + Y says you permute the list using Y first, then using X. So if we want to figure out what
[2, 1, 3] + [3, 2, 1]
is, we just do both permutations (starting with the one on the right). Starting with (a, b, c), we have
[3, 2, 1] maps (a, b, c) to *(c, b, a)*.
[2, 1, 3] maps *(c, b, a)* to (b, c, a)
(Italics just to show you that we took the output of the first permutation and used it as the input to the second one.)
So [2, 1, 3] + [3, 2, 1] is just the permutation that sends (a, b, c) to (b, c, a). Well we already know this one: we called it [3, 1, 2].
You can do the same thing for any pair of permutations f and g. f + g is just whatever permutation you end up with when you apply g to the tuple, then apply f to the resulting tuple.
I'll leave it up to you to convince yourself that this is really a group. You would need to show that the 4 group axioms (listed above) are satisfied. But it turns out they are.
So that's all the symmetric group is: it's a group of *permutation* elements which re-order tuples, combined with the *composition* operator which combines permutations.
& nbsp;
The alternating group of size n is a subset of the symmetric group of size n. It just contains all the permutations on n items which have a special property.
The property is that if you do the permutation, then count how many pairs of symbols are "out of order", this count is even. Let's look at an example on 4-tuples:
The permutation resulting in (b, a, d, c) is even, because
*a and b are out of order*
a and c are in order
a and d are in order
b and c are in order
b and d are in order
*c and d are out of order*
So two pairs are out of order, and that's an even number. Thus the permutation [2, 1, 4, 3] is even, and it is in the alternating group on 4 elements.
For 3 elements, the alternating group consists of 3 permutations (it's always half of the total possible permutations). Here are the resulting tuples from those 3 permutations:
(a, b, c) [0 pairs out of order]
(b, c, a) [2 pairs out of order: ac and ab]
(c, a, b) [2 pairs out of order: ac and bc]
(For bigger tuples, the symmetric group is more "complicated", in that it isn't always just "rotations" like we see here.)
It turns out that this subset of permutations is in fact a group, which again you may need to convince yourself of.
I know that's a lot but hopefully you can get comfortable with each step and build up to being comfortable with the end result. There's kind of no "short version" of these things, unfortunately. | 0e86d85f-80ff-4caf-9efc-f7aeabf173a2 |
4pqnan | How can dogs smell cancer? | The current theory is that cancer cells produce characteristic organic compounds which get into the bloodstream and are then also present in the patient's breath - only in tiny amounts, but enough to be detected by a dog's amazingly keen sense of smell.
Which compounds those are exactly is still being researched, in the hope of using the knowledge to produce test kits. | e73d5ddc-997d-4476-867b-2850b26a650f |
355r5m | Why does a multitool spin this funny way in zero gravity? | It's because the rotation about that axis is unstable, and small deviations quickly build until the pliers flip round. You can see the same effect if you throw a tennis racket in the air.
_URL_0_ | 72aefb67-de57-4479-9179-ffc88ed71cc0 |
1o8v1o | What does "force start" while using a torrent client actually accomplish? | In μTorrent at least, it means "Ignore download queue settings and start right now". For instance, if you have it set so no more than X torrents will be downloading at one time, the normal Start will respect that and put lower-priority torrents on hold. Force Start lets you override that setting temporarily for a particular torrent. It doesn't have any particular meaning in the Bittorrent protocol or anything, so it might mean different things from client to client. | 21e95042-ecce-43fe-8f58-14dd9097bece |
1sgh61 | Why can Putin openly introduce ridiculous legislation against LGBT groups, (teaching kids that gays dont exist) yet still retain global political integrity? | I don't think he has retained global integrity. But he is the leader of his own sovereign nation, so besides going to war or using diplomatic channels to persuade him, there is nothing we can do to actually stop him. | 5e16d6df-c182-4924-a927-beb2128a98f3 |
7ya00w | How can an area see very little rainfall but also see quite a bit of snowfall. | Several things to consider here. One is that an inch of rain can be a foot of snow. So if you get a couple of 10ths inch of rain, this could translate into several inches of snow. Another thing is that some places get rain seasonally. It may never rain in July and August, but maybe May gets most of the rain. The reason for this is different for different areas.
Arizona rain, for instance, doesn't usually fall Jan to May, and May and early June typically have some of the highest temps. June and July bring the monsoon rains, which means cloudy days reduce the chance for those 115F days. If this rain fell in central AZ during the winter, it could easily come down as snow. | 52b63f05-823b-428d-a5f8-cc9897081b6f |
1xwona | If radiation kills cells, and cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, then why does high-volume radiation cause cancer? | Radiation causes damage to the DNA. At a low enough dose, it will simply damage the DNA but allow the cell to live. In this case, the cell could then develop cancerous properties due to the damaged DNA, and before you know it you have cancer. | 493b05c4-22d1-4ceb-8552-6f1be677db4b |
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