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4k28a5 | Why some frequently occuring diseases like psoriasis are still incurable? | In order to cure a disease, you need to be able to (generally speaking):
* Know what causes it and how that process or processes get started and progress
* Be able to design some kind of agent that will reliably stop that process
* Have that agent not cause worse effects than the original disease
* Have there be a big enough motivation to spend either public or private funds on achieving the above steps.
You can see how in all of these there can be problems. For example, we know what causes the common cold (it's a virus infecting our nose and throat). However, we haven't invented a reliable way to stop this viral infection that wouldn't put patients at risk more than the actual disease will.
In the case of psoriasis, it's most likely what is known as an auto-immune disease, meaning it's caused when something triggers our immune system to start attacking our own body tissues. There are a bunch of different autoimmune diseases...Type 1 Diabetes involves the immune system attacking the cells of the pancreas; MS involves the immune system attacking neurons in the brain, etc. The problem is we don't know exactly why the immune cells go haywire in the first place, and figuring out a way to reprogram the entire system back to normal is really, really difficult.
Most of the therapies we have are basically designed to suppress the whole immune system, so that it attacks our own tissues with less force. The problem then is obviously that it makes it hard for the immune system to do what it's supposed to do, which is attack infections.
People are working on research to only kill the specific immune cells that have gone "bad", but it's slow going and it takes a long time to figure these things out, especially since our understanding of these fields is pretty new. | 0c9c6022-b950-4ea6-bed6-0ba15bc1a699 |
2s4blf | How are serving sizes on nutritional labels determined, and why are they often so much lower than a realistic amount that most people would consume? | They are arbitrary. They are just used so you have a reference for the nutrition label.
The smaller the serving, the healthier you food looks to unobservant consumers. | f75de389-b7b0-4195-8186-00ebcd18b4df |
6cbogt | Newtons Law of Cooling/Microwaves | A quick look at [the Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) reveals this quote:
> Finally, in the case of heat transfer by thermal radiation, Newton's law of cooling is not true
This is the key. A microwave doesn't work by just adding ambient heat to food through conduction and convection. Microwaves are a form electromagnetic radiation which deliver heat energy to the food by vibrating chemical bonds in molecules such as water. This can be done very quickly. | 103017c4-8bf7-4ddd-abae-a3aaa6ceb379 |
5j3qz0 | Goosebumps, what the heck are they? | Goosebumps is a series of children's horror fiction novellas by American author R. L. Stine, published by Scholastic Publishing. The stories follow child characters, who find themselves in scary situations; usually involving monsters and other supernatural elements. From 1992 to 1997, 62 books were published under the Goosebumps umbrella title. Various spin-off series were written by Stine: Goosebumps Series 2000, Give Yourself Goosebumps, Tales to Give You Goosebumps, Goosebumps Triple Header, Goosebumps HorrorLand, and Goosebumps Most Wanted. Another series, Goosebumps Gold, was never released. Goosebumps has spawned a television series and merchandise, as well as a feature film, starring Jack Black. | c9893d93-b0c9-42b0-a5bb-530ebf80b1f7 |
3impw7 | Is there a reason why various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linked In, etc.) use blue as their theme color? | You may want to take this answer with a pinch of salt because I'm not 100% sure, But I would imagine the reason why is because certain colours can physiologically change your view on things.
The colour blue is known to give a more calming, trust worthy view. I recommend reading up on [this](_URL_0_) it goes deeper into the effects of colours on our brains. its a very i interesting read! | 5eadead5-fdb8-4f90-8fd7-d09b3fcf7ac6 |
2sqrm0 | Would there be any way to "improve" the internet if we could start it all over? | Tons of stuff we could improve on.
For starters, the early days of the internet were like a small, rural community where nobody locks their cars or homes. Many of the protocols rely on a fundamentally high level of trust.
We could build encryption into everything. We could build out the email system in such a way that servers *don't* implicitly trust the sender to tell the truth about where the mail is coming from. We could improve DNS to include public keys. We could build some sort of trusted identity service into the protocols.
We could scrap the web and start from scratch with a system that's cleanly designed to do what we actually want with it. The browser was originally designed to handle static pages with a few pictures & it's become a graphical, dynamic platform for thin-client applications. HTTP is a horribly inefficient protocol that we could replace with SPDY or something similar. We could build a sane HTML/CSS replacement. We could standardized on something more well thought out than Javascript for client-side scripting. We'd be able to give browsers & servers WebSocket-like functionality that's not just a hacked-on afterthought.
We could probably make some big improvements to TCP/IP as well. Starting with IPv6 addressing & probably building the system around jumbo (or larger) frames that make sense on today's high speed networks.
If you wanted to be *really* forward looking, you'd probably design a protocol for communicating with other planets that didn't require a full handshake & frequent acknowledgement of received packets. If you're transmitting data over interstellar distances, a 30-minute round-trip time really gets in the way of things. | dea2a00c-8f4e-420e-a399-04c5405a469b |
30xfhy | when you have x^3, you can "explode" this out into x * x * x. What is happening when you take a root? Is there any way to "explode" that? | Ish. You can view x*x*x as x^1 * x^1 * x^1. Since sqrt(x) is x^0.5, you can do the same thing, as long as all the powers sum to 0.5, like so: x^0.5 = x^0.25 * x^0.25, or x^0.5 = x^1 * x^-0.5 | 1427e697-b72a-4196-b1f6-bc4f7ac295b1 |
3wf38r | why does ice stick to an empty cup when you're trying to get it in your mouth? | When the ice cube melts, some water will stay surrounding the cube, "connecting" it to the cup, sorta like a vaccum. | 087488ec-91a8-416d-a56a-8a383a9da7f1 |
6p3ahg | Why do DVD menus loop so poorly? | In the DVD menus the DVD players have to move back to the starting point to re-read the video, and so there is a gap where it is moving the disk.
sorry about my last comment i didn't quite understand what you were asking. | f3fc8b56-5845-4c3a-9152-32d34d190769 |
2xrf0m | Why do we make fun of France so much? | We make fun of them because we can't really control them. Britain will do whatever we say so they're our besties. France is like that cool kid who generally hangs out with you but sometimes makes you look like a complete dick by calling you out just when you think you've got the gang worshipping you. | 6d816260-13ee-4bc3-bb4e-bc4fb566a773 |
zw0cs | How does Cable-Modem "Turboboost" work? | In typical Internet use, most things that are transmitted down the wire to your computer are very small. Like this web page, for example. It contains a few bytes of text, and several image files that are themselves just a few bytes.
A common service offering from Internet providers is to give you *considerably* more bandwidth — in terms of bits delivered to your computer per second — for the first however-many bytes of any given data transfer, then throttle that transfer back for all the subsequent bytes to be delivered.
This is good for most people, because most of the things transferred to your computer are sufficiently small that they come entirely at that higher initial rate of data transfer. It's only when you try to get a big collection of bytes all in one go — like a movie trailer, say — that you notice the throttling.
It sounds like in your case it's based on time rather than on bytes, but the principle remains the same. | d9b2ce33-aa14-4c56-b47a-78821534aa0c |
1ik8at | What are Bayesian Statistics, and how are they used to filter spam? | Bayes theorem is a simple equation in probability theory that basically lets you calculate how likely a hypothesis based on how much evidence it has and it's prior probability.
A naive bayesian classifier is a type of machine learning algorithm that uses this equation to try to figure out the probability that a message is spam or not spam given a bunch of it's features. It starts out with a bunch of examples of messages which are spam and some which are not spam. Then when it looks at a message which it's unsure about, it compares it to them.
For example, say 70% of messages are spam. So it starts with a 70% probability that the given message is spam. Now maybe 5% of spam messages contain the word "sale" but only 1% or legit messages.
So it knows that, out of a 1000 messages, 700 are spam, 300 are not. Of those 700, 5% of them, or 35 will contain the word "sale". Of the 300 not spam messages, 1%, or 3, will contain that word.
If the message has the word sale, it has to be in one of those groups. Out of 38 messages that contain that word (out of a thousand), 35 will be spam. That is about 92% of them, meaning this message has a 92% chance of being spam.
Now it does the same thing with other words and features, except instead of starting with a 70% probability that it is spam, it starts with a 92% chance that it is spam. If it contains other words like "blowout" or "order now" that are more commonly found in spam than in not-spam messages, it will increase the probability that it is spam. If eventually it estimates it at a higher than 99% probability that it is spam (or 99.99% or whatever you choose), it will throw it into a spam folder.
You can also use this with other features, not just words. Like the length of the message, or the number of links in it, etc. The point is to find things that are more or less likely to be found in a message that is spam than a message that is not spam. | 635eba61-68eb-47ec-8d0b-85194978fe4c |
58zgsw | What would the US have to do to revert back to a no political party system? | There is no way. Political parties are not part of the government. They are a group of like-minded people who decided the best way to get what they want is to unite behind a single nominee. Political parties are a natural result of our freedom to assemble. Dissolving them would be a violation of the First Amendment. Even if we did dissolve them, people would just make parties again, unless we somehow made it illegal to meet with others, discuss politics, and agree on stuff.
If we did that, it's not really the US anymore so no, there's no way. | 0ccd72a1-13ea-48bd-8272-58d68a4db1b3 |
642848 | Why haven't the USA and Russia ever gone to war? | Generally, a country will only choose to go to war if they believe that the benefits of winning are worth the losses they will take getting that victory. The thing about the Cold War is that there were very few upsides to any potential conflict and a mountain of downsides. | e8881626-824d-4dec-90b4-b94b2f8e443d |
73ps79 | Why does alcohol on an open wound hurt extremely bad the first time, but no pain if poured on seconds later? | The same reason you aren't constantly aware of the smell of a room or the feeling of clothes on your body: sensory adaptation. The first time you feel it, it's fresh, but past that, it stops being a new sensation and so your nerves stop sending out signals about it. | 82e570b6-b30f-4de3-839c-db1fc0044884 |
53pxy1 | how life was created, how seemingly inert atoms formed what we are today, these weird organic creatures with sentience | Those atoms aren't inert.
They react with other atoms, attaching and detaching from each other, requiring energy, releasing energy, etc. All life depends on chemical actions to function. Life is a natural extension of a chemically reactive environment. | bbb21c40-fae6-41fb-b317-44f7a14e4d90 |
2mhxcu | In this 2012 satellite photo of Berlin, you can distinguish West and East Berlin by the tone of the street lights. Why? | The East and West used different types of lights, and there's no reason to tear down perfectly good lights that are only a few decades old. | 7ff43706-5583-497e-ab61-5b6d8fc532fd |
1y9oi4 | Why are e-cigarettes bans becoming widespread BEFORE any conclusive studies have been done on their safety? How can you ban something that is not well understood? | It's an idea called the "precautionary principle." It says that the burden to prove safety---once there's some reason to doubt whether something is safe---is on the group that wants to introduce something, rather than on the population. The fear is that allowing widespread use of potentially dangerous things creates incentives to downplay risks and hoodwink people into underestimating dangers until the new things becomes too ingrained to easily ban/limit.
Obviously, there are significant costs to this approach in terms of missed opportunity and limited choices. But it's an idea that has many supporters, particularly in areas where there is a possibility of addiction. | 38380edd-996c-4ab5-95bf-891ab1781e4e |
416yuj | is an animal being turned on its back the equivalent to a human being held upside down? | Not really. The main problem with turning human beings upside down is one of gravity and circulation. The human body is designed to be vertical or horizontal. Valves in the veins are designed to assist blood return from the lower body back to the heart. Between heartbeats, as gravity pulls blood downward, the valves close and blood stays there until another heartbeat pushes it higher. There is no need for such valves in the veins above the heart.
So when a human body is held upside down blood goes to the head and gravity continues to pull it downward away from the heart. There are no valves in the veins to resist gravity so when the heart is at rest, you get retrograde flow of blood back toward the head. This causes a buildup of blood and pressure in the upper body, which eventually will start to impair brain function or a clot is more likely to form and obstruct bloodflow even further.
Most animals are longer laterally than they are tall. So simply flipping a dog, cat or turtle upside down does not change its hemodynamic status very much. Just as there is not much difference in bloodflow in a human if he lays on his back or his stomach. | a735361d-4ed6-4df0-823c-6f02ca9212c1 |
2odbj1 | What is the science behind TNT Pop-Its (Snap Bags)? What makes them explode when you throw them at something? | Inside the tiny bag is ~99.99% gravel or sand, the other 0.01% is a chemical called silver fulminate. It's a highly unstable chemical that ignites under any sort of friction ( by dropping, squeezing, or stepping on it). When the chemical ignites it creates a shockwave that travels faster than the speed of sound and that's where the "snap" sound comes from (kind of like how a whip makes its noise). This shockwave is extremely weak and that's why you can pop one in your hand and it wont hurt. | a04f5a62-deb3-403e-a515-62e855fcc345 |
1rfub2 | Why Israel does not like the Iran nuclear deal? | It's simple: they know Iran is full of shit. | a76869c7-19d6-400e-a907-bffd960069ed |
7zr390 | The weird noise your eyes make sometimes when you blink, what is it? | It’s the tensor tympani muscle in your middle ear contracting. It’s sort of like the muscle pressing against the hearing bones in your ear creating a whooshing or rumbling sound | cb40b43d-9118-4b79-8dae-272cda2cc625 |
5qnvp9 | Why does time asleep feel the exact same whether it's four or eight or ten hours? | I believe it has something to do with the fact that you are not conciscious when asleep, and thus any kind of recollection of elapsed time is beyond what you're brain had been doing while asleep. | 9ff227e9-a6b8-45d9-b745-0a54ad70f599 |
3f7v4y | Red Cross told me my blood is super special because I am O-Negative, and CMV-Negative, and my 5 units of blood helped save premature babies, what is CMV-Negative, and why does it help premature babies? | Cytomegalovirus negative. It's a very common viral infection that normally doesn't produce any symptoms. However, it can be dangerous towards immunocompromised patients and can cause liver failure. By not having it you can't expose it to the premature babies, which have weakened immune systems. This reduces their chances of infection, which is good for obvious reasons. | e7ff8641-cf1f-41b9-bdcf-720be0ddd28f |
sitw3 | How does Reddit make money? | Advertisement (as AlxeYo pointed out, you might have an ad-blocker on), sponsored links, and reddit gold. | 8712d88e-6b5a-4121-96ce-0faee5764c93 |
qwg1o | why we can secure banking/investment accts online but we can't secure voting | The requirements are different.
Most importantly, banking information needs to be tied to the person making the transaction. If any inconsistencies come up they need to be able to make sure they have enough identification information to trace the transactions back to the person who made them.
This is exactly the opposite in voting. Voting has to be anonymous. Having anonymous voting but still being able to trace the inconsistencies back is a trickier problem. It's not impossible tho.
The real big issue is that an election screwing up and a country having a tyrant running it who is willing to fix an election to win is far, far worse than any loss of money a bank might suffer. Electronic elections software has way more riding on it than banking software. | 1a623708-a58b-4f9c-8fa2-68c3280b3f66 |
5ks3zv | How does Netflix make money on original programming? | Netflix is paying its rent with member subscriptions. Whatever keeps folks paying $/month will drive their decision making. By whatever logic, they've determined the most folks are willing to pay is $8-12/month. That means the only way they can increase profits is to make money elsewhere or lower costs.
Since folks come back for the content, they have to keep making/renting more. Most of this is through purchasing broadcast licenses. Right now they're showing Civil War. Someone at Netflix brokered a deal with Disney for the streaming rights. Disney knows that Netflix users REALLY want that movie, and not having it devalues the Netflix subscription. This puts Netflix at a disadvantage for negotiation purposes, as they'll have to pay more for it.
When their license ends, they'll have to go through the whole song and dance again to get another round of rights. For every movie anyone puts out.
Conversely, if Netflix makes it's own content they can keep the rights indefinitely. No more negotiation. If they have to spend $1mil on overhead costs just to pay for the lawyers and negotiating team to fuck around with Disney to still get stuck paying $200mil for the rights to show Civil War for a couple of months, eventually you have to wonder if someone can knock out a season of Daredevil for less than $200mil that you keep forever. Bonus points if you get to beat Disney up for Daredevil merchandising rights.
Also, look at their production costs for early seasons of House of Cards. Most of that first season is shot in generic offices, homes, and landscapes. The script was innovative, no "real" network wanted to touch it because it was a risk. Sure the writing was really great, but bigger networks could make safer money on another round of Law & Order. Netflix took the gamble, spent the money on Kevin Spacey and saved on set design and special effects.
Consider the rest of the Netflix shows. Most of them are relatively low budget, and spend their budget very wisely. House of Cards NEEDS a good anchor, so you get Kevin Spacey. Daredevil's powers are mostly invisible. You save money not rendering lazer blasts and spend the cash on a good stunt team in glorified workout gear. Orange is the New Black, you commit to building key rooms of the jail and use the shit out of them. Higher startup costs, but once you have the set, Season 2 is cheaper than Episode 1. And again, drama drives the show, not special effects.
This also doesn't include product placement. If your characters drive a car, use a computer, or dress fancy, Ford, Apple, and Ralph Lauren would like to influence their purchasing decisions. Not all programs lend themselves to product placement, and not all directors can do it in a way that isn't horrible, but it is a great way to subsidize production costs. | 7b56b2e0-2fca-4571-88bb-d2e98385585b |
3pkl6n | If Stephen Colbert is so marketable and millions of people watch Jimmy Fallon clips on YouTube, then why don't the networks move their shows to prime time? | these shows win against nothing. would people tune in every night when its up against football, voice, ncis, ect ect? I think they would struggle to garner as many viewers in primetime. | 7b53fa51-dff9-463e-b34c-c4daa58f8735 |
1iqt9g | Relativity | First off, relativity is hard. It screws with everything you know, it makes distances shorter and time longer and things heavier.
Basically all Einstein saw was that the speed of light was always the same. Now, that's pretty weird if you think about it. If I throw a ball at you with 30 km/h, you see it coming with 30 km/h. If I'm also running towards you at 10 km/h, you see the ball coming with 40 km/h and if I'm running away from you at 10 km/h, you see the ball coming with 20 km/h. So far, so good. Now, light is different. If I shine a beam of light at you, you think it has the speed of light. Duh. If I also move towards you at half the speed of light, how fast is the beam to you? *still the speed of light*. Our universe just works that way.
Now, that just can't work normally. Einstein said "you know, if this really works that way and physics still applies here (conservation of energy and other things must still be true), then we must probably have the following other effects:". So it's just a rigorous derivation based on an observation, namely that light always travels at the same speed. All these effects concern objects in motion.
How he derived these effects can't be explained to a five-year old, here's just an overview:
*You can't go faster than the speed of light. Ever. You can only get really, really close to it.
*The following effects depend on the viewer. That means that something can be heavier to someone and lighter to someone else, and both are still correct.
*If you observe something fast, it appears heavier.
*If you observe something fast, it appears shorter.
*If you observe something fast, time seems to pass slower there. A clock on a fast spaceship seems to run slower than one right next to you.
Now, these effects only appear when you get close to the speed of light, that's why we notice nothing of them in everyday life: We're just too slow. If you're into formulas, they all scale with the term 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) (type it into WolframAlpha to have a neat formatting), where v is the speed of the object in question and c is the speed of light. For instance, a moving object's mass is its "rest mass" (mass it would have if it stood still) multiplied with this term. If you analyze this term, it's very close to one if v is small. If you accelerate to one hundredth of the speed of light, the term is 1.005, so you get 0.5% heavier and shorter. One hundreth of the speed of light is insanely fast, though. | b3e5a359-2852-4c8d-8691-92204e2f7ae0 |
mavma | Christopher Nolan's movie, "The Prestige" | Eek - this is a tough one... I had to watch the movie twice to have it make sense...
The Christian Bale character was actually a set of twins, but no one ever knew it - not even his wife. They take turns dressing as the assistant throughout the entire movie.
One of the twins was in love with the wife, the other was in love with Scarlett Johansen's character.
Hugh Jackman spends the entire movie trying to figure out how to copy Bale's signature move, and eventually turns to "science" as a way to do that. Eventually, he gets it to work, and kills off one of his clones every night. Besides trying to figure that out, he also blames Bale's character for the death of his wife, and all of the trauma drives him insane.
In the end, he uses the clone machine to frame Bale's character for his murder. He then goes on a mission to destroy his life, and Bale's character is hanged for murder.
The end shows the assistant leaving with the little girl, but he is actually one of the twins. | 86652663-92da-4ea5-b4ca-ba02bd9cb04c |
4o7i1u | How is that the colors we see organize into a repetitive pattern (ROYGBIVROY...) while their physical wavelengths are linear (390-700nm)? | The issue is wavelength doesn't define color. Photons can be any single wavelength, but our eyes sense the number of red, blue and green photons (there is lots of overlap), so a single wavelength light will be one color, such as red, green or blue, that doesn't cover what you get when you have two different wavelengths at the same time. So Red and Green light added
together is yellow, and your eye can't tell the difference between that and single wavelength yellow (since both cases are just equal amounts of red and green excitation of your eye.
The special case is purple, that is red and blue without green, on the EM spectrum halfway between red and blue is green, but if you actually mix red and blue you see [purple](_URL_1_), this color is not on the EM spectrum and does not correspond to any single wavelength. It is different because your eye can distinguish red+blue+green and red+blue without green.
To cover all the colors a human can see you need a [2D plane](_URL_0_), they don't map to a line. | 9ff9e6a4-3584-4310-bbcb-ba323fae4364 |
7ulcoc | Why can we see the xenon atoms in the IBM logo but not the atoms of the surface they're on? | For the same reason that you can't clearly see objects far behind the subject of a photograph. The background is not in focus. That is a simplified explanation, but basically still true. | ddc4cb30-1483-47b0-abea-528ac9c7502b |
1yyltw | What would happen to the United States if China called the debt to be paid in full within 12 months? | the debt is in bonds. which have a set maturity schedule. the bond holder doesn't get to dictate the terms. only the bond creator does. | 25f24827-ab9e-4118-b229-3318fad607a7 |
8mdhd4 | What exactly happens to your debt when you die. Who is left unpaid? | All assets are usually frozen. The executor to the estate that is assigned by the state (usually identified in the will) must, by law, pay off all debt before any inheritance is given out. If no money or assets are left in the estate, the unpaid folks are out of luck ! | 72f1a9ad-6600-47db-9514-b7ad1c646458 |
3mic4f | Why hasn't NSA's "Prism" database been hacked? | A common feature of secure cross network scenarios is a 'data diode' which literally only allows data to pass on one direction.
So even if some hacky malware does manage to get through to the secure system there is absolutely no way for it to send anything back. | f61aaf1e-dc8c-4c8f-8632-a5f56c04763b |
5qkjw7 | Why can't huge companies like Google and YouTube beat ad blockers? | Ad blockers work in one of two ways.
* The "Take it and dump it" method.
* The "Refuse to ask for it" method.
The majority of ad blockers work on the "Refuse to ask for it" method.
Basically when a page is loaded, your ad blocker consults a list of known ad serving addresses to check if the content loading on a page is part of an advert (Most adverts are loaded from third party domains). It also consults an algorithm to check if something on a page could be an advert (For example most adverts come in industry standardized width and heights in pixels) and for locations on the page it suspects might be an advert. It will also examine the cookies being placed on your PC by the site.
Once the ad blocker has examined the page and determined what is and is not an advert, it will continue to request the bits of the page that is not advertising (Such as photos and images that belong to the sites design), and not request any of the advert components of the page (Like advert graphics/audio, cookies), which it then hides from the sites design so it doesn't look funny. This saves you loading times and bandwidth.
Unfortunately, the developers of the site can write detection routines using Javascript to detect that your adblocker has not requested say for example, the graphic of an advert on the page or other advertising components. This is how they detect you are blocking ads and how those annoying "We know you are blocking our adverts, will you please reconsider?" messages appear.
To prevent this, the other method of blocking ads can be used. The "Take it and dump it" method downloads everything, adverts, advertising cookies, the whole lot. However once they have downloaded to your computer, the ad blocker then deletes them almost immediately and carries on hiding them from the page. Though you still do not see the adverts, this is much slower as it still has to download all the advertising components of the page.
It is however, nearly undetectable by the site operator. The reason it is not used more frequently at the moment is because it's often more liable to break the working of the site, can sometimes be functionally messy and at the moment, it hasn't yet hit the point where they have to resort to this method so the bandwidth savings are worth it. Detecting ad blockers requires some considerable input and at this point the arms race hasn't yet got to that stage.
There is actually something of a cold war armaments race going on between the developers of ad driven sites and ad blocking software developers. As ways are found to beat the ad blocker, the ad blocker is updated, repeat, repeat, repeat.
In the end though, it's always going to be a lose for the ad companies because an ad blocker when given total control of a browsers output, it's always going to win. The ad companies just don't have that much control over your browser. To that end, it's likely online advertising is going to change or the paywall is going to become more common in the future. | fc92e0f2-2806-4949-a973-149a45eb3e0f |
1pw0pu | What would happen to the human body if it got exposed to the extreme pressures of the deep ocean? | rapid compression.
if I had to guess... and this is a guess, your body would quickly fill less tightly filled spaces within itself. (intestines, heart, lungs, ears.
rapid outgassing via anus, rapid color change of your skin almost akin to when you open a compressed water bottle and it makes condensation. like a flash, all your blood vessels etc would adjust.
Not sure what color you would turn though, probably first white then red due to lots of vessels rupturing during the pressure adjustment.
I would assume death would be in a matter of seconds.
In other words very very uncomfortable. | f98cdfa6-387a-46fd-a413-6756e6fdc1fc |
2d9bpw | . How does a knife cut through stuff | Every material has some amount of stress it can absorb before it gives way. Knives create a lot of stress by taking the force you apply and putting it in a very small surface area. | 99960be5-8cd1-4ca6-9cec-ce63beb90da2 |
1r9t5s | Why does everybody with Down's Syndrome look alike | Because those facial features are a symptom of Down's Syndrome. | 78472bb0-d3f5-474e-ba60-141ef81bb9ea |
8g8gcb | Why do parents need to force their children to eat? | It's not about forcing them to eat. It about forcing them to ready right. Left up to children they will eat only candy and snacks. That's why parents want their kids to eat all their actual food on their plate (veggies and grains) before letting them go and eating dessert. The fact that some parents over proportion is unrelated. | d7d51d6a-d583-48ca-a95d-fe7a3785e6aa |
1ujkop | why does it sting when I put my contacts in if I haven't slept much /well? | Eye gunk (Rheum) is kinda floating around our eyes while we sleep. When we first wake up, it takes some time/binking for that to go into the corners of our eyes which we end up wiping away. Putting contacts in shortly after waking up, this stuff gets stuck behind the contacts and irritates the eyes... Actually I have no idea why even if this explanation counts for anything... its only a bit of the explanation... (must be more blood flow in the eyes, making them more sensitive or something) I just hate putting my contacts in after not much sleep. Contacts/eyes suck.
TR;DL: This is a useless explanation....why am I typing right now?
Source: I wear contacts. | a59cd2db-5386-4062-9544-888d010d9bf1 |
1idx6q | What does the three-body problem mean? | It's just an interaction involving three objects.
The Earth orbiting the sun (if we forget about all the other planets, moons, etc) is a two-body problem.
But if we lived in a binary star system, it would be a three-body problem. Two suns and a planet all orbiting their collective center of mass.
The third body adds significant complications to the mathematics involved with calculating the equations of motion for the objects. | f22bcdf2-9377-470e-9d30-042de849c6b0 |
38bzyf | Chapter 11 bankruptcy. How do companies stay in business and recover when they have no money? | Chapter 11 and chapter 7 are very different. Chapter 7 is game over, sell off everything, pay whatever debts you can from the sale of assets.
Chapter 11 might be a temporary crunch. For example, an oil company in Texas has sold 1 billion dollars of oil to Japan. It takes 1 month for the super tanker to go from Houston to Tokyo, payment won't be made until the tanker actually offloads in Tokyo.
In the mean time, a bill for 500 million is due. You will have the money in 30 days, just not today. The creditors want payment now. Chapter 11 lets you renegotiate the terms of the payment.
Maybe renegotiate the terms of the loans you've taken. Stuff like that. It's common known as a reorganization bankruptcy. | 6a1934b1-015e-4aca-a671-a95dc02b81d7 |
35ehrr | Why does Israel continue to build/expand settlements in Palestinian lands despite international condemnation? | Cause it does not care.
It gets the USA to veto any action against it at the UN. The P5 countries: US/RUSSIA/CHINA/UK/FRANCE can put a magic veto on any action they don't like against a country they support. So the UN has really no power at all, just puppet bullshit and more money wasting. The are also the biggest weapons dealers in the world BTW
Pretty much the same way Israel has nuclear weapons, still gets tons of money from the USA (which is illegal, can't give aid to nuclear armed countries) AND still tells Iran they can't have nuclear, although they themselves did not sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty AND do not let the UN/International agency inspect their nuclear installations (pretends they don't have any weapons
and if you think Israel is doing anything wrong you are a Nazi anti-semite. | cfd58e8c-f599-4c34-8d7e-84f0717ecbdf |
ofeiq | Why is Friday the 13th unlucky? | "Consequently, several theories have been proposed about the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition.
One theory states that it is a modern amalgamation of two older superstitions: that thirteen is an unlucky number and that Friday is an unlucky day.
In numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the twelve months of the year, twelve hours of the clock, twelve gods of Olympus, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles of Jesus, the 12 Descendants of Muhammad Imams, etc., whereas the number thirteen was considered irregular, transgressing this completeness. There is also a superstition, thought by some to derive from the Last Supper or a Norse myth, that having thirteen people seated at a table will result in the death of one of the diners.
Friday has been considered an unlucky day at least since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales,[3] and many other professions have regarded Friday as an unlucky day to undertake journeys or begin new projects. Black Friday has been associated with stock market crashes and other disasters since the 1800s.[6][7] It has also been suggested that Friday has been considered an unlucky day because, according to Christian scripture and tradition, Jesus was crucified on a Friday...
The connection between the Friday the 13th superstition and the Knights Templar was popularized in the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. However, experts agree that this is a relatively recent correlation, and most likely a modern-day invention. Although according to many Freemasons, this date corresponds with the slaughtering of the Knights Templar by the Church."
[wiki source](_URL_0_) | f02a8768-9185-4d96-a509-e367ebefe3aa |
3b5d5e | How do wild animals know to not drink salt water? | it doesn't taste as good as fresh water. that's the same reason you wouldn't drink it if no one taught you. | 38a0aa7d-ccca-44c8-ad82-5e5a769a2582 |
3tirbg | Why do people have a hard time with public speaking? | Worry too much about how people are judging them and less on the subject matter being delivered.
Confidence is just a nice word for giving less of a crap about what other people think about you. | 3f7dd87d-3e44-4586-8da9-46e5a631ae2b |
1irgse | Why does acne hurt, and what is the actual white puss from? | The acne hurts from the inflammation. The majority of puss is actually not dirt or dead bacteria. It is your own white blood cells (mostly neutrophils). | b5df4091-85b0-44ae-ae41-c3d0482d94d4 |
3w2d88 | If a women drugs and rapes a man then becomes pregnant, can she be forced to undergo an abortion? | Of course not. Why would you think this? | 9ce19c9a-55f3-47e1-88c7-3684bde8e29b |
2q71gr | What it would take to shut down the internet in the US | Every country has an equivalent of the UKs peering points provided by "telehouse" and "telecity". This is where Internet providers connect to each other, and to international carriers who in turn connect to other Internet providers. The US will likely have many of these, so in order to stop all Internet traffic from the US you'd have to take out these peering points.
Edit: Grammar | 801a578c-756e-4b1e-8b06-48f6f12a708f |
80zhf5 | How does gas compression work? Highschool chemistry taught me that various states of matter are the same thing just molecularly tighter. Why is a compressed gas not just liquid? | Super compressed gas *does* become a liquid for most gasses (though I think a few gasses like hydrogen get kinda funky there instead). Compressing gasses brings the molecules closer together, but most gasses need to be compressed quite a bit (or cooled down a lot, or some combination of both) before they actually transition to a liquid phase.
Check out "phase diagrams" when you get a chance, they show the combinations of temperature and pressure for a given material where the material is a gas, liquid, or solid and can help you to see where things will switch from one to another. | cde2d570-4d2d-479b-a519-34673463ff13 |
2qszgr | How does the box office work? For example Interstellar cost 165m to make but it only grossed 173m. How in the world does a cast get paid with 8m? | Also worth noting that the profits from a movie don't end after a month of release. DVD sales, rentals, licensing agreements with streaming services etc all create revenue after the initial release of a movie. | 63e18082-09fc-4880-9c11-8ee189496a16 |
6veyfw | If your eyes don't have pain receptors, why does it hurt to look at the sun? | It is incorrect to suggest eyes don't have pain receptors. Some structures in the eye can be among the most sensitive to pain. The retina itself may not react to damage, but there are cells in it which (While photosensitive) are not used in vision. Instead, it appears some of these cells function to stimulate the trigeminal nerve, creating the sensation of discomfort. In fact, even in blind people photophobic (light avoiding) behavior can be stimulated, such as responses in the iris. This may also be why closing one eye reduces the discomfort, as you are effectively reducing the signal. | d3e432fe-3871-498a-8081-d4302b3c023a |
2i930r | If I drink half of a Five Hour Energy, will I have half the energy for five hours or the "full" amount of energy for 2.5 hours? | There are multiple active ingredients in the stuff. Each of them has a curve that initially goes up relatively quickly and then fades slowly as your body processes it.
If you take half, the strength of those curves cut, but they are not squashed in the time dimension.
That said, it takes a lot longer than 5 hours for it to be 100% out of your system. The "effectiveness" ends when the strength falls below a certain threshold. With a lower dose, that would happen sooner.
So, it would be weaker at its peak _and_ not last as long. | 06870a54-8809-455f-9719-d669a8c98be6 |
11zc25 | What is quantum tunneling and how does it work in stars? | Things at subatomic scales are a lot fuzzier than things at everyday scales. You might visualize electrons and protons as little balls at definite positions in space moving in definite directions, but understand that this is only a conceptual model. They aren't actually like this. Electrons aren't balls. Neither are protons and neutrons.
Instead, these particles are actually clouds.^1 Can you say that a cloud is in a certain place or that it's moving in a certain way? Clouds change shape in weird ways, right? They might move with the wind, or they might spread out. The point (no pun intended) is that they don't really have a definite position and velocity. Subatomic particles are the same way. In a sense. They're also *not* like clouds in some ways. The most significant way in which they're not like clouds is that an electron "cloud" (i.e. one electron) is really a cloud of where the electron could be *if* we were to observe it.
Imagine that we have a fog machine inside an office cubicle. You turn the fog machine on for a few seconds, and the cubicle housing it fills with gas. If the dividers separating this cubicle from its neighbours are short, then quite a bit of the gas will seep into the cubicles next to this one. If the dividers are tall, less gas will get into the neighbouring cubicles. If the dividers are *really* tall, very little gas will escape into other cubicles. But some surely will. Now imagine that this gas is an electron cloud. Remember, this electron cloud represents all the possible locations an electron could be in if we were to observe it. Because there is a lot more gas in this cubicle (the one with the fog machine), we are bound to observe the electron in this cubicle 9999 times out of 10000. But there is still some amount of gas in the neighbouring cubicle, even with the seemingly impassable divider. Thus we will sometimes observe the electron in that cubicle, so it seems as if the electron that was in the cubicle with the fog machine has "tunneled through" the divider.
I'll let someone else take a stab at its significance in stars.
1. This, too, is a bit of useful fiction. It's a somewhat moot question to ask what they "really" are, as we can't exactly use our senses to directly observe them. A combination of analogies to everyday phenomena and mathematical descriptions of their behaviour is the most accurate way to understand them. | 7b966f85-67cf-4e0e-a7c0-9cbc9f357d52 |
653yex | How do physicists transform observation into formulas? Isn't there a chance they aren't accurate, precise, valid or reliable? | The easiest way to support the accuracy of a formula is to make the dataset larger, or in other words take thousands upon thousands of observations. Computers can tell you the probability of your data just *happening* to follow your formula randomly, and when that probability gets suitably small (most commonly under 5%, though it can be even smaller) we say the theory is supported by the observations.
So yes there's a chance that a particular formula is wrong, but a very small one. What does happen sometimes is that we're limited to making formulas for things we can more easily observe -- for example velocities seem to add (like, I throw a ball from a train so the speed of the ball = throw speed + train speed, right?), but actually they don't and that addition is just an *approximation* of the real formula for calculating speed, which gets more different near the speed of light.
Also it's important to note that a large chunk of physics is done on the chalkboard, not in a lab. We start with some basic things we observe, like the speed of light is constant everywhere, and then use math to derive a bunch of consequences of those fundamental observations, such as the true velocity formula I mentioned. Observations can lie but math can't. | bff819f2-e480-4311-b558-f1e2538ccb77 |
2cwwju | How do illiterate people in developed countries function? | Being illiterate doesn't necessarily mean that you can't read at all. A lot of times means that you can sort of read but you can't comprehend a lot of what you read. There are plenty of kids in school who can say the words that are on the page, but they don't really know what it means. If you're on of those people, you can find a job that has minimal "reading" and what does need to be read is often written in very basic language. What you said about birthday cards? Well, they probably know how to to write "I love you, Jonny." They probably also know what that means. You might be able to recognize the pictures on food that you're buying. You may even be able to figure out basic math to know that the numbers on the shelf of the grocery store add up to less than what you have in your wallet. | 3749181c-cdcc-4e86-9ac4-9b2395a10f01 |
2nt2y5 | Why were the Star Wars prequels considered so bad? | Personally, my question would be more along the lines of "why were the original Star Wars movies considered to be so good?"
They had awful scenes and dumb humor throughout. The greatest thing about Star Wars IMO was the universe it created. Jedi, lightsabers, space travel, all amazing. However, breaking it down scene by scene I don't love them. | cbd47251-9777-41c8-b75d-952724f6ef03 |
4gtwg5 | how does a thermal explosion cause a human to get knocked back, as often seen in action movies? | Movies aren't always representative of real life. Action movies even less so.
Of course, it's possible for an explosion to knock people back. Because of the rapidity with which explosion take place, they almost always create a shock wave. The problem with being knocked back with the shockwave from a thermal explosion, however, is that the shockwave is likely many thousands of degrees. Of course, only being in contact with it for a short time, you wouldn't necessarily be burnt to death (unless it was a *really* hot bomb), but it certainly wouldn't be as clean as movies lead us to believe. | b6ee7522-a052-4dfd-8cf3-7b803825ac33 |
4aqdea | What goes into making a music video? Can JT just ask Scarlett Johansson to make-out with him on camera? | As SAG actors, they are required to be paid for the production and usage, and as a big celebrity Johansson's agent surely negotiated a huge sum for her performance.
The role of the actual musician in making the music video might be pretty minimal. The concept of the actual video primarily comes from the director. In this case, Samuel Bayer and JT worked together to concept the music video. The concept, sometimes down to the specific shots, setpieces, etc. was nearly or entirely finished before Johansson was even brought on board. If she said no, it might be the exact same music video with Emily Ratajkowski or something. | 6002a911-8cb7-4533-a028-2d3773460908 |
4oa20o | How do police and military forces decide which puppies will become members of their team? | I believe they pick specific breeds from the start and train them all, only to give up the really ineffective ones. | d2f91f37-487e-4d93-a1cf-fa525ac464c0 |
2fl42f | Why are metals like bronze harder than the metals used to create them. | It has to do with the different phases that form in alloys. Basically two materials form a matrix that creates a hybrid grain structure that is stronger than the homogeneous materials themselves. It is a bit complex, but think about it like concrete. Concrete is really made up of sand, pebbles, and rocks. Each on their own isn't very structurally sound, but together they all interfere with each other's movements, making the whole much stronger than any one part.
Tried to keep it high level, but I can elaborate if anyone likes. | d30fa713-a2cd-4649-9047-0a5f0942b864 |
35b78a | How can US Mail delivery vary so much in delivery times just because of an extra fee? | I think your airplane analogy has merit but you're thinking of it backwards. Think about it this way. Generally speaking, a direct flight to your destination costs more than one with layovers. Why is that?
Let's use an example. ATL is a huge airport, because it's a major hub. Lots of regional and local flights fly out of there. Now let's imagine people from all over the United States want to go to Disney World. The closest major airport is Orlando. But you're not going to have enough people wanting to go from Boise to Orlando on a Tuesday to rationalize having a regular flight. HOWEVER, if you combine all the people who want to go to Orlando, Miami, Savannah, Birmingham and Jacksonville on a Tuesday, then you have enough people to fill a flight.
So you fly them all to Atlanta on a full flight. You make a profit on the trip and they save money. In Atlanta, all the people from NYC, LA, Boise, Chicago, etc who want to go to Orlando, Daytona, etc., are then combined to fill local and regional flights to their final destinations.
It's the same with mail. If you send a mail from point A to point B, it has to take a truck there, fly, get on another truck, etc. By bringing all the mail to regional hubs, they combine large amounts of mail into groups, fill up 18-wheelers, take them all to the same hub, then sort them for local delivery. This all takes time.
When you pay the extra money for express delivery, you're paying them to "special case" your package and make sure that it bypasses the standard, time consuming handling in order to get delivered within a certain amount of time.
I hope that makes sense! | 6ee88bff-23ea-4cd7-8647-315397ed3141 |
2c4xn9 | Selenium and mercury | Mercury and selenium have a high tendency to bind to one another. This is bad because selenium is used in some very important enzymes, and when mercury binds to these enzymes they get deactivated. The selenium in fish isn't being used by the body (yet), so if mercury binds to that selenium instead, there's no harm done and the body is able to get rid of it. | 0d0958f0-0a9d-4499-8563-3fb936a16071 |
48zhnv | if we Americans strive to separate church and state, why are so many polling locations in churches? | Why cant they be?
The separation of church and state just means that there can be know government endorsed religion. It does not mean that politicians cant be religious or that government functions couldn't be held in a church etc. | a9e1d489-6cf2-4720-ba8f-109cedae34c6 |
2f6o28 | What is making the prices of houses in the UK so high? Is there any hope of fixing this issue? | There are a finite number of houses and a finite amount of space. So as population grows and more and more people want houses... prices rise.
There is no solution save a good plague or a good war. Need to get rid of the bodies or acquire more land. | e615c1f5-c1fd-4ad9-b7d0-e462f9424d5d |
1mzau8 | how does "old faithful" erupt so consistently | [It doesn't](_URL_0_), at least, not anymore. The 1983 Borah Peak earthquake set the schedule off balance, and another in 1998 really changed things up.
Geysers are fed by underground rivers that lie above a pool of magma. After an eruption, the water begins to fill back up and the pressure increases. Pressure causes the water to be superheated (over boiling temp, like a pressure cooker ^hello ^NSA!) by the magma and, like a volcano, the turbulent pressure brings it to the surface. When it reaches the surface, the pressure inside drops, which causes the superheated water to become volatile. It vaporizes and shoots out of the geyser like a rocket.
[Mythbusters](_URL_1_) has an example of superheating that offers a pretty neat visualization. | efa47ab9-8e26-4e8b-ae46-bd09e9830125 |
7vo96p | why do our eyes/brains struggle to figure out how many numbers/letters are in something when one repeats it self vs when all are different (12333332 vs 60292813) | This is because it is easier for the human brain to count different numbers since you can know at which number you are looking at (The criterion is that the next number is visibly different than the previous).
When you have to deal with a repeatitive number, you "have" doubts whether you skipped or count twice a number , so you instictively start take more time to make sure you read the number correct. | 06b4aeee-2bef-44b7-b027-4537074e0084 |
39wc6h | Why do Black Lives Matter protesters only show up for police-involved shootings? Why are black-on-black shootings ignored? | The protesters aren't there just because people are dying or because they hate "shootings". Black lives matter is about a particular issue - injustice at the hands of the people / systems that are designed to protect us all equally.
You might as well be asking why the same people aren't also showing up for events about diabetes and heart disease since these kill a lot of black people.
Further, black on black violence has been the subject of many conferences and events. It doesn't receive much coverage in the media. | 272b2014-a76c-493c-83e5-f5eaa1861392 |
52icof | Beer and rate of consumption... | 2 a day would be healthier.
When you drink 14 at once, your body is going to struggle to deal with it at once, you're taxing your system a lot more.
While a couple a day, your liver can deal with that without a bunch of backlog, you're not going to be sick, not going to be dehydrated etc... | 16f74307-c5e2-40f2-9356-7418460b169d |
wbwkj | Supreme Court decision on Citizens United | To understand *Citizens United*, we actually have to go back to some earlier cases to get the context.
The first concept to understand here is that the line of cases beginning with *Buckley v. Valeo* and continued in *Citizens United* basically said "the ability to spend money to support a given ideological view (but not to support candidates directly) is part of ones free speech." In order for me to have the freedom of speech in politics, I need to be able to buy an ad on television (if I want to) which says "legalizing marijuana is good" or "legalizing marijuana is bad."
The first important distinction is between "hard money" (direct contributions to candidates, which can be limited) and "soft money." Soft money is money spent by an independent entity (not associated with a campaign) which cannot directly support or oppose any individual candidate. At best, it'd be advertisements that say "SOPA is bad." In reality, the rules are such that they can say "SOPA is bad, Lamar Smith supported SOPA. Lamar Smith is in the breast pocket of the RIAA. Tell Lamar Smith to protect Americans, not corporations."
Under *Buckley* as long as the advertisement does not say "vote for," "elect," "support", "cast your ballot for", "Smith for Congress", "vote against", "defeat", "reject", or any variations of those, it has been treated as an "issue" ad, rather than a campaign expenditure.
This led to the rise of so-called Political Action Committee (the PACs you hear so much about). Their purpose was to spend money on "issue ads" in the hopes of influencing voters, but often were using only sham issue ads. Think about the Swiftboat ads against John Kerry. They were treated as "issue ads", even though they were clearly intended to influence voters to vote against a specific candidate.
After *Buckley* Congress wanted to rein in that kind of expenditure, and so included in McCain-Feingold (a campaign finance reform bill) a provision that made it illegal to run those kinds of ads within 30 days of an election.
*Citizens United* was a court case stemming from that law, where the Supreme Court ruled that such a restriction was unconstitutional.
The reasoning was based primarily on the previous right to spend money to influence other voters being part of free speech, and the right of individuals to associate to pool their political voices and campaign expenditures. So, an association of people (any association of people) has the right to spend money on issue ads, at any time during the campaign.
The Court did do away with the "magic words" from *Buckley*, but that hasn't changed the character of "issue ads" much.
By reaffirming that spending money to influence voters is free speech (that's the "money = speech" misrepresentation so many people make), and providing associations with the same protections as any individual's free speech in this area it gave corporations, and especially PACs, the ability to spend money on issue ads without limits.
Now, this does *not* mean that they can contribute to campaigns themselves. Corporations cannot donate to campaigns at all, and PACs can only donate $5,000 to any individual campaign. But, a corporation could donate to a PAC, and that PAC can spend an unlimited amount on these issue ads.
The concern is that a corporation would be able to go to a candidate and say "do this, and we'll direct our PAC to spend money supporting you, if you don't we'll direct our PAC to spend money opposing you."
The problem with all of the concern about that "corrupting" influence on politics is that it requires the assumptions (a) that the American people decide who to vote for based on who spends the most, and (b) that the American people's choices can't be trusted to be above undue influence. | 32a02b06-fd40-498f-af42-243d257a53b5 |
40vyhc | When momentarily walking past fumes (exhaust, tar, etc) is it better to breathe normally or to restrict your breathing for a short period (thus reducing oxygen intake)? | Hold it. There isn't harm in short periods without breathing, so the down side is nil. The stuff you're breathing probably isn't going to hurt you if it's just a whiff, but there's more potential harm from it than from held breath. | 11e0e674-1415-4753-b76d-7b930ca16d52 |
4u70eu | How is the Universe expanding if gravity pulls things together? | Wouldn't physicists like to know.
But seriously, they dont know. At this point, all we have are some theories. Mainly, dark energy. Basically an unknown, undetectable force that pushes on everything in the universe. Locally, its not strong enough to overcome gravity, which is why stars, planets, orbits, galaxies, etc. still exist; but on a cosmic scale, it is strong enough to push all the clumps of mater (which are basically clumps of gravity), away from each other.
It's also worth mentioning that, since dark energy expands space itself, and isn't technically *moving* anything, the expansion of the universe is actually faster than the speed of light. Some galaxies are moving away from each other so quickly, that light from one galaxy would never be able to reach the other, because it cant travel fast enough. | 76529481-a45b-400f-ae92-769f96db8f58 |
2dap6m | How does the placebo effect actually work? | You have substances in your body that are chemically very similar to the drugs that are prescribed by physicians. The reason drugs work is because we have receptors that drugs may biochemically bond with. In the case of placebo, it's believed that the suggestion actually activates the body to create and mobilise the natural substances to bind to the receptors. So, for example, our bodies make natural opioids (dynorphins, enkephalins, endorphins, endomorphins and nociceptin) which are natural analgesics. In the example of pain, a placebo primes the individual to create their own opioids.
RadioLab had an excellent programme on this, [podcast is here](_URL_0_) | ddb5e32d-8ee5-47fb-bb10-d6c369192d58 |
60ztg5 | How do those 90's "Magic Eye" pictures work? | The proper name is "single-image random dot stereogram" (SIRDS)
It's tricky, and describing it without drawing diagrams is a little hard, but I'll try:
Imagine a 3-D model on a table. There's a piece of glass halfway between your eyes and the model.
Paint a random dot of color on the glass near the middle. Look at that dot with your right eye. Paint that same color dot on the model, behind the dot on the glass.
Now look at the dot on the model with your left eye and paint the glass with a dot of the same color in front of the one on the model. Now there are two dots on the glass.
Now look at that second dot with your right eye, and paint another dot on the model behind it.
Keep repeating this process, alternating eyes and painting dots. Eventually, you get a line of dots across the width of the glass, spaced about half the distance between your eyes.
Now do it all over again with another random dot on the glass. Keep doing this over and over again until there's no spot on the glass without a dot on it.
Take the model away and look at the glass, and if you diverge your eyes the right amount, your brain will lock onto the repeating pattern of dots and reconstruct the stereo view of the model that's not there any more.
One final note: the dots don't need to be random; you can take pixels from an image, and it will look like you just have a repeating image on the glass. The result looks like the image was painted onto the surface of the model.
[Wikipedia article, with diagrams](_URL_0_) | 48333cff-bf31-4c25-b43f-e5d8784eb778 |
35mv7h | Why do we find "sweet" things so pleasurable? Even other animals really seem to enjoy sweet things. | Sweet implies calories, and animals need calories to survive. Animals evolved not knowing where their next meal was coming from, so it benefits them to eat as many calories as possible while they can. By making calories pleasurable, it creates a desire to eat them. | cf1da8e0-d555-4719-aa2a-bca622eda1c6 |
3ogj6u | Why can't electrons have a defined position? | I suspect you have an image in your mind of electrons moving around in space like physical objects such as ping-pong balls. So you'd be right in asking "how can't that object have a defined position?".
But there are other ways of thinking about electrons. Imagine I yell "I am an electron!" from across the room. Now, where is that sound? Is it where you hear the sound? Is it where I'm shouting? Maybe. But if you move around the room while I'm shouting, you'll discover that the sound is everywhere in the room - and subtly different dependent on where in the room you stand.
Another way to think about it would be to imagine electrons not as physical entities at all but rather just a property of atoms. Imagine you're wearing a plaid skirt. You can point to a defined position for the skirt. But what is the defined position of the *plaid*? The question doesn't really make any sense because 'plaid' is not an object with a location - it's just a property of objects. The plaid is definitely something you can perceive and interact with - it's just not an object you can pinpoint.
The question you're asking is the same one physicists asked themselves a century or so ago. The answer they came up with was "electrons aren't ping-pong balls". | 73a3e637-e440-4ff0-8db1-1951cfb6f386 |
8klgz9 | how do multilane highways reduce traffic if they merge to fewer lanes without oppurtunity to turn off? | They alow the people driving at a faster rate to get ahead of those that are driving at a slower rate and causing the traffic to collect behind them. | 50879c21-dfc4-4d95-81db-0f589a40f050 |
5v8zre | Canned meat not needing refrigeration? | Part of the canning process is heating the cans after they are sealed. The heat kills any bacteria present in the contents, and the sealed can prevents any new bacteria from getting in. As long as the can isn't compromised most canned goods remain safe almost indefinitely (although many won't taste good after a long time). | cd234220-dc0b-4d36-9600-307768e76889 |
22i14g | Why is North Korea so secluded? | Ok. So here's the "non-loaded-rhetoric" version.
The isolation in North Korea has two aspects. The ideological aspect, and the "actually useful" aspect. THe ideological aspect deals with the ruling political philosophy of the nation, Juche. Juche is, in simple terms, the idea of self-reliance. And not the "'murican" self-reliance where we trade with everyone and generally hand out in the global market. I mean total self-reliance. As in fuck you all, we'll make our own stuff.
By now you should have realized that isn't how things are. The DPRK is entirely reliant on other countries donating food and supplies. You know that, I know that but (until recently) no one in North Korea knew that. Far as they knew the DPRK was just that good at getting them hardly any food.
Oppressive regime 101: Give the people a cause to rally to and they will forget they are starving. The North Korean's are proud of their self-reliance! They are proud of how they stand alone against the threat of the evil western powers and their puppet South Korea!
Do note. That this is changing as more North Koreans get access to foreign media. | 3602eca0-8c9f-4213-a059-b6b2dc55c2e2 |
4nslf0 | Why do the members of the Whitehouse press pool yell out questions to the President after they have been told that no questions will be taken. | That's what you do as a journalist, ask questions. You wouldn't be doing your job if you kept quiet. It's pretty normal in all settings like this. There's a big difference between "we asked, and he didn't want to answer" and not asking at all.
I don't know if it's ever worked in a presidential press conference, but it certainly does happen that someone will decide to answer a poignant question even though he didn't want make any comments. | 42c417fd-44ae-4863-afad-1d4ac3021c93 |
22b6v4 | Why do we use the "Qwerty" keyboard? | You can wiki for more.
The basic story is that English has a number of common letter pairs. On old typewriters these letter pairs were often so close together that the arms (that "type" the letters onto the page) could swing in and jam if the operator was too quick. So the Qwerty board was developed. It breaks up the common letter pairs so that jams happen less frequently. | ed325017-d7cb-4345-8d1d-c47b965f59c7 |
3towde | How do companies like EB games and Gamestop make money when the game/console creators sell the game online for the same price? | Source: I was an assistant manager at Gamestop, and I worked there from 2011-2014.
A very large majority of their money comes from used games. We paid $54 for every $60 new game we sold. We only made about $25 off of new consoles. The only thing that keeps them afloat is used games. We would make $35 off a used game that recently just came out which is more than a new console and new game combined. | 597356bc-7a5c-4d85-b188-ffed3287c192 |
nwytd | How do pressure cookers work? | A pressure cooker is a device that uses a sealed container to capture all the fumes developed during heating liquids. Imagine if you have a pot full of water. If the pot is sealed and you heat it up, steam will develop. Because of this steam, the pressure in the (sealed) container increases. Thermodynamics predicts that a higher pressure increases the poiling point of liquids, i.e. water would need more than 100 degrees Celsius to boil. Therefore, you can heat up the liquid to a higher temperature than you normally could without the liquid evaporating.
Pressure cookers, for example, are useful at higher altitudes, where normally the inverse effect would take place: The lower atmospheric pressure would reduce the boiling point of liquids, so far that eventually food couldn't be cooked. The use of a pressure cooker can counteract this.
I don't know abut food tasting better (I have never actually cooked with a pressure cooker), but i would assume it has to do with the higher cooking speed due to increased temperature of the water.
Hope that helps :) | 45e1e9a1-f1ec-4324-8774-4631720c639e |
1b1e6q | What would happen to the financial stability of the United States if foreign governments suddenly stopped investing (and reinvesting) in U.S. treasury bonds? | Foreign Governments don't use Treasuries as a form of investment, the yield is so low on them that they often don't even beat inflation resulting in a small real loos for those holding them.
There are a couple of reasons why a sovereign (or institutional investor) would still choose to hold UST's;
* They are considered the most stable (both in yield and risk) of any sovereign issued securities throughout the world and as such are frequently used as a safe harbor when the market is turbulent, this is why US borrowing costs actually drop in a recession. Individual retirement funds throughout the world convert from stock holdings to UST's as retirement approaches for this reason too, having a stable base becomes more important then yield.
* There is a guaranteed secondary market. US monetary policy relies nearly entirely on the trade of UST's in the secondary market to accomplish its aims and as such there is always someone who wants to buy UST's if you no longer want to hold on to them. Fed demand this year is likely going to be in the $1.2t range.
* With two standard floating currencies a trade imbalance between two countries results in the value of the country with the higher trade output increasing. Japan (and to a lesser extent China) purchase UST's to artificially inflate the value of the USD and thus make it cheaper for them to import. As their economies are heavily based on trade with the US this is not a situation which will change.
* As the USD is the primary world reserve currency and UST's are treated as cash like assets you can use them in trade. Particularly with large trade deals it can be significantly cheaper to trade UST's then it is cash.
* Banks are permitted to hold UST's as a large part of their Tier 1 capital (even outside the US). Using a number of leverage strategies this allows them to use significantly less then $1 of capital to secure $1 of their capital requirements which in turn means more to invest and lend, which leads to higher revenues and profits. As such its extremely desirable for them to hold UST's over other securities. This is one of the reasons the QE programs use UST's instead of just capital.
TL;DR: It never would happen. | 929634b4-17aa-4a3e-a82a-6ef798155d0d |
5gxc2a | Why there is such a variance in the human phenotype, as compared to other species? | the same reason asian people tend to look the same to a white person. they're so different from us that we overlook the subtle differences that are in fact obvious to someone or some animal of the same species.
e.g. they do vary, you just don't notice it because you aren't an elephant.
the point about human evolution that /u/lithuim brings up below is also a good point to add, humans specialize in recognizing subtlties in other humans, irrespective of the points above. | 51ad0c70-66f1-4294-9251-459adf5e431b |
3vuszs | How exactly did Edward Snowden get hold of all the documents he leaked? | From [this article](_URL_0_) : "As a system administrator, Snowden was allowed to look at any file he wanted, and his actions were largely unaudited. “At certain levels, you are the audit,” said an intelligence official. " and "... a system administrator has the right to copy, to take information from one computer and move it to another."
He had the clearance and permissions to look at and copy just about anything he wanted. | f2580b81-176a-4971-abd9-b4e7aa69f7b3 |
1qbh46 | If poverty is so bad in an area like in ghettos or in Africa. Why do people so readily continue having children only to be born in to hardship? | You think of them as another mouth to feed because you're a middle class guy in a nation with child labor laws.
If you were in the developing world you might think of them as another pair of hands to help with the work or something to exchange for goods in a wedding. Or you might simply be uneducated with no access to contraceptives and no other activity to bring you any joy. | 01ff6b62-ca5a-46b9-be54-d82950246003 |
6c5d90 | why aren't there electoral systems that allow negative votes? | There are several different voting systems that allow you to downvote certain candidates. However it is usually not compulsory. However the most effective way to keep people from voting strategically is to use a ranked voting system where you sort the options from most preferable to least preferable. | bf6c4786-b8f4-431e-b518-d16fddd10b9a |
4mra8t | Is Generalized Anxiety Disorder something you're born with, or are there life-triggers that set it off? Can you ever truly be "cured" of it? | TLDR: We don't know.
Since brain science is a young field and not much is well understood yet, psychiatry mostly aims towards addressing mental illnesses pragmatically, rather than trying to achieve a deep understanding of mental illnesses, with a goal of eliminating symptoms. In this way, it is firmly within the realm of medicine and not natural science. There are of course people who study the neurological causes of anxiety, but there is not enough knowledge there to be very helpful in a medical context (except perhaps in some cutting-edge treatments that are still being studied).
Generalized anxiety is a medical definition, not a scientific one. It's based on having a set of symptoms, with the idea that this is helpful because we know a set of treatments that are sometimes effective for eliminating this set of symptoms. Even for medications, which clearly work in a chemical and hence physical way, the mechanisms for how it works is not well understood. For medicine, the most important thing is that treatments be reliable. Understanding underlying physical mechanisms is useful to that end, but it is not an end in itself-- unlike for science. | 61e86e74-ae8c-48a2-8ffc-1857f37bd68b |
69ml0l | Do smarter brains use more energy or do they just use it better? How? | Some studies have found that when people are not very good at a particular task, they exert more mental effort and use more glucose and that, likewise, the more skilled you are, the more efficient your brain is and the less glucose you need. Complicating matters, at least one study suggests the opposite—that more skillful brains recruit more energy.
so the answer lies between yes (it takes more energy when you do something at first) and no like you can't be sure other factors like stress also come in play | c84756b0-8dbe-4826-8a20-33ad5470690c |
44lb7t | How does changing electricity companies work when it travels in the same wires? | See the electricity network as a huge tank (the wires). There are some things that need to be done: the tank has to be filled with electricity, the tank has to be maintained and the electricity has to be distributed to the people.
These things can be done by different companies! There is usually only one company owning the network and maybe a few filling the tank, but there can be lots of companies distributing your electricity. They can all make a difference to eachother by offering you deals with gas or other services, by making different arrangements with the owner of the tank, ... That way you get better competition and a fair price for both consumer and producer. | f4462a2d-53a8-41ef-af0d-effb4360cea2 |
2jntma | At what point is a virally infected person no longer considered a "carrier"? How can we become immune to certain things without carrying/spreading the sickness ? | I'm not sure about the first part but I can answer the second part. The answer is vaccines. Vaccinations contain a weakened variation or something that resembles the disease causing micro organism. By doing this, it teaches our immune system to fight off the pathogen by copying traits of the disease that our bodies have trouble fighting. When our bodies have been exposed to a pathogen it can better prepare for the real version of it, thus providing an immunity or resistance. Vaccinations are similar to how people who have survived a pathogen are unlikely to contract it again (ex, chicken pox). However, it is not permanent as the immune system can "forget" the disease after long periods of time which is why vaccinations usually have time period. | c0ced595-5732-42fb-be92-159842720cc4 |
2ec83j | Why do my mom's ashes make a weird sound? | > What happens to the bones during cremation?
If I had to guess, it probably is the hard, remnants of bone hitting the inside.
That, or ghosts. | 98d493b5-54d2-484c-bf4b-1b264c52e994 |
3blaim | Why is it so much easier to remember song lyrics without even trying, yet vocabulary words and their definitions take forever to memorize? | Music therapist here. It's because the information is stored in multiple locations in your brain!
Language is primarily stored in the left hemisphere of the brain, while music is stored on both sides of the brain. So when you learn words associated with music (i.e. lyrics) there are more parts of your brain being used to store those words.
There are very cool implications for this, the first of which most people have benefited from:
1. Mnemonic devices (ABC's, Nifty Fifty United States, etc...)
2. Alzheimer's patients who have lost all speech and memory can still sing and remember lyrics to songs.
3. Stroke patients who have lost all use of the speech center of their brain can still sing words. Some music therapists use this to quite literally transplant the speech center to another part of the brain with music. (look up Gabby Giffords) | 98edf7f3-b3d6-4742-a554-574d6eb6a43d |
y029z | Why do we have fingerprints, why are they located on our fingers/hands? | "Fingerprints" are actually NOT only on your fingers and hands but over your entire body! If you look closely at your arm you'll notice hundreds of tiny lines across your arm, this is most obvious near your elbow. These are actually the same lines as your fingerprints.
[Here's an example of what your skin looks like under the surface](_URL_0_). Notice the waves in the bottom layer? Those exist to increase the surface area between your skin layers and this makes your skin much stronger and keeps it anchored in place. On the surface those look like tiny lines which we call fingerprints.
The reason why they're more pronounced on your hands (and also your feet) is because the skin in those areas takes the most abuse and has to be the strongest, so the lines are more pronounced. | 100055d0-f8e8-4660-b8f5-2dbbc4839949 |
t6bpl | Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) photograph | Have you ever seen a [long exposure photo](_URL_0_)? They look pretty cool. Basically, instead of having the camera shutter open and shut very quickly (as most cameras do), you set up the camera so that the shutter stays open for a few seconds or a few minutes or even longer, to let in more light than it normally would. It turns out that you can do more than just make pretty photos with this technique. If you take a very powerful telescope, like Hubble, and point it at a specific spot in the night sky featuring extremely distant objects, you can leave the "shutter", so to speak, open for days or even weeks, letting in a slow but steady trickle of light from those distant objects. The HUDF is an example of the end result of such a very long shot (several weeks of exposure).
The galaxies in the HUDF are (estimated) to have existed just a few hundred millions years after the big bang. Because they're so very, very far away, it's taken the light from those galaxies billions and billions of years to reach us. In a very real way, it's like looking into the past. Cosmologists hope to use this image, and others like it in the future, to further their knowledge of how galaxies form. | 64905d55-2569-49e8-8687-a6a4faa48abe |
1329xb | How exactly does the counting for total karma work? | Keep in mind that self. posts don't add anything to your karma count. | 2efb560f-b041-4132-b01d-eb32715c0e03 |
271s0d | Why don't all companies do what supermarkets do with advertising? | Because Apple and Samsung don't sell the same products.
But companies are allowed to say that they sell a product for less if they actually do. | 7ca46188-b861-49ad-bf31-0aecbbffbb3f |
1u1lz6 | How are "generations" measured? Where is the cut off? | A "generation" is a vague unit of time, so it depends on the context. In genealogical or biological terms, it is strictly the parent/child measurement, so yes, you would be in the same generation as your cousin, since you share the same percentage of genes of your grandparents.
In a sociological context, "generations" are defined more vaguely as the group of people who grew up and lived together in similar circumstances. It starts at a relatively arbitrary point, in america it starts with the 1885-1900 generation, "The Lost Generation", The people who went through WWI and then the roaring 20s. Then the kids born in the next 20-25 years or so are the next generation, "greatest generation", then the "lucky few", "baby boomers", "Generation X", and most recently "millennials". The generations are usually named after what they do when they're aged 25-50, not when they're born.
Sorry if that was a shitty explination | 2bd0dbb5-7a38-4752-8e77-f6ebce33dbc0 |
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