query_id
stringlengths 3
6
| question
stringlengths 1
299
| goldenAnswer
stringlengths 3
35k
| doc_id
stringlengths 36
36
|
|---|---|---|---|
11lh4z | Why are porn sites more likely to infect the user's computer with viruses than other sites? | Impulse clicking.
People are more likely to ignore warnings to see a naked chick than to read an insurance quote. The are also more likely to be embarrassed about what they were doing and not report it.
Scammers know this, are are much more likely to use porn sites to deliver malware. | 6c660b8a-135f-440b-8ea1-08ce22b6800f |
3y0gna | Why do loud noises seem to physically hurt? Is it all in our brain signals? Do deaf people feel pain from them? | Pain is how our body signals to our brain that we're in a situation that's potentially causing us harm, so we're motivated to try to get out of that situation.
Loud enough noises can physical damage your ear, and as a result, we've evolved so that somewhere before the threshold of damage to our delicate ear parts, a loud enough sound will cross a pain threshold.
That pain is your ear telling your brain that being around these loud noises is bad for you, and you should try to get yourself away from them before your hearing is damaged. | fa580772-2e72-4279-ab89-6dc56adaae4f |
6kghj3 | How do GBA ROMS actually work? How do people recode entire games from Game Boys and DS' to work on the computer? | This is actually very straightforward.
The ROMs are basically the software that's usually on the cartridge (or whatever medium).
They don't get recoded to run on a PC (or android, or whatever). People use emulators that pretend to be a Gameboy or DS or whatever, and the ROM thinks it's running natively.
And you can search to find answers to how emulators work. | 722b2e2f-0747-4490-8c77-ebdcd3f51d5e |
7mul7v | How do carnivores like Tigers and Lions get enough nutrient balance by only eating meat? | One, By eating things like blood, skin, organs, bones, etc. Obviously that animal they ate *contains all vitamins and minerals required for that prey animal to live* so consuming all, or most, of a prey animal will include a wider variety of vitamins and nutrients.
Humans can do this too, for example fish liver oil, whale blubber etc,. Whale blubber contains high amounts of vitamin C.
Two, Different animals have different dietary needs. We primates require Vitamin C in our diets but we can manufacture other vitamins , many other mammals, including cats and dogs, *can actually synthesize their own vitamin C* so it isn't a dietary requirement.
Cats require vitamin A from animal sources, they cannot process carotenoids(from plants) into vitamin A. Dogs, and us, can eat a carrot and make vitamin A. Different animals have different needs and different capabilities to manufacture vitamins or to dietary input into essential compounds. | 703eca4c-ef20-49a4-ba4a-fe635a0f3bde |
8qisxz | Why does some food get freezer-burned while others don't? | Packaging. I wrap my stuff in plastic wrap, then foil, then a ziplock baggie and I never get it. | e86ab189-ec99-435d-b154-d72be02ff117 |
4xo89n | Pay-to-play politics | It refers to how big donors get more access to politicians. If the average person contacts a national-level politician, they'll probably get a form letter reply from an intern. If someone who donated $20,000 contacts them, they'll get a call from the politician. High-level appointed positions are often given to big donors. Things like ambassador jobs to Caribbean island nations are one of the more common ones. But high-level advisory and even cabinet-level positions are often given to big donors too. | d4a884b1-da71-45b4-bf2a-4d1770d56ea9 |
7i97sp | How do we measure calories in a product? | I hope you're talking food here, because my answer relies on that
Short answer: very poorly
Real answer: calories are a unit of energy, the amount required to heat one gram of water one degrees Celsius at standard temperature and pressure (normal earth conditions). So to measure food calories, we light it on fire and see how much the temperature of our system changes, and we can use that to measure the energy in the food
Problem 1: we aren't firey pits that burn everything we eat, we do complex biology and we can't actually process everything, so the numbers are generally imperfect estimates
Problem 2: we can't measure all samples of a single thing. Any item can vary wildly in sugars and fats, even between say, two bananas, and so our numbers are just an average of a pretty small sample | 4f9ba963-4091-44fe-8231-aa5e802fcc6d |
2k20s4 | when I want to type an apostrophe, I would hit the key next to the enter key on my keyboard and get this character ' but why does this alternate character ’ show up in text that I have copied off the web? Are they meant to be used interchangeably? | The prevailing wisdom is ' should be used for feet or minutes, while the curlier ’ should be used as a quote or apostrophe. | 240d59bd-0c35-4801-9def-7e54ec1b8bdc |
4wv1et | Nowadays most money is digital, what prevents a bank to edit its computer records with another trillion $? | Digital money isn't just a number in a spreadsheet, it's an accounting of where the money came from. If there's no log showing that money was debited from one account and credited to another, it's not really there.
Banks are regulated, audited, and taxed. Sure, a banker with enough seniority could probably create some fake money, and get away with it for a short time. But they wouldn't get away with it forever, because the numbers just wouldn't add up and before long somebody would figure it out and they'd go to prison. | 96c59a61-79b1-4f41-a510-0a3f8379c95e |
4wijgu | How and why did the body associate tears with sadness? | Without getting too technical, the short version is: When you are sad, your body released hormones(ACTH and Leu-enkephalin) through tears that can help you feel better(reduce stress and painkillers). | 4c425689-55d9-4701-bda6-8af7458277b5 |
5myz5r | Why does the sky look grainy at dusk? | Just a slight malfunction while rendering the night sky. Projecting a holographic observable universe isn't easy work, you know. | 6168d0d4-d408-44ff-8c38-7f615f0ab35b |
5m1o9s | Why do colors combine to make other colors? | Colors are a response your brain makes to picking up certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation striking receptor cells in your brain. When this happens, those cells send signals to your brain, and your brain creates the image.
Certain combinations of stimulation on those cells cause your brain to generate different colors, to help further discriminate, because this is a beneficial evolutionary adaptation (harder for things to blend together).
Color itself is not a property of light or anything. Rather, a product of your brain interpreting it. | 8b84bbd9-0e2a-417c-aeb1-c97eb38b4662 |
7utjvj | How does electronic currency mining work? | Simplified, with bitcoin, the "coins" are a long chain of solutions to a convoluted math problem. Each coin has to be discovered mathematically by computing out the problem, and it's designed so that each new coin's problem is harder than the one before, and that only a set number of coins will be discovered. After that, the coins are to be used as currency. Until then, as long as each coin is valuable enough, there's money to be made by devoting lots of computers to working through the problem to find the next coins. That's bitcoin mining. | 2ae313c5-7584-413e-8ef1-6e75d9348215 |
4ga3ka | why is the Wilhelm scream so overused in movies? | It's an inside joke/running gag. Sound mixing is a very tedious job, so they like to have fun. Like how Pixar movies almost have "A113" in their movies. | ecacc955-2611-45a3-8b1e-af975f9294f8 |
41pocj | When dieting and losing weight, is there a universal right way? Also do cravings mean something? And other ? | The right way is to utilize more calories than you consume. All diets that succeed do this, all diets that fail, fail to do this.
People may be more or less effective at eating less calories, or at burning more, but the equation is always the same.
It is possible that combinations of foods make you feel better or worse and that these things enable you to stick with it more. It is certainly healthy to avoid HF corn syrup in general, but from a pure weight loss perspective it is not all that important. Cravings can certainly happen with sugar swings, but again...thats about your ability to sustain a pattern of reduced calorie intake and increased calorie burning.
Eat the right number of calories. Then...eat a good balance of foods. Exercise. That's the recipe for both health and weight loss. | eca06c50-e5f9-42a4-80e1-4537df6dd73e |
lumvt | Why "Gravity" Does Not Exist | Newton said gravity is a mysterious force that affects everything with mass. He didn't know what causes this force but he did create some useful equations.
Then Einstein came up with General Relativity. He says that mass bends space-time and that's why things are attracted to each other. For Example, if you put 2 heavy balls on a trampoline, they warp the trampoline and move towards each other. This is just an analogy, but it helps give you the idea.
This warping of space-time has some other side affects, which allows General Relativity to predict and explain thing that Newton's law doesn't (like small changes in the orbit of planets, light bending around stars, and clocks in GPS satellites running slower). | 59c894e7-f795-4807-8b0b-da3267c689d3 |
7v83ha | Some genes, increase the likelihood of getting certain diseases (like cancer) why? | It's kind of misleading to think of the gene as being exclusively for cancer-causing purposes. Typically the "cancer genes" people talk about are variations on a gene that codes for sometime useful.
Like when people say they have the BRCA1 gene (the gene most commonly associated with genetic breast cancers), they don't actually mean they have a genetic sequence in a place where everyone else has nothing. Everyone has a BRCA1 gene, it's just that normally it codes for tumor-suppressing proteins. In people with certain mutations in that region, however, the proteins that it codes for are not produced correctly and thus do not properly suppress the uncontrolled growth of cells. | 2ab9629c-0cad-4242-983c-901da4139fa6 |
6r3hhp | What determines a person's sense of humor? | Mostly psychological. When a person has good sense of humor, it generally means they are happy, socially confident and likely to have a healthy perspective on life. But this has exceptions because humor has a dark side. There are people who use self-defeating humor; also humor is used to criticize and manipulate others through teasing, sarcasm and ridicule. So being funny isn't necessarily an indicator of good social skills and well-being. It all depends on the kind of humor the person uses. | da069cbf-b119-45de-a094-2f78bd9aa355 |
2n0eod | What are the primary cost saving mechanisms of single-payer systems? | If you think about what a private insurance business looks like right now and notice that a huge expensive fraction of it provides no actual care, or even actively works to AVOID providing care, you'll start to see how single-payer systems can be more efficient.
I'll list some costs associated with private health insurance which are absent or greatly reduced with single payer:
1. Agent salaries and commissions
2. Phone center employees and facilities
3. Billing infrastructure and salaries
4. Website maintenance
5. Advertising salaries and media buys
6. Legal services; compliance, contracts, civil suits, mergers, etc.
7. Adverse legal settlements
8. paperwork to customers (policy changes etc.)
9. Every single contact between insurance co. and health care provider, you pay for both sides of that interaction (provider's representative and insurance representative). Also, inevitable protracted conflicts are costly.
10. Actuarial analysis/business planning
11. Executive salary
12. Company profit! | a1598b8b-9d43-4464-b11b-932ce307b07f |
j6tzf | - How Do Solid State Hard Drives Work? | Flash drives work by having individual cells that are left with an electrical charge by depositing extra electrons (and thus negative charge) that is maintained even after power is removed. It's almost like a tiny series of microscopic batteries that is either set positive/negative or negative/positive.
From an answer about general storage: _URL_0_ | 4202e94c-79c2-481a-b751-52237ef98650 |
5tuppt | Why do floppy disks and SD cards have a mechanical lock switch to block access, when anyone can just flip the switch and access the data inside? | The lock on floppies didn't deny access to the data. It locked out writing over it. It's more a a precaution to keep your data safe from yourself. | 81dbb7ab-640c-43ce-86c2-044439905d8c |
2h2tim | What is the definition of life? | All known life has a few things in common, organisms (things that are alive) have these in common: they're composed of a cell or cells, undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, grow, respond to stimuli, and reproduce. There are a few things that seem to do a few but not all of these processes, like viruses, which is why they're classified as nonlife or as some kind of intermediate gray area between life and nonlife.
We don't necessarily "know" nonlife mutated into life sometime in the past, but we view it as the most likely scenario because we do know that the Earth once had no life, and now, today, it does have life, and also because we know the processes it would have to undergo are theoretically possible. | a782af68-0f45-4d12-aae9-b7c2e119d39b |
mn83f | Blackfriday | It's generally the start of the holiday/Christmas shopping of the season. It is referred to as "black" Friday as most stores will receive so much business that their daily totals will be "in the black" meaning positive profits vs. operating costs, as opposed to "in the red" which means a loss. | 4278fc89-d226-4b58-b7c9-da1cf8885a34 |
265bhu | Weird password policies | Actually, your suggestion of a possible password might be safer. I vaguely remember some xkcd on this... | 67f1f48e-5b67-44b5-8dba-8e8247acd528 |
87bzno | Is there any benefit to washing your hands before going to the bathroom? | Well, if you are handling something that you shouldn't get onto your mucus membranes, it might be a good idea to wash your hands before wiping your ass.
Like, for example, if you are cooking with chili powders. | 213f1353-9906-4773-b066-e4d207551ccf |
27x5mr | What is that awful thumping sounds I hear when only one car window is open? | your car is basically acting like a flute, with the air pressure passing over the open window. | 736d9f29-c7fe-4aac-b218-c4c8675dde28 |
2atsnb | Why does good cellphone service/4G come and go, even in the exact same location. | Could be a number of reasons. Most commonly:
1. That is because cell coverage is a "breathing" network. As more people use the tower the less power an antenna can allocate for you so the coverage shrinks. As people log off or move out the more power an antenna has and the better your service will be. This is especially true if there is rough terrain between you and the tower.
2. Your between two towers or two "sectors" aka antennas of the same tower. You could constantly handing off between two towers which causes your tower to fluctuate. Also if your between two antennas the same hand off occurs. The more antennas and or towers that can talk to you the higher the noise floor or pollution and the less good signal you get.
3. The tower your at isn't maintained well. We have metric reports on cell sites where we work and can usually trend when problems occur. Your provider may be out of fucks to give and won't spend the money to dispatch a tower crew to fix.
Source: I work for a tier 3 regional carrier engineering department as a director for 10 years and launched CDMA/evdo/lte. | 23f1b60e-b6a8-4bdc-a04a-130c9fa88dcd |
1iwvy6 | Distillation as it pertains to alcoholic drinks | Once the liquid that they are making the liquor out of has been fermented, and has alcohol in it, then the alcohol needs to be concentrated. Alcohol has a slightly lower boiling point than water, so they heat the liquid (which is called a mash by the way) to just below the boiling point of water. The alcohol boils off while the majority of the water remains liquid, separating the two. The alcohol vapor is then cooled and condensed back into a more concentrated and higher proof liquid. Then they generally age it in a barrel. | 0ad142b1-ffb1-4143-9284-b949e4ecc314 |
4009zo | Are magnets just found or does man make them be what they are? How does this happen? | Both, magnets occur naturally and we can make them. So electrons are like fanbois and ~~neutrons~~ protons are like hot babes. The bois orbit in the friend zone of the babes, never getting too close, never getting too far away either. If a bunch of babes and their bois go to a mall, and there's a sword outlet on one end and a Victoria's Secret on the other end, then the bois are going to generally head towards the sword outlet, and away from the lingerie shop due to embarassment. At this point, if someone shoots a size-Large anime T-shirt (a packet of electricity) into the front of the crowd and the fanbois start to excitedly pass it around and it swiftly gets passed towards the sword outlet. This is what we call magnetism.
Now sometimes the fanbois happen to be arranged nicely, such as in the food court. This is natural magnetism, and generally what you see in ferromagnetism (natural iron magnets). Sometimes you have a Victoria's Secret nearby and this is called induced magentism or paramagnetism.
Now sometimes everyone is randomly scattered around but you have some bro dudes walk by that the babes are attracted to but the fanbois try to get in the way. After the bros leave, the fanbois are still standing in the same (now ordered) spot, and this can be an example of magnetic domains, or using magnets to create more magnets.
I hope that was as entertaining as it was explanatory? | 2ae1e229-f2e4-4f76-ab30-0ab0b3ef8911 |
6sjpwd | Why do we cover railway tracks with rocks ? Does it improve the stability when a train goes by ? (due to the vibrations) | Although it doesn't look it, the ballast is pretty solid. It distributes the load from the passing trains, keeps down unwanted vegetation (there aren't many plants than can grow on rocks) and enables water to drain away.
This last one is very important. Where I live, there was some flooding back in May, and parts of the railway line were submerged. The water, having just washed down from the hillsides, was very muddy, and so the ballast is caked in mud.
And so right now the line is closed for a couple of weeks while they clean the ballast. This is because the mud is preventing the water from draining away properly. In the winter, the wet mud would likely freeze, and water expands when it freezes: and so it might actually lift the tracks slightly. If we have a winter where the ballast freezes, unfreezes and freezes again a few times, that could loosen the tracks and make them dangerous. | e9430273-a139-4e52-bce5-7296daf4b7df |
1r1ex9 | If I were to only rinse my body with water to clean myself, how clean would my body be? | Our modern obsession with cleaning our bodies on a daily basis is still relatively new - you can get away without washing your body without too many ill effects, depending on your lifestyle - yes, you will get smellier, and dirtier hair and skin. However, most of the bacteria and yeast that lives on the human skin is not harmful on the skin; it is only if it enters your bloodstream that it would be a problem (so if you got a cut, or if you scratched yourself and broke the skin, you stand a greater risk of infection). And, of course, failure to wash your hands can be a major source of spreading pathogens and contamination, so there's that.
There was a documentary a few years ago where a woman went without showering for six weeks, to investigate the effects. Bacterial swabs were taken before and after the six week period by researchers at the university of Leeds. What they found was that, although by the end of the six weeks the 'hotspots' for bacterial action (groin, armpits etc.) contained 5,000 times more bacteria than at the start, this was still within the 'normal' parameters for a human. Unfortunately, the only source I can find for it is a [Daily Mail article](_URL_0_), and it is important to remember this is a sample size of one. Also, part of her inspiration behind doing it was based on a misunderstanding of cause-and-effect; wondering if chemicals in grooming products (sales of which have been increasing year-on-year) caused increases in cancer (incidents of which also increased year-on-year). However, if you ignore the unfounded hypotheses, and just focus on the cleanliness issue, it is quite interesting. She found that she didn't smell that bad, and although her hair looked very greasy, she thought her skin looked better.
So, it all depends what you mean by 'clean'. Do you mean less smelly? In which case, yes, you can clean your body reasonably well with just water, and scrubbing - particularly if you use some sort of exfoliating agent (exfoliation is basically using something to remove the uppermost layers of dead skin and the various buildups - if you were just to use water, you would use a mechanical exfoliator, such as a coarse sponge). That will take care of a lot of the breeding ground that bacteria can use, and, as long as you wash like this on a regular basis, you probably won't get that smelly. Whilst soap does wash away the oils that can contain bacteria (so potentially making you 'cleaner'), it is important to remember that our skin needs that oil, and getting rid of it on a regular basis can cause our skin to dry out.
I am unaware of any studies that compare the bacteria on the human skin after washing with water, compared to washing with water and soap. However, as stated above, most of the bacteria on the human skin will not do you any harm as long as it doesn't get into the blood stream. So, as long as you do wash your hands with soap, and disinfect any wounds as and when they occur, you could easily get away with not using soap on your body when you wash.
Edit: clarified exfoliation. | e50b050d-d570-4097-932a-58f8f755cd6e |
3cjp40 | Why at high speeds on a highway with the window down create s fast pulsating air sound? | Have you ever blown air over the top of a bottle and made that cool "hum" noise? If so, I'm sure you've noticed, the tone gets higher pitched with a smaller bottle, or with more liquid in it.
The same thing is happening in your car, only on a much larger scale, which is why the tone is so low (and sounds like a "wub wub" instead of a "hum").
The window is open, acting like the opening of a bottle. The rest of the car is essentially sealed and mostly empty inside, acting like a container. Travel the right speed with the window open the right amount, and that reverberation will occur just like you were blowing the right speed over the mouth of a bottle.
The technical reason this happens is because air pressure drops as relative speed increases. The air inside your car is "not moving" (relative to the car) and is "high pressure", while the air outside is moving at whatever speed the car is, and is relatively "low pressure". Basically, the air outside sucks out some of the air inside, which makes it speed up, which drops the pressure, which makes some of the air outside come in, before repeating over and over and over. | 6e18eb41-0283-4e12-804e-d4297d2d6c59 |
27fg1v | Why does it take longer to develop professional baseball players than professional football or basketball players? | The average length of a professional baseball player's career is longer than that of an NBA or NFL player, largely because the athletic skills needed don't drop off as dramatically once the player gets into their mid to late 20s.
So, since a baseball player has a longer career, they can take longer to develop the skills. | c84e92a7-e23d-4bca-936c-6b073ab3adb7 |
3ydppu | China's one child policy and their economy | The one child policy was that if you had more than one child you would be fined, and then more heavily taxed. They did not take and kill children.
You are correct that without a population growth high enough to at least replace the populace they are looking at economic collapse. That is why this year they changed the law to be a 2 child limit before you start facing fees and heavier taxes. | b7e6b00e-5ba2-4729-b58c-b64435a8ed00 |
3bfs20 | Is it possible to have any more than 3 spatial dimensions? | There are only 4 dimensions that we can experience (3 spatial, one time). Other dimensions can (and do) exist in mathematics at least. The problem is that we cannot properly imagine these dimensions, since our minds cannot truly comprehend/ visualize a fourth spatial dimension. We can sorta represent 4D object in 3D, just like we do with 3D objects in 2D but there is nothing (that I know of) in our universe that expresses 4-dimensionality in any meaningful sense | 421c9571-8e6e-455a-8bd4-0f913eb9b60c |
udcsj | Why do things with lower resolutions look bad only after seeing something higher in resolution? | Because the brain is really good at filling in blanks. You're not seeing the picture itself, you're seeing the thing it is a picture of. You don't see a collection of brown and green pixels, you see a tree. It's not until you have something to compare it against that you notice the difference. | aec7eba6-0ae9-48fd-bb86-9e2a1ed3ef20 |
62543a | Why do new cars smell the way they do? | because of left over chemicals from the plastics and the leather or faux leather treatments are evaporating into a mostly sealed environment | e53e9321-d513-42ea-9eac-788b5d2d8ed6 |
1uqfq0 | I tried to sign up for health insurance through _URL_0_ but I don't make enough money to get subsidized...what do I do? [from Florida] | If you do not make enough money to get subsidized, you may make little enough money to qualify for Medicaid.
Unfortunately, due to Florida's decision not to expand the Medicaid program, there is a gap between the maximum income to qualify for Medicaid and the minimum income to qualify for subsidies. If you fall within this gap, you probably will not be able to get affordable insurance. (You'll be exempt from the individual mandate, though, so you mostly just aren't affected.) | 3f14df61-d7c0-4375-8a05-3049912fc784 |
6sgtaa | how come there is thunder/lightning during storms but during blizzards/snowstorms there is no thunder? | Actually, there is! [See this!](_URL_0_ snow)
That said, the reason you don't usually hear thunder during snowstorms is because snow actually suppresses the sound! It basically absorbs it, since it's just fluff in the air, drastically reducing the distance it can be heard! While a regular thunderstorm can be heard for miles and miles, a thundersnow is limited to just 2-3 miles of sound.
As for why it's so rare to see a storm like that? You need moisture in the air to produce a thunderstorm. In the summer this is easy, as warm air holds water better. Unfortunately, or fortunately, cold air holds less moisture, and as a result you need special conditions for thundersnow. A warm, wet front trailing or leasing a cold front can produce it.
Places like the gulf of Mexico will see it more often, due to readily available warm moist air! | a83b5262-48e7-4c01-9798-ff0e69f44e64 |
2osm2s | Why do nuclear weapons create "better looking" mushroom clouds than other explosives? | Most of the photographs you see of nuclear mushroom clouds are of stereotypically "mushroomy" appearance, and taken within the first minute or so of the blast. This is when they look maximally like mushrooms, because the extremely hot nuclear fireball is rising up, encountering resistance from the dense air of the atmosphere, and flattening.
If you look at pictures of late-stage mushroom clouds — e.g. 10 minutes later, when they are at maximum altitude — they often don't look very mushroomy. So [here is Hiroshima quite some time after detonation](_URL_5_) — it has "anvilled." [Here is late-stage Nagasaki](_URL_6_) — a lot less mushroomy than the classic early stage photos. [Here is Castle Bravo at 60 seconds](_URL_7_) — still mushroomy — and [here it is at 16 minutes](_URL_0_) — not very mushroomy, more of a column. [Here's a nuclear cloud that was set off too high to create a stem, so it is just the top](_URL_2_). And so on — there is a lot more variation in nuclear mushroom clouds than most people realize, because [they often see just the same clouds repeated time after time](_URL_4_) and don't realize that these are usually very early-stage clouds.
As an aside, the size of the "top" of the cloud is related to the size of the fireball in question. Nuclear detonations have very large fireballs most of the time. The heat of the fireball determines how high it rises (and nuclear fireballs are _much_ hotter than conventional explosions). As it rises, it encounters air resistance which sets up what is known as a [Rayleight-Taylor instability](_URL_1_) condition. This means the less dense part (the fireball) starts to bend back on itself as a torus. The higher it rises, the more it squishes out into an anvil or pancake shape. If it is large enough to hit the troposphere, that can squish it out even more ([and for very high yield weapons, a little "tendril" of cloud can squirt through the very top, which looks weird](_URL_3_)). Whether there is a stem or not depends on how low the fireball was detonated and its width varies as a percentage of the total size of the fireball. | 726ba617-e878-4b40-8dc4-9fb6f48e238e |
6v96rx | Power button on a smart phone | I suggest that you read a few button tutorials for embedded systems like arduino or raspberry pi. The processor can read the state of the buttons at any time. So they do this in a loop. When they notice the button is pressed they start a timer and wait for the button to be released. By measuring the time it takes for you to release the button they can do different functions. To save on battery they might not do it in a loop but rather have an interrupt logic in place that will signal the CPU whenever the state of a button changes and make it run the button checking logic. There may also be additional logic on the circuit board that detects if the power button have been held down for some time without the CPU reacting and do certain functions like toggling the power. This can be useful if the CPU have crashed or if the device is out of power. | fa377414-fd56-4c62-a062-597a41af1f06 |
92w04w | How do our eyes coordinate to look at the same point and produce one image? | There are tiny muscles in the eye socket to control your eyes movement. Due to evolution and natural select of ability to control where we look and how much control we have over fast-twitch muscle fibers, we are able to have our eyes turn to the same focal point and our brain merge the images together to produce our visual stimuli. | 020e7ff8-e575-4948-9519-d73ca962feeb |
50shtz | Can you really snap a neck like they do in the films? | "asking for a friend."
Borrowing [this answer](_URL_0_), we learn:
"You have seven vertebrae in your neck (cervical vertabrae).
Breathing is controlled by nerves that come out above the third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae. Severing or severely injuring the spinal cord at this level will paralyze the diaphragm and keep you from breathing.
It will also paralyze all other muscles below this level.
Either the carotid or vertebral arteries supplying blood to the brain may also be damaged by the shear forces of the neck being snapped, referred to as dissection. This would cause ischemia to the areas of the brain supplied by those arteries.
The most immediate cause of mortality in this situation would be respiratory arrest leading to cardiac arrest and death."
So, not exactly.
But you have to remember that, in movies, bad guys fall down dead instantly from long-range gunshots, but good guys can take repeated blows to the head and body with blunt, heavy instruments with no apparent ill-effects. | b013d4aa-f0ec-4538-b05e-6f3df195688d |
3y5cur | Why are most holiday messages depersonalized? | It's so that the card won't be limited to being from a single person or a group. "Wishing you a happy holiday" can come from either your single brother or from both your grandparents. If it said "I wish you a happy holiday," groups and couples wouldn't buy that one, and vice-versa.
So the company that makes the cards would have to make multiple versions of the card. That incurs additional expense-- and, simply due to chance and demographics, one version would outsell the others, so they would have to try and calculate how much that discrepancy would be, in order to not produce not enough or too many of each one.
Much easier to just make them more generic, so they make sense coming from either individuals or groups. The people giving the card can add personal messages that make any vagueness clear, anyway. | 75dcb117-5cbb-47cc-859e-1a639d7df95b |
29dv21 | Why do people use American Express credit cards? | American Express (AmEx) is a very Customer-Oriented card program. The individuals that actually carry and use the card love it, generally speaking. Many merchants, of course, hate it. However, there are a few merchants that do like taking AmEx, even though the commission is higher.
AmEx is more like a "Club" card than a regular credit card. On the opposite end of the scale, "Visa" is accepted by almost every business in the world -- even your Sister -- Ummm... that's a joke... :)
AmEx is far better, in my experience, at rewarding brand loyalty. My current AmEx has no fees, anywhere in the world -- no exchange fees, no ATM fees, no telephone call fees. Every time I rent a car with the card, I'm fully covered, even to the point of having a car delivered directly to where I'm standing within 12 hours. I had a strange charge on the card one time. I called the AmEx service desk. I told the rep that I had a strange charge on the card that I did not think was accurate, and I will explain it to you... "SHHHH! Mr. Speedy1! You don't need to explain anything. We don't want you to waste your own time. The charge is coming off the card this very instant! If the hotel doesn't like it, then they can go pound sand!"
I swear that I have never spent more than One Minute -- yes, 60 seconds -- on the phone with AmEx. | f634b671-3a76-43bd-b3e9-6a76fce9ff48 |
3g4hkr | How are autonomous vehicles supposed to function in large cities (assumed to be where they'll be used most) when any normal gps system can't even function correctly with all the interference from the skyscrapers? | They don't use JUST GPS. They also use cameras, sensors, and built in maps (and math). They are programmed to read signs, recognize pedestrians, keep an updated version of where they are on a map based on speed and direction, etc, etc... | 3d647480-068f-4145-be33-06845a6a2043 |
2403fx | Why does inbreeding increase the likelihood of birth defects? | Everybody has bad genes in them - I remember a scientist quipping that there are enough genetic defects in the human genome to kill a person several times over. However, all humans get two sets of genes, one from each parent. As a result, many of the 'defects' you might have in your genes are simply overridden by the working copy you got from your other parent.
However, when you inbreed, you've got two people with very similar genetics, which means that its more likely that they'll both have identical copies of a defective gene (or gene set). That means the offspring is more likely to receive both copies of the defect from their parents, losing that protection that normally came from receiving two sets of chromosomes.
Do not that inbreeding doesn't increase rates of mutations, just the likelihood of genetic defects that are already existing in the parents being expressed fully.
Also, this question gets asked a lot. Use the search bar next time. | 0e67d595-8067-4de5-b55f-860537ce4b6f |
2zq2fe | Is at your own risk/we are not responsible for X Legal? If yes, to what degree? | I'm answering from a US perspective. This is a question of state law for the most part, so it varies by state. There are two things you're talking about: assumption of risk and waiver of liability.
Some quick legal background: if you don't have a contract with someone you can usually only sue them in tort. A tort is just a wrongful act that gives rise to civil liability on its own. In order to sue someone in tort they usually have to have acted negligently. Negligence is generally defined as not exercising the care that a reasonable person would under the same circumstances. What sort of care a reasonable person would exercise is usually a question that the jury decides.
An assumption of risk just indicates that the participant knew of the dangers of participating in the activity. The person signing it doesn’t waive their right to sue the other party if the other party acts negligently. It’s main purpose is to protect someone who is hosting something like a sports event from having a participant sue them later and say “they were negligent for not telling me that I might get tackled playing football.”
A waiver of liability says that a participant in an activity waives their right to sue someone. In most states the waiver of liability can be enforced to prevent a participant from suing the sponsor for any injury arising out of the sponsor’s negligence. It usually won’t be enforced if the sponsor was more than negligent, though (for example they were reckless, grossly negligent, or intentionally hurt someone).
In some states like Virginia (last I checked) a court will not enforce any waivers of liability regarding personal injuries. You can still sign a waiver for injury to your property, though. However, Virginia is in the minority. Most states will enforce the waiver and won’t allow someone who signed a waiver to sue the protected party for its negligence.
Most waivers also only cover claims you could bring personally. If you die and your spouse sues for wrongful death then a waiver probably wouldn’t cover that because you can’t waive your spouse’s right to sue; your spouse would have to do that themselves. If the waiver language were broad and said something like “I waive everyone’s right to sue sponsor for any injuries I may suffer due to sponsor’s negligence” I’m not entirely sure what would happen if your spouse tried to sue. I imagine most courts would not enforce the waiver, but I have read any cases on that specific question. | ce03b4ec-ad1a-4810-a8e9-2228b0a4acf8 |
1sjpwy | Where is all the water going? | The problem isn't that we're losing water, it's that we're just using clean freshwater faster than it's being replenished.
You remember hearing in the cowboy stories about how great the Rio Grande was? [This is what it looks like today](_URL_0_) after it's been dammed up for irrigation & drinking water up north. | 749dee02-45b9-4d74-853d-5fdde297ab83 |
19zw35 | Is it possible for new major cities in first world countries to emerge and be as populous as the current ones? | Theoretically, cities build up for many reasons, but a key is economics and demographics.
There is a dual causality to these. Cities with good demographic conditions can create good economic opportunities, and vice versa.
Basically what you need is economic opportunity, or some major demographic shift.
For example, Fort McMurray (oil town in northern alberta) has increased its population by 10 times in the last 40 years or so. Because there are good jobs there.
Also (pre-collapse) many of florida's fastest growing cities were from Retired people moving in from the north. | 48ffedf6-a665-4c07-a125-8ca69ab3aea5 |
22lowe | The recently annonced exotic hadrons made of 4 quarks. | {Quarks carry color, antiquarks anticolor. These colors can be red, green or blue, RGB, and ofcourse also antired, antiblue, antigreen.
Mesons are made of 2 quarks, a quark and its anti-quark, so that the resulting meson will be colorless (color + anticolor = colorless)
Baryons are made of 3 quarks. (3 different colors, like RGB or aRaGaB are together colorless again)
The exotic hadrons are made out of more than 3 quarks and that could be done like so:
4 quarks
R, aR, B, aB (red + antired + blue + antiblue = colorless)
5 quarks
RGB R aR (red green blue, red antired = colorless)
So yeah normally the 4quark hadrons aren't more stable than two mesons of 2 quarks. so we call it exotic }-ish | 9404294b-c692-4cab-9d42-cd84a8b5a9e2 |
60y6c4 | Why are Canadians considered to be one of the nicest people? Did anything special happened? Is Canada such a nice place to live in? | We help people all over the world. Many countries have been helped by our peacekeeping efforts. And we are generally polite.
We even won many battles during the world wars and even hid the Dutch princesses in our country while the nazis invaded them. They send us 100,000 tulips every year in appreciation.
_URL_0_ | c5a16dd0-6299-496e-bb0c-5b9e33e62920 |
1spuy8 | How I can tell if it's safe to click on a link here in Reddit w/o someone doing it purposefully to get my IP | Guy threatens suicide, someone tries to help, guy is mad. What? | 4639cc14-c18d-4bbb-8525-ff7368262f4f |
4u0ikk | can anyone explain this magic trick | If you are asked to pick a number between 1 and 10, statistically most people pick the number 6. Do this trick enough times with enough people and eventually you'll hit the jackpot. | 5e24045a-0cc7-470c-a693-4be486e4f63c |
85riry | Why can't we send someone with a piece of paper and a pencil to map the Paris Catacombs? | Because he would end up dead in few minutes of course.
Seriously, there are maps of Paris catacombs (official and not public or unofficial and public), they could be incomplete because things can change and (I guess) nobody cares about extra dead-ends. | dc13f493-2ef4-4b11-a1ea-60d23dce13e4 |
501k5h | Why does our body seem like it's exhausted when we oversleep? | REM cycles. You oversleep, and your body's internal clock (regulates daily processes) gets screwed up so it rolls over to the next cycle and thinks you need to sleep.
We need sleep to give our bodies time to repair without need for action, so they can do it freely and easily. Studies have shown that we can also solve problems we were thinking up the day before during sleep. It's basically a system repair daily to make sure we're good to go for tomorrow. | 1280fc0b-ce6a-4955-8b2b-a9986ebc4b9d |
192dq6 | Why is building a fence/wall at the U.S. border considered foolish? | Because the border is fucking HUGE. Seriously the border of the US and Mexico is almost 2,000 miles; for a comparison the entire border of France is ~1800 miles. Also it is just a fence and people can easily jump it like they do now where fences are in place.
And it will cost a shit ton, not only to build but to maintain. | bfea716e-7489-483b-842a-124c9eb2c848 |
2q2oow | Does the FBI really have a magical Google like in Criminal Minds? | No, that's ust to make TV interesting. Dozens on people sitting quietly in cubicles for days or weeks searching for the info doesn't make good television. | 4fa47003-9148-41d3-afb2-ae11d7f758dd |
39hqqi | How does the numbering on interstate exits work? | Varies by state
In some states, the exit corresponds with what the mile marker is. So if the exit is at mile marker 25, it's exit 25. In case of multiple exits or new exits added at mile 25, then it's subdivided into exits 25a, 25b, 25c, etc.
In other states, the exits go in numerical order for the duration of the highway. There's an ordering system which runs east-west or north-south from lowest to highest. So the first exit is exit 1, second exit is exit 2, and so on til the end. When new exits are added, that's where you see exit 2a, 2b, 2c, etc. | 71808f16-d870-4960-8676-9117b2026791 |
13uj1s | Why do we see spots in our eyes after looking into a bright light? | It's called an [afterimage](_URL_0_). Your eyes get all tired out looking at the same thing for so long, so your receptors need to take a break. It's kind of like how your body gets used to the feeling of clothing on it all the time. | 35d57258-30c5-41d2-a6df-37f3299e52ad |
1vw48d | Why do African Americans dominate athletics in the U.S.? | ...and, as a follow-up, why is hockey nearly devoid of blacks? | b5b501a1-2c7a-46c2-ac52-003c15ba7155 |
5sogx1 | Why is it so common for kids to dislike vegetables | Maybe it depends how it's prepared, I'm from europe and my entire family could make delicious vegetables, I always wondered why on earth in American tv shows/films/sitcoms kids hate vegetables 99% people I know love, exception is Brussels sprout, it's abomination and should be banned | 6a7de8eb-553a-4f10-9471-cd69a6553933 |
5ikuti | Why is smell the most nostalgic of our senses? | Basically because the area of the brain that processes smells is the one (of the ones that process senses) closer to the area were memories are stored. | f7843da5-56a7-4488-a3a1-df0c6f5a585c |
4pju3f | how do Wii remotes work? You point them at a small black bar and you can move the cursor anywhere on the screen. | Actually, you can replace the sensor bar with two candles.
The sensor bar is simply a device that emits infrared radiation, the Wii remote has an infrared sensor inside hs detects where the IR is coming from. Using that, it then uses Bluetooth to send that info to the Wii where it is displayed on the screen.
Candles emit enough IR as well. | 195446ce-ef73-4993-8aef-3d07f3402a6f |
3m2ya5 | What happens when my eyes focus on my reflection in my phone screen then switch back to the screen? | The light field that exists in the three dimensional volume between your eyes and your screen contains many different patterns that correspond to different images at different locations. By pointing your eyes in a certain location and adjusting the shape of the natural lens on the front of your eye, you select out only certain light rays in this light field and bring them into focus to form an image on your retina. The light from your face is always reflecting off the screen and reaching your eyes. But if your lenses are shaped such that your focus is aimed at the screen, the light from your face reflecting off the screen is out of focus because it comes from a different depth. Even though the light from your face seems to be coming from the screen, it is actually coming effectively from behind the screen because it is a reflection of a light pattern created in front of the screen. Therefore the light pattern from your face has a different effective distance then the light created by the screen. So you can focus on the distance corresponding to the location of the screen and only see the image created inside the screen, or you can focus farther away on the effective distance of your face and only see your face. | f093e96e-630a-4ed4-9216-1a9923d4e64d |
4v1tdg | How do computers built inside minecraft out of blocks work? | Computers are essentially huge state machines. If you can store some sort of state and describe how to transition from one to another, you have the fundamentals of a computer. Modern computers use microscopic transistors, but you can also represent state with all sorts of things such as Minecraft blocks that can toggle between two states. Then using the red stone as wiring to describe how to transition from one state to another, you have a state machine. | 1cc08ab7-94ae-487c-84be-27ee5bdeafdc |
3ul60h | Is it possible to thrive on a 100% fungus based diet? | Mushrooms are, indeed, awesome, but they don't have all the nutrients you need. They're very, very low in fat, for one (and yes, you do need some) and carbohydrates (and yes you need those too).
Mushrooms can definitely be good for you (especially if you eat a good variety if interesting ones and not "plain" white mushrooms), but you can't live just on them, I'm afraid. | 3021fd22-a6b1-4254-9139-fdb994cc9822 |
75esyn | The most recent physics noble prize | It won for discovering strong evidence of gravitational waves. Usually things that cause fluctuations in gravity move too slowly to tell, but large, violent events cause waves: fluctuations in the gravitational field. These were predicted a century ago but it took these guys and a clever experiment to finally observe one.
Classic Newtonian understanding of gravity was that it would propagate infinitely: if you could instantly remove an object, the lack of gravity from it would be immediately felt. This experiment shows that it propagates at the speed of light, and radiates out like light or other forces. | 0bde5029-75db-4f94-854a-796e10c1c503 |
7p9i3j | Why can't you use dialysis for threating blood poisioning og high amounts of carbonmonoxide? | Carbon monoxide is a lot smaller than the impurities that a dialysis machine can handle, smaller than your kidney can handle. The problem is that it is attached to the blood as oxygen should be, not merely in your blood stream as well.
Its not a bad idea, the scales just unfortunately don't work. | 9bbd03f6-3224-4ebd-9537-dc1510a4e517 |
3af6t5 | What is the difference between Netflix's New Releases and Recently Added? | Recently Added means that the content has only been added to Netflix's library recently but may have aired/been released on other platforms at any time before. New Release means the content has only been released on other platforms recently.
For example, if Netflix added a tv show from the '60s yesterday, it would appear on Recently Added but if they added a season of a tv show that aired earlier this year, it would be new releases. | 8a131c8f-f318-4185-9c5c-a7524d24e2e7 |
6czkkb | What is the difference between sutures and stitches? | Same thing. Medical people usually call them sutures, and general public calls them stitches. The word "stitches" has a connotation of being on or of the skin, but same thing. | ea21f16e-a990-46c7-ab0a-b027dae49aa6 |
2di5vh | From an evolutionary biology standpoint, why do we enjoy music at all, and "good music" in particular? | # pobody's standard evolution response
This comment is a RES macro. You are seeing this because your post or comment shows a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of one of the concepts of evolution described below.
* Evolution is a very simple process.
1. A random mutation occurs.
2. If the mutation is *beneficial* to survival and/or procreation and *hereditary*, organisms with the mutation have an advantage, and the mutation will show up more often in the descendants. If the mutation is *detrimental*, the offspring will have a harder time. If it's *neutral*, it may or may not continue to show up.
3. There's no step 3.
* Evolution does not have a will, plan, design, or intent.
* Evolution has no impact on anything that doesn't deal with *survivability* or *reproduction*. Evolution will not make us into godlike athletes with six arms and the ability to see through steel because those things do not help with *survivability* or *reproduction*.
* Evolution does not produce perfect solutions. Maybe the right mutation simply hasn't happened. Maybe it wasn't beneficial enough. Maybe the only member of the species to have it was hit by a truck. It's too *random* to discuss "why hasn't X happened?" or "why is X not optimal?" In any case, it is an ongoing process.
* Evolutionary pressures are different in different environments. This is the whole point of speciation and what Darwin was going on about. Evolution causes multiple different answers to similar problems because (a) it's random and (b) environments are different. | d7d0e70d-73b8-4a07-858e-fdb237d9626d |
23kk17 | How do blind people know they are gay? | They know they are gay because they feel attracted to members of the same gender as themselves. | 6bc5d1e8-dba5-41e0-8607-28a31380ce00 |
27qwm0 | If a cold is a viral infection, then why did paracetamol make my throat less sore? | Paracetamol doesn't do anything to any disease (except worsen liver diseases - check your doses kids). Basically all over the counter drugs are just there to mask symptoms. Sometimes treating symptoms is very important, like reducing a fever if it is too high, but they don't cure the illness. | f70196ae-77e6-4d34-881c-c4a29d64fc0d |
17jlru | What determines what a planet or other celestial body is made of? | As I have come to understand it it's gravity.
more massive elements tend to wind up closer to a solar's center of mass ( AKA the sun/star ) in comparison to the lighter elements.
This all happens when the emerging solar system is still a cloud of particles. So once these particles get pulled together in to planets you'll get planets with more heavy elements in the planets closer to the star and the planets with lighter elements further out. | 4adebef2-1afd-4eb6-b3b7-9261d7c29a91 |
86oytc | Why does sweat smell different coming from the forehead instead of the underarms, or the underarms instead of the feet? | There are a few things to consider: where the sweat is coming from, how that part of the body is dressed, and how long since it was washed.
Your feet are stuck inside shoes for most of the day so there's a bunch of bacteria that live there going to town on your delicious sweat, the funky "Foot smell" is a bi-product of their feast.
Your armpit has a certain type of sweat gland called an Apocrine gland which is there because we're apes, that as well as regular, scentless sweat, also exude oily pheromones which can have a certain odour, and if you don't wash it there'll be a bacteria party in there too which causes B.O. These glands are also in a few other places, your groin, ear, eyelids (bizarrely enough), taint, nipples...
The reason the rest of you doesn't sweat stinky sweat is because sweat from the rest of your body doesn't smell unless bacteria are given a chance to chow down on it.
You can also sweat some odour from foods that you've eaten, onions and garlic break down into sulfur compounds in the body and can come out in sweat, just as they do in your breath. | d439b267-b44a-4572-a7d0-8ca01c1b39fb |
339u2p | How/Why does cracking a glow stick "activate" it? | The ELI5 is this: A glowstick works by mixing two liquids which undergo a chemical reaction that produces light. The two parts are kept separate by a thin, fragile division inside the stick. Bending the flexible outer part of the stick cracks the inner division, allowing the two fluids to mix and start producing light. | 467ca059-2292-4dc6-8b70-b7bd80ee7fe1 |
49i0sx | How is Noise Pollution dangerous? | Beyond the reality is that long term exposure to loud noises leads to deafness. There is a sense of social propriety as well. Just like you shouldn't walk down the street naked, and not let the smell of your shit disturb your housemates, you should show respect to others with regards to sound as well. | 847fb907-7766-47ed-847b-1c6ad522e109 |
7al7hu | How is the wind capable of making 20 m high waves? | The wind blows consistently over a very long distance of ocean. It isn't one single strong gust which blows a wave up, but a sustained force that puts lots of energy into the wave. | 73edf7d1-6bc2-4c01-9f14-b102295386de |
5dkaal | how come things that are blurry due to motion in rel life can look clear in mirrors? | Our eyes are simply better at tracking motion that is further away.
From the perspective of your brain, the fan in the mirror is twice as far away from you. | c91c28e6-0de6-44c0-a8a0-8a3dec64a0ae |
s7tdj | neo-paganism | Neo-Paganism is the revival of old, traditional, pre-Christianity religions (mostly European, this doesn't include things like Native American religions). The religions go by different names: Wicca, Druidism, Heathenry, etc. Because there are so many different religions, and all of them believe in different gods/goddesses/spirits, it's difficult to describe them all.
The most popular Neo-Pagan religion is Wicca, which is based on old Celtic religions. There are different sects of Wicca (just like in Christianity): some worship a God and Goddess (some worship them as separate entities, some believe they are incarnations of one main God), some worship a "triple Goddess" (the "Maiden, Mother, and Crone"), some worship several different gods and goddesses (like the Greeks did), and some worship one goddess Diana. Some Wiccans believe in reincarnation, some believe in an afterlife. Some Wiccans practice alone, some Wiccans practice in groups (or covens). Magick (usually spelled with a K, to distinguish it from stage magic) is still very much alive in all Wiccan sects, however it's less a "love spell" sort of thing and more like the Earth's natural energy in their eyes. Wiccans believe that certain phases of the moon or certain times of the year invoke certain kinds of energies, and when celebrating holidays (the "Sabbats") or moon phases (the "Esbats"\*), they can use or channel those energies to help others or themselves (eg, use Spring's symbolic newfound life to do fertility rites, or use the Equinox to try and instill a balance between two fighting friends, or use the Moon's rays to guide the healing process, etc).
\***Edit:** I might be wrong on this. It appears the term "Esbat" is in debate amongst Wiccans. It's popularly used to refer to celebrations of the moon cycle, however it originally meant just a coven gathering. | ca2e87ef-0616-41eb-b0ef-e2b897616805 |
1c6j3q | The plot of Animorphs | I gues I need to add this.
**Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers**
*Though honestly, it's been out for almost 20 years do we really need a spoiler warning?*
Alright, so last year I found a torrent and reread all of them so I have a pretty good feel for it. They are honestly pretty good once you get past the first 10 or so, but they are so short for an adult the first 10 books might as well be 10 chapters; not as arduous as it might seem. If I bolded something, it is the most important.
There are two alien races at war, **The Andalites(good aliens) and the evil Yeerks (Bad aliens).** Andalites are the Vulcans/Protoss of the series. They have more advanced tech, have been around for a long time and are kind of douchey because of this, but overall pretty good guys. **Specifically the Andalites have devolped a tech called the Escafil Device which gives a person the ability to absorb DNA by touch and then transform into that creature.** The Yeerks remind me of the Zerg/Tribbles. **The Yeerks are slugs that can crawl through a ear canal and take control of a host body completely.** The host is still alive, they just have no control of their body. The host can communicate with the Yeerk slug in control. The Yeerks reproduce very quickly, because of this and their lower technology they prefer subtle infiltration as opposed to ROFL-stomping a new planet. Also this a very spread out war, so if they committed a lot of resources to Earth, The Andalites would do the same. But by slowly infiltrating they gain hosts without opposition. There are trillions of Yeerks and in their natural state they swim around in a pool. Being in a body is a supreme luxury. Imagine what a blind, mute, and deaf person would do to gain access to sight, sound, and easy communication. Now imagine an entire race and what they might do to free themselves. **Earth is very valuable to them because there so many of us and the quality of life they can live through us.** **The weakness of the Yerks is that they have to leave their host and regenerate in a Yeerk pool every 3 days.** The Yeerks have enslaved several species, the ones they use most are the Hork Bajir(think Klingon with razor sharp blades and points everywhere) and the Taxxons(giant centipede that can devour a horse in 5 minutes and is always hungry.) **The only Yeerk to ever gain a Andalite body(and the ability to morph) is Visser Three, and he is in charge of earth. Visser is a rank in Yeerk society, there are 46(??) out of trillions of Yeerks, so Visser = OG.**
In the first book, Andalite Warrior Prince Elfangor is shot down into a construction site where 5 Tweens find him. He knows he is about to die and that the extent of the invasion is not know to the Andalite High Command. **He uses the Escafil Device to give the 5 Tweens the power to change into any animal and explains to them the threat Earth faces from the Yeerks. He also warns them that they have a two hour limit in their transformed bodies, or they will be stuck forever.** They decide to use this power and do battle as Elfangor wished. Each book is pretty formulaic. They find out the Yeerks can be hurt by destroying a facility/protecting a important person from infestation/gaining intel/freeing hosts, so they are forced to acquire a new animal DNA every book that will help them accomplish their goals. **They do a boss battle with Visser Three at the end of most books, where he morphs into some crazy alien species and they narrowly escape.**
**One of the themes(but not foremost) is about imagining what the different 'personalities' of animals are. Dolphins are incredibly fun to turn into, ant's are so terrifying that IIRC at one point Marco was willing to risk death or capture, rather than turn into one.**
Now many people reading this might be turned off "yea yea, a group of tweens does battle against a intergalactic empire by exploring their animal side and still have to do their homework, BORING!" But there is an adult level of depth and emotion that goes on. **The focus is not on the Troubles of Tweens, but on the cause and effect of war on the human soul and on society.** Because one of the major appeals of this story is that it is character driven I will break the rest down by character.
**Marco** Funny, witty, sarcastic and really smart he is the reluctant fighter. He finds out early on that the reason his mom abandoned him and his dad is because she was a controlled by a Yeerk. His sole motivations is freeing his mom and restarting the family he can barley remember. **Before this discovery he wanted to quit**. The rest of the group pressures him to continue fighting even when he doesn't think it will lead to his moms freedom, or it goes against every thought of self preservation. He would prefer to use his power to become famous rather than fighting. He is Jakes best friend.
**Rachel** She is a Valley Girl turned Viking. Before this all she wanted to do was shop and talk about boys. Now all she wants to do is fight. **Her secret fear is that they would somehow win the war and she would not be able to transform into a bear and rip peoples faces off.** Jake is her cousin and Cassey is her BFF and Tobias is her love interest.
**Cassey** Her mom is a vet at the Zoo and her dad runs a wildlife clinic. She is the soure of info and access to the animals(and therefore there DNA). **She's the most compassionate and would give up the war in a heart beat if she could.** She even feels compassion for the Yeerks, and IIRC at one point meets members of a Yeerk underground movement who do not want to be en-slavers anymore. Rachel is her BFF and Jake is her love interest.
**Tobias** He was a super loner without parents, constantly being shuttled between relatives.**He gets trapped as a Hawk early on and is forced to give up the human life.** He is a stereotypical beta male in that even though his situation is really fucked up, and he knows its fucked up, he tries to act like it's OooooKaay that he is trapped to the rest of the group. He likes Rachel, but the birdman stuff makes it super weird. Weirder even than Twilight and the vampire/werewolf love triangle
**Jake** He is the reluctant leader of the group. He reminds me of Ender because he has the tactical sense to win most engagements but the empathy to feel bad about the pain he causes. He is also haunted by the fact that his brother is infested but he can't single him out for rescue because that might expose their identities, that Tobias becomes trapped as a Hawk in the first book, that his best friend Marco wants nothing to do with all this crazy shit (understandably) but he keeps pressuring him, that Rachel becomes a blood thirsty killer and that Cassey(the compassionate one) is forced to deal with all of this horrible stuff. IIRC at the end of the series he sends Rachel to her death to finish off Visser Three but he never forgives himself for it. **[This Is Jake] (_URL_0_)**
**Ax** He is a Andalite and the younger brother of Eflangor and crashed landed in a seperate peice of this ship. They find him sometime around or before book ten. He is similar in age to the rest of the group. Because Andalites do not have mouths when he morphs into a human he is overpowered by the taste of doughnuts, popcorn, and candy. **He is also the Mcgyuver of the group.** "Oh, you need a Z-space transmitter? Give me a NES and some tucktape, in two hours you can be talking to someone on the other side of the universe, in real time AND in HD"
"Ax how is that possible?"
"Z-physics, duh"
**David** Holy shit, how can I not not talk about David. David is a shit of a kid who somehow gets the morphing tech somewhere around book 20 in the series and almost exposed the animorphs to the Yeerks. He is essentially a poster child for that saying **Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely**. They decide they need to neutralize him so they do the most cold blooded thing possible. They trick him into becoming a rat and staying past two hours, thereby trapping him, and then carry him to a island filled with rats so that he could never do him no harm. This cause Jake and Cassey a lot of moral pain but Rachel and Marco don't really care and are glad the problem is solved. He eventually comes back but they beat him then to.
**I love the David arch because it shows the grey area of the protagonists morality** And in fact I enjoyed this series for all the grey areas it displayed. **This series does not pander to YA or kids, but tries to ELI5 the horrors and tragedy of war, and the fucked up things the people going through a war feel and the fucked up decisions they are forced to make**
Fake Ninja Edit: So I was saving this as a post every so often so I would not not lose the whole thing but thank you to people who upvoted early versions of it!
Fake Ninja Edit Two: To those wondering why I did not mention the Crayak/Elliminist ark: It honestly does not matter to the over arching theme of these books (War sucks and negatively changes those who participate, regardless of reason for participating) but I can go over it in a edit if there is enough clamor for a explanation. Honestly there are better arks to be curious about. The stuff that goes between Jake and his infested brother; the book where Jakes family goes on vacation into the woods for four(?) days and Jake constantly wants to free him might be the best book in series. The android-dog ark is pretty interesting. The time near the end of the series when they decide to give the ability to disabled kids is heart breaking. The free Hork Bajir colony is intriguing. Rachel and her descent into becoming Xena Warrior princess, plus her weird relationship with Tobias. Tobias's own struggle adapting to being a bird. How disturbed Cassey becomes because of the things they are forced to do in the name of war and how that affects her feelings for Jake.
Also I did not cover the end, but I can if needed. | bc5d1a18-5920-46a8-acf4-76243a468629 |
362l3q | "Click Bait" sites? | They're obnoxious because their goal is to get as many eyes on their advertisements as possible. They write headlines that make you curious and them force you to look at as many pages as possible to drive up their advertising revenue - each new page serves up a new ad that they get paid for. Because they make money while being cheap and easy to run, lots of companies are copying the business model. | ac3e1518-4807-46a0-9524-98830c8ad497 |
7kmst2 | Why are 3d models used for games, in a T-Pose when not in use or before an animation ? | It's the best way to model or sculpt it. it's also more or less a standard, so you can easily take a skeleton from another model and place it on your working model. It allows for easier deformation modelling too. You can also model a character with their arms down, but then when you want to animate those arms upwards the deformation becomes a lot harder to get right. | 31c9ec7c-f0ef-4d7d-bf78-6a3212ca3b15 |
1vl2fy | Why do we read Shakespeare? Isn't the point of a theatrical play to watch it? | The reason behind Shakespeare being in the Curriculum is one that is quite anti-climactic. The reason we study Shakespeare is because he was not only a great Playwright, but a wordsmith and a lyrical genius. [He invented over 1700 words](_URL_0_).
Not only that but the way he wrote was genius, because theatre in the 17th Century was very different, They had no use of lights, sound effects, props, backdrops. The reason Shakespeare work is so Long is because most of it is descriptive. Instead of seeing a scene that has trees for a backdrop, and Leafy Gobos while being lit in a green tint, he had to describe the surroundings, and he had to make that as captivating as possible, he couldn't just blankly state "She was beautiful" The scope of that is so broad, as opposed to saying "She is more bright than fire, more beautiful than a jewel, the world does not deserve this woman, she is making me question whether I had actually fallen in love before now". Even his original actors would find surprises in the text due to them not knowing the whole script, but this is due to the fact that they had no way of mass printing and it would have taken one man ages to hand write multiple copies of the scripts.
As well as this, his structure is phenomenal, the way his stories unfold are brilliant in the way that it's unlikely enough to be entertainment, but plausible enough to be relatable. Take for example Macbeth: His paranoia and hunger for power increases and an alarming rate and most of the characters give the lead couple the benefit of the doubt extremely generously, but where it all comes from is completely understandable, think about all great men with a great woman behind them. On top of this, its the way he wrote lines, and dialogue, Things like Iambic pentameter (Having 10 syllables per line, and stressing all the even numbered ones. During a Iambic Pentameter speech, if one line has less than 10 Syllables, there should be a dramatic break.) and the way that some characters, couples mostly, conjoin their lines to make 10 syllables.
Which meads me onto "But you can just get this from watching the play, right? If the actors are good" But when:-
Producers choose to do a modern translation or reduced text production
Directors have different intent, adaptions or dramatic choices
Actors have varied understandings or implications on lines
can result in a loss in translation. This is a very common thing to happen because Shakespeare's work is so adaptable to modern times and relevant Social/Political/Economical issues. It's well worth trying to see adaptions, which should be easy, Shakespeare's work is the most performed in the world. (In fact it is generally believed that his work is being performed every day somewhere in the world, most likely in more than one place) But the best option to be able to fully appreciate everything he did in writing, you have to read he work, to fully be able to analyse it. Of course, your analysis may be completely different to someone else's, which then will spark a debate and get people talking, which may make you want to go back to the text and read it again to find new things, and so on and so forth.
**TL:DR:** The man's writing is so complex and layered, as well as the factor that modern performances have the license to change and adapt his work so much, that a lot of beautiful, lyrical and poetic writing gets lost.
*Studied Theatre for 7 years. BA(Hons) Drama. Studying for an MA in Music Theatre. Wrote a Dissertation on the Relevance of Shakespeare in Modern Culture.* | 907fc922-5eaf-4545-aa51-4a7a5f72cc54 |
4dgwke | How did it come to be that baseball would be played during the spring and summer, football during the fall, and basketball and hockey during the winter? | * Baseball - outdoor sport, needs good, dry weather
* Football - originally a collegiate sport, played during the fall semester
* Basketball - developed as an indoor sport to be played when the weather was bad
* Hockey - outdoor sport that required frozen surfaces | ad3f0912-bf7c-415e-8ed2-eae6194b83da |
1vztkp | What is stopping 911 dispatch centers from adopting texting capabilities? | Phone calls are live data stream. Its transferred in real time. Text messages are not. They're queued and sent whenever the network wants.. When the network is busy, like after a disaster, text msgs are delayed minutes or hours later | 56207aa4-034b-4c6b-bcca-d4e42f4f14f0 |
34yxl4 | Why all the hate for Joss Whedon's handling of Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron? | She got captured and put in a cage by a male villain. Partly because ScarJo got pregnant during filming and they had to write her out of some action scenes, but when the only woman on the team is the one who gets kidnapped and needs a man to rescue her, it seems off. That, combined with the addition of a romantic subplot annoyed people who liked that for once, a female lead in a film didn't need a love story to be cool.
Oh, and the line about being sterilized got interpreted by some fans to mean "Because I can't have kids, I am a monster." Instead of as "I can't have kids, because of the horrible things they did to me, which resulted in my being a monster." Which offended women who thought this meant Whedon was treating women as baby-factories who have no worth unless they are pumping out children.
So this, combined with the internet amplifying people's anger and rage, lead to so many angry tweets. | 741ca2f3-fb93-42b4-a745-3db9eb2d3a29 |
4x0es9 | How is Russia able to afford its current modernization program? | The available resource right in mainland and doesnt have to import, Russia with its vast land is very resource rich, so it's more cost-effective to self supplying some of the industries, making the product costs lower comparing to other countries. Furthermore, the cost living in Russia is lower than other western countries, although their social welfare isnt as good, but still acceptable in their own standard. And finally, being a somewhat "dictator ship", they can easily cut the money at some departments and transfer it to their higher priority one. It's the same with NKorea, where 60% people in starving thread, and still can launch rocket, although quality is questionable. Russia is way more bigger than NK, and has more experience in dealing with trouble from WW2. In motherland everything can happen. | 0cf7b927-5c63-45ae-89eb-2b1c54e69d80 |
2k47yw | Why are people of Nordic origin taller than most humans? | Somebody has to be the tallest. That area of the world happened to get mutation for height. | 057963a9-52e9-4645-88f5-8869fc13c1e0 |
4kqvf7 | If cellphones are replacing landlines, why aren't there versions of white pages for cellphones? How are landlines any different? | Problem Is there are multiple cell phone companies, so if each had their own book it would be incomplete and inconvenient to have to look through 5 books to find a person. Land lines used to be one company in an area generally. It was a weird deal because they were a company, but a utility and basically a monopoly. Even after it was deregulated it still stayed much the same.
And even if someone does somehow arrange to get one combined cell list, it's still going to be very incomplete because people could choose to be unlisted and a large percentage would. I know I would. | f94957e0-c135-45c5-96fb-058487f54e36 |
3jxlul | What causes certain wines to make your tongue feel "dry" after taking a drink? | Chemical compounds called tannins in the wine are the culprits. They're found in most plants and are also what turn tea brown. | 2c1492fc-dbdb-4463-9e6e-d085bb914aa1 |
2tckda | Is "dream Deja Vu" a thing? | One of the prevailing theories on Déjà Vu is that sometimes our wires get crossed (metaphorically) and the sensory input goes through the region of our brains for memory formation and recall before going to conscious thought. I mind tags information based off of where it came from, so it sees that some of the stimuli came from our senses, but the similar stimuli came from our memory. It makes us feel like we've seen this exact before, when it's all coming from the same input. | fca56cd6-c827-44d6-bc42-1490363034d2 |
5b2xwg | what is the theory behind juries? Why can't judges just make all the decisions? | The idea behind juries is that you don't want to turn judges into an elite ruling class that has total power over people. That kind of power is easy to abuse.
Plus, laws are supposed to be a reflection of society itself determining what rules it wants to follow, so having "society itself", in the form of a jury of the accused's peers, determine whether or not the law was broken seems only fitting. | 2905299a-2fbe-4618-911d-fdcf165a62e5 |
3xo1ha | Why did the Earth form with just a single continent? | It didn't.... I'm guessing that you're referring to Pangaea which is usually the starting point when teaching about Continental Drift, however the continents were separate before they formed the supercontinent Pangaea.
In fact, Pangaea is actually thought to have been the seventh or eighth [supercontinent](_URL_0_). | dac5fca2-cfc9-43b0-875e-48768a41c6c9 |
2hnwus | How is being a Redditor different or any more 'special' (or less so?) than regularly browsing any other forum? (genuine question, I'm not trying to be a bitch) | It really doesn't make you any more special than someone else on another forum. Reddit has its bad subs and their users, just like 4chan has its bad boards and their users.
I suppose reddit has a more progressive, liberal stance towards things with a *generally* friendly and welcome user base, which may give it a more favorable reputation.
Again, being a redditor doesn't give you any sort of special status - subscribing is free! | 6a0aa9aa-e0e9-42f7-9fa4-3245ebb063f7 |
3d7nqg | How is it possible to know precise details about planets that are many lightyears away, but not to know the exact size of pluto? | One is a precise measurement based on brand new data on an object that is almost perfectly dark and is extremely small.
The other is a broad, sweeping guess based on a humongous object that is glowing almost as bright as the sun.
I don't see the problem here. | 44451b99-7a6e-4f45-899f-0f5765ce077e |
1mxvrj | What exactly is zero point energy | Let's say that you have a ball and it behaves like a particle. From physics, we know that the total energy of the ball is the sum of the kinetic energy and its potential energy (the energy trapped as matter.) When the ball isn't moving, it has a minute amount of KE even though it should not have *any* kinetic energy at all. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle forces it to have a minimum "inherent" KE that allows the uncertainty principle to exist.
Zero point energy (ZPE) is this "inherent" minimal KE, otherwise known as the energy of the ground state. Because of quantum fluctuations due to the HUP, it is impossible for a particle to have no KE at all. Ergo, it is impossible to thermodynamically induce absolute zero. Technically, I shouldn't even be comparing ZPE to KE because it is possible to have no KE and still have ZPE. But for the purposes of this explanation, I will make this mistake. Thus, the total energy of a particle is its KE + PE + ZPE. | 1fdf41fe-5d7b-4923-a299-af204513dad5 |
2n8tam | How do prisoner exchanges during war actually work? | The reasoning for doing a POW swap are worked out in advance. Generally the prisoners are walked to the border and then let loose to walk to the other side. Or they are moved to a mutually agreed location and then let go. It all kinda depends on who they are and the parties. Some times there isn't one. In WW2 in japan the japs had treated their POWs so bad that once it was announced that the japs had surrendered the guards at the POW camps just left and let the POWs on their own.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | f2d42cbc-a2d6-4320-92e0-f05e3e3cfebf |
1m1xjs | Why do books get banned, and who decides which books to ban. | Most books don't really get banned, when you hear librarians or authors talking about their banned book, what that means in is that a specific school or library has chosen to not feature or include that book in their curriculum or their reserves. However the US government both at the state and local level has to power to ban a small group of books that typically infringe on existing laws or cultural norms.
1. Books may and have been banned for providing high detail on the construction and implementation of homemade weapons. I don't want to link the book here, but a famous such handbook is still illegal to own in some states as it provided detailed instruction on how to build pipe bombs and the pressure cooker weapon used in Boston.
2. Books may also be banned for sexual obscenity. This is a changing field of law, but in 1873 the Comstock Act made the transfer of "obscene" material illegal. This banned a large swath of literature in the 19th century that would not be able legally to be sold until the 1950s. Even today certain graphic material such as pornography can be regulated and banned through these obscenity laws.
3. Books may be banned for violating a specific contract made with the US government. This happened recently when a member of the SEAL team that killed Bin Laden attempted to publish a memoir in which he did not have full clearence to disclose. If one signs a non-disclosure agreement, or has some sort of top-secret legal requirements the government just as any contract signatory has the ability to enforce a banning or censoring.
All this being said very few books are actually banned in a legal sense today in the US. But these three generalized considerations still limit books and other media in other ways, such as providing ratings for movies, or preventing children from witnessing them and so still inform modern culture.
TLDR: banned by law for inducing violence, sex crimes, or violating law/contract. | e440ecd6-fdeb-47aa-b6a7-716429d4d511 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.