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5862hx | Why can't U.S. citizens 'veto' an election? | The candidates are who they are because the American public voted for them. The time to decide who are candidates will be has long passed. | 1d887858-ab45-452e-a3d7-1eb8e5b8df1d |
5ah0zt | Why do humans find eyeless or pitch black eyes scary/unsettling? | It's called The [Uncanny Valley](_URL_0_), and it's not limited to eyes. Basically, the closer something gets to looking human, the more we can sympathise with it - until it gets to be about 95%-99% human. Then it *freaks us the hell out*. Basically if something is just a bit... off.
Eyes may have the additional trigger of us being A. Very attuned to identifying Human faces, B. Vision being our primary sense, and C. Knowing how sensitive eyes are. | 0d8d371a-857c-4c51-a6af-9a55de8b3a30 |
2gvt3k | 3D printing organs. | Ok, this is hard but I will try to make it an ELI5.
We do not put stem cells in a 3d printers and then it came out an organ.
What do is to create a *scaffold* where the stem cells will attach. This is usually done as a different, completely separate step of the process. I mean that they print the scaffold, then they give it to a lab where they will put the stem cells in place and provide the nutrients to make them grow.
I honestly don't know of a process where you can use the stem cells directly in the printer but this is a bleeding-edge sector, so I may be wrong on this.
The stem cells will use this man-made scaffold as a guide to grow in the right way. They use it both as a physicall ground to attach temselves and as a guide.
Immagine that you are a blind person. You are relying on your cane to fell the street in front of you, and you know that there is a wall approximately 20 step after the last turn. But this time you don't find any wall after 20 step. You try to walk some more step, but still there is no wall there.
So you start to freak out. You don't know where you are anymore. You have basically two choice, stand still there or going blindly (I'm sorry for the pun) on the street, taking an huge risk.
This is what happens to a stem cell when it is growing outside is enviroment. They reach a point where they expect to hit another cell or another tissue, like bones, muscles ecc ecc. But they do not encounter any of that. So they stop growing or start growing everywhere, making a mess.
The scaffold provvide that enviroment. The cell will meet another cell growing in another part of the scaffold or the scaffold itself. And they will "know" if they have to duplicate again or stop.
Also you have to know that some organs works, at least in part, by mechanical force. This means that are actually forces like gravity to do the the work, so you can use non-organic stuff quite a lot. Dyalisis works Like this. | bf5888c2-1baf-45a3-908c-d458fd98f80e |
5qddg1 | Why do lakes freeze but rivers don't, in the same temperature? | Water in lakes is still, so it has time to freeze. Rivers are flowing, so water is constantly moving, making freezing much more difficult. | bc553060-ee5d-4578-b070-6a9516115a87 |
82k0jp | Why can’t we capitalize numbers like how we capitalize letters? | We do; we just stopped mostly using the “lowercase” numerals.
[This](_URL_0_) is what numerals used to look like. Some typefaces still provide such “old-style numerals” or “text figures” instead of or in addition to the newer “lining figures”. | 13bb8b0c-e513-480a-9b64-00d09a0f223d |
1dey0h | How/ can people be sentenced to multiple 'life-sentences' in prison? | People are given a sentence for each charge they are guilty of. If you commit 4 murders you can be sentenced to 4 separate life sentences. It's largely redundant but allows prosecutors to stack charges against people and allow justice in each of the cases of the criminals victim. | 7b5a91bd-bbf5-486c-928b-6f9bda86a735 |
4qwdme | What's the biological purpose of males getting sleepy after ejaculation? | It's about pair bonding. If you fall asleep next to your partner you are likely to wake up next to them. It's to promote bonding. | 6f1596a1-7e0f-4d5e-99c9-d55cb924bf87 |
30ecbc | How did Dubai become so rich and prosperous so "quickly" | First they discovered oil, then they started selling oil. Then they formed the UAE and aligned with the western world rather than the lunatic dictators in the middle east. they also arranged their city in such a way that made it very attractive for foreigners to do business/live there.
tldr: oil | 02a909db-6481-4316-b390-09e480f03087 |
2i3wx9 | Why is it when you put room temperature items in a refridgerator, does it seem to make the other items inside less cold over time until everything has cooled down tothe same temperature? Or is this all in my head? (explanation in text) | Technically, things can't give or take "cold" from objects, they only give or take heat. Cold is simply the word to describe when something is colder than another thing (usually our hand). Cold objects actually still have a lot of heat in them.
But anyways, a mini fridge doesn't have very much power, so it takes a long time for it to cool down the inside of the fridge. If you put a lot of room temperature stuff inside, it will often take many hours to remove all the heat from those items. In the meantime, the temperatures of everything inside the fridge will try to equalize - the hot things will spread their heat around to the cold things and, if there was no fridge, everything would become equally luke-warm eventually. Since the mini fridge is so weak and takes so long to re-chill everything, there's plenty of time for at least *some* of the heat to spread around inside. | d5344338-03c1-4025-a38b-b2237b90ef98 |
3hc3jt | How does color blind glasses (EnChroma) in recent youtube videos fix color blindness? | Enchroma glasses only work for people who are color deficient, not completely color blind. By this I mean, the color cones in their eyes are still functional, but the Red and Green cones (for example) are overlapping in terms of what portion of the color spectrum they are sensitive too.
These people suffer from colorblindness in a way that makes it difficult for them to perceive the difference between colors like red and green because both their red and green cones are activating in many cases when either red or green light hits them (making it impossible to differentiate those colors).
The Enchroma glasses basically knock-out a portion of the spectrum that sits between colors like Red and Green.
That helps to avoid the Red/Green confusion because now the wavelengths of light that were causing both the Red and Green cones to activate (with either Red or Green colors) are blocked and only very red colors and very green colors are visible / pass through the glasses.
A side effect of this is that the glasses significantly increase the color saturation/intensity... So even to someone who is not colorblind, the world will look different with the glasses and the colors will be much more vibrant/saturated.
A lot of people who are colorblind and try the glasses on get confused between the increased saturation levels (which is a property of the glasses that affects everyone) and the addition of new colors/shades.
So some of these colorblind people believe the high saturation/intensity look is the 'correct' way to see things and they think that's what they're missing out on, but really that's not what normal people see either.
So unfortunately, not everyone who tries the glasses on is able to perceive new colors (e.g. purple) the same way we do, although they may be fooled into thinking they are seeing new colors as a result of the changes to the color saturation/intensity levels.
Some people do actually see new colors with the glasses, but as I said, it only works in the case where all your color cones are functioning normally, it's just that your Red/Green cones or whatever are overlapping too much (but not completely) in the portion of spectrum they are sensitive too and thus have problems discriminating those colors.
The glasses do not work for people who are colorblind and:
- are missing one or more types of cones in their eyes (e.g. genetic 'defect')
- have one or more types of cones in their eyes that are not functioning at all
- have two or more types of cones that overlap almost completely in what spectrum they are sensitive too; or
- have a brain injury or other disorder that prevented the color processing areas of the visual cortex from developing normally or damaged those areas of the brain | 58461e9e-f428-489b-a7ae-265ef8af9f71 |
2bnhsv | How/why did SDCC become so big? | Big things have been happening there over the last few years (reveals of movie trailers, new TV shows, etc.) so it draws more and more attention.
Kind of along the lines of Black Friday. More hype every year makes it bigger and draws more people. | 6f2fb1cb-46e2-4ef4-b562-995f7c14a148 |
5wgztm | How can people be allergic to lobster but not other shell fish? | There is more than one type of shellfish allergy. Some people can eat lobster, but not any of the others. | f951c7b8-b562-43aa-8708-87889ccbdb4e |
29xk28 | Why have they not started issuing social security cards in plastic form like the DMV does with drivers licenses? | Oh god somebody please answer this. I never understood using that damn piece of paper as an item for your I-9 verification. It looks like something a half baked forger can copy. | 3559ce5e-270c-4469-8ec7-285206242788 |
1pzici | How do some people sleep with their eyes open? | You do not want to learn. I have this, and it's a disease. I have no control over it. I don't even have it severely and have to put a jelly paste in my eyes multiple times a night which is also a pain in the ass in the morning. If I don't put the paste in my eyes I wake up with a horrible burning sensation from my eyes drying out. It has taken as long as 48 hours to recover from not using my jelly. | 27399ca4-35a2-49c5-98bb-26871e96099e |
5pl4ua | Who is a bigger drag on healthcare premiums: The uninsured or the insured sick? | both? neither? In the US you're going to struggle to find someone who actually turns away a person in need of healthcare, even if they're uninsured. They will go the the ER, the ER will process them, and try to bill them for whatever they can. In light of the fact that this uninsured person can't afford insurance, they also can't afford to pay the ER, so the hospital takes that patient's cost as a loss, but then in the bigger picture, adjusts it's cost of business to take into account that patient, and all the others like him. This translates over to insurance costs, even tho he wasn't insured.
Now, lets say he had insurance, well he only will use it if he's sick, in which case, he's incurring expense to the insurance company.
To answer your question, the only people who make insurance premiums go down are the insured, healthy people. if there were a larger distribution of healthy people who still paid for insurance, the cost would (well....could) go down. | d00fd56a-a9a4-49a2-a402-2cd76c2ec0a7 |
1k8rpr | I understand that in most criminal gangs the leader gets to the top by being ruthless and fearless but it would seem that in mexico regarding the cartels that there would be no shortage of machete wielding psychos to take top spot,so how do these people make it to be the boss of these cartels ? | Really, really depends on the cartel. A lot of the time it's smarts. Who's the man with the plan? Who knows all of the best ways to do things.
More often than that it's status and networking. Some of these cartels are made up of military and police defectors. Rank carries over. Other times its who knows who: who has the most contacts to get the drugs across, who's been in the game longest? Experience and notoriety is probably the biggest factor
Loyalty can be earned in ways other than brutality, and when it has been earned over decades (as in the case of most cartel leaders) it is very, very difficult to break. | 7c270496-bb9d-42e4-84ff-5fc1943fd539 |
8d6y86 | how does muscle contraction and the sliding and Calcium thing work? | Thats not eli 5 material I think but anyway.
Muscles are bound od something like 2 kinds in planks laid in rows: row of planks a, row of planks b, row of planks a etc etc.
Planks b have one head at a 90 degrees angle at each ens, towards either the row above or below.
When muscles contract those heads bind to planks a, while also turning slightly, moving planks b. That causes them to slide slightly, shortening the muscle, aka making it contract.
I believe calcium just works in passing the transmitters even before that, but I had those classes like 7 years ago so that might not be accurate.
Please respond to this so I'll find the post, I'll draw a schematic. | a23deff3-b533-4c02-ba11-91399785585d |
1rzt76 | What's the legitimate purpose of a water tower? | It regulates water pressure for an entire area with a single control, by using gravity to create water pressure. You fill up the water tower, and the water coming out of the tower is under pressure from the weight of the water above it. Otherwise you would need to have a pump that keeps the pressure up, and it would have to quickly respond to changing water demands. The water tower handles all of that by itself without anything complicated. | 8ba1bef8-a165-410e-a56f-5809f42e0ffd |
73tn1y | What gives a person their own unique tone or pitch in their voice, and why are men and women voices so vastly different? | There are actually quite a few factors. The larynx is the primary organ in vocalizing. It's where the vocal chords are located, and different shapes will result in different tones. Men tend to have a larger larynx with longer vocal chords, giving them a deeper voice than women. In addition to the larynx, the shape of the pharynx (the connector between the mouth and larynx), mouth, tongue, and nasal cavity all influence the outgoing sound. | a6754893-3466-4ee3-997a-cc5699501def |
89znk1 | How did someone decide where all the keys went on the common keyboard? Was it random or is there actually a scientific reason behind their placement? | The reason for the QWERTY keyboard we use today goes back to the first mechanical typewriters in the 1860's.
At first, typewriter keyboards were arranged in alphabetical order, but there were problems--specifically, when quickly typing two letters that were next to each other on the keyboard, the mechanical arms that did the printing would jam.
Several different keyboard configurations were tried in an attempt to avoid jamming, including some designed to force typists to slow down (which pretty much defeats the purpose of typing in the first place)
The QWERTY keyboard was designed to separate the most commonly used letters from each other, to help keep them from jamming. As it turns out, the QWERTY keyboard did its job, yet still allowed speed typing--my greats grandmother could type 120 wpm on a mechanical typewriter before she died.
Other styles were developed, but they didn't catch on for one reason or another, although at least one is still seen in use occasionally: the Dvorak keyboard, invented by a man named Dvorak, is still occasionally used for speed typing. | 5bba3f2e-1fe7-4a15-b658-f20e2e6e187f |
1zp4kz | what is the difference between body wash and shampoo? If im hairy cant i just use shampoo for my body? | Body wash can be excessive harsh on your hair, stripping it and turning it into straw (dry and unmanageable), Shampoo is gentler, generally, washing out any hair products and environmental buildup without stripping it completely.
You can use shampoo on your body, but, personally, I've never used a shampoo whose scent I'd like to have spread over my body.
If you like you could skip shampoo, you could use a co-washing method, which is using conditioner to wash your hair. If you have a oily skin/oily scalp/oily hair then this is probably not a method that'd work for you. | ae6435b7-6717-4935-be28-8d385cbd2734 |
2dojiz | How is it legal for a Greyhound bus to allow people to stand up in the middle of the aisle going 65 on the highway when seatbelt laws are so enforced? | [The answer to your question](_URL_0_), and [a story from a kid inside a flipping bus](_URL_1_). | 7a027cb1-02ae-4267-a389-b55d8f033321 |
309g6z | How would a group of people go about starting a Union? | There is a clear cut way to form a union. You would want to either check out the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or consult a labor lawyer (labor law means unions, which is different from employment law).
First, you should check out if there are any existing unions for your area of work. If you can get the help of a national organization it makes things much easier. The AFL-CIO and SEIU can help you find existing unions and local organizers.
To start a union, though, you first need to define a bargaining unit. These are the employees that the union will cover. It might be something like all hourly workers at the company. Or all clerical employees.
Next, you have to get 30% of the employees in the proposed bargaining unit to sign a petition showing support for a union. Or they can fill out "authorization cards."
Once you have signatures or cards from 30% of the employees, you submit it to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and they will conduct an election. There are a lot of rules about who can say what during the election period (the NLRB doesn't want management to be able to make employees sit there and listen to anti-union speeches against their will until the election is held). If the union is approved by a majority of covered workers in the election, then you have a union! Your employer now has to bargain with you as a group. You also have to start collecting dues and figuring out how to best organize.
The biggest hurdle facing unions now is "Right to Work" laws. Although a union covers all employees in a bargaining unit, not all employees have to join the union. However, it used to be the case in most places that the union could still take some union dues out of the paychecks of employees who didn't join. The idea behind that was the union needed money to bargain and those employees still benefited (since the union represents the entire bargaining unit) so they would have to pay. Otherwise everyone would benefit from negotiations but would have no individual incentive to pay dues to support the union's operation.
Right to work laws are state laws that prohibit a union from collecting fees from nonmembers, even if they are in the covered bargaining unit. Since most people won't want to pay for "free riders" it's hard to get a union going in a right to work state because even if you have 70% support, those workers aren't going to want to pay the dues for the other 30% while the other 30% do nothing and benefit from the union's work. | e30de7be-e8c4-4799-b3e5-6ea8f920da08 |
3djdun | If Ant Man just shrinks but stays the same mass, how come when he runs on a bad guys weapon it doesn't tilt forward with 150lbs pressing down? | OH SHIT! YOU SIR, youuuuuuuuuuuuu should not say such things if I were you...that is uhhh....very observant of you...does he stay the same mass? So he's just more dense....I feel like that opens a HUGE can of worms for this scientifically...oh well comics, super heroes, what you gonna do | 87405a42-3e5d-4a27-a737-47906b686109 |
4n2vcp | Why was the "Great Potato Famine" so devastating? | There was actually plenty of food there, but England was claiming most of it and having it shipped across the channel.
On top of that because of the potato the population was well above what natural sources could provide. Even if you fished the waters till nothing lived it wouldn't be enough food and still problem one of England claiming a lot of the food production. | 51be2ade-c547-48a1-9756-508b4c4464ce |
3m93y8 | What's the difference between someone who has a learning disability and someone who's just stupid/slow/dumb? | I would think of it in terms of a computer.
Stupid or dumb would just be someone with a slow processor. Everything works fine, it just doesn't work that fast.
A learning disability would be a hardware defect. Maybe there is a problem in ram causing a corruption of data... the computer is working perfectly fast enough, it just encounters errors which make it difficult to complete a certain task. | 644d5c5f-683d-43d2-8867-f06255d79bc9 |
66cc7b | Why did adding laugh tracks to comedy shows become the norm? | Originally, the shows were filmed before a live audience, or just aired live with an audience, so people got used to the laughter and producers thought that they wouldn't like the silence.
A fair number of modern shows still have the audience, actually. I'm not sure how many actually add a laugh track. | 72b138a8-564d-4b9e-b2c1-ab8974298cb7 |
8gk3bo | Where does a thought go when it's forgotten? | This is actually not too difficult to explain. When you have a thought, the signals are passed via neurotransmitter molecules that travel across the small spaces between the nerve cells. A simple thought can involve hundreds of thousands of neurons. When one of these thoughts are “forgotten”, the neurons... the neurons and the synapses... uh, they uh... shit, I forgot where I was going with this. | c49678b6-ac65-4827-b868-bc1f2b7b4ad4 |
49ovxk | What makes something Machiavellian and what are some examples? | Machiavelli wrote the Prince, which is a guidebook for political advancement through social climbing, manipulation and what we would now think of as branding or PR, and then instructions on how to consolidate and maintain power once you acquire it. In short, it's a how-to book for scheming your way to individual success at the expense of others.
Vladimir Putin might be the current figure who is most visibily Machiavellian. The annexation of Crimea was pulled off using espionage, deceit, trickery and political maneuvering, and is a pretty good example. Putin's switching back and forth with Medvedev between the offices of the President and Prime Minister to avoid term limits while still maintaining power is another good example. | 5700b56d-96a3-4fc4-b23d-347b12112c60 |
36gnml | What is inflation and deflation and why is it bad? | Inflation is when prices over time increase and deflation is when they decrease. Another way to say it is that inflation is currency becoming worth less and deflation is when it becomes worth more. Neither is inherently good or bad. But you can have a stable value of currency too, it's just rare.
Say you have a loan for 100$. You have to pay back that dollar amount. So if there's a period of inflation, you effectively have less to pay back because 100$ doesn't go as far. So you would like inflation in that case, but the bank wouldn't. But if the currency deflated in that time, you would be upset and the bank would be happy. | 6e5cdb73-870e-4f3a-88bd-6522e39fbef6 |
1j59j9 | Why don't people run out of air in a submarine? | Modern subs have machines called Electrolysers. Basically, these machines take seawater, and split up the hydrogen and oxygen molecules and the oxygen is then stored in tanks for use. Subs also have scrubbers that remove CO2 and recirculate the oxygen from when we exhale. | ef5107d3-f92e-4fb3-907a-d8668db1b054 |
1hu3xq | why my helium balloon stops floating after a few days | Helium is an extremely small molecule, it will squeeze out through even the best the seals and through the tiny gaps in the balloon material itself.
Eventually enough has escaped that the balloon is no longer buoyant. | a1adf9b7-5ad2-4f67-8a1e-c8867a843593 |
4kud33 | Why does the body wake up starving when it consumes a lot of food before bed, but wakes up fine if it doesn't? | Hunger isn't always regulated by whether you have enough total energy. Other factors such as whether your body thinks its using up a lot of energy affect hunger as well.
When you eat late at night, especially something sugary or filled with simple carbs, you get a boost of glucose in your blood before bed. Your body releases insulin in response so that your cells can utilize the glucose. As your cells take in the glucose, your blood sugar drops, which causes you to get hungry. As a result, you wake up hungry. If you don't eat late at night, then you don't get the insulin boost before bed and your blood sugar won't drop as much. Therefore, you aren't as hungry. | b8aeb87c-bc72-4667-a1ed-3e32df58b51c |
7k3662 | Why is Sex pleasurable and yet Childbirth is incredibly painful? [Likely to be NSFW] | Sex drive is something all animals share. It's a basic, instinctual thing. Being able to even *understand* that there's a link between sex and childbirth is a uniquely human thing. Millions of years of evolution aren't going to change just because childbirth becomes unpleasant.
...and the main reason childbirth is hard for humans is because we've evolved these ridiculously oversized heads to hold our oversized brains. | 8e53ea24-bfad-4910-8827-03447f57e988 |
3ouzbb | National socialism vs Democratic socialism | National socialism is Nazism. Nazi is a sort of acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National socialist German workers party. It is all about building a strong centralized state with a unified (aka non-democratic) nation behind it, motivated by racial chauvinism and not really characterized at all by socialist economic policy.
Democratic socialism is about promoting socialist economic policy within a democratic society.
They have essentially nothing in common other than having the term socialist in their names. | 7f987363-153e-44d2-b3ea-437bc0eb1e0c |
2750or | Why can't they reuse the water at Fukushima? | They are.
The problem is water is constantly leaking IN to the facility. So they need to store it or clean it up and discharge it. | 386c9111-bf9c-444a-a226-b6f238c2a569 |
5dad65 | What does 1 degree Celsius really mean? | One degree Celsius is one hundredth of the span of temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water at sea level. | 77b2f84c-6b86-4163-a99b-a5e5fb2eeb23 |
1prrq8 | How Redbull racing, an energy drink continues to complely dominate Formula 1. While massive car manufacturers, Mercedes, Ferrari etc can't catch up? | Vettel's car was built by Renault, Red Bull GmbH provides a good portion of the funding but they're working with a major car manufacturer. | 4421a644-ee3f-478e-af6c-c5af32416ad9 |
1pq7nw | Why did the US and Soviets continue to expand their stockpiles during the cold war, even after each side had the retaliatory power to obliterate the others' industrial centers many times over? | Most of those nukes were intended to be used to destroy the other's launch sites before they could launch. It's a critical part of nuclear strategy: why are all the silos clustered in a few places in the middle of North Dakota and Montana, for example? But why aren't the all in one big facility, just sort-of spread out a little?
Here's why: when a nuke blows up a silo (or anything else) it spreads a cloud of dust, sand and gravel into the stratosphere. Any other nuke trying to hit a nearby location will be sandblasted to nothing on the way in by that cloud. But an *outgoing* missile can fly through the cloud no problem! It takes about an hour for the cloud to dissipate.
So you build your silos close together, but far enough apart that it takes a separate nuke to destroy each one. You know you'll sacrifice one of your silos, but after it's hit its neighbors have about an hour of free launch time where they'll be safe. Of course they can't do just too much damage because your enemy will have followed the exact same strategy.
The technique is called "nuclear walking", I think, and it means an actual nuclear war would have been more drawn-out than people realize: in the first volley all the major population centers, ports, industries, and military bases are gone. Then for *several days* both sides' bunkers keep lobbing handfuls of nukes at each other, pumping more and more fallout into the stratosphere, until one side ends up the last one standing and uses its remaining few nukes to complete the destruction of the other side. Hooray. Their prize is trying to survive the mess they've made. | c683223a-db4f-440f-92e5-3eb406472ac4 |
1j4vm9 | a company like apple reports profits in the BILLIONS. Where does that go and why are people disapointed? | Let's say you earned $100,000 last year, and you reported you were able to put just $500 of that into savings.
$500 might be a lot to the guy pouring your coffee at Starbucks, but you kind of suck at saving money, and your SO who wants to save up for a house is probably going to be pissed at you.
Apple did the same thing, just to a bigger scale. | cac6f4b5-2365-4e9d-93e3-ec020313c427 |
29batp | Why is it that parents go to great lengths to see that their children receive the best education available, yet do not take the time and effort to educate them as well? | Depends on the parent. In my house it's the school's job to teach my kids specific information; it's my job to teach them how that relates to life. So when they learned about the Civil War, we went to Gettysburg. When they read *Hatchet* we went camping and built campfires with flint. When they learned about weather, we went to the Mt. Washington Observatory. They went to Space Camp, and pottery class, and took stand up paddleboard lessons, and went to a wolf preserve,and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and built rockets, and took a canoe trip down the delaware.
Sitting at a desk can only teach you so much. You have to experience the world to really learn anything. That's my job. | c0a288a0-97ba-40e3-8022-d686d00b7cc5 |
8tdgx5 | how are the intensity and speed of wind related to the time of day? Aka why are winds calmer in the morning and pick up throughout the day? | The sun generates heat and moisture in the atmosphere. Heat changes air pressure and energy. Changes in air pressure can generate wind.
One of the reasons it’s often coolest just after sunrise as the air above you gets sun and warmth first, starts to rise, and the cool air come in under it to replace it (convection). | c3fe3a13-bbb4-461a-86d5-b827f6b63691 |
8toh1k | How is sound recorded in the grooves of a vinyl record? | Sound is vibrations in air ( or any other medium )
Vibrations are picked up by a diaphragm which causes needle to move up and down in the same way to produce the sound frequency wave.
Two channels are cut out each side at 45 degrees to each other to produce a stereo recording. | 2cccd8e7-2982-46c6-b5c7-d0fe82aeaa5e |
8x1qh3 | Why does Starbucks allow people to sit there for a whole day even if they buy little to nothing there? | Others mentioned that the store needs to look full, but the other part is that it makes perfect sense to invite people who will eventually want coffee into your store, instead of only allowing in those who want coffee right now.
Doesn’t cost much extra cleaning to let people hang around, and now you have a ton of potential, if not nearly guaranteed, costumers - who bring their friends to hang out too. It becomes a place you can just go and have a quick social gathering. | 415d3f0e-8107-4490-abe4-a58f325f1ef2 |
1jdahb | How can different instruments play the same note but sound so different? | short answer: [Timbre](_URL_0_)
Musical notes from instruments are not pure sinusoidal waves. The differences in wave shapes produces different sound "Quality" or timbre even if the wavelength is the same. | 2e2607e4-612a-4f85-bee0-dde7ecd86e3b |
1gwu5c | Why don't babies get morning breath? | 1) they don't have teeth yet/don't eat solid foods yet
2) their mouths stay moist most of the time (a big cause of bad breath is dry mouth) thanks to their natural nose-breathing/drooling
3) every night a magical fairy comes in & fills their mouth w/ Gypsophila, sort of like how your parents leave an air freshener in their car | 7992354e-3359-49b6-bc93-dc2086c5c757 |
2plg4a | Why do politicians not just choose the best scientifically proven policies based on statistics, instead of bickering about what their ideology tells them, rather than make the choices which will bring most prosperity, safety, opportunities, and happiness to its people according to science? | Well, for one, academics don't always agree.
But more importantly: because they're running to be elected by people who neither know statistics nor care about it and who would like to hear that a simple, intuitive solution will solve giant complex problems. | 1efe2c31-e381-4f44-8a5e-72f5d808a28e |
3g5irr | How does the Army National Guard work? | I'm not sure about the requirements such as diploma / GED, but it works like this. I'm going to assume we are talking about an enlisted person, not an officer.
When you decide to enlist in the military, you go to a recruiter and tell them that you want to enlist. You have 3 choices. Active duty, Reserves or National Guard.
Once you decide which component you want to go into, (AD, Reserves, or National Guard) you will sign up and get a date to go to Basic Training. Everyone who is enlisted goes to Basic Training. Once you graduate from Basic Training, you will go to your advanced (job specific) school. After graduating from that, you will go to your unit. If you are active duty, that unit will be at a military base where you will be stationed. Think, JBLM, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning etc... You will be provided housing and food there. If you joine the reserves or national guard, you will come back home and go to your unit for in processing. Once you have been assigned to your unit you will go to "drill" with them one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year. Usually the 2 weeks happen over the summer.
As far as incentives, it depends on what is in your enlistment contract. Some people get a cash bonus, some people get more money for college, some people get nothing. It all depends on your job.
The difference between the guard and reserves is that the Reserves is funded by the federal government and the Guard is funded by your state. The guard gets called up for local emergencies AND war but the Reserves is only deployed for war / training missions at the behest of the federal government.
Hope that helps. | 87164ba2-f521-4aa6-9763-81d16ed8e0cc |
okx64 | How is Foxconn able to to operate as it does? | Foxconn factories exist in an entity called a Special Economic Zone where special rules are in place that encourage the production of export goods and foreign investment. Less restrictions means lower costs which makes it very attractive to foreign companies who want to lower costs.
Will such a thing exist in the US? Probably not, because the people are unwilling to work for the wages and the conditions the Chinese are. Is it possible? Of course, but we'd be taking a huge step back from the advances in labor laws and workers rights that we've made. There would probably have to be a ban on labor unions first.
Do not forget that China had its economic growth stunted for most of the last century, so they are doing what they can to play catch up right now. Think of it like a game of SimCity. You first build your city with industrial zones that have high pollution and high density. Once you get your economy going and everything set up nicely, you switch over to high tech industry that pollutes less and are regulated more tightly. | b2bac52a-0173-4722-9e2e-d85945343d93 |
4c1fan | Why is it that whats politically correct sometimes isn't the same as the opinion of the majority? | Let's start off with a statement, society evolves towards increased compassion for all members of society. On the forefront of that evolution is radical thought that tends to be less judgemental of others. For example, native Americans are equal humans (1920s), women are equal humans (1940s), Blacks are equal humans (1950), Gays are equal humans (1990). The population in general is conservative, they find radical though scary. Thus social regulation has to be created to help move on society (equal opportunities acts, etc.) This is called "political correctness" in that the politics of the time have moved on past the status quo of the population.
Of course, there are always people looking to mock evolution of society because it scares them a lot. This is usually because they are in some way inadequate and need oppression of sectors of society in order to keep their inadequacy "punching above their weight". These people use "political correctness" as a mocking term. They are trying to undermine a fairer society so that they don't need to address their own failings.
So, to answer your question, leaders need to create political correctness in order to evolve our society forward to a better place. By that definition PC will always be pushing the majority | f1f78bc0-213e-4a34-9e5b-f525a8bcc1a1 |
2asbxc | How can we produce (supposedly) exact figures of the amount of animals remaining of an endangered species? | You mean like, there are x amount of white rhinos left? We pay people to go count them | 1fffe15f-f7cb-4e25-af5a-50b593ff1239 |
4e0qq6 | A matrioska brain | Take a solar-powered calculator, one of those cheap-ass branded demo jobbies that sits on office desks. It uses solar energy to drive a computational engine.
Now take the solar panel and make it a few yards square and add a storage mechanism for the power. After a sunny day, you now have enough power to run a standard laptop for a while, so your efficiency and speed of doing stuff is increased because your computational power is increased.
Cover your whole house and yard with those solar panels, and you have enough to run a server farm... except for that annoying night. So you move your solar power and computer into space where there's no night, and you no longer need to worry about power storage. Battery system goes bye-bye.
Keep increasing and increasing the size of your solar panels and, as long as your technology can keep up, you get more and more computational ability since you're harvesting a lot more power.
So max the system out completely, and you have a layer of computers and solar panels (or heat-resistant equivalent) in a shell that surrounds the entire sun, harvesting ALL of its power. The computing and storage power at this machine's disposal is astoundingly immense, and as your computing power increases so presumably does that computer's intellect and potential consciousness.
That's a matrioska brain. | da87ac54-8bec-4ea9-83ec-e1cd972d4017 |
2ut8gp | How do natural harmonics on a guitar work? | The sound you hear when a string vibrates is composed of many different frequencies. When you play a harmonic you are isolating one overtone from that range of frequencies. If you divide the length of a string half that is the 12th fret, that harmonic is one octave above the open string. If you divide a string into fourths, you get a note 2 octaves higher than the open string which can be played on the 5th, and 24th frets. Not all harmonic nodes are exactly above frets due to the increasing subdivisions of the string. Not all are easy to voice and as you subdivide the string more the pitch of the note increases which can be beyond a layers hearing range. I can clarify if I didn't explain well enough.
Edit: This chart shows the divisions and corresponding notes nicely _URL_0_ | 92e1c172-9f7e-4fda-8ce6-c7b8b4a6f9a5 |
1yjxwu | Why is there a little symbol for a link to CandyBox 2 on the bottom left of /r/adviceanimals? | The short of it is because there is a line of HTML in the page source:
< h5 > < a href="_URL_2_;
The < h5 > tag is being formatted by the css file [muRL57ENy-52RGha.css](_URL_1_):
position:fixed;bottom:20px;left:20px;z-index:1000;margin:0;padding:0;text-indent:-99999px;display:block;background:url(_URL_0_);width:16px;height:16px
which is causing it to show you [this](_URL_0_) file as the link.
I'm guessing that each subreddit has mods who are allowed to change CSS rules and modify the header and footer, and that one of them chose to place this ad for personal benefit.
With over 3 million subscribers and 14,000 people on the sub at any given time, they might make some money. | 4db1e2e0-d88c-45ad-9c46-aaa12354185f |
2tx6b2 | How does the Obama administration justify removing the tax credit from the college 529 savings plan? | > I realize many middle to low income families don't know about this and therefore don't take advantage of it
That was pretty much the basis of the argument. 529's are overwhelmingly used by wealthy families, so they labeled it as a tax break for the rich. | 1e06e6ad-7143-4a9b-8f95-70d282a9ab8b |
1rg6y8 | Why haven't nuclear powered spacecraft become common? | So there are four main categories of practical nuclear energy one can consider for spacecraft using technology that we have in hand today (i.e. no fusion):
* Nuclear reactors as nuclear thermal rockets. This has been [studied extensively](_URL_2_). Basically you run a propellant (i.e. hydrogen) through a hot reactor. It can be made to work, it's just very expensive and it is very heavy. There are a lot of proposed ways to do this, but all basically work in a similar way.
* Nuclear reactors as electricity sources, to power e.g. ion engines. [This too has been studied quite a lot](_URL_0_). Again, heavy and expensive, but probably not a bad choice though for spacecraft meant to go pretty far in space. This is the sort of thing you'd use for an in-space thruster as opposed to a rocket.
* Radioactive decay to power electric sources ([RTGs](_URL_1_)). The are pretty good for providing compact electrical sources. They _are_ used extensively for things like the Mars rovers or satellites. Basically they are radioactive materials that are very hot, and that heat can be converted to electricity. Apparently the idea of using these as heat sources in rockets has been studied, but generally they have just been used to power apparatus (or ion engines) of things that have already been launched into space.
* Exploding nuclear bombs and using the force created to propel the ship. [Also quite studied](_URL_3_). Downside is you have to make and blow up a lot of atomic bombs to make it work. Politically not very feasible. Expensive. Up-side is that it is one of the few really feasible ways to get big ships to go really fast over long distances.
Why don't we do any of these except for RTGs? It's probably not so much that any of the other designs are infeasible (except maybe the exploding atomic bombs one, for political reasons), other than the fact that they are expensive (though all space travel sort of is).
It's more likely the case that _nobody is at all interested in building long-range, heavy-duty spacecraft_. That is, the space-faring nations built up a space infrastructure around liquid fuel rockets, trying to achieve tasks that are pretty easily achieved through liquid fuel rockets — putting up satellites, for example. You don't need nuclear rockets to put a satellite, or even the Space Shuttle, in space and you probably don't get many advantages out of doing so — certainly no advantages worth the cost of switching systems for.
The place you get the real advantages are if you are talking about craft that is meant to travel really long distances or with really heavy weights. But nobody is doing that, because it would be more expensive than any government is willing to pay for in order to achieve. | ff9cc945-af24-4d94-88b3-1e18dd8e8d6d |
6a4o5g | what stops people from "counterfeiting" digital currencies? | That is the genius of the invention of blockchain currencies. Satoshi Nakamoto developed a "mining"/"proof of work" system that solves the "double spending" problem.
When a miner solves a puzzle (it can be a pool of a million individual miners acting as "one" miner then splitting the reward), that miner chooses the transactions that go into a "block" of transactions. This is "settlement". If a transaction attempts to spend Bitcoin (or any crypto currency based on Bitcoin code) that doesnt exist (double spent) that transaction is invalid.
A miner that "solved" the puzzle the past 10 minutes spent ENORMOUS amounts of energy doing so. This miner can double spend, but when he/she is caught(and they will be since the blockchain is completely transparent), all the energy he or she used will be wasted since all the other miners will not allow this miner back on the network and the block reward would be taken back once the rest of the world builds off the previous block.
So basically, if a person wanted to cheat, they just threw away approx. $21000 in reward and his/her equipment suddenly became useless since he just got banned from the network.
Worth it? Nope.
And that is why it is impossible to counterfeit a Bitcoin.
Alt currencies are "more" possible to counterfeit since 51% miner attacks are actually doable on weak coins. | 2aa87796-71fc-4f43-9350-a56d6eb68077 |
1nse3e | How do machines that accept cash payment determine that a five dollar bill is a five dollar bill, etc? | Optical scanning. An optical scanner looks at the denomination Portrait, and other parts of the bill to reduce fraud. Optical scanning is a follow-on from magnetic scanning developed and commercialized by Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) for bank check clearing automation. Look at the font at the bottom of a bank check (or cheque). It was originally developed to be printed with a high iron content and read by magnetic arrays (early 1950s). As computer processing and digital imaging progressed, better optical recognition was developed. Some currency scanners also read the metal strips put into US currency starting in the 1990's. | 5c77e97d-c03b-48b5-ab07-695d93df8292 |
2d2b8k | Counter steering on a motorcycle | Here's how I think about it..
Because the bike is moving quickly and heavier than you, you can't exactly muscle the bike into a lean like a bicycle.... so you initially kick the bottom out from under you in the opposite direction to generate the lean you need for the turn. after the lean is generated the bars revert to the expected direction..
tl/dr: you don't fall *into* a turn, the bike moves *out* from under you | 50ffa9a3-dfef-4a72-9d98-7f4f1864b60d |
606ib7 | In ancient and medieval times, did people really just kill disabled people? | In some cultures, yes. The disabled can in some cases be an enormous drain on time and resources, to the point of making life much more difficult for others. In a society where resources are extremely limited, the tough choice might be made. In most modern cultures, this is no longer a choice that has to be made. | 384cbf84-d6ab-4e80-af83-dbac15357a7f |
8a7ckk | Why wouldn't gravity cancel entropy? | If u/taggedjc explained your question correctly, I firstly I want to clear up your misconception of entropy.
Firstly, entropy does NOT mean "everything gets cold and freezes to a halt". The heat death of the universe is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy) where no thermodynamic free energy exists and therefore no processes that consume energy can take place. It does NOT imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be used to perform work.
Here's the catch though, the expansion of the universe increases its maximum possible entropy faster than its actual entropy, which in turn means that the universe will never reach perfect thermal equilibrium (maximum entropy, or total heat death). Between this fact, and the idea of a quantum vacuum filled with virtual particles and how that relates to large-scale energy/entropy concepts, makes the mathematical analysis of thermodynamics on a scale such as the Universe itself very difficult to model mathematically, but nothing will ever actually "freeze to a halt".
Secondly, Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no energy at all (this is impossibly, but you can get arbitrarily close to 0k.) Absolute zero is the point where where all molecules have no kinetic energy. I think you are mixing up total energy with kinetic energy, and ignoring rest energy. An object would still have mass at any low temperature, and an object with mass obeys the laws of motion. That means an object at 5K will move just the same as one at 300K. In other words, an arbitrary cold planet won't stop orbiting a star just because it's extremely cold (ignoring the impossibility of that scenario).
Bonus trivia: Gravity is already being overridden by the expansion of the universe, accelerated by dark matter. In the far-future, there may not even be any large-scale structures of matter to meaningfully attract each other, so there's no reason to think the effects of dark energy will stop and somehow gravity will begin to override those forces to contract matter again. | d0cdb816-70e0-4cb2-a595-9e985f69be70 |
8gaf48 | What is the TeV mass scale and what does it have to do with particles beyond the standard model? | Ohh thats my paper! Its a rather old one of course, our latest version is [here](_URL_1_) with a preliminary result [here](_URL_0_). Anyways I feel honour bound to do an ELI5 of it now! Will do my best although its very late in Geneve so appologies if its not clear
First, what do we mean by a scale? A scale refers to a rough “order of magnitude” and the physics happening depends on this scale. For example you can completely ignore relatively at the speeds we encounter in our daily life, these are "non relativistic scales". So at a given "scale", different physics processes become important. And particle physicists like to measure everything in terms of eV (and I do mean everything!), when an eV is an electron volt and is the energy an electron will gain when it passes though a potential of one volt. Through the magic of E= mc2, this relates to masses. A proton weighs 1 million electron volts (GeV) while the heaviest known particles way ~125 (the Higgs) and 174 GeV. A TeV would be 1000 GeV.
So physicists have this great model which describes almost all known physics, this is known as the standard model. And its got a bunch of particles. There are the eV scale particles (neutrinos), the MeV scale particles (electrons, muons, light quarks), GeV scale particles (protons, taus) and a bunch of 100 GeV scale particles (Higgs, W, Z bosons, top quark).
And thats as far as the previous colliders could really go. Energy is conserved so to make a TeV particle, you have to put a TeV in, previous colliders just didnt have the omph. So for this paper, we had a shiny new toy, the LHC which can go up to 7 TeV (although not all the energy you put in can be used). That paper was in 2011 when the LHC was brand spanking new, simply we were exploring a region we had never seen before so we were seeing if there were any lovely new particles to find there. Exploring the unknown to see what is out there!
Turns out there was nothing there but it was a reasonable assumption if you’ve seen new particle every time you increase your energy by a factor 10 in the past, you might see a new particle going from around 100 GeV to around 1 TeV. But we havent given up and we’re still looking for them to this [day](_URL_0_), we have lots more data on the way!
And why did we hope there were new particles there even though our standard model didnt predict any, well thats a story for another time... | 7b248a34-c31f-4722-98d9-a752d8454ef7 |
7qqy1n | If electric fields produce magnetic fields, and our brain/nervous system operates electrically, how do we not have electromagnetic interference disrupting our entire body's operation? | 1. The brain/nervous system operates mostly *chemically,* with electricity being used as a bridge between chemical reaction sites. So it's much less susceptible to this interference than a purely electrical device.
2. The amount of interference absorbed is low -- notice that your computer and phone, which *are* electrical, are not being disrupted either. | f1898bea-f728-46e8-bafa-daef6b16a616 |
1kcqvt | How does sunlight fade colors? | Sunlight is a form (or a combination of forms) of radiation. This radiation can excite atoms and break bonds in the molecules which cause colors, effectively fading colors. | 45a3e063-8f44-4902-928e-3cdd3df1e0b7 |
331rm8 | Why do people oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? | > Now, I haven't read the actual agreement (I'm a busy person), and I assume most people haven't either.
Nobody has. Because the talks are held in secrecy - which most people think might indicate some funny business going on. Hell, even members of the European Parliament don't have access to recent papers - an Austrian politician talked about this recently... the most recent paper he was allowed to read (in a secured room, no cameras/phones allowed, forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement) was about 3 months old at the time.
So even **if** this was an agreement where the public would only benefit, measures like that raise questions... and the stuff that does leak through sounds pretty good for big companies, but rather bad for small firms, average citizens and sometimes even countries as a whole. | 644684dd-b627-44f5-b9e5-d78211b43c33 |
6sxmm2 | How does the mars rover send photos to earth? | Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:
1. [ELI5: How does the Mars Rover send data(photos) from Mars to Earth? ](_URL_0_)
1. [ELI5: How do rovers on Mars transmit information, such as pictures and video, back to Earth? ](_URL_3_)
1. [ELI5: How can NASA receive data and pictures from a Mars rover that is over 33 million miles away? ](_URL_1_)
1. [How does the mars Rover Curiosity transmit data over such uber long distance? ](_URL_2_)
1. [ELI5: How do we communicate with the rover on Mars when it is so far away from our satellites? ](_URL_4_)
1. [ELI5: Explain how the hubble sends pictures back to earth while far away? Same with the mars rover. ](_URL_5_) | 814b51e4-c365-4b26-a671-49badb948184 |
1ok29r | How is the eye of someone who has 20/20 vision and someone who has, say, 20/15 vision different from one another? | Well 20/20 means that you see at 20 feet what a normal person sees at twenty feet. 20/15 means you see at 20 feet what a normal person can see at 15 feet, so you have better than average vision with 20/15. I don't exactly know why this is but just laying a base for understanding. | a57aca32-5923-4a57-a65c-f45428162db0 |
6ccwkz | Why do websites exist that take you from one sketchy set of links and data to another and another and another? Who is this benefitting? | Your attention has commercial value. Every clickbait webpage you visit has some ads on it, and the publisher scores a fraction of a cent income from your visit paid by the advertiser, on the assumption that you notice these ads and there's a fractional chance you might buy the goods or services in question.
To increase that income, the publisher might put 100s of ads on a page, but it turns out the advertisers don't believe that a reader would diligently read pages of just ads, so the next best strategy is to try and persuade you to go from page to page, each with a few ads on it...
As Andrew Lewis said _'If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold'_ - your eyeballs are the product, the publisher of the "You won't believe what happened next..!" click bait pages is the seller, and the advertising agency is the customer. | bdabae20-fd52-431f-bae5-a1f87e934401 |
8eg8ag | What do painkillers actually do? | Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:
1. [ELI5 : how do painkillers work? ](_URL_3_) ^(_13 comments_)
1. [ELI5:Why do pain killers help some types of pain, but not others? ](_URL_2_) ^(_4 comments_)
1. [Do painkillers just "hide" an issue that your body was telling you to fix? After your pain stops, is the original source of it still active and a potential threat? Are these questions even anything I should be concerned about? e.g. a TERRIBLE beating headache rapidly fixed with a Tylenol. ](_URL_1_) ^(_3 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why do painkillers sometimes not work? ](_URL_8_) ^(_4 comments_)
1. [ELI5: How do painkillers like Ibuprofen work to relieve pain? ](_URL_7_) ^(_10 comments_)
1. [ELI5:Why do pain killers such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen help with fevers as well? ](_URL_6_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)
1. [ELI5: do pain killers actually numb the pain or do they just numb my pain receptors? ](_URL_4_) ^(_6 comments_)
1. [ELI5: How do painkillers actually work? ](_URL_5_) ^(_3 comments_)
1. [ELI5: How do pain killers that 'target' areas of pain work? ](_URL_0_) ^(_4 comments_) | 43bccd29-55e9-4cc5-b794-3b9d6ab988b1 |
2tlitg | how does currency/money work? If we donate 100 million to a country, it's not like we send a crate of money over | Money is just a representation of value. Bartering, trading stuff directly is inconvenient. So we invented money as a "value holder", for example instead of trading my goat for your 100 apples. But I don't want 100 apples at once as they will spoil before I can eat them all. I instead get 100 apple tokens as a promise that I can get the apples later.
And the more people that agrees that the tokens are valuable the more useful the currency is. So if we understand that money is just a promise of value, it makes it easier to understand how a bank doesn't actually need to hold your physical money in a vault. You trust the bank to keep track on how much money you have, so your bank account is just a number in a computer. | 0c3d3f4f-de02-48cf-ab75-fd6cc6bb2bfe |
2b9byp | How do the different baseball pitches work? | Baseball pitch movement is often based on something called the "Magnus Effect." Essentially, when a ball is thrown with a certain spin, one side of the ball is spinning in the same direction as the ball's movement and the other side is moving in the opposite direction. As a result, opposite sides of the ball are affected by different forces and the ball curves in a specific direction.
Another factor to consider is that baseballs have laces. If a pitch is thrown such that the laces are predominately out on one side of the ball, more resistance will be on that side of the ball, and the ball will curve accordingly.
All pitches generally work under these basic principles. The exact amount of movement is based upon which grip the pitcher uses and how it is positioned and moving as it moves toward the catcher. | a4c59f96-c5e6-4d9e-aadd-4856f594c19e |
24fh73 | Why is French the preferred language for body care products. | I don't have anything to back this up but for the North American audience stuff in French sounds more sophisticated and refined as shown by the use of French to refer to more refined versions of stuff like eateries are called restaurants, underwear is called lingerie, perfume, cologne, rotisserie and so forth | 9f07717a-5364-41b7-b53e-c7f5cdbace68 |
3wmga0 | Why is it that double decker buses have only been used in North American for the past decade while they've been used in Europe for more than a century? | lots of low bridges and efficiency are the main reason. A bendy bus can load and unload at twice the speed.
Also less handicap accessible.
The ones being use in the US are in very few cities or just for fun. I know the one that started up in Las Vegas, is more for fun than anything else. | f9627913-8c39-4d7a-a3f9-49dda047e33d |
5v2ksc | What's the controversy with the Dalai Lama? (Specifically within China and Tibet) | Tibet is a territory that's being ruled by China. according to Tibetan religion and law, the Dalai Lama is the spiritual as well as legal ruler of the land. That doesn't jive with China federal government, who want dominating rule over the area. Instead of the Dalai Lama appeasing the Chinese gov and being made a puppet, he moved out of the country where the gov can't exercise their influence on him. He has continually made speeches and led movements for freedom as well as independence for Tibet.
some people in China oppose the Dalai Lama and call for him to "get with the game". others support the Dalai Lama at the risk of the gov "disappearing" them. in China, you do not have the right to an speedy and fair trial. you can be arrested and whisked away and sent to prison for accusations of sedition and held until further notice at the gov's whim. | 2a4cab6f-ad19-479e-b219-cf21cf764fa8 |
1z62l2 | Why don't actors use actual liquids when pretending to drink in films? | After 20 takes you'll probably be vomiting from drinking too much water, coffee, etc. | bd305036-0c81-4085-9b33-8e2acd0548c2 |
3gfm18 | How does it feel to have an Orgasm? | you know the jack-in-the-box from when you were a kid? and as you turn the handle slowly the music pings through note after note. Each one slowly leading into the next.......the anticipation of knowing that the next note could be the one where it *pops*? That feeling of suspense, chills, eager anticip--------ation? That is as close as i can get to describing it in a sensory similar experience way. | d0b0299e-b120-4331-bec7-a4d8684091f3 |
60kakl | Why does harmony, especially harmony by multiple human voices, sound so pleasurable to our ears? | Harmonies are created when multiple notes are played together and blend to make a sound. Certain notes blend better together due to differences in frequencies. There is a mathematical method to finding those notes. Notes that blend well together create they create a sound that is unified or consonant, while notes that don't blend well create a sound that is "off" or dissonant. Consonant sounds trigger more activity in sensory neurons which ultimately lead to more pleasurable feelings. | acd51ad6-b386-4d12-9090-de9a4f9a1556 |
2xzhu5 | How come uninstalling is faster than installing softwares/video games? | The answer is pretty simple: When you install, you have to write all of the files in their entirety and decompress them from how they're stored in the installer, then make records of all the files and potentially entries in common places to tell the operating system how to reference specific files.
When you uninstall, you delete the files from disk, *which doesn't actually remove any data from the drive*, simply the file system pointer to that file - a VERY quick process. The most complicated uninstalls require reversing specific common entries that can take a little while, but many modern companies simply ignore that and leave orphaned entries in system registries or libraries. | b8c0a520-f6b9-484b-849e-ac271d018791 |
351br8 | How do you develop the ability to perform a backflip? How do you practice? | Trial and error is the way, but they usually practice this with a 2nd person catching them if they go head-down to the ground or they give them an extra push to make the whole flip. Another option which is sometimes used at sports clubs is a chassis. It looks like climbing gear and swing combined. The ropes are elastic so they help with the lift, and its attached to the chassis in a way that it can just freely rotate on a x axis without becomming entangled.
Or you could go full yolo. | a645c600-e283-4407-ad7c-769e16ac4149 |
2quiet | How do you "clean up" a harbor? | First you stop pumping fresh shit into it. Second you remove all the built up shit off the bottom and sides. Then you wait for the tides to exchange the water. Redo the side cleaning process as necessary until the harbor water is now as clean as the overall ocean. | 415a0354-1afd-4d2b-b244-974ff54e663d |
262qdf | Why is gas so expensive? | The price is set largely by OPEC (a group of Oil Producing Countries), they say how much they want to charge per barrel of oil and it becomes the price. They could produce more and drive the price down but all the big oil producing countries agree to only produce so much to keep the price up.
Neither Canada nor the USA are members of OPEC, but because there is so much demand for oil the price fixing really stays in effect. Also because it's expensive to extract oil from shale which is where most oil is extracted from in the USA it doesn't really drive the price down.
Once the oil is out of the ground it's sent to a refinery where it's turned into gasoline and other chemicals. All of the refineries in the USA operate at 100% capacity all the time. Any time one refinery has to do maintenance on part of the production line the supply of gasoline drops and with simple supply vs demand economics the cost goes up. The USA govt won't allow any new refineries to be built, due to environmental regulations, so we're all subject to this pain. | 8f8110d9-1ebe-4298-b21f-4e524ac5b75c |
3crn2o | What is exactly is a "gut feeling"? | It's pretty much intuition. Many people feel this in their gut. You aren't sure why, but you "feel" like you know the answer. I usually feel a tingle behind my right eye, but sometimes feel a sensation in my abdomen. I'm speculating that this feeling has to do with release of adrenaline into the blood system. Adrenaline is produced in the kidneys, which may explain the feeling. Intuition paired with a want for action, perhaps can explain this feeling. | 7b932fcc-c1a9-494d-b67c-2ca8506a2e98 |
5szljn | Why does most of the land mass lie north of the equator? | "Land mass" is a bit of a misleading concept when discussing planetary geology, and particularly in regards to the formation of a planet's surface, as what you are really referring to is merely the exposed planetary surface not submerged under water. It has a lot of significance for us, but in that realm of science is not much of a consideration.
Continents are the landmass portion of continental plates which comprise both the land mass and the submerged portion and are often moving in various ways in relation to each other. What actually causes land to be elevated enough to be above water, or significantly landlocked enough to prevent water from filling it is a combination of plate tectonic shifts, bolide impacts (asteroids), erosion, and other environmental factors (such as humans and their mighty machines).
In regards to why there is more land mass north of the equator than south, it is predominantly coincidental and is mostly relevant to what direction the plate tectonics are moving that caused the landmass to move and to even be in it's current shape. | 8671f196-5c00-44fd-a9bf-4fac13561a40 |
3l9fmg | Why is the term "socialist" a dirty word in American politics? | In most Americans' eyes, socialism is irreversibly tied to communism, which is synonymous with the Soviet Union, the US' geopolitical rival for most of the latter half of the 20th century. The USSR was communist, and also socialist, so both have always had a bad connotation. Most people don't understand that you can be socialist and not communist. Just like democracy doesn't have to mean capitalism. | 46142959-bf60-43aa-946b-85cbde52f935 |
2lallm | why popular american fast food and snack brands are found nearly all over the world but we never see any popular foreign fast food and snack brands here? | You may not be aware that some snack brands are foreign because you grew up with them. For instance, Nestle' is a Swiss company that licenses the Kit Kat bar, invented in England, to the Hershey company.
Probably the largest foreign fast food place in the U.S. is Tim Horton's which is a Canadian doughnut restaurant with 800 stores in the U.S. | efa4a11c-adc5-446d-9af3-22873975035a |
2q1bep | How does the US have the most powerful military in the world if less than 1% of the population joins the military? | 1% of the US population is still a hell of a lot of people. | 957bd875-6ddd-4b93-b375-ecf4729ccc12 |
61hdlg | how to game advertisements that use false gameplay mechanics (ex: mobiles games) in commercials get away with it | There will be a small disclaimer that says "not actual gameplay" or a simiiliar phrase (this isnt just games, a huge amount of commercials and industries use "fake" stuff to display their goods and all have some type of small disclaimer). Even if there wasn't it would almost certainly be understood by an average person that this was a promo and probably not representative of actual gameplay. But they'll put the disclaimer in anyways. | 48259a33-73a9-4a24-9507-e2cee8210f3e |
7021z2 | Why is it so difficult to be fired from a job working for the state (in US)? | There are 2 main reasons for the protections awarded to State Workers and public servants :
1) To protect them from political interference. Since they can't be fired, they do not have to obey unlawful orders. Political power can't put too much pressure on them because ultimately, they will outlast the political power.
2) To give an incentive against corruption. You got a lifelong-guaranteed job. You will not accept small amounts of money if getting caught means that you will loose that job if you're discovered. (That part did backfire a bit... It mostly lead to an increase of the money to corrupt public servants...) | 27d60a1e-3353-44a9-9ac7-4babbfdddcc9 |
2o0nq7 | why is antibiotics prescribed for flu? | Antibiotics are *not* (supposed to be) prescribed for influenza. It's possible that this is a case of a bacterial infection that a patient mistakenly called "the flu", when it wasn't actually the flu. It's also possible that the doctor prescribed antibiotics because the patient demanded it, and they didn't want to lose a patient. | 13f6d993-c6bf-496e-b8d4-ca89d161713e |
19607d | why aren't police officers in the UK allowed to carry guns? | In the US, regular beat officers are allowed to carry handguns, but not sniper rifles and submachine guns; those are reserved for SWAT teams.
In the UK, regular beat officers are allowed to carry batons and pepper spray, but not guns; those are reserved for special gun-carrying teams.
In both countries, it's possible for a situation to come up which regular beat officers aren't equipped to deal with. This is seen as a fair tradeoff, as most people would greatly prefer a society where police do not regularly carry automatic weapons. The only difference is where the cutoff is; sine the UK has fewer guns, its people are more comfortable not giving regular officers any guns. | c125ec63-0eb5-47a3-9979-fe8699bb5300 |
225z06 | How 5 hour energy actually makes you stay awake | Most notably caffeine. It's fine if you do it infrequently but if you make a habit out of it (or coffee or any other source of caffeine) it'll no longer help wake you up, it'll just get you to normal. Your body learns to adjust to what it consumes so it'll wind itself down if it's expecting caffeine.
If it's just something you do every now and then that doesn't happen.
Even if you do get a caffeine addiction going it's not that detrimental to your health, it just means you'll probably have headaches and feel groggy until you get your fix. Plenty of people out there are 'abusing' coffee daily to prevent the negative side-effects of not nurturing the addiction but it's a pretty minor health concern. | c6d160a9-d1b4-4748-b0b5-73d3b13886f9 |
2o4p00 | If I eat a lot before going to sleep, why do I wake up hungry? | I am on board with you mate. I experience the same thing. You would think that since you ate more recently (and supposedly your metabolism slows down when you are sleeping) that you should be less hungry than if you went to bed on an empty stomach.
*
I would add as a followup question: Why am I NOT hungry when I wake up if I go to bed hungry? | 851b0d73-3c82-4f42-8925-9cedf413a7a0 |
1fodvj | How does a Tornado Intercept Vehicle avoid being sucked up into the air? | Some of them have pneumatically-operated spikes that they drive into the pavement when contact with a tornado is imminent. | 4e060930-ab52-4cb3-be22-6dd4ab66a9ee |
65eff4 | Radio waves and how they send information. | > Are there two separate waves?
Sort of. That 96.5 MHz wave is what is called a carrier wave.
It is combined with the wave that carries the audio wave, and they your receiver subtracts out the carrier frequency, leaving only the audio. This process is called modulation.
There are two common forms of modulation, *amplitude modulation* and *frequency modulation*, commonly known as AM and FM.
With AM, the audio wave is represented as a [change in the strength](_URL_1_) of the signal.
With FM, it is a [change in the frequency](_URL_0_) of the signal. | 5432c71f-4009-43c9-99b9-0a52b9c905b6 |
1mq9gn | How the "mob mentality" works? | Lets say you're on a playground.
There's a group of people who are playing dodgeball. Its a pretty small group at first, but there are a few more of them, and then a few more. Pretty soon, a lot of people are playing dodgeball.
But you aren't, and as that group gets bigger, you start to feel left out. You should probably be playing dodgeball too. How many people it takes to start this - well that probably varies from person to person. But at some point you start to feel like you should be playing dodgeball with everyone else because - well everyone is doing it, and if you stay out of it, that feels wrong.
Mob mentalities work in the same way, I think. You start with a small group of people, which gets larger and larger as people join in so that they aren't 'left out.'
Whether they are triggered by fear, hatred, anger, excitement, so on and so forth probably depends on the person and the situation - a riot after a big game is probably a combination of excitement and adrenaline, and once a few people start tipping cars, well, why not join in?
With fear, its the group of people who kick the crap out of someone, or start a riot, or go in for some vigilante justice - there's this mixture of fear, anger, hate, and its all absorbed by the mob and returned with greater strength.
I'm not a psychologist or someone with a lot of experience with this kind of thing (academically), but I have had to deal with schoolyard shenanigans that always seemed to come down to 'everyone else was doing it.'
You do see it on the playgrounds, in schools - everyone bullies Stinky Pete, because everyone bullies him. If you don't bully him, or call him Stinky Pete, then you're just like Stinky Pete, and now you're Stinky Joe. You don't want to be Stinky Joe, so you call Stinky Pete Stinky Pete and throw things at him when other people do, because at least you're safe in the group.
At least you aren't Stinky Pete. And if that means hurting Stinky Pete, well thats just fine. | bb1a860c-5b3d-4a7a-9b78-c3d1737460b3 |
2scow4 | Why does an automobile depreciate in value the minute you drive off the lot? | Let's say a brand new Ford Focus costs $16,000.
Would you be willing to pay $16,000 for a Focus that someone bought, drove around for a little bit, and then returned for some reason.
The average consumer is always going to choose the new car over the slightly used car, so dealerships are going to have to offer the slightly used one at a solid discount to get rid of it.
Because of this, no one is going to pay full price for a slightly used car, so as soon as your car is slightly used, its value drops. | 4cfbc1be-de3f-49fc-a13b-fad6fa72f5ca |
3djz61 | How your voice sounds different to yourself when you talk versus when you hear your voice in a recording. | So, when you talk, you hear the sound waves traveling through your skull and into your ears. Other people, or recordings, just hear the sound waves that travel through the air.
As such, you hear your voice differently because you're hearing it filtered through your skull. | dd533bef-36a9-4435-a90c-7ec04a6e2615 |
2y6n19 | Why is radiation so damaging as it is? | You are a very complex controlled chemical reaction.
Ionization causes different reactions and products than are supposed to be inside you. | ef4887e3-38f0-4935-a516-c1473baf0c0c |
6o0tvv | What happens to the foreign objects in our eyes when we rub them until the discomfort is gone? | 'Twas oft asked here. Ye may enjoy these:
1. [ELI5: What happens to stuff that gets in your eye and disappears behind your eyeball? ](_URL_3_)
1. [ELI5: What happens when something goes into my eye and I'm unable to find/pull it out? ](_URL_1_)
1. [ELI5: What happens to eye lashes and where do they go when you don't get them out of your eye? ](_URL_0_)
1. [ELI5: What happens to stuff that gets "lost" in your eyes? Do things ever get trapped behind them? ](_URL_2_) | e10736ff-20ac-453a-a85c-9f7908919f5b |
85slnt | Why do advertisers hold so much power? A lot of sites like Reddit are trying to be "advertiser friendly", to make money, but do advertisements really pay that much? Are ads really so useful to to the company that they will splash that much money? | For many entertainment platforms, advertisers are the *only* source of income, or the extreme majority of their income.
If the advertisers are unhappy, than there is no money, than there is no show/website/ect. | 754d5c63-c195-49bd-87e6-37671ab5e0fe |
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