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3eo8rj | Given the emphasis placed on the separation of the three pillars of the American government, how can the president grant pardons? Is this not the executive messing with the judiciary? | It's built on checks and balances, not separation. Each branch can limit the other branches so no one branch is all powerful.
Congress passes laws. The President can veto but Congress can override. The Supreme Court can overturn laws passed by Congress. See how everyone can check (or limit) the other branches?
Pardons are one of the checks the Executive branch has over the courts. A perfectly legal law passed by Congress and upheld by the Court can still be nullified in some cases by the President. | a91a7f17-6b73-4e48-9b7f-ec048bab3d9d |
1yc7zn | How is it possible for a person who was born deaf to understand spoken language the moment their cochlear implants are turned on? | The video you linked is somewhat misleading. The woman is "deaf", not deaf. By which I mean that she was severely hearing impaired to the point that she is classified as deaf, but **could** hear (poorly) with hearing aids. In other words, she was never completely unable to hear. Thus she could understand English because she had heard English before, albeit less clearly than with the implant. | 84f98ea7-076c-46bc-9f87-dd3735a21907 |
p4x1v | Sumerians | Once upon a time, a *very* long time ago, there were people called who lived in the part of the world that we now call Iraq. We call them the "Sumerians". They're important partly because they were one of the first people to live in a country that had multiple cities, and partly because they invented writing about 5000 years ago!
Modern scholars can learn about them because of things they made that survived all those years: things like cups, storage jars, foundations of buildings, and also some things with writing on them. They didn't write the way we do, but clever scholars have managed to work out what they wrote.
A bit over 4000 years ago the Sumerians gradually faded away after being conquered by another people, called the Akkadians. Our name for the Sumerians actually comes from the Akkadian language. One of the stories that the Sumerians told each other was a story about a king named Bilgames. The Akkadians liked this story too, only they called him Gilgamesh.
The end. Now, [go the fuck to sleep.](_URL_0_) | 8f19f0fd-cc7e-4b32-8177-914638e8c375 |
2gb4mm | What is happening when our nipples get hard? | Body parts which can be become erect - nipples, penis, etc can do so because they contain erectile tissue, which is like a sponge. There are arteries which carry blood from the heart to the body, and veins which carry blood from the body to the heart. When at rest, the arteries carry the same amount of blood to the tissue as the veins take away. However, when stimulated the arteries dilate and carry in more blood than can be carried away, so the tissue fills with blood and becomes "hard" from the pressure. The nipples never become as hard as a penis, so with time the blood vessels simply return to normal. With a penis, the orgasm causes release of hormones that return the blood vessels to normal and "soften" it immediately. | cc567ee8-6ddb-452b-8788-e9f7e36c1198 |
44y866 | What exactly is "bailing out big banks on Wall Street" and what caused them to need bailing out? How did this result in the 2008 recession? What exactly is "the establishment" | You have the order of events a little bit wrong. The bailout was caused by the crash, not the other way around.
Back in the 1990s, there were some changes to regulations surrounding mortgages that allowed people to buy and sell ownership of debt. Let's say I lent you half a million dollars to buy a house and in exchange you have to pay me a thousand dollars a month for 20 years. I can sell that contract to someone else, and you'll pay them instead.
Mortgages and real estate shares became a super popular way to save for retirement. Everyone figured that since population was always rising, demand for housing would always be rising, so real estate value only went up.
Banks came up with this idea that they could sell a house to anyone. Even if you defaulted, you basically paid the bank money for two or three years then gave them a house that was worth more than they paid for it. People bought more and more shares in these, and more and more houses were built and sold. There's a famous story now of a Las Vegas stripper who owned 5 mansions because people kept basically giving them away to her expecting her to rent them out, then default when the tenants moved out.
Then the trend caught up with people. Suddenly, there were all of these empty houses without tenants and buyers. The price of houses dropped. Banks stopped getting mortgage payments. They were in serious trouble, and when your bank is in trouble, you're in trouble. You might think that if your account has $10,000 in it that there's $10,000 dollars in a vault somewhere with your name on it, but there isn't. The bank owes you that money, but it's not obligated to actually keep any of it, only to provide you with money when you ask for it. If the bank runs out of money, then your money is gone too.
Major trading firms, banks, and other companies negatively affected by this crash were going to collapse if they didn't receive a huge, interest-free loan from the government. So, the government gave it to them. But the government never gave huge interest-free loans to failing small businesses or homeowners, so a lot of people feel like the bailouts were a costly way for the government to pay off their friends, rather than halt the crash. One of the major arguments in capitalism is that people manage risk and make smart investments, suffering the consequences of failure themselves. The rich will argue that they take on *risk* for a project, and that's a major contribution. If there was a bailout, was there ever really risk, or just a gravy train for the rich? These people argue that the government should have extended that loan to all homeowners, basically providing free mortgage payments for everyone. It would have cost exactly the same, but the people who bought houses they couldn't afford would still have the houses.
Your opinion may vary on whether the bailout was the right thing to do. It was expensive, it saved a lot of rich people from a stupid mistake they made, and it did nothing to help the unemployed masses in the great recession. But on the other hand your money would have vanished too, even if you had nothing to do with the mortgage crisis. Either way the mistake hurt everyone, guilty or innocent. You might feel that poor people buying mansions deserved to lose them, or rich bankers selling mansions to poor people deserve to be bankrupt. In the end, a decision was made that did as little as possible without doing nothing. You be the judge if it was the right one. | e05c9a18-e2f8-469c-9dc4-57400d5ce2f6 |
3ggvec | Why is it that macro photos tend to only have a small portion of the entire photo in focus? | Not limited to macro photography, but it is due the aperture of the objective, which basically means the "hole" the sensor sees through. The larger the hole is, the smaller the focused range is. The smaller the hole, the larger the focused range is. | 883371e7-3ea8-4199-9068-8538f5be36fc |
56opny | Where are we with gene replacement and what are the challenges that need to be overcome for it to work in humans? | I'd say that 10 years is too soon, but I'm not going to speculate on whether it's 20 or 50.
We have some techniques, like a relatively new one called CRISPR, which allow us to edit DNA more easily than before. In cases where we know that a single gene is the problem, we can use this technology to fix that gene, but right now, we can only do it reliably in single cells at a time. That means that, if you know you're a carrier for something and you don't want your kids to have it, you may soon be able to use this technology to save your kids - but it's too late for you.
One big problem is that CRISPR has "off-target effects," meaning that it can cause changes we don't intend to make. We need to solve that problem before we can use this technology in humans.
There is other technology that is already being tested in humans to cure conditions that only affect a few specific tissues. For instance, if you have a genetic condition that affects the way your eyes work, we are testing local treatments that would replace that gene in your retinas, hopefully restoring their function. But these are still in the testing stages; we know they can work, but we need to make sure that they work every time, safely. You might see that come to market in 10 or 20 years. | 38614fb5-1079-4099-ba71-df99f36c51d7 |
3gt7jk | The grammar in "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds" | It's a valid, but archaic form of the [present perfect](_URL_0_) tense, which is used to refer to a past event that has present consequences.
The archaic tone is fitting for a translation of the [Bhagavad Gita](_URL_1_), an ancient text. It's similar to how many people prefer the King James Bible over more accurate modern translations — we want our revered texts to sound different from everyday speech. | 6d05d6d2-fe22-45e8-929c-281308d8f661 |
3mmezl | We're having elections here in Catalonia and we can tracks the results in real time using mobile apps. Why does it take a few minutes to count from 0 to 2% of all the votes, but it take the same time to count from just 98,10 to 98,24% of all votes? | A bit of a guess because I don't know exactly how that count is organised, but at first you'll have all the counting locations counting results and reporting in as they go. Towards the end, many will have counted all their votes and you're left with the last few who had most votes cast. With only a few locations left counting, fewer votes are counted each minute. | 259aedee-e2e2-49fb-bdef-7465ca12d10e |
2qzqzm | Why does my nose run when I poop in the morning | Because this is asking about a condition you suffer it qualifies as a personal problem according to the sidebar rules.
If this really is a complex conceptual question about the human body and not a question about you specifically, you can rephrase and resubmit without reference to yourself and try again. (Body questions are pretty common though, so try a quick search!) Good luck! | 71f4b372-0823-446e-9eb6-95b74d5e670e |
143wz3 | Why is zero multiplied by infinity not defined as zero? | Infinity isn't a number (you can't point to it on a number line), and since both things that you're multiplying have to be actual numbers, you can't multiply anything by infinity. In general, infinity is not a valid term to use in any "normal" math.
What you *can* do is take the **limit** of "0 * x" as x approaches infinity, and the solution to that limit is zero. | 0f6a895e-81a7-44ef-9e2e-c78af71fd80b |
7a080v | How Does Instant Messaging Work? & Online Videogames? | There is a delay, this is called ping. With broadband internet connections it is not uncommon to have pings around 10-50 ms. That's milliseconds, a nearly imperceptible amount of time, so it is effectively live from your perspective. Electricity travels at nearly the speed of light and computers work very fast. | 44768262-031a-443a-9d4b-4b01ceeafbff |
5scl79 | How do pulleys make things lighter? | Pulleys do not make things lighter
Energy is expended in lifting a mass by a distance
By using a system of pullies you reduce the movement distance that is travelled with each pull of the rope or chain or whatever
The same mass is moved a smaller distance in each pull so less energy is expanded
To move the object the same distance takes a number of pulls on the rope or chain
The total energy expended is actually higher as the pulley system has an additional amount of friction that must be overcome | 95c8966c-4e4d-45b8-a482-8f5268289447 |
38qgh9 | Why was Miami considered so cool in the 80's, and what happened to cause it to lose that status? | There was an insane amount of money flooding Miami due to cocaine. Many drug busts later and it is what it is today. Check out the movie Cocaine Cowboys. | 38603f6f-1ca6-4f83-b104-17003904ec5f |
4gwlyh | why are men required to register for the draft if it's mandatory and the government already has all of our information? | Modern draft laws have their origins in World War I, back when the government didn't have everyone's information. It was entirely possible to be born on some farm, go to a rural school that didn't keep records, and grow up to be an 18 year old man the gov't had no idea existed. | 83d601a7-ba16-41dc-a36a-a63318c293bd |
2rdq70 | How do they deliver liquid water to (and take sewage away from) homes and businesses in places that get really cold in the winter, without it freezing? native of Phoenix here, I don't get | Water and sewer pipes in cold places are buried deeper, usually below the freeze line if the installers have half a clue. My hometown in Oregon freezes regularly but our mains are 8-15' below ground level and keep flowing. | 7e0b1fac-e1e3-4fe2-8b82-484e94229dc3 |
6744at | Why rent a house when you can buy one and pay for it every month, when you move out just sell it and get profits? | Buying a house requires one of two things: enough capital to buy it outright, or sufficient credit to get a mortgage. Not everyone *has* either of these things, especially when one considers that in the latter case it's only worthwhile if the interest rate is sufficiently low to make it a better option than renting. What improves credit and therefore interest rates? Having money and/or a high income is a *big* factor.
Then there's the fact that while house prices generally increase overall, they can't be 100% relied upon to do so, and needing to move during a slump could potentially be utterly ruinous in this situation.
TL;DR: if it's viable that often *is* a better option, but it's not accessible to everyone who needs housing. | f177ecfb-c8ed-434a-82a6-013bdffa8d4d |
2f3yfj | Why does my vision become slightly blurred after laying on my back while viewing a computer placed on my stomach? | I'm no expert on this but having to, what I'm assuming you're doing, tilt your head on an angle to see the screen, means the blood isnt properly circulating to your head | 846fb6ea-1425-47a8-aed9-e307cd580195 |
3meilj | Why do planes fly both east and west if the Earth rotates at 1000 miles per hour? Wouldn't a plane need to fly over 1000 miles per hour to make any progress in one direction? | We measure speed relative to the ground. So an object that appears stationary wouldn't be measured at 1000 mph just because it was on Earth.
The air moves along with the Earth and everything along with it. If a plane had to fly over 1000 mph to make any progress, when you jumped, the ground would have move significantly below you. | c5aab3bb-c319-4e37-9f2b-1e2cecb5510d |
3tg8wn | Why don't we use microwave waves for water heaters instead of natural gas? | The speed at which a microwave works depends on the mass of the materials. That's actually a FAQ here (as in "Why does my microwave take longer to cook twice as much food when my oven doesn't?").
I timed this and discovered for my own stove and microwave, the break even point is just about one cup. The microwave is faster for less than a cup, the stove top is faster (at least on the big burner) for more than a cup.
For the amount of water in a water heater, you'd need a huge microwave. You'd also have to solve the problem of letting water flow through it without having the microwaves leak out. Finally, there are places where gas is much cheaper than electricity. | 8c11411d-58b6-4006-a5f5-3d869ca868b7 |
y3dlz | Why do birds not get electrocuted when resting on a power line? | Electricity will take the path of least resistance.
The electricity could go through the wire, or from the wire to the bird and back to the wire.
People get electrocuted because they are touching the ground. The ground is low voltage and large, thus a very good receptacle for electricity. Even though a human is high resistance the ground is a very appealing place for the electricity to flow to. The bird leads nowhere except back to the same wire. | fc364e9e-cd4b-4d41-a839-59c5f9cc1564 |
44jo9d | What are the "voices" Schizophrenic people can hear ? | Not all schizophrenics hear actual voices. More commonly, they simply have aberrant thoughts that seem like they are originating from someone else. This is probably why "mind control rays" and the like are such common delusions for schizophrenics. After all, if you are sane but start having thoughts that you would never have, then someone else must be putting those thoughts into your head, right?
In the most extreme cases, these aren't just oddball thoughts. They actually hear a voice as if someone is speaking to them. Most of the time, the voices aren't saying anything all that extreme.
Interestingly, some otherwise sane people report very occasionally hearing voices. | d317fdc8-9316-4d46-926e-fa634c3cfb23 |
46g0ft | Why does Frozen Fish have a reputation of resulting in higher quality than with other Frozen Food? | First of all.
Fish is a VERY perishable product, their flesh tends to rott a lot faster then meat from ground animals and also cooks at a much lower temperature, Some shellfish such a shrimp can actually "cook" in room temperature if its summertime.
In the last few years all major industrial fishing vessels (not small fishing boats) have industrial freezers onboard, so the fish is directly frozen on board, meaning that the fish is fronzen very shortly after its caught.
Another thing we have to discuss is ice crystals, Water due to its chemical composition is one of few compounds that actually expand when going to a more stable form, usualy when going from gas to liquid to solid each state takes up less space, except for water due to its molecular bonds meaning that ice expands at first.
But the faster you get over that grow bump (i think it was 0 to -10c) the better quality the ice and the smaller cristals you get, so if you flash freeze something quickly the smaller ice crystals wont destroy the flesh and texture of the fish.
When you freeze something at home, your home freezer i usualy between -5 and -10 degrees, which means all the ice you produce has large rugged ice crystals in it that make you associate something frozen with something thats absolutly trashed, tasteless and severly damaged from ice crystal damage.
Now the other issue is that paracites in Seafood are very common. especialy this little wurm called [Anisakis](_URL_0_), This paracite is very common in commercial fish and is usualy ingested in larve form and it becomes a wurm in your stomach and intestines, the only way to kill it without rendering the flesh of the fish toxic or destroy it by cooking is to flash freeze the fish to kill the larve.
Freezing like cooking or drying is a tool, and it depends on how you use it, bad freezing leads to large ice cristals, damaged texture and horrible quality, good freezing perserves the quality of a meat and will allow you to safely enjoy it for a lot longer. | 8f8565be-bef3-41d6-b146-3ec0905a1cf1 |
1xx0ub | How does washing my hands protect me from viruses? | You got it when you guessed it is removing them from the surface of your skin. In great part this is to help others as well since you have perhaps coughed into your hand or rubbed your nose/face and picked some up. The mechanical action of washing your hands causes many of these to be sloughed off and sent down the drain.
Soap helps with the mechanical action of lifting cells from your skin but along time under running water is also effective - with robust hand rubbing - between fingers - etc.
Hot water will help liberate cells better as well as it makes the oils on your skin loosen up and wash off and take with them dirt/cells. | f2128a95-2ac6-451e-bc80-7ff266bdb2eb |
8ev7yv | Why are tabloids allowed to report seemingly libelous stories? | For one, the requirements for libel for celebrities require the celebrity to show that the tabloid intended malice, and was not simply confused/negligent. Furthermore, cases against these tabloids can become costly as these companies are extremely powerful. The celebrity has a slim chance of proving libel, and the cases go on for years. Being apart of one of these court cases also brings attention to the celebrity’s private life, likely opening the door to more criticism. As these tabloids are known for their ridiculous stories on any celebrity, its likely not worth the celebrity’s time to fight it.
Ultimately if someone believes what they read in one of those tabloids, their opinion likely isn’t important to any celebrity.
_URL_0_ | 1837d2f0-026c-42be-b8e1-74a557b00976 |
mj04n | What's itching? | It's a sensation from the nerves in the skin near the itch that causes you to scratch. It's probably an adaptation against insect/arachnid bites. | 20ec45ac-1904-4d7c-b666-7133925b2ca3 |
25kdb7 | Why I see twice when I push my eye (from the bottom upwards)? | Because when you push on your eye from the bottom like that, you are actually making that eye point upward, while your other eye is still looking forward. If your eyes are pointing in two different directions on the up/down axis, you can't put the two images from each eye together into one picture, so you see two pictures on top of each other.
The same effect occurs on the left/right axis when you cross your eyes. | e4d834fe-c5f8-47c5-9a8c-3165ce47ed71 |
1okj5c | Please explain (like I'm 5) the Republican party. | The Republican Party caters best to those that both fiscally and socially conservative.
The Democratic Party caters best to those that are both fiscally and socially liberal.
This is different from the Libertarian party who are socially liberal, yet fiscally conservative.
Fiscal conservatism means you want to spend as little money as possible. This means less taxes. This means the government stays out of your business.
Fiscal conservatives believe the government should *only* be used to do three things:
1) Commons' Services. Supporting places that everyone everyone should enjoy like a state park, city park, municipal pool, municipal tennis courts, hiking trails, beachfront, etc.
2) Infrastructure. This means roads, bridges, tunnels, railroad tracks, etc. Imagine a world where everyone had their own private roads? It would create a mess.
3) Military.
Pure fiscal conservatism: these are the only three things taxes should be used for. These are things that are incredibly useful for the health of society and economy. These are things that unprofitable *or* unreasonable for a private enterprise to do.
These people believe *money* is the single greatest motivator to do better work. Profit-motive is why a private company *does better work* than a government. Imagine going to the DMV. Remember how much it sucks and how unhelpful the workers are? That's because the organization has no reason to make the experience better. They get paid anyways because they're a government service. Now, imagine if the DMV was competitive and *needed* your business to stay afloat. That profit-motive would almost certainly improve customer service, speed and ease. I mean, how much easier is it to register for Netflix than it is to register your car?
This is fine and dandy, but the Republican Party is also *socially* conservative. This means they thrive on old-fashioned values. They don't like modern art, modern fashion, modern music, tattoos, piercings, etc. They *like* gender roles, they're anti-drugs, they always remeness about the way things *were*. They use religion as a justification for their old fashioned values: anti-abortion, pro capital-punishment, anti gay-marriage, etc. A good friend of mine once said, "country music is about a time that everyone remembers, but never actually happened." That time is what Republicans hope to achieve.
It's a sad irony: The Republican Party prides itself less government in business, yet wants the government to interfere in the lives of people.
This is why there is a growing schism in the party. People like Ron Paul are Republicans, but really Libertarians. They don't care what people do in their personal lives - they just want weak government. And the Libertarian Party is entirely *too weak* for them to officially switch sides.
Anyways. Fiscal conservatives see the affordable care act as an overreach of government power. They want the government to stay out of lives as much as possible and they believe a private business (such as an insurance company) would do a better job because there is profit motive. They're worried that if government has control over healthcare - then quality will go down, perhaps affordability. | 701d8780-8b31-4fef-8cc8-1812f2a2422e |
2kg2tm | can someone please explain the NCAA div 1 football league? | Division 1 is actually about 300 schools split in 2, the FBS and the FCS. The FBS is a little over 100 schools and is considered the top division. The 100+ schools are grouped into conferences, each without about 8-14 schools (Notre Dame, Army, and Navy are all independent, meaning they don't belong to any conference). There are a few "power conferences" that are considered the best of the best. These include the SEC, PAC-12, Big 12, Big 10, ACC. Each conference has their own scheduling rules, but generally, a school wil play 8 or 9 conference games against other members of the same conference, and either 4 or 3 non-conference games, so that their total games played is 12. The independents determine their own schedule by making deals to be one of a conference team's non-conference games.
This year they implemented the playoff system, which will be a tournament between the top 4 fours teams at the end of season, as determined by a committee. Everyone else will play in traditional bowl games, as long as they have at least 6 wins. | b955cd89-e5f1-4c0f-86ef-f736b3b45978 |
37rv5f | What is income inequality and why does it matter? | Those are two different questions.
The first, "what is income inequality": When the people with the lowest incomes have substantially less income than the people with the highest incomes a condition of "inequality" exists.
The second, "why does it matter" is complex.
Let's imagine that 90% of the population had an income of $100/year, and 10% of the population had an income of $1 billion/year. Life would be really hard for that 90%. Living on $100/year is extraordinarily difficult. I think everyone would agree that such a society wasn't just manifestly unequal, but it was also unfair.
Now let's imagine that 90% of the population made $100,000/year, and 10% of the population made $1 billion/year. This is slightly less unequal, but you can live a very good life for $100k/year. It's a lot less "unfair" even though it's extremely unequal.
Researchers have studied this question of inequality and fairness and found some surprising results.
It turns out that the more unequal a society is, the more likely that society is to have a lot of negative attributes. Things like deaths in childhood, rates of diabetes, violent crime, etc. correlate very strongly with inequality.
The weird thing is that these outcomes DON'T correlate with global inequality. In other words, if you look at negative societal trends in a highly unequal society like the United States, they are higher than a poorer, but more equal society like Spain.
In other words, people appear to have worse societies when their incomes are unequal with the people they interact with regularly, not in terms of absolute household income. You might be happier, healthier, and suffer less violent crime if you lived in a more equal country even if you made a lot less money.
This distinction between the absolute value of income, inequality, fairness, and society's attributes is the nexus of immense study and debate and nobody (yet) has come up with a theory that really explains it well. | 31814a93-2634-4b16-982c-656e08d7a24b |
5na9sv | Google Translate's forming its own language | An article about it from Google: _URL_0_
Little bit about training neural networks: _URL_1_
An artificial neural network was trained for different language pairs. To much surprise, they found the same (or somehow similar) neurons activate for phrases with the same meaning for different language pairs. It's thought that this means the network encodes something common to all languages (such as meaning). That is, instead of translating cow (english) to vaca (spanish), it's translating cow to some internal phrase to vaca. The same internal phrase should activate when translating vaca to lehmä (finnish).
Interestingly, this wasn't intended. Training artificial neural networks is somewhat of an automatic process. The training process happened to create the internal language on its own. The internal language isn't a language in a normal sense, being able to be spoken or written. Rather, it's set of clusters of neurons where each cluster has a unique meaning. | 933e61a7-ebe9-4e5c-9841-1f76be9c1fdc |
2ni6fq | Why does a wet trampoline feel like it makes you jump higher? Does it actually do that? | I recon it doesn't...the only think I can think of is if it is cold water, the trampoline fabric/springs might get tighter as the materials contract. | 2fb2b5bb-91f6-488c-b8e8-2cc9aa1d1804 |
nejp7 | Why don't Mac's get viruses? | They do, its just that there are a lot more Windows PCs out there. The entire purpose of a Virus on a computer is to cause as much trouble as you can before anti-virus updates and eliminates it. Ergo, if you want to cause as much trouble as you can, you write it for windows, not OSX or Linux.
There are plenty of examples of viruses and malware written for OSX in the past though. | 9831bf28-3aa0-4055-9fbc-a96bedb48722 |
3d4iwn | There seems to be a ton of contradictory information on what causes diabetes... how much of a role does excess sugar consumption play in getting it? | I am not a doctor.
Diabetes is caused mostly by the pancreas, which is the organ in your body that produces insulin, which is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels.
There are two types of diabetes. Type I is caused when the pancreas is damaged and *can't* produce insulin. Type II is caused when your body grows resistant to insulin.
Excess sugar consumption can easily lead to both type II diabetes and obesity. They're linked in that way; obesity tends to come with excess sugar consumption and an overall lack of healthiness, which is linked to type II diabetes--and excess sugar consumption tends to lead to obesity, do you end up at the same place no matter where you start off. | ab4d2d05-4e91-4eda-ac22-4e6181c7f4f6 |
33v0nd | in the NFL what does it mean when a team picks up a players fifth year option? | Normally players' contracts are for X amount of years. Occasionally, most notably rookie quarterbacks, will have the same X amount of years plus the option for an extra year. So if the player played well for the first couple years the team can pick them up for the extra year to have time for another contract. | 9e97028a-7d9f-4157-8b3d-a325f1ae5e33 |
71qyht | Why does bending material such as metal, plastic, i.e. eventually wear it down so much that it snaps off? | Bending stuff actually breaks the inside of the material, but hopefully not enough to break the surface. Some materials like metal and plastic are secretly buzzing and jiggling around on the inside, and might even fix some of those breaks over time, when warm enough.
Sadly materials like wood or bread don't jiggle enough to fix anything, and the breaks sometimes get worse over time instead, eventually breaking the surface and 'helping' to snap off.
Fun fact: Cheese and Plastic act alot like each other on the inside. | e9f37cc1-f50c-4bf4-b1cd-05a99f659236 |
2r15hz | why don't truck and car companies (like Ford) make new trucks with new technology that look like the older models everyone loves? | Paraphrasing here, "if I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" -Henry Ford | bae92175-0eec-40b9-bc98-bc9bef4e1269 |
3g45q0 | Why is it that almost all black guys I have met IRL and seen on TV always have their heads shaved? | Because it's not the 90's anymore.
Also Black hair on men longer then a half inch looks "savage" to many potential employers and clients, so professionally we have to keep it short. I had a luscious footlong Afro until I was looking for an internship this summer and one of my interviewers, a Black dude, suggested that if I really wanted White people to take me seriously, I needed to cut the fro. My dad, the Black parent of my mixed heritage, said the same thing to me growing up, but teenage rebel me didn't listen.
Plus a lot of White people associate cornrows, dreads, box braids, etc. with thugs, and Afros are hard as FUCK to maintain. I spent > 3 hours a day on my bush. | 04e6fef2-49ca-45ae-8fa7-36f5122bea4d |
4pkk8j | When checking out a library eBook via OverDrive, why is there a limit as to how many copies the library has when it's a digital format? | I work at a library and do AP for bills like overdrive & similar. Each time the ebook is "checked out" we get charged. What we do is prepay the account for the year for the fees accrued from what's borrowed and also prepay a contract for the content on over drive and another for the use of the database. Basically it's how overdrive, publishers & writers etc make their money. Now it's doesn't cost as much as if you were to buy the regular book, or even an ebook on Amazon or B & N. I guess you can say it's like a renters fee like what you'd use to pay to rent movies from blockbuster. But it's the library's expense and you the patron get it free. | 6b690941-41ee-4404-b9c0-4b7edc677c11 |
2zgtmw | Why can't Greenland just play their home matches in another country, if the only thing stopping them from joining FIFA is lack of suitable playing surfaces. | Because then their own fans wouldn't easily be able to watch the games. What's the point of having a national team if your own nation has to book a flight just to watch them? | 3dc6ba23-065d-494d-a649-990f428636a6 |
11uspi | Why is water, when in mass quantities appear blue or green, but when in a small glass it is clear? | First of all, think of light as a stream of tiny little particles called "photons". Each photon has a certain amount of energy that it carries - like a ball that you throw: a fast ball has a lot of energy and hurts if it hits you, a slow ball doesn't have much energy and doesn't hurt. The amount of energy the photons have is what we call the color of the light.
The next thing to think about is how matter (like water) is made up: it's made up lots of atoms which internally contain so-called electrons. These electrons are small balls which fly around the center of the the atom (also called "nucleus"). Like photons, electrons also have an energy associated with them. There is one peculiar thing with electrons and their energy: they can only ever have integer multiples of a call it "universal" energy. So a electron can not have just any old amount of energy, it's quite picky.
When light and therefore photons pass through an object they can crash into the atoms and transfer there energy onto the electrons of the atom they hit (like when you hit a billiard ball with another one, the first one loses energy and the second one gains some). But: remember how I said that the electrons are picky about what energy they have? If a photon comes in that doesn't have the right energy for the electron to get to the next higher allowed value of energy then you can't transmit any energy from the photon to the electron - ergo: the photon just keeps on going.
Now, I just explained why photons of some energy can just pass through the material and photons of some other energy cant - some are accepted and some are not. So, as it turns out in the case of water - water likes red. It's not the #1 red fan of materials but it does like red, as in if red photons come in then every once in a while they will be picked up by one of the atoms in the water.
If the light only has to travel a short distance through the water this really isn't a problem. Only a few red photons actually get absorbed and there is no problem. However, if the light has go through meters of water then after a while almost all red photons will have crashed into one of the atoms. If you look at the light after it went through that much water then you will only see those blue and green photons that the picky electrons didn't like.
This is why water in large quantities appears blue-greenish while it is transparent in glass. | ad3e3143-7ad5-45fc-aa2e-cf6195488293 |
1180no | What is "gold plating" when we're talking about rent control? | Most rent control laws have exceptions for when a property is improved, proportionate to the degree of improvement. So if a landlord wants to force lower income, rent controlled tenants out of his property, he can over improve the property with features they don't really want, and make it too expensive for them to stay.
Example:
You live in a rent controlled apartment for $500/month, where the market value is $1000/month. The law saws if your landlord renovates, your rent goes up in proportion to the increase in value.
So instead of turning it into a $1500/month apartment, which would cost you $750/month, he puts a crystal chandelier and a jacuzzi in, and says it is now a $3000/month apartment, which would cost you $1500, more than you can afford.
And later, if he can only get $2000/month for it, he is still coming out way ahead. | 14999464-bf82-4124-94df-9336c36639a7 |
255l5h | Ball-bearing sound | It's in your ears right? If so, that's your ear muscles. Muscles make a little noise when they do work because they vibrate. So, you're the muscles in your ear area work. | 7311e9a1-ad3a-4d1a-b0c1-bac3e493ffed |
35vh4h | Why can't we process ocean water so it's drinkable, instead of relying on rivers/lakes for our drinking water? | We can. And in some areas we even do. It is incredibly expensive though. And seeing as that people like their water cheap, it is more advantageous to get it from lakes or underground sources than desalinate ocean water. | 9c7db8d1-960e-49ea-a21e-cd0ba07d221c |
8wvx9y | What happens to things that go in our eyes? Like where do all of the eyelashes go that we blink into oblivion? | They fall out. Your eyes produce more tears to make the process of getting foreign particles out of your eyes easier. They just eventually fall out. | a6a342d5-10b9-45bc-9e46-a129bf94d837 |
5t0s7o | what is your body trying to accomplish when having food poisoning? | All your body is trying to do is purge itself of whatever it is that's you've eaten that went off. Even once your stomach et al are empty, it's still feeling the effects of that food/drink and the only way it knows how to fix that is to keep trying to get rid of it. | 662b1350-1bc2-4b75-8622-9d6c9755b238 |
2wa5xu | why don't they put nutritional information or ingredients on alcoholic beverages? | Alcohol is regulated by a different federal agency than food and non-alcoholic drink and said agency has not set those regulations in place. | 85f65830-ba04-4320-a976-2729be561a4d |
450i2l | Why can one judge's ruling set a precedent? Isn't that too much power in the hands of one man? | If one judge is making the decision, it's likely to be a trial court decision. Trial court rulings can be appealed, and appeals courts have more judges. At least in the US, trial court rulings also don't set binding precedents; other judges may be *persuaded* by the ruling, but they can ignore it if they are unconvinced (whereas an appeals court binds courts down the appeal chain, and they can't just ignore it). | 9303d1b2-7621-4e5a-a7fd-8632cb6be603 |
6wuddc | In those videos where they play opposing tones through a stream of water and they cause the water to take on an odd, often gravity defying shape that can only be seen through a camera, is that shape actually occurring or is it an illusion? | It's an illusion sorta. It's tied to the pitch of the note and the aperture speed being exactly the same or relative to indicate the water freezing or flowing backwards. There are plenty of videos on this. If you have trouble finding one I think I have one in mind. | 4526cd10-3626-481f-8c6c-11cf469accde |
s4r5f | Why is GMO considered bad? | Basic answer : there are little (if any) reasons to think that GMOs are bad in general. The biggest problem IMO with GMOs is the way they are used. And now the problem can get big.
[Some facts (wikipedia)](_URL_0_):
* Monsanto provides 90% of the GMO's in the US, and a big part in the whole world. So, when you talk about GMOs that you eat, the chances are that you talk about the GMOs that monsanto produced.
* Monsanto is involved in many legal issues concerning public health. I don't think you should ever trust something you by from it. They don't give a shit about you, only your money. Or someone's money. Whatever. Money.
Now, how can GMOs be bad ? Well, there are many different kinds of GMOs. You could theorically do anything. Really. GMOs is just directly hacking into life beings complete mechanism.
But that is really complicated. Most of the GMOs crop do the following (which is probably already much more complicated than it might seem) : they either
* provide a plant with a resistance to a certain pesticide. Most of the time, this is [Round-Up](_URL_1_). This shit is literally toxic to everything.
* make a plant directly produce pesticides and insecticides. While this is maybe better for the environment, this is certainly worse for you, as you'll directly eat all the pesticides the plant produce, so it's likely more than if you just use pesticides from outside (I didn't search for evidencesof this, maybe it's not completly true).
There is also the patenting of the seeds, the fact that a GMO seed branded by a company belongs to that company, no matter how it grew. This means that, ifever a GMO seed arrived in your garden, the plant that grows
* is not yours.
* if you sell it, the company it belongs to can sue you for patent infringement.
[Well, it seems like things are beginning to change a bit](_URL_2_)
The fun thing about all this ? Well, life is strong. And resilient. We could do a lot of very destructive stuff, life would likely come over. So what's happening, is that some species are now very resistant to products like round-up. And they really like those fields where there are only those weak plants designed to produce lot of food, and forgot how to fight... So how do you kill them? Easy. [Just use more pesticides !](_URL_3_) | 0c9b6fa0-8bfc-42be-84a6-2a612e78fe4a |
2nt6c2 | When i accellerate my car, why do i hear high-pitched noise through the aux input when nothing is plugged in? | Its noise off the generator or alternator.
Cords like that aren't shielded like other people have said. Its basically RF interference coming from that because its often not shielded.
Its usually not something noticed, and the stereo itself has filtering to block it. But when you plug something unshielded into it (your aux cord) you're creating an unfiltered path to the stereo, so you hear it. | 6695f0b4-fa39-4a6a-8d31-42c4da8dfb72 |
7en65q | How do (usually paid for) fake social media likes, favorites, and followers actually happen? | It's actually generally not controlled by a computer program, but sadly but people in countries with low wages, typically like Indonesia or sometimes the Philippines. Companies hire people and pay them very little to click "like" or "follow" or whatever on thousands of people's page/groups/companies/etc. that have paid for the likes, but as this takes very little time the workers can often follow hundreds or thousands of new links a day.
Keep in mind that they will have little or zero engagement in the thing they've liked, which often hurts people on Facebook more than it actually helps because of how the programming is set up. | 3dbdfafd-0307-428b-b93e-2c2ede10cb1a |
3go7a9 | How painful would it be to get beheaded? At what point would you feel no more pain? Would you have moments of consciousness after your head was removed? | There's this. Not sure how much credence it should be given but here FWIW:
> Read this report from 1905. The report is written by Dr Beaurieux, who under perfect circumstances experimented with the head of Languille, guillotined at 5.30 a.m. on June 28th, 1905:
> > Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds ... I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased.
> > The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.
> > It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: 'Languille!' I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions ... Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves ... After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.
> > It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.
> > I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds. [SOURCE](_URL_0_) | f172df5f-096f-482c-a0cf-7a1b57a338bc |
30p66n | Why does some clothes shrink when it dries when heat is usually for expanding things. | Cotton (and some other fabrics) are woven together while under tension for ease of weaving (a group of wires pulled and ziptied tight is easier to manage than a group of loose wires.)
When washed in warm water, these threads expand, allowing for the tension to temporarily relax. While relaxed the fabric is moved about, causing shifting in the now loose fibers. When the fibers cool they shrink back up and a fill in millions of tiny gaps because of their earlier shifting. Leaving your shirt smaller but under less tension that before the wash. | 17b15ec3-7e5d-4ccf-b64a-88c2056f5c85 |
3d7n7c | How is North Korea so well hidden from our view when the US has such high tech satellite imaging? | A couple reasons:
1. You and I don't have access to military satellite images.
2. Satellite images don't tell you anything about living conditions, secret facilities, or politics.
It's easy to estimate population numbers, and how big the military is, how many planes and tanks they have, and those numbers are public knowledge. Who controls the power and makes the important policy decisions? We don't have a clue. | edc28982-bc63-4096-842d-3147e513ac5d |
60ik4o | How do professionals know if a wound happened before death or post-mortem? | Wounds are classified as post-mortum, peri-mortum, and pre-mortum.
Pre-mortum wounds will have clear signs of healing, an indication that the victim was alive and well before being killed.
Peri-mortum wounds occur during the death, and may have minor signs of healing but are mostly unhealed. They will have more blood coming from them as the blood pressure pushes blood from the wound.
Post-mortum injuries happen after the body is dead. Blood pressure is low, so there is less spatter and loss from the wounds, and there is no healing whatsoever on the wound.
There are other signs that coroners look for, of course. In all, it is educated guesswork by the coroner to help patch together a timeline of death. They record every recent wound, up to and including the shaving nick on your face, when investigating the gaping wound in your chest. | 124d82c5-dcc3-4a2b-92c1-79736f7e5ebb |
14re3z | why water tastes so cold after chewing gum or brushing your teeth. | [Sugar alcohols](_URL_0_). According to Wikipedia:
> The cooling sensation is due to the dissolution of the sugar alcohol being an endothermic (heat-absorbing) reaction, one with a strong heat of solution.
ELI5: What this basically means is that when certain chemicals in your gum dissolve into the spit in your mouth, it absorbs heat. When heat is taken away, things feel cold.
Menthol is another sugar alcohol that has a cooling effect, but its effects are just illusions. I have some Extra Polar Ice gum and some Dentyne Ice gum in front of me, and neither contain Menthol. They both use Sorbitol, Mannitol, and Glycerol. | ad150e59-82c4-4f4d-bda1-6d2d45174300 |
8go3fs | What is happening to our teeth so we have to brush them when we wake up? | Our mouth isn't sterile, and overnight you aren't doing enough to stop bacteria from growing back.
We brush in the morning to clean it off again, even if you already brushed it clean the night before | 5bb3c924-d753-49d9-96ee-bfd9883fd4f8 |
2blnyi | Tuna. How can one tuna fish be worth over a £million? What stops you from simply catching a tuna and becoming very rich? | It's worth what it is because someone is willing to pay that much. They really want it.
Nothing stops you except the difficulty of catching such a valuable fish. (If it were easy to catch them nobody would pay that much for them.) | 37045507-56c3-41c3-9f22-baeb7e0d86d5 |
32akjs | The difference between ale and lager yeast | The top and bottom fermenting is somewhat of a misnomer - they both ferment throughout the body of the beer. Ale yeast tends to form "crops" on top, though.
Ale and lager yeast are different species and prefer different temperature ranges for fermentation. Ale yeast usually ferments at a cool room temperature, while lager yeast ferments in the 50s, 40s, and down to just above freezing. Ale yeast tends to produce more esters and phenols, which give the beer flavor and aroma; lager yeast tends not to, letting the malt and hops shine on their own. Of course, "tends to" is about as close as you can get to solid rules, because there are dozens of strains of both species, each with their own characteristics. | 5cdd5681-8705-4634-8296-eea8caabc5d1 |
jbwkv | How is Horsepower and Torque actually beneficial or descriptive of a car's merit? | We'll start with torque. Torque, as the link provided above states, is a measure of twisting force, or force at a distance. Just look at it's units:foot*pound (or newton*meter). Try this: say your arm is 2 feet long from your shoulder to your hand. Grab a 10pound object and hold it straight out in front of you. Your shoulder is being torqued by 10 pounds at 2 feet: 10x2 = 20, 20 ft_lb of torque: a force (10 lb) at a distance (2 feet). So that's torque: the measurement of the force applied to twist something. And our cars run via shafts that must be turned, so we make engines that produce *torque*.
However, that torque can vary over the RevolutionsPerMinute (RPM) range - but to keep it simple we'll say it's a virtual constant in the 'range of operation' of our engines RPM.
The *horsepower* of a car is merely a way of expressing how powerful a car is. Power is just a measurement of work over time.
Without getting into the math (it's covered in the link) a horsepower rating is a function of the *torque* multiplied by the RPM and divided by a constant: (*T* x RPM) / 5250.
So if we have a high torque engine we can produce "good" (i.e. useable) horsepower at lower RPM (a typical american V8 engine) and we don't need to have a high reving engine.
But a big V8 isn't practical for a small car or a motorcycle, so for that we can get by with a smaller torque engine that revs a lot higher and we still get the same "good" horsepower.
Let's throw some numbers into this. I want a V8 with 200 horsepower. I have an engine that produces 250ft_lb of torque. So it will have to rev to *X* ? (250 x *X*)/ 5250 = 200. *X* = 4200 RPM.
Now my motorcycle is a GP bike so I need 200 HP from it too, but I can only get an engine that has 40ft_lb of torque... (40 x *X*)/5250 = 200. *X* = 26,250 RPM. So I have to rev the piss outta it to get to 200 HP.
And as an answer to "when the RPM decreases torque increases..?" for all intents and purposes here, no. Throw some numbers into the equations and you'll get a feel for it (in your head, at least).
edit: fixed some numbers & words | 6763b5d9-29db-4c18-aa2e-a77a8dd18e46 |
3p66j1 | If individual federal campaign donations are capped at $2,700, how do billionaires donate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to individual candidates? | correct, it does not count if it goes to a super-pac. but super-pac money cannot pay for things like campaign staff salaries. they need both. | 9a1f6193-79bc-498a-a9b5-e2f270b68cb1 |
3vgb9h | Why do so many famous or successful people seem to be from South Africa? | Care to name a few? I don't see that trend | 43316431-1207-410a-a2ee-68fae778ee11 |
5v3usb | Free wifi | The bandwidth gets doled out across the hundreds of people connected to it. Some places do better than others, but building a wifi network that will handle 1000+ connections with any decent speed is expensive. | 67a22554-3f54-43a4-9090-e1138e789227 |
je1t6 | absolute zero temperature. | Temperature is molecules moving around like balls on a billiard table. The higher the temperature, the more moving around.
Absolute zero is when they stop moving entirely. | cc99372e-5b5c-4878-a885-8683d7db2e9e |
1txwpi | Why do animals never seem to roll an ankle or pull a hammy? | Most animals walk on all fours, which is a very balanced way of walking. If something goes under one of their feet, they have 3 others on the ground that they can stand and balance on. Humans, on the other hand, have just about the most reckless method of transportation since we only walk on two legs. "Walking" for humans is more like standing on one foot, then falling forwards and catching yourself on your other foot. It's controlled falling. We have much less balance, and our weight is distributed over less points, meaning more potential for a fall and more weight being applied to joints when you catch yourself, resulting in more injuries. | 1d082bec-afbe-4142-9ec6-78b7caae3af4 |
2q9jt2 | Why do countries with small armies send their troops overseas to support countries with armies hundreds of times their size? | Small army doesn't mean bad army. And when you add numbers from more countries it's pretty substantial number of soldiers. | ba6afc23-1518-4966-a9cf-ba9cfe5f28ea |
1w68ar | the difference in sorting comments between "best" and "top" | 'Top' is purely 'highest voted', after the up/down delta. 'Best' takes into consideration much more, like how quickly a comment amasses upvotes, down/up ratio (not just the delta) and some other stuff. | e6f89d50-05d5-4b85-ba7f-13bf334df52a |
4sfywh | How does cell know which genes to read (transcribe) at this moment and which genes should be sleeping. | Nothing controls *all* of it at once. This is a massive interlocking system of various elements.
There are some genes that are expressed all the time in any given cell. Those are typically those that are needed all the time, e.g. those that control the process of protein synthesis in general.
The rest... some are turned off by chemical modification of the DNA structure, either the DNA itself or the proteins it associates with, making the gene in that spot unavailable to the transcription mechanism. Some other gene might have a protein bound to it that blocks the transcription that is detached by interaction with something else, or conversely a protein that assists the transcription of that particular region may bind to the gene. Then there's a special kind of RNA that can bind to the genes already transcribed and stop the transcribed gene from doing anything.
They can be controlled by the many, many signalling pathways that respond to all kinds of things, from molecules to temperature, shear stress or what-have-you, which typically end in some molecule(s) entering the nucleus and regulating the expression of the genes by one of the mechanisms above. | 6622b323-eab7-484a-9587-19bbed37a3b1 |
1sirvh | Did communism during USSR ever do any good, if not, why didn't it end sooner? | It's not really true, early on in the USSR's history communism did a great deal. Most notably, it bridged the gap between the urban middle class and the rural population, who had only recently been emancipated from serfdom. It allowed Russia to rapidly industrialize and turned it into a superpower. Although the communist leadership was oppressive, it wasn't anywhere near as self-interested and inefficient as the Tsardom. | d250ad05-3502-4b50-9333-7a545da5a75d |
5g16o4 | Why is it that sometimes when you look at an analog clock, it seems to freeze briefly before continuing? | When you move your eyes you should see a blur as they turn in their sockets. However, you don't. Why? Because your brain focuses on the image your eyes settle on, and retroactively fills in the blurred space with that new image. Normally, that's fine, the effects aren't really noticeable. However, on something with very regular, predictable movement this creates a brief "pause" effect because your brain fills in the gap with the still image of the object. So, it appears like the object, in this case the clock, "pauses" for an instant before continuing. | 3d8db75a-f740-4fb7-b4f9-8e31aea031bd |
1qstq2 | How is the southwestern part of the U.S. still hospitable after all the atomic devices tested there? | There are a few factors:
1. Most of the tests you saw in that video (almost everything post-1962) were underground test. That means there was very little contamination except the ground immediately around the test.
2. Almost all of the atmospheric tests there were of relatively low yields that would not spread contamination very far. Nevada is a big state and most of it is uninhabited and owned by the federal government, so it doesn't matter that people probably shouldn't live there.
3. Some of the atmospheric tests were airbursts, which reduces local fallout. (When the nuclear fireball does not touch the ground, it does not create much radioactive contamination in the nearby area.)
4. They did try to time the shots so the weather was optimal for not spreading contamination into inhabited areas.
But there was still some significant downwind contamination into areas in Nevada and Utah in particular, and the communities exposed (the "downwinders") have had significant health issues related to this. These were generally low individual doses (but not always), but radiation risk is cumulative, so it all kind of adds up, especially for kids. One of the worst places affected was St. George, Utah, which is right on the Utah/Nevada border.
The US government passed a law in 1990 to provide compensation for people affected downwind of the Nevada Test Site (the [Radiation Exposure Compensation Act](_URL_0_)), in the states of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. As of this writing they have awarded some 17,300 claims totaling some $866 million dollars. | de8e94d5-0427-42de-8298-cdbdf07d614a |
rlmb4 | What causes that distortion in the air near hot surfaces? | There are two things working together to make that happen.
First, when air gets hot, it means the molecules are bouncing around faster. Because they're bouncing faster, they push each other away, and the gas expands and gets thinner (that is, there are fewer molecules in the same amount of space; we call this "density").
Second, when light goes from a thinner gas to a thicker one (or vice versa), it changes direction based on the angle of the border between the two gases and the difference in density. So when light goes from a pocket of hot air to "normal" air, it can bend a little bit. And that's why things look distorted when you see them through hot air.
It's basically similar to the reason stuff looks distorted through a glass of water, but of course in that case the water is denser than the air (also the fact that it's water and not just really dense air makes a difference, but that's another story). | b0d94ffa-9996-46a8-9cdf-7da8f6beb30b |
17rpxf | The difference between beer, ale, lager, stout, draught etc.... | In the most basic sense, there are two main types of beers: ales and lagers.
Ales are top fermented whiles lagers are bottom fermented. A stout is a type of ale made with roasted malts. A draught beer is just beer from a keg.
If you're looking for more information look at [this thread](_URL_0_). | c25ff22c-3e9d-4038-942b-e3fac6ba5083 |
3160t5 | Google drops Chinese Security Certificates | Ok, this won't be retard friendly, but I'll try:
Certificate work with a so called assymmetric cryptography, this means, you have two "passwords":
* **public key:** can be used to _encrypt_ stuff and - as the name implies - can be public without any problems
* **private key:** can be used to _decrypt_ encrypted data, must never, ever, ever become public
I won't go two far into cryptology behind that, Wikipedia can help you there.
**However**, a certificate in this context means just a document which is used to identify a computer(-network), this is done with above mentioned keys. With such a certificate Google (or any other site) can proof that they are them - and not someone else. And to make sure those certificates mean something you build a chain of trust. There are so called "root CAs" which act as a trustworthy third party and their root certificates are installed in your browser/computer, so Chrome knows, those certs can be trusted.
Now if someone - like, Amazon - wants to introduce encrypted stuff, they have their certificates signed by a root CA. If Chrome encounters this cert it can (locally, and safe) check wether the CAs signage is real or not.
In theory this can go on over hundreds of steps until you reach a trustworthy cert.
If the chinese CA got hacked or consists of corrupt idiots, anybody could claim to be your bank, redirect (phishing) your traffic to them and you would have no way to detect, that this isn't really your bank - that's really, really bad. By removing these certs, you can't verify the fake banks cert and your browser won't trust that site.
**More retard friendly**
You meet Steve for the first time and have no idea if he's good or bad, but you both know Li. Then you can ask Li if Steve is a) really the person he claims to be and b) trustworthy. As long as Li is trustworthy too, the system works. But if Li is an asshole and says everybody's great, you may make friends with a serial killer without knowing.
PS: I'm not a native speaker and it's quite possible that this isn't as ELI5 as I intended, sorry for that. | 5976ad38-5566-4980-a101-3878c5d5c8b5 |
6e5jnx | What's the physical advantage of sweating more (excessively) during exercise? | The physical advantage of sweating more is that it provides more capacity to cool the body down through the evaporation of sweat. The transition from liquid to vapor reqruires energy, which is pulled from the body in the form of heat. When core body temperature increases less rapid than normal, it enables you to run for a longer period of time and faster before your performance drops because the body tempeature is way too high.
Someone who is not used to exercise will take a long time before he sweats, but he'll sweat earlier and more when he continues to train. That is the main trend, but there's still a lot of differences between people in sweating patterns. Some people have a very low sweat threshold, or the rate of sweat increase is super high etc. These differences don't mean that they're all beneficial because there are limits to everything but in general, more sweat=more cooling.
Sometimes sweat just drips off the body. That isn't because the body spends too much liquid for sweating and getting much cooling in return. In an ideal setting, the body maxes out the sweat capacity and all the sweat you produce will be evaporated. So the problem isn't on the body side of things, it just want to cool down. Sweat evaporation happens all the time, but there are 2 things that affect the rate of sweat evaporation: convection (air movement around the body) and humidity. It's not a suprise when I say that sweat (or any type of liquid) evaporation happens more easily when there's a nice wind blowing around you, look at how a blow dryer works. Second, humidity plays a yuuge part. When humidity is low, the water pressure in the air is low and evaporation is fairly easy. When humidity is high, the air is more saturated with water. This makes it harder for sweat to evaporate and the sweat just rolls off your body. Try to go for a run on a day with dry heat and on day with high humidity. You'll feel a big big difference. | 559736c0-a359-4fd7-ba39-34a830f38fb8 |
7ezqwi | Why do certain foods taste bad when they are actually beneficial for us? | What is 'good' or 'bad' for us is often not determined by what it is but rather by how much.
From an evolutionary perspective, we crave sugar and fats because this was the most difficult (and thus rare) thing to have, and at the same time, its the thing that contains most energy. Our bodies still 'believe' that this is the case, so we still crave sugar and fats despite its abundance.
The science of what we should and shouldn't eat is a difficult one, and it doesn't help that every scientific finding or study is then bloated by mass media in articles like "If you eat xy, you will live longer" just because some rat experiment showed a marginal effect of a highly concentrated and chemically modified substance that also happens to be in xy. So you will probably find studies suggesting that eating oils in general is bad, and others stating that eating olive oil is better than eating palm fat, whilst others state that not oils but carbohydrates are the problem.
Then there is taste, and that is often very individual. I for example like olive oil and could eat bread dipped into nothing but olive oil every day. | eb3abcc5-3f8d-4739-8922-db85e547a835 |
1ks1yt | When dating, why is age difference a big deal for teens/kids, but not for adults? | Children and young adults are on a [diminishing returns](_URL_0_) scale of maturity.
That means that there's a lot more difference in maturity between a 14 and 16 year old than there is between a 32 and 33 year old. Ideally, by the time you're in your mid-20's your both mature and smart enough to recognize when someone older than you is taking advantage of you. Something that teens and younger-adults cannot necessarily do.
This isn't universal, of course, but... lets just say exceptions are exceptionally rare (at least for teens, there are plenty of immature adults). | 3e1ff6e9-7dec-4afd-a359-cea3cbd40600 |
51yvci | how can so many different kinds of cheese be made starting from the same few ingredients and similar techniques? | In many cases, the same few ingredients can be changed in quantity or be substituted for other similar ingredients.
Furthermore, preparation methods, aging methods, and storage and packaging methods can drastically change the character, flavor and texture of the cheese, leading to different varieties.
Other factors like fat content, moisture content, the cultures used (microorganisms), and any flavorings added will further change the end product.
In the case of cottage cheese, it's one of the earliest stages of curdling, and very little if any moisture is pressed out of it, leading to a very loose, lumpy product.
Blue cheese is allowed to age for a long time after it curdles, it is tightly pressed to extract as much moisture as possible, and it is left to culture a type of mold which changes the taste and texture to those associated with Blue Cheese.
Similar ingredients, but significant differences in the way everything comes together to make a different product. :) | 9367de1e-89a4-4520-a466-f6b4b0f8251f |
4u9z0k | Euclidean vs non-Euclidean geometry with examples | Euclidean geometry is the normal geometry you probably learned in school. It's all based on squares and takes place within a plane.
Non-Euclidean geometry is literally anything else. One of the simpler non-Euclidean geometries is spherical geometry. Spherical geometry takes place on the surface of a sphere (duh). In spherical geometry, you don't have lines. Instead, you have "great circles", which are circles with the same radius as the sphere itself. Now, you no longer have parallel "lines", because any two great circles must intersect.
You can use great circles to make triangles on the surface of the sphere. But these triangles have different properties than Euclidean triangles. The three angles on a Euclidean triangle always add up to 180 degrees. IIRC, the angles of a triangle on a sphere always add up to more than 180 degrees. In fact, you can have a triangle with three right angles. You just put a right angle at the north pole, then put the other line along the equator. | d29948ee-83a4-4c5b-9d78-e1eb83874f5f |
3xk381 | Why does an electric kettle make a lot of sound at first, which eventually dies off once the water starts to boil? | Cavitation.
Basically, the heating element heats the water just above it. This causes that water to boil, forming a little bubble of gas. This bubble immediately rises, encounters colder water, shrinks and collapses.
The repeated forming and collapsing of the bubbles creates the noise. Once the liquid starts boiling (and the bubbles therefore stop collapsing continuously) the noise disappears. | aff2e42f-5956-433a-89c0-1b38620d59a3 |
86u5pp | If we can feel the sun so hot down here on Earth, why is it so cold in space? | Space isn't cold, space just has nothing to stop radiant heat so temperature can change quickly. If there's no heat source, say you're in a show, you'll cool down very quickly in space. If you're not in a shadow though, the sun will make things get stupidly hot. The illuminated side of the moon is 121 degrees Celsius while the dark side is -156. | b50f0b57-ae1d-44c0-b129-7df13fea9d4e |
1bkwy7 | Why, after looking into a bright light, are there those blochy things in your vision? | The photoreceptors (the rods and cones of the eye) contain light sensitive molecules called photopigments. When a light particle hits one of the photopigment molecules, it breaks the molecule apart, and this causes a change in the electrical potential of the photoreceptor cell (which is how you see things). If you are exposed to a very bright light, all of the photopigments in one particular area of the eye have been broken apart, so, until the photopigment molecules are brought back together, you will briefly see a spot in the area where the light was. The spot goes away once enough photopigment molecules have reconstituted themselves. | e41e1999-de2d-460c-9ae2-067773f5b0a0 |
3eq9zm | Why when you look sideways at a moniter it looks like a picture negative? | Nope, it's just LCD monitors. LCD stands for "liquid crystal display", because there is a layer of an electrically reactive liquid, enclosed in tiny little cells, over the top of the screen. When the liquid is activated, it turns dark, blocking out a pixel of color. As you move to the side, instead of looking straight through the cells, you're looking at them from an angle. As you move further to the side, you start looking through the barrier between the cells as well. When light from the screen hits those walls, it *refracts* - it gets bent at an angle, and the colors no longer line up exactly. The further you go to the side, the more this diffracts the colors away from your eyes, so you don't see them.
LCD manufacturers have worked very hard to fix this issue, and it's hardly noticeable on modern LCDs unless you get way off to the side. | fc2f46a6-46e9-478c-b345-a3103fe0a328 |
3h1l35 | What happens to the roof of your mouth when you eat hot food? | The tissue lining the roof of your mouth is not skin, it's more sensitive tissue.
What might be equivalent to putting a hot iron on your arm, could be compared with hot melted cheese on the soft tissue in your mouth.
It isn't as tough as skin...thus, causing it to blister like skin would. | d98ef164-5aa0-4c17-b9c8-4cd19cdf066b |
zrvxw | Steroid use | [Here](_URL_0_) is a great documentary on the subject/ | e2043702-28e7-45f1-b80a-73891508a252 |
2xvm3j | Why are females generally shorter than males? | Evolution. Male humans had to fight other male humans to survive so they grew stronger and taller and bigger through natural selection. Females did the nurturing and child rearing and did not need height since they weren't out hunting food and killing rivals. | e04c59fc-058c-43ff-a66d-1e5d8fc728ab |
5kpxli | What would happen (legally or otherwise) if you just up and left your wife/family with no notice? | This really depends on state law...however, the only really thing the left behind wife can do is file for divorce or legal separation and request support. Then a judge has to grant such support either as a temporary basis until the divorce is final or on a schedule with finalization of paperwork.
However, if there are no children, support will be for a short period of time, and only if there is a big difference in the ABILITY to earn income.
A short term marriage is no longer the life time meal ticket it once was...and if both parties has similar incomes in the past, support will be minimal.
If the leaving spouse cannot be found, then very little can be done, unless the leaving spouse is declared dead, and that needs evidence.
In short, on a short term basis, very little, on a long term basis, divorce or legal separation with possible support payments. | cf989a20-083c-4b8a-892a-a8fd9cb519f4 |
44xiul | From all the US backed dictatorial coups, why was Pinochet's coup the one that gained notoriety around the world? | I'm no expert in the politics or history of the region. But I would surmise that the reason for the notoriety of Pinochet's regime was the egregious human rights violations. As an example, reportedly there were camps solely dedicated to sexually abusing prisoners. From Wikipedia: "One woman testified that she had been “raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats.” She was forced to have sex with her father and brother—who were also detained."
If you want to know more, I would recommend checking out the Wikipedia article: _URL_0_ | f26afe71-694a-4f30-9f5d-5f90feb3db47 |
njrvc | How is the global economy *not* a zero sum game? | If global trade were a zero sum game, the only way any country could gain wealth would be to take it from another country. That's what a zero sum game is - no-one can win without someone else proportionally losing.
Relevant principles here are 'division of labour' and 'comparative advantage'.
Suppose a simple economy with just you and me. We don't trade, we make everything for ourselves. Let's say there are only two things that matter, fish and firewood. We both catch our own fish and gather our own firewood. That's fine, each day we divide our time between the two jobs and we each produce enough fish and wood for one person for one day. But suppose we have an idea: I could spend all my time fishing and you could spend all your time gathering wood. I'd end up with more fish than I wanted and you'd have more wood than you wanted, so I can trade you some of my fish for some of your wood. How is this an improvement? Well, we're both doing the same amount of work, but the thing is if I only catch fish and don't have to worry about firewood, I can be more efficient. I don't have to go back and forth between the woods and the sea, and I can get better at fishing because I have more experience. If before I produced one days worth of fish and one day's worth of wood, now I can produce 3 days worth of fish, and you can produce three days worth of wood. Now between us we have six wealth-units instead of the four we had before. And it spirals. I can keep one fish and trade two with you for wood. Now I have extra wood which I can use to build a boat to make me even better at fishing, and you can take the extra fish and use it as provisions to go on trips further inland where the wood is better. Maybe when you go inland and I go out to sea we can each gather 4 units. Now we have 8 wealth units a day, up from our original 4. The world is twice as wealthy because we traded, it's not a zero-sum game at all.
Edit: And if we're going to tell this story to the end, I keep getting better and better at fishing, and you keep getting better and better at wood gathering, and we keep trading, and investing the surplus into new equipment and more efficient production methods, and the economy keeps growing at an ever increasing rate, and then we realise that you've cut down all the trees and I've caught all of the fish, and then we both starve/freeze to death. But in the medium term it's a great system. | eb2cbb14-b4cd-4e73-a5b3-b4c341f35eef |
3ulcql | Why do we only say "an" before the number 8 but for any other number, we say "a". For example, "an 18-year-old", "a 17-year-old", "a 91-year-old" | Because eight/eighteen/eighty-eight begin with a vowel-sound, and therefore get an 'an'. While seventeen, ninety-one or five do not and therefore get an 'a'. | d13e36f6-a649-46e8-9481-3887f3b3e534 |
21naaj | If people are not satisfied with the U.S. government, why don't they vote for a third party? | It's gamesmanship, essentially.
Let's use an example; say there are 101 people, almost evenly split between voting for two parties. 50 voters apiece, with one guy making the difference between the two parties (the swing vote). Let's say this guy votes randomly.
If you, as a Democrat, vote Democrat, then both parties will be evenly matched, and the swing vote will randomly decide a winner (in real elections, this is decided by how well each candidate campaigns). **However**, if you vote third party, then your original party (Democrats) is very likely to lose to the Republicans (as it will be 1-49-50, with the swing vote choosing randomly between the three). If two people vote for the third party from the Democrats, then it's 2-48-50; no matter how the swing vote goes, the Republicans win.
As such, each vote for a third party increase the chances that your original opponent will win. In general, people who vote third-party support more of the original party's ideas than their opponent; someone changing from Democrat to Green will support more Democrat ideas than Republican, but Green better represents the voter.
Therefore, voting for the Democrats is the lesser of two evils; while all of my views (Green) will not be represented, at least some of my views (Democrat) will be represented, as opposed to very few of my views (Republican) | fd43aaa0-ca4d-4784-877c-f951cacd8774 |
5hfapq | What is the purpose of the sewn on loop on a seat belt? | It has a few purposes:
* It stops the buckle seat-belt from rattling against the side pillar. _If you take a closer look, you'll find that the driver's-side seat-belt does not have one, because they should always be buckled in._
* It stops the [buckle](_URL_0_) from sliding all the way down. | 1e0412f0-94d7-45ac-89b9-d01d70a53c5c |
71eqjb | What does a software engineer acutally do | I work with some. From what I understand, they write computer code for an engineering project. Often they are part of a team, in which parts of the project are broken up into sections for each person to work on.
For example, say you work for a company that makes a video entertainment system like Roku or Apple TV. As a software engineer you might help with making the computer code that runs the GUI (graphical user interface) - all the menus and buttons etc. Or you might work on computer code that handles core functions like streaming video and audio, that kind of thing.
So all that to say an software engineer helps to create software to meet some goals or requirements. If you are interested in it, check out coding as there can be decent money in it! | 216608ef-aee0-46ae-a32d-e7c2f25a0bbc |
8sq74i | What’s up cold sores? Why do they blister without a burn? Why do they then morph into a scab that takes weeks to heal opposed to any other scab that might heal in days? | Cold sores are the herpes virus ‘erupting’ from nerve endings. Unlike a cut that forms a scab, a cold sore blister is quite deep as it comes from deep in the layer of the skin. This is why it takes a while to heal. | b099cac6-a912-4eb1-ba7f-64ab47b1a7cf |
2t0p7w | Why do we wake up with morning face? | When you're up and about and walking around, your heart has to work against gravity to pump blood up into your face. But when you have been laying horizontal in a bed for 8 or so hours it gives blood the opportunity to "pool" or "settle" in your face, resulting in puffiness. You'll get a more extreme example of this if you hang upside down for an extended period of time. | 1fc6c764-79c8-4233-93f2-770f53e1337a |
2h789h | Why do we breathe differently when we sleep? It goes from a mostly silent process to an audible and pronounced inhalation. | Your throat and palate relax when you're asleep, and can restrict airflow. In more severe cases, it causes snoring and apnea. | 060c45a1-41b8-4906-b66f-23e1a1ac14f6 |
1n8rtl | Why on maps and globes do they show Antarctica with ice caps but not the arctic? | Basically, under ice cap of Antarctica there is land, and thus it is counted as a continent. Arctic consists of pure ice, without any land. | bdadca12-786a-4861-a99f-4ee80aef4091 |
3s878p | If undocumented immigrants in the US aren't citizens but they still pay federal/state/local taxes, what keeps them from being deported? | There are millions of illegals in this country and deporting them all would take a huge amount of time and resources. Plus, they would just be replaced by more illegals coming in. Governments are not infinitely powerful, and sometimes have to pick their battles.
> Why can't a UI just "apply" for citizenship?
Because at the present time, there is no legal way for them to do so. | 6deb1fa2-5f4b-4c8f-8565-50964aa65ebf |
488a2c | I spend a lot of time looking at computer and phone screens. What exactly is it doing to my eyes? | Looking at a computer or phone requires concentration and attention. Your eyes need to focus on small print and details. This can fatigue the muscles in the eyes which makes them ache if you spend extended periods of time doing so. Also, you blink less often when focused which can cause dry eyes as well.
And that's it. Poor vision is normally caused by deformation of the eye that is genetic in origin. As you age your vision almost universally gets worse over time as well.
So tired, achey, dry eyes? That can be from the computer. Poor vision? Nope. | 1bf86de2-8d38-4e67-977e-b23d31a35553 |
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