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3sp0uh | How, on a technical level, did Carnegie Mellon (reportedly) help the FBI unmask Tor users? | Here's my lame attempt to take something uber complex to ELI5 level:
You know those card trick games where the guy mixes up the cards really fast and you're trying to guess which one it is? That's kind of like Tor. Tor gets a bunch of people to volunteer to be relays. When a request comes in, they pass it randomly amongst themselves three times and then it continues on to it's destination. But since it's volunteer, the FBI/NSA can easily set up a bunch of relays and play along. But really they're recording everything, and trying to de-anonymize users. If they get enough relays, it's possible that one unlucky user gets all three relays that are malicious. Then the attackers can use meta data from the requests such as timestamps, and recorded hops to de-anonymize you. Malicious relays can also "mark" your request (called tagging) so that if both the entry and exit relay are malicious, it'll see the tag and know who you are. There are also ways to fight this, and Tor is constantly updating it's software to fight back against these attacks. It also discovers malicious relays all the time and blocks them from Tor.
This is basically a giant cat and mouse game between Tor and the FBI that makes headlines every now and again. This is one of many reasons I advise people to stay off the Dark Web unless you have a really good reason like you're a journalist or in a country where you free speech is severely restricted. There's just far too many ways you can get yourself in trouble and it's not really worth it.
Hope that helped! | bb5d767f-dfb1-4551-b941-405b28a7299b |
6q6nc4 | What determines the speed limit of a road? | For traffic engineers it's the 85th percentile. In other words there is an assumption that 85% of drivers will drive at safe speed for road conditions. Speed studies are done, and this determines the speed limit.
Unfortunately, the traffic engineers recommendations are often ignored by politicians, who set speed limits based on their own limited understanding of traffic control. | e5412295-e2d7-4fbf-acd2-c79cab86fb77 |
6100dk | how foodstuffs can sit on shelf a long time and then must be refrigerated after opening... is it just exposure to air that flips the switch? | Right on, and exposure to bacteria. Moisture without oxygen in a sterile environment won't generate bacteria. Once opened you have all three, by refrigerating you actually just slow the enzymatic breakdown and reduce the suitability for bacteria to grow on the food | d19cebde-6fa6-4738-95d0-faa44b9bf224 |
48dx7c | Why can't we tax everyone the same percent? | There is literally no government policy anywhere that *nobody* would complain about.
In this particular case, it makes little sense to tax people who are already on government assistance (even aside from whether it's right to do so). | 095f4554-edf3-4fa7-bedd-fbfb07491f5d |
5d6wcs | How a Jeep is able to climb an almost vertical incline with not much trouble? | a combination of low gearing, low center of gravity, and engine location.
the engine being in the front means that the weight helps hold the front end of the jeep down, making it far less likely to flip while climbing. the low center of gravity also helps prevent flipping in the same way.
the low gearing allows for very large amounts of torque, so while it wont be able to hit 100mph it can climb up damn near anything. | 8e4413ea-f715-4e4a-af0a-eaec31681c7c |
8v8wrq | Why is it that transplanted organs only have a short life span once transplanted? | Primary reason is the person's immune system attacking everything that is foreign in the body, including the cells of organs that don't have the exact genetic markers that the immune system recognizes.
So in a transplant situation, they have to match the blood type between the donor and the recipient, and it helps if the donor and recipient have even better matches (by being related - more similar DNA), but ultimately, for all transplants, the person has to take immunosuppressant anti-rejection drugs to disable their immune system somewhat, so it no longer attacks the new organs so fiercely.
So they can't completely disable the immune system because the person would then get sick and die from even a common cold. Which means they can't stop the attacks on the organ, they can just slow them down. | 89843a3c-51fe-4431-86b9-64fdaf08058e |
2zdblj | What happens to someone who does not eat vegetables at all | Are they being replaced with anything? You could go into a severe vitamin deficiency, which would have different effects based on what vitamins are deficient. Also you could go into a calorie deficit and lose weight. Lack of fiber is another possible issue which will lead to constipation. | b4fea16c-d3a9-4794-8456-806b11473557 |
2ntv99 | does drinking chocolate milk give the same benefits as drinking regular milk? | The normal positive aspects of milk (Vitamin D, calcium, protein) will all be in chocolate milk.
The downside is that chocolate milk usually has quite a bit of sugar added to it.
Edit: and as for milk with chocolate cereal, it depends entirely on the cereal. You'd just get bits of the cereal leaking into the milk, and I can't see that being any different from eating the cereal anyway. | 379f7b6a-ee9c-45e1-ab2a-f7fdd033dc61 |
6je5r7 | How is the maximum load of truss columns calculated? | The amount of load a column (whether part of a truss or not) can safely hold is principally based on the material,the geometry, and the nature of the load.
The material (wood, steel, concrete, aluminum, masonry, plastic, etc) has a certain strength properties. Each material has a certain allowable stress (force per unit area) before failure (I.e. yielding, or permanent deformation). Also each material has stiffness properties, meaning the amount a material deflects with an applied load (called Young's modulus). This is important to know how something physically reacts under load, but more specifically is mainly used to establish buckling limits for a material, which is a different type of potential failure.
The geometry is also important. For columns, the main variable is the cross sectional area of the component itself. Next is the length of the column. Next is the nature of the degree of restraint of the ends of the column (ends that are held rigidly are stronger to resist buckling than ends that are loosely held). Also of importance is the shape of the cross section of the column, the shape will dictate a property called the radius of gyration which will affect the amount of load a column can withstand before buckling.
Also, the nature of the load is important to define. Loads can be applied in 6 different ways, axially (which is what I think you're wondering about), but also laterally in two directions (shear), and flexurally in three directions (bi-axial bending and torsion). All of these loads are combined to consider if the column is appropriate.
Finally, most engineers use national design codes and standards given all the information above to establish the 'safe load'.
As an aside, triangles are an important shape in structures (triangles in 2-dimensions, and tetrahedrons in 3-dimensions). These shapes efficiently transfer load by minimizing bending loads in a structure which will significantly reduce the strength of a component. Hence the more triangle in your structure the better. You had a good intuition regarding the presence of triangles. | 284f4fe2-b645-4ace-83e2-39437af1c940 |
8h0uuh | At what heights do falls become dangerous? | There are a lot of variables in that question. People have fallen and died from a standing position. | ac66b0a1-ccc5-46be-ae9a-dc1536d5611c |
2iwn3f | Why are vaccines egg based? How are they made? | They grow the virus with host animal cells, and eggs are high in supply. | 34a71661-4a89-4e5f-a401-fc4ef0e75abd |
18kjh2 | What this Tesla Model S thing is about? | 1. A New York Times reviewer wrote up a description of a trip he took in a Tesla car. He described instances where the car didn't get as much mileage as Tesla claimed, and that at one point the car ran out of power and he had to have the car towed.
2. The head of Tesla called him a god damn liar (I'm paraphrasing here)
3. The reviewer published a blog post and stood by his claims
4. The head of Tesla published the log data from the reviewers trip. In it, they were able to demostrate clear discrepancies with what the reporter said (e.g. "I never drove the car over 65 MPH") and what actually happened (e.g. "he drove the car at 80MPH for at least 10 minutes). They produced data that appears to indicate that the reviewer may have intentionally tried to drain the battery, and may have removed the car from the charging station before the car was ready to travel the distance he intended.
5. The Reviewer has responded again, but so far he's blamed the Tesla PR group for giving him false information about what he could/couldn't do with the car.
6. Someone from CNN drove the same car on the same trip as the NYT Reviewer without any significant issues. | 4966e48e-7de0-48b7-b223-79556cd1c568 |
5z2m1h | How durable are pandas? | Like all bears, pandas have ridiculously large and thick bones which make them very durable in general. In addition, bears also have thick layers of fat which can absorb impact, as well as dense outer hairs which provide protection. These attributes combined with their huge muscle mass make pandas and other bears essentially walking tanks. | 13ad783b-e0a5-4372-a84f-730b70c3444e |
58qtji | How does crop rotation work? | Crops have different effects on the underlying soil. Vegetables tend to be taxing on the soil because they're grown really densely, they need a lot of nutrients, and they don't leave behind deep root systems to help replenish the soil by decaying.
Legumes (like alfalfa or clover) harbor nitrogen fixing bacteria in their root systems, so they actually leave the soil with more nitrogen compounds than before you planted them. This is basically like natural fertilizer.
Cereal crops (corn, wheat, etc) have deep root systems which are good because when you harvest them, they leave a lot of dead matter to decay.
So by rotating through these kinds of crops, you can get the harvest you want, while making sure your soil is well-replenished with nutrients. | 135a1565-23ba-4301-8642-f963c3ebfef5 |
7lu9rv | why did the SpaceX exhaust trail (or what ever that was) stay illuminated for so long? | It was because of the time of day. While it was night down on the ground, the sun was still shining 100km up in the sky.
It was so bright and so big because the exhaust contained a lot of water vapor. When you burn any fuel containing hydrogen, it combines with oxygen to create water. In space, that water-containing exhaust expands rapidly, and, like a spray of deodorant, becomes cold - cold enough for the water to condense down into many small ice crystals - basically, a thin, light very high-level cloud. The sunlight shining through this cloud is scattered, and some of the light makes it to your eyes.
That water doesn't hang around, though. It only stays liquid as long as there is other gas around. The exhaust gas keeps spreading out, and the water evaporates because of the very low pressure, before either falling back into the upper atmosphere, or escaping to space.
Edit: I posted this answer yesterday, but the person who asked it immediately deleted their post. Please don't do that - other people will want to find your question and its answer when they search. | 5188657e-8a0a-4f91-b306-94c15f6a1687 |
55p413 | Why aren't there automatic transmission motorcycles? | There are, they just aren't popular. Also, scooters are a thing. Automatics cars are more popular than manual (in the US), because we are lazy and don't like to swift and like to always have a free hand. For motorcycles, it's different, you almost always want two hands on and shifting is much more simple, not many people are texting while riding a Harley. | 3bf46003-b6df-4562-bb7e-548923407125 |
6jh7sh | How can someone see practically all you've done on a computer, even after you've deleted it, but recovering a phone doesn't always find everything? | If you delete something, it's only moved to the trashbin at first, where it's still 100% intact. If you delete it from there, you only tell your OS to clear the place. It basically makes the area on the drive available for being written over, but it's still there, as not every single switch is reset. Only once everything has been written over by something else, it is clearly gone.
Phones are Android, with is UNIX. Windows isn't. That maybe be an explanation for the difference in how it works exactly.
Also, on a PC you usually have 500 to 1000 GB of storage, but on a phone only 8 to 64 GB. First obviously has a lot more space, and doesn't need to write over old data anywhere as fast. | 3ecb7b95-efe6-4c14-98a5-9e16b642438c |
8a1oeb | Why is it far easier to run up multiple stairs than down multiple stairs? | Actually I think this has to do with the mechanism behind climbing and falling.
When climbing, you are working against gravity and have much more fine control over how much energy and power is needed to be supplied to your muscles to overcome gravity and attain the speed you desire to go up the stairs.
When going down stairs, you are now working WITH gravity to “fall down”. Since there is an outside force that is ADDITIVE to the power your legs are exerting to go down the stairs, your body has a much harder time regulating the small muscles and there less control. | 7d2a4a24-0e2a-48f6-8394-13c203634e95 |
2ft4zs | Is there a word, in any language -- that describes the deep, sinking feeling of knowing that life is short, and we're going to miss out on so much... | Existential dread. Plenty of philosophers in lots of languages have discussed that feeling. | 3755c640-dccd-4d5b-add2-eacbfbea4b2a |
2jbhkw | what's the difference between .com and .org and .gov and .net and etc etc | Different rules apply to each TLD (top-level domain). ICANN is the organisation that runs the show, they decide what TLDs should exist and what rules or sub-organisations should govern them.
.gov is a good example since as you guessed, it's restricted to use by the US Government. ICANN will not allow anyone else to register a domain ending in .gov.
There are quite a lot of "open" TLDs that pretty much anyone can register a domain to, like .com, .org, .net and so forth. The reasons we have different ones are (a) they're meant to specify different types of website (i.e. .org is a non-profit, .net is a network), and (b) to increase the number of names available. As well as these generic categories, we also have regional TLDs (.uk, .ca, etc.) which are also allowed to have sub-TLDs (._URL_2_, ._URL_1_, ._URL_0_, for example).
So each TLD gets its own little universe, likely managed by a separate organisation who can set their own rules. As such, some TLDs cost more than others, some are deliberately cheap to attract small business or individuals, and some are expensive owing to their uniqueness (such as .ly, the TLD for Libya, which gets used for all sorts of other stuff). | 50546336-dcc6-4aef-a72b-8475ceca192d |
4s2bbw | Why does your body occasionally jolt you awake when you start to doze off? | It's called a [hypnic jerk](_URL_0_) and can result from anxiety, stress, or nothing at all. | 37e4dd75-7af1-4855-8872-f6236561352a |
7mwr6r | Plasma, in the electrical sense. Why is it its own state/phase? | Plasma forms when you heat up a gas to really high temperatures. The electrons get ripped away from the atoms due to their high energy. This is called ionization. This makes plasma highly electrically conductive. Plasma is its own state of matter because its properties are so fundamentally different from a gas, in the same way that a liquid's properties are fundamentally different than a solid's. | 5046a859-77c8-427f-b3ba-448a679bbde3 |
58c24n | What causes our muscles to feel weak when we are nervous/ in a high tense situation? | When you are stressed, you're body reroutes blood away from your limbs to supply your brain and other areas. The lack of blood can give you that weak feeling. | cbdac703-44c0-42a9-b85e-4c503d9cf443 |
6pyh9w | Why is it that when ants or other bugs fall from the ceiling to the floor they don't die/can still walk, but me falling from a short height could break my legs? | Square cube law. They don't have nearly the volume per unit of surface area you do.
So assuming approximately equal mass per volume, the ultimate force generated by the same fall and stopping with the same negative acceleration will be much higher for you because of the increased mass. F=ma
Also chitin is quite a tough material | ec843c5e-2f9b-4c85-9b8a-006c164b682b |
8ih7gg | Why people lost all their money in bank failures back in history? Did they have no insurance or other securities? | Insuring bank deposits is actually a fairly recent thing - back when the Great Depression started, your money in the bank was only backed up by your trust that the bank wouldn't fail. Which is why there were runs on the banks when that trust ran out - if the bank went under, your money was gone.
In the US, the FDIC was created in 1933 (during the Depression, because they learned their lesson) in order to renew trust in the banks, and it's still in effect today, insuring your accounts up to a certain limit (I think it's now something like $250,000 per account). And that money is provided by insurance payments by the banks to the government, along with a backup line of credit to the US Treasury. Many other countries have similar measures in place to keep people trusting their banks. | 83088182-9356-450a-a3fb-7e260fbea8dc |
1r1ij5 | How do we get pictures of North Korea if North Koreans are forbidden from the internet? | Under the right circumstances people can get in and out of North Korea. Under even more right circumstances they'll be allowed to have cameras.
North Korea also has a government regulated media, including television. Broadcasts can be picked up from South Korea. | 03e31258-8142-4dae-886c-1ab2e171bff2 |
3n9va8 | Why are children more likely to fall off the bed while in deep sleep than adults? | When you sleep your brain turns off your motor-cortex (the thing that controls your limbs) so that you are basically paralyzed. This is also the reason you sometimes feel like you are falling when you are about to fall asleep and suddenly jolt yourself awake.
In children this function is still developing and sometimes it doesn't turn off all the way or at all. Thats why kids also sleepwalk much more often than adults. | 77e2691e-4cf7-4f05-b675-e66e5f93f8f6 |
5xj3l3 | Why is everyone against a one world government? | Because the needs and wants of society vary greatly depending on the region you live in, climate, available resources, opportunities, culture... there's very few laws and policies that you can blanket across the world and make work. | 69ad6fdc-73d6-4605-b9f4-c9407484ed78 |
1m956v | Why do Indians bob their heads forward and backward when they talk? [FIXED] | The culture is different in india. A left to right wobble means "I agree". If they sort of bobble their head in a circular motion it means they are listening. If slow its friendly if fast its more like "I really understand". | 7c6f4ddd-8dab-4031-8ba8-44d05b4d0679 |
4db2tf | If Mary was a virgin (and had thus never 'known' Joseph), why does Matthew 1:1-17 explain the lineage from Abraham to Joseph as the Genealogy of Jesus? | The lineage was to establish Jesus' royalty by identifying him as a son of David and heir to the Kingdom. It was not meant to establish strictly biological descendency. Notice that it does not say that "Jacob begat Jesus." It specifically says that Joseph was the husband of Mary, who gave birth to Jesus.
*Right after that*, in Matthew 1:18-25, they talk about how Jospeh was going to put Mary out, but an angel appeared and convinced him to take her as wife. In doing so Joseph became Jesus' father, legally, and therefore the heir to the Kingdom. | e30418d9-ee4e-45db-9aaf-a7ef21063bd4 |
7rsjsw | Why do some companies or sites pay for annoying pop up ads when they only make us angry and less likely to buy their products? | I can only assume these ad bring in a sizeable return.
Businesses don't play around especially if it would only serve to ruin their reputations - but if something makes them money then they clearly wouldn't be competitive if they didn't take advantage of it. | 00c11178-5af3-4c12-bf56-1f187844e7cb |
67t2q4 | Why do we feel the urge to keep throwing up even if there is nothing left? | It's because of the physiological mechanisms involved in throwing up.
When you first start, it's in response to the body trying to expel something. The muscles around your stomach contract and squeeze it to propel the contents out (there are other elements involved, but they're not relevant to the question).
After a while these muscles start spasming despite the fact that the stomach is empty, which is what leads to the continued retching afterwards. | 16987a1f-9149-40ce-bb7a-288d3d33b446 |
1jiwgx | How do buffets make money? | For everyone that eats 5 plates there are people who went to a buffet had a plate and then realized they were not as hungry as they thought. | 950f8899-78cc-4c29-a791-a0a67a0898bf |
2lo8qp | Why fizzy drinks like Cola are stored in aluminium cylinders, while milk in cardboard cuboids? | Probably because cardboard doesn't keep the carbonation from escaping soda as well as aluminium. | e36e4b7c-7db9-4acb-ac0a-75f7eba414fa |
70yt0f | How can a plant which has always been an indoor plant and never been outdoors suddenly have ahids or gnats? Where did the bugs come from? | Aphids are small enough to get through window screens and can be windblown onto screen from nearby plants, and most houseplants are kept near windows. They can also hitch a ride on you when you brush by aphid-infested plants then go inside.
Most gnats seen in houseplants actually come from the soil, their larva feed on tiny roots. Cheap soil often contains the eggs/larva of these fungus gnats. | e0ddbcd6-056b-42c4-93c6-7aae77a94997 |
3anaxt | - why, in the wild, does rigor mortis set in an animal carcass in just a few hours, but the meat from my butcher stays 'fresh' and limp for days? | Rigor mortis is not permanent.
Depending on several things it does goes away & the body relaxes after a few days (typically 72 hours or so). | c944c0c0-4569-4714-827c-43acbdf26d7e |
60dnb7 | Do any other forces besides supply/demand factor in a company's stock price? | Profit (technically) doesn't matter when it comes to stock. When you see a "price" for a stock, that's not the price sticker of the stock like an item on a shelf in the store, that's just the average price people are willing to pay for a share of it.
You can sell your stock for less, you can sell it for more, as long as someone is willing to buy it. Therefore, the only real (ELI5) factor in determining stock price is how much someone is willing to pay for a share of that stock. | 16549158-21a6-4e27-bab2-b17acc6ce183 |
24foat | Why does hot water (or heat generally) clean better than cold water (or cold generally)? | It's all about the chemistry. Heat is a measure of kinetic energy, so hotter chemicals are moving faster. In most chemical reactions adding heat will speed things up as the faster moving molecules will collide more often and therefore are more likely to react. Because of this, hotter chemicals have a higher reaction rate than colder chemicals. Furthermore, in order to have a reaction at all, two molecules need to hit each other hard enough. Since chemicals move slower the colder they are, they may not react with one another until they reach a certain temperature. | 38b30670-68cb-4491-afa5-6be4cd6bd142 |
1398c5 | Why did the FBI publicly release the information about Patraeus's affair? Isn't that part of his private life? | If he has something he wants to keep secret, that's an opportunity for blackmail. And blackmail is a big concern when you have access to top secret information. By making this information public, they remove a potential security risk, because you can't blackmail someone over something everyone already knows. Damage to his personal life is just a side effect. | 42c0cc43-ee2a-4f9f-8cd7-25970c2827a3 |
1004up | How is the quantum world random yet the world we know predictable? | The quantum world is random in specific, but predictable on average. An example of this is the tossing of coins; no single toss can be easily predicted, but if you toss a coin many, many times, you can bet that it will land on heads very close to 50% of the time.
When you put a few things that are predictable on average together, you get a more predictable output; if you throw one six-sided die, you can get any value from one to six. If you throw fifty, you'll get a sum pretty close to 175 (50 * (1+6)/2). If you throw five hundred, you'll get a sum much closer (by proportion) to 1750. If you throw 5,000,000, you'll get very, very close to 17,500,000 (by proportion; the absolute error may get a little larger, but it'll be a much smaller percentage of the total).
Things on the scale that we perceive are made up of trillions of trillions of atoms; a chunk of carbon with a mass of two grams is composed of approximately one hundred billion trillion carbon atoms (10^2 (one hundred) * 10^9 (billion) * 10^12 (trillion) = 1 * 10^23 ~= 2 grams of carbon). If you put that many things together which have an outcome predictable within a range (like position or momentum), you come up with one result that is overwhelmingly likely, which we perceive as only one result. | fdd478e3-b39d-49f3-8d9c-dba8b7cebc4e |
td0wq | How does gravity affect time? | More gravity makes time go slower. The reason stems from two observations.
**The speed of light is always constant, no matter who measures or where it is measured.**. One important result of this is that time and space will change with speed. Since speed is distance *divided by* time, the only way to keep the speed of light constant for everyone is if distance and time both change with speed. Time must slow down. It also turns out that all accelerated motion slows down tiime.
**You cannot tell the difference between being in a gravity field or being accelerated.**. This is called the *equivalence principle* and it means if you are in an elevator and you feel your feet pressing on the ground then you do not know if you are feeling gravity or if the elevator is just accelerating up, pushing you down. Since your time is slowed when you are accelerated and you cannot tell if you are being accelerated or in a gravity field, that means gravity also slows down time.
So, gravity slows down time in order to make sure that the speed of light is constant. | 9ee1e6ca-954d-40be-bdd9-bb4dc2cc55f5 |
3hdtgu | How are time statistics calculated? I.e: every 20 a kid dies and stuff like that. How accurate this kind of numbers are? What is the time interval used for sampling? | It's not literal
It's just an average based on totals over a total amount of given time
Like if you knew in 1 year 12 people died from auto erotic asphyxiation the you would say that 1 person dies from it every month. Wheras the reality might be that they all died the same day at an auto erotic asphyxiation anonymous singles mixer | e6a0a673-00b6-4e3d-b91a-d83e48f4d1a4 |
4vjwh1 | Why are some people naturally talented with maths? How does it happen? | I think this gets in to a nature vs nurture situation. It's likely he wasn't born with an ability, but had a recurring need for this ability through early childhood or something and it became thoroughly developed through time.
Or just lots and lots of practice | 5a27ba63-8fae-44fd-a96e-f6d0456f52b1 |
5vilme | What would the United States look like today if no humans have ever explored the land? | A hell of a lot of Buffaloes and Wooly Mammoth's would be roaming around. The Eastern US would have more forest than it does now. | 077d4d0c-a363-4480-bbc6-31ce6ce99503 |
8y5rd9 | Why do cuts burn when you put hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol on them? | The chemicals in rubbing alcohol when applied to an open wound activate the same nerve receptors in your skin that let you know that a flame is hot, giving you a burning or stinging sensation. 🔥 | 489daa6c-3f8d-4137-a965-db8c6b2f398e |
6dms2p | What objective reasons explain why some people can hold their liquor while others can't? | Practice makes perfect.
This does not just apply to tolerance, which indeed would be much higher in someone who drinks daily as opposed to yearly. For instance we all have a buddy who gets the hottest wings everywhere you go and they barely phase him but if you were to touch them to your tongue it would ruin your night. Same thing your body builds up tolerances.
Fun fact, most drug overdoses are people who have gone clean for a month or two then gone back to their old ways and not taken into account how much their tolerance levels have dropped and just jump right back into high doses. Not really fun maybe just fact.
Also a seasoned drinker will know when and how much to drink. An amateur drinker will think well I had 10 beers last friday and was fine, but last friday you had steak and potatoes for dinner and today you just grabbed a quick sandwich at a gas station.
Whereas a seasoned drinker takes into account how much food you got in your belly, how tired you are, what you have to do, and more importantly, what company your in. If everyone is having a glass or two of wine and you down a 5th of whiskey in an hour your gonna be the drunkest the person in the room and seem like an ass. Whereas if everyone is shooting double shots of tequila at the bar and you show up late and drink that same 5th of whiskey in an hour, you're gonna be the soberest person in the room and everyone else will seem drunk to you.
Also, drink water, any chance you get just drink water helps beat the hangover and helps keep your head straight. If you feel like the bros would chirp you too hard for ordering a water, 1, your bros suck, but more importantly 2, order a coke, no liquor, still looks like your drinking while giving you a little break.
Hope this helps haha sorry half cut right now,
Source: Seasoned Alcoholic among other things
Edit spacing was hard to see all clumped up haha | e2df1dae-9ec1-4b32-ac08-86767fc40491 |
3embo0 | After being bothered by mosquitoes, I began to wonder: Do mosquitoes have any purpose? Why do they bite certain people more than others? If mosquitoes were annihilated, would anything affect human society big time? | > Do mosquitoes have any purpose?
They have just as much purpose as any other living animal or organism on Earth. They live to reproduce.
> Why do they bite certain people more than others?
Google can answer that: "In addition to heat and carbon dioxide, mosquitoes are also attracted to naturally-occurring chemicals that are released as people breathe. Day said carbon dioxide and heat will draw the mosquitoes to a crowd, but these chemicals, called secondary attractants, can lure the insects to one unlucky person at a barbecue." [Source](_URL_0_)
> If mosquitoes were annihilated, would anything affect human society big time?
Google can answer that too: [this page, or example, is the first result when searching "Mosquitoes role in ecosystem"](_URL_1_). Cliffnotes is that lots of animals eat mosquitoes and mosquito larvae. Killing off mosquitoes can adversely affect animals that rely on them as a food source. Mosquitoes also carry disease, so eliminating them would help reduce the spread of disease too. | 64cb3a84-fd42-4b85-94ef-e0c497017184 |
o69la | I'm teaching myself to sing, and I'd like to know why my throat hurts after a short while of doing it. Also, how do I stop it doing this? | I'm pursuing a BA in classical vocal performance currently. Almost all vocal fatigue is due to muscle tension when you sing. Do you feel like you are straining to hit most of the notes? If so, the song may be in too high of a tessitura (avg range of the song) for your voice type. By your username I'm assuming you're male; a lot of pop and rock are written for singers who are naturally high tenors. You might be a baritone or a bass and would be much more comfortable in a lower part of your voice. I'm a bass and singing along with Journey is out of the question for me.
Anyway vocal fatigue is a result of muscle tension. The number two rule of singing is relaxation, which comes naturally with rule number one: always support with good breath. Take a deep breath, like you're about to sing. Did your shoulders move up? If so, stop that, you're getting a really shallow breath. When you breathe in, you should feel that breath go all the way down to your waist. Your breath is controlled by a muscle called the diaphragm, which is a flat muscle that sits below the lungs. When you breathe in, this guy pulls down to pull air into your lungs from outside. The feeling of pulling downwardness when you breathe in correctly is the diaphragm working. The way I like to think about it is to think 'down and expanding outward like a balloon' when taking a breath rather than 'shoulders up and gasp.'
Taking a proper breath helps eliminate muscle tension because it gives you more air power to work with. Being able to maintain a consistent stream of air while relaxing is most important. Exhaling should be controlled entirely with the abdominal muscles from your belly-button downwards; everything else should be relaxed, your throat, your chest, your shoulders, your mouth...
tl;dr - think about how you're breathing. | 355e4d97-5a8d-48ea-84c2-4218bc5342d8 |
ktuo8 | Metaphysics | Metaphysics it trying to understand the Universe by talking about it.
"Imagine you are doing a thought experiment"
If you are using ideas, forces, entities that can not be tested with an experiment with tangible evidence, you are doing metaphysics. | 095afc30-0987-425a-811a-df12c24e866e |
1cg4os | Why Comcast "Xfinity" ads are allowed to continue claiming they are the fastest ISP in the country when they are clearly lying? | They offer 305mbit/s fiber residential service in certain metro areas - they are the fastest residential isp In those and likely other areas as well
_URL_0_
edit: also they may be saying something like "fastest national ISP" because one-offs like Google Fiber are not a nation-wide ISP. And when they offer 305mbit/s vs FiOS' 300, they do have the edge in numbers too. | a02186a6-d368-45d9-a894-81294503dc6f |
2c2frl | Why is the post-WW2 50s decade considered the quintessential time period for defined gender roles when throughout the 40s women were in "men's" roles for the first time? | Because after the war there was a push for women to go back to traditional roles, this didn't fly. So women have been fighting to gain equal footing as men in career roles ever since. | d25c0bcf-5599-45da-b533-e1995068262b |
8ocew1 | why window tinting is black instead of white | sane reason sunglasses are tinted dark or a color instead of white. It aborbing the light prevents it from coming in.
Also if it was white it would reflect on the inside too. Possibly making glare which is opposite of the point. (car light lamp or otherwise) | 0a61d358-9d1b-4255-b80d-9d8137d5382b |
nwy5i | Why my computer was so brilliantly fast when I first purchased it is now intolerably slow after only a few months of use. | When you buy a computer, there's nothing bogging it down (or at least, not a lot). But when you put more files onto it and start running more programs, it becomes "cluttered," in a sense.
There are a few different types of memory on your computer, but primarily I'll talk about your RAM and your hard drive. RAM is easy for your CPU to access, so it doesn't take long to fetch stuff that's stored there, but you don't have a lot of space there. On the other hand, the hard drive is a lot harder to get to for your CPU, but you can store a lot more. It's a very dramatic difference! Sometimes it can take a few thousand times longer to fetch info from your hard drive than from RAM.
Now, if you had to decide where you'd store a program that you're using, the logical thing to do would be to put it into RAM, right? You're using it, so you want it to respond very quickly, and the other stuff that you're not actively using can be stored somewhere else. The problems with speed *really* start when you start running out of RAM.
When you don't have enough RAM for a program to run, you need to start using the hard drive more often - swapping stuff in and out of it. That takes a long time because the hard drive is so slow. Furthermore, a file on your computer isn't always stored as one long, contiguous thing: sometimes they're all muddled up. There are ways your computer can look up where the different parts are, but that can take a little while too. The more stuff you have on there, the more you move it around and delete it and save over parts of it - the more likely it is for the files to get all mixed around.
So slowing down over time is kind of a result of a few things. Programs that open on start-up and stuff you've installed over time can quietly take up your RAM running in the background, meaning you have do slow swaps more often, and the mixed-upness ("fragmentation" ) of the files gets worse over time. A clean install of the OS will fix some of these things, and a full format would fix all of them.
Of course, it'd be easier to try and find what's leeching your memory and working unnecessarily! Running a defrag would help too. There are a few free programs which will help with stuff like that, the most well-known I believe is CCleaner.
Also, it might be worth noting that computers run better when they're cold! When dust gets into fan intakes and stuff, that can make it harder for the computer to run at full capacity since it makes the whole machine hotter. It can get pretty gross in there so cleaning it out is a pretty good habit as well. | e0861867-2985-4159-85c8-c12286752fbb |
tco1m | How older films can be made into 3D (eg Titanic, beauty and the beast). Can they do it with TOPGUN? | It can be straightforward, but it depends on the type of effect that needs to be achieved.
It's basically a process of manually 'cutting out' (rotoscoping) elements of an image, turning it into layers. These layers can then be shifted around, differently for each eye. This would normally leave a gap around the area that it was cut-out from, so the layered area is often enlarged (which is used as part of the 3D effect anyway). There's usually some leftover area that needs to be matte-painted (filled in).
The technique is a bit different depending on whether you are adding depth *into* the screen, or *out* of the screen.
[Shitty demo](_URL_0_) 2D cat on top, rotoscoped, enlarged and shifted left and right underneath, which should make the cat 'pop out' in 3D. (Edit: It's not actually the enlarging that produces the 'pop-out' effect - it's the distance between the images on each frame. The enlarging is mostly used to 'cover up' the rough edges, but it's entirely plausible to enlarge sections if the image really needs to move into the negative space)
Edit: It's worth noting that Crytek (Crysis 2 makers) created a 'cheap' (in computing power) way to convert a 2D rendered image into a 3D image. Fortunately in video games, the 'Z-buffer' is known for all pixels on screen. This means you can easily figure out what parts of an image should be at the front vs at the back. They can use this data to automatically create 'depth' in their image - effectively auto-rotoscoping. | e5552c68-adbb-4fd0-8133-db2b852929f5 |
5z0qd3 | Why do they worry about rocket ships burning up when returning through the atmosphere from space, but not going to space? | A rocket shop starts at earth at standstill and speeds up to get into space. The rocket ship is not going really that fast in the sense parts of the atmosphere.
When a rocket shop returns it has orbital velocity, aka is going really fast. To slow down it actually uses the atmosphere. With terribly big shoes out enters the densest parts of the atmosphere. This shows down the rocket ship, but also generates a lot of heat. | f57019eb-ac6a-4a57-b13b-538f8aaa4d98 |
22b6ju | Types of UK visas and what they require. | Go to _URL_0_ all the information is there.
Since you're on a tier 4 I'm assuming you're a student or have a post study work visa. In which case you will either need a sponsored tier 2 if you're looking to work or a standard tourist visa if you wanna just hang out. (I think) | 7d67a1b8-2ade-4846-88ed-bea3ce64e587 |
2vbnsu | Why does the US have so much more aircraft than any other country? | One of the main tactics used by the American military relies on overwhelming air superiority. Ground forces discover enemy fortifications and locations, and call for bombing runs.
And, of course, there's also the matter that the US military is often fighting around the world, and the fastest way to get across the world is to fly. | a8ddf2a9-0038-4190-995b-35c915cd5aa6 |
1xx07f | Why does folding a piece of paper both ways help to tear a straight line? | Folding paper weakens the bonds at the fold. The outer bonds are stretched more, so folding both ways weakens both sides at the crease. When you tear, the rip follows the path with the weakest structure which is usually the crease. | 86c3a8db-1652-4575-9287-7a51a0fb8dd5 |
1oiezz | why wireless devices/electronics can't be used in an airplane below 10k feet.. | Previously the FAA was worried that the small EM field generated by electronic devices could introduce interference to an airplane's internal electronics. This was well before shielded everything on these planes. Recently the FAA has come out in favor of consumers, saying they are going to recommend the allowance of using portable electronics gate to gate. Cell phones will still need to stay in airplane mode though.
Source: I studied wireless communication in college. As for the FAA ruling, a quick google search for "FAA Electronics Policy" returns many news articles with much more information in them. | 96c3a66c-a509-485b-8c21-3bfcf5f6fdad |
42q3zu | Is Africa as unstable as the media portrays it to be? | Africa's a pretty big place, and the experience can certainly vary depending on where you go. Blood Diamond was set during a civil war in Sierra Leone, so the shitshow factor is going to be pretty high in such a situation by default.
If you went to some place like Nairobi, Cape Town, or Johannesburg, it'd be more or less like most big cities - some nice areas, some middle-class areas, some touristy areas, and some places you'd probably want to avoid. | 4d4ef1b1-d5f2-4683-96f8-5117c4aa4316 |
k2v8m | How do American street names work? | Pretty simple, actually they are probably the same as the UK. The examples you mentioned "[street x] and [street y]" are cross streets. They are saying "at the intersection of Raven and 42nd".
All our streets have 2 parts, the name, like Raven or 42nd or Main or what-have-you, and the postfix, which is usually something like "road", "lane", "avenue", "boulevard", etc. I've seen some like Circle, Loop, Way, etc etc. Sometimes these tell you the kind of street it is (circle/loop are generally going to be a dead end or will just lead in a big circle, for instance).
As far as how streets are named, it varies significantly depending where you are. Housing developments like to have "themes", so all the streets in the area will be named after nautical terms, or types of trees/flowers, or people's names, crap like that. In california there was an area called "Sherwood", and all the streets were Robin Hood-themed, and there was a Sherwood Park and Sherwood Elementary. It was totally awesome, there. My mom's house is in an area with really weird first names, like "Alecandro Daniel Avenue" or "Robin Persey Lane" and other ridiculous shit.
Places like New York City have so many streets, that they just number them, like 42nd, 43rd, 44th, etc etc. In NYC I believe they get higher the further "uptown" you go, so based on the number you can tell whether it's in the ghetto or a nice area.
Finally, an address is constructed like so:
[Number] [Prefix] [Name] [Postfix] [Unit]
Prefix is not required (which would be North, South, etc), number is required (that's the actual address), name is required obviously, and postfix isn't strictly necessary but it's often used as part of the address. Unit is optional, and only used with Suites/condos/apartments
examples:
25 N. Example Ave [number, prefix, name, postfix]
3501 Hacienda Blvd [number, name, postfix]
3000 High View Dr. #901 [number, name, postfix, unit]
8670 S. Eastern Ave [number, prefix, name, postfix]
1500 E. Tropicana Ave Ste 395 [number, prefix, name, postfix, unit]
Make sense? | 10453f1e-4de9-4b03-9220-33bb7efd8c87 |
16mst6 | What happens when we crack our knuckles? | The fluid in your bursa sacs are moving, and quite quickly at that. Sudden movement makes the popping sound.
Like you're five: Look at your fingers. They are made up of little chunks, with knuckles in between. Think of these knuckles like hinges on a door. They allow the door to move back and forth. Knuckles do the same thing, but are built differently. There is nothing solid attaching your finger bones to each other, only stretchy things that keep them in place. Think like if you put sausage links in a garden hose. The hose would keep the sausage links stuck next to each other, even though there is no physical "hinge" attached to each sausage. The sausages are your bones, and the hose is your finger. BUT, in your finger, there are little things in between your bones that prevent them from rubbing against each other, because that is very painful. (Imagine if chalk had feelings. Do you think it would like to be scraped down a blackboard?) Imagine then that someone has put teeny tiny water balloons in your hose between the sausage links, only these balloons are made of extra strong rubber so they won't burst. As you bend the hose around, the balloons squeeze and unsqueeze. Sometimes, the water in the balloons has to squeeze or unsqueeze REALLY fast, because when you crack your knuckles, you put a lot of pressure on a small space, and water doesn't like to be under pressure, so if it can breathe easier in another part of the balloon, it rushes over. Only instead of making a splashy sound, it makes a cracky sound. This might worry you, but rest assured, your balloon has not popped. In fact, there is nothing wrong with cracking your knuckles, except that it bothers other people who find the sound annoying. | 231ae4d1-fdba-4985-a4b5-012710682da9 |
q36fz | Why are rainbows shaped like arches/parabolas | You're only seeing a portion of the full circle. | 9742cda9-de14-4e4a-9318-d2a45573dac3 |
1k3pvw | How is it legal for the US to conduct drone strikes in foreign countries that result in the deaths of innocent people without any repercussions? | Who would stop them?
Typically the drone strikes are done with the consent of the country in question (Specifically Pakistan). Public hand wringing doesn't necessarily equate to private Disapproval. | 5dc433ce-3025-494e-b736-0416d1a0327e |
6e50r3 | what would be the benefits and the drawbacks of having one world currency? | If you have one world currency you link the economy's of every country in the world.
If you look at some countries they are currently in recession leading hyperinflation of there currency etc. Not to mention what happens when a country is at war like Syria and economies collapse.
What would happen is larger more stable countries would have to interfere with the smaller less stable ones and impose restrictions on things. Maybe even invading to stabilise a region they otherwise wouldn't.
If you want to see what can happen, and it's actually a **MILD** example of what could happen look at Grease and the Eurozone.
To sum up: it would only work if every country had a similar economy and nothing changes anywhere in the world
Edit: spellings | 10272069-3d41-4661-8b93-dc141eb26718 |
2uizxp | How come I do not feel hungry in the morning if I don't eat breakfast, but if I do, I find myself wanting something to eat or drink. | It's actually kind of simple really.
If you don't eat breakfast, you're body looks to other ways to begin fueling itself. If there's nothing in your stomach, it seeks out and uses glycogen (stored energy from food you've recently eaten) to run itself, and also to help your brain function properly. (Your brain gets the first go at any stored energy.)
Naturally, when this begins to happen, and even through there's no food in your stomach, your body stops reminding you that you're hungry, and gets right away to burning up any energy reserves (again, the 'glycogen').
The reason you're probably feeling tired is because -- and let's say you ate something carb-heavy, such as a bagel, or a stack of pancakes -- considerable amounts of blood is now beginning to flow to your abdomen, to help to begin processing all of the stuff you've just eaten. (Part of the reason why you feel 'sleepy' after a big meal.)
Your body telling you you need a drink, or wanting something to eat soon after breakfast, is basically just your metabolism speeding up and/or requiring hydration so as to move the process along more efficiently.
Hope I've helped. :} | 8dcce929-e0d3-4745-acdf-c4e0fc4f7711 |
22fam5 | What is the economic growth and how is our economy model based on it ? | Economic growth simply means that the economy is producing more value as time goes on.
Take for example a small village. It has an economy in that the villagers produces things of value. Say there's a clothing factory or a mine. These hard working villagers are producing useful things of value on a daily basis. On some days, they even find better and more efficient ways of creating value. Someone in the village mine discovers a massive new copper vein to mine from. Or someone in the clothing factory creates a new needle that makes it easier to create new clothes. Sometimes a businessman outside of the village will visit and pay for a massive new shipment of clothes to be produced, so then the factory owners have to employ more people. Those events "grow" the economy. | 4ba46d08-3798-4da4-b9ec-ce59067ea06d |
32wqgw | why don't hockey teams hire a 500 lb. goalie to block the whole goal? | There is a sports science episode covering this.
It basically boils down to 1)It does not cover the whole net. And with the assumption that a 500lb guy isn't too athletic, the open part of the net will just be free goals.
Also regulation sized protective equipement does not cover a 500lb man. | 56b65fdd-d62f-47bc-a610-f434a570a74a |
6b4c60 | How do new, unpublished writers ensure that their original work is not copied/stolen by the publishing house they give their work to consider? | Copyright protection, unlike patent protection, exists automatically to protect a work. No registration or other action on the part of the author is required.
So if a publisher were to steal an author's work, the author would sue the publisher and -- assuming they could prove that they indeed authored the work -- they would win. | 9c37358d-f1fa-42a5-8fc1-b3b9a0bc6d2b |
p0s6j | What does a part-time teenager do with his W-2 form? | More than likely your parents will claim you and they should handle this. However you can file a return yourself (see below). Make sure to check with you parent if they are claiming you as a dependent.
You can file a tax return and get any federal (and probably state) taxes you paid back in a refund check.
Goto _URL_0_. [TurboTax® Freedom Edition](_URL_1_) is a good choice for electronic filing.
Turbo Tax will charge you ($15) to file state tax returns. Most likely your state has an online filing for low income (you qualify) returns but you will have to check your state's website. | e325e72d-2484-41fd-8e80-b4fbd819e6fb |
5g7pvv | How do we (in first world countries) contribute to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" and other marine trash issues? | * A lot of the trash is blown off beaches or picked up by tides off of beaches world wide.
* Other trash was thrown in by careless boaters.
* Trash is washed into rivers and sewage system pipes that flow into the ocean in heavy rains.
* Faulty sewage treatment plants, or sewage treatment plants that are overwhelmed by heavy rains.
* There was a time when cities like [New York City](_URL_2_) dumped their sewage sludge and other materials, oxygen concentrations in waters in the locations like the [New York Bight](_URL_0_) by the barge full between 1949 and 1969.
* Now [China dumps between 1.3 to 3.5 metric tons of plastic in the ocean](_URL_3_).
* [Military and nuclear waste dumped in the oceans as far back as the 1940s](_URL_1_).
* Illegal dumping of industrial and construction waste into the ocean either by ship or by truck.
* Some trash is picked up by birds and dropped in the ocean.
Check out the EPA's page on [*What was dumped into the ocean before 1972?*](_URL_0_) | 73e4b35d-a7cd-4723-bb39-198a84581b70 |
1z4d7n | why the news doesn't report on suicide (unless it's a celebrity)? | Because comparatively few people care. It is not a story that has an effect on a significant number of people. | 1175f9db-bafe-4976-9ff8-1a6285036f2c |
1ounjd | Why do game developers make exclusives when it limits their audience so much? | Usually because that console manufacturer publishes the game for them.
For example ThatGameComapny made really odd and out there games that a big publisher wouldn't likely publish, for fear it wouldn't sell well enough to be worth their time. So Sony approaches them and says "We will publish your game, market it, and sell it for you, and in return you only release it on our platforms." So the dev gets paid, and they get a game under their belt which will be big for getting them bargaining power next time they look for a publisher.
Its generally a win-win.
There also timed exclusives, again a dev has a game that they can't get published how they like so someone like Microsoft says "Ok we will publish it for you, but in return you leave it Xbox only for 6 months. Afterwards you are free to port to other platforms."
Again a Win-win.
Finally there are cases where the dev loses their IP and its locked to a system. For example Insomniac's Ratchet and Clank was published by Sony on PlayStation. Part of the deal was that Sony owns Ratchet and Clank, so Insomniac is unable to bring it to other platforms. This is getting increasingly rare as developers are fighting more and more for rights to their IP but up until this point it was almost always publishes who kept their rights to games. | 94eb1193-3734-4384-b27c-65e86711789c |
5y2wrt | how counting cards in poker works? | As a general rule, you don't count cards in Poker - you count cards in BlackJack. This is because, unlike most card games, BlackJack does not shuffle the deck between hands. This means that knowledge of historic cards can give you important information about what cards remain in the deck for future hands.
There are multiple ways to count cards, but they all boil down to remembering what cards you have seen in previous hands so you can extrapolate what cards are left in the deck. If you have seen are large number of low cards (2-6) then that tells you the remaining cards in the shoe (card holder the dealer uses) are weighted to higher cards (7-10s). This can influence how you choose to play your hand - if you are sitting on a 15, you may not want to hit if the shoe is heavy with high cards as you are likely to bust. Opposite logic would be true if the deck is heavy in low cards.
Now, all that said, counting cards is very much against the rules of any casino and you _will_ be banned from the property if you are caught. Casinos also do things that reduce the impact of counting cards (playing with multiple decks and shuffling more often). | 3349b710-89b7-4234-9a1c-517afa347b14 |
1nn6ir | Why does my pen work on a sheet of paper, but doesn't on another one? | A ball-point pen requires a certain amount of friction between the ball and the paper in order for the ball to rotate, which moves the ink down from the reservoir to the paper. Also, the paper surface needs to be porous enough to pull the ink off the ball onto the paper. Other types of pens have similar requirements, even if they work differently.
In my personal experience, most quests for a better pen are solved with better paper. Papers for other purposes can have coatings or formulations that defeat either of the above mechanisms. | c015e127-a210-40ef-9e06-4839014beea8 |
2ga0n5 | Why Do Animals Leave Permanent Water Sources? | Staying in a place is making predator job easier and making it harder and harder to find near food. | e848b4e7-031d-4822-9977-db5d23e416bc |
2v1p57 | Why has iTunes been deleting all my music since 2004? | Sounds like what is happening here is that you are syncing a device with a device with an unassociated library. An iDevice gets linked to a particular authorised computer + library file, and when you sync your device with an unrelated computer, it will erase the content. I know you said you manually manage the device, but the only thing I can think of is that something is going wrong in this process and erasing your device. I don' t mean this as a slightly against you. Itunes can be pretty ridiculous to work with at times. It just seems like that is the one consistent factor across your story. | a3a6670d-b869-4c53-b878-de076e174c7b |
39um1z | What is CFOP? | It's a very common method for solving a Rubik's cube.
**C**: You form a **C**ross of all the same color on one of the faces.
**F**: You solve the **F**irst two layers below the face you formed the cross on. Also known as F2L.
**O**: You **O**rient the bottom face. Basically you completely solve the face that is opposite of the original cross you formed at the beginning.
**P**: This is **P**ermutation of the last layer. You use known algorithms to solve the final layer of the cube. | 64c9e38d-f238-45df-be91-8748c3155b4a |
1dmk40 | Where does the extra water go during low tide? | It shifts to a different part of the earth causing a high tide in that region. | 6d1b8038-49fd-4146-bb0f-34419055dab1 |
2vahgw | What is happening, physically, when you feel like you've burned off your taste buds with hot tea, soup, etc? | You've destroyed the nerve enedings. That's why sudden pain then numbness. The mouth regenerates very quickly however, thus feeling will come back in a relatively short amount of time. | b1679626-18d2-451c-ba99-ba1999034042 |
5aw1dp | The Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) Theory | I can't explain it, much less in terms a 5 year old could understand. Any explanation, at a minimum, is going to have to include introductory explanations of Platonic forms, Godel incompleteness, neurobiology and cell structure. All I can tell you, very simply, is that no one who is helping to create and refine the idea has any intention of the idea being used to address anything about the afterlife, and anyone using it for that purpose either doesn't understand it or is deliberately misusing it. | 50805fd2-a3ab-49cf-86a5-cad2abd9fef3 |
4r3a11 | How is the design of the U.S. gov't "deliberately inefficient"? | The checks and balances system ensures that one person or one branch of government can't make quick, unilateral changes. For a law to be passed and take effect, all three branches have to be (more or less) in agreement. The fact that legislation can be difficult to pass, even if one party has a majority, makes some people think of government as inefficient.
Also, the Constitution, which sets all of the rules, was made incredibly hard to amend (2/3 of Congress, 3/4 of the states) to again prevent large changes from being made easily.
EDIT: If you want to read the Founding Fathers' opinions in their own words, read the [The Federalist Papers](_URL_0_). These were essays written by James Madison (primary writer of the Constitution), Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay that were meant to convince people to adopt the Constitution. In them, these three Founding Fathers laid out a lot of their ideas for how the country should be run.
In particular [Federalist #10](_URL_1_) by James Madison addresses your question almost exactly. In it, Madison talks about the need to prevent what he called factions from taking over the government and undermining democratic principles. | 1c65e619-45b5-4859-bfdc-f50e50ecb8f1 |
3n0t83 | why is turning your assets into cash called "liquidating"? | This is known as a "metaphor".
Money isn't literally liquid, but we *do* refer to it as "cash flow". Basically, having your assets liquid means you can easily move them from place to place. | 51c23efd-de33-421b-ac04-12bef971a6fd |
1jqt4f | How does the gas pump know when to stop automatically pumping? | There is a small hole at the end of the nozzle that gives the pump a signal when your tank is full. When gas is flowing into your empty tank the pressure is the same. When it starts pumping gas and it's almost full the small hole feels a pressure change and stops pumping. | 0dec1676-8a2f-486f-8292-7dc000bee459 |
5zjunm | What is the point of internet contests, does anyone actually win? | I won an Xbox 360 with Connect from an internet contest about 5 years ago, Mars candy corp I think. I entered like 20 times. It was legit, they just emailed me, I signed a form and they just mailed me the the Xbox.
Then I sold it to my sister for $300. Best deal ever. | fc3ce04e-9ee1-4dc8-9f48-3294b8d66af9 |
8jxhvj | Cardio gets the heart working which ultimately makes it stronger. So why do recreational drugs that do the same thing cause harm to the heart? | when you exercise your whole cardio vascular (heart,lungs and arteries and veins) system adjusts to get more oxygen into your muscles, and also more waste out.
All the components are working in tandem, increasing, decreasing and stabilising as required.
Its a very nicely synced system
when you take cocaine its JUST your heart that increases. its now out of sync with rest of the system, even pushing against it and making your heart strain.
That's the problem.
I suppose the cocaine case is a bit like having one formula-1 wheel on a car: its out of sync with the rest and you're gonna have a bad time. | ee3859af-6845-48f3-9469-449686649d51 |
2vdsqd | When countries with different currencies trade with each other, where along the line is the currency actually switched? | Generally when they agree on a price they include in what currency. If a German company wanted to be paid in euros then the American company would have to trade USD for euros at a bank, currency exchange business, or other businesses who offer the service and then pay.
Countries do have reserves of foreign currency but that is more of an "In case our currency completely goes down the drain, break glass". It isn't so private companies can buy goods with it.
No they don't just print off other countries currency.
What happens most of the time though is if two countries have differing currencies then they just use USD. A lot of banks keep reserves of it as it is fairly stable so companies don't have a problem getting a hold of it. | ca76328f-bf30-4cf5-9c77-fdc50fbead9d |
11gqeu | Caisson disease (the bends) and why the reverse doesn't happen (an astronaut going from low to high pressure) | They're in a pressurized environment so there's no pressure change. Submariners don't get the bends either, for the same reason.
Anyway the difference between space and sea level is only one atmosphere so it wouldn't be an issue anyway. You've done a one atmosphere change at something like ten meters underwater, to compare. | 55aeefda-d0c5-4207-8431-ea3f327a37aa |
8no7rw | why can’t light stay still? | Hello, so a quick disclaimer is I'm not a particle physicist, this has just come in my entry level to physics knowledge I'm trying to learn while working with biochemists.
The answer lies in the fact that light is massless (for all intents and purposes we shall assume this, it's a bit more complicated than that). All massless particles must move at the speed of light. Why is this?
It's because mass is defined based on a particles interaction with the Higgs field, which is an all-pervasive field that exists throughout our universe. It determines how objects move throughout the universe as every particle must travel through the Higgs field.
So, as stated in another answer, it isn't that something is keeping it from moving slower than the speed of light (in this case, the photon is the particle in question), it's that the particle lacks what it takes (mass) to interact with the Higgs field to move slower than the c, the speed of light.
A bit trippier is that technically every particle must be moving at c, but those particles interactions with the Higgs field is what creates mass and allows it to move slower than c relative to other particles. (c, of course equaling the speed of light). It's interacting with the Higgs field in a more intimate way. Momentum, which is defined as mass (interactions with the higgs field) times velocity, will always translate in terms of c. Mass is simply the interference the Higgs field creates with different kinds of particles. | 5f61bf24-b4d3-42f3-ab16-866d460769ec |
54mepj | What happens when people fall asleep on their arm and it becomes unmovable completely numb? | A nerve is getting pinched, blocking signal from reaching the brain. It's relatively harmless, but is uncomfortable (especially when your limb "wakes up", causing a flood of conflicting signals that were backed up to all get sent at once). | 0ec72e76-2a87-486d-bb41-2e2d5c6cedfc |
4xfya4 | Why do german and scandinavian languages use different letters for ö/ø? | swedish and icelandic use the ö/Ö
however, a likely explanation is that Ø came from latin Œ (a letter currently used in french), and that the slash was just a different way to write it. as for why the difference, it's theorized that the Ö was used in old norwegian texts in order to distinguish between the short Ö/Ø sound and the long Ö/Ø sound.
related is the cyrillic letter Ө, which makes a similar sound in some languages such as mongolian and kazakh. | 34ff451e-3ac1-4be1-96ae-975973ccdd16 |
16wnc4 | how the show moonshiners works and how it is legal | * All they show is people hauling clear liquids around...that is not sufficient proof of a crime.
* Large portions of the show could very well be staged. | 70423217-ce66-449a-be85-84ca5d6f80c5 |
5iha4m | How "clicks" become a legitimate form of profitability for websites | Advertisement.
The general theory is that ads are worth more if more people see them. An ad seen by 1,000,000 people is more valuable than an ad seen by 1,000 people.
If an ad on your medium is going to reach more people, you can charge more to take the ad, so you make more money from ads.
Of course, it's turned out to not be a very good measure by itself. Views aren't the same as click-throughs (people actually *clicking* the ad; a more useful measurement), and even click-throughs aren't the same as sales. But views *can* lead to click-througs and click-throughs *can* lead to sales. Targeting your adverts is important: if men never go for your ad, then advertising at an audience of 1,000,000 men and women isn't as useful as advertising at an audience of 500,000 women. (The actual divisions are more subtle than this; accurate statistics and information is a huge thing in planning and targeting advertising.) | f795aa0c-a79b-44d8-8417-32d479a1e16c |
6jqacs | Why do we call illegal immigrants undocumented immigrants? | No drivers license, no SSN, no finger prints, no shots, etc. Things required to have for work permit, green card, citizenship. | 6374ec90-19b0-4bf9-a24f-3c58e289ca64 |
3trmb3 | Health Insurance for those that have not elected in 2015 | If you want to get coverage for 2016, the exchange should be open til December 10.
The cost of coverage really depends on how much subsidies you're eligible for. | 367d6beb-3ed0-42a4-8fd0-a8dbeb0ba933 |
73ew9g | How does countries calculate its land area? | These days the most accurate answer comes from GIS data. This basically describes the shape of the country as a polygon, i.e., a shape made up of a sequence of straight lines connected together. There's a (relatively) simple [mathematical formula](_URL_0_) to determine the area of a polygon. There are some minor complexities involving islands, lakes, islands in lake, lakes in islands in lakes, and so on, but these can be handled with care. | 8e49b14e-2ea8-484c-a503-a85d307c5472 |
3f2cla | why isn't hunting lions and other endangered animals banned world wide? | Well, first off, lions are not an endangered species. Important to draw a line there.
What makes a lion different than a deer, duck or elk? Sport hunting of animals is a pretty common behavior and there is nothing intrinsically different between any animal we choose to hunt for sport. The truth is that we kill animals all the time, be it for sport, meat or to remove a nuisance.
In fact, hunting animals can often be beneficial for the herd. Deer in the US will breed to a point where they begin to exhaust their food supply - culling the herd is actually good for them overall.
As for endangered species, sometimes killing them is good as well. Take the rhino that was hunted a little while back. He was becoming too violent and was detrimental to his herd. Killing him was better for all the other rhinos. The people to protected the game preserver sold the rights to kill him to earn a bit of extra money to fund the preserve. Since he was going to die anyway, it was win win.
You can be morally object to any animal killing or just hunting in general, but its a moral argument. There are many others that don't have those objections. That is why it is legal. | 7e1bb2a8-edf6-4f84-a258-04463b58c073 |
1ndcly | Why is GNU Hurd development taking so long, while the Linux kernel reached maturity/usability fairly quickly? | There's not one single answer, but a combination of different factors, which I'll explain:
(1) Linux sucking the air out of the room
(2) OSs becoming commodities
(3) Poor performance tradeoffs in Hurd's design
(4) Uncompromising stance of the FSF
At the time when GNU Hurd was being developed, most of the interest was on Linux. So if you were a developer who was interested in operating-system level work, you probably worked (or tried to work) on the Linux kernel. This meant that there was good technical documentation and a community around the linux kernel, where there wasn't anything nearly as good equivalent around Hurd.
Now at the same time, even as Linux was getting really good, operating systems were starting to become commodities. Fewer developers work on OS level code these days, and more work on things like dynamic web applications. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were many aspects of OSs that needed drastic improvement; there was much research, and much code writing. Development of OSs continues obviously today, but there's less focus on it in the Computer Science research world. Why less focus? Well first because the ones we have are really, really good, and second there may be a feeling that we understand very well the tradeoffs that go into OS design, and there's not as much un-tilled ground there.
Hurd represents a microkernel design, related to/based on the Mach microkernel. That microkernel [has some problems](_URL_0_). It's fair to say that this overall OS design (which Hurd adopted) favors parallelism, which is great, if parallelism is what your software needs. Such a large performance penalty for generic workloads isn't worth great specialization for paralellism. The only people who'd be willing to go for that I think are those who have parallel tasks all day every day. They're out there, but they're not a significant portion of the computing base.
Finally, the position of the FSF -- the Hurd is closely aligned with the FSF, while Linux just uses the GPL and doesn't have anywhere near as many formal ties. Linux was successful because of a "big tent" approach. If you disagreed about the philosophical aspects of free software, you could still hack on Linux, you just GPL'd your code. As far as the FSF is concerned, if you disagree with the philosophical stances on free software, you are wrong and an active agent in destroying hacker culture. That perspective does not foster participation, it fosters dogma. As a result, free software hackers would likely only gravitate to hard-core FSF projects if they had already accepted the dogma. If you just wanted to write free software, but didn't have an opinion about the computing issues of the day, it's just easier to work on Linux. | 0c1ea784-44eb-46cc-9c79-15b56e3267c5 |
3jrsto | Why don't snakes choke when they devour large prey whole / is it ever possible for a snake to choke ? | Yes, snakes can choke. Sometimes they start to swallow a prey, and when startled or find that it is too big, they reverse the swallowing process. It's usually not healthy for the snake to do repeatedly, and can hurt the snake.
Also, snakes have a special extendable tube trachea they push forward to the front of their jaw when swallowing a large prey. It's like a snorkel for eating. | 07f8812e-8de2-4f78-88c7-8cff1b20f4e3 |
7nwlz1 | How metropolises such as Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, other southwestern U.S. cities, get enough water to supply the huge population with no lakes or rivers near. | All these cities share water from the Colorado River under an agreement called [the Colorado River Compact](_URL_0_). it is carried through the area by pipelines. | 7baba81c-286f-4885-8720-b2d206449b3d |
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