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83s3a6 | How does Cadillac's "Super Cruise" autonomous driving work? | The car looks at the road and it looks at you.
If it understands what it sees on the road, it stays in it's lane and a safe distance back from the car in front of you. It both steers and controls the speed.
If you stop looking at the road, it slows to a stop in its lane. It does not change lanes, or follow directions, or anything else like that. You are still driving, it's only steering and working the gas/brake. | 1f549e8b-4d80-40be-b144-d519b9bd749d |
44vrc9 | How reactors don't melt if stuff going on inside them hit millions of degrees? | What's going on here is they keep the stuff that's millions of degrees from touching anything else, and they only use very very tiny amounts of the stuff they're heating up.
The most common way of doing this is to trap the little wee cloud of hot hot stuff within a very strong magnetic field. Because it's not touching anything, the heat it contains isn't conducted into the structure around it that's generating that magnetic field, and they can keep pumping more energy in. When they release it, there's so little hot stuff there that it doesn't really heat up its surroundings enough to damage them. | 48e8bd97-369b-42c3-82f5-e103acb7a586 |
6yub5d | Why can't your phone use wifi and 4G/3G together? | [You can do it on Android](_URL_0_)
In general it's undesirable because mobile bandwidth is far more limited. Something like watching youtube in high quality could easily use up all your limit in very little time if you fail to notice.
It could also result in you being charged a lot of money, and people tend to hate this kind of thing. | db3ca6ec-04cc-4800-822e-63729062db81 |
5sxzxa | What is the dark web vs. deep web? How exactly do you get there? And how dangerous is it if you don't know what you're doing? | the dark web refers to the part of the internet that requires using the TOR routing service to gain access. Once you have access it is much like the rest of the internet only generally targeted towards much more shady things and conversations that people want to remain anonymous for.
the deep web refers to all parts of the internet that are unindexed, that is to say are not publicly accessible to just anyone. Every page and post on reddit if properly searched for can be found on google and therefore indicates that it is indexed. Companies have many web pages, documents, and data that require special credentials and logins to access. The deep web refers to all of these various pages and locations.
If you're a member of a private forum that requires you to log in to see information, congratulations, you've been to the deep web and there is nothing dangerous about it.
If you've downloaded the TOR software and connected, congratulations you've been to the dark web. the level of dangerousness is correlated directly with the activities and websites you visit, though largely harmless you may find yourself on a list at some government agency :p | 680d0a95-62d6-4692-8ad7-1ecf1bca233c |
71z431 | why do we move our arms while walking? | The real reason is balance. Unlike most animals, we're bipedal. Try running with and without your hands and arms behind your back. I think you'll be able to tell the difference. Basically you have to use your torso to balance without your arms helping you. It's possible but less energy efficient.
> Arm swing in human bipedal walking is a natural motion that each arm swings with the motion of the opposing leg. Swinging arms in an opposing direction with respect to the lower limb reduces the angular momentum of the body, balancing the rotational motion produced during walking.
_URL_0_
> Scientists know there is a mechanical benefit to the motion: Swinging arms counterbalance the momentum of a person’s legs, providing stability to the runner. | d7ce9b32-507e-422c-99c2-25645dd65f84 |
1zj3d2 | How do people keep "discovering" information leaked from Snowdens' documents if they were leaked so long ago? | The documents were given to journalist/lawyer Glenn Greenwald. Snowden did this because he trusted Greenwald not to release any documents that would put anyone's life in danger. Greenwald is going through the documents and publishing them slowly to ensure this and to only show documents that implicate government wrong doing.
edit: I should spell his name correctly.
edit 2: Thanks for Gold! Only been here a month and I am grateful that anyone at all cared what I have to say. | 1cec6846-b7e7-49f3-b235-8bb2389c795f |
4j7dp6 | why do collegiate athletes from military schools (Army, Navy, Air Force) need permission to play in pro sports? | When a person is accepted into a service academy, they don't pay any tuition but they make a commitment to serve a certain term of years in their chosen military branch after graduation. If that player is drafted by a pro franchise, they can ask the military to defer or waive their service requirement which in this case the Navy agreed to do. | 96869b1a-6add-42d6-946c-35e7b1befea4 |
53vw9y | What causes us to wake up right before the alarm goes off? | Your body has proteins that act like grains in an hourglass. When they run low your body knows it's time to go to sleep. While you sleep the hourglass fills back up until it's full enough that your body starts to wake up.
If you keep a regular schedule, your body's natural cycle will start to sync with your artificial cycle (the alarm clock)...so your body will start to naturally wake up at the same time your alarm clock is set to wake you up. | 8af47233-64ec-45d6-b1a8-79b8c1e9b4ee |
2f1y0j | What causes red-eye in pictures? | Side note: most noctural animals have a special part of the eye called the [tapetum lucidum](_URL_0_) which helps reflect light onto the retina. The color hue reflected by the animal's eye is commonly used to classify the organism or determine types of creatures present in a biological night study/survey. | d034ecee-a58e-4a5e-8115-547fbe389091 |
3fnmx6 | Why does notebook power supplies have no vents? Would`t it be more efficient if present? | Laptops are portable. They're constantly getting stuffed inside bags with other shit.
If you had vents on the power brick, it would open up opportunities to "stuff" to get in there that could be worse for heat transfer than the plastic casing. Even worse, if a paperclip or staple got in there, you'd be looking at an electrical problem involving 110V wall power. | 02875052-c413-4e7d-94d8-1b27c18bc008 |
2mm02a | What exactly is happening when I put a cup or bottle to my mouth and suck the air out? | You aren't creating a perfect vacuum, but you are reducing the air pressure inside the cup, causing the ambient air pressure outside to hold the cup to your face. | f279e640-cfdd-491f-be4e-ebc7ac8afc0b |
5vs4og | How can my iPhone emit any sound it wants? | Information is stored as a series of 1s and 0s in a iPhone. This is called binary data and you can represent virtually any piece of information as binary data including sounds. To recreate these sounds from the data this data has to go through a series of electronic circuits. The first one being a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC). A digital signal of the data is sent through this circuit and the output is an analog audio signal. This audio signal now goes through a second circuit called an amplifier. This recreates the audio signal at a more powerful level. This more powerful/amplified audio signal can now be sent to a loudspeaker where it will be used to drive the coil of the loudspeaker, moving the diaphragm and creating the sound wave. | 8246d0d8-350b-4382-ac37-0f9c7a8e64d1 |
42dl2t | What does a CPU do when it's idle? | Nah, that would keep the CPU busy in the sense that it'd draw power, dissipate heat, and spin the fans as if it were doing real work. Well, perhaps a bit less, since it doesn't need arithmetic, memory, etc units to spin a nop loop and it will power them down, but nop loops still aren't the "right" way to do things these days. So what is the right way? Let's look at linux.
Apparently the platform-generic routine is pm_idle and the x86 implementation is [mwait_idle](_URL_2_) which calls an x86 instruction [MWAIT](_URL_1_).
The more traditional instruction would be HLT, and from the [Stack Overflow](_URL_0_) comparing the two, user2665185 explains the difference:
> The HLT instruction implements the shallowest idle power state (C-State) available for an individual thread, whereas the MWAIT instruction allows you to request all available idle power states as well as sub-states.
So we can rank the solutions on a modern processor:
nop loop < HLT < MWAIT
EDIT: poking a bit deeper into this it looks like there was an IO based mechanism between HLT and MWAIT, and that there's an acpi routine acpi_cpu_idle which ideally improves on what MWAIT can offer by tying off-CPU idle actions into the CPU idle state. | cc0d5170-3846-4b13-9b6e-9b641bfff733 |
5jrepb | Why can't web services simply scale up by buying more servers? | Think your way through a simple example, tickets to a concert. There are 10,000 seats in the auditorium, and some algorithm that says which seats are "best". You make a web program that accepts how many seats the customer wants and shows them the three "best" options for seats of that group size.
With one server, this is easy, and users take turns looking at seats. With two servers, this gets a little more complicated, since you can't sell the same seats to two people. That means you need a third server that keeps track of the seats that are "sold", "available", and "maybe". This operation can't be just replicated on more servers, because there is a single resource (the seat data structure) which requires atomic operation to update.
The data server is a simple function, maybe it can support 20 web user interface servers. That means the problem scales pretty well up to 20 web servers, and then it bogs down. With 25 servers, the users see a lot more hourglass "waiting for data server" lags and you don't actually sell any more tickets/hour than you did with 20 servers. Since the wait time is longer, more users demand more web servers, and more cost, but they don't generate any more revenue. Scaling the service bigger by just adding servers raises costs and holds income constant, making the company less profitable. That's bad, so companies don't do it. | 0931885b-a942-4ab5-9c97-8063de813516 |
3i4aed | Could the supreme court end birth right citizenship without a constitutional amendment? | It's pretty doubtful, since there's not much wiggle room in the 14th Amendment. The only exemptions are to people who are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. At the time, that referred to most Indian tribes. But since all Native Americans have been US citizens since 1924, that clause now applies only to children of diplomats. | a5ca40bb-967c-4f9e-951b-a498b32c071b |
4kn3it | Why were animals SO much bigger back then? | When you say back then I'm going to assume you mean millions of years ago, and more specifically the Carboniferous period (300-260Mya). The reason organisms were much bigger then is due to the increased oxygen levels within the atmosphere allowing much larger organisms to be supported. An example of this that is quite interesting is the giant insects such as Arthropleura which are giant Centipede's around 3m in length and around 30cm wide.
This website has a photo of the tracks left by one, the 2nd photo down. _URL_0_ | f45cf2cc-3ede-4c69-a08e-c84fc341429a |
1teo2f | Why is software/video games so expensive in Australia compared to places like the US or Europe? | The simple answer is that people in Australia are willing to pay more for the same product. If everyone in Australia got together and said we're only going to buy video games if they are equivalent in price to the US counterparts, then that's exactly what would happen (i.e. prices would come down to match US games).
The more complex answer is it has to do with things like:
- Differences in wages
- Differences in the cost of living
- Lack of alternatives/competition
- Factoring in operating costs
Specifically, wages in Australia are much higher than those in countries like the US. Whereas you may only be paid $7.25 USD per hour for a minimum-wage job in the US, the equivalent job in Australia would pay you roughly $14.60 USD per hour -- That's over 2x as much pay! Basically this means that Australians have a lot more spending money available that allows them to afford more expensive games as compared to people earning money in the US.
The second point is also tied into wages. Because Australians have more spending money (as they tend to earn more for the same job), this results in the price of everything being higher relative to prices in the US. Basically, Australian prices take into consideration the fact that Australians, on average, have more spending money available so everything becomes more expensive because people are able to afford more expensive items and retailers will keep raising their prices to match whatever consumers are willing to pay.
In terms of (lack of) alternatives/competition, this is partly the result of Australia's geographic location. People from countries say like Canada (for example) can relatively easily (and cheaply) import software/games from the US if there is a large price difference... so manufacturers/retailers know the Canadian price has to be similar to the US price or people would just find alternative ways to get the software/game from the US market.
When you're talking about countries like Australia, however, the cost of shipping and importing software/games to such a remote country means it's just not worth it. Also, due to incompatibilities (region codes, power system differences etc.) it is often not possible or practical to import from other markets. This means that people are willing to pay more in Australian retail stores because buying from alternative sources (e.g. getting the game shipped from the US) is not a realistically viable option.
Lastly, some of the price difference can be attributed to additional costs in operations. For example, it costs game manufacturers more to ship game discs to Australia than within the US, so Australian retailers have to pay a larger wholesale cost on each unit (as compared to US retailers) so the price is naturally bumped up to maintain a similar profit margin. Also, apart from shipping, there are other operating costs like the cost of lawyers/legal teams that help ensure their business is operating within compliance of Australian law and is following all appropriate industry regulations. | 99581c1e-71b6-4fda-8e5e-661ed9134f66 |
53lh60 | Sarepta announced their new drug, Exondys 51, will cost $300,000 a year. How can patients afford the treatment? Who pays for this? | Insurance companies mainly are the ones who pay. Drugs are expensive, especially new drugs there's a lot of cost involved, and this is a rare disease if they're going to be able to make back the costs of development and testing they need a big price tag. | dbe261cb-195e-4b46-862c-161c88c494e0 |
6on5hk | Why does antisemitism refer only to the Jewish people even though the term "Semite" encompasses both Arabs and Jews? | Because the term was coined by people who used it to refer to groups that specifically hated Jews (Such as the Nazis), not groups that hated Jews and/or Arabs (For example, the Nazis got along pretty well with the Arab world, especially because of their shared antisemitism).
_URL_0_ | d5c9e45f-2dc4-4934-a08b-d1b8a2c39a63 |
717a4t | What are Complex numbers, why, how and what for? How can square of number be negative? | Well, to explain this a bit, the key idea of complex numbers is that you add rotation to the mix of what numbers can do.
You know how multiplying by a negative number kinda swaps the direction of the multiplied number? If you multiply something by -2, you stretch it by 2, and then turn that number on a number line by 180 degrees. Sorta. So 1 becomes -2, and -2 becomes 4.
Complex numbers add all 360 degrees to this. Each number has two parts: their magnitude(size), and their direction(which way that magnitude is pointing at). So -1 in complex number terms is 1, pointing at direction of 180 degrees.
And all the same rules hold. To multiply two numbers, you multiply their magnitudes, and add up their directions as angles. So for example, if you have calculation -2 * -2, then you have to consider magnitude and direction of both numbers. Both numbers have magnitude of 2, and direction of 180 degrees. So you multiply magnitudes to get 4, and you add up 180 + 180 degrees, to get 360 degrees, or a whole turn. So you're back at pointing towards positive direction. So you get 4. Just as with real numbers.
Complex numbers however allow you to choose any direction, even those other than 180 or 0 degrees. Notably, imaginary unit *i* has magnitude of 1, and direction of 90 degrees. So i^2 has magnitude of 1 * 1, and direction of 90 + 90 degrees = 180 degrees, so it's -1.
Some reasons for why these numbers are interesting are that allowing any directions makes these numbers fairly cool when you study things like rotation. Complex numbers also make polynomials equations always have solutions. Even better, on complex plane you can define a whole new way functions can be "nice", and with these nice properties you can then prove useful things. Unfortunately I lack the ability to really explain why complex numbers make this niceness pop up like they do. | 8581c1f0-74fa-43bd-838d-28896f97b6d2 |
25i8c3 | Why don't we breathe in fully (deeply) with every breath? | At rest the body does not require a lot of oxygen. It would be a waste of energy to expand the lungs fully each time we took a breath.
Also try taking multiple deep breaths at a time, you'll start to feel quite light headed! | 00e98152-490d-48df-92aa-f36fb3a98176 |
43f3wh | Why does alimony exist in a world fighting for equal women rights? In other words, how is it okay for women to demand men's earnings after a divorce? | Alimony is actually pretty feminist and really really really old, and is intended to protect women (esp housewives with children) after their husbands have left them. Historically, women did not hold jobs, and also had primary responsibility for taking care of the children. Thus, when the husband decided to leave, they would take away the sole source of income from the children and also the wife, leaving them unable to support themselves. So, protection was put in so that this wouldn't happen.
As it continued on, this was changed to only if the husband was deemed to be at fault, as the marriage would have continued if the husband hadn't done whatever he did.
Currently, this is spousal and not necessarily gender specific. If one spouse makes more than the other, and a prenup isn't signed, the poorer spouse has to be reimbursed.
It's also important to know that at the time alimony was first recorded, the husband had to reimburse he dowry, which he had been paid for marrying the woman in question. He also had to give her land so she could support herself. | 62a15b40-5e44-46fb-bb49-0e7866347cb8 |
83jju4 | Why can time be dilated or compressed but never go backwards? | Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:
1. [ELI5: Why time moves forwards, not backwards. ](_URL_5_) ^(_5 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why is time travel backwards not possible? ](_URL_3_) ^(_6 comments_)
1. [ELI5: What causes time to move forward? ](_URL_6_) ^(_28 comments_)
1. [eli5: How can we know if time travel is/isn't possible? ](_URL_0_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why we cant travel backwards in time. ](_URL_2_) ^(_4 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why time travel cannot exist ](_URL_1_) ^(_85 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why can we travel forwards in time but not backwards? ](_URL_7_) ^(_3 comments_)
1. [ELI5:Why can't we turn back time? ](_URL_4_) ^(_20 comments_) | 828f75f1-feb7-4d9f-bf6a-acc5e5f52e52 |
8iowca | What is the psychology behind competitiveness? | Dominance. Usually being the best puts you in a leadership role. Leadership means success. And humans usually tend to strive for success. | 22311e5c-eeee-4595-a6f0-029fd549bc53 |
6ya0dj | Why do we rely on donations from the public for disaster relief? Isn't this the government's responsibility? | > Shouldn't the government be able to fully fund disaster relief without relying on contributions from the general public?
If you want to fully fund disaster relief, that means convincing voters to raise taxes, or cut spending elsewhere.
getting Disaster funding is notoriously tricky. No one wants to pay for it until it happens (especially if it happens to them), and no one wants to subsidize areas that are disaster prone. If federal funds are used, it means places that don't get hit (say, Wyoming) will pay for something only FL/Texas would use. Voters in Wyoming might not be super keen on that.
> I believe the federal government should pay for these resources - even if they just cut a private company a check to feed/temporarily house/etc. victims. Our tax dollars should cover this.
If you think it should- great! convince other voters. Right now, you're in the minority. The government does do quite a bit for relief. It's just not fully funded.
It's not a question of whether the government can or can't. It can, but people don't necessarily agree with you.
> I'm focused more on why the public is being urged (and many corporate leaders have donated millions) to donate to disaster relief - which goes to companies like the Red Cross. The Red Cross in turn pays for food, water, etc. to help people during disaster time.
The idea is that the federal government covers the bare minimum of what people want federally covered. However, private donations are encouraged for people who feel more should be done. This allows people who wish to help more, to do so. The people who don't, don't. | e487f861-dc7e-4fac-baf2-c90051e577f1 |
j7eyu | the "Super Congress" | The Debt Ceiling bill that was approved by Congress and signed by President Obama today (8/2) created a special joint committee of Congress. The committee is to be made up of members from both the House of Representatives and the Senate and will have a total of 12 members, 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans. The job of this 'supercongress' is to find 1.5 trillion dollars to cut from the national budget by Thanksgiving.
They then write a bill detailing the cuts and it gets sent to the House and the Senate for approval under a closed rule (no amendments), no fillibustering in the senate (a technique the minority often uses to effectively kill the bill before it gets brought to a vote), and passes by a simple-majority (50% + 1).
Implications: 12 dudes get to determine what to cut and what to save. Then the rest of Congress gets to simply say Yea or Nay. If the bill doesn't pass it goes back to the 'Supercongress' for another attempt to appease a majority. | 0872a686-7bbb-4141-92c3-aee7c41882cf |
1xrb9c | Why are non nicotine electronic cigarettes illegal for minors? | The are thinking that it may be a gateway back to the time when smoking really did make you look cool | 1f1fd432-817a-44ed-9c0b-c7ddac507b41 |
6p90ql | What criteria do ingredients need to meet in order to be classified as "active/medical"? | It needs to enact a physiological change on your body, as opposed to simply being processed like normal food.
The change has to be noticeable and measurable, and often directed towards a specific medicinal goal. | d148b8e1-2880-453c-abd2-a5ea222939a8 |
54kv1i | Why aren't drummer suing each other all the time for plagiarism? | Copyright applies to creatively unique works of art; basic standard beats aren't necessarily "unique", or unique in a way that cannot be reproduced without having heard the original version. Like, for example, recipes, dictionary lists, and other basic representations of information aren't copyrightable because anyone assembling the same generic info will result in the same list. There's not much creative you can do with a 4/4 beat that isn't related to the copyright on the whole song. It sort of like copyrighting the use of alternating color stripes; creative expression within a limited set of options isn't copyrighteable, people have been making stripes for centuries and you need to prove your stripes are different than any others ever. Same for drumming; you need to prove that, if you want to hold the copyright on something, you have to be the first one to have done it.
All this is general information, there's always exceptions and examples of copyrightable ways of dealing with very basic things, for example: [read about the "Amen Break" copyright debate](_URL_1_) for an example of the exact same thing you're originally describing. This is a piece of work, just a short sample, that has gone from a creative, copyrighteable work to being treated as public domain when it clearly is not public domain. On the other hand, the [Bo Diddley Beat](_URL_0_) has the guy's *name* in the description but is used without fear of copyright infringement all over the place.
The other factor: copyright has to be *defended by the person who owns the copyright*. If somebody never sues anybody for using their copyrighted work, it doesn't matter if there's copyright or not; there's no governmental-entity copyright-police watching for copyright violations. If nobody sues you for using the Bo Diddley Beat or the Amen Break, you get to use it. It doesn't mean you won't be sued *someday*, it just means you're not caught now. But, my guess is drummers are too busy drumming to worry about trying to prove in court that those eight bars of syncopation belong to them and them alone. | 23b0691d-9da8-46d8-991e-27f9ece5ce64 |
4t6jwr | Why does it sometimes feel like time slows down and and I have enhanced reflexes? | Everybody here is correct, apart from the Witcher guy, and the bug dude, but nobody has explained why time seems to slow down.
Our bodies measure how time passes by the amount of information it processes. The more information the brain is processing, the slower time goes, and the less information the brain is processing, the faster time goes. This is also why time passes quicker when you are not zoned out: because you are not focusing on your environment and are thus processing minimal information.
Adrenaline kicks all of your senses into overdrive, and the amount of environmental stimulus you are capable of processing increases dramatically, hence the illusion that time has actually slowed. This enables you to respond in a seemingly impossible time frame. This is called hyperarousal (note that in psychology, arousal simply means that a physical response is caused; it is not necessarily sexual arousal). I can remember being hit by a car seven years ago with photographic accuracy, because in the instant before impact, adrenaline was erupted into my bloodstream, causing all of my senses to sharpen and allowing my brain to process all information as it was being received, and it created a response that saved my life. Everything that happened in that moment is permanently etched into my mind, and some people have difficulty revisioning such situations. I just find it funny that my last thoughts could have been "bugger".
You should see a doctor if this happens frequently for no reason: adrenaline induces the physical responses that other people have commented on, and these can be stressful on the body if they occur to frequently. | 7e1d812a-4ae6-42db-868b-42ce03ca98ab |
145mpr | How come humans need to eat three times a day to sustain good health? | Eating three times a day is a relatively new thing.
Eating once a day was quite common throughout most of civilised history, and before that eating once every couple of days may have been quite common.
Humans are warm blooded mammals with a high basal metabolic rate (the amount of energy we use each day). We much eat quite a lot of food in comparison to other animals. That large amount of food can be eaten in one large amount rarely, or in small meals frequently.
EDIT: Why is it that humans require so many calories? Our brains and we are warm blooded (we make our own heat). Our brains use about 20 - 25% of our daily calorie use. | ae2b6657-c306-4de2-a3c2-0449baa32037 |
3206av | What's the problem with loaning money for college in the states? | Our education system is in complete meltdown mode. So here's the deal - all college students have to fill out a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). The FAFSA tells you how much you can get in government grants (don't have to be paid back) and how much of a federal loan you qualify for. Here's the issue - until you're 24 ~~(I think it might be 26 now)~~, you don't qualify as an independent student, meaning you have to provide your parent's income on your FAFSA, making it impossible to get grants, and the amount of federal loans available drops (I believe.) The only way to become an independent student before that age is to get married, have a baby, join the military, be an orphan, or get legally emancipated from your parents.
Now, if your parents aren't actually helping you pay for school, then the only place left to turn is private bank loans. And without a co-signer, a college student without a lot of built up credit ends up with an outrageous interest rate. After a couple of years, private banks no longer want to give you a loan. Then, you're basically dead in the water.
This is exactly what happened to me.
EDIT: Checking my facts *after* I post. Silly me. | 45379462-6911-4ec5-bc39-61a64d072b8b |
8i5sbw | why does chilled water taste refreshing and sweet but warm/hot water taste disgusting? | Have you ever tried room temp kool-aid? Different temperatures have an effect on the sensitivity of different receptor cells on your tongue.
[Here's a good article on the subject](_URL_0_) | 15362521-40c2-42db-a3fc-84506a4d7990 |
3qswqm | How do we determine the directional source of a sound? | I think it has to do with the time difference between one ear hearing the sound first, then the other. | e1ef112f-feca-4bf1-abf3-ac03a53d8e19 |
24hnet | Where did the phrase "1 Mississippi 2 Mississippi" come from? | The idea is that it takes one second to say Mississippi.
So if you want to time something in seconds, you count it out while saying Mississippi. | 1e732353-657b-4547-8a24-cc6e5ea7c799 |
4c9rny | How can companies make food taste so consistent? | I actually found ketchup tastes very different in different parts of the world at McDonald's. | 5e2014c7-4f8c-4147-8284-12d1fcabcba1 |
ldddt | The Millenium Bug | A lot of things like air traffic control and power plants were run on very old but very reliable computers from the 1970s. Very old computers had tiny, tiny amounts of space to store information. To the point that you had to squeeze every bit of space you could.
When storing a date, a good way to save space was to write MM/DD/YY instead of MM/DD/YYYY. Like for August 12, 1974, you'd just put 08/12/74.
Now, at the time, nobody thought their programs would still be running 26 years later, so they didn't anticipate the problem of what to do after 12/31/99. It would become 01/01/00. Computers are fairly dumb, so if you tell a computer "how many years since 01/12/94" and it's "01/01/00", the computer will say "it's been -94 years."
This meant stuff would break! In theory, power might go out, bank computers might crash and you have no way to get at your money, planes might be grounded, all kinds of stuff could go horribly wrong. They called this the millenium bug or y2k (year 2000) problem.
But people realized the potential for catastrophe starting in the mid 1990s, everyone combed through their computer codes to fix potential problems, and everything important worked just fine.
I did hear of a cash register that stopped working, but every y2k problem that I know of was trivial like that.
Some other people were scared of the year 2000 because some religious nuts said it would be the apocalypse. Similar kinda thing with 2012. | 7bbb624e-379f-4d7b-9735-9b610cf2a244 |
4jqanm | Why does the body store fat (or so much of it) if we can not realistically live off what the fat cells provide, why not have a cut off point? | Too much body fat was never a health concern for 99.999% of human existence. It is only a concern now because of how much food we have access to and the sedentary life the modern world has made.
Evolution only kicks in to traits that affect reproduction or survivability *until reproduction*. Evolution does not made things "better" for us, or make things more ideal. | 9080ea14-1d25-45bc-9086-b50019a260de |
7yk7e4 | ; Why do two headed snakes seem so common? | It does happen with other animals, and they tend to not survive. Snakes are basically a tube with a digestive system...so they deal with issues pretty well. When you only have to eat once a month, fighting with your other head (in captivity!) isn't as life-threatening. | 1cb0bf14-6f1c-4804-a7e6-24654fb068bb |
ql140 | The difference between mutation and evolution. | Mutation is a naturally occurring phenomenon within DNA. As mutation occurs, certain traits change. If a new trait makes survival more likely, this trait is likely to become more widespread throughout later generations of a population. This is an aspect of evolution.
TL;DR: Mutation that leads to beneficial traits is a cause of evolution. | fc4f4d83-6e09-4ab7-ba15-3d5a28303d10 |
29ahpm | Why people keep saying that banks/bankers are bad? | If you're referring to the banks that helped cause the financial crisis in 2008:
* Many took the money people put in the bank and used it on investments they didn't understand and still didn't understand because some ratings agency said they're okay, winding up losing a whole lot of the money people put in the bank.
* Many gave out loans to people without actually actually checking if they were telling the truth. In other words, they loaned your money to someone without checking to see if they could pay it back.
* In the midst of the recession, the government loaned them money at near 0% interest rate with the expectation that they would then take that money and loan it to small businesses to help the economy recover. They didn't do that and used the money they borrowed to pretend that everything is okay.
* Despite all this, they pretend that they know exactly what they're doing and complain that the real reason is there are too many rules telling them how to behave properly.
That's why I don't like them. Other people may have other reasons. | 47aaeb96-e723-4965-9dfe-172b477d6246 |
27vcjw | Why does my body get covered in goosebumps and why do I feel light headed / relaxed when I'm really enjoying a piece of music or song? | There are two competing theories on this.
One, listening to music triggers the same reward pathways as addiction and reward, coating your striatum in dopamine. Your brain can predict (to some extent) what's going to happen next in the music, so it's anticipating the dopamine shot before it actually gets it, and it's that moment between the anticipation and the reward that gives us goosebumps.
Two, the amydala (what controls our emotions) reacts uniquely to music, acting as if it has 'real' triggers. However, your brain knows that this isn't 'real', so is constantly shutting that down before it becomes a true fight-or-flight reaction, so we get the hairs-on-end physical reaction without the adrenaline. | 09d685eb-1f2d-4439-a251-89796a9d3a6d |
2fo93x | Why was Super 8 film such a popular format at its time and even when it was already outdated? | It was cheap. The projectors were cheap, the cameras were cheap, and the film was cheap.
As a kid, I had an 8mm camera and projector. No sound, but I made a lot of movies with it. Before the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market, it only cost a few dollars to purchase the film and have it developed. | 32c6088b-3c81-4786-8c78-e1ddcbf0cb55 |
4kdwis | Why would an asteroid collision wipe out life on earth? | > but would it stay there for so long that we would all freeze to death?
Your bigger worry is starving because all the plants have died out due to lack of sunlight. But yes it would stay up there for months AT LEAST.
Assuming you weren't caught in the blast or any of the earthquakes or megatsunamis such an impact would cause of course. | 83a6a9bb-63e1-48b2-bc2f-5677463592ce |
mh219 | Why are much-wanted TV shows like Firefly and Arrested Development (well, previously) so hard to get back on the air despite a rabid fan base? | OK, Like you are 5:
1) TV shows are expensive to make; for example an "inexpensive" show such as a reality show on TLC runs about $700,000 per episode. A drama such as Firefly (with special effects) or AD (with dedicated sets, larger crew, etc) costs much more.
2) Additionally, each 1/2 time slot has a "cost", based on how much money a network thinks it can/should make in that 1/2 hour.
3) The "good majority of folks online" could very well be a false sample, and in fact the "rabid fanbase" may not provide the amount of viewers necessary to cover (1) and (2) compared to other shows that can. You are online all the time, so it seems like a large viewership to you.
To the networks, it is all about minimizing (1) and maximizing (2) -- and your favorite shows cannot compete with "Ghost Hunters" or "Toddlers & Tiaras" in that equation. | 53d721e6-4471-4f85-a008-c011668f2f8d |
6hx04f | Why should we drink ~2L of water a day if most of it just goes straight through us? | It doesn't go straight through us. Water is used by many of the bodily processes we go through on a daily basis, and in addition the water that we don't "use" is used to wash out waste and transport waste away, as well as help act as a heat sink inside our bodies.
Water is useful in many functions and very little passes straight through the body without being used by at least one function. | 6d4b5262-a8ad-47d5-a0b4-4b0bd0236cd8 |
6mym27 | How does Tiger Balm work? | It has capsaicin, which is the same chemical which makes hot sauce spicy. Capsaicin mildly irritates the skin, which basically distracts the brain from whatever else was hurting in a process called counter-irritation. With the brain distracted, you don't notice whatever was hurting quite so much, so it hurts less. | cea1e1e2-cb77-4106-9634-6ace0e48f5de |
1w1a45 | How can the quietest room in the world be -9 decibels? | Decibels are a logarithmic scale. 0 isn't no sound, it's just the lower-limit of what a human can typically hear. So -9 isn't no sound at all, it's just quieter than the quietest sound a human can detect, by a factor about the same as the factor between 0 decibels and 10. | 327aca9b-ccdd-477d-8d42-e9630475714a |
1vchz9 | War crimes/law | > - Who makes the laws that make war crimes "crimes"?
The United Nations and its constituent organizations are responsible for international law.
> - How long has the world even had "rules" about war?
I would argue both since forever and that we still don't.
People have fought wars according to certain preconceived notions of what's right and wrong for as long as humans have existed. They've codified it on occasion, like the UN or chivalry, but largely it's been ad hoc and in response to an event (like world wars one and two).
> - Who is charged with a war crime? He who gave the order, or he who saw it to completion? The national leader or the military officer?
All of the above. You are responsible for ordering a crime or undertaking it. You're also responsible for not stopping it under certain conditions, although the levels of culpability vary.
> - How are they prosecuted? Who sentences them?
They're prosecuted because someone turns them over to a prosecuting body. In practice this means after they've been forcibly ousted from office (since no sane man trades sovereignty over a nation for imprisonment, thus is why asylum is so often offered to dictators, to get them out of office and done killing).
The forcible ousting is either domestic (a coup) or international (usually American).
In practice this means international law requires sovereign nations to enforce it.
> - How can you possibly ensure that all nations will follow these rules? Nations dissolve, revolt, unify, and become occupied all the time, so treaties wit one govt (e.g. Soviet Union) might not be applicable to a country that takes its place (e.g. Russian Federation).
You can't. International law is bullshit. Its a trumped up excuse for powerful nations to enforce standards of behavior on less powerful nations. That doesn't mean I think its bad, I think standards of behavior are important... It does, however, mean we should recognize it for what it is. | 4fa1aeb2-6707-4180-8046-1f6f2867cecb |
11kyol | How to drive a car with manual shift. | You can write pages of text explaining how to work the clutch or how to pick the right gear, but you wont learn much without actually trying it in real life. Very much like learning about riding a bicycle from a book.
There are two additional things you need to worry about while driving manual. First is picking the right gear. You start on a lower gear, which is high torque, but low speed, and slowly progress to higher gears which are lower torque but higher speed. If you come to a up-slope, you might need to lower your gear for a bit. With experience you can tell when to change gears from the pitch of the engine sound (which is pretty indicative of the current RPM). The general rule of thumb is to shift-up when RPM reaches upper limit and shift-down when RPM reaches lower limit. If the RPM falls below a certain value, the engine can turn off.
The second thing is the process of changing gears itself, which is where the clutch comes into play. The third pedal, the clutch pedal needs to be depressed whenever you're changing gears and slowly eased back in for the gears to mesh properly. Again, the only way to get this right is to practice. | cb1e1a4e-ac38-476f-9d86-4438790d44e3 |
1j9fr1 | What's the difference in a violin and a fiddle? | _URL_0_
> A fiddle is any bowed string musical instrument, most often the violin.[1] It is also a colloquial term for the instrument used by players in all genres, including classical music. Fiddle playing, or fiddling, refers to various styles of music.
All violins are fiddles, but not all fiddles are violins.
Basically, a Fiddle is a category of stringed instruments, specifically the category that is played with a bow, not picked or strummed. | cf147ccd-fab9-44e2-bb06-21494aedb204 |
j378h | LI5: Can you explain why some people think buying a house is a bad investment? | House costs 100k (at least). You put put 10k down. You owe a bank 90k
House value drops a lot, you try to sell your house but you can't until you lower the price to 50k.
You now have 50k. You now owe a bank 90k.
You now have -40k
That is a way in which it would be a bad idea to invest in a house. This is an extreme example obviously, but lesser examples happen all the time.
I own (have for a year or so) but if I tried to sell now I'd owe the bank money but wouldn't have a house. If I had rented I wouldn't be in this situation.
The good thing is I don't need to sell, so soon I will be in a position where it was definitely a good idea to buy, as opposed to just probably a good idea now.
Unless my house value tanks, then I'm screwed. | b89dcf4e-b683-4614-b74d-56ffd32c9a19 |
1qdr24 | Why is it considered embarrassing to get an erection in public? | The same reason it would be embarrassing if you sneezed and got snot all over yourself, if you had sudden diarrhea, or vomited. These are all normal bodily functions but are perceived as embarrassing by our culture. Also, anything related to sexuality is inherently perceived as embarrassing. It's the same reason it's considered taboo for a woman to walk around shirtless but OK for a man to. | 296b4ab7-636b-4f36-a7b5-f71fe7dadfc6 |
3669f9 | Why do cars have blind spots (dead angle)? Can't we design side mirrors that would help eliminate this problem? | You actually can set up mirrors on a regular car to eliminate blind spots. Most people just set their mirrors up incorrectly. | cf82123e-8023-437c-8e40-7d6a58d018e3 |
2k90ga | Why do most people sneeze in groups of three? | I disagree with your premise that most people sneeze in groups of three. | 8ca9225f-454a-431c-8845-f388ae2450a9 |
mzyiy | Why do redditors watch 'my little pony' | Hahaha, this question again.
The answer is pretty simple: The show is *actually good.* So far in Season 2 they've had
- a fight with a god of chaos (voiced by John De Lancie aka Q from Star Trek)
- Two big musical numbers
- temporarily turned evil and beat each other up,
- shot-for-shot recreated a Star Wars scene
- set off a rainbow-colored nuclear blast
- snapped a bear's neck,
- had a *severe* psychological breakdown
- and referenced the Big Lebowski.
And we're nine eps in. Basically, it's not the old pony show at all.
It still has it's cute moments but they're enjoyable because they don't talk *down* to you, and rarely hammer you over the head with a moral. The writers are all talent from other cartoons (including things like South Park) or other "real" shows; the result is characters with some depth, actual conflicts, and a fleshed-out almost Harry Potterish universe...it's like nobody told the ponies they're ponies.
I never thought for a second I'd like it either. But I do! | 5cfecc8d-0b13-4c4c-a1e4-7a1c604cfd01 |
5nwz8c | how do muscles push? | Skeletal muscles move bones by pulling on them. Because we control this movement, they are called voluntary muscles. Muscles can pull but not push, so skeletal muscles are often arranged in pairs that pull bones in opposite directions. | a4a2b7b1-1019-4eed-aaf8-fbf1ab577249 |
1r0a55 | Why do we still have daylight's saving time? | Daylight savings time is actually what allows you to get more sunlight in the evenings after work. Now that it's the end of year, we're done with daylight saving's for this year, so it seems to get dark earlier.
Supporters of daylight saving's time like it because it shifts the time when it's light out to later in the day, when outdoor activities are more common. There are also arguments that it saves electricity, though that's still up for debate. | 9530a3ea-83a1-4569-a652-694951d6f5fb |
6k3mnq | Why the sound of a thunder can be heard for a couple of seconds, although the lightning strike itself takes much shorter time to happen? | Ever wondered why sometimes you hear a super loud crack that's quick? Other times a rolling boom that goes on for awhile?
Some of it is echoing, but a large part is the orientation if the lightning itself. If the lightning bolt is entirely parallel to you , then once it strikes and generates the sound wave, the wave hits you all at once.
Now imagine if the lightning bolt stretches from somewhere close to you to someplace far away. You get a sound wave that hits you from the bit of lightning closest to you and you continue hearing the wave as the rest of the sound comes.
To clarify, if the bolt of lightning is oriented like a baseball bat on it's side, aka you can see the full length of it, you will porbably hear a louder crack as the entire wave hits you at once.
If the baseball bat is on its end, where you can only see the tip of the bat and nothing else, then it's entire length produces a sound wave but each point of the bat is at different distances, so each sound wave hits you at different times creating the rolling thunder effect.
This is stupidly simplistic, and lightning can fork and twist and turn into all kinds of shapes. It's intensity can be stronger or weaker, it can run parallel to the ground or perpendicular. All these factors, and many more, all shape the sound you hear.
Another main factor is wind. It blows sound around quite well, especially since lightning is frequent during storms that create wind.
Hope this helps :) | 08ccbdbc-0357-4e85-a0f4-7777681f1a61 |
3yqz9j | What does the word "dank" have to do with memes? | "Dank" in this context literally refers to good-smelling marijuana. It's a pretty popular term amongst stoners which caused it to become popular amongst some teenagers, who probably used the term "dank memes" non-ironically at some point. Because it sounds so silly the term "dank memes" became a meme itself. | b0f5d2e1-6071-4a32-911b-eeaa612eb492 |
5vxcv6 | What are ACH transactions, and how is it a bad system? | I wouldn't call it a bad system, just an outdated one. ACH is the system that US banks use to transfer money to each other. The system is run by the Federal Reserve Bank. When you request to send funds to an account at another bank, your bank sends the cash to the Fed, and the Fed then sends the funds to the receiving bank.
People don't like the system because:
- The Fed acts as a middleman, so there is a lack of privacy in the transaction.
- The transfer isn't instantaneous. There are strides being made to speed up the process, but it can still take up to a day for the Fed to move funds.
- Its a legacy system developed forty plus years ago. | 5cf74f03-d1b3-4d25-a93c-9a4af069f5f8 |
3nurhm | I get how prime numbers work, but why are they important? | For a long time, they really weren't important. The study of prime numbers was seen as "pure mathematics": the rules about them were consistent, but couldn't really be applied to anything "real world".
Relatively recently (since the 1970s), prime number have been found to be useful. It is very easy to multiply two primes to create a "composite" number, but very hard to factor (divide) a composite into primes. This imbalance is the basis of public key cryptography, which is a way to share information secretly without needing to share a specific secret key.
To explain public key cryptography, imagine a lockbox that can be locked with one key and unlocked only with a different key. To receive messages secretly, you only need the unlock key, which you never need to share with anyone, ever. On the other hand, you don't care who has access to the locking key, you can give it away to everyone without worry.
The most common public key algorithm is reversible, too... If I lock the lockbox with my secret "unlock" key, anyone can unlock it with the public "lock" key. This is useful for digital signatures... if the box is unlockable with the "public" key, it proves that it was locked with the "private" key, which is proof that it was locked by me. | c03943fc-0335-4e3b-827a-ef0fb8b522aa |
3oc7p0 | how did humans clean their teeth before toothpaste? | some didn't like most parts of Europe, like a lot of poor people don't.
other places used to use tooth powder and their fingers. a bit like charcoal, like in india they call it monkey powder.
but in middle east and Muslim country they used to use miswak due to the prophet pbuh recommending it. and still do.
it's the twig of the salvadora persica tree. and it's broken, then end made bristly like a toothbrush and then used to brush the mouth, gums, throat etc.
it's been proven to be more effective than toothpaste and toothbrush in killing oral bacteria.
but it does require access to fresh sewak tree to use, which is rare in the west.
you have to realise before the farming of sugar and sugary foods, most people did not have oral health problems.
most people did not have access to enough food or alcohol or sugar for oral hygiene to become the serious problem that it is now. so people weren't losing their teeth so easily till the industrial and slave revolution. | 1f6bb44b-90cf-4176-b3db-88049ad66f3d |
8tekz5 | Why do sunsets look incredible after nasty thunderstorms? | The refraction of light from all the water vapour in the sky due to cloud cover and high humidity means brighter and more dramatic colours for us as the sun sets. Each water molecule acts kind of like a prism, distorting the light into different colours. A similar thing happens after a bush fire, with a smoky sky making a stunning red sunset. | 334a0d8b-a243-438a-9be6-294a090e3040 |
rfyuj | How can cults like Aum Shinrikyo be able to perform such obviously insane and violent acts? Wouldn't the members reach a point where they'd want to refuse to murder or kidnap people? | There are a few factors at play.
First, you don't start making flat-out crazy requests, you start with a few reasonable requests here and there to establish a bit of space in the group's heads. Each time your request goes just a little bit further than the last, but never so far that it seems unreasonable compared to the one before it. Sales are a great example of how this works; you just bought a TV, you might as well get some Monster cables to go with it, but you should plug those cables into this surge protector we sell, and don't forget the extended warranty too! You're more likely to agree to the extra things because they don't seem unreasonable, considering you've already bought the TV.
Second, cults tend to work because of isolation. You've already agreed to a bunch of other minor requests, so what could possibly go wrong with moving into the compound? When we're somewhere unfamiliar we look to other people, specifically those who seem to know what they're doing, to know how we're supposed to act. Suddenly the only people you can determine the correct course of action from are other members, and they're all looking at you too. The only person who seems to know what's going on is the leader so his/her example is believed to be correct. After all, nobody's jumping up and shouting "hey, this is crazy!", so people shut out that inner voice that says "danger!" because they see no one else act on it. (You might find the [bystander effect](_URL_0_) an interesting read.)
Finally, they try to create a sense of belonging and solidarity through their rituals. Not only are these suddenly a bunch of people you look to when you're lost, they're now your family as well. They're the people who reinforce everything you believe in and tell you the rest of the world is wrong when you start to doubt.
If you want to see all these factors at work, sit through a timeshare presentation sometime. I'm not joking either, they are set up to trigger every instinct that bypasses common sense and turn an otherwise sensible person into a believer. | 6d54bb09-c14b-4617-9f8a-2c8868b69b62 |
6ox6e3 | What are the steps to becoming a Professor? | - Get a bachelors degree, get a masters degree, get a doctorate.
- Fill out lots of job applications and then go on lots of interviews.
- Publish papers, write a book or two.
- Fill out lots more job applications. Go on lots more interviews.
- Get hired at a community college as an adjunct professor for 25K per year.
- Become depressed because that is what employees at McDonalds make. | 71a9328e-f6c3-468e-be5e-f02a459c9f24 |
1ygrfk | Why is Shakespeare Still so popular? | There is this quote by Robert Graves that I think sums it up: "The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good—in spite of all the people who say he is very good."
And the more you learn about English poetry, the more you realize that Shakespeare was not anything resembling a fraud, or an overrated hack, but a genius who used every poetic means imaginable to express a given point, and sometimes invented new ones. I don't think it's possible to create a complete bullet point list of why he matters, but I would at least start with the following obvious ones:
1) **His meter is really really good.** I'm not sure what your native language is, but if your native tongue isn't accentual-syllabic in character (and by that, I mean that the meter of your native language's poetry doesn't take into account BOTH the amount of syllables in a line AND the amount of accents in a line), then this will be difficult to really get your head around, but understand that Shakespeare's rhythms and his variations in the metrical line are fucking amazing and stretched the conventions of the time to its limit. He used these little tricks in the rhythm of the line to emphasise the emotion of what was being said.
Take a simple example, where the metre of the line is regular (plain old iambic pentameter):
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."
This line doesn't seem very interesting. There are no rhythmic variations to speak of, but what's curious is which words receive the accents.
"To-MOR-row AND to-MOR-row AND to-MOR-row"
What you'll find (and, indeed, what your mind and your crotch notice about it, even if you yourself don't) is that there's a really clever syncopation going on here. It's very very rare for the word "and" to be accented in an English sentence, but in this case, the "and"s receive strong accents. Macbeth says this line just as he has reached his breaking point, and he's imagining what fresh hell the future will hold for him. The futility of his life, and the tremendous burden of all those tomorrows is heartbreaking, and emphasized by the fact that the "and"s here are accented. Every tomorrow is a new pain. It's as if he's saying, "I'll going to have to live through tomorrow, AND I'm going to have to live the day after that, AND the day after that." Only a man who's thoroughly broken talks that way. And it's evident not only from the lines that follow, but by the very rhythm of this one line itself, that this is a man at the end of his rope.
It's merely one example, sure. But Shakespeare's poetry is filled with brilliant rhythmic devices like this that enhance the expressivity of his poetry.
2) **His language is unequaled.** I needn't go into examples about this, since a simple google search will show just how many turns of phrase that we use regularly were coined by Shakespeare. Some have become stale with age and overuse, but even a simple phrase like "The wheel is come full circle" is actually extraordinaily clever once you try to forget that people have been overusing it for 400 years.
And, bear in mind, I don't just mean that his imagery is important because it became popular. His imagery is also extrodinarily beautiful, and manages to compress a lot of meaning into as few words as possible. Take another line from Macbeth: "Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself. / And falls on th' other." No matter which way you slice it, it's a beautiful, beautiful phrase, but it's also packed with meaning. You could spend entire pages pulling apart that phrase and how it relates to the thoughts and conflicts within Macbeth's spirit. Not one single word or syllable is misplaced, and it packs a TON of thematic and expressive density This density of expression, and this staggering beauty, is something that all poets have strived toward ever sense.
3) **His impact on the English language itself.** Whenever he was starved for a word, he just made one up. And another simple Googld search will show you that literally thousands of words that we use daily simply did not exist before Shakespeare invented them. By combining nouns (e.g. bed + room = bedroom), combining adjectives (e.g., faint + hearted = faint-hearted) or by negation (e.g. dress -- > undress), turning a verb into a noun (e.g., assassinate -- > assassination), or verbs into adjectives (e.g., laugh -- > laughable) he did a tremendous service to the English language by increasing the expressivity of certain hitherto unexpressed or misexpressed concepts. Look it up. The motherfucker invented THOUSANDS of words that we still use today.
4) **The three-dimensionality of his characters.** For the first time in the history of the English language, you had a poet who could fully express the inner motion and conflicts of the human mind. Don't get me wrong, plenty of great poets before him found wonderful ways to express human drama, but Shakespeare's characters are on an entirely different wavelength. I don't think I could say it any better than people like A.C. Bradley or Harold Bloom have already, but the extraordinary depth of Shakespeare's characters, and the notion that, rather than devices in a play, Shakespeare's characters were actually real people, with real problems and doubts, and sometimes were capable of thoughts and motivations that even the characters themselves were aware of, remained hugely influential.
And there's plenty more but I'm sick with a bad cold and I've run out of energy. | 08d948db-e4dc-4f65-88a7-e4ceef57adab |
zfnaz | why video games are always released on Tuesdays | I honestly have no idea why games are released the way they are, but I'd like to point out a few things.
As far as I know, the Tuesday release is North America only. Europe is Fridays, and I think Australia is Thursdays. I'm not sure about Japan.
And it seems to me that releases for Nintendo systems (or at least first- and second-party games) are always released on Sundays. | 3ccc2a4b-27e2-4212-9ed2-1507aa078327 |
67acfe | what is Millennials ? | We tend to refer to a whole generation of people by a name, because their fashion and internet memes / fads change from generation to generation.
Millennials are people born in the 1980's and 90's; unlike previous generations, they grew up with computers and internet and phones, and are quite active with social media. They were also just about out of college when the recession of 2001 hit the computer industry and caused a lot of them to be unable to get jobs. | 9f68bc88-dc32-4b1a-8f4c-cb2cc0276f0a |
1xg97n | Why isn't there an affordable working printer out there yet? They all suck. | Most printers these days use the "razor blade business model". They sell you a printer for the least amount of money they can, then make their profits on the consumables (such as ink cartridges). This exploits the fact that most consumers are sensitive to the initial price of an item, but not so sensitive (or sensible) about the ongoing cost of operation. It also exploits the fact that consumers have few good ways to judge the quality/reliability of such a product before they buy it, and that few of them pursue the few such resources that do exist.
These give the printer manufacturers incentive to make a product that works just well enough to survive the warranty period (usually) and to make it as cheaply as possible. | 6b5b3676-7967-439a-b41f-23b7d8ed6599 |
3g04zz | Where are all of the foreign domain names? | Generally, they're used by people who speak that language, and you presumably are reading English content. If you're making English-language queries on _URL_1_, for instance, you'll be shown results that are in English, which are far more likely to be hosted on English-language domains. If you were to search _URL_0_ for something in Japanese, you'd be a lot more likely to see domain names that are in Japanese. | b2bf2dcd-df8c-44a1-a9c2-5c897a17af25 |
8va5en | Why does a person feel more sleepy when day drinking and then stopping, than when compared to drinking from the evening onwards? | Because alcohol is a depressant, if you drink and then stop you will feel tired and ready to sleep because thats what alcohol as a drug does to you. Generally if you drink in the night you will be going to sleep very soon after finishing drinking anyway which makes it kinda biased. However alcohol also converts to sugar basically which is energy so as long as you keep drinking you wont fall asleep as easily. | 8e8ff015-e17d-477d-bb0c-56df90586f75 |
6vs8ra | Why on some mornings it is a struggle to get up, but others I am jolted to begin the day. | This can be the result of being woken at different stages of your sleep cycle.
If you're woken (by an alarm clock or other intrusive effect) during stages of deep sleep, you will feel very tired and sluggish. If you're woken during the lighter stages of your sleep cycle you will feel fine. Most adults have sleep cycles that work in approximately 90 minute intervals; so an ideal nap is around 90 minutes of sleep. It also means if you wake up naturally 10~15 minutes before your alarm clock goes off; you're probably better off just starting your day than falling back asleep and being woken during a deeper stage. | 0052d2b9-8784-49d2-b209-eadb101b78dd |
3s81o3 | The difference between a capacitor and a battery? | A capacitor stores energy in the form of an electfical potential difference between two metal plates. A battery stores energy in the form of modified chemicals which can easily release the energy at a later time.
Capacitors are cheap but lose their charge quickly; batteries can store energy for extended period of time but are more expensive and break down. | 330b11d8-c7ba-479f-a2dd-7406b3f8e337 |
3ds5k7 | How did milking a cow first come to be? When did someone decide that drinking a cows milk was a good thing? | Nobody is really sure and it happened a very, very long time ago. Way before we have any surviving records. In fact drinking milk from animals may have predated cows even existing. It's likely some clever prehistoric dude saw a young animal drinking milk and figured there might be some food there. People are pretty clever about finding food.
People started keeping these pre-cow animals around for their good milk and tasty meat and eventually the modern domesticated cow was created. | a00b4770-f3c1-4db3-bef2-3ef5e7991f04 |
3kmq83 | Why is California experiencing such a horrific drought? | !!! ITS THE LIBERALS !!!!!
j/k...There has always been times of drought in California. Northern California isn't as bad as southern, but historically there has always been drought.
If Abbott Kinney has looked back more than 100 years, our water delivery and retention systems would have been different.
Regardless, this one might be one of the longest that we've seen in a while. Hopefully the El Nino effect will refill a bit of our aquifers, but I think that we need to rethink our water retention systems into the future. | 04613448-bc7f-41cb-aac0-fc434fe267ea |
7sh4xp | How did Vision and Dental coverage come to be "outside" of general health coverage in the USA? | Starting with dental, dentistry was not something that doctors used to perform. Teeth pulling was actually performed by barbers! And there was no other options than pulling. So once we got dentists, medical insurance didn't want to touch them. They weren't sure of the future costs, or what was reasonable, and people didn't expect to see the dentist enough to need to deal with insurance.
For vision, vision insurance, for the most part, only covers routine or preventative care. Glasses, contacts, annual exams. If you have a significant eye issue, glaucoma for example, the treatment would be filed under medical. So vision insurance isn't insurance at all, its more of a savings plan for eye care. The money you pay is used to pay the doctors later, minus a small fee, or the doctors just agree to give you a discount as arranged by your vision plan. It can be useful as your vision plan can haggle for discount services/goods for you. | ec014475-1588-4a15-a6d5-f1082f245baf |
7bpwy2 | The difference between breathing ‘through your chest’ and ‘through your stomach’. | Breathing through your stomach:
Mainly by contracting your thoracic diaphragm (separates thoracic cavity and abdominal cavity), which increases the volume of your thoracic cavity and draws in air.
Breathing through your chest:
Mainly by contracting the muscles between your ribs (intercostal muscles), which again increases the volume of your thoracic cavity and causes air to be drawn in.
"Mainly", because most of the time, you use a mix of both, slightly contracting your diaphragm and your intercostal muscles. And even if you "breath through your chest" your diaphragm will contract, too.
We can do this because
a) sometimes our body needs ALL the air it can get. And using two different methods at once is more efficient (higher increase in volume = > more air drawn in) and
b) safer, because if one fails (or partly fails, think of a broken rib) you still got the other one | c2196dc5-d1ea-4483-9a4e-fe7061844cbf |
3vjrag | . Why does food packing say "Use by" a certain day rather than "Consume by" a certain day. How else should I be "using" my cheese wiz? | "Use" takes many fewer letters. Since the message isn't essential marketing to get you to buy the product, the less space it uses the more is available for Marketing. | 3bbd5b3b-688f-40a3-80f8-c56aa17e76fa |
3fawy9 | How do tabloid papers like The Globe get away with running obviously made up stories about public figures? | One way is to word everything as a question. So if your headline reads "Is Kim Kardashian a Hobbit?" then nobody can sue you because, hey, you're just asking questions.
Another strategy is to use so-called weasel words. Instead of saying "Kim Kardashian is a Hobbit", you say "Some people have claimed Kim was a Hobbit". See? It's not you, the tabloid, saying that she's a hobbit, its' "some people" saying that, and you're just reporting what "some people" are saying. | 698ba590-6a9f-495f-a2ac-532dfa7a66a8 |
6158cq | Why are people's political opinions mostly based on emotion rather than reason, facts and logic? | Here we go with the facts and logic arguments. Not your fault.
If someone believes something, the sheer fact they believe makes it true to them. It may be true to you, but it's true to them.
People can base their beliefs on any basis they want. It's called democracy. Now when we are all required to have the same belief...well...then that's where we have a really, really big problem. | df725cfd-7bcd-45ba-adb1-14bade849524 |
2z401a | How would the davson+danielli model of membrane structure look after freeze fracturing was performed on the cell? | Frozen?
No really
Membranes are not identical. They differ in thickness and the ratio of proteins:lipids.
Membranes have distinct inside and outside layers (defined by the membrane proteins which are present on the surface of the membrane)
Other than predicted by the model, the membrane proteins do not have a very good solubility in water - in fact they are amphiphatic, meaning they have hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions. The hydrophobic side is anchored inside the membrane.
When the membrane proteins would cover the lipid bilayer, their hydrophobic regions would be in contact with water, which destabilizes this construct. Even if they would be oriented towards the membrane, they would face towards the hydrophilic heads of the phospholipids causing the same effect. Additionally the proteins would also seperate the hydrophilic phospholipid heads from the water. So there is no real stable solution in embedding the membrane with proteins.
The act of freezing membranes of unequal thickness would not cause those membranes to become uniform, therefore the cell would deform and fracture during the freezing process. | 629d8b31-562d-483c-a230-39ffaf6901b7 |
1uo3uy | Why do the majority of Americans believe that Henry Ford invented the automobile when in fact he did not? | Give it a few decades and you will have kids that think Steve Jobs invented cell phones.
While Henry Ford did not invented cars, the model T was the first mass produced model that was affordable to the regular people. Basically, he was a great marketer. | f7f25251-da0c-45cc-9512-cfa5c507bce3 |
2ssqlc | What made Einstein so regarded as a genius? | In 1905, Einstein was the modern-day equivalent to a doctoral-candidate student working at the Swiss Patent Office to pay the bills while he worked on finishing the papers he needed to get his final degree. (This is to put a bit more perspective on the whole "he was a patent clerk" line. It's true, but perhaps a bit misleading. He was the equivalent to a modern-day patent examiner, so the job was much more technical than simply filing paperwork.)
That year, he had four papers published in the scientific literature:
1) The first paper took an idea Planck had introduced in 1900 to make the black-body equation, namely that light energy came in discrete chunks, and applied it to a totally different phenomena, namely the photoelectric effect. While Planck regarded his result as a weird mathematical hack, Einstein expanded on it, showed it explained the photoelectric effect, and linked the two. In the process, he effectively created quantum mechanics.
2) In his second paper, Einstein showed that the then-controversial microscopic "kinetic theory of fluids" (aka, atomic theory) should produce macroscopic effects identical to that of the already observed phenomenon of "Brownian motion". His result effectively proved the physical existence of atoms, bringing a decades-long debate to a close.
3) In his third paper he reconciled the Maxwellian laws of electromagnetism with the laws of mechanics. In it, he showed that a slight modification of the laws of mechanics, nearly undetectable by scientists of the day, would account for the seemingly constant speed of light implied by Maxwell's equations, plus the inability of experiments to detect a directional difference in the speed of light. This is the "Theory of (Special) Relativity" he is well-known for.
4) In his fourth paper, he expands on the implications of Relativity, and shows that mass and energy are equivalent (aka "E=mc^2").
All four papers are revolutionary, in the sense that they drastically changed the direction of science in their field by introducing new ideas or new ties between previously disparate things. And he wrote them as a doctoral student, working alone, raising a family, with a full-time job, all in one year.
He followed it up by realizing that his "Theory of Relativity" broke gravity, and spending the next 11 years fixing it (creating the "General Theory of Relativity") which in a revolutionary sense changed our entire view of the shape of the universe.
Einstein's "Annus Mirabilis" (Miracle Year), plus General Relativity, are all "really big things", and firmly cemented Einstein's reputation among scientists as a really big genius.
I don't know how this got parlayed to popular fame and adulation. Perhaps it's because of the publicity of the Eddington mission to test General Relativity. | b5e45559-a882-46cc-b59c-b695f355ab8a |
pq5r8 | The plot of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas(movie) | It is the story of a journalist who goes to cover a story about a motor cross race. He gets distracted by his drug use. The movie meant a lot to me but the message is more up to you. To me it seemed like the message was finding yourself, even if you have to fail along the way. It is based of Hunter S. Thompson, famous journalist. I am not totally aware if I got this right, just my opinion. | b22159c5-945f-43ec-a0b1-ae9cfdf40703 |
4cvqcv | What goes into making "Good" Netcode? | The majority of commercial fighting games still use *input delay-based netcode*; the inputs you make are delayed on your end to compensate for the time it takes your inputs to travel to your opponent. This usually translates to "If you have 100ms of latency with your opponent, your inputs will be delayed by around 100ms, or 1/10th of a second". This ensures that no action takes place before your input data reaches your opponent, and results in smooth *looking* gameplay at the expense of having to deal with input delay.
[GGPO](_URL_0_) was made in response to criticism directed at the dubious quality of many input delay netcode implementations. GGPO is middleware that allows games to utilize *rollback-based netcode*; the inputs you make come out instantly, and your game client predicts your opponent's actions before his input data returns to you. This means that even if your input data hasn't reached your opponent, your inputs will occur instantly on your end, and gameplay will feel as fluid as playing in person. The sacrifice for this is having to deal with "rollbacks", where the game rewinds player events (usually by only a couple of frames) to reflect what really occured once players exchange inputs. A typical example of rollback would be "I punch player, player appears to be hit for a split second, but the game rolls back and he's actually blocked my punch".
Most people who are really into 2D fighting will tell you that rollback-based netcode is the obvious choice, since you don't want to feel like you're playing underwater in a genre that requires split-second timing. | 1ddf0d13-7eea-451d-9bd4-fc0904da6552 |
5vdg4w | Exactly how and when did our current journalism and news media devolve from more objective, fact-based reporting to the talk show host partisanship wasteland we have today? | Long ago, in the good old days, TV stations had to agree to "serve the public interest" in exchange for free use of valuable airwaves. The FCC expected a nightly news hour (half national and half local) and a Sunday morning detailed news program. That's why Meet the Press is the longest running show in the history of TV. Stations added late local news, and then the networks started morning shows with "feel good fluff news for homemakers". All good, the network needs 30 minutes of real news a day and the local station needs 30 minutes of local stuff and weather that they do twice. This is enough TV to cover all the news, and real journalists like Walter Cronkite did the evening news.
Then a brash rich guy from Atlanta, called "The Mouth of the South", decided to expand his cable TV brand with a pair of news channels. One "Headline News" played the same world news stories over and over every 30 minutes all day. It was only 30 minutes of content, and a parade of talking heads to read it over and over. Editors tweaked it a little each cycle, but not much. The other station, the Cable News Network, would show all the news that they could find, repeating less often. The idea was the scope of the New York Times on TV. Since cable TV was new, and channels were filled with even less interesting stuff (I'm talking about you CSPAN3), there wasn't much pressure to get good ratings.
Then some liberals thought that the deep south "news" station was not progressive enough. They complained to the FCC that it wasn't "fair enough" and Ted Turner told the FCC "Cable News in just like the other shows on cable, you don't have to pay for it or watch it if you don't like it." Since it wasn't broadcast anywhere, like HBO, the FCC couldn't tell CNN to be fair. That lead to the end of the fairness doctrine in general and the liberals started a northern counterpart with content more suited to their NPR tastes. Then the right wing started their own station, to advocate for their special interests.
This was all fine as long at the newspapers were the big profit centers of news, the cable outlets reused newspaper content (with attribution of course). Papers were powered by ads, and they needed lots of pages to have space for all the ads.
Then the Internet blew up the whole thing. Papers see falling ad sales, and scale back on news gathering. Facebook and other outlets start to be people's source of print news, and they don't pay anything for the stories they link to. Cable TV becomes the standard, and ratings start to matter. Time after time channels test "better news coverage" vs "more entertaining news delivery" and better news loses every time. Headline News becomes HLN and it's just another fluff factory in the AM, conspiracy theories at lunch, and crime solving in the evening. There is just too much demand for entertainment and no demand for facts.
What's the worse that could happen by ignoring the news, a Doonesbury character gets elected President?? | abcdaeb0-343d-49ba-8849-d8e11beb571a |
2ainpa | ELI 5: How can it thunder and lightning without raining? | Lightning is a static electrical discharge between the clouds and the ground. Thunder is caused by the expansion And contraction of air superheated by lightning. Neither of these things are in any way dependent on rain falling at the time. | 4dcbddb2-a8f1-46c8-8c2b-de95f6cdabbc |
3z1sle | Does the principle of confidentiality between a doctor and a patient also holds in the other direction? | As an MD the answer is no. This allows the patient to attack the doctor, not only in the courts, but also in the press. The doctor can not refute the publicly aired allegations. This is not uncommon. | 31d895ce-2f48-4219-8fe2-e5e07345639b |
4ibcry | Why people thought tablets would replace laptops/pc | The issue is that people needed a computer smaller than a laptop or a desktop. The idea that the smartphone would so quickly grow to the point where it would be that replacement instead of the tablet came as a surprise to most. | 8fb32115-6ff4-42fe-b433-76602330d0b9 |
1pzmry | Why do numbers come first in Alphanumerical order? | Because they are traditionally sorted by the ACSII code and special characters and numbers have lower values than letters. _URL_0_
Some systems may sort by different rules. | 8f66a09e-92e8-48ba-b6e0-da0590ed20a9 |
693jas | why do churches get freedom from taxes | Not just churches, but all non profit charitable organizations can have tax exempt status.
There are certain legal guidelines that they must follow. | 6df66a5e-462c-4ff7-9fce-38b242f7fff8 |
2j5dfj | Why do liquid detergent and fabric softener bottles use such small print when labeling what they are? (Image examples in post) | Because the manufacturers want you to be brand-loyal: to wash your clothes not with "detergent" but with **Tide**, to soften them not with "fabric softener" but with **Downy**. | 164e7596-0cb3-4869-b22d-49593db72dae |
3tc7ak | Is there a "best if used by" date for Nuclear Bombs? | Yes, well it's not really "used by" it's more of a "change oil after X years". The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile and production complex, is funded at $8B per year. Most of that money is spent on NNSA’s Life Extension Program (LEP) where the stockpile of nuclear warheads and bombs is continually refurbished. Existing warheads are certified annually to be safe and reliable. | e2e22b43-e162-4a89-99b9-5e39af3dfdf7 |
402zum | What happens when you're in the navy/army reserve and your day job interferes with your ability to do the navy/army job? | Legally almost all jobs have to give you time off for military service.
If he has to go then he goes, and his next in line takes his spot till he comes back. | 8c285322-fccc-4a59-885f-7ac226ef1653 |
2wyqdf | What the hell happened with Snowden's IAMA? | A lot of people want to know. No-one seems to have a good, definitive answer yet. | e59ac827-df91-42c4-87e0-b73811c7bc15 |
5rd1jq | If heat rises, why do mountaintops often have snow in places like California and Hawaii? | Hot air rising is the exact reason why there is snow on mountain tops. Imagine a little cube of air at the ground surface. There is some amount of water vapor in this cube. The air is hotter than the surrounding air (and is therefore less dense), so it begins to rise. As its rising, the pressure of the air is decreasing, so it begins to expand. As its expanding, the temperature starts to drop (roughly at 1 degree Celsius per 100 meters of lift). Now, as the temperature is decreasing, the cube is also losing the ability to store water vapor. Eventually, the cube will rise high enough to where it will no longer be able to contain the amount of water vapor it started with, and it will begin to get rid of the excess water through precipitation (snow). Generally, by this point, the temperature will be low enough so that it will stop rising. | 3c916166-85a7-4d47-a0a1-93d30823f64d |
490gcl | Why do people/things feel significantly heavier when they relax all their muscles? Otherwise known as "dead weight"? | Somebody answered this last time but basically:
A person who is awake will always center their weight automatically, and it makes it easier to carry them and more comfortable for them to be carried. When theyre limp and unconcious then their weight is just left flopping around. | b4837298-034a-4423-a97b-706d046f225a |
6slor2 | How is the worth of a person or company determined? | If you're asking about financial worth:
* A person's net worth is the sum of the market value of their assets less the sum of their liabilities. So someone who owns a $300,000 home, with a $200,000 mortgage and a $10,000 auto with a $5,000 loan has a net worth of $105,000.
* When governments make decisions (like how much money to apply to cleaning pollution that can kill some people each year or the cost of vehicle safety standards) they use an estimate of the statistical value of a life (this is based on the premium people accept for dangerous jobs, and how much people pay for their own safety equipment). This concept is sometimes used in wrongful death lawsuits, too.
* Companies are almost always valued based on trades of smaller parts of them. So if someone paid $1 million for 10% of the company, a reasonable assumption would be that the person would have paid $10 million for the entire firm, so we start with a value of $10 million.
Other types of worth are more subjective and can be quite personal (your mother probably places a higher value on you than a random stranger). The subjectivity doesn't make these valuation methods invalid, just much much more costly to measure. So they aren't often used. | 180c8e90-a6c9-4455-93d8-222bddb1fb2a |
10el03 | How bad is alcohol for a teenager? | At 15 your body is still developing, so it is generally not advisable to meddle with your body chemistry too much before it sorts itself out.
According to [wikipedia](_URL_0_) heavy drinking will mess with your brain and make you stupider, i.e. your memory will be crappier and learning will be more difficult.
Besides, alcohol can be quite nasty regardless of age. When someone gets too much to drink, they may lose conciousness which is a state where medical help is required - it basically means you've drank more poison than your body can handle on its own, so you may stop breathing, or simply choke on your own vomit. | 2aa227d5-26c6-4e1c-9699-9d41ef963bfb |
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