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2p0mb6 | Why is my graphics card so big compared to my CPU? | Your graphics card has it's own RAM. Your CPU's RAM is on the motherboard. Technically you're counting the GPU, it's board, and RAM, and cooling stuff as one thing. So if you do that with the CPU too, the CPU is much bigger since its board is the motherboard. | 959e0bbe-7ff6-45f8-9208-54bf73a17930 |
54cka6 | Why are terraced houses in New York and possibly other places elevated? | They have lower levels (originally servants quarters) besides the main entrance, they usually go below street level. Every place is different, but I would assume that the underground pipping as well as water level do not allow for basements of considerable depth, which is why he main level is above street level. These lower levels have their own exterior door and are rented out. | 748e7bc8-478b-41b6-a356-aef817c396eb |
27dm8y | Why does daycare cost so much when the teachers are paid so poorly? | It's for much the same reason that private schools are very expensive: teachers' salaries are only a small portion of the costs of operating the business. Add to this these costs:
* Supplies
* Rent for the facilities
* Administrative costs (licensed daycares have to cope with mountains of paperwork to comply with state and local laws)
* Taxes
* FICA/Medicare for employees
* Training for the teachers
* Liability insurance
* Legal counsel
* Employee benefits (if provided)
* etc. | 76197e2f-f227-4927-a1b3-83fa06425768 |
4av06p | What is the controversy of CrossFit exercise programs? | It's olympic lifts (good) but focused on speed and reps at the expense of form and safety (bad). | 8e778d4a-e794-4e87-9321-834b1a4188d7 |
6z398m | Why do we feel hot when the air is as hot as or colder than our internal body temperature? | Because our bodies don't just sit at our preferred temperature. Humans are warm-blooded; we produce heat constantly as a byproduct of the chemical reactions in our body that maintain our metabolism. That means that we have to constantly get rid of heat at the rate that our body produces it just to stay at the same temperature. Otherwise, we'll overheat and possibly die.
When the air is near our internal temperature, the rate at which we lose heat to the environment slows down. When the air reaches our internal temperature, we can no longer lose heat the normal way, and we have to sweat, which allows us to lose heat via evaporative cooling. | 83113717-5286-4d3e-bf94-943602ec52d4 |
606wnl | What is the weight of gravity in pounds and how to find it? | Gravity is a force, while weight is the effect of gravity on a given mass. You cannot convert gravity in to weight. It's like asking me to tell you the speed of your car using only the measurement of how much gas you have in the tank. | 52349a9f-7fb1-41ce-b238-c9725a7be67e |
22rj4w | Why can't "We the People" petition to have the NSA shut down (and it actually work..)? | That would be a [direct democracy](_URL_0_). The United States of America is a representative democracy, the people's voice is heard by proxy of their representative. | 94500625-e60b-4b27-9d29-dd3181f52932 |
4bres7 | Why can some humans survive thousands of feet while others die after a short fall? | It all has to do with mechanics and overall health.
If you're reasonably healthy, well built, and happen to land the "right" way so that your body can absorb the shock of the landing, you may be bruised or even break something but you should be ok.
Meanwhile, a leading cause of death in old people is falls. Older people have far more brittle bones and the like and it's much easier for them to fracture something and lead to even more internal damage.
There's also the mechanics of the fall. If you fall in a way that you can use the momentum to "correct" the fall (like you see a lot of parkour practitioners do), you should be alright. But if you fall maybe a short distance and land on your head with nothing absorbing the fall or getting rid of the kinetic energy that really damages you, you're going to be injured or die.
Bear in mind that falls are basically vertical collisions. Some people can survive being hit head on by a truck while others die immediately in some other wrecks. | 5fe096bb-0b55-4516-b832-3db7b74f8dfd |
3i31jv | Why don't we sue politicians for broken election promises as breach of verbal contract? | There is a saying that a verbal contract isn't worth the paper its printed on. But beyond that humorous quote, there is a better reason.
An elected official can simply say that the situation or information changed in the time between the campaign and the vote, which is a great defense, because that's how we want our representatives to act. | 5b2901c8-ef45-4c65-af56-4b27f9cea40d |
3j4p47 | Why can't they make a cheap car that is made of basic parts internally, but looks high end externally? | The look of a Lamborghini does cost lots of money to make. Lots of weird shapes in the metal and plastic. Expensive materials, etc. It's not just the engine that is pricey.
What you're describing is basically a kit car, which are available and hobbyists put them together to be exactly this.
People who like sports cars don't just like how they look, but how they handle and accelerate and lots of other things. Your average person might want a Lambo in their garage but probably don't want to get stared at or ooed and ahhd at driving it around town, and would probably be terrified of parking it in a public place. Most people don't like nearly lying down in their driver's seat like you do in a lambo. They like to have a place to put a bag of groceries, or a couple other people or kids.
That said, there are plenty of cheap sporty looking cars out there. | 173f5ed5-96d6-4ead-84ac-8cde5bbddc0e |
17c24l | EL 5, How is it that "polar bear" clubs can go swimming in January and not die of hypothermia? | They basically just go in and out of the water, and they're prepared with towels and warm clothes as soon as they're done. Even in near-freezing water, it takes at least 10-15 minutes for hypothermia to happen. Also, at least in the bigger polar bear clubs, there's medical staff around in case of emergencies. | 1047cd32-345a-43f8-ac03-a1525e02b24d |
3qiw5j | Til Death do us Part. Do religious people believe they are all single in Heaven? | This is coming from a Christian perspective, but marriage is seen as an earthly example of our relationship with Christ, we find fulfillment in caring and loving on our spouse and we get the benefit of them doing the same for us. Now once we get to heaven we are completely and entirely fulfilled by God for He is our ultimate desire of the relationship we were seeking on earth. Now we still get to chill with our loved ones but it marriage is no longer needed like it was, sorry if that was too preachy, hope that makes sense | a18fcfff-4f9f-43e6-b7f7-f936c616fe18 |
24z9vr | Vulgar Latin and it's difference between Classical Latin | Vulgar Latin uses more vocabulary that made it into modern Romance languages, and the sentence structure is often more like the modern Romance languages too. So stuff like: occasionally, you'll see the relative pronoun (qui quae quod) used to mark indirect discourse instead of accusative + infinitive constructions.
The pronunciation is also different, but that probably won't matter in your class.
Most people I've spoken to have said they found Mediaeval Latin 'easier' than Classical Latin.
And the subject matter is often more church-focused, so you'll run into lots of new ecclesiastical vocabulary often borrowed from Greek (eg episcopus for bishop, angelus for angel/messenger (of God)), or new meanings for old words (eg Dominus for the Lord, God, rather than the head of a household) | 5fc5dcab-1852-423a-b2b5-7034efb15a9f |
44t0qo | I've never seen a fat bird. Is that because flying is vital for them to survive so natural selection kills them or because birds simply don't get fat? | People commenting here don't know what they're talking about. Birds do get fat the closer you get to the cold extremes (arctic, mountain peaks). You've never seen one because, I assume, you haven't been to these types of places. Furthermore, you wouldn't know how fat the bird is until you kill and butcher it, but I promise, there are fat birds.
Yes, flight is a big part of their survival, but so is fat in the cold weather. As with most things, there's a balance. When colder season come, birds store fat. Not enough that they cannot fly anymore, but they do store fat. When it's time to migrate, a lot of that fat gets burned off. | dcc4e848-9064-424f-8d24-5de620745908 |
32btsa | How does paracetomol work? | The mechanism of action for Paracetamol/acetomenophen is not entirely understood. It *probably* inhibits COX, which is an enzyme that is part of the chemical pathway for chemical pain signals in the body. Inhibit the enzyme, the body makes less pain-signalling chemicals. | 5f98612d-81eb-4508-a6af-1179be40d2e0 |
5pcivp | Why is "I don't like sand" line from Attack of the Clones considered so bad? | It's supposed to be Anakin's smooth line to use on Padme and it's just so derpy and cringeworthy. Lucas has such a tin ear for dialogue that Harrison Ford said to him, "You can type this shit, George, but you can't say it." | c1bbfc82-0137-4776-a858-4106c8d3dbf9 |
788miw | Do you need a computer to create a computer? | Assuming that all humans alive today survived, there's a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience that could be used to quickly bypass lots of steps along the way.
As an example of this, check out [the best Commodore 64 games](_URL_0_) from the mid 1980's, and compare that to the winners of the [2010's Commodore 64 Demoscene](_URL_1_) where people take all of the advances in programming from the last 30 years and apply them to old hardware.
It's true that modern computers are designed and built in part by computers, so it'd probably take several years to rebuild simple computers by hand, then use those to build more and more complex computers from there. But it'd take far less than 70 years to "catch up" because we have the advantage of knowing the full history. | c85f2f35-bb72-4dcd-b1f2-cd9c71efb883 |
2rium9 | What is more environmentally friendly forced air hand dryers or paper towel? | New air dryers (like the dyson air blade) are more environmentally friendly than paper towels. Older dryers might not be, because they use more power. | 9eadc9e1-f9dd-4a33-8e3e-127549c9b956 |
3khucy | why does all music attach me to something thats occuring in my life and make me feel nostalgic even a weel later? | Because that's effectively how your brain functions. Your brain is a collection of neurons that fire in sequence. Your brain is always being adjusted, new connections are formed as you 'learn' new 'information'. Essentially, your brain is correlating an experience of life with the auditory experience of that specific music. So when the neurons for that music are activated the adjoining ones referencing that memory/experience are fired in tandem. Your brain does this for pretty much everything. I say 'game' you think 'fun'. I say 'car', you think 'travel' or 'speed'. The only difference is that it isn't language it's music. So yes I'd go as far as to say this is normal. It would depend on how often you listen, the time difference between the experience and the listening session, as well as how long you hold on to specific tracks of music. | 824339ae-6d43-44fd-9201-07ab30f54c6a |
2mzmuh | What is the point of having a complex password? If someone figures out your password what does the complexity change? | It makes it harder for someone to find out your password.
It's not difficult to build a computer system which tries your username, with a password that's a word from a dictionary, over and over again. Such a system can go through a whole dictionary in a couple of hours. This method of finding a password is known as a "brute force" attack. So using a word from a dictionary (or a person's name, or anything else very common that people can easily make a list of) makes it easy for someone to find your password with this method.
Using a long combination of letters and numbers, which don't form a single word, makes a brute force attack impossible. With a password just 10 or 12 characters long, the number of possibilities, if you don't have a dictionary to work from, is so huge that it would take a lifetime, literally, for a brute force attack to be completed. | a9a5d4d9-2c5a-4fb7-aa85-b17e0ff7ddd5 |
7zoxo0 | Why do some downloads not show file size and / or ETAs? | When you make an HTTP connection, there are a bunch of pieces of metadata that are sent before the data. One of those is Content-Length, which tells your client how long the data portion is going to be. If you don't see a file size in a download, it means the server didn't send a Content-Length header, so your client has no idea how much data is going to come, and it just needs to continue receiving data until the server stops sending it. | 49c60365-0f4a-461c-a2f9-2b78ed320a13 |
34ybms | How do coffee machines (like a Keurig) super heat water in 10 seconds? | a thin layer of water heats up very quickly. Take a wet sponge, put it in the microwave for 10 seconds, it will be extremely hot. A cup of water wouldn't be warm in 10 seconds. | d44ad1a8-6e43-400c-b75a-b91b47e71cc3 |
2x9gja | how to eat healthy | Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.
-*Michael Pollan* | 7f0f36b9-b1d8-4104-b9ea-3315825cb069 |
1p1te5 | When you boil water, where does the air that fills the bubbles come from? | "Boiling" is the process of water becoming steam. The "air" in those bubbles is water turning into its gaseous form from its liquid form. | 8fe4b691-33a9-417d-8e16-bd39bd4403b6 |
2n5ebs | ... If yogurt is made with a starter of a small bit of yogurt, how was the first yogurt ever created? | They were not created, they were captured and bred from wild strains of bacteria. You could start the same sort of thing today, but your quality would be hit or miss (and the misses would be nasty). | 75825012-653a-434b-9a23-a794cb4659b7 |
77oor4 | What causes something to have a smell? | Molecules from it break off and float around in the air. Your nose picks them up, and your olfactory center "reads" them. Yes this means exactly what you think it means, when you smell poo. | de058292-448c-4de8-96b8-6bc84285c943 |
3b9wx8 | I'm British. How could Greece defaulting on its loan repayment and leaving the eurozone affect me, the rest of the EU and the global economy? | For one thing, some of that debt is owed to UK banks and institutions. They will have to take a loss, which could mean everything to high interest rates to outright bank failures.
It will heard the economies of the EU in general, and those are some of the UK biggest trading partners.
One the other hand, the weakened euro might make the pound more attractive, which could boost the UK economy. | 6d6beeb5-a9fd-40aa-a5e1-a7e8edeed5d4 |
1rf7ny | S.A.D (Seasonal Affective Disorder) | Basically, not getting enough sun makes you depressed. That's why one of the ways to alleviate it is to use a light box. | 8415d7b6-07e1-4e63-8d94-fddcac2ea42d |
5b8bz0 | The difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. | Deductive starts from a broad premise and makes a narrow conclusion. Inductive starts from a narrow premise (edit: or many narrow examples/cases taken together) and makes a broad conclusion.
For example, "all Redditors are smart. You're a redditor. Therefore you're smart" is deductive. I started with knowledge about a large category, then placed you in that category to figure something out about you.
Inductive reasoning would be, "that Redditor is smart. This Redditor is smart. That other Redditor over there is smart. Therefore, most Redditors are probably smart." I started by looking at some examples and then made a conclusion about the category they're in or the rules they follow.
If you want more "real life" type examples, then someone might use deductive reasoning to make a simple medical diagnosis. "People with X Disease have Y symptoms. You have Y symptoms. Therefore you might have X Disease." Inductive reasoning is used when we do studies with random sampling. "We found X result in this chunk of population. That chunk of population represents the whole. Therefore this discovery applies to the whole population." | 28eaeab1-1e98-47a3-a6c5-c181c73a12e9 |
3dkhto | Why is it so difficult to fall asleep without a blanket even when you aren't cold? | People develop patterns for going to sleep. When you lie down, put your head on a pillow and cover yourself with a blanket your body thinks "ok, it's time to go to sleep" because you've trained it to react that way.
You could just as easily train your body with a different set of criteria for sleep. | d81a8dea-2bd1-4001-afa8-152c175179ec |
1pftq4 | Why are some major media outlets speculating a Ted Cruz presidential run, ignoring that he was born in Canada? | His father was a Cuban who moved to the US in the 1950s (and was probably a US citizen by the time Cruz was born in 1970), his mother was born in US. You don't have to be born in the US to be eligible. | 908362b6-fa64-4888-87a5-f30af86e8d7d |
47sv44 | The way cops sometimes talk | That is the sort of language they might use in a formal report or when testifying in court. It's filtered through to every day use with the public in part, I think, because the words are carefully selected not to have improper connotations, though it does sound rather awkward. | 34e9662d-272c-43d9-917d-40a5c5972904 |
1ijqka | A few questions on house-buying stuff | Equity in something means how much of a stake you have in its ownership. If you pay for the house in cash, then you own it, and you can borrow against it. If you take out a loan to buy it, then you only own it conditionally (so long as you keep making your payments to the bank). If you already have a mortgage on the house, then it will be harder to use it as collateral for a loan because you're already in debt on it. | be082020-143b-42a8-ba20-9ecff3d151e6 |
3brogz | At what point do under the table bank deposits become suspicious? | The reporting limit is $10,000 but if you arrange multiple transactions that look like you should have done a single over $10,000 transaction you'll trip anti-money laundering law wires.
For taxes, you should report *all* income earned in a period, regardless of source. | 360e63ec-c7a7-4002-8efb-10cee75cb174 |
17d7nm | How does ''Rule Against Perpetuities'' actually work? | **Background**: The Common Law Rule seeks to make sure that things get used. Why would you want a perfectly good car being held by a dead person? We have property laws to make the world more efficient not less efficient
Here enters the Common Law Rules Against Perpetuities. This is a rule, not written down in a law, but rather a set of practices the court follows (common law). This set of practices deals with giving property to people (most commonly when things are given in a will)
**What it deals with** When someone gives something to another person, they can put restrictions on it (eg you will get my house when I die). However, sometimes those restrictions can take a very long time to actually occur (you will get my house when man leaves the solar system). The common law rule against perpetuities tries to get people to avoid the second example
**Example** So, how does it stop people from making up ridiculous restrictions: by saying that you can only give something to someone if the event occurs within the lifetime of the relevant parties (say yourself and the person who is giving you that house) plus 21 years. If, the person who is giving you the house dies, and 21 years pass (without meeting the restriction that gives the house to you) then the house is no longer yours and goes back to the estate of the person who gave it to you.
**Modern Context** That said, in Canada at least, the rule against perpetuities has been modified by laws passed by the government in many jurisdictions such that it takes a "wait and see" approach. In the example I used that means they would just wait till you die and **then** the house would revert to the estate of the person who gave it to you.
**Nuances** There is a caveat here. All of these things are looking at one's interest in property. So for instance, property given to children from their parents is said to already said to be "burdened" with the interest of the child. Since the interest is there, the rule of perpetuities is done with. Another example is a marital relationship. Each partner already has a interest in the property even if they don't have outright possession (physical holding and use of the property) or ownership (title to the property). Again, rule of perpetuities is not as important because the interest is there.
**Conclusion** The rule against perpetuities is *not* against perpetual ownership, but rather *perpetual uncertainty.* It is not good that we don't know when someone is going to get a piece of property so the law creates boundaries. When there are boundaries then a piece of property can be used, people can bring order to their lives, and society is more stable | 95695741-f66b-47b3-a2fb-896b662468f5 |
7dicxo | Why in ancient times anything but a pure wife was rejected, but some men married widows? | Men didn't prefer virgins because they got to be the first. It was about legacy. Everything they had and were would be passed on to a son, and they wanted to make sure that boy really was his son.
Marrying a virgin helped ensure this. Not only could the husband be sure she was not pregnant with another man's child, but she had followed the norm of society, and could be expected to continue to do so when married. Conversely, a woman known to have had sex out of marriage defied society, was considered a harlot who could not be trusted to remain faithful.
In this scheme, a widow is almost as good as a virgin. She followed the rules and just had an unlucky break, so there was no reason to believe she would be any less faithful. Also, widows often inherited their husband's property and were more wealthy than a young woman still living with her family. | bed18453-d63a-43df-9716-d054c0e1985d |
2mp904 | Why do people say county jail is worse than prison? | County is nothing but laying and sitting, in a lot of places. Small town? You're just in a cell in a courthouse with a few other guys, beds, and a tv. Prison has other shit to do. Library, classes, exercise and what have you. | e5a0ab79-f720-4c0b-aadb-d23d4e6de89c |
6w3dyv | why do large amounts of prize money, (e.g. $100,000 from a game show or a lottery prize) get taxed so much? | Lottery winnings are taxed as ordinary income at the Federal level, and by most states. The highest U.S. tax rate is 39.6%, and it's applied to any income over $418,401 for an individual. So on a big jackpot, that's almost 40% right off the top. Then of course your state gets to tax the income as well. | 7b907543-75da-478a-ba8c-bff3fbcd3e6b |
1ilwwy | That baby smell. Like on baby items in Toys R Us, what is it and why does it all smell the same? | It's made to smell like baby powder, which (fun fact) is rarely actually used on babies these days. But lots of diapers have that as their default scent, so babies still smell like it.
The day my daughter was born, it blew my mind that she smelled just like the Cabbage Patch Kid I had when I was little. Then I realized it wasn't her, it was the hospital-issued Pampers she was wearing. | 1ec50a81-04d6-46ec-939b-f1c040909c3f |
4l2uqx | How do zero gravity flights work and why do they make people sick? | What we call "zero gravity" in space isn't actually zero gravity. Rather, it's a constant freefall around the earth. Gravity is pulling the space station down, it's just also moving so fast sideways that you fall towards the earth without actually hitting it. Everything in the station is moving together, so there is no relative motion between them (or at least, very little). Farther out in space, you might be pulled by the gravity of a thing (like the sun), but everything around you is also being pulled with the same force so you move together.
So, yeah, Douglas Adams was right about the secret to flying.
In any case, zero G flights take you up really high, then plummet back down so you, the plane, the air in the plane, and everything else involved are all falling at the same rate. This is basically what's going on in space, except that you're not going to miss the earth. Instead, the plane pulls up safely, climbs back up again, and then noses back down again...
It makes you sick because your brain is very good at orienting up and down when you're standing on the ground. Not so much when you're falling. There is liquid in special semi-circular canals in your ears, and gravity pulls them down, which tells your brain which way is down, which by extension tells you which way your head is tilted. If you're in freefall, you're going down just as fast as gravity is pulling the liquid in your ears down, which means your brain can't know which way is down (and which way is up). This is *really* confusing for your brain. Even more confusing is that if you're sitting in the plane, you don't have any good visual cues for up and down, either.
This makes you *sick* because many poisons have the effect of making you dizzy and upsetting your sense of balance. Over time, we evolved to get violently nauseous when we're dizzy because thousands and millions of years ago, that *probably* meant you ate something poisonous and your best bet for survival was to throw it up before more was absorbed into your system. | 7a428f23-294a-44dd-a4d7-02dd688ae12c |
4hqki6 | How do owners of non-profit organizations or people who are "experts" in really odd things make money? Are most of them just retired or do they get paid by someone to do these things? | Non-profits are still business that have expenses. Sometimes it is an organization that pays salaries and overhead expenses. What is leftover from however they produce income is what is provided to their charity or organization.
As far as getting paid for odd jobs, that usually falls under the consultant category. Basically a company or individual seeks the advice of someone who specializes in a certain field or area. The most popular example would be something like website design where big companies can have an inhouse team, but small companies or non-profits, will contract someone to create their site... in which case the one time cost is significantly cheaper than a full time employee.
But there are people who specialize in some weird stuff and their specialty is sometimes needed. For example, while in college I met an archaeologist student who specialized in analyzing dung (basically human waste), well that speciality landed him a consulting role for a book that won a Pultizer.
Hope that helps | 7306c659-f122-41bc-b183-a624b31dc28f |
1awjtf | What is on the papers that news anchors are continuously shuffling? | Newsreaders usually have a small screen under the camera. On that screen, the text they read out is shown. This screen is called a "teleprompter". But in case the prompter breaks, they have the same text with them on paper, so they can continue reading the news. | 37afbb2f-fc5a-40b7-9020-ab7dbaa8fb94 |
6m7j7k | What happens inside of your body when you overheat? | The heat messes with the functionality of your cells.
Different mechanisms within the body require that very specific heat range or they fail to function properly. As your core temp increases the biological functions are no longer I their optimal zone so they start malfunctioning or stop malfunctioning.
Additional, especially with the brain temperatures too high can cause damage to certain portions. Buddy of mine was a corpsman and they had a severe heat casualty where his body temp was up over 106 degrees after 10 minutes in an ice bath. Actually damaged the portion of his brain responsible for regulating temperature and now he can even do mild exercise without overheating. Ruined his military career. | 99a03115-34ce-45b3-ba05-04a5ffb9e934 |
28gdf3 | How is headbutting someone effective? How do you hurt your opponent without hurting yourself? | You take the harder part of your head and aim for a softer part of theirs. | 4a23db5a-429b-43ac-a360-2c8b29195470 |
4gxtwp | Most fracking happens at over 1 to 2 miles under ground. What is the theory that explains how that water gets through 2 miles of bedrock to pollute my 150 foot well? | There is definitely the potential for fracking to pollute groundwater.
The truth is, we don't really know for sure exactly how much the underground geology is altered when they use fracking. They inject an extraordinary amount of fluid into the ground under an extraordinary amount of pressure, fracturing the rock formations around the drilling site, which allows for easier extraction of natural gas and/or oil..
It's possible that these rock formations may have been separating oil or gas deposits from groundwater, and after the shale is fractured, these two may begin to mix, where they couldn't before. | 9be3adc3-6905-4d93-a401-0d2b892ff9e6 |
3qnv0r | How do planes "break" the sound barrier? | The speed of sound is only about 780 miles per hour, and all you need to do to break the sound barrier is go faster than that. Most normal planes already go about 500~ mph, so boosting that up to 800~ isnt too hard | 4846f3e2-35e5-4c86-9df5-3fc0330e3e90 |
5s2h1l | If all nine Justices of the US Supreme Court have an equal say on the opinion of the SCOTUS on cases they accept to preside over, why is there a position for "Chief Justice"? | He would preside over an impeachment trial, in addition to give the oath of office to the president. He is the chief spokesperson for the SCOTUS, and appoints judges to judiciary comittees. He doesn't have that much more power than the other judges,l. First among equals.
He also makes more money. | 2e1480f3-5d98-4cc5-8fab-5ff61d255b2a |
1d83ew | How can we sometimes see the moon during the day and at night within a 24 hour period? | When the sun, moon, and earth form a 90 degree angle (viewed from far above the North pole) the moon will be visible for part of the day and part of the night since it's only 6 hours ahead or behind the sun but still fairly well illuminated.
In that case the moon will rise around noon and set around midnight (or vice versa), making it visible during a portion of the day.
The moon will always rise in the east and set in the west just like the sun, only the position relative to the sun changes from our perspective.
The moon will never be visible for 24 hours straight unless you're very near the north or south pole. | c3e5e520-54cf-40e8-aa5a-302a75df1320 |
2qm8wr | How can "The Interview" have an all persons fictitious disclaimer at the end, when it is clearly based on a real living person? | So the TL:NR is going to be "That line doesn't really do jack" here's why:
Like someone using music or audio without consent saying "Blahbity blah belongs to such and such, no claim to copyright is made" or some such gives you no legal protection in court should that person decide to sue you the same is going to be true in satire.
Being a public figure, Kim Jung Un, in the U.S., has little to no protection against satire, and even if he wanted to, he'd have to sue Sony, et al in U.S. courts for damages, and that's not going to happen.
The litmus test, afaik, is simply "Would a reasonable person believe this to be actual events?" | 4dba325f-6de2-49eb-b3e4-55df464ac17d |
o3nnq | Why did Longswords give way to rapiers and sabres during the Renaissance? | This is a very basic explanation: The rapier is dated to the 16th-17th centuries, and the sabre was popularized in the 17th century as well - the late Renaissance.
Concurrent with this was the popularization of gunpowder, and earlier, the popularization of the crossbow. These two weapons were very strong and efficient at countering basic medieval infantry, but vulnerable to attack. This led to the popularization of pike and halberd infantry defending arquebus or musket infantry formations with cavalry support, and a general disappearance of man-to-man combat that dominated medieval warfare.
The rapier is a weapon of nobility, and intended for dueling or ceremonial usage - not for use in heavy combat. These weapons valued aesthetics and lightness over military efficacy. You would never see a knight or a man-at-arms take a rapier into battle. It was a "civilian" weapon, much how hunting rifles and military rifles differ today.
The sabre was a cavalry weapon, and chosen for its ease of use in cavalry charges. The sabre's design makes it very efficient at slashing, which men on heavy horses charging toward other men would be doing, rather than longsword combat which was best done on foot.
To summarize, the longsword was the weapon of choice for antiquated fighting styles, and did not have a role in the new armies of the late Renaissance. The rapier and the sabre did play a role, however, in their own niches. The longsword did not so much give way or be replaced as die out, with other combat styles replacing it. A similar question would be asking why cavalry gave way to tanks.
TLDR: Gunpowder and pikes replaced longswords, not rapiers or sabres. | 98757337-77ea-4090-a0ec-86cc3331beb8 |
1k533r | Is a human virgin birth scientifically possible? | If a woman is a virgin until a penis enters her vagina, then yes, virgin births are possible. If a man were to ejaculate on her, it's possible that sperm cells could swim up the vaginal canal and make her pregnant. | aa244946-9dcb-48ec-b149-54c4c7d2fbd0 |
1qcq1n | How does Piratebay still manage to be a live website? | This bully, Pirate von Bayinstein, goes to a school connected to yours. Every day at the joint lunchtime your two schools have together he steals the cookies your mom packed for you. This pisses you off, so you go to your teacher and tell on him. Unfortunately, while he may be breaking your school's rules, he is not breaking his own school's rules, and your teacher does not have the authority to punish him.
Your teacher is the US government, pirate von bayinstein is the pirate bay, and you are the MPAA/RIAA ect. TPB's servers are not in the US and are therefore not subject to our laws. The country where they are does not have any laws prohibiting what they do. | 754ef634-ee1d-436a-b7cd-aaed0bbbfd4b |
46frai | Why does Anime have a bad stigma? | Hardcore fans argue otherwise, but the majority of anime *is* poorly-animated entertainment fodder marketed towards teenage boys. This is coming from someone who enjoys some anime series, but it's a medium that most Japanese natives look down on for this reason, too. Because anime is deemed a niche genre unto itself, even in its country of origin, *everything* (including shows that feature paedophilia, rape and so on) is tarred with the same brush.
There's also the weeaboo phenomenon: Westerners who get into anime are mind-blown at this myopic exposure to one of the world's most unique cultures, and rather than research the parts they would inevitably find disagreeable, they latch onto fictionalised Japan as some kind of utopia willing to let pudgy white kids commandeer their culture. | f9c2d94c-c7fa-4d4b-bd2f-2f7997e6b045 |
7vp13t | What does it mean for a song to be well mastered/mixed? | So, there are 3 major steps in creating the sound of a record.
1) Recording. When you actually put a mic in front of a guitar (piano, singer, etc.) and capture some audio. And/or when you synthesize some sounds directly.
2) Mixing. When you take all the recorded tracks (guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, for instance, will all be separate.) and put them together. The goal is to get each individual part to sound good, and more importantly, for the entire thing to sound good all together. "Good" is partly subjective, but a good mix will:
* Let you hear each part as clearly as the artist intended
* Nothing sounds out of place or "off" compared to other instruments
* No parts get "lost" or become hard to hear in the mix
* Overall volume is loud enough
* Overall sound is clean, i.e no unwanted distortion
* etc.
A bad mix will have some instruments hard to hear, seem obviously too loud, or will have unpleasant tonal properties, i.e. they sound "sharp", or "woofy" or "muffled', etc. Basically, any time you notice separate instruments as popping out of the song in a distracting, unintentional way, that's a bad mix. Or if the vocals just sound oddly cheap and weird. Etc.
Mixing is also where you add EQ, Compression, reverb, and sometimes other artistic effects that change the sound. However, the line between mixing and production is a bit blurry, as is the line between mixing and mastering.
Mixing is about 50% of what makes a record sound good, 40% is a good recording, and 10% is mastering. (my opinion.)
3) Mastering used to be, after they made the final mix, where someone would edit the audio so that it would play well on tape, CD, or vinyl record - it was a process specific to the medium and wasn't really artistic in nature. For example: Vinyl requires a special mastering process because the disc physically can't handle too much bass. They take some bass out at the mastering stage, and then the phono preamp puts it back when you play the record. So the mastering engineer's job was basically just to apply that process, not to do anything fancy to the sound of the record.
Edit: forgot this part: Mastering can also encompass making the entire record sound good as a whole. So one song will have a similar character to the next. If the various mixes all sound a little different then the mastering step (whoever does it) will involve bringing them all into line. So if one song basically has more treble or bass than the next, they'll tweak it so they all sound like they came from the same record during mastering.
These days mastering is also sometimes treated as a "final touch" on the mix where someone just tweaks things a bit and makes it sound extra-nice. But it's really almost more like a final step in the mixing process, than a technical process now. Since most music is distributed digitally, which has no technical requirements that would require audible changes to the mix, mastering engineers are more like "final polish". | fec717f7-da43-4589-ae66-d1335e9e068b |
20q65e | Theoretically, shouldn't a pyramid scheme work? | Pyramid schemes are 100% effective so long as the number of people joining exceeds the number of people who are already involved. This works because you can use the joiners money to pay off the oldest members.
The problem is that the number of fools (while massive) is a finite number. Eventually the scheme cannot maintain cash flow. | a3276f9c-63a9-4701-9058-89626499b993 |
2bup1w | How reaction wheels (gyroscopes) in spacecraft work? How do they produce force? | The simple answer is because of Newton's laws. They actually aren't using any of the special properties of gyroscopes. If you apply a force with an electric motor to a heavy disk, you are also applying an opposite force to the object the motor is mounted to. Same thing if you apply a force using a set of brakes.
That opposite force is what you are really after when maneuvering a space craft.
Here's a video showing this in Earth gravity: _URL_0_
You should note also that it is possible to use these disks as gyroscopes in order to maneuver. In that case, you most likely will want to use gyroscopic precession to apply force. That's a property where applying force to a gyroscope to tilt its axis of spin will result in another force acting 90* around the gyroscopes axis of spin. This is actually how helicopters control their orientation. By tilting the blades of the rotors up **on one side of the helicopter**, they can produce a force that lifts or lowers **the front** of the rotor disk. | 1e98de6a-6cfe-4790-854b-5ed407082ca9 |
jkmxo | How does radiation make you sick/kill you? | Radiation is made up of tiny particles. These tiny particles are so small that they can fly right through your body without stopping, but occasionally, they smack into one of your cells. Radiation particles are super-tiny, but so are cells, so sometimes, a particle can kill a cell.
Sometimes, there's a lot of particles, so a lot of cells die. But in fact, that isn't usually what kills you. What kills you is what happens next.
Your body notices that there's a bunch of dead cells, and it doesn't know why they're dead. But it suspects a virus, because that's the usual culprit. Your body is wrong, but it doesn't know that. So your body sends in its virus-killers, the white blood cells.
Unfortunately, white blood cells have a hard time swimming through solid muscle. So your body makes it easier for these white blood cells to get to the dead cells by pumping up the muscles with extra water. That's called "inflammation."
Unfortunately, if too many cells died from the particles, the body goes overboard. First, it pumps too much water into all your organs. Your organs can't handle all the water and they start malfunctioning. Then, at the same time, your body tells the white blood cells to get super-aggressive. The white blood cells lose track of friend-vs-foe, and they start wrecking the place.
That's "acute radiation poisoning." | 5d7ef5cc-a903-4d58-bfdd-b9750b42ff62 |
3p1r85 | Why is a baby not nine months old when its born? | Because it's called a "birth"day - we define your age as being measured by your date of birth.
We do that because it's easier to know for sure the day that the baby came out of the mom than the day that the sperm hit the egg. Even with all our technology, there's no real 100% way to know "Oh yeah, this was fertilized on May 8th." So we base our date on what we know, and everything works out about the same. | 33c25044-203d-42a2-959b-b299a3570919 |
tpsph | File systems (NTFS, FAT, HPFS etc.) and differences between them. | Imagine you have a warehouse full of filing cabinets. Tons of them! You can store everything you want in there! As long as they are sheets of paper, of course.
Well, you'll need some way to know how to find stuff in there. If you just put your homework in one filing cabinet and then forget where it is, it would not be a very helpful filing cabinet!
So, you dedicate some of the filing cabinets right at the front for storing maps, or a gigantic index. This index says "Your homework is stored in this location", because you wrote that down when you put your homework away. This is called a File Allocation Table.
Another feature you'll want, right at the front where it's easy to find, is a list of what filing cabinets are not completely full. This helps you find where you should put your homework before you run out to the filing cabinet to put it away. This is called a free space map.
Another fun idea is to have a list of related pieces of homework that are easy to find. You'd put some note in your big master list, saying where to find information about this group of files. Then you'd go out to the filing cabinet where that information is stored, and that will point you to other files, or perhaps to notes about another group of related files. We will call this Directories.
Now, what if you have a big report, and it's too big for just one file cabinet? Well, you can just put a special note at the end of the first file cabinet pointing to the next file cabinet that has the rest of the report! Your index at the front just needs to point to the beginning of your report, and your free space map needs to know about the entire report, but you can just keep following your notes to read your entire report.
Now, what happens if you get called to dinner while organizing your files? For example, you wrote down in your index that your homework is at one place, and you put it in the free space map, but you didn't actually have time to run out to the right filing cabinet and put it in there. If you were to completely forget about it, like most computers do when they get interrupted (powered off), then your homework would be lost forever, and attempts to find it by following your index would bring up nothing.
So, you could keep a Journal of what you are about to do. You'd write down at the front, saying "I'm going to keep this homework in this filing cabinet", and include a copy of the homework and everything in there. Then, you'd go out, fill in the index and the map, file the homework away, then cross off that item from your list. If you get interrupted like before, then you can just go back to your journal, see what things haven't been done yet, and then make sure they get done.
Now that you know the principles behind file systems, different filesystems have different features:
* FAT only supports the File Allocation Table and free space index idea.
* HPFS is like FAT, except that it adds some extra features that were missing in the original version of FAT, like longer filenames, more precise timestamps, and general efficiency increases.
* NTFS adds a journal on top, and fancy features like compression and encryption and extra notes about each file, including who should be allowed to look at them, enforceable by you.
* ZFS and BTRFS are the latest generation of file systems, and they include really advanced features such as the ability to automatically store across multiple harddrives, and to detect when files get corrupted and to pull a good copy from the other harddrive, and store previous copies of files whenever you change them. | 1044b765-6b70-4fdb-b5fa-112df3d48cb1 |
6gtkhb | What does the CDC in America do? | As some examples:
CDC tracks the spread of diseases, looking for the source, transmission vector, and that sort of thing.
CDC also maintains the ‘strategic national stockpile’ of medicine, which is basically something from an action move. They can get tons of medical products to basically anywhere in the US in 12 hours (and I mean tons in the literal sense).
> These so-called push packages are warehoused in a dozen, classified, non-descript facilities under 24-hour, contractor armed guard protection. Geographically situated to allow rapid delivery anywhere in the Continental U.S., material will deploy by unmarked trucks and/or airplanes within 12 hours of the receipt of the request by CDC. The U.S. Marshal provides armed security from these federal sites to local destinations.
_URL_0_
How cool is that? | 60dc4687-8add-499c-9ed2-2462d4e49df4 |
349xzd | why I get friction burns on my inner thighs when I walk too much, but sometimes I don't despite doing around the same amount of walking | It depends a lot on the pants/skirt/underwear you are wearing, and the heat and humidity (sweat seems to make the chaffing much worse). | 9f18b71f-e159-4452-9d07-c34bff444ba5 |
1ws0v5 | what in our brain makes the auto alarm clock go off? | This is an extremely complex part of biology.
The processes your body uses for internal time keeping is called the circadian rhythm.
Your circadian rhythm is affected by many different things such as hormone levels and balances within your brain, which in turn can be affected by external stimuli such as temperature and light.
These hormone levels are controlled by a part of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, located in the hypothalamus.
At the very basic the suprachiasmatic nucleus is stimulated during the day time via a nerve pathway from the retina of your eye during exposure to light. When it gets dark, this signal stops and the suprachiasmatic nucleus turns the pineal gland on; which starts to produce melatonin. The melatonin relaxes the body and causes you to start to feel tired.
In the morning, when it starts to get light again, the pineal gland is switched off and the levels of melatonin in your blood start to decrease again; causing you to become more alert.
Those are the basics anyway, how the body is able to determine time to an accurate enough level to wake you up within 5 minutes before your alarm goes off, I do not know. I'd be interested for someone to chip in with more detail. :) | 465c8e55-a9f3-4bd3-9947-b0810ea01c03 |
2q791u | What is actually going on with the oil companies, and why do the prices keep dropping? | all of these answers contain somewhat true points, but something to point out -- no one 'sets' oil prices, not the oil exploration and production companies, not OPEC, not anyone except the market. The two types of oil quoted when people talk about 'oil prices' are WTI (U.S. benchmark) and Brent Crude (North Sea, worldwide benchmark)...and these prices are set by futures contracts that are traded instruments.
In other words, the price of oil is determined in much the same way the price of a stock is determined, not like the price of a good/service is determined. OPEC decided not to cut production (Saudi Arabia especially), which had the effect of driving prices down (supply/demand imbalance), but they do not actually decide what price they will be able to sell a barrel of oil. | 667437af-bf87-4ed4-a015-471da9cc4749 |
15unbc | what antibodies and reagents are | An antibody is a protein produced by the body to combat disease. The antibodies will attach to the outside of a virus, coating it and making it inactive. A virus coated in antibodies can't infect other cells.
A reagent is chemical added to a mixture that allows a reaction to occur but is not consumed in the process. | b6a629a6-8037-4903-a5ae-50abd869367a |
92xoa6 | elders and heat | Babies and old people have a hard time regulating body temperature. Someone mentioned thinning skin, and that is totally a factor. Another is that, as people age, circulation cuts down a noticable bit. That will make a person colder, as it's the heat in the blood that warms your extremities.
This is why they say "check on the elderly" on the news during heat waves. | 068ce47a-e893-44d7-9a28-fc188ed11c15 |
3r0jy0 | How does the extra printed money from quantitative easing get into circulation? | It's created electronically, and then used to buy bonds. Because those bonds are now owned, they can't be bought by the private investors anymore, so they have to go put their money other places instead. | 3f756d8f-7d75-4c6d-ab07-3e373385618e |
1j73y8 | Why do most promotions say "Purchase Not Necessary"? | If a purchase is necessary to enter the game of chance the promotion is classified as a lottery. Some governments, such as the US and the UK, deem as illegal.
You should be able to get a piece for free by going to your local McDonalds and stating you'd like to enroll without a purchase. Your request must then legally be obliged, possibly with a postage paid form that you fill out and mail in and they will, in turn, will mail you a piece. I am not certain how frequently you can do this, but I believe it's once per day per household. | c118bbcf-5c91-42d9-a821-859d03da97c2 |
xmrqh | Why do people call Fifty Shades of Gray porn? | It's an erotic novel, which is about as close to porn as you can get while still being a novel. From what I understand, it goes into great detail about the intimacy involved. | 5ed4bf6d-8cc3-4fd1-967e-7b9b28c6ccd2 |
2dr9uo | How does hollywood accounting make a successful movie like Forrest Gump to be categorize as net loss, is it not true that box office - production office = profit? | Let's imagine that I'm making a film.
It costs me $100million to make the film. And the film takes $300million at the box office. But of that $300million, the cinemas themselves keep $100million, so I get $200million. This sounds like $100million profit, right?
I'm going to pay the screenwriter 10% of the profit. So he stands to make $10million. Not bad.
But as well as spending $100million making the film, I also had to distribute the film to the cinemas. And arrange for it to be advertised. And I had to hire studios in which to film it.
I decided to hire myself to distribute the film. I charged myself $40million for that. And I charged myself $40million for my expertise in arranging the advertising, too. Add to the the $30million I charged myself to hire my own studios, and you can see that the total cost of making the film was $210million. Even though over half those costs go to me.
So why would I want to do that? Well, now there's no profit. And since the screenwriter's salary is a portion of the profit, I don't have to pay him anything at all! I've just saved myself $10million. | ba397fd1-bcbd-4565-86f3-f87faecaf2ed |
1u4t7x | Why is it that Reddit only displays some of my subreddits in the drop down at one time? | The maximum number of subreddits for the drop down list is 50. | 628b37dd-674f-434e-84ba-2ebae866823a |
5m938l | How and why did cannabis come to be illegal? | because of systemic political racism. back in the 1930's, mexicans and blacks smoke weed. white people didn't. so weed was make illegal to have a reason to put mexicans and blacks in jail. | b3a7808b-f3df-4856-8b19-eb9525bb1a18 |
7dm52a | How are aluminum tent poles so much stronger/springier today? | It might be the same as how it's done with aircraft wings. In a normal alloy the elements are evenly mixed throughout the structure. In some more modern high strength alloys you have certain regions that have a greater ration of one metal to another than other regions do. This can allow things such as increased flexibility or the same strength for less weight | 1569533e-fbc2-4c11-866d-b00f82d969d2 |
2pizhl | Why is female handwriting generally distinguishable from male handwriting? | Young girls fine motor skills tend to develop a few years earlier than young boys. This also coincides with schools teaching handwriting, ages 5-8. As a result girls can get a bit of a jumpstart on developing and perfecting their handwriting.
If you want to throw socializations in also, it is usually stressed that girls should be neat and precise, while boys tend to be given a bit more leeway in messiness...."boys will be boys" excuse. | 9e5b2113-ea85-4989-a6ec-4db85770b8da |
2gb48a | Phishing | Phishing is when people make up clever ways to get you to tell them your info. One (fake) example: You're "You", and the person trying to phish is B.
**B:** Hello person, my name is Mr. Bankerman! I am from the bank. We're doing a routine check. All you need to tell me is your PIN.
**You:** Oh, yes, of course! Here it is: 9-9-9-9.
**B:** Thank you! Congratulations on your banking and stuff.
The person trying to phish now knows your PIN and you now leave thinking he was from your offical bank, _after all_, he was wearing a fancy suit and tie.
In addition, you're
1. Too lazy.
2. Think it would be rude
3. Just dont have the time
4. So convinced that you didn't think about it
to actually check if you're dealing with a legit person. | 0bae5dc2-1aac-4ff6-a796-1aaf2b6dcfc5 |
4f1w4x | Why does sperm and bleach smell basically the same? | If I remember my awkward Catholic school sex ed, the female reproductive canal is (very slightly) acidic. Therefore, the male ejaculate has to be slightly basic (alkaline) to counteract it.
Bleach is a strong alkaline, hence a somewhat similar smell.
Also, I think semen may contain an element of chlorine, we didn't get that far in class ;) | ce16074b-007f-48fa-8337-737be3385bb5 |
2oif91 | How does the 'Stingray' work? Wouldn't you be able to hear interference on calls etc? | Your phone treats the Stingray as a local cell tower. And the Stingray passes through all cell phone traffic. It happens quick enough that any delay is not noticed. No interference is generated.
If you are concerned about Stingrays in your neighborhood see:
_URL_0_ | 08f3998d-67e4-4ee1-b4dd-e20f77f0c997 |
1p6uij | What stops a journalist from printing anything 'off the record'? | If you print something that was said to you in the course of performing your journalistic duties, you are basically betraying the trust of your source and burning that source. You do it once, you'd need some luck to be able to talk to anyone on the inside ever again. | 286bc19d-acb0-4009-ba40-d5f382d6eb11 |
2yr0q5 | Why do I become even more angrier at the person who really hurt me when they try to be nice to me or offer something nice when I'm upset? | Human instinct is to not repeat a task that hurts you. You have in some way opened up and allowed yourself to be hurt by this person. They hurt you and your natural reaction is to want to not be hurt again so when they try to be nice your brain doesn't want to open back up to them and give them another opportunity to hurt you. The easiest way to prevent yourself from opening back up is to be angry with them. It is one of the strongest emotions and the most difficult to change through reasonable thinking which makes it the go to emotion for when you are upset with someone. | e95f9010-648c-451f-8baa-728afac16794 |
6g5exu | what is the point of making medical students study all the subjects/all residential rotations? | I like /u/police-ical answer a bit more than my own.
You need to have a basic understanding of how the body works and what can go wrong with it regardless of what field you go into. Without this knowledge, you can fuck up really badly. Let me give you a couplr examples regarding psychiatry.
Say you have a patient coming into the hospital for a manic episode with psychosis and this patient is sent to the psych service for control. You may think he has bipolar disorder and typically you can give them haldol to control them but one of the things you need to do before giving haldol is the work up for hyperthyroidism. You need to be able to see the signs such as exopthalmos, tachycardia, pretibial myxedema, jitteriness and psychosis. If you miss this diagnosis you will be knocking out this patient over and over again without correction and could place the patient in danger of thyroid storm which could kill him.
Say you have a patient with schizophrenia and you want to prescribe risperidone, an antipsychotic medication. You don't want to do this if the patient is complaining of vision problems or gynecomastia or galactorrhea because the patient may have a prolactinoma (a tumor) in his brain.
If you want to prescribe clozapine you need to be aware of the potentially deadly side effect of agranulocytosis which can disrupt a patients immune system. If a patient has certain immune problems then it may not be worth placing them on clozapine because you could cause fatal infections. But clozapine is also an amazing antipsychotic. This is a judgement call but you need familiarity with the various immune conditions a patient could have if you want to appropriately make this decision.
I'm not even in the field of psychiatry but I know these things because if one of my patients were to come in on psychiatric meds or have psychiatric conditions, I'll need to take that into account with whatever I do. You could of course consult the hospital psychiatrist but you'll look like a fuckin retard (at least on these basic things).
It's true that a lot you learn in college and med school isn't applicable in practice but you also gotta realize that knowledge is foundational. You can't skip a layer of knowledge otherwise you'll have gaps and prob won't be able to critically think. And truthfully, there is a certain amount of studying strength you need to make it through med school and if you can't make it through the various science courses you most likely won't have the determination and skill to complete med school.
Also, from a practicality standpoint there are hundreds of fields you can go into through med school. It wouldn't be financially reasonable to split them all into different groups. You could of course go through different routes to enter certain fields: become a psychologist if you like psych, become a crna if you like anesthesia. | 153944ee-1b3f-4e12-bddf-f07a69bc56b2 |
3bndrz | Why were ancient cities buried or abandoned if they continued to grow into modern cities? | Some cities have been around for thousands of years, and still are inhabited today. Rome or example or Istanbul.
Many cities were abandoned because of things like:
1. Natural Disasters
2. Lack of/exhaustion of local resources
3. Economic/Trade shifts | b7b15ed8-5aa0-44cb-ad2b-891a55560e6e |
3rjsrz | Why do we perceive our vision as a single frame when we have two eyes? | We have binocular vision, by using two eyes our brain receives to separate images with everything shifted slightly left or right. Your brain then takes the images and process them together into a single image, using the differences to give you depth perception and three dimensional vision.
For example I am sitting at my computer screen. If I close one eye, then quickly open and close the other my computer screen seems to shift, this is because it's close to me. If I look out the window at a tree down the street and do the same that jump is minimal or imperceptible. This tells me the tree is far away.
Your brain is doing this in real time with the two images to constantly keep up our sense of depth. | 1d2ffb05-ed0d-4de8-bd4e-22678f47a3b2 |
4f566m | Why does semen turn hard when exposed to hot water? | The same reason eggs get more solid when they cook, I believe.
The heat causes some of the proteins to denature.
Proteins are kind of like balled-up organic strings. Since they are round, they easily bump past each other in a liquid. When they denature, they partially or completely unravel, and the loose ends get all tangled up with each other, creating a more solid structure. | 4863fe1c-439c-4142-9b95-6e3ca5031c68 |
ln1mv | LI5: Why wont the US government legalize marijuana? | Legalizing marijuana is not a politically wise proposal to make. There are lots of reasons why this is so, but the core thing is that a politician would lose more votes from the minority that opposes marijuana than from the majority that supports it. As long as that is true, marijuana will not be legalized, no matter how strong the reasons are. | 78cc1f37-c28e-4880-9747-e66731d907c9 |
5aftlv | Why did Tipper Gore get so much hate from the music industry and fans during 1985 for wanting parental guidelines on music? | People thought they wanted to ban/censor music because that's exactly what they wanted to do. And they did it successfully at the time with Body Count's song Cop Killer. They put so much pressure on the label that the album was pulled from the shelf and the song was eventually replaced with a song called Freedom of Speach.
It wasn't just an emotional response to a perceived threat. It was a very literal threat against the freedom of expression. | 9bd90911-bbad-473f-ad48-3e8a2a0e71f0 |
1u99fh | How is a SSN (Social Security Number) generated? | Area numbers - The first three numbers originally represented the state in which a person first applied for a social security card. Numbers started in the northeast and moved westward. This meant that people on the east coast had the lowest numbers and those on the west coast had the highest. Since 1972, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has assigned numbers and issued cards based on the ZIP code in the mailing address provided on the original application form. Since the applicant's mailing address doesn't have to be the same as his residence, his area number doesn't necessarily represent the state in which he resides. For many of us who received our SSNs as infants, the area number indicates the state we were born in. You can find out which area numbers go with each state here.
Group numbers - These two middle digits, which range from 01 through 99, are simply used to break all the SSNs with the same area number into smaller blocks to make administration easier. (The SSA says that, for administrative reasons, group numbers issued first consist of the odd numbers from 01 through 09, and then even numbers from 10 through 98, within each area number assigned to a state. After all the numbers in group 98 of a specific area have been issued, the even groups 02 through 08 are used, followed by odd groups 11 through 99.)
Serial numbers - Within each group designation, serial numbers -- the last four digits in an SSN -- run consecutively from 0001 through 9999. | 146dfbaa-c672-4532-8fd6-6b7a41c2715f |
5efjc1 | How is math like a language? | I guess this one's going to depend on your definition of "language"
One way of thinking about a [written] language is as a systematic manner of representing abstract concepts via symbols
For example, if I write the word "tree," you know that I'm referring to [this](_URL_3_) and not [this](_URL_4_)
If I say "tall tree," then you know that I'm talking about [one of these](_URL_5_) and not [one of these](_URL_7_).
If I say "family tree," you might think of something like [this](_URL_2_)
There's nothing inherently special about the letters t, r, e, e, - they don't look like a tree at all (well, the t does, kind of), and yet when you combine them, they form a coherent thought. When you add on additional words, it modifies the thought and gives it more meaning. The reason that you think of a tree when you see the word tree is because it's generally accepted that when I write "tree," I'm referring to one of those big woody plants growing out of the ground.
Similarly, math is a system of symbols which convey *a lot* of meaning when arranged in a specific order, despite the fact that the symbols aren't inherently connected to the "mathematical object" we're describing.
For instance, if I write
r(t) = < cos(t), sin(t), t >
this probably means nothing to you, if you've never seen the notation before. However, a person familiar with vector functions would recognize this as a [parametric representation of a helix](_URL_0_) in ℝ^(3), as opposed to, say, a [sphere](_URL_1_), or a [straight line](_URL_6_).
There's nothing inherently helical about the collection of symbols used to describe it, but together, they very clearly describe to someone who knows the "language" the object in question - the helix in the picture. You could argue that this helix exists regardless of whether or not we have a language to describe it; you've got the picture, right there! There are also multiple ways to describe the helix, using a different collection of symbols.
Similarly, the more you know a language, the more you can handle abstract concepts in that language. The more mathematics you know, the more "fluent" you are with abstract mathematical concepts. | dbc2eb4a-f6a2-405b-b2bf-346d449e4ec3 |
5axh1j | How do trees survive winter? | They can store nutrients below ground mostly. Think of syrup, which all decidious trees in northern climates produce. The flow of syrup is the tree moving sugars from its lower storage organs to its leaf buds yo support the new growth. Also woody tissue with secondary cell walls are dead so they aren't really supporting as much living tissue as it seems. | e443dbee-0d7c-4482-a6f3-b4750b2bb950 |
1x1ovd | Why in construction, when they lay rebar, is it in a grid pattern? | Because grids are easy and the structural integrity gained from triangles would not outway the massive extra time investment. | 60f05595-6e66-4138-9acd-cbd1a92c1e68 |
2uvbm8 | Why do Wind turbines have three blades? | According to [this]( _URL_0_ ), wind turbines are nearly as efficient with one blade. Adding blades barely increases efficiency and adds considerable cost, so the question is really "why have more than one?" And the answer presented is that three blades is the smallest number where the forces balance in a way that prevents destructive vibrations.
Now, why the farm-style ones have so many blades, I'm not sure. My guess is efficiency is not a concern, so it may have more to do with increasing durability. It's a small windmill so the cost isn't much greater to have more blades (and I think they're very simple metal blades), but it may be costly in manual effort to repair. So having many redundant blades may just let it last longer. It's also possible that the design *limits* speed since these irrigation mills should only operate at a maximum level of performance: pumping beyond that isn't a bonus, but could actually damage the irrigation system.
Edit: /u/DrScrubbington gives the real explanation for irrigation windmills below. | c4186406-e881-46a6-a100-84a019810d42 |
3lzwec | Why does diarrhea make your anus burn. | Several factors contribute to the feeling of burning, ranging from the following depending on your particular situation:
* diarrhea poop is more acidic than normal poop. (Normal poop is often alkaline, but diarrhea moves quickly through your intestines without being properly "processed," leaving it more acidic.)
* reduced time in transit through your gut may also leave more digestive enzymes in diarrhea than regular poop
* increased water content in your poop means that the entire contents (food, bacteria, etc.) are more easily smeared onto the surfaces of your mucous membranes. Normal poop is more desiccated and thus doesn't spread all the food contents over your rectum and anus.
* The bacteria that live in your mid-gut may have been expelled more quickly than normal, meaning that the bacteria in diarrhea may be different than those in normal poop.
* There are many immune cells that hang out near the rectum (a soft mucous membrane), and tissue inflammation (being "red and puffy") is a common side effect of your immune cells detecting foreign substances. This doesn't happen as badly for regular poop because it is often more solid, and therefore less accessible. As described above, normal poop is also more alkaline, less digestive enzymes, and has normal bacteria in it.
The combination of all these things, combined with the need for more wiping is the primary reason why diarrhea burns. | 18f2e441-6803-4f31-b855-0685a972ba68 |
4jzbcu | What is the purpose of hanging highly irradiated patient's limbs up in the air? | Not a scientifically backed explanation as such but it might be to do with minimizing contact with surfaces to reduce the pain the subject is in. Any sort of second degree burn or worse hurts when it has pressure applied. | 1a415ac3-7db7-46cd-a009-d140e0449783 |
1w0yj1 | How is the melody encoded on a vinyl and how is it reproduced by a record player ? | Such is the genius of Thomas Edison. It turns out sound waves are really pressure waves that exert force on your eardrums 'creating' sound. Vinyl is a soft material which is sensitive to subtle changes in force. Therefore to make a recording, an etching needle is placed on the vinyl and when sounds are made it moves the needle up and down according to the pressure exerted by the sound wave. As a result it literally converts a pressure wave into a physical shape.
To play back, the opposite occurs. You run a needle over the record and the needle moves a diaphragm back and forth converting the 'shape' of the sound wave back into an actual sound. | 541eee74-b78e-423a-b73a-f47175b8ec5c |
1sqng2 | Why can we multiply by 0 but not divide by 0. | Let's put it this way - you can't divide something into zero parts. You can divide it into one part, but not zero parts. That's an illogical question (what happens if you divide $10 in zero parts?) There's no answer. Here:
$0 x 12 months = I'll give you $0 every month for 12 months. How much money will you have after a year? $0.
$12 x 0 months = I'll give you $12 every month, but no months have occurred yet. How much money do you have? $0.
$0/12 months = You've made $0 in a year - how much did you make monthly? $0
$12/0 months = You've made $12 in the span of no time at all. How much money did you make monthly? Um...well...I didn't make money monthly. There's no way to calculate this, because there's no time on the scale. | b865fd4c-8cca-4980-acba-8e32fd061f67 |
1ydet6 | How did child rearing work before diapers? | As far as infants, cloth and linen were often used as diapers, this is shown in native tribes. Disposable diapers are relatively new. Many people still use cloth diapers as they tend to be better for an infants skin. Thorough cleaning was just very important. | 7afee720-3f58-4ecd-acaf-b5b9ffd6816e |
34yaz3 | When naming a new royal, are there only certain names they are allowed to use or is it just assumed they'll use a previous royal name? | It comes down to custom and tradition. For instance, with British royalty, they need to pick a British name. Custom dictates they can't go with something like Barbara or Fleur.
Custom shows that typically they choose names to honor other family members or royalty. That's how they chose Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Diana as the three names for the Princess. You want something with historical significance and personal significance. | b6425532-d570-425a-b542-71f35731779e |
42gxbx | Bullet proof cars | They aren't bullet proof, they're bullet resistant, depending on how much you want to spend, what kind of bullets you want to stop, and how many of them.
Typically run-flat tires are standard on those vehicles. | f2b9bc74-e8c2-470d-9541-93bc3398f8e7 |
3v9udp | According to the BBC: pilots used the aircrafts' sensors to confirm "no civilians were in the proximity of the targets" In the Syrian Bombings. How? | It basically means "We hit the designated target. The target was defined as hostile, therefore everybody there were enemies. If there were any civilians, we define them as enemies as well.".
In other words, they only know that the bombs hit as intended, they don't know who was there or if the intelligence that selected the target was correct. | 5e7ccef2-058a-4aef-bd0e-b10853b724b3 |
1kx6ya | Why do dogs throw up when they're hungry? | I guess you have never been really hungry. Not an insult I just mean humans do the same thing its just we can just feed our selves or drink water or something to stop the hunger before it gets to that point. As a former homeless dude I have been that hungry you start to drool and it burns in your belly till you just got to let it out. hurts. it sucks. | 6f4f0c8d-db30-4f77-9b35-ff7c7e5fcb40 |
2s4zwy | Why is the Holocaust remembered as such a tragedy, while the Japanese invasion of China (with similar casualties) is almost forgotten? | I live in China currently and it is a really big deal here. They will never forget. | 1d33b3fa-da8f-479e-920e-afa2eadd1669 |
73evom | How did Enigma cracking machine know it cracked Enigma? | There was known plaintext it was trying to match against. I seem to remember they used weather reports which were broadcast each day in the morning, and always had the same initial letters.
Once you crack the settings for that one, you could then decode all the messages sent the same day (until they change the codes again the next day). | f35758ec-e1d3-4c02-ae18-387ef38064cf |
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