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asf81i | why aren’t the bottoms of people’s feet the smoothest skin on their body? | The bottoms of people’s feet are constantly being rubbed as if having sandpaper taken to them (less harshly than that, of course), so why haven’t they been rubbed ultra-smooth like when you sand other materials? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/asf81i/eli5_why_arent_the_bottoms_of_peoples_feet_the/ | {
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"The rubbing your feet get during the day is different than the rubbing you get when smoothing your feet. It is less of the spa kind and more of the asphalt kind. Rough enough to make your feet want to protect themselves.",
"Because the body's response to that friction and abuse is to harden the skin, which is not conducive to smoothing.",
"They aren’t really being rubbed. You are applying pressure to areas. Also it needs to be dry for friction so a little moisture just makes the skin peel. Cotton is soft as are most fabrics used for socks so there’s no “sand paper” effect :)"
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27csq4 | when countries "put pressure" on other countries, what exactly does that mean? | You hear that a lot on the news when talking about diplomacy. USA wants Russia to "put pressure" on Syria. What does this mean? Veiled threats? Withdrawal of financial support? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/27csq4/eli5_when_countries_put_pressure_on_other/ | {
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"We are in essentially a global economy. Nations depend on one another for resources and can \"put pressure\" on each other by imposing economic sanctions, boycotting trade.etc\n\nRussia is funding the Syrian government. USA wants Russia to reduce the flow of money and weapons citing atrocities committed by the Syrian government forces."
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15s5ud | how come when you stretch or get up fast you black out? | Sometimes, if I've been been sitting for awhile and get up to stretch, I black out. Usually, I lose my eye sight and have a headache, but only momentarily. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15s5ud/eli5_how_come_when_you_stretch_or_get_up_fast_you/ | {
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"When you stand up quickly after sitting for an extended period of time the blood pressure to your brain decreases as blood flow increases to your legs, and you experience a mild form of \"postural hypotension\". Postural Hypotension is a more severe form, that often results in fainting and is a real medical issue- often related to things like diabetes. \n\nEdit: Used hyper rather than than hypo. ",
"I know how you feel, I have the same thing happen to me whenever I stand up to quickly. I usually just play it off by just leaning on something until my eyesight comes back. ",
"Your body is full of blood. Blood brings oxygen to all your organs (including your brain), allowing them to function. When you stand up gravity forces the blood down away from your brain. That's why you can lose vision. It's only temporary because your body quickly gets used to the fact that you're standing up.",
"I didn't know people could black out from this! There's been a few times I've felt dizzy from getting up to fast but that's all that happens.",
"It's called \"orthostatic hypotension\" and it's pretty common. Basically, if you're sitting or lying down your heart doesn't have to work as hard to keep your blood circulating. When you stand up quickly your heart has to start working harder against gravity to get blood to your head. Sometimes it takes your heart a second to catch up to the change, so your head gets less blood than it needs and you can get dizzy or blackout for a second. "
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4sn4fq | why all my friends suddenly have gluten intolerance? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sn4fq/eli5_why_all_my_friends_suddenly_have_gluten/ | {
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"Did they \"suddenly\" get a gluten intolerance, or are they just hopping onto the \"gluten-free\" fad without even knowing what gluten is?\n\nYou are born with gluten intolerance. You don't just one day magically grow it. ",
"Odds are they don't. Gluten intolerance is a rare condition that affects less than half a percent of the population. But the current fad diet is being \"gluten free\" and so if they are on that fad they may say they are gluten intolerant to explain participation in the fad, or to try and make the restaurant comply with their dietary restrictions. Or they could have tried it and felt better (for a number of possible reasons) and assumed they were intolerant to gluten when it was really reducing or eliminating a different thing from their diet theat was helping them. "
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9o8vrl | what is the difference between auschwitz 1, 2, and 3? | I read that there are three different camps, but all the links I read confuse me. Could anyone help me out? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9o8vrl/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_auschwitz_1_2/ | {
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"These three camps were part of the Auschwitz camp network but they were built at different times (Auschwitz 1 was built first, then 2, then 3). Auschwitz 2 was a combined concentration camp and \"extermination\" camp (where they committed mass murder), and Auschwitz 3 specifically provided labor to a chemical company called IG Farben.",
"1 has the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign. 2 has the railway arch and had the gas chambers. They're about 2.5km apart. "
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b3grgu | the difference between mercantilism and free trade | (For my history work at school) I understand mercantilism is maximising profits and reducing imports and that free trade is trade without tariffs etc..., but isn't all trade made to maximise profits? What makes mercantilism different from any other type of trade? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b3grgu/eli5_the_difference_between_mercantilism_and_free/ | {
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"At it's most basic core mercantilism is the idea that if a country exports more, they make more profit. That profit is made by selling to others.\n\nFree trade turns this idea around. Sure, selling to others is good but not exclusively. If you can purchase something cheaper somewhere else rather than make it yourself than doing so is a form of cost-cutting, that also leads to profit.\n\nSo mercantilism says that trade is great, but only the selling part. Countries should strive to sell as much as possible to other countries and purchase as little as possible.\n\nFree trade states that everyone should sell to everyone and people should purchase things where the cost is lowest. The idea is that every country will settle into equilibrium and since everyone will be minimizing costs everyone will be richer as a result."
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dbcu6m | why are the music royalties "harder" to obtain or mantain than other kind of royalties? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dbcu6m/eli5_why_are_the_music_royalties_harder_to_obtain/ | {
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"I wouldn't necessarily say that they're harder to obtain/maintain, but there's a couple reasons you probably notice them more.\n\n1. They're incredibly incredibly widely used. There's dramatically more need for using music in varying forms of media (games, TV shows, movies, etc) than say, showing clips of a famous movie or something.\n\n2. The music industry is a very old, mature, and powerful industry and major labels have a ton of power."
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9t7fcw | what are you actually doing when you take the derivative of a function and why does it give the area? what about integration? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9t7fcw/eli5_what_are_you_actually_doing_when_you_take/ | {
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"Derivative function gives the change of the function as it travels a very small distance. For example, consider the function y=x. Its derivative is 1. Meaning that if x changes from 1 to 2, y also changes from 1 to 2, i.e., by 1. Also, if x changes from 2 to 3, y changes from 2 to 3 by 1. This is because derivative of y does not depend on x value. This fact is represented by the derivative function. \nIf the derivative function is dependent on x as in the case of y=x^2. Then, its derivative is 2x. Meaning when x changes from 1 to 2 change in y is 3. And if x changes from 2 to 3, change in y is 5.\nOnly derivative is a function meaning you can actually compute for any range of x and instant value of x.\n\nIntegration is reverse of differentiation. It combines the effects of y for an interval of x. It is similar to addition. Thus, integration gives the area under a curve.\n\nChap 6 of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality gives a nice intuitive explanation for both the operations.",
"Taking the derivative gives you the gradient (steepness) of the function, and for y=function of x, the derivative tells you how quickly y changes with respect to x.\n\nIntegration gives you the area under a line, and essentially just reverses the derivative process. If you integrate a derivative you get the original function. Integrating a line gives the area as you're multiplying each y value (the distance from the axis to the line) by a very small X value (dx, which is really just a way of saying an infinitely small change in X) which is another distance, and then adding them all up, and since distance*distance=area, you get a value for the area under the line",
"For simplicity, lets assume differentiation and summation (discrete equivalents to derivation and integration).\n\n\nYou have set of numbers, lets say something like (1,5,22,3,4,0). Differentiation tells you difference between current number and number that was before it, so in this case you'll end up with (1,4,17,-19,1,-4). On the other hand, summation is adding those numbers, so in our example it's 1+5+22+3+4+0=35.\n\n\nDerivation and integration is basically the same thing, but you do it on continuous data rather than discrete so you do the difference or sum over infinitely short steps.",
"The reason differentiation and integration give us the things that they do (the slope of graph and the area underneath it) is that they were created specifically to do just that.\n\nA line tangent to a graph at a point has approximately the same slope as a line joining two points, one on each side of the point we are interested in. Finding the slope of that line is easy: it's the difference in the y-coordinates divided by the differences in the x-coordinates. If you make the line shorter, it approximates the tangent line more closely. Differentiation is just the process of seeing what result we get for the slope in the limit case where we allow the line length to shrink to zero.\n\nSimilarly, finding the area under a graph can be approximated by cutting it up into rectangles, finding their areas and adding them together. If we make the rectangles narrower, we get a more accurate result. Integration is the process of finding the area in the limit case where we allow the rectangles' width to shrink to zero.\n\nAnd it just so happens we can prove that these are inverse processes: the integral of a differential is the original function (plus a constant)."
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1rthl3 | why is the auburn football game such a big deal? | I see everyone freaking out about it. Reddit, facebook, and friends are all talking about it. I've never been interested in football, and i've never watched it, though i've played a couple times for shits and giggles.
But is it really that rare for a person to run from one side of the field, to the other? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rthl3/eli5_why_is_the_auburn_football_game_such_a_big/ | {
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"With no time on the clock, as the game winning run, and the fact that it was a missed field goal that was run back. Yes indeed it is that rare. ",
"Alabama has won the last two national championships and they were in the way to their third straight as they were undefeated until tonight. With them losing their chances of making it to the game have gone down greatly. Also, they won't win the SEC now either. The SEC championship game is now between Auburn and Mizzou.\n\nThey ran a play with 6 seconds left to get into field goal range and just *barely* got out of bounds with 1 second left. The field goal was short and Auburn returned it 109 yards for a touchdown, only the 4th time it's happened in NCAA history. ",
"I am not a big football person, but I can tell you that the Auburn v/s Alabama games are one of the biggest rivalries out there. I have been to the state and if you live there, you are for one or the other. This game is a big deal for the entire state. College football fans tend to be a very loyal crowd and bragging rights for the entire next year come from this. Not to mention the way it was won was simply astonishing and made for one hell of a game, rivalry or not. \nAnd one final note, winning these games are important to the colleges themselves. IIRC, across the college football programs, there have been coaches fired for not winning against rivalries. So yep, it is a big deal to those involved. ",
"1. The game really really mattered. Alabama is the top ranked team in the United States. On top of that, Auburn and Alabama are arguably the biggest rivals in college football.\n\n2. It has major implications for many other college teams. If 5 guys are racing towards a finish line, and the guy in first place trips, every single other guy has a chance of moving up a place.\n\n3. It was an insane and rare play. 109 yard run almost never happens.\n\n4. All the kicker had to do was kick it into the goal from a close line and it would have been over. Even if he just missed, the game would have gone into over time. Auburn was pretty much done.\n\n5. This happened on the very last play of the game as the clock ran out.\n\nAdd these factors all together, and you have what will go down as one of the biggest moments in college football ever. "
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5wsaxc | can we reverse the damage done to earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wsaxc/eli5_can_we_reverse_the_damage_done_to_earth/ | {
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"Earth is self-healing (the process may become faster by some human actions) give it a few million years and it'll be *mostly* restored, we just need to stop whatever we're doing that harm the planet--and that's the hard part. Harming the planet is an *unavoidable sacrifice* to advance humanity (just because it's unavoidable, doesn't mean we can't find a better alternative though).\n\njust my 2-cents.",
"Earth can repair itself over a long, long period of time (dozens of thousands of years would be a bare minimum)... for now. \n\nSome scientist fear we're nearing a tipping point where earth would start an unstoppable chain reaction of self-destruction that would make it permanently uninhabitable not only for humans, but for any form of megafauna in general (any animal over 40-45kg, or 90-100 lb.) The terrifying thing is, once it's started, there's no way to stop it. Even if we stopped everything we did bad overnight, that would still be too late. And when i'm saying we're nearing this point and the chain reaction would happen. Don't think \"200-300 years\". More like : tipping point in 10 to 20 years, uninhabitable planet in 80-100 years.\n\nClimate change is a serious and very real problem guys, don't underestimate it. Lobby your government and representatives, lest your children or grandchildren may witness the end of humanity."
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b9ihtm | how do college credits work? | Do certain amount of credits equal a degree? If you earn some credits in math and some in science and they total a degree is it a math degree or science? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b9ihtm/eli5_how_do_college_credits_work/ | {
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"Where I went to college you get credits for passing classes. You need a certain number to graduate. After you pick a major or minor you need to complete certain required courses for the major and then a certain number of credits in whatever classes you want within the discipline.\n\nSo for example for my CS degree I had to do classes like C programming, discrete math, scientific computation, digital logic, etc, and then a certain number of credits in any CS related classes I wanted (AI, compilers, computer architecture, etc). I also had to do a bunch of math classes (since I was in an engineering school) and certain liberal arts classes that everyone had to do.",
"When I was in college, there were a total number of credits needed to graduate, as well as certain credit requirements for your major and distribution requirement credits needed.\n\nSo you might need to pass 30 classes to get a bachelors degree, and your major requires 15 courses, and distribution requirements total another 15. At my college, all academic courses were 4 credit hours, while PE classes, studio art classes were 2 credit hours, so the numbers were basically x4, except the PE requirements.\n\nTypically you spent most of your first two years taking distribution requirement courses -- this means taking specific courses or ones within defined groups to ensure a well rounded education. So it might mean you have to take something like: 3 history or social science courses, 2 literature or culture courses, 2 math courses, 2 science courses including 1 lab science, 3 PE classes, health, etc. \n\nYour major will define what is required to get that degree, which likely include some specific courses (like the depts 101, 102, 201, 202 courses) and some elective courses."
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2iknnp | what makes the discovery of blue led so important that nobel physics prize went to it's discoverers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iknnp/eli5_what_makes_the_discovery_of_blue_led_so/ | {
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" > This enabled a new generation of bright, energy-efficient white lamps, as well as colour LED screens.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n > The blue light-emitting diodes they helped create are taking over lightbulbs as we know them, but already see universal use in smartphone flashlights and displays.\n\n***\n\n > Red, blue, and green light combine to make the bright white produced by LED lightbulbs. Bulbs using blue light-emitting diodes are more efficient and have a longer lifetime than old fashioned bulbs (up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights).\n\n***\n\n > All three men continued to improve on their work during the 90s, and also independently created blue lasers -- which, because of blue light's very short wavelength, allow for information to be stored much more densely than infrared light does. That’s how Blu-ray movie discs came to be.\n\n_URL_0_"
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"http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2014/10/07/the-nobel-prize-in-physics-goes-to-three-men-who-gave-us-blue-light-emitting-diodes-used-daily-in-your-smartphone-screen/",
"http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29518521"
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3f48lk | why does one's age need to be 18 to online date, when the age of consent is 16? | If 18's the age for accepting terms and conditions, then why can't a 16 year old online date with parent's consent? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f48lk/eli5_why_does_ones_age_need_to_be_18_to_online/ | {
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"How do you prove parental consent online?\n\nAlso, the age of consent is not the same everywhere. The company is probably covering themselves legally by making it 18, a common age in the US.",
"Because the dating site doesn't just operate in your state; it also operates in places where the age of consent is 18. \n\nAlso, you have to agree to terms of use of the site, and a minors agreement to them may not be binding. ",
"Another idea is that typically when using those sites you have to agree to terms and conditions. You need to be 18 years old to enter into a legally binding contract. "
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xn946 | why are passports needed to enter a foreign country? do you need to switch passports when you switch citizenship? what does a passport actually prove other than the fact that you have a certain citizenship? | ELI5: Why are passports needed to enter a foreign country? Do you need to switch passports when you switch citizenship? What does a passport actually prove other than the fact that you have a certain citizenship? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xn946/eli5_why_are_passports_needed_to_enter_a_foreign/ | {
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"Every country has rules about how long visitors are allowed to stay. Sometimes these rules change depending on where the visitor is from.\n\nA passport is a book that says which country you belong to. You show the passport when you visit another country so they know where you came from and how long you can stay.\n\nIf you change your citizenship, you get a new passport. You are supposed to throw away the old passport, but not many people do this because it's cool to have lots of passports.\n\nPassport now have biometric ID info in them. That means when immigration agents scan your passport and take you picture, they can match you against a database of criminals, and they can decide whether or not to let you enter their country. They may also arrest you if you are the criminal and you're on the run.",
"There are a lot of good answers in this thread, but they don't answer the fundamental question.\n\nThe reason you need a passport is that it is a proof of one thing in particular, which is that there is a nation which will take you back if the country you're visiting wants to get rid of you. Since every nation has control over its own immigration, if the US wants to deport someone, they need somewhere to deport that person to. If they randomly decided they wanted to send them to, say, Canada, Canada might not accept the person, and the US wouldn't be able to get rid of them.\n\nA passport is effectively a guarantee that the country issuing it accepts them as a citizen, and so will take that person back if they are no longer welcome. This is also why your passport is often required to be good for a certain period of time after your intended departure---unforeseen circumstances may arise.\n\nIt sounds mostly stupid, but there are on occasion people who are *stateless*---they have no citizenship. This is a bad spot to be in because no country will automatically let you in. Usually nowadays statelessness happens due to different citizenship rules at birth, such as if your parents' nation requiring you to be born in that country in order to grant citizenship, and you are born in a different country which doesn't automatically grant citizenship to anyone born within its borders. A stateless person is a theoretical liability to a nation letting them in, since they may have nowhere where they can legally work or live, but it would be morally wrong to force them to spend their life without a place to live or work.\n\ntl;dr it's kind of stupid except for one rare edge case that ruins it for everybody.",
"Not an answer, as there are plenty of good answers here, but an amusing trivia: the Queen of Englnd does not have a passport, as all British passports are issued on behalf on Her Majesty and are basically just a way to say \"The Queen of England requests that you let this person in\", which is kinda obsolete if she is standing there in person."
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2o6tjs | why don't most supermarket checkouts use a single line feeding into all the registers? | I see this sort of checkout line at banks and some computer stores. Basically, everyone goes into a single long line and at the end, a person or display will direct the first in line to the next available register.
Contrast that with most supermarkets where people line up directly for a register, not knowing if that line will move fast or slow and people will frequently shuffle between lines for different registers.
Why don't more stores use the checkout lines I described in #1 (at least in the US)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o6tjs/eli5_why_dont_most_supermarket_checkouts_use_a/ | {
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"Because imagine how long that one line would be. Imagine trying to navigate shipping carts in a confined space like that. \n\nIt works in banks because it's only a person standing there, so you can queue up 20 people in a small area by doing that snake-style lineup.",
"A number of grocers I've been to do this and it is quite effective. Most military commesaries I've been to are like you described. Although it did require a lot of space near the front of the store where many other grocers have product shelving.",
"So one line with multiple registers (like a bank) is the fastest way to move everyone through (operations courses teach this system). However, most people will not recognize this and most people think it is slower (also taught in those same classes).\nNow, if you have a choice between efficient work but unhappy customers (because they think other ways are faster, and they are wrong) or inefficient systems with happier customers, most firms tend to implement the first only if the customer has no choice (think Comcast). If you have the choice to go somewhere else because you think it's better, most people will without verifying or testing that assumption.\n\nSame logic applies to Wal-Mart. People think groceries are cheaper there so Wal-Mart starts upping the prices of groceries until they are maximizing profit. It's not a bad system at all (for Wal-Mart) but people seem to be convinced that groceries, on average, are cheaper there instead of where they are actually cheaper (like Kroger if you live in the South).\n\nIt's all about perception.",
"It requires a lot of open floor space to be able to do that, as there needs to be a single point that has an unobstructed view, and unobstructed access to while pushing a large shopping cart, each of the registers."
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1wnhmf | how does salt water not contaminate fresh water supply on an island? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wnhmf/eli5_how_does_salt_water_not_contaminate_fresh/ | {
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"Salt doesn't go up stream. All fresh water pools flow to the ocean at some point.",
"I'll give you the best example of the Everglades.\nThere is a difference in density between salt water and fresh water. \n\nAlthough they are side by side (0 ft above sea level, basically), the density of the fresh water doesn't allow the salt water to seep in and contaminate everything in South FL.\n\nThis is why droughts are of extreme importance in South FL, but our tropical weather keeps us safe usually.\n\nI'm sure there are more \"technical\" explanations, but this is ELI5."
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3vvxln | how can i remember 1000's of song lyrics but can't remember recent events? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vvxln/eli5how_can_i_remember_1000s_of_song_lyrics_but/ | {
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"I don't know much about neurology, but the fact that there's a rhythm, you like to listen to it, and likely did so multiple times probably helps."
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4i23wj | if a photon of light behaves like a wave, why can't you cancel light out the same way you can sound? | I'm probably missing something about the nature of photons, since I was taught they behaved like a wave and a particle, but I've never seen anyone cancel a light wave out with one of opposing wavelength. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i23wj/eli5_if_a_photon_of_light_behaves_like_a_wave_why/ | {
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"You can, in fact that was the experiment done to show light behaves as waves. You can see it yourself. Hold a pin sized hole up to your eye and you will bands of dark around the edge. That is the light waves canceling each other",
"You can in fact cancel out light. This is how the [double slit experiment](_URL_0_) shows the wave like properties of photons. However there are a variety of reason that make light cancellation impractical, such as the high frequency and the power needed."
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j382g | how how antivirus companies generate malware signatures, and how they use them to find viruses | I always wondered how they extract virus signatures and how this signature is used when the file is being scanned. Can someone explain?
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j382g/eli5_how_how_antivirus_companies_generate_malware/ | {
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"First someone writes a virus that gets out into \"the wild.\" \n\nOnce it's 'popular' enough for a larger antivirus company to see they will typically document the file itself, what it does, any other things it affects (registry keys/files it creates/etc..). That information gets placed into a virus \"dictionary\".\n\nYour anti-virus software will download that dictionary, then look though each file you have on your computer, and check to see if it's in that dictionary. If it is, then the other pieces of the virus are removed (for example, a registry key that says to run the virus on startup) and the virus itself is removed.\n\n"
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78p4pn | how does the federal reserve figure out how much money to print/mint each year? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/78p4pn/eli5_how_does_the_federal_reserve_figure_out_how/ | {
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"The Federal Reserve Bank runs a program called FedCash. They accept sorted currency and fulfill orders. It's relatively standard supply-chain management. They know how much was ordered each month in the past, the lead time to get more from the BEP, and how much they have on hand. While they occasionally make mistakes and run low, it's not normally a problem.",
"Minor quibble, for clarification only: the Fed doesn't produce coinage or currency. The US Mint and Bureau of Engraving and Printing, respectively, do that. But the Fed is the only entity that can place orders for either, so really, the question is still well-put.\n\nTo answer, the Fed estimates the need for new coinage/currency the same way a business estimates the demand for its products: it generates forecasts for *this* year based on actual figures from *previous* years. Throw in a few tweaks, here and there, for specific, identifiable events that are likely to throw things off a bit (e.g., the introduction of a new bill, etc.), and Bob's your uncle. ",
"When it comes to actual, physical currency - Bills and Coins - whatever member banks of the Federal Reserve ask for, the Fed will essentially give them. In a modern economy, from a broad monetary perspective, physical currency is basically meaningless. The overwhelming majority of the money supply exists purely in electronic form. So when the Fed is \"printing money,\" really what they're doing is buying assets (usually bonds, but in extreme circumstances other assets) from banks, and giving them electronic currency in exchange.\n\nThis buying and selling of bonds is called Open Market Operations, and it's the primary way in which the Fed controls inflation. In order to determine how many bonds to buy (or sell) the Fed targets an interest rate. If the Fed sells a lot of bonds, the supply of bonds will increase, and the price of them will drop. This means that in order for the Federal government to issue new bonds, they have to have a higher return.\n\nBy raising the rate of return on new Bonds, the Fed also raises the interest rate on most other savings instruments as well. US treasury bonds are considered to be risk free (or as risk free as an investment can get), so in order to compete with the increased return, other savings and investments need to promise a higher return as well. This slows down consumption (as savings becomes more attractive by comparison), this drives down employment, which then drives down inflation. \n\nSo to answer your question, the Fed figures out how much money to \"print\" each year by looking at unemployment and inflation. It then performs open market operations in order to effect interest rates in order to hit it's unemployment and inflation targets.",
"I am going to assume you don't know what you were actually asking (most people don't) and answer the question I think you asked.\n\nHow does the Federal Reserve figure out how much Quantitative Easing and other tools to control the interest rate to use each year?\n\nPeople who criticize the Fed's policies are generally talking about this and pejoratively call it money printing. Also the question now has several ELI5 embedded into it.\n\n1. What is Quantitative Easing? QE is a program where the fed would buy loans from banks in exchange for increasing the amount of reserves the seller had at the Fed (basically let the banks loan more).\n2. What other tools does the Fed have? The main tool is actually buying and selling Federal debt, already purchased by others, in exchange for reserves.\n3. What is the interest rate the Fed controls and why is it important? The Fed controls something called the Fed Funds rate which is important for determining the rate at which banks will loan each other money overnight so they can be legally operated. Banks are required to have at least a certain percentage of their deposits in cash (10%) so these loan make sure they are always above that limit.\n4. How does the Fed know how much of these tools to use? They want to maintain full employment and stable prices (low inflation) they look to see if unemployment is rising too fast or just generally very high. If it is they will lower rates. If inflation is too high they will raise rates to get it under control.",
"OP, can you clarify whether you mean the physical printing/minting of currency or the creation of money itself? They are different things. Currency is not the same as money. The answers you are getting are making an assumption one way or another, but they are not going to flesh out the true answer unless they know what you are asking.\n\nCurrency is a method of transferring wealth, money is a method of quantifying it. Some money is currency but not all currency is money."
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1x5mdu | why do i feel out of breath sometimes when i take hot showers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x5mdu/eli5_why_do_i_feel_out_of_breath_sometimes_when_i/ | {
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"Definitely depends. Yeah when you are breathing in steam, there is less air, but only in insignificant amounts. Whenever your body is excessively warm, however, your blood vessels dilate to try to release heat (increases the surface area of the external environment that touches your blood). Since the heat is continually being heated by the shower, your blood vessels continue to dilate. This can result in lower blood pressure, which can trigger a shortness of breath. "
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139xbq | the appearance of pixelated, blocky, and green colors when playing and skimming through some videos. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/139xbq/eli5_the_appearance_of_pixelated_blocky_and_green/ | {
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"Modern compression algorithms rely partially on a technique called *temporal* compression. If the background in a shot stays the same, then you only need to remember how to draw it once. Temporal compression depends on the frames that happened before and after it. If you skip through a video it may not have enough information about what happened before to draw a correct image at your current point in time. Eventually something with all the info needed to draw the entire video frame (called a *keyframe*) will come along and the image will fix itself.\n\nThe other artifacts can be caused by errors and corruption in the data or a video that was compressed poorly."
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65fjl7 | why do touch screen devices only register certain touches (fingertips, styluses, etc) but not touching using other materials (fingernails, clothes, etc)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65fjl7/eli5_why_do_touch_screen_devices_only_register/ | {
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"because they use the minute electrical conductivity in your fingertips and the styluses point. The other objects do not have this characteristic. when you touch the screen with your fingertip some of the electricity the screen produces goes to your finger and the screens sensor can tell that some electricity is gone and knows something it touching it.\n\nedit: last sentence."
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1x1spm | does the female body produce more breast milk then needed? if so, where is the excess breast milk stored? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1x1spm/eli5_does_the_female_body_produce_more_breast/ | {
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"The pathway of milk in the human breast: Alveolus, duct, sac, nipple, baby. The milk is stored in the bubble-like cavity of the Alveolus and the infant sucking at the breast causes the cells to sqeeze, ejecting the milk.",
"I nursed 2 babies. When your baby is about 2 days old, the milk production increases to a level that the baby can't keep the pressure down and it is very painful. At this point, you can pump it to relieve the pressure and freeze it for later or just toss it. After your baby has developed a pattern of nursing, your milk production levels out for the frequency your baby nurses. As they get a little older and start to eat solids, your milk production starts to decrease. When you pump during this time, your body will think it's the baby and keep up with the high production. This can be frozen. Some moms donate their frozen milk. \n\nMy 3rd child nursed once at night for about 6 months before I cut her off at 25 months old. To prevent painful milk buildup, I ace bandage wrapped my chest so no milk would fill the alveolus. \n\nI froze some of mine for use when my husband had to keep her while I was working, but she hated the bottle and just screamed the whole time I was gone. I hope this gives you a little insight on nursing."
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5mh1k0 | how do internet routers transmit data from a pc through their device and then to the internet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mh1k0/eli5_how_do_internet_routers_transmit_data_from_a/ | {
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"First, the program using the data takes data and chops it up into reasonable chunks called packets. Each packet has an IP address and port number where it is destined to, in addition to the data. It's kind of like the address on an envelope. It gives this packet to the operating system.\n\nThe OS keeps a list of all the IP addresses it knows about on the local network, and associates those with Mac addresses.\n\nThe OS also knows about a special IP address called the gateway address. When the IP is outside of what the OS thinks is local (this is defined by the Subnet Mask), it sends traffic to the gateway.\n\nIn order to send traffic on the local network, to an Ethernet device connected to another computer, that IP packet gets wrapped in an Ethernet frame, like another envelope. When the device it is destined to sees that number, it starts listening, and unwraps that envelope. This is where the gateway comes in.\n\nWhen the gateway unwraps an Ethernet frame, it looks at the destination IP. If it is outside the local network, it sends a packet out to the WAN, which is really another router. That router then looks at the list of gateways IT knows, to see if any are wider areas, until your packet is either on a network whose subnet matches the destination, or it is certain that the destination doesn't exist on that network."
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20stat | why is radioactiveness always associated with the color green? | Everytime someone mentions radioactiveness, plutonium, radioactive waste or anything radiocative it is always associated with the color green or neon green, why is that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20stat/eli5_why_is_radioactiveness_always_associated/ | {
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"It is mostly the green phosphor that was added to radioactive luminescent paint.\n\nThey made a paint that included a radioactive element and with a green phosphor. This was applied to things like clock faces. The radioactive stuff gives off radiation, which excites the phosphor so that it glows green.",
"Because early in the 1900s, before we figured out just how chronic, low dose radiation can be, we used to use paint laced with radium to paint [clock dials](_URL_0_), among other things. The radium gave off a green glow while it decayed which allowed the clocks to be read in the dark. "
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1farwm | how can stadiums oversell their capacities without violating some kind of fire code? | Lots of stadiums do the General Admission thing I suppose so they don't have to have an actual seat number on every ticket but is it just bench seating and hoping for skinny people? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1farwm/eli5_how_can_stadiums_oversell_their_capacities/ | {
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"As long as they don't actually let too many people in, they're not violating fire code.",
"Many places will \"oversell\" an event because a reliable percentage of people don't show up."
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2h2h9p | why does toothpaste clean headlights so well? | I've seen a few tutorial videos where people are using toothpaste to clean their headlights. I even saw one using mosquito repellant. What is it about these things that cleans a headlight? Is it because they're abrasive? Wouldn't that make the plastic of a headlight foggier? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h2h9p/eli5_why_does_toothpaste_clean_headlights_so_well/ | {
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"Toothpaste is an abrasive. \n \nIf you imagine starting with a plank of rough wood, and wanted it to be really smooth, you'd start with really rough sandpaper. That would scrape out lots of (relatively) deep grooves in the wood. You'd now have something with a rough finish, and would repeat that with finer and finer grades of sandpaper. Going from 40 up to 250 or higher would leave you with a smooth surface, and the scratches get finer, and each time you're scraping away the smaller scratches. \n \nFor something see through it's harder, and the light gets bent more easily by even small scratches, so you'd have to use really really high grades of sandpaper, and it still might look foggy. \n \nNow instead of sandpaper, imagine you took the abrasive off the paper and just rubbed it straight on with a cloth. This would be polishing compound, and it makes much smaller scratches. If you use very small abrasive particles, the scratches are too small to be that far off a flat surface. Toothpaste is a close approximation to a polishing compound like this. The scratches are so small the surface is almost completely flat. You've removed the bigger scratches and your headlights are clear."
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an43h7 | what is the missing link, is it still missing or was it found? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/an43h7/eli5_what_is_the_missing_link_is_it_still_missing/ | {
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"It is a popular culture term for any new transitional form of organism, especially pre-human, which is found. It isn't something which is missing or found because it isn't one thing, and the term isn't really used in the scientific community because it implies evolution is linear.",
"A missing link is a transitional species between two well established species. According to the theory of evolution the changes from one species to another will happen gradually. However these species in between can be hard to find as they are often poorly adapted and therefore change rapidly into the new species. So they tend to be missing from archeological records. The most famous missing link was between humans and other primates. We have found a lot of different species linking the gap but there are still missing links between them. There are also missing links further back in the primate tree. Similarly there are missing links between dinosaurs and birds.",
"It is/was a way of attacking evolution. There should be evidence of an intermediate species between pre-humans and humans. But this is a fools game because if we find the \"missing link\" you can just ask for the intermediate species between the missing link humans. You can keep subdividing.\n\nSo we find homo erectus. Fine, where is the missing link between homo erectus and modern humans?\n\nSo then we found Homo heidelbergensis. Fine, where is the missing link between Homo heidelbergensis and modern humans?\n\nwe've found enough evidence of intermediate fossils that the debate around the missing link has died down. But it was big 15 or 20 years ago.",
"The missing link was the missing species between early primates and homosapiens. The idea would be a species in the line of evolution that lies between two more distinct forms. You can think of it as the evidence we haven't yet found for what is otherwise solidly known.\n\nThe idea is that, in evolution, change is not sudden- each creature is largely similar to its parents. That suggests that we should be able to find fossils ranging back to early apes that basically flow together from early ape to modern humans. As some time in the past, humanity had not yet found nearly as many fossils as are currently in scientific archives today, but had found enough that it was clear that some sort of progression had occurred. The missing link was those fossils that as of yet had not been discovered.\n\nObviously, once it's found, it's no longer a missing link, and the modern usage is from people attacking the facts by looking only at a limited slice of the available fossil record (typically only at the common examples of the named species of early man that are used in science books) and then choose to claim that there isn't a clear progression. Common sense says we wouldn't want to spend the resources to include a picture of every skeleton ever discovered in high school science books when there are so many other topics to cover and that usually only devotes a chapter or so to evolution and its mechanics.",
"There is no missing link, rather a pattern of evolution leading from our current ancestors. The idea of a missing link is really a neat and boxed version of the idea of evolution. Evolution doesn’t occur that way. It is small moves in our genes to allow us to survive better that our competition. "
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30q7eu | what prevents someone from misusing the information on a check i write them, to withdraw money from my account using a service like xoom? | When I use a service like xoom to transfer money to someone else, it asks me for my name, address, bank account number and routing number (to fund the transaction) - all of which are available from my checks. ELI5: What prevents someone from misusing the information on a check I write them, to withdraw money from my account using a service like xoom?
Some sites do authenticate that you are the true owner of the account my doing a sub-dollar deposit and withdrawal and asking you to enter the amount. But not all sites do this. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30q7eu/eli5_what_prevents_someone_from_misusing_the/ | {
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"There's nothing stopping them from performing the transaction. However, when you seethe fraudulent transaction and report it to your bank, the fraudster will have left a very short trail that leads back to them, or at least their bank account. \n\nThis kind of act is called wire fraud, and can be a felony depending on the amount or location.",
"Pretty much nothing -- other than the fact that is it would be against the law. Your bank account is only as safe as every single person you have ever given a check to (you are relying on them to keep your information safe). \n\nRiconquer is correct - these transactions can easily be traced to the recipient's account. However, based on my experience at the bank, most perpetrators of this type of fraud realize this. So, what they do is they have fake/stolen checks from one account, and deposit those checks into a second account that they have taken over and quickly withdraw the money. So when the bank investigates, it does not lead to the fraudster, but to another victim of fraud."
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2hm3ey | how do web genies like akinator use the questions to guess even the most obscure things with apparent ease. | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hm3ey/eli5_how_do_web_genies_like_akinator_use_the/ | {
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"Good coding, learning and many, many people answering. It's simple as that. It's just algorithm looking for patterns, especially based on previous questions. ",
"There's a general explanation in the [Wikipedia article about the 20Q toy](_URL_0_), but if you want more detail you can also look at [the patent](_URL_1_).",
"This program seems to use a method called binary search. Essentially it has a big table of millions of characters, each with various characteristics. With each question, the goal is to eliminate the most potential candidates possible, in which case the best strategy is to ask a question that can split the remaining group in half.\n\nHere is an example, let's assume I want to find where you live with only yes/no questions. First I would ask: do you live in the north hemisphere? If yes, I would ask, do you live in China/India? If no I would ask, do you live in North America or Western Europe? If yes I would ask do you live in North America? If yes I would ask, do you live west of Missouri? If yes I would ask, do you live south of Oregan? If yes I would say do you live in California? So on and so on, using this same division of remaining possibilities, you can specify further and further.\n\nImagine this same strategy applied to every person on Earth. If you could actually split the group in half each time, it would only take 33 questions to get from 7 billion possible people down to one individual!",
"Has anyone else noticed that Akinator asks redundant questions often? For example it'll ask if the character is human, you respond \"yes\", and then one of the following questions will be something like \"is the person you're thinking of a breed of dog?\"?"
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457ttt | what is the difference between an engineer and a technician? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/457ttt/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_an_engineer/ | {
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"Engineer makes the stuff that works. Technician fixes/operates the stuff (depending on the type of engineer/technician).",
"From a careers perspective, an \"Engineer\" is USUALLY a certified person with a specialist degree in one of its various branches, which has to do with the design, development and deployment of systems or infrastructure. There's formal types of engineering such as mechanical engineer, civil engineer, and electrical engineer. There's some informal and sometimes misapplied labelling of the term such as \"systems engineer\" (which could mean anything), but regular engineers who work hard and pay dues for their degrees and designations get annoyed when these types of terms are used professionally. I've seen those labels get quashed in some unionized public sector environments.\n\nEngineer is a bit more formal as a designation than a 'technician', which can mean anyone that works with technical equipment. The fields for those are very very spread out - you can have computer technicians, radio technicians, x-ray technicians, ultrasound technicians, client service technicians (help desk staff) heat pump technician, and so on. The great variety extends to a huge variation in responsibilities too: some are highly trained and require specific degrees and/or certifications to operate legally, others are just a label of complete convenience that make a responsibility sound way more formal than it actually is (e.g. \"Sandwich technician\" at your local sub shop).",
"An engineer is the person who designs the Lego blocks and sets.\n\nA technician is the person who puts it together and fixes it when it breaks apart.",
"Engineers solve practical problems.\n\nNot problems like, \"What is beauty?\", because that would fall within the purviews of your philosophy.",
"If you make it happen in a the lab, you are a scientist. \n\nMake it happen repeatably in the, lab you are a great scientist.\n\nMake something happen in the real world, you are an engineer.\n\nMake something happen in the real world reliably, you are a great engineer.\n\nMake something happen every day that a great scientist discovered, a great engineer designed and built, and you are a technician.\n\n\nMake sure technicians can reliably, economically make something happen for the public, you are an entrepreneur."
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2kjo5e | why don't market forces and competition drive down the cost of medical procedures? | My fiancé recently went in for a test that involved her running on a treadmill for 12 minutes. Today she got a bill for $12,000.
Now, obviously more went into that test than simply running on a treadmill for 12 minutes. Analysis needed to be done, and you need to hire experts to do that analysis, etc. These things cost money, and I'm all for medical professionals making really good money. The services they offer are vital and I have no problem with someone making a profit.
But what I don't understand is why market forces and competition seem to have no effect on such procedures. If one hospital is offering a basic stress test for $12,000, wouldn't it make sense for another hospital or facility to offer that same test for $10,000? Like any other industry, they would presumably be favored by customers and insurers looking to save some money, and in the end they would make more money by attracting more customers. The competing facilities would then need to drop their prices to compete, and the cycle would continue.
I'm sure this happens to a certain degree in the medical field, but it seems like it ought to be happening more. Especially for simple, straightforward procedures like check ups and simple tests, it seems odd that such incredibly high prices would be tolerated by the marketplace. I know the customers need medical care and so they will pay whatever they have to, I'm just surprised that competition between the various providers doesn't create more of a check to incredibly high prices. It seems like insurance companies alone would be putting a lot of time and effort into finding the best deals, which would encourage healthcare providers to offer such deals, even when individual customers might not be able to find them.
Can anyone explain why this doesn't happen? Why doesn't competition between various hospitals and healthcare facilities lead to lower prices, at least for simple procedures like check ups?
NOTE: I'm not asking why these procedures cost so much, I'm asking specifically why they don't seem to have the same forces preventing their costs from growing, the way other industries do. A burger or a phone or a cable service can only cost so much before customers switch to a different company; why don't medical facilities fear the same behavior? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kjo5e/eli5_why_dont_market_forces_and_competition_drive/ | {
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"The medical field is so highly regulated there is little room for competition. Coupled with massive consumer side subsidising, private and public, causing endless demand. Malpractice insurance us a run away giant in this country as well. Then you have the inability for hospitals to turn away patients which creates debt for health care networks that must be distributed across the masses. It skyrockets our health costs",
"How much did your fiancé shop around to find lower prices?\n\n",
"In the US nobody shops around for medical services. Also medical firms don't advertise their prices. Add to those most insurance companies have contracts with medical firms. The prices are already set by these contracts. The amount of regulation has very little to do with the price setting. Saving $2000 on a 12000 procedure is a big savings but unless you ask and in same cases demand the price prior to compare you will pay whatever the firm is asking. I comes down to being informed and having easy access to the pricing information to make an educated decision."
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71pwj5 | how is anesthesia so simple in animals but complex in humans? | It seems a vet just gives the animal a shot, while on humans they need to be closely monitored- so much so that there's a specific doctor just for it (anesthesiologist.) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/71pwj5/eli5_how_is_anesthesia_so_simple_in_animals_but/ | {
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"Making someone sleep so deeply that you can hurt them without waking them up, is super difficult without messing the person's brain up. If we accidentally ruined an animals brain, but it seemed to recover and 'be ok' afterwards, we would assume we ruined nothing and that it all went ok. If a person's brain is ruined, we spot it immediately, and don't really know how to fix it. Being a person is complicated, but being a cat is reasonably easy :)",
"It is just as complicated in animals as it is in humans. In fact, in many small animals, the risks of putting an animal under, especially if they are older, much be carefully weighed against the benefits of the surgery. Monitoring is also an important part of putting an animal under. And there are veterinarians specialised in anesthesiology. \n\nThat said though, for most people, the life of a cat or a rabbit is not as important as the life of a human. So they feel it is more of an acceptable risk to put an animal under without a dedicated anesthesiologist (and instead just have a vet tech monitor that, for example) but they don't feel that is acceptable in a human because if it goes wrong, it is worse to lose a human life. ",
"It's not necessarily that simple in animals. Incorrect dosage can lead to a dead animal or a surprise awakening. In fact, adverse reactions to anesthesia are more common in many animals (dogs, cats, and especially horses) than they are in humans. ",
"It's complicated for animals as well. When I had surgery on pet rats, they had to bring in a specialist on anesthesia on small animals. They have small energy reserves and a fast metabolism, so they can quickly run out of energy, and dosage is difficult.",
"Full Anesthesia in animals is just as complicated as in humans. You have to have them monitored for their blood pressure, blood oxygen, heart rate, airway, and so forth. Complex surgeries requiring this level of anesthesia are simply less common on animals. In most cases, a lower level of anesthesia, that does not suppress the nervous system/breathing apparatus is sufficient.\n\nNor are procedures using lower levels of anesthesia, sometimes called conscious sedation, rare in humans. Particularly dental surgeries and many common types of cosmetic surgery are done on humans using conscious sedation. "
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1wvhf2 | why do we experience droughts if the earth has very cyclical patterns? | The patterns should fall within strict parameters, right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wvhf2/eli5_why_do_we_experience_droughts_if_the_earth/ | {
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"Well, yes, and those parameters include long periods with no rain. There is a lot of randomness in the weather, layered on top of the various weather cycles, as well. There are many cycles, and those cycles run at different, changing, cycles. So two cycles that make it hotter and dryer can peak at the same time.\n\nTLDR: cyclical weather patterns include drought.",
"It's all about the Sun son"
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acjku3 | when you look above a fire, why is it blurry? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acjku3/eli5_when_you_look_above_a_fire_why_is_it_blurry/ | {
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"The air above the fire is hot, and it's mixing with the cold atmospheric air. Since the density of warm air is different from the density of cold air, you get a bunch of different bands of air of different densities above the fire. Light distorts as it travels through these bands of different densities, and that is why it looks blurry.",
"The path of light changes as it passes through different temperatures of air. So as it passes above the fire, its path is changed from 'straight ahead' to some minutely different direction. Since the rising warm air is mixing with cooler air above it, the change in path fluctuates. \n\nAs a result, you don't get a constant flow of light from 'directly ahead.\"\n\nInstead, moment to moment, the path of the light from beyond the fire is minutely shifted, so you are seeing light from changing \"nearby spots\" which is the blurring."
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3qsro7 | why do some museums don't let you take photos of the artwork? | I mean how am I supposed to brag about being there? Is it because someone might duplicate the artwork? I noticed in Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona. And is not only "no flash". | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qsro7/eli5_why_do_some_museums_dont_let_you_take_photos/ | {
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"The term \"Exit Through the Gift Shop\" explains this as well as anything. They don't want you taking pictures or videos, they want you to buy their picture books and DVDs. I'm looking at you Sistine Chapel!",
"Being constantly exposed to bright light can degrade some artworks, especially those made with delicater materials and particularly with softer pigments.\nFor example, if you leave a color picture in the sunlight for years, it will eventually fade, same principle.\n\nAnd its easier to have no photography than no flash photography because people forget or even lie. \n\nAlso there is the point about buying souvenirs, but it is not about danger of copying. If someone is going to copy a painting, that is not cheap, getting historically matching tools and materials, 10 dollars for a photo of a trip to google images will not stop that.",
"It's hard to enforce the no-flash photography. People forget and leave the flash on anyways, or don't know how to shut off the flash. The repeated exposure to a flash can fade some of the organic pigments used in many old works of art. \n\nEspecially in cameras that don't have a UV filter of the xenon flash bulb. The other issue is repeated flashes disrupts other people from enjoying the art work as they get temporarily blinded by the flash. \n\nAs for duplicating art, that's rarely a concern, sometimes you'll see people siting on benches in art galleries sketching the art they see. Replica paintings of many works of art can be purchased. "
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3i4psf | theoretically, if there would be an elevator that would very slowly reach terminal velocity when descending, would humans be able to travel on it through the descent with ones feet touching the floor for the entire fall? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3i4psf/eli5_theoretically_if_there_would_be_an_elevator/ | {
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"If you hoisted an elevator up in the air and just dropped it and then once it reached terminal velocity you sloooowly slowed it down then everyone inside would be super freaked out but totally fine. Speed doesnt kill you, acceleration does. So in freefall, earths gravity doesnt kill you no matter how fast youre going, until you hit the ground. This is because you experience a tremendous acceleration when the earth applies a force to your face on impact. But we said the elevator slows down somehow so that it doesnt hit the ground over 200mph."
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1zlss1 | why do so many americans self-identify as some nationality different from us american? like "i'm, italian" or "i'm pakistani", when in fact they're both american? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zlss1/eli5_why_do_so_many_americans_selfidentify_as/ | {
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"First of all they are NOT identifying as a different nationality. \n\nWhen someone uses the hyphenated identifiers such as Italian-American, Irish-American, Pakistani-American they are using ethnic identifiers to tell you their heritage. We are a nation if immigrants and heritage is a very very big deal to us. \n\nIf a person has dual citizenship they will say \"I am dual citizen Canada and America.\" ",
"Nationality has two [meanings](_URL_1_). Nationality can refer to a citzen's relationship to the state, or to a group of people of common heritage. For example the [kurds](_URL_0_) are a nationality without a state. There is no such thing as a pure \"American\" as each is a hybrid, the exception being Native American. So people identity with their ethnic group because their identity is more rooted in a common heritage than in simply their relationship to the state.",
"the number of generations you can go back for anyone who is \"american\" of any flavor is relatively small compared to most other countries, and as a result for many people/groups there are clear cultural and/or genetic aspects of who they are that connect them back to wherever their ancestors came from\n\ntl;dr: we're all different, only native americans are actually long term americans, so there are basically different flavors of 'american'",
"It pisses me off too. I know my grandparents came form Sweden, but I am American. You will not here me trying to impress people by informing them that I am Swedish-American. However, if someone asks directly what my heritage is, I'll tell them my grandparents came from Sweden. But I am an American, through and through.",
"Telling someone your ethnic background is a shortcut to getting to know someone. By saying, \"I'm ___,\" it calls to mind cultural norms associated with that ethnicity. It's different than nationality.",
"You mix up nationality and ethnicity. Yes, they have an Americal citizenship, but they just got different (Italian/Pakistani/etc) blood.\n\nAfter all, the only true Americans are Indians, though a lot of people call themselves Americans.",
"Lots or folks in America like to romanticize the \"Old Country\" even if they've never been there. In a country where everyone is from every where and nowhere all at once, being able to claim a tenuous connection to a group of some sort can be appealing. After all, everyone is Irish on St. Patty's Day. We do it down here in the South where we are ethnically separate (and obviously superior) the Yankee race et. al. jk.",
"I feel like people understand the question, but are splitting hairs, so I'll try my best to answer your question.\n\nFor me at least, I do identify as American, but I also identify as Israeli because, even though I have grown up in America my whole life, I speak Hebrew fluently and grew up with Israeli foods, music, bedtime stories, etc. \n\nThere will be times where my friends will reference a dish or song or nursery rhyme that their parents told them when they were younger, and I won't be able to relate because I grew up in different circumstances. \n\nIn this case, I don't think calling myself only American would completely encompass what it means to be me. \n\nThere's also a pride and solidarity factor, but that's mostly self explanatory.\n\nI feel like this is how it is for most people, though perhaps not to such a degree. ",
"This question comes up again and again. We need to clearly establish what an \"ethnicity\" is. It isn't easy, but wikipedia provides a pretty succinct answer: is a social group of people who identify with each other based on common ancestral, social, cultural, or national experience. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be associated with shared cultural heritage, ancestry, history, homeland, language (dialect), or ideology, and with symbolic systems such as religion, mythology and ritual, cuisine, dressing style, physical appearance, etc.\n\n**Ethnicity is more than genes, more than heritage**\n\nThus, someone who says I am \"Pakistani-American\" but knows nothing of Pakistan, its culture, history, rituals, religion, language, style, cuisine, traditions, customs...is not a \"Pakistani-American\". They are simply \"American\" who looks like they might come from Pakistan. Their heritage may be Pakistani, their parents may come from there...but in terms of the ethnic group that they identify with, it's not the people of Pakistan, it's Americans. \n\nNow, if you grew up in America following Pakistan's traditions, rituals, immersed in the culture and language. Knowing the idioms and dress, the customs, history, and ideology. Then you are truly able to self-identify with the Pakistani culture. You can (IMO) call yourself a Pakistani-American. \n\nFor example, my heritage is French, my family emigrated from France several generations ago. While I speak the language (Canadian-French) I know nothing of French (France) culture, their customs, idioms, their particular traditions, rituals, religion or history beyond what I learned in class. It would be wrong for me to say my ethnicity is French, when really it is Canadian...and if I want to stretch it French-Canadien (not France-French, Canadian-French - there is a difference).\n\nOf course, it seems to me that for so many Americans their identity is tied to some (often) distant \"homeland\". I know there are many immigrant Americans who are truly immersed in their ethnicities and that is not what I am trying to get at here. I am talking about those cases that know nothing about the country or culture of where their ancestors came from. \n\nIt may also interest you to know that in Canada these terms aren't as widely used. Although I have noticed some terms growing popularity, owing I think to a spill over of American culture. In general I just view everyone as Canadian because I have many friends who do, and don't identify with their heritages. First and foremost we are Canadian. I never really view people as \"African-Canadian\" because I think it is kind of rude to assume someone associates themselves with a particular ethnicity based on the way they look (e.g. superficial traits determining who someone is). To put it another way, when I or Canadians ask \"where are you from?\" I (we) don't mean \"what's your ethnicity?\" I (we) mean \"what [Canadian] city where you born in?\" ",
"I always do say \"American.\" It's always a white person that forces the hyphenation, ie \n\nStranger: \"What are you?\"\nMe: \"American.\"\nStranger: \"No, I mean, Where were you born - what nationality are you?\"\nMe: \"I was born in California, but I'm half Japanese, half Irish.\"\nStranger: \"Oh, so you're a nip.\"\n"
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5syfay | why do phones need to be charged more frequent over time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5syfay/eli5_why_do_phones_need_to_be_charged_more/ | {
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"Batteries wear out after being charged again and again and again over years. If you noticed that devices using disposable batteries don't have this problem it's because it's getting a fresh battery with all its charge each time. \n\nAll rechargeable devices, including laptops and handheld gaming devices, will have their batteries wear out, but the former has a very large battery and the latter isn't used with the same frequency as a smartphone so users don't notice it to the same extent. \n\nReplacing your device's battery, if you can replace it, should see a sharp increase in battery life. ",
"On one end of the battery you have an anode (positive current flows into) and on the other a cathode (positive current flows out of). In a healthy battery ions (charged particles) flow freely between the cathode and the anode. The process of charging a battery forces ions out of the cathode and back into the anode. This process wears out the cathode resulting in a decreased capacity. "
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8izgor | what is physically taking place inside the ear during an ear infection? | I was unfortunate enough to have an ear infection recently. It began with the sensation of pressure that gradually became painful and then grew into sharp pains.
I could obviously hear in great detail the attack within my ear. It felt and sounded like bubbling or fizzing. These "bubbles" would crackle and pop, increasing my pain.
I'm just curious what that actually was. Did my infection actually bubble up? What was it attacking? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8izgor/eli5what_is_physically_taking_place_inside_the/ | {
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"There is a little space behind your eardrum. This area is called the \"middle ear\". It has a drainage tube called the Eustachian tube. You can feel changes in pressure here, like when you fly in a plane or dive deep in water. By swallowing or trying to blow through your nose, you can either release or increase the pressure in your middle ear to make it equal with the outside world, and feel more comfortable.\n\nSometimes, your Eustachian tube doesn't drain very well, and fluid builds up here. This is often after having a cold, and there is some inflammation. Younger kids don't drain as well also, because their tubes are more horizontal. In the human body, anytime there is a collection of fluid that remains stagnant, it is prone to becoming infected. Bacteria love stagnant fluids pockets. Once they start growing, your body reacts by initiating an immune response. The area becomes inflamed with more fluid and lots of white blood cells enter the arena. This causes increased pressure, and it hurts. Sometimes the fluid is under enough pressure to squeeze through the Eustachian tube and you can hear these noises.\n\nThe bugs that cause most ear infections are Strep pnuemo, Moraxella catarrhalis, Haemophilus influenzae. I'm not sure if any of these produce significant amounts of gas in the middle ear."
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6u9h1b | why do you get cellular coverage over a much larger area than 3g or 4g coverage? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6u9h1b/eli5why_do_you_get_cellular_coverage_over_a_much/ | {
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"All modern cell service is digital. \n\nA normal voice call uses a relatively low data rate (it's variable, but it's something like 10-20 kbps).\n\nA good LTE connection can be more than 1,000 times that data rate.\n\nFor a given carrier frequency, using a higher data rate means you need a higher signal to noise ratio. Think about being in a loud restaurant - is it easier to hear someone who is speaking slowly and clearly, or someone who is speaking very quickly? It's a lot easier for noise to garble what you're hearing from the person speaking very quickly.\n\nAs you get further from the cell tower, the signal gets weaker (both because of the simple fact that it is getting spread out over a larger area, and because more things may get in the way and block some of it), so it gets harder to \"hear\" over the noise. \n\nPast a certain distance, the signal is weak enough that a high data rate LTE signal can't be accurately and reliably received, but a low data rate voice signal can be.\n\nThis is also why, as you get farther away from your WiFi router, the connection speed drops - the router and your computer continuously measure the signal to noise ratio and change the connection speed to insure reliable communication, reducing the connection speed as the signal to noise ratio drops."
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469ll4 | how can reducing taxes help an economic recovery if that means the government won't have as much money? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/469ll4/eli5_how_can_reducing_taxes_help_an_economic/ | {
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"But remember that just because the government has less money to spend then the individuals and businesses have MORE money to spend. \n\nWhat has to be remembered the ONLY way government can spend money is by forcibly taking it from someone else. So if the government takes $1 trillion away from the businesses and consumers that is $1 trillion less THEY can spend. That government spends it is irrelevant.\n\nAnd the individual and businesses spend their money more efficiently because they are maximizing utility and productivity. When government spends money they spend it inefficiently and not for what is best for society.\n\nSo massive tax reductions reduces the amount of money that is taken from the private sector thus there is more money left in the private sector to create jobs and economic growth.",
"The economy is mostly supported by the mass consumption of your average Joe and Jane. If there are less taxes, people have a higher disposable income. That means people have more money to consume, which leads to companies having higher profits. This allows them to hire more people, which means even more money goes to people to consume. \n\nThis could lead to the government getting less taxes from individual transfers of money, but having many more transfers to draw taxes from.",
"This is a very long explanation because there is a lot of misunderstanding about economics.\n\nEconomy comes from trade and production. I will simplify this down: A fisherman concentrates on catching as much fish as possible while a farmer concentrates on growing as much wheat as possible. By focusing on one task each, they are able to produce more and better than 2 people who spends 50% of their time on each. Then, they trade resources at their agreed rate. When you have a lot of these trades happening in a community, that becomes an economy.\n\nOf course, the farmer might not want fish, or the fisherman might not want wheat, so you can see how there is a problem. One side produces something that the other doesn't want, so the community agrees on an item that has value and that people will generally want to accept. That item is what we call money. In a perfect world, this would mean that money is a way to keep track of what society owes you for the services you have performed.\n\nNow to answer your question on why reducing taxes help an economic recovery: By not taking away the people's rewards, the people have more to gain from producing products and services. The rational person then sees this as an opportunity to make their lives better and then applies himself to producing for society, either as an employee or as a business owner. Incidentally, this makes things cheaper due to the scarcity principle. The scarcity principle dictates that the less of a demanded product there is, the more valuable it becomes. Inversely, the more of a demanded product there is, the less valuable it becomes. As a result, by increasing production in society, things become more affordable.\n\nFinally, you will see the symptoms of an economic recovery: People keep more of their income while products become more affordable, so they start spending more. Entrepreneurs and investors see that they can keep more of what they earn so they flood the country to open their business, driving production up and lowering costs even more."
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a44yxg | why is law and justice often connected to the word 'right'? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a44yxg/eli5_why_is_law_and_justice_often_connected_to/ | {
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"Centuries ago it was believed that a person's right hand represents good, while the left hand represents evil. This is where the combined meaning came from.\n\nWhere did this belief originate? (1) most people are right-handed, so being left handed was weird, and (2) in some cultures people reserved their non-dominant hand for ass-wiping, so it was considered filthy and gross.",
"I believe its because people who are just, and kind and other ‘good’ things, were considered to sit on the right hand side of god. Which is a position of honour.",
"People used to believe left-handed people were afflicted by the devil, which is why the Latin word for \"left\" (sinister) is an English word meaning malicious or untrustworthy.\n\nI'm only guessing here, but I'd wager that there is a connection between this and your query."
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asj8sb | does your brain create the electricity that moves your muscles? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/asj8sb/eli5_does_your_brain_create_the_electricity_that/ | {
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"Your brain might send the signal, but it does not provide the energy to contract the muscles.\n\nYou can compare it with the sensor above the door: It detects that there is somebody, it sends the signal to the motor which opens the door.",
"You brain does NOT move your toe. It merely send a signal to your toe ordering it to move and the muscles on the toe use energry from your food to do the rest. It's like when you use your remote control to turn the TV on. The Remote control does not power the TV. It tells the TV what to do, and the TV uses power it gets from the wall to do it itself."
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4zwuyi | why do people stick their tongues out and bite them when they are concentrating on something minor like tying shoes or itching their back? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4zwuyi/eli5_why_do_people_stick_their_tongues_out_and/ | {
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"\"Tongue protrusion\" is caused by interference from the two activities fighting for the same bit of brain to process them. The tongue is a big muscle, densely packed with touch receptors which relay a mental map of the inside of the mouth to the brain. If you ever saw a picture of the homunculus, the mouth (tongue and lips) takes up a large proportion of kinesthetic proprioception (how the body feels in motion). The tongue is connected to the language center as well as the motor. We think in words and our tongues move in tandem forming words enunciation. When a person sticks out their tongue or bites it, this stream of information is diminished and so more brain power is freed up to concentrate on task. \nBy sticking your tongue out, you are suspending motor activity and keeping your head rigid, to minimize movement and hence interference. "
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fkgxnu | why was the plant used to brew beer switched from blue lotus to hops? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fkgxnu/eli5_why_was_the_plant_used_to_brew_beer_switched/ | {
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"Beer made with only fermented cereal grain ends up tasting very sweet and people found it unpalatable.\n\nThroughout history, many things were used to flavor beer to try to balance this sweetness. Before hops it was common to add a combination of herbs and roots called gruit.\n\nKings and goverments also found taxing beer, specifically taxing the gruit flavorings, a reliable income source.\n\nEventually it was discovered that the oils in the Hops plants would turn bitter with heat, and not long after that it was noticed that beer flavored with hops lasted longer. This is because the acids in hops have some anitmicrobial effects and therefore delayed the beer spoiling in the times before refrigeration.\n\nThe bitter taste, preservative effects, and cheaper taxes eventually made flavoring beer with hops a favorite choice. The practice started in what's now Germany and over time spread to the rest of the world, ultimately becoming the only beer flavoring still in common use."
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dlgr0j | how does telecommunications work (voip) on a large scale? | Having trouble solidifying in my head how does Telecommunications work, especially VoIP. I get that cable is a twisted pair of copper or fiber wires from a telephone pole outside connect to a point of entry to a building then runs to computers and phones that both run off the internet. But how does it work on a larger scale?
- For example I just started work at Granite Telecommunications. Where we also offer customers the ability to connect to our network. But how does someone in one side of the country connect to our "cloud" network. Does it literally mean a company in Seattle has wires that connect from their site and eventually connects to our site in Boston? Furthermore what is a "cloud"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dlgr0j/eli5_how_does_telecommunications_work_voip_on_a/ | {
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"A cloud is just someone else's computer that is on the Internet that you can access over the web.\n\nAccessing the cloud over the Internet is done through a network of undersea cables and data centers all over the world. If a company has one server, then the data would need to travel through cables to the system requesting it. If a company has multiple data centers, then the data may travel quicker to the system requesting it.",
"Hoo boy, this is a *very* broad subject, but I'll try my best. \n\nTo look at VoIP, it may be easier to look at IP (Internet protocol) in general. Basically, it's a system of routers and switches responsible for determining where the traffic goes. VoIP works more or less the same, but using voice traffic instead of data. \n\nVoice traffic is much more time sensitive, so it's usually tagged in a voice virtual LAN (VLAN) so it has a higher priority over data traffic. So, your routers and switches process voice traffic first, otherwise you would get much poorer call quality. \n\nData traffic has always went over phone lines in DSL connections, so it wasn't much of a stretch to make the necessary adaptations. \n\nThe biggest cloud we know, The Internet, is essentially billions of routers (inter-network), switches (intra-network servers (anything that holds information needing to be sent). The Internet is a cloud that virtually all other networks connect to. \n\nThis one is tough to simplify. Well, it was for me anyway.",
"First, I think you imagine an \"old time\" circuit switched phone system. Where the call is connected through a dedicated single wire. All modern telecommunications is digital. Meaning the \"voice\" signal is deconstructed into binary digits, combined into packets, sent to the other party, reconstructed into a \"voice\" and delivered. The benefit of this is many (many) conversations can simultaneously be transmitted using just one wire. (the discussion is beyond ELI5) A single \"voice\" conversation is actually a fairly low data rate signal (\\~100s kbps) to a modern network connections (\\~100 Gbps) so a single line can carry enough digital information to handle thousands of calls at the same time."
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1u2nr0 | how does memory work for sociopaths who "don't feel emotions"? | I could be way off but: In college we had a short unit on how people's memory works and there was something about "emotion tags" that we use to recall stuff. Everything from complex formulas to world history to words and scents supposedly has some particular mixture of emotions we associate with it and when we want to remember something we "feel" the right feeling until the memory pops into our minds. I'm sure that's way oversimplified, but if that's sort of how memory works, then how does memory work for people with the type of sociopathy that causes them not to feel feelings the way the rest of us do? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1u2nr0/eli5_how_does_memory_work_for_sociopaths_who_dont/ | {
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"I imagine they remember things with no emotional bias at all"
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3pbf3q | how are companies like google and yahoo able to change branding and logos on such a consistent basis without the public hardly noticing? why do they do this? | ELI5: How are companies like Google and Yahoo able to change branding and logos on such a consistent basis without the public hardly noticing? Why do they do this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pbf3q/eli5_how_are_companies_like_google_and_yahoo_able/ | {
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"I think you're overestimating how large the changes have been with Google and Yahoo - there are certain distinctive features that have carried on for the past 15-20 years (Google's color scheme, Yahoo's exclamation point). Most major companies go through subtle changes in their branding like they have, they keep the core elements constant, but update the rest with the times.",
"I would not say the public hardly noticed. An hour after Google changed their logo my facebook was filled with articles and statuses about it. On the other hand, Google provides a service where the end result is practically the only thing the user cares about. You go to Google to find something and immediately after you start typing, the screen changes to the results page, so you hardly have time to even notice the logo is slightly different, not that you care, because there is not much to look at on Google's homepage. It's a blank space with a logo and a form. People have learned not to check it out too much unless there's one of those special animated logos that mark a certain occasion."
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5jzoqn | how will mars colonists deal with radiation and deadly sun rays? | I've read online that Mars has no magnetic field, so how will that affect life? How will that affect terraformation?
Can we somehow make an artificial magnetic field or something? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jzoqn/eli5_how_will_mars_colonists_deal_with_radiation/ | {
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"We're nowhere near the level of Technology needed to combat solar radiation on Mars. The best we can do so far is to put a lot of mass in between our body and the Sun. This just means pulling a big pile of dirt or water on top of our shelters AKA living underground or underwater"
]
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cspu6j | why is it generally frowned upon to have song writers if you’re a rapper but not frowned upon if you’re a singer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cspu6j/eli5_why_is_it_generally_frowned_upon_to_have/ | {
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"In rap people look for well written lyrics instead of a melodic voice. While being a singer people care much more about their voice than the lyrics."
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fammni | how are infectious disease diagnostic test kits made/developed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fammni/eli5_how_are_infectious_disease_diagnostic_test/ | {
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"Oof, this is a tough one because there are a lot of different types, and they work in radically different ways. Broadly, you can group them into a few different groups: testing for the components of a microbe, figuring out their DNA sequence, or growing them under conditions specific to that microbe. The first is the most common for field tests. The last is the most common in hospitals, but is also the slowest.\n\nAn example of one that is just as useful in a rural area as in a lab is called ELISA, which is an Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay. A type of protein called an antibody is bound to the surface of a material. Antibodies are extremely specific in what they bind to and bind very strongly to their target. So when you add a sample, give it a little time to bind, then very thoroughly wash, the only thing left bound is the antibody and the molecule it specifically binds to. Then you go though some other shenanigans to see how much antibody is bound. By tailoring what antibody you use, you can determine exactly what type of bacteria/virus/fungus is present in a blood or whatever sample."
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65kgsz | why intel (and amd) puts integrated gpus on highend cpus? if you need an i7 why wouldn't you buy a gpu? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65kgsz/eli5_why_intel_and_amd_puts_integrated_gpus_on/ | {
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"There are plenty of things that you'd use an i7 for that would not in any way need significant graphics processing power that would require a separate GPU.\n\nAlso, the GPUs are built into the CPUs for ease of use as well, that you don't *need* to buy a separate (often expensive) GPU to use the system.\n\nGPUs have very specialized and limited uses. Primarily gaming, and some complex math operations that work better on a dedicated GPU, outside of that, the need for a separate GPU is almost nil",
"Lots of people need a high-powered CPU but are not doing very interesting graphics (gaming etc.) -- they just need a basic GPU to run ordinary productivity software and websites and the like.",
"Say your gpu breaks and you have no money or no time to get a new one. but you need your pc for work. Boom integrated gpu saves your life. Or say your pc is acting up and your testing each and every part, it would be way easier to be able to test your gpu for fault if you had a integrated gpu "
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e5vbpv | why do you get "cotton mouth" when you drink a lot of water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e5vbpv/eli5_why_do_you_get_cotton_mouth_when_you_drink_a/ | {
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"2 gallons of water a day is a _lot_. Perhaps you’re diluting the electrolyte balance in your body?\n\nI mean, it’s possible that you’re nine feet tall, or that you have an extraordinarily physical job, but otherwise my bet is on electrolyte balance.\n\nMight also be the particular water you’re drinking and the minerals in it — most drinking water had minerals added to it, and a lot of city water supplies have a non-trivial mineral content.",
"To be clear, you drink 32 cups of water a day, 256oz?",
"Do you drink that amount out of thirst or out of \"hydration is always good\"? Because if it's thirst, and you're not exercising incredibly hard, then you should see a doctor... Because that's not normal. You're practically drinking more than your total blood volume everyday. And if you're drinking for hydration because of the \"dehydration is the root of all problems craze\" then you need to understand that too much water can also be bad. I think you even qualify for having polydipsia (I'm not a physician though).\n\nThe cotton mouth could be a symptom of the same underlying condition making you drink this much. But if you have no condition, I am not sure what could be the reason by it potentially includes electrolyte imbalance or a salivary secretion issue (it may be that you have dry mouth due to not secreting sufficient saliva and you drink water to wet your mouth which washes off whatever you do secrete making it even drier). There are many possibilities, but I cannot stress this enough.. Go see a doctor (and if you're drinking just for hydration, tone it down like 5 notches)."
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8a5d58 | do you get electrocuted if you touch overhead electrical wires? why? | Is this a myth or is it true? Wouldn't the wires be coated in rubber or something similar? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8a5d58/eli5_do_you_get_electrocuted_if_you_touch/ | {
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" > Wouldn't the wires be coated in rubber or something similar?\n\nThey are not coated. To do so would be prohibitively expensive and would make them much heavier, requiring more structure to support them. Touching power lines absolutely can electrocute you, which I was under the impression was ubiquitously known.",
"It depends on what else you're touching. Under controlled circumstances, there are people who can sit/hang from those wires to do maintenance on them, but it's really all about how the electricity is flowing and how you fit into its path. ",
"You can touch them as long as your not also touching the ground in any manner. Which is why birds can stand on them and not get electrocuted. ",
"You can get electrocuted if you are touching something else at the same time, which allows the current to flow through you or if the voltage is high enough to arc from you to somewhere else allowing the current to flow. \n\nBirds can sit on a wire, because they aren't touching anything else at the same time and don't form an electical circuit.(current doesn't flow) ",
"No. They are not coated. Have you ever seen a tree branch touch a power line? They spark and hiss because the current is diverting through them and to the ground. Birds and squirrels that sit on lines, do not ground the current and because of this they do not get electrocuted. If you touch a line and are touching something that is grounded or are on the ground, you will most likely die so don’t do that.",
"Some power lines are insulated, some are not.\n\nIf it's mutiple wires hanging from insulators, touching the wire will kill you, a lot.\n\nIf it's a single wire, usually hanging from poles about the same height as a street light, with not insulator between it and the pole, it's insulated. Still, don't touch it, as the insulation can be damaged, but at least nominally safe."
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28pdus | ; how do television channels work in the uk? how does everyone with a tv paying a fee work? | How do they monitor who all has a TV? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28pdus/eli5_how_do_television_channels_work_in_the_uk/ | {
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"They can't, obviously. Some decades ago, they claimed to have \"TV detector vans\" which would patrol the streets and could detect if a TV was switched on in any home, but that was just a ruse to scare people into paying up.\n\nHowever, they do know which properties have valid TV licences and which don't. If you suddenly stop buying a TV licence, they'll likely send somebody round to ask. If you deny you have a TV and they think you're lying, and if they think it's even worth bothering with, they can get a search warrant.",
"A TV license is required to watch TV as it's being broadcast. Either on a TV set or over the internet via things like iPlayer. It is not required that you buy one if you watch things like Netflix, YouTube or even the iPlayer. You also can own a TV set and not pay, but it would then be illegal to watch TV on it. I have a TV with Xbox connected, I watch DVDs and play games on it. But it's not connected to the ariel. I therefore do not have to pay for a TV license.\n\nAs for where the money goes, it goes to the BBC to pay for their excellent services. The relatively balanced news output is renowned around the world and some of the drama they produce is excellent. It's a shame that the government doesn't just collect the license fee from everyone by general income tax like everything else. The BBC (like the NHS) is something Brits should be proud of, sadly most are not.",
"In finland we had tv-lisence, you pay a fee if you had tv and then there were door-to-door inspectors.\r\rToday we have this media\\tv-tax which everyone pays, tv or not. No inspectors needed.",
"Wow they need permission and a permit to everything there.",
"It's just a tax that you have to pay. \n\nWhen you buy a TV the store has to inform the TV licensing authority who then checks on a database to see if you have a licence to watch it. If not, they send a guy to your house to talk to you (various footage of such an attempt available here: _URL_0_)\n\nThe TV licence is technically only needed for BBC broadcasts, (as other channels are commercially funded). You also need one if you listen to the radio. However you will be liable for a penalty if you watch a non BBC station without a licence, as they assume you de-tuned your BBC stations (essentially you're guilty until proven innocent).\n\nSome European countries are trying to change the legislation so you need a TV licence for digital broadcasts, which includes YouTube tv shows, Netflix / HBO go and purchase for iTunes. IIRC only Sweden has actually implemented this though.\n\nThe TV detector vans are utter BS and were just a scare tactic."
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e1ndyj | what happens, especially hormonally, during menstruation. | I’m especially interested in the effects of each hormone throughout the cycle. I know progesterone drops and the uterus begins shedding its lining. I think estrogen rises at this time, too. I don’t know what role androgens play. I have endometriosis and fibroids and I’d like to have a better understanding of what’s happening (or what should be happening) in my body. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e1ndyj/eli5_what_happens_especially_hormonally_during/ | {
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"[This](_URL_0_) picture is a great summary of the different things going on during the menstrual cycle. Interestingly, all four of the relevant hormones are at their lowest levels during menstruation! I believe- this is where my memory gets hazy- that FSH (Follicle-stimulating hormone) tells the follicles when to develop into eggs, LH (Luteinizing hormone) tells the eggs when to release, progesterone tells the uterine lining when to build up and when to shed, end estrogen has a role in a lot of different things. A quick google search suggests that the causes of endometriosis and fibroids are unclear, but fibroids is more likely to include hormonal causes, and that androgens in women mostly get turned into estrogen."
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"https://cdn.britannica.com/07/55707-050-5927EDFB/changes-woman-cycle.jpg"
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rk2s1 | supercooling | I saw a video of a beer instantly freezing when being tapped after being in the freezer for a while, can someone explain supercooling like im five?. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rk2s1/eli5_supercooling/ | {
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"There are methods to cool a substance below its freezing point without it turning into a solid. You basically control the conditions of the cooling (it varies from one substance to another).\n\nOnce the entire substance is below its freezing point, you can somehow \"cause\" the first solid crystal to form, setting off a chain reaction, which then freezes the entire substance.\n\nBonus info:\n\n- Of course, on the other end of things, you can also \"superheat\" a liquid. A good, and recent example, is the theory behind the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Basically, there was pressurized water that was at temperatures above boiling, and once enough of it escaped to the atmosphere because of leaks - it immediately changed phase to steam. Steam takes up about 1000x the volume of water, and the explosion of steam followed."
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156hxd | why are contests in canada always open to "legal residents of canada (excluding quebec)"? | Something that I have always wondered is why Quebec is never included in contests in Canada. For instance, TSN's new Junior Hockey Championship contest excludes Quebec. Is it because of language laws or perhaps differences between common/civil law? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/156hxd/eli5_why_are_contests_in_canada_always_open_to/ | {
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"Quebec has a bunch of policies about sweepstakes that the rest of Canada does not. Rather than spending a bunch of money to make sure all the rules are followed, companies prefer to just not run the contest in Quebec.",
"No research. Might be wrong. Contests are heavily regulated in Québec. All information must be avalaible(prize, odds, date and time of draw etc) No purchase must be necessary. We also have to answer a mathematical answer in a lot of cases. So yeah I am all over the place with this answer but it boils down to laws. It's just easier to exclude Québec. Ha ha. Separation joke.",
"They are a rogue state. \n\nSource: I am from Vancouver.",
"Because according to provincial law, anything pertaining to the contest must be available in French. Most companies (especially foreign ones) cannot be bothered with translating everything, so they'll just explicitly exclude Quebec from their contest.",
"In Québec, as others said, contests are heavily regulated. Everything must be verified by certified people to protect contestants from fraud.\n\nAlso, the prizes are tax exempt. If the prize is $100,000 the winner gets all of it. This means that the organization must pay the taxes themselves to the Government.\n\nSo this may very well having a contest available to Quebec residents be cost prohibitive to the company that essentially uses the contest as a form of advertising."
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672ur6 | why is it that after undergoing anesthesia we have no control over or recollection of what happens until we "come to?" | I am having surgery tomorrow and so naturally, have been watching videos of said surgery and people waking up from anesthesia. I remember a few years ago I had wisdom teeth surgery and when I woke up from surgery I was leaned over talking to this other kid who had his taken out and was probably mid-sentence and just stopped and sat back. The nurses told me that we had been conversing for awhile and I have no idea what about, and can't remember talking to him at all. Thankfully they let me stay in the office until I got past that, I've seen some hilarious videos.
Why is it that we react that way instead of just staying asleep until we fully wake up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/672ur6/eli5_why_is_it_that_after_undergoing_anesthesia/ | {
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"While I am no doctor this is what I would assume:\n\n-You are still partially under the effects of the anesthesia, similarly to how you don't instantly become sober after being drunk.\n\n-Your body is still under quite a lot of stress and pain\n\nI think these things in combination with other factors would cause you to not have much of a recollection about what happened.",
"They usually are using a combination of drugs, with different effects.\n\n Some are anesthetic gases, which make you go unconscious and people generally recover from quickly once they are stopped.\n\nOthers, such as Benzodiazepines, decrease anxiety / agitation and keep you form making memories. These take your body a little longer to metabolize, so you're awake before you can make new memories.\n\nThat use them together so that you are calm, of under, and can be awakened without remembering the disturbing parts you really don't want to anyway."
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5r91wz | why were many of the ancient greeks so "clever" compared to the rest of the world st the time and indeed compared to people now. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r91wz/eli5_why_were_many_of_the_ancient_greeks_so/ | {
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"They weren't necessarily \"clever.\" But they did introduce philosophy and critical thinking skills, democracy and some other cool stuff. As for why it arose in Greece and not elsewhere... That's a bit harder.\n\nGreece itself was a chaotic place. It was divided into many independent cities and villages. There was never a point at which a single ruler controlled all of Greece (until Philip of Macedon). The Greek way of life placed great importance on the independent farmer. This made them a bunch of free thinkers who rejected authority and liked to argue. \n\nCompare this to a place like Egypt, where a single ruler was considered a living God and had absolute power. The Egyptians accomplished many wonderful things, but their culture changed only very slowly over the course of many thousands of years because they had no reason to debate or question how they did things.\n\nThat's just a thought, though. It doesn't completely answer the question. Whenever you ask why something \"didn't\" happen, sometimes there is no good answer except to say it just didn't.",
"Greek history is considerably more ancient than other European civilizations like the Romans or the largely over-looked Etruscans.\n\nThey also interacted with a lot of comparatively less-well-known cultures, for example the Babylonian and Sumerian scripts were lost by the middle ages. The Arabs attempted to decipher them but were largely unsuccessful. They were deciphered in modern times so their influence hasn't spread as quickly.\n\nThe Greek (and Latin) language remained accessible, unlike so many others which were forgotten, because of Christianity. The earliest texts were written in Greek, so European monasteries kept Greek writing alive, allowing a greater spread of Greek philosophy into Western Europe (where the Greeks had never spread).\n\nRoman writings also repeatedly mentioned the Greeks increasing European interest in them. Similarly we know so much about Ancient Israel because of Judaism whereas the other Levant cultures are less well preserved.\n\nHow much of Greek philosophy was really Greek in origin? We'll never fully know but they are the sources for which that philosophy was preserved.",
"I believe the answer to this is that their culture simply allowed for the position of \"philosopher\". Almost all other settlements or civilizations at the time would have laughed at the idea of paying someone (money was also a huge advancement) in coins or food in order to wonder about the universe and life. The Greeks large civilization and surplus of food allowed for finer jobs like philosopher. When you're worried about putting food on the table for your spouse and offspring its hardly easy to worry about what is real.\n\nSince people in the Greek city-states were willing to pay for tutoring in the art of critical thinking, philosophers were able to continue living and thinking. It's just like how Italy thrived in art production during the renaissance. People had a surplus of money and valued art, so the demand for artists skyrocketed and some of the best art on the planet was made during this period.",
"They aren't necessarily more clever than people now but they get a lot of credit because they laid foundational work in philosophy and mathematics. Today we have functions of math and philosophy that go way beyond what the Greeks could ever come up with BUT they almost all rely on what the Greeks did as a starting point for their work. There are smart people and dumb people in every age, but the smart people make life easier and better for those that come after them and so we generally remember them."
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dfbk1k | why do smartphones take so long to boot up after they “die”? | Other household electronics power up as soon as they are plugged into an outlet (Pc/laptop, gaming console, camera, microwave etc...) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dfbk1k/eli5_why_do_smartphones_take_so_long_to_boot_up/ | {
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"Unlike those devices, a smartphone has to load an extensive operating system consisting of perhaps 50 different programs all of which need to be running before it can be used.",
"\"take so long\", lol! \n \nMy 2nd computer took 5 minutes to load a 40Kb program. That's about a third the size of a picture message!"
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2kkanm | why my dog hates having his leash and harness put on him, even though it doesn't bother him once it's on and he knows it means he's going on a walk? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kkanm/eli5_why_my_dog_hates_having_his_leash_and/ | {
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"I noticed that my dog doesn't like having the leash put on because you're going for the throat. As for the harness, no clue.",
"Dogs don't like wearing a leash or harness, and some dogs are more prone to mixed emotional response than others. Once the dogs leash is on, you'll find that the thought of going for a walk is distracting him from his dislike for the leash.\n\nI think calling it a trauma based response is a bit premature to be honest. It's a dog, dogs don't like many things, one of which is being under strict physical control particularly when they're excited.",
"It might just be that he pain old doesn't like it, but lives walks, like somebody else said. \n\nIt also might be a dominance issue. Leaving over a dog can be scary for them. If you lean over him when you put stuff on, that also might be alarming to him. Try kneeling so that you don't lean at all and avoid working over his head as much as possible and see if there's a significant difference. ",
"My dog is honestly stupid, and that is ok, it is literally too much for her brain to handle that she is going for a walk. She spazzes out and flops about in excitement. She isn't purposely NOT trying to get the harness on its just so exciting that we are going. \n\n\n\n\nI am the only one who can put a harness on her. She knows that if I cannot get it on within 45 seconds or so I will leave without her (fake out, of course) so she will flop about, I take that moment to straighten the harness. I tell her Boo its time and she will stick her butt up in the air still wiggling and her face on the couch. I grab her face slip the collar over and quickly pick her up, turn her around and she is harnessed. Husband hasn't mastered the harness trick "
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3cbelv | can anyone explain google's deep dream process to me? | It's one of the trippiest thing I've ever seen and I'm interested to find out how it works. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, hop over to /r/deepdream or just check out [this] (_URL_0_) psychedelically terrifying video.
EDIT: Thank you all for your excellent responses. I now understand the basic concept, but it has only opened up more questions. There are some very interesting discussions going on here. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cbelv/eli5_can_anyone_explain_googles_deep_dream/ | {
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"Does this have anything to do with dreaming?",
"Basically the idea is to build a system that looks at a lot of photos while telling it what the photo contains, and from that data builds a model of what an object looks like. Then you can use the system to find out what objects are present in new unknown pictures\n\nThe dream images you have seen is obtained by feeding the system an unknown picture asking it \"What is present in this picture?\" and \"If an object is recognised, then enhance the characteristics of said object.\" Then the picture is fed though the system again with the same prompts. As anything that was vaguely observable before now will be more obvious to the system, the same objects get further enhanced. After a number of these iterations, the pictures get really funky.\n\n[The google research blog](_URL_0_) has a fantastic article about this with some nice picture examples.",
"It uses artificial neural networks, which are a (very simplified) software representation of biological neural networks (like in your brain).\n\nUsually the way artificial neural networks work is completely opaque. You set them up, give them training data, and let them do their thing. It's hard to tell how the various weighted connections produce the right answers, but they do anyway.\n\nTo better understand what's going on inside the neural network, they're essentially looking at its output at various stages before it's finished.",
"Here's how I understand it, but I'm not an expert: Google has the ability to compare and recognize things in photos. So, in theory it could look at a crowd and recognize individual people's faces, or look at a car and tell you what kind of car it is.\n\nThis is revolutionary in itself, because it emulates *understanding*. But, were just humans looking at bits and bytes: how do we *know* what it sees? Well, we tell the computer to output an image, with the comparison image overlapped. So, maybe it recognizes you in a crowd, so it's output is the crowd photo, with your high school graduation photo overlaid on top of your face in the crowd -- but just the face, because the background of the school photo doesn't match.\n\nIf you were to send *that* picture back through the process, it would recognize you again, of course, and overlay the same image.\n\nIn that example, say there's a guy who looks kind of like you, but different color eyes -- the process may overlap your graduation photo, except for the eyes because they don't match.\n\nFeed that through again, and maybe the process replaces the whole face this time, because with your school photo overlaid it's practically a definite match, so it overlays your whole photo. Now the crowd scene had replaced your face over a strangers face. \n\n Next, let's take a photo of a car, taken from the side. Google tries to recognize it and thinks that the wheels are eyes. It isn't, but when you overlay what the software *thinks* is there, now you have a car with wheels for eyes. Its not too uncommon, I'm sure you've had weird things like this happens, you see faces or eyes in places they don't exist.\n\nSo we send the eyes for wheels picture back through the process -- now the software *definitely* sees eyes so it tries to detect a face in there. It finds a close face, overlays it, now the car looks face like.\n\nRepeat that process a while, and now everything that looks remotely like eyes are turned into eyes,anything remotely like a face becomes a face -- this is called feedback, like a microphone picking up a quiet noise, sending it through the amp which filters the noise and makes it louder, which is picked up by the Mic and sent to the amplifier again, to be filtered and amplified, over and over, until it is an anormouslu loud whine. In the Google dream case, the 'noise' is visual noise, and the filter is designed to amplify faces.",
"Ok, so google has image recognition software that is used to determine what is in an image.\n\nthe image recognition software has thousands of reference images of known things, which it compares to an image it is trying to recognise.\n\nSo if you provide it with the image of a dog and tell it to recognize the image, it will compare the image to it's references, find out that there are similarities in the image to images of dogs, and it will tell you \"there's a dog in that image!\"\n\nBut what if you use that software to make a program that looks for dogs in images, and then you give it an image with no dog in and tell it that there is a dog in the image?\n\nThe program will find whatever looks closest to a dog, and since it has been told there must be a dog in there somewhere, it tells you that is the dog.\n\nNow what if you take that program, and change it so that when it finds a dog-like feature, it changes the dog-like image to be even more dog-like?\nThen what happens if you feed the output image back in?\n\nWhat happens is the program will find the features that looks even the tiniest bit dog-like and it will make them more and more doglike, making doglike faces everywhere.\n\nEven if you feed it white noise, it will amplify the slightest most minuscule resemblance to a dog into serious dog faces.\n\nThis is what Google did. They took their image recognition software and got it to feed back into it's self, making the image it was looking at look more and more like the thing it thought it recognized.\n\nThe results end up looking really trippy.\n\nIt's not really anything to do with dreams IMO\n\nEdit: Man this got big. I'd like to address some inaccuracies or misleading statements in the original post...\n\nI was using dogs an example. The program clearly doesn't just look for dog, and it doesn't just work off what you tell it to look for either. It looks for ALL things it has been trained to recognize, and if it thinks it has found the tiniest bit of one, it'll amplify it as described.\n(I have seen a variant that has been told to look for specific things, however).\n\nHowever, it turns out the reference set includes a heck of a lot of dog images because it was designed to enable a recognition program to tell between different breeds of dog (or so I hear), which results in a dog-bias.\n\nI agree that it doesn't compare the input image directly with the reference set of images. It compares reference images of the same thing to work out in some sense what makes them similar, this is stored as part of the program, and then when an input image is given for it to recognize, it judges it against the instructions it learned from looking at the reference set to determine if it is similar.\n",
"I'm no expert, but I took a class on neural networks, so I'll take a shot.\n\nGoogle's Deep Dream process is a neural network. That means that the code is set up to mimic how our brains work. The program consists of many nodes that perform simple operations (usually just adding a number). These are like neurons in our brains. The program can change what exactly its \"neurons\" do by comparing what is desired (as set by the developer) with what it got. The process of developing a neural network that does what you want through feedback is called \"training\" the neural network.\n\nIt's like if you were taught how to play an instrument. The instructor might say, \"play this note.\" You give it a shot, but it's the wrong note. In return your instructor might say, \"that note is too low.\" So you raise your pitch until finally they say, \"that's right, you got it!\"\n\nSo Google's Deep Dream neural network was trained to look for patterns in a picture that look like something that it knows. It's similar to someone trying to find familiar shapes in the clouds. The program will find some pattern in the picture and say, \"hey, that looks like an eye!\" It will then edit the picture so that the \"eye\" pattern is more pronounced. Deep Dream then starts over with the new picture. This time, it might decide, \"Hey, that looks like a leaf,\" and edit the picture so that the leaf pattern is more pronounced.\n\nThis continues until the user decides they're too dizzy.",
"Imagine a child that is seeing an image for the first time being asked what it thinks is in the image and to change the image to highlight what they recognize. Now, the child will look not just at the image as a whole, but at parts of it too. So anything that looks like something it recognizes will change to be even more like that thing. Eye shapes become more eye-like. Animal shapes become more animal-like. \n\nNow the child has seen a lot of images of animals, especially dogs, so naturally it picks out things that look like dogs or eyes (which are common to other animals too) and changes those parts to look more dog-like or eye-like. \n\nDeep Dream does this many times, so the images become more and more dog-like or eye-like to the point where it's basically just dogs and eyes. ",
"c/p'ed from the last time I answered this:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThere's several things that are going on in that blog post, but here's what's basically going on. So Google created a program that can recognize objects and things in images. This is something that is very, very, very hard for computers to do, because there's not really any defined guidelines for how to recognize things - is it the way pixels of different colors are positioned relative to one another? Is it the way that lines decide images into shapes? Is is a certain structure, of other objects? This is really really really hard to do. So what Google did is they didn't really teach the computer to recognize things. Instead, they taught the computer to learn. Then they said \"Here's a picture and this is what's in it\" and let the computer come up with its own guidelines. But the thing is so complicated they didn't totally understand what those guidelines were. So they came up with some tests to try and get an idea of what the computer had actually taught itself. One of those ways was saying \"Here's a picture. Look for things that kinda look like & lt;X & gt; and make them slightly more prominent.\" So they did that over and over and over again on the same picture and they could get an idea of what a computer things that object looks like - for example, they gave the picture a computer of static and told it to look for dumbbells. What it came up with was a whole lot of dumbbells, but every dumbbell also had an arm involved, meaning that the computer thought the dumbbells had to have an arm attached, because it only every saw dumbbells with arms attached to them. Now, when they gave the computer actual pictures - not static, and told it to look for things that were not in the picture, or they gave it the same image way too many times, the computer started seeing things where there wasn't anything really, because it'd say \"oh, this clump of pixels looks sliiightly like & lt;X & gt;, I'll make it look a tiny bit more like & lt;X & gt;\" and when you do that 3.2 million times you start seeing things. Similarly, the programmers would give the computer a picture and say \"Look for things in the photo. When you recognize something, make it look slightly more like what you thought it was.\" Again, do that over and over and over and you start seeing things in a clear blue sky. It's not that the computer is broken or doing stuff wrong, it's that the programmers, by making the computer have these feedback loops, were screwing around with its sensory perception, much like LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs screws with a human brain's sensory perception, making us see things that aren't there because we convince ourselves that something is there and then we see it and we're really convinced and we see it more. It's a really cool look into the mind of this computer that taught itself, though. \n\n**tl;dr: google programmers made their self-learning computer hallucinate so they could understand what it taught itself but programmers get bored easily so then they decided to put it on drugs.**",
"Heres a decent example of a [neural network](_URL_0_) for those wondering more about it. ",
"First, they invented Skynet. Then, they fed it a ton of acid, to keep it distracted. Then, they show it a bunch of pictures and try to analyze if the damned thing can be rehabilitated.",
"What is the purpose of deepdream,other than making trippy videos/pictures? I didn't learn much from the sticky in /r/deepdream, ELI5 please! I understood that it's about learning some system the difference between objects (something like that), but what will the system accomplish when it's done?",
"Why is everything eyes & animals??",
"I work in this area of vision research.\n\nThe neural networks they used are train to recognize and differentiate categories of dogs, cats, humans, etc.\n\nIt turns out that the networks discovered that faces and facial parts (eyes, noses, ears, etc.) are very easy and reliable signals for this task. \n\nSo a picture littered with dog face, nose, eyes, etc., even if the larger overall picture does not make sense, is very dog-like, to the neural network. \n\nSo telling the network to make a dog MORE dog-like, it will litter the picture with many dog facial parts.\n\nWhat the project tried to do is given a image and seeding a random noise, bootstrap the most dog-like thing image according to what the network thinks. It ends up creating these psychedelic images as a pleasant discovery. We somehow associate these kind of images with the psychedelic experience.\n\n~~Or maybe psychedelic drugs does a similar thing to a human brain. They instruct our brain receptors to overwhelm with the perception of a certain thing, so whatever we see in front of our eyes, we hallucinate extra copies to filling in the blanks creating a stronger signal. This is pure speculation, please ignore. Could make a really good paper though if people in neuroscience managed to draw this connection. Would be yet another huge indication that we are on the right path.~~",
"## A machine that recognises a building\n\nGoogle has a machine that can recognise what's in an image (to some extent). This type of machine works using a mathematical technique called *neural networks*.\n\n & nbsp;\n\nYou might ask, how do they build a machine that can recognise, say, a building?\n\nThe truth is that this is tremendously difficult. This is no simple machine that goes through a checklist, makes a tally, and returns its respons. In fact, if you would open up this machine you would find a whole bunch of smaller machines inside. These machines work together to recognise the concept of a \"building\". The first machine might recognise lines or edges and pass on its results to a second machine. The second machine might look how these edges are oriented, and so on and so on.\n\nIn reality, one of these machines might be composed of many tens of interacting layers. The result is a machine that's really difficult to understand. Visualising what it does becomes incredibly hard, even for people who've dedicated their lives to studying these machines.\n\n[Here's a visualisation of a three-layer machine.](_URL_7_) Each column is a layer, and each bubble receives information from the previous layers and passes it on to the next.\n\n## Turn it around!\n\nNow, what Google did was incredibly novel. Because it's hard to visualise what comes out of the machine, they turned the machine completely around. They changed the machine so that, instead of telling whether or not an image satisfied its demands, it would say what kind of image would satisfy it.\n\nLet's say you would give it a random image that does *not* contain a building, but instead just clouds.\n\nThe first machine might say that it doesn't recognise any items that look quite right. Sure, it sees an edge here and an edge there, but none of those edges really fit the bill. \"No problem,\" you say. \"Just tell me what looks *most* like the things you're looking for, and I'll make those things stand out! That way, it'll satisfy your demands, right?\"\n\nSo the machine points out which part of which cloud looks *kinda sorta* like the thing he was looking for and you enhance those features. If it was a dark edge of a cloud, you make it darker. If it was the sudden color variation between two spots, you make the variation larger. And then you pass on the enhanced image to the next machine in line.\n\n[Here's an example what some of the first layer enhancements might do to a picture.](_URL_4_). Note, however, that this is likely not a machine that recognises buildings, but something else entirely.\n\n## Understanding what the machine is thinking\n\nWhat you're really doing is that you're highlighting the items in the picture that pique the interest of the machines. Where first, this wizardry could not be visualised, now it can.\n\nSay, you have an image where the original machine recognised a building, but there's not a building inside! You feed this image to the new machine, which enhances all the building-y things. And there it is! Doesn't this bus kind of look like a building? Not quite, but *just* enough. Especially with the windows more expressive and the door in higher contrast and ....\n\nSuddenly, by turning the process on its head, it *is* possible [to see what the machine is thinking.](_URL_1_) Simply awesome.\n\n## Starting from nothing\n\nYou can take this one step further. Instead of giving it an image of clouds, you give it an image of natural noise. Very similar to the grey noise on an analogue TV that's stopped working(, but with a few extra tweaks). There are no edges of clouds it can enhance, but there are still patterns in the noise. By enhancing these patterns, [the machine starts drawing its own image!](_URL_5_)\n\nIn effect, the machine is drawing what it thinks a building looks like, just like most of us would try to draw a face. We know there should be a nose, and above that nose should be a pair of eyes, and...\n\nThe result is not entirely a building, but it has a lot of the characteristics of a building. In fact, it has *exactly* those characteristics of a building that the machine would normally look for.\n\n## Buildings in buildings in buildings\n\nSo you might have seen some really strange visualisations on Reddit these past few days, reminding you of fractals and whatnot. Those are a simple extension of the images drawn by the machine.\n\nFirst, you let the machine draw it's image of a building. When you get the result, you slightly zoom in and feed the machine back into the machine. It will enhance the things that are already there, but likely also discover new buildingy things in the parts you just blew up. [And you do it again, and again, and again.](_URL_3_) Each time you zoom in, new buildings sprout up.\n\n----\n\n^Images: ^[Cburnett/Wikimedia](_URL_2_); [^(Zachi Evenor)](_URL_0_)^( & Google/)[^(Google Research Blog)](_URL_6_)",
"Wow. \n\nOk so why is that so physically uncomfortable to watch? Is it that my brain is trying to make sense out of nonsense? Or is it that every time I recognize something, it changes into something else? \n\nI didn't find it scary but it was just weirdly unsettling. Very interesting explanations by the way! - jen",
"Figured I may as well try to ELY5 too, because I'm bored and this stuff is cool:\n\nImagine there's a table in front of you, and on that table are a number of flowers in pots. Those flowers are different in height, in color, in smell, and other features. They also have a little tag on them that says what it's called (\"Tulip\", \"Rose\", etc). Now I'm going to give you a challenge; I pull a flower out of a bag and put it on a table, and this flower *does not* have a name tag on it. \n\nCan you tell me what kind of flower it is? How would you do that, assuming that you knew absolutely nothing about flowers before today?\n\nWell, you'd probably look at all of the other flowers on the table that are identified by name, and try to figure out what makes flowers with the same name similar. For example, all of the flowers on the table that are red are called \"Roses\". If a new flower comes along that is also red, you might guess that it's a rose too, right? But let's say that the flower is yellow, and on the table there are two types of yellow flower, called \"Sunflower\" and \"Dandelion\". Just using color to guess may only help you name it correctly half of the time. So what do you do?\n\nYou'd have to make use of a number of the features of the flowers you've already seen (color, smell, height, shape, etc) in order to guess, and you could 'weight' the importance of some characteristics over others. Those weights would be a fixed set of rules that you could use with every new flower that you're shown to try to predict what kind of flower it is. If those weights turn out to be bad predictors of the flower name, you could try new weights. And you could keep trying new weights until your rules guess correctly 99% of the time.\n\nThis is remarkable, because no one had to give you a taxonomy or guidebook to identifying flowers. You simply took the information that was available, and used your intelligence to create a set of rules that helped you understand new data moving forward.\n\nBut let's say I wanted to reverse engineer your rules. You can't just explain them to me. Not really. It's just a mental model you've put together in your head, and you might've even invented adjectives that you can't possibly convey to someone else. It's all personal impressions. So what can I learn from you? \n\nIf I give you a blank piece of paper, and tell you \"use your rules to draw me a Daffodil\", you probably won't succeed. You're not an artist, and you don't have a complete mental picture of all of these flowers; you just put together a set of rules that used some standout, relative features to differentiate between flowers. But what if I started you off not with a blank piece of paper, but with a picture of the stars at night? Then you'd at least have somewhere to begin, a scaffold on which to apply your rules. You could squint your eyes and sort of decide that *that* group of stars is like the bulb shape, and *these* stars are X inches away from the bulb, so they must be a daffodil stem etc. You could sketch out something that, in your imagination, kinda captures the essence of a daffodil, even if it looks really weird.\n\nLet's say, then, that I took your drawing, held it behind my back, and put it right back in front of you and said \"Okay, where's the daffodil?\" Well, now it's obvious to you. You just drew a thing that you'd kinda consider a daffodil. You can point to it, and see features that your rules apply to. I tell you to draw it again using that image as a starting point, and the shape, size, and other features of the daffodil start to come into greater clarity. And then you draw it again, and again, and again. Eventually, I can look at your drawing and understand what your conception of a daffodil is, as well as how much information/detail your rules about daffodils really captured.\n\nWhy was this useful? Well, let's say that the daffodil that you drew has a weird protrusion on it that kind of looks like a bumblebee. I'd scratch my head and wonder why you think a daffodil has a bee-limb attached to it. I might then look at the table and notice that all of the daffodils I've shown you have bees buzzing around them. Remember, you knew nothing about flowers (or bees) before this, so if you saw 10 daffodils and each one had a bee on/near it, and if no other flowers had bees on them, your rules for positively identifying a daffodil may heavily weight the presence of a bee. Your rules have a bee in them, so you drew a bee, even though I wanted you to draw just a daffodil. I'd learn that in the future, if I want you to correctly understand daffodils, I should make sure there aren't any bees on them. What if a bee landed on a rose? You might think that rose is a daffodil by mistake. If it's important to me for some reason that you can accurately tell the difference between roses and daffodils all the time, this insight will help me to better train you.\n\nNow I want to try a different experiment. Instead of giving you a picture of the stars and asking you to draw a daffodil, I give you a starry page and ask you to draw whatever flower it is that you think you see. Maybe it's a daffodil, maybe not. Maybe you squint and - not prompted to think it's a daffodil - decide you sort of see an orchid. You draw your essence of an orchid, and I give you that image back and ask you to do it again, and again, until your rules about orchids are clear. Which is mildly interesting. I could show you different patterns of stars and you might show me different flowers. Is this useful to me? Who knows. I know a little bit more about how your brain works than I did before.\n\nNow I want to try yet another experiment. Instead of a picture of stars, I give you a picture of Sir Paul McCartney, and ask you to find the flower. Obviously this is a weird thing for me to ask. Way weirder than using stars for an abstract connect-the-dots. But like a good little test subject you just apply the rules like you're told. Maybe in his eyes you see something that triggers your rules about orchids, and his lips trigger your rose rules. So you trace the outlines/shapes over his face. I give you the image back and you trace more deliberately. And again. Until finally you've created a trippy-ass picture of Sir Paul with orchids for eyes and roses for lips, and I have to say \"What's wrong with your brain, man?! You're an insane person! Just look at this, are you on drugs?!\"\n\nAnd THAT, my friend, is what Google engineers who are pulling in $150k+ spent their time doing to their computers. They let a computer create a set rules on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions of images to identify virtually everything. Dogs. Buses. Presidents. Pumpkins. Everything. And then they wanted to reverse engineer the rules because they were curious. Would the computer's rules reveal themselves to be similar to how a human brain works, or reveal something about cognition? Would it be incomprehensible? Could we use whatever we find to come up with better ways to train the computers, or even better ways to create rules (i.e. machine learning algorithms)? Who knows. All we know for sure is that the images they got were bizarre and discomfiting and really, really interesting.",
"This process is 100% how brain handled LSD and Shrooms. I haven't dont them for nearly 20 years, but they always helped me to find levels of patterns/faces/common shapes, in places they didn't really exist. As I looked at something and analyzed it, the more layers were added on. The deeper into the abyss I would go.\n\nBasically it was exactly how this Deep Dream works. At first pass, maybe a face in the trees. Second pass faces seemingly appearing in everything. Third pass, faces within the face. Fourth pass, the faces are making structured and connecting to form common patterns. Fifth pass, I am flowing through a visual river of ever changing infinite, everything if pulsing with life and as far from reality as a dream.",
"Ok, this might sound childish or naive, but is this not a form of creativity?",
"You ever sit on the crapper for an extended period of time, eyes zoned-out and staring at the floor, and start to see patterns or pictures in the tile/carpet/whatever?\n\nIt's like that.",
"Computer vision is hard, so let's draw an analogy to something easier: finding out how red a picture is.\n\nIf you already know that pictures are made out of pixels, which are made up of fixed values of (normally) [red, green, and blue](_URL_0_) (eli5 link), you could write a program that gets the average redness and bam -- there's your answer.\n\nNow, because you're a lazy programmer, you decide to avoid figuring out this 'averaging' thing works, and you train a [neural network](_URL_1_) (eli5 link) instead. Problem is, although the neural network successfully tells you how red something is on a scale of 0-1, *how* it works is a mystery. Maybe it's just spitting out a [random number every time](_URL_2_)? Who knows.\n\nYour laziness is all-pervasive, though, so instead of digging into all of those neuron weights, you make a completely random picture and ask the network how red it is:\n\n0.2. Kinda red. You take that random picture, randomly change a small part of it and ask the network again: \n\n0.5. Pretty red -- getting better! Same deal as before, randomly change the picture and ...\n\n0.3. Drat. Alright, so you go back to step two, change the picture again, and ...\n\nEventually, after many (hundreds of) thousands of tries, this process ends with some value like 0.99 and a very red picture. [s/red/dog-like/g](_URL_3_)",
"I just saw Terminator Genisys, and now I find out Google can dream. Ya know what happens after something dreams? IT WAKES UP",
"It's probably a little post-ELI5, but this is the most easy-to-understand yet still sort of technical and pretty comprehensive explanation I've seen in my days of googling trying to understand this. Thanks to /u/warrenXG for the link \n_URL_0_"
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"https://vimeo.com/132700334"
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"http://bit.ly/1ThztJ6",
"http://i.imgur.com/rgsDE2m.png",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network#/media/File:Artificial_neural_network.svg",
"http://i.imgur.com/Me436Pc.png",
"http://i.imgur.com/pMeIFzV.jpg",
"http://i.imgur.com/J2bftvt.png",
"http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html",
"http://i.imgur.com/P4YSGdi.png"
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dlaqx/eli5_if_the_primary_colors_are_red_yellow_and/",
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m1cb3/eli5neural_networks_how_they_work_what_they_are/",
"http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25",
"http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?sed"
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1wyqjd | why jews are depicted as being greedy...for thousands of years? | I joke around about Jews being greedy, but why are Jews considering greedy but other countries/people aren't?
I heard it started in medieval times, an army wanted to borrow money from the Jews and never payed it back so Jewish people became greedy with their money from that point on, but maybe i'm wrong? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wyqjd/eli5_why_jews_are_depicted_as_being_greedyfor/ | {
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"The version I heard was a bit different. Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, whereas Jews were not allowed to lend money to other Jews at excessive interest. They could lend money to non-Jews at excessive interest, and they did because it made financial sense.",
"A thousand years ago, the most prominent bankers of the day were Jewish, partly because many non-jewish religions at the time outlawed effective banking. All successful bankers have to understand the slightly complicated concept of \"compound interest.\" But most of their profits have always stemmed from giving loans to individuals who do not fully comprehend compound interest. This is still true today.\n\nThe result a thousand years ago was that a bunch of uneducated peasants who were too uneducated to understand they were just bad at math, assumed whoever they owed money to must have been born from a race that was just inherently greedy. ",
"Ask that nice Jewish boy, Jesus, who kicked the bankers out of the temple of Jerusalem, where they'd been doing a nice business with the Roman occupiers. This stuff goes back some distance.\n\nHowever, in Medieval Europe the Jewish reputation for sharp dealing had much to do with the fact that Jews were often forbidden from owning land, and they periodically got thrown out of kingdoms, so they developed a network of urban traders and crafters in the ghettos, trading crafts for food. They had to be clever to survive, and that developed into the merchant network of the Renaissance, which eventually dealt the feudal system right out of the game. ",
"The Christianity of medieval Europe outlawed usury, which these days is typically defined as the charging of *excess* interest on a loan, but in those days, was frequently interpreted as charging any interest at all. Of course, that meant that you couldn't make a single ducat by lending people money, so these charitable Christian men simply chose not to engage in it at all (for the most part). \n\nJews were under no such restrictions, and they quickly flourished in the moneylending trade. There were undoubtedly some who charged exhorbitant interest rates, but if you owe somebody money, even at a perfectly fair rate, and you can't make the payment, the moneylender pretty much automatically becomes the bad guy of the story (the canonical example being Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice). And since these people were *already* Jews, hating them was just that much easier.\n\nSince then, the people who want to hate do what they have always done: point out one or two examples that illustrate their claim, and ignore the dozens of counter-examples. For example, an early theme the Nazis used to whip up hate against the Jews was that, while good Aryan Germans were out dying in droves in WWI, filthy Jewish businessmen sat at home making obscene wartime profits. The one or two small Jewish-run companies they could *actually* point to kinda paled in comparison to the REALLY big war profiteers, like Krupp's Industrial , which was run by good Aryan-pure Germans, but they never got around to mentioning that inconvenient truth.\n\n\n\n"
]
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[],
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tm188 | how web scraping can be legal? | Is there a way for a web scraper or crawler to not be held liable for infringement and if so what are the consequences involved? How is Pinterest legal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tm188/eli5_how_web_scraping_can_be_legal/ | {
"a_id": [
"c4ntc6x"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"From your question, you are implying that PInterest is a web scraper/crawler. It is not. It is user-submitted content, just like imgur/reddit where users take a photo from one source, upload it to imgur and link to it from reddit. \n\nA crawler involves a bot (automated software) that goes out to other websites for the purpose of reading and parsing the HTML for content. They are also called spiders. GoogleBot is an example of a spider. It goes to other sites, scrapes the content and stores it in Google's own databases where it is indexed for your searching. Some people have tried to imply that Google is responsible for all the pirated material it is hosting but that the problem is that the bot cannot fully understand the information it is parsing. Its only purpose is to scrape and store.\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
360wg8 | why are junebugs so awful at flying properly? | Every time I see these goofy guys flying around my porch light, they just hit everything in sight. What's the deal with that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/360wg8/eli5why_are_junebugs_so_awful_at_flying_properly/ | {
"a_id": [
"cr9oz21",
"cr9plyt"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Haha OMG I asked this same question last Summer!! They are so bad at living, they just bash around everywhere. If I remember correctly they just mate, lay their eggs if they are female, bash into everything and then die (sort of how I imagine Andrew WK going out). I could be wrong though, this was a year ago and most people just called me a dumbass for asking. Glad I wasn't the only curious about these crazy little fucks! I've grabbed and relocated at least ten from my doorstep already this year. Maybe they just want to come in and party?",
"Also, actual scientific bullshit, I still prefer to think of them as little WKs, partying til they die. \n\n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllophaga"
]
] |
|
48i57e | why/how can all the different local news stations have the exact same stories? | If they are supposedly in competition? This seems almost hard to accomplish if they aren't in on it together? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48i57e/eli5_whyhow_can_all_the_different_local_news/ | {
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"text": [
"I mean, it's news. If it happens, and people care about it, they're going to cover it. They get paid by advertising, not per viewer. So as long as they're watched and air ads, they're making income. What would be the point in not covering a local news story people care about? All it would do would be to send viewers to see a station that actually aired the story.",
"Well, because they are covering the same thing.\n\nIf three local stations cover a local city council meeting, where the council voted 6-3 to authorize a new road construction project, they're all going to be reporting the same thing. One station won't be saying it was a 5-4 vote, and another won't be saying it was for a new housing project. Same facts lead to the same story.",
"The headline stories aren't what they're competing for -- they're competing for loyal viewers.\n\nIf a prominent building in town is burning down, how do you think Channel 2 is going to keep Channel 5 out? They can't. But as long as they have good footage, their loyal viewers will watch.\n\nAlso, particularly when it comes to politics, the same story can be covered several different ways.",
"In a small enough city this will happen routinely...there is only so much happening in the town, and put together, it may be enough to fill everyone's newscast. So each of them will have a slightly different take take on the same events...or the same take, with slightly differing footage.\n\nIn a large city like LA or NYC, there will be some stories on more than one news outlet, and each will also have their exclusives. There is more to choose from.",
"Two main reasons:\n\n* They're owned by the same parent company (there aren't that many companies that own broadcast networks). \n* They used a press release to write the story (a good PR firm may distribute witty lines for the anchor, video for the backgrounds, even text or questions and answers for the reporter). ",
"In addition to their own sources, I think there's a news aggregation service like Reuters or Associated Press which aggregates all the news and makes it available to all channels who subscribe to it.",
"Many news outlets will run syndicated stories. That means the story is written and released by an agency like the Associated Press, and the local news will just reprint the story. It's how they can get national content without spending the money on reporters. Not having this content puts them at a disadvantage.",
"This is a mature industry in which all the stations have figured out the best principles for getting people to watch the news, so they are going to make similar decisions.\n\nLocal news stations also have very modest research budgets, so they mostly report on things that are very obvious -- a big fire happened today, a new mayor took office, a murder, a new school opened, etc. -- or things that were handed to them pre-made, like a press conference held to announce a new local project. So they all have access to the same pool of stuff to choose from.\n\nVery, very rare is the local news station that will go out and find more than 1-2 unique news stories per week. It's just hard work, and doesn't increase viewer counts."
]
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fnu2xf | positive vs negative pressure environments | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fnu2xf/eli5_positive_vs_negative_pressure_environments/ | {
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"text": [
"\"Positive pressure\" means that there's more pressure on the inside of something than the outside.\n\n\"Negative pressure\" is the opposite.\n\nRooms need to be kept at negative pressure, so air flows *into* them (and air containing the virus doesn't flow out into the hallways).\n\nVentilators need to be kept on positive pressure so that air stays in the lungs. More specifically, they need to alternate between positive pressure and either less-positive, neutral, or negative pressure depending on the settings.",
"Not sure about the negative pressure in the room bit but I can answer regarding lungs and ventilators.\n\nWhen you breath in, your diaphragm contracts (fills up less space in the body). This gives the lungs space to stretch out and increase the amount of air they can hold (volume). By increasing volume, the pressure in your lungs goes down, as the gases are much less tightly packed. \n\nThis causes air from outside the lungs to enter the lungs because the pressure is trying to balance itself out. The lungs in this scenario is a negative pressure environment relative to the outside air.\n\nA positive pressure ventilator works in a similar way (movement due to pressure difference). But rather than decreasing the pressure of air within the lungs, it increases the pressure of air outside.\n\nLung tissue is also very elastic and will try to recoil back to it’s smaller state. Leaving a small amount of positive pressure on the ventilator reduces this effect. However I don’t know the full medical benefits of positive pressure ventilation.",
"Positive pressure is when inside has higher pressure than outside.\n\nNegative pressure (otherwise known as vacuum) is when inside is lower pressure than outside. .\n\nBest way to think about it is positive pressure will push out and negative pressure pulls in. Of course this also depends on your frame of reference."
]
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[],
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|
1ld7mg | what makes something "commercial property" instead of "private/personal property"? | Commercial property sells for so much more. Sometimes, the properties are just regular houses that people use as a law office or business. What is stopping someone from buying a personal home, labeling it "commercial property" and selling it for more money? Where does this increase in value come from? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ld7mg/eli5_what_makes_something_commercial_property/ | {
"a_id": [
"cby1sjy",
"cby1swp"
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"score": [
3,
2
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"text": [
"Local zoning laws dictate which plots of land can be used for commercial or residential purposes, it's not just a label that the owner gets to slap on. There are different regulations to follow depending on the region. ",
"You have to be in an area zoned for commercial activity. Houses can be in a commercial area but usually commercial building are not allowed in residential areas"
]
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[],
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|
5pj3ua | why do we read and write from top to bottom? | Almost everything the humans build starts at the bottom and ends at the top. (At least if you stick to the traditional way) But writing is different. I have never seen any writing system that starts at the bottom and I have seen some children who start at the bottom but are taught begin at the top.
Why is that so? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5pj3ua/eli5_why_do_we_read_and_write_from_top_to_bottom/ | {
"a_id": [
"dcrinwy"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Because 1: the human arm and hand do their best work when moving towards the center of the body, you can see this in combat throws and drawing. 2: if you write bottom-up, you will smudge the ink or charcoal, which was what was used for lots of writing in history. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1xpf20 | where are nuclear bombs blown up when they are described as being blown up underground? | I can't imagine there being massive underground complexes big enough for a nuke blast. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xpf20/eli5_where_are_nuclear_bombs_blown_up_when_they/ | {
"a_id": [
"cfdeewx"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Let me wiki it for you: \n\n_URL_0_\n\nNo complexes, they literally just bury the bomb and set it off.\n\n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_nuclear_testing"
]
] |
|
a1d07y | how does false advertising work in the us? | Saw an ad for a popular phone that came out this year. It had videos of people reacting to Christmas gifts that could not have been the phone. Then it said “We can’t wait to see your reaction” is this not false advertising? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a1d07y/eli5_how_does_false_advertising_work_in_the_us/ | {
"a_id": [
"eaoqg8g",
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"text": [
"Most digital screens when shown in commercials or ads are \"simulated screens\". It will actually specifically say so in the writing on the screen as a disclaimer.\n\nNext time you see and ad like this look and there will generally be a small disclaimer on the screen then or at the end of the ad.",
"If I'm understanding your description, the lie is that the gifts the people are opening aren't actually the phones?\n\nI don't think that would count as false advertising since there's no material statement being or implied about the product. In other words, a reasonable person is unlikely to make a decision to buy the product based on that lie (even partly)? I might think *\"Ooh, a new phone would make an excellent gift for so-and-so, because they've been complaining about their old one a lot\"*. No reasonable person (in the US, at least) is going to think *\"Those characters (i.e. fictional people played by actors) look really happy about getting that phone as a gift, so Jimmy James will definitely love it, too\"*"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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|
d0gipg | why do deafness and muteness usually accompany each other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d0gipg/eli5_why_do_deafness_and_muteness_usually/ | {
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"text": [
"Depends of when the person was deaf. If the person can't hear and mimic/learn from adults then they can't speak.",
"My assumption would be that if you never heard language, it would be incredibly difficult to learn to speak since we learn how to speak by listening and mimicking noises until we get it right.",
"so much of how we learn to speak is based upon our ability to hear it, s'basically why accents happen and why people have different accents, so if you are unable to hear you can't hear the sounds to mimic them and thus cannot speak. even then its the same thing you see in older people, as their hearing decreases they talk louder, part of speech is hearing ourself say it too"
]
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[],
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||
26gdu3 | what about swaying in a hammock relaxes us? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26gdu3/eli5_what_about_swaying_in_a_hammock_relaxes_us/ | {
"a_id": [
"chqt7mg"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"I really wish I could remember which episode it was... but Neil deGrasse Tyson addressed this exact issue while discussing motion sickness on Star Talk.\n\nMost are familiar with motion-sickness. The very mild symptoms are fatigue and sleepiness. It's mild enough not to cause nausea. He presented it as a \"gee-whiz\" aside to explain why hammocks, car rides, etc. put people to sleep.\n\nIt makes sense... I'm not much of a napper, but put me in an airplane and I WILL doze off. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
3dwa7k | the significance of the pentaquark | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dwa7k/eli5_the_significance_of_the_pentaquark/ | {
"a_id": [
"ct99pmu"
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"score": [
61
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"text": [
"Some theories predicted their existence, some didn't. We now know to reject the theories which were wrong, and pursue those which got it right. That's how science works.\n\nThere is no direct practical impact, other than the general advancement of science."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
3xloz8 | how it was decided how would the keys of a piano sould like the first time it was made? | Or how "Do" sounds like, the first time it was done | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xloz8/eli5_how_it_was_decided_how_would_the_keys_of_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cy5o4p6"
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"score": [
2
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"text": [
"The musical scale used by the piano was already in place long before the piano was invented. [Here](_URL_0_) is a detailed article including its history. The piano was designed to fit the traditional musical scale, not the other way around."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale"
]
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|
jt6vn | why israel and palestine have remained at war for so long? why can't they make peace? why do so many nations want the israelis dead? | I have only a vague knowledge of why the Palestinians and Israelis are fighting. Is there ever going to be peace within the Middle East? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jt6vn/eli5_why_israel_and_palestine_have_remained_at/ | {
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"text": [
"The short and over-arcing version is that multiple religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) consider that area of the world as their sacred holy land. This doesn't jive so well. \n",
"After World War Two, Britain, which controlled Palestine decided to GTFO. The Jews had been asking them for some time if they could have some of the land. \n\nAfter the holocaust there where even more Jews who wanted to GTFO of Europe, so the UN decided to cut Palestine in half and give half to the Jews and half to the Local Arabs. The Arabs were pissed off at this, and didn't want this new country. So both sides got pissed off and soon there was war between them, then another war, then another war. The middle war (67) led to Israel taking over much of the land. Now they are supposed to come to some kind of deal and create a Palestinian state to exist along side an Israeli state. ",
"Done already.\n\n_URL_0_",
" > Israel and Palestine have remained at war for so long? Why can't they make peace? \n\nThe Palestinians want the land back that was taken from them. The Israelis don't want to go. It's basically what happened in the Americas and Australia (though not South Africa, funnily enough). A bunch of Europeans come, marginalise the natives and say it's alright because it's their \"manifest destiny\" (they're supposed to do it).\n\n > Why do so many nations want the Israelis dead?\n\nName one?",
"The short and over-arcing version is that multiple religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) consider that area of the world as their sacred holy land. This doesn't jive so well. \n",
"After World War Two, Britain, which controlled Palestine decided to GTFO. The Jews had been asking them for some time if they could have some of the land. \n\nAfter the holocaust there where even more Jews who wanted to GTFO of Europe, so the UN decided to cut Palestine in half and give half to the Jews and half to the Local Arabs. The Arabs were pissed off at this, and didn't want this new country. So both sides got pissed off and soon there was war between them, then another war, then another war. The middle war (67) led to Israel taking over much of the land. Now they are supposed to come to some kind of deal and create a Palestinian state to exist along side an Israeli state. ",
"Done already.\n\n_URL_0_",
" > Israel and Palestine have remained at war for so long? Why can't they make peace? \n\nThe Palestinians want the land back that was taken from them. The Israelis don't want to go. It's basically what happened in the Americas and Australia (though not South Africa, funnily enough). A bunch of Europeans come, marginalise the natives and say it's alright because it's their \"manifest destiny\" (they're supposed to do it).\n\n > Why do so many nations want the Israelis dead?\n\nName one?"
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/"
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[],
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2d9r/ok_heres_a_really_difficult_oneisrael_and/"
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|
2kzkeh | the difference between dna and genes | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kzkeh/eli5_the_difference_between_dna_and_genes/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Did you try searching this first? _URL_0_"
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/search?q=The+difference+between+DNA+and+genes&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all"
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||
lqdai | stem cell therapy | So, my mum is about to go through it, she has cancer and they seem to think this is going to help, I could read through the masses of information online but really I just need a simple overview to even grasp what it is they are doing and why, it sounds a rough process. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lqdai/eli5_stem_cell_therapy/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Think of stem cells here as the repairmen of the body. A few liver cells die? No problem. A few stem cells with the liver blueprint will divide and then: new liver cells!\n\nSo there's two types of stem cells: somatic, and embryonic. Embryonic stem cells can become ANY type of cell in the body; somatic stem cells are assigned a specific organ, but they can become any type of specialized cell within that organ.\n\nMostly, one stem cell splits into two: 'original' stem cell, and a specialized cell. But if a stem cell splits into two specialized cells, another stem cell will split itself in half resulting in two stem cells. So they're good with population control, provided they're functioning normal.\n\nChemotherapy does a nice job of killing cancerous cells, but it also kills some good cells our bodies need to stay healthy.\n\nThe idea is to use fresh, undamaged stem cells to replace the stem cells damaged from chemo. This way the damaged organs/systems can regenerate using a good blueprint, instead of one covered with radiation. I think as it is right now, bone marrow transplants are the most common stem cell therapy. Fresh stem cells are introduced into the bone marrow and from there they grow into blood cells, so this can be helpful for people with lymphoma.",
"Think of stem cells here as the repairmen of the body. A few liver cells die? No problem. A few stem cells with the liver blueprint will divide and then: new liver cells!\n\nSo there's two types of stem cells: somatic, and embryonic. Embryonic stem cells can become ANY type of cell in the body; somatic stem cells are assigned a specific organ, but they can become any type of specialized cell within that organ.\n\nMostly, one stem cell splits into two: 'original' stem cell, and a specialized cell. But if a stem cell splits into two specialized cells, another stem cell will split itself in half resulting in two stem cells. So they're good with population control, provided they're functioning normal.\n\nChemotherapy does a nice job of killing cancerous cells, but it also kills some good cells our bodies need to stay healthy.\n\nThe idea is to use fresh, undamaged stem cells to replace the stem cells damaged from chemo. This way the damaged organs/systems can regenerate using a good blueprint, instead of one covered with radiation. I think as it is right now, bone marrow transplants are the most common stem cell therapy. Fresh stem cells are introduced into the bone marrow and from there they grow into blood cells, so this can be helpful for people with lymphoma."
]
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mpoyr | how motherboards and processors work in computers, and how would i replace one (or both)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mpoyr/eli5_how_motherboards_and_processors_work_in/ | {
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"The motherboard is the part of your computer into which everything else is joined. Analogically, it is like the veins in your body, that carry blood (information) to the different parts of your body. The processor is similar to your brain, but it can't think for itself. It needs some instructions, which is all programs are, a series of instructions for getting something done. What a program does is ask the processor to do something for it (add, multiply, divide (not subtract)), and the processor will do it and send it the result along a thing called a 'bus'. You can think of them like buses in real life that carry people, except these ones carry information.\n\nTo replace your motherboard, you first need to check that all your other current components are compatible. You want to check that the RAM's clock speed is compatible, and if you are still using a floppy drive or an old hard drive, that the motherboard has an 'IDE' slot on it. You also need to make sure that the CPU socket on your new motherboard is compatible. Depending on whether you have an intel or AMD processor, it will be something like LGA1156 or AM3+ respectively. ",
"The motherboard is the part of your computer into which everything else is joined. Analogically, it is like the veins in your body, that carry blood (information) to the different parts of your body. The processor is similar to your brain, but it can't think for itself. It needs some instructions, which is all programs are, a series of instructions for getting something done. What a program does is ask the processor to do something for it (add, multiply, divide (not subtract)), and the processor will do it and send it the result along a thing called a 'bus'. You can think of them like buses in real life that carry people, except these ones carry information.\n\nTo replace your motherboard, you first need to check that all your other current components are compatible. You want to check that the RAM's clock speed is compatible, and if you are still using a floppy drive or an old hard drive, that the motherboard has an 'IDE' slot on it. You also need to make sure that the CPU socket on your new motherboard is compatible. Depending on whether you have an intel or AMD processor, it will be something like LGA1156 or AM3+ respectively. "
]
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||
ecsgbt | why do so many people hate greta thunberg? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ecsgbt/eli5_why_do_so_many_people_hate_greta_thunberg/ | {
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"text": [
"Essentially old people think shes an arrogant stuck up little girl\nAny arrogant male business man",
"I do not hate her but do find her strident denunciations very childish. Which is slightly forgivable given she is a child but not completely because she has been given a platform worldwide. Yes climate change is a real problem, yes we need to do more about it, yes some countries are really not doing very much but do not make out that the world will end tomorrow. Humanity has been very good at averting crisis after crisis by scientific and commercial advancements. I see no reason to expect climate change will not be dealt with in the same way.",
"Mainly because she’s just entitled and angry. So far I am not sure, if she offered any workable solution. Our way of living is not compatible with saving the planet. Too much consumption and growth requirements."
]
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7d9f7h | how does hedging work? | How does hedging in gambling work? (apologies if this is the same thing but...) How does hedging in the finance industry work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7d9f7h/eli5_how_does_hedging_work/ | {
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"There are a lot of ways this could work. Here is just one of many examples.\n\n\nLets say I'm building planes in the US. Somebody in Europe wants to buy a plane. They will pay me 100 million Euros in 2020 when I deliver the plane. \n\nI'm a US company. I don't want Euros. I could convert it to US dollars. Lets say the rate is 1 USD to 1 Euro today. If the rate swings a lot, I could loose money. \n\nOf course, I could ask the buyer to pay me 100 million USD, but they might not agree to that because that represents too much risk for them.\n\nOne idea might be to buy an option. The option would say \"on Jan 1st, 2020 I can trade 100 million Euro's for 100 million dollars.\"\n\nThis option would cost money, but it would minimize my risk. If on Jan 1st, 2020 100 million Euros is worth 75 million dollars, then I exercise the option, and I still get my 100 million USD.\n\nIf instead 100 million Euros is worth 125 million dollars, then I would consider my option to be worthless, and instead I can exchange my money on the open market.\n\nEither way, for a fee upfront, I have a good upside, but I can limit my potential downside.\n",
"hedging a bet in gambling is once you feel pretty sure you are going to win - you can bet on the other side to minimize the potential to lose.\n\nLet's say you did a three team parlay - your bets were: \npatriots -7 (sunday night football - they won/covered)\npanthers -8 (Monday night football - they won/covered)\nand your last bet is still pending - which is steelers(-7) on Thursday night football. \n\nYou originally bet $100 to win $600. \n\nbut you are already 2/3 of the way to a good win - if you want to play it safe - you could now bet on steelers opponent (titans +7) \n\nLet's say for example if you bet $200 on titans +7\n\nso now - if the titans cover the +7 - you lose your parlay - but you win your hedge bet (making a positive $200 - the original $100 on your parlay.) (TOTAL = +100)\n\nBut if the steelers cover the -7 then you still win your parlay and get $600 profit (plus your $100 back) BUT - you lose your hedge bet for $200 (TOTAL = +$500)\n\nHedging is just a way to reduce your risk of losing.\n\nAnother example of hedging in gambling = \nLet's say you bet on the panthers on Monday night to win straight up - (panthers were -250) so you bet $250 to win $100.\nAt half time they were winning by a lot - so the dolphins were big time underdog at halftime - you could have bet the dolphins (2nd half only bet) and they were paying +1200 to win the game = so if you bet $25 on the dolphins to win the game - you would win $300. - in this case the dolphins would have to pull off a miracle come back - but you would be guarantee to win money - because if panthers held on to win - you win your original bet ($100 profit - $25 on dolphins TOTAL +$75) or if dolphins make miracle comeback - you win $300 (minus the $250 you lost on your original bet - final PROFIT = +$50)\n\nhedging is more useful is you are doing parlays and only have one game left to hit. In the case of straight bets - it severely reduces your profit potential.\n\nIt's really best if you are just a grinder who is looking to make a little profit on every game while minimizing your risk.\n",
"You pay a little now to buy your way out of a later risk.\n\nLet's say your airline needs a million liters of jet fuel next year, but you worry the price will go up. You can pay a fee now to lock in today's price for next year. Now if it does go up, you're protected. (But if it doesn't go up, you wasted your money.) That's a form of hedging."
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6fqncs | how do modern mercenaries operate? | It sounds like something illegal to me, but they do exist. How do mercenary organisations form, where do they come from and how are they hired? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fqncs/eli5_how_do_modern_mercenaries_operate/ | {
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"Strictly speaking, it likely is illegal: there's a United Nation Mercenary Convention that prohibits their use by state actors. However, only 35 countries are signatory, and most of the big military players are not among them.\n\nThat said, private military contractors occupy a likely legal grey area. That's part of what complicates the issue.",
"They are typically formed by ex-military or police officers and are hired just like any other company: you'd sign a contract with them. Naturally, they don't use the term \"mercenary\" preferring the more subtle term, \"security services.\"\n\nYou would not hire these companies as an army to fight a war though. Typically they would be contracted for personal security and to train an existing group of men, turning them into soldiers. They would also offer strategic counsel and probably have sources for supplying arms.",
"See also Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater later known as Academi, brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.",
"The way I understand it, an Australian woman tells you what contracts to take and what's going on in Local government (who's in power, what factions to side with, etc.) . She also explains new areas as you enter them so you know what's what. I think this only pertains to Venezuela and you have to be Swedish and have a mohawk to receive the info. \n\n",
"Mercenaries are just companies that provide people who do work.\n\nSwiss mercenaries (employed by the vatican in an official capacity to guard the pope) are essentially an officially endorsed state sponsored mercenary arrangement. \n\nNepalese Gurkhas who fight for the British army are something similar.\n\nBut wholly private mercenaries basically grow out of some former soldier or someone with diplomatic and military connections who can hire people who are going to fight. \n\nGhaddafi hired chadian mercenaries essentially straight out of want ads in, well, chad. \n\nMark Thatcher (son of former UK Prime minister Margaret) got into the business through Simon Mann, a former British army officer who was contracted by the Angolan government to provide military services retaking an oil field.\n\nThe legality of mercenaries is sort of all over the place. If the government of a country hires you to to do work for them, in their own country then presumably the work is by definition legal, at least in the sense that you took a contract you understood to be legal. \n\nUsing a mercenary force against another country isn't at all obvious when it is or isn't legal.\n\nIn the case of say, colonial efforts by the americans in Iraq, well, private contractors delivering supplies etc. need guards, so are those guys mercenaries? (Yes, but not necessarily). \n\nIf you want to pay some French or Americans or whatever to come to your country and train your army that is presumably legal. But if you want to pay them to come and train your insurgent force to take over the country that usually isn't. \n\nKeep in mind that many countries, particularly in Africa and the Middle East have pathetically small armies, that have almost no equipment, no combat experience, no competent leadership, and generally can't be trusted to actually fight, or if they do, probably not win. Those countries rely on foreign specialists for their fighting and training needs because they can't be bothered to train their own forces for the relatively rare event that they need them. So long as they are fighting non sovereign states (so pirates, gangs, insurgents, even ISIS) mercenaries are generally desirable. \n\nThe situation against ISIS is a fairly good example of why you might need mercenaries. If you don't trust your own army to not defect, you have a problem (Syria and Saudi have this problem). If you think your army is going to turn and run at the first sign of trouble you have a problem (the Iraqi's have this problem). If your army refuses to fight during Ramadan, you have a problem. Mercenaries let you overcome a lot of that. \n\nAlso, Mercenaries, are essentially outside the geneva conventions, they are not considered combatants and not entitled to geneva convention protections explicitly. For that reason they have no motivation to adhere to geneva conventions, and if you intend to do something illegal some mercenaries are happy to torture and stage coups etc, because it can't get any worse for them if they are caught and taken prisoner. ",
"It's totally dependent on the job. I personally see it as working for the military with no benefits, just a fatter paycheck. There are combat jobs that go to people with combat experience. Me only having been in for 3 years I didn't get accepted for the really good jobs but I have leadership from when I was still in the Army who got out and is now making six figures going through some horrifying things just to make sure his family back home is well taken care of in the best way he knows how.\n\nThere are tons of jobs that fall under \"mercenary\" work. You can pull gate guard duties, you can be a chef, a translator, train k9, etc. If you specialize in anything theres a decent chance you can be a merc for it. It's not necessarily something bad people do. It just has a bad rep.",
"Ha, something I can answer, my thesis for my bachelor of political science is completely on Dutch private military companies. In the current scientific terminology mercenaries are actually defined as contractors, calling them mercenaries was considered pretty old fashioned by the private military company directors I interviewed. \n\nContractors are defined as military personnel that do not work directly for a government but for a company. A lot of states, especially the US, have started to use these companies a lot over the last decades. In 2007 for example 54% of US defense personnel in Afghanistan were contractors and not US state troops. Contractors are deployed in a myriad of ways, they fight shoulder to shoulder with American soldiers in the front line but also protect vips or convoys, protect the outer rings of camps or support armies in logistical ways by flying planes or helicopters with vital supplies. They also guard merchant vessels in for example the Gulf of Aden and they help companies that have to deal with kidnappings of personnel in Africa. \n\nContractors have advantages over normal troops in some situations. They are often cheaper to deploy than army equivalents. You do not want elite troops guarding the outer rings of camps in low intensity areas, so it is preferable for states to hire cheap third country contractors to do these relatively simple tasks so that the regular troops do not have to waste their time on patrol duties and can do actual missions. \n\nThere is some criticisms on this system as some argue that companies should not partake in the monopoly of the use of legal force. This monopoly is the idea that only the state can legally detain you or punish you using force. Now there are companies do basically the same. Fighting wars for states makes it legal for them to kill people sometimes largely to their own discretion. The academic and philosophical debate on whether companies should be allowed to partake in this monopoly on the use of legal force is still raging and something we will have to tackle in the coming decades as the use of private military companies is on the rise. \n\nI hope I gave a quick am understandable overview of what pmcs do, I am sadly not with my computer so I can't give references for my sources, but if you want to learn more about pmcs authors like Tonkin and Leander are great sources to learn more about this emerging issue. ",
"I've been a private security contractor for 10 years. A 'mercenary' if you like the term. Like most Reddit comment sections, a lot of good answers here, a lot of crap. Put too much faith in knowledge derived from fiction (movies, tv, video games, bullshit stories from wannabees) and documentaries and similar external assessments, you'll always get the wrong answer. The common truth threaded in the more knowledgeable comments here; it's a legal business offering a service for a fee with licensing, insurance, contracts and government regulations. The vast amount of misinformation and conjecture that goes on about it from people who have never been actually involved in private security business makes it seem otherwise. ",
" > It sounds like something illegal to me\n\nIn a very strict sense, mercenary is illegal, but there are so many ways to go around it.\n\nThink about the mall cops, bar bouncers, movie star bodyguards, and bank security and money transport guards, they all perform the same function as \"mercenaries\" operating in Iraq or other highly dangerous areas. \n\nIndeed, nowadays they just provide \"Private Security\" \n\nThis is a good documentary on US PMC (Private Military Contractors) in Iraq. It's called Shadow Company\n\n_URL_0_",
"One of my coworker used to serve in Iraq then worked for military contractor for couple years. He told me quiet a bit about them. It's just a private company that employ people with combat background. That's why most employee there are either vet or off-duty troops, ex-soldiers. People like to join military contractor because the pay is better and more relax than military camp. There is no yelling, yes sir no sir bullshit. \n\n He said most of the stuff contractor do are guarding and escort stuff. He worked in Africa, guarding warehouses and trucks from diamond mine. He also said contractors do a lot of fuck up shit because they arent bound to no rules like the real military"
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2bq0im | what are the potential impacts the new development bank (brics) will have on the global economy? can the new development bank and international monetary fund coexist in the long term? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bq0im/eli5_what_are_the_potential_impacts_the_new/ | {
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"This is more of an Ask Reddit, not an ELI5. Especially since you are asking for an opinion. I will answer your second question, I am not qualified for the first. There are probably only a small number of people on the planet that can answer that question ELI5.\n\nI think that BRICS will be very good for the global economy. It will create competition. BRICS will want to make money like any other bank, they will be fiscally responsible (or so we hope) in doing that. Sure they are supported by different countries, but the global economy relies on everyone. And giving more competition and more access to the global banking network could vastly improve. Bad things could happen, however I believe it is worth the risk.\n\nImagine if we had only one bank in America (or your country). If that bank goes the whole country suffers. If they make one bad decision. If you don't agree with their policies or rates what can you do? Now open a second or third bank and things get a whole lot fairer quicker.\n\nOnly time will tell how this will effect things. But I see this as a positive project and ambition set out by China, Russia, Brasil, India, and South Africa."
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ffkuwa | how do plastic spatulas refuse to melt? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ffkuwa/eli5_how_do_plastic_spatulas_refuse_to_melt/ | {
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"They are fundamentally different materalis with different properties. Ie.They are Silicon, not plastic.\n\nDifferent materials have different properties such as their melting point. This is due to the atomic structure (arrangement of atoms and molecules) of them up.\n\nIce vs rocks, for example, have different melting points."
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3okxm0 | those random phone numbers that call you and hang up when you say hello... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3okxm0/eli5_those_random_phone_numbers_that_call_you_and/ | {
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"That was a call centre's computer calling you. They dial loads of people simultaneously, some of whom will pick up, and say 'hello', or make a noise of some kind so the computer knows someone's there. You then get transferred to the operator to be lied to about PPI/old car crashes/fake lotteries/phone upgrades. If no operator is available, because too many people picked up, you get hung up on instead. Many countries have legislation to limit the number of hang-ups allowed in this setup, which feeds into their equations on how many people they can call at once.",
"Not sure about other countries but here in Korea they might already have your personal details like your address etc... They might be calling to see if you're an elderly so they can rob you ( no joke ).\n\nWe recently found numbers etched next to the ringer at my parents apartments, aparently that is for the same purpose except it goes into details on if it's a robbable place or not.\n",
"They might be predictive diallers.\n\nOutbound sales call centres will use these, rather than having agents manually dialling a list of numbers. The general aim of these diallers is that an agent will become available to speak to you around the same time as you pick the phone up. This way, they're not paying people to sit around waiting for you to pick up.\n\nDialler configuration is a bit of a black art. Do it correctly, and everything's fine. Do it wrong, and lots of people will get silent calls.",
"I wish I could make it stop. It's been progressively getting worse for a couple years now. ",
"They want you to be curious and call them back and it will be a phone number that will charge you. It is usually a small amount so a lot of people don't even notice it. They make money on volume. ",
"When it's calling a business, where telemarketing laws are less strict, and it's a hang up, usually it's the telemarketer using an auto dialer, which takes a second for your info to pop up. Once it does, they quickly realize you are not a decision maker and hang up without bothering to ask if you're interested in lead generation. ",
"There has also been a scam I believe where the goal was for you to call them back in which case every minute on the phone was an extraordinarily expensive amount of money that they would get."
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5400i3 | what happens to your brain when chemotherapy doesn't work combating a malignant tumour? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5400i3/eli5what_happens_to_your_brain_when_chemotherapy/ | {
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"I have a question. I would like some clarification. Where is the tumor? ",
"First you have my condolences, but you're an adult so I'll try and avoid being patronising by not sugarcoating it... But more than likely the cancer will eventually spread. Since it is frontal lobe some of the first things to go will be the hypothalamus and pineal gland, other than discomfort this will cause personality changes, memory loss and difficulty in normal functions.\n\nBeyond this point its unfortunately no walk in the park. Lowered brain function means that some biological functions will be affected. This may lead to muscle atrophy and general lethargic behaviour as the cancer damages nearby cells and increases energy consumption.\n\nPain will come, its inevitable as the body starts to fail. But fortunately at this point many patients are quite drugged and are in the last few days of mental control.\n\nMake sure that affairs are sorted, and that a psychiatrist is available for the psychological symptoms; depression, suicidal thoughts etc.\n\nTl;Dr: nothing good is going to happen, the brain basically withers away. But it's usually a relatively fast cancer that people don't have to suffer with for too long",
"I'm a hospice nurse and I have to admit that this is one of the most devastating diagnoses I have encountered. As a previous poster had mentioned it progresses quickly and can be painful. As with most terminal illnesses there will be incontinence and weakness. Eventually the person will no longer be able to walk. An indicator that can show that things are getting bad is when the person is slow to respond and has trouble finding words. I have seen a lot of success with very high doses of steroids to limit the swelling in the brain but only delays the inevitable. "
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bnuwwy | how do restaurants, and similar business, deal with ramadan in islamic countries? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnuwwy/eli5_how_do_restaurants_and_similar_business_deal/ | {
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"I can only speak from my own experience. I’m not Muslim but I was in Istanbul once during Ramadan. People would gather together every night to break their fast when the sun went down. You couldn’t get a seat in a restaurant because they were all fully booked with large parties eating together at sunset. It looked like they were doing very good business to me.",
"Depends on the owners. Where I live, different businesses offer different services during ramadan. \n\nFor ex most fast food places are closed all day, opening only 2 hours before iftar and give ramadan promotions. Its not bad business. Restaurants are filled for the next 4-5 hours. \n\nCafes on the other hand are open all day. This is kind of due to the number of non muslims living in the area who need their daily coffee fix, as I have observed. \n\nFor seheri, only a handful of restaurants stay open, also providing promotional offers.",
"Depending on the country, open cafes/restaurants also use curtains to block their windows so customers eating inside can’t be seen from the outside - out of respect for those fasting.",
"In Indonesia, they usually just put curtains on the windows to block the view from outside and open them later when maghrib is near.",
"Currently in Qatar- Restaurants are closed throughout the day, and open at 6pm for seating and won’t serve food until after sunset. From what I’ve seen routine activity remains such as car shops, medical/ dental, and construction. We visited the mall, able to walk around inside but no stores opened until 730pm, however, they were open until 2 am or later."
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1vs3b0 | why does magnets lose their magnetic powers when heated? | I stuck an neodymium magnet to my wood stove, and after while it fell off. When the oven is cold, it`s really hard to get the magnet off. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vs3b0/eli5_why_does_magnets_lose_their_magnetic_powers/ | {
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"Here's a slightly more LI5 explanation.\nMagnets \"work\" because little bits of them, inside (called \"magnetic domains\") have all been lined up, pointing in the same direction, when the magnet was made. When a magnet is heated, all the little magnetic domains are free to do whatever the heck they want, as the atoms are wiggling around like crazy (that's what being a hot solid is: your atoms wiggle around like crazy). As these magnetic domains squirm and wiggle around, they typically end up not being all lined up anymore. If the domains aren't lined up, then the magnet is just a chunk of potentially magnet-metal. \nIf your magnet still works when the stove cools down, then there must be a pretty strong external magnetic field in the area where the stove is. This magnetic field will cause the domains to stay lined up as the magnet cools.",
"I'd have to start with how magnets work first. \n \nElectrons have magnetic moments giving a magnetic moment to their atoms. Neighbouring atoms usually orientate themselves so they oppose cancelling out the magnetic moment overall. \n\nIn ferromagnets neighbouring atoms align up due to certain rules governing electron spin. In this case having spins aligned has a lower energy than having magnetic poles opposing meaning we get a net magnetic moment. \n \nHowever these alignments compete with thermal energy rattling atoms around and if the heat is too high the atoms don't align. "
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mekyn | what are the occupy protestors unhappy about? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mekyn/eli5_what_are_the_occupy_protestors_unhappy_about/ | {
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"TLDR version:\n\nCorporations, in the form of PACs (donations to politicians, essentially) are shaping government policy at the expense of the citizens. This leaves corporations with huge profits, but leaves consumers barely able to afford massively overvalued food and possibly evicted from their homes. But you know, the big corps have posted record sales figures.",
"Like most groups of people, the Occupy protesters are a diverse bunch and don't necessarily agree on every point.\n\nBut what they mostly have in common is that they believe the government is no longer serving the interests of the people, but rather the interests of the financial industry, or even just the pursuit of power for its own sake.\n\nThere are a few pieces to this puzzle:\n\n**First,** there's the response to the financial crisis that started snowballing with the housing collapse in 2008. Basically, a handful of large banks took advantage of a housing bubble to gamble with investors' money. A small number of people made a *lot* of money, but when the bubble burst, the investors (which includes regular people who just put their money into those banks) stood to lose trillions. The banks then basically extorted the government, saying that society as a whole would collapse if the banks went down. It worked, and the government wrote them a giant check to stay solvent. The super-rich got away with it and became super-richer, and the taxpayers were left footing the bill.\n\nNow, opinion is divided on whether that was the right move. Some people say it was the only thing we could do to avoid another Great Depression, while others say it wouldn't have been that bad to just let the banks fold. But what disappoints pretty much everybody is the total lack of response to what caused the crisis. The banks that were \"too big to fail\" are still there, even though they could've been broken up. Almost no one has been held accountable or charged with a crime. Some argue that what happened wasn't technically illegal, but even if that's true, no significant attempt has been made to *make* it illegal.\n\n**Second,** there's the fact that things are getting pretty bad for average people. Unemployment is high and is staying high. Average income over the past ten years has increased, but almost all of that increase has gone to the top 10%. Wages for the middle and lower class (those who can find jobs, that is) have stayed more or less stagnant, while the costs of things like food, healthcare, and education continue to increase, often at far more than the rate of inflation. We have a huge and increasing number of people who can't afford health insurance, and going to college often means taking on a huge amount of debt. The rich are continuing to get richer (by some measures, the top 1% of the country now controls 40% of the wealth), but it's getting pretty hard for average people to get by.\n\n**Third,** there's the fact that the government appears to have difficulty acting on *anything*. Obstructionism is rampant, particularly among Republicans in Congress, many of whom are even opposing initiatives that they themselves supported just a few years ago. Obama's healthcare reform law is very similar not only to what Mitt Romney supported when he was governor of Massachusetts, but also to proposals by other Republicans such as Bob Dole, yet Republicans are now in lockstep opposition. Meanwhile, Democrats can't seem to agree on anything, and fail to get many of their own initiatives off the ground, or even stick up for the ones that do.\n\nThe feeling by many is that partisan politics has reached a state where the emphasis isn't on helping the people, but simply on keeping (or regaining) the majority by any means necessary, even to the extent of opposing their own ideas, or refusing to defend things they previously fought for.\n\nAnd **fourth,** there's an increasing feeling that money drives politics. The biggest recent example is the *Citizens United* Supreme Court decision, which opened the door to huge campaign contributions by corporations.\n\nPutting these things together, the protesters feel that we are bordering on a plutocracy, where money drives politics, and only a handful of people control most of the money. They're concerned that the middle class is disappearing, and we're edging towards a new version of feudalism, where a tiny ruling class controls the government, and a large worker class exists to support them, with a low standard of living and not much hope of economic mobility.",
"You enjoy hamburgers yes?\n\nYou go to McDonalds and buy a hamburger for $1.39\n\nMany people worked to bring you that hamburger. The workers at the store made cents off of your purchase. A very large portion of that money goes to the corporation. The people at the top of the corporation make money off of every single hamburger sold world wide. The corporation employees a million people. They make 100 billion a year. After expenses there is 55 billion left for salaries. Enough that every employee could live comfortably.\n\nThose at the top are the ones who get to make the decisions. Millions of people world wide depend on them. They decide all hamburgers should now come with a nice thick leaf of cabbage. They raise the price to $1.49 to cover this. This does not go well and profits go down. Now there is less money in the company. The gap is covered by closing 50 stores putting 1000 people out of work. The people who don't make the decisions are getting punished for other peoples poor decisions.\n\nThis is then made worst by the pooling of wealth. The people at the top are making a lot and they deserve to be making more than those at entry level positions. They make so much more though that they can influence the government by using their extra money to ensure politicians they like get more campaign funding. Thus more funding = higher chance to be elected. Now we have people in the government who are grateful to the corporations and are more align with their views. Ensuring that legislation is more in line with their views. This perverts the idea of democracy as people think they are making a choice. But because of advertising their perceived options are inline with what the corporations want. It's like asking which cola you want and expecting a different answer than Pepsi or Coke a Cola. 99/100 times it isn't happening. It isn't a real choice as no one else is really allowed to compete. This then allows the cycle to continue.\n\nIt's coming to a head now because so few people have so much money it's really starting to corrupt the system. The bail-out is essentially the biggest example. They made bad bad moves with mortgages and sealed their fate. Since they have so much of the money them breaking really breaks the economy. So when it finally came down and it was their time to pay for their mistakes (and crimes) we gave them more money. On the flip side every person who took a mortgage they could not afford was hung out to dry, foreclosed upon. No bailout for the homeowners. But those very same people who lost their houses had their tax money spent on saving the people who put them in that position.\n\nWhat we want it so that we get paid for the work we do. This system essentially works towards 1 or 2 companies owning everything. It does not support innovation or entrepreneurship. You don't start your own company and make it huge. You don't work for a company and make a sizable portion. You HAVE to do business with the mega companies eventually and you will lose.(Their are outliers but on the whole this is true). A better wealth distribution results in more people spending more money. More spare income for everyone means more education. The naturally gifted people can try more things because their are more of them born in comfortable situations.\n\nThe kicker on all of this and my reason for supporting it is this. There is a number for income that has been shown to have the best dollar to happiness ratio. It peaks at around $70,000. Enough to live comfortably and have small luxuries. Once you hit about that much money the return is less. So someone who makes $40,000 is very much happier than someone who makes $20,000. Someone who makes $300,000 is in fact not that much happier than someone who makes $280,000. In fact there isn't even that big of a gap between $300,000 and $70,000. So those who make billions a year are doing so for no other reason than unmitigated greed. They are denying millions of people happiness so that they can be rich. It's like painting a cream wall to make it whiter, put some of that damn paint on the green walls it will be a lot more effective there.\n\nThe more we even it out so that the median income is around $70,000 the better. You don't need to be rich it's a bullshit pipe dream.\n\nTo really explain it to a five year old. They and all of their classmates are losing their favorite blanket, toys and food so that one classmate can have a diamond encrusted platinum teddy bear instead of a diamond encrusted gold teddy bear.\n\nEdit: Larger text wall",
"TLDR version:\n\nCorporations, in the form of PACs (donations to politicians, essentially) are shaping government policy at the expense of the citizens. This leaves corporations with huge profits, but leaves consumers barely able to afford massively overvalued food and possibly evicted from their homes. But you know, the big corps have posted record sales figures.",
"Like most groups of people, the Occupy protesters are a diverse bunch and don't necessarily agree on every point.\n\nBut what they mostly have in common is that they believe the government is no longer serving the interests of the people, but rather the interests of the financial industry, or even just the pursuit of power for its own sake.\n\nThere are a few pieces to this puzzle:\n\n**First,** there's the response to the financial crisis that started snowballing with the housing collapse in 2008. Basically, a handful of large banks took advantage of a housing bubble to gamble with investors' money. A small number of people made a *lot* of money, but when the bubble burst, the investors (which includes regular people who just put their money into those banks) stood to lose trillions. The banks then basically extorted the government, saying that society as a whole would collapse if the banks went down. It worked, and the government wrote them a giant check to stay solvent. The super-rich got away with it and became super-richer, and the taxpayers were left footing the bill.\n\nNow, opinion is divided on whether that was the right move. Some people say it was the only thing we could do to avoid another Great Depression, while others say it wouldn't have been that bad to just let the banks fold. But what disappoints pretty much everybody is the total lack of response to what caused the crisis. The banks that were \"too big to fail\" are still there, even though they could've been broken up. Almost no one has been held accountable or charged with a crime. Some argue that what happened wasn't technically illegal, but even if that's true, no significant attempt has been made to *make* it illegal.\n\n**Second,** there's the fact that things are getting pretty bad for average people. Unemployment is high and is staying high. Average income over the past ten years has increased, but almost all of that increase has gone to the top 10%. Wages for the middle and lower class (those who can find jobs, that is) have stayed more or less stagnant, while the costs of things like food, healthcare, and education continue to increase, often at far more than the rate of inflation. We have a huge and increasing number of people who can't afford health insurance, and going to college often means taking on a huge amount of debt. The rich are continuing to get richer (by some measures, the top 1% of the country now controls 40% of the wealth), but it's getting pretty hard for average people to get by.\n\n**Third,** there's the fact that the government appears to have difficulty acting on *anything*. Obstructionism is rampant, particularly among Republicans in Congress, many of whom are even opposing initiatives that they themselves supported just a few years ago. Obama's healthcare reform law is very similar not only to what Mitt Romney supported when he was governor of Massachusetts, but also to proposals by other Republicans such as Bob Dole, yet Republicans are now in lockstep opposition. Meanwhile, Democrats can't seem to agree on anything, and fail to get many of their own initiatives off the ground, or even stick up for the ones that do.\n\nThe feeling by many is that partisan politics has reached a state where the emphasis isn't on helping the people, but simply on keeping (or regaining) the majority by any means necessary, even to the extent of opposing their own ideas, or refusing to defend things they previously fought for.\n\nAnd **fourth,** there's an increasing feeling that money drives politics. The biggest recent example is the *Citizens United* Supreme Court decision, which opened the door to huge campaign contributions by corporations.\n\nPutting these things together, the protesters feel that we are bordering on a plutocracy, where money drives politics, and only a handful of people control most of the money. They're concerned that the middle class is disappearing, and we're edging towards a new version of feudalism, where a tiny ruling class controls the government, and a large worker class exists to support them, with a low standard of living and not much hope of economic mobility.",
"You enjoy hamburgers yes?\n\nYou go to McDonalds and buy a hamburger for $1.39\n\nMany people worked to bring you that hamburger. The workers at the store made cents off of your purchase. A very large portion of that money goes to the corporation. The people at the top of the corporation make money off of every single hamburger sold world wide. The corporation employees a million people. They make 100 billion a year. After expenses there is 55 billion left for salaries. Enough that every employee could live comfortably.\n\nThose at the top are the ones who get to make the decisions. Millions of people world wide depend on them. They decide all hamburgers should now come with a nice thick leaf of cabbage. They raise the price to $1.49 to cover this. This does not go well and profits go down. Now there is less money in the company. The gap is covered by closing 50 stores putting 1000 people out of work. The people who don't make the decisions are getting punished for other peoples poor decisions.\n\nThis is then made worst by the pooling of wealth. The people at the top are making a lot and they deserve to be making more than those at entry level positions. They make so much more though that they can influence the government by using their extra money to ensure politicians they like get more campaign funding. Thus more funding = higher chance to be elected. Now we have people in the government who are grateful to the corporations and are more align with their views. Ensuring that legislation is more in line with their views. This perverts the idea of democracy as people think they are making a choice. But because of advertising their perceived options are inline with what the corporations want. It's like asking which cola you want and expecting a different answer than Pepsi or Coke a Cola. 99/100 times it isn't happening. It isn't a real choice as no one else is really allowed to compete. This then allows the cycle to continue.\n\nIt's coming to a head now because so few people have so much money it's really starting to corrupt the system. The bail-out is essentially the biggest example. They made bad bad moves with mortgages and sealed their fate. Since they have so much of the money them breaking really breaks the economy. So when it finally came down and it was their time to pay for their mistakes (and crimes) we gave them more money. On the flip side every person who took a mortgage they could not afford was hung out to dry, foreclosed upon. No bailout for the homeowners. But those very same people who lost their houses had their tax money spent on saving the people who put them in that position.\n\nWhat we want it so that we get paid for the work we do. This system essentially works towards 1 or 2 companies owning everything. It does not support innovation or entrepreneurship. You don't start your own company and make it huge. You don't work for a company and make a sizable portion. You HAVE to do business with the mega companies eventually and you will lose.(Their are outliers but on the whole this is true). A better wealth distribution results in more people spending more money. More spare income for everyone means more education. The naturally gifted people can try more things because their are more of them born in comfortable situations.\n\nThe kicker on all of this and my reason for supporting it is this. There is a number for income that has been shown to have the best dollar to happiness ratio. It peaks at around $70,000. Enough to live comfortably and have small luxuries. Once you hit about that much money the return is less. So someone who makes $40,000 is very much happier than someone who makes $20,000. Someone who makes $300,000 is in fact not that much happier than someone who makes $280,000. In fact there isn't even that big of a gap between $300,000 and $70,000. So those who make billions a year are doing so for no other reason than unmitigated greed. They are denying millions of people happiness so that they can be rich. It's like painting a cream wall to make it whiter, put some of that damn paint on the green walls it will be a lot more effective there.\n\nThe more we even it out so that the median income is around $70,000 the better. You don't need to be rich it's a bullshit pipe dream.\n\nTo really explain it to a five year old. They and all of their classmates are losing their favorite blanket, toys and food so that one classmate can have a diamond encrusted platinum teddy bear instead of a diamond encrusted gold teddy bear.\n\nEdit: Larger text wall"
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2e4ubt | why is the asterisk the sign of a correction over the internet? | So, say if I misspelled sometihng
I would do this: something*
Why is that the sign used in stead of another symbol? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e4ubt/eli5_why_is_the_asterisk_the_sign_of_a_correction/ | {
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"I believe it's because correcting your spelling after you've already written something is similar to a footnote. In typography, the asterisk is used to call out a footnote. \n"
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a6u8ph | automotive oil weight ratings. | This has long perplexed me and I will attempt to explain why.
At 100F a 20 weight will flow better than a 30 weight which will flow better than a 40 weight. So, the higher the number, the less easily it flows. Now the "W" weights indicate the viscosity of the oil at 32F (or 0F I forget which temperature) and at 32F a 0W flows better than a 5W which flows better than a 10W. So again, like above, the higher the number, the less easily it flows. I get and understand all this but a 10W-30 flows with a 10weight viscosity at 32F and as it warms up it flows with a 30 weight viscosity. The number goes up, so the oil flows less easily but with the above stated logic and the fact that we all know if I drain 10w30 oil in a car that has sat over night in the winter verses draining it after it just got off the interstate after a 100 mile drive, the hotter and higher 30 weight oil flows better and faster out of the oil pan than the colder thinner 10W weight oil... It's this that has me confused. In my head oils should be like 50w-20 or 75w-30 because the cold oil clearly flows slower than the hot oil. The colder thicker oil flows like a 50 weight when cold and as it warms up it flows better like a 20 weight and so on....this is where my brain is hung up. Can someone help explain this. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6u8ph/eli5_automotive_oil_weight_ratings/ | {
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"So it doesn't actually get thicker. let's take 5w30. Now picture a single weight oil with a viscosity of 30. a 5w30 oil will have the same viscosity as a 30 weight oil at 100f. Now if you have just a plain 5 weight oil same thing a 5w30 oil will have the same viscosity as a 5 weight oil at 32f. A 30 weight oil at 100f will still be more viscous than a 5 weight oil at 32f.\n\nThe weights are not an actual measure of the viscosity at that temperature. For a 5w30 It just means at 32f it will act like a 5 weight and at 100f it will act like a 30 weight.\n\nI don't know the actual temperature measurements I was just using your numbers as an example. ",
"If it helps, here's a visual representation of how oil thins out at heat, and the comparison of single and multi-weight oils:\n_URL_0_"
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as8cy1 | how do owls heads turn so far, what are their bone structures like? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/as8cy1/eli5_how_do_owls_heads_turn_so_far_what_are_their/ | {
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"They can do it because the muscles and tendons allow it to stretch that far. \n\nThe main reason we can’t is because we would stretch or break the arteries in our necks. And cut off blood to our brains. So our muscles stop at a certain safe point.\n\nOwls have much roomier tracks for the blood vessels and arteries to slide through within their neck bones. So the they can slide along as the owls turns.\n\nIt’s also has to do with where the blood vessels enter their head and how the the blood is stored and flows along. ",
"[look at this owl without feathers](_URL_0_) - they actually have quite long necks, so like other animals with longish necks it gives them more range of motion. It may not be as long as like a goose, but it's not a stubby neck like humans. "
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4gmdl0 | how is an area that's been affected by radioactivity decontaminated? | I'm thinking specifically about the arch that's being built over reactor 4 from Chernobyl; they decontaminated an area just large enough for the workers to safely build the arch. How is this possible? And if this can be done, why will it take 3000 years for the area to be deemed safe for human inhabitation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4gmdl0/eli5_how_is_an_area_thats_been_affected_by/ | {
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"I believe time is the biggest factor. The reason why we know the times it is considered safe is because we know the half life of the chemicals. Someone correct me if I am wrong please. ",
"The purpose of the arch (the sarcophagus) is to prevent rain from rusting the structure more and causing debris from knocking up radioactive dust (which will spread around the world).\n\nAs for decontamination in the local area, you basically have to dig up the ground and transport it someone else. They aren't actively doing anything about the radiation, just packaging and moving it somewhere safer until it isn't radioactive.",
"You decontaminate things by spraying them down with water, and putting the water into barrels. That is literally it. If it is something that can't easily be decontaminated, you have to box the material up and move it. Irradiated materials will lose their radiation over time, but it can take a very, very, very long time."
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5h37w3 | historians, with empires like alexander the great and napoleon, where their empire was a single conquest across their lands and often lost that land within or soon after their lifetime, how did they enforce the area as theirs? | From my understanding, Napoleon swept across Europe and headed for Russia where he was eventually defeated soon after. How was that land enforced has his? What was it like as a peasant to now suddenly be under Napoleon instead of some random Lord? Did he leave soldiers behind to defend it? Why wouldn't Austria, Italy, or someone just attack the capital while he was all the way out in Russia? Was he the only general or did he send other generals to take land and divide from his army? I'm just confused as to the nature of his and other conqueror's empires where they alone lead an army to victories. Another similar one would be Alexander The Great because he too swept across the ME and soon after he died the empire crumbled. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5h37w3/eli5_historians_with_empires_like_alexander_the/ | {
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" > How was that land enforced has his?\n\nWith very different methods for different countries and situation.\n\nNapoleon replaced many rulers with people loyal to him, usually family members. For example he made his brother Joseph King of Spain, his brother Louis King of Holland, his brother Jerome King of Westphalia, and his brother-in-law Joachim Murat King of Naples.\n\nThe thing about conquering other countries is that there are always people who are happy with you. These are people who often were unpopular with the old rulers, and who definitely don't want to go back to the old days. So they will certainly remain loyal to you, without you having to keep your armies there.\n\nIn bigger and stronger countries like Prussia, he actually kept his army to occupy the country and repress any rebellion. \nIn Austria, Napoleon married the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, making it politically difficult for them to oppose Napoleon.\n\nOther countries and many regions of other countries he simply annexed and said: \"This is France now.\"\n\n > What was it like as a peasant to now suddenly be under Napoleon instead of some random Lord? \n\nIt depends on whether you are under direct French rule, or indirect one, and also how you were living before.\nIn general it meant: You now have clear rights as a citizen. You can enforce your rights under Napoleon's Code Civile, the most progressive law of that time. It meant that you could become a craftsman without having to obey the guilds. You could trade freely because borders and taxes are easier. If you were a serf (a peasant basically belonging to a noble lord), you now were free. If before you were ruled by a bishop or monk, you wouldn't be anymore, because Napoleon pressed secularisation.\nThere were quite a lot of people who gained immensely by being ruled by Napoleon, so they had little cause to rebel.\n\n > Did he leave soldiers behind to defend it?\n\nHe always left some soldiers in his own countries, especially Central France.\n\n > Why wouldn't Austria, Italy, or someone just attack the capital while he was all the way out in Russia?\n\nAustria, Prussia, Spain, and Sweden did rebel and attack when Napoleon started to lose in Russia. They focused on defeating his army though. Because while they would be marching to Paris, their own homes are unprotected.\n\n > Another similar one would be Alexander The Great because he too swept across the ME and soon after he died the empire crumbled\n\nAlexander was very different. He basically didn't conquer countries, but replaced other rulers, and let the countries rule themselves afterwards. People's and satellite countries were used to being ruled by other peoples', so nothing really changed for them. Also a lot of marriages between his loyal followers and local nobles. And his empire didn't crumble because the locals rebelled, but because of fighting over who would inherit his whole empire."
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6dvc7m | when you see cars neck-and-neck in a race, why does each car get past the other for a second | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6dvc7m/eli5_when_you_see_cars_neckandneck_in_a_race_why/ | {
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"That doesn't really happen much in real life. That's mostly for dramatic effect in movies and TV shows. In real life, cars don't really surge forward and fall back that way. ",
"u/RadBadTad is correct here, however it could happen if:\n\n1) The cars are changing gears during a rush after a slow corner\n\n2) the track isn't entirely straight\n\n3)The track isn't level, and small steering corrections have to be made."
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cdv53j | what is kernel? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cdv53j/eli5_what_is_kernel/ | {
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"In a computer context, a kernel is a low level program that interfaces the hardware with the software. The kernel's job is to allocate CPU time, RAM, etc to different programs, to take input from the keyboard and mouse and route it to programs that need it, and other things like that.",
"The kernel is a section of code within a computer's operating system that has the most amount of privilege and has direct access to the hardware. When a user has a program that needs to access the hardware, say to read from or write to a hard drive, the program must request permission to have access from the kernel. A system call is the process by which a program requests these accesses to the hardware, and the kernel grants or denies access based on permissions.\n\nIn windows the kernel is made of two layers. The upper layer is called the executive and this contains functions for object management/retention, permission verification, memory management, etc. The lower layer is the actual kernel, which is responsible for low-level processor synchronization, interrupts and exceptions handling, thread scheduling, and recovery from power failure (power loss, hard shutdowns, etc). These layers work together to provide everything that a user may need to access the hardware and make changes to the system as they need to and are allowed to.\n\nForgive me, but I don't have as much knowledge about Linux to this level, but the kernel performs basically the same in Linux (I'm a windows instructor). Instead of being built with layers, it instead has kernel loadable modules (KLMs) which can provide additional functionality to the kernel.\n\nHope this helps.",
"I feel like this needs to be explained more in the context of operating systems and history.\n\nOriginally computers took up rooms and could only run a single program at a time. There was a circuit by which a program was loaded using punchcards or what not and then the computer would run that program to completion or until someone halted it for some reason, maybe if the program took up too much time. \n\nA program is just a list of instructions the CPU knows how to read. Each instruction can do something from jump to another instruction if a condition is met or manipulate numbers stored in computer memory.\n\nThe main thing an operating system allows us to do is run multiple programs at the same time. So how does it do this? Firstly each program exists ultimately to manipulate memory so the operating system has to give it memory to do so, but it must keep the memory of different programs separate since issues arise if they use the same memory. Additionally the programs need something to execute their instructions, so we have to give them some processing power to do their thing with, so the kernel additionally manages the CPU and gives each program some time with the CPU to do its thing (this part of the kernel is known as the scheduler). Normally the way this works is that the kernel code gives control of the CPU to the program being run but computers have an additional circuit known as the timer interrupt circuit which \"interrupts\" the CPU's current program execution after a time specified by the kernel and jumps to code specified to be run when a timer interrupt occurs (this is normally loaded during boot of course, and this code is of course kernel code). In this way the kernel can both grant control of the CPU to a program and then take it away as it pleases. \n\nNowadays we also have files and devices and stuff, and we want to allow programs access to those but only the right ones. So we make it such that to read or write a file, the operating system has to give it permission to do so, so we have programs ask the operating system to read these files for it. \n\nAll of these are basic kernel functions but there are also a lot more. Its essentially the core of an operating system, an OS needs to be able to handle multiple processes working with hardware given and its the job of the kernel to do this.",
"In computers it is a piece of software in charge of using the hardware directly.\n\nIf you want to use the camera, turn on lights, manage the memory o processor, that is done by the kernel.\n\nWhen an OS wants to do anything, like calculate 2+2 it sends and instruction for the kernel to do it in the processor.\n\nThe kernel itself should have instructions on how to use all specific pieces of hardware, like the processor, memory or a video card, but being there so many that’s unrealistic. For that you add what in windows is called a driver, or in Mac a kernel extension.",
"It is the seed of a corn.......\n\nOh wait, are we talking about computers?",
"The kernel is the only real program that runs on the computer. It manages everything. All other programs are just running with its permissions.\n\nI know this is an oversimplification, but this is an ELI5",
"Imagine a nut, like a walnut. You have the shell, the part you can see and feel and interact with.\n\nIf you crack it open, the kernel is the meaty part in the middle.\n\nThe operating system kernel is the deep low level program that does stuff like get the computer started and keep different programs from messing each other up",
"The kernel, also known as the \"null space\" of a function from set A to set B, is the set of all x in A that make the function value zero. In your early math courses, you've probably referred to A as the \"domain\" and B as the \"range\". A contains all of the values you can put into the function as inputs, and B contains all of the values you can get out of the function, given values from A. With the kernel, we're specifically looking for all the values in A where we can feed them to the function and get out zeros.\n\nFor equations that describe a straight line (linear equations), this is just the x value where it hits the x-axis; you can find it easily on a graph, but you can also just solve for y = ax + b = 0 - > x = -b/a. This can be extended to systems of equations as well, and the solution in this case makes up one of the four fundamental subspaces of the system. This is a fun and interesting topic to explore, especially if you follow along with Gilbert Strang's lectures on the subject!\n\nFor more complicated equations, the set may contain more than one element. For example, a parabola has two places where it crosses the x-axis (even if they're the same place!), while sines and cosines (and other trig functions) have an infinite number.\n\nYou *were* talking about math and not corn, right?",
"The kernel is the computer god. It controls all allocation of resources (cpu, memory, i/o) and handles process priority.",
"The Kernel is the computer's Mom. It tells the computer who it can play with and who can see it.",
"There's a lot of good information in here, but I think there's a common thread that might be misleading for everyday users. Lots of people have mentioned that the kernel has the highest level of privilege, but it's important to point out that this is the case because it's responsible for stuff you probably don't want to do as a user, not because you're not privileged enough as a user (although of course safety is a component of that because most users don't know what they're doing at a very low level of abstraction). You're able to do enormously privileged stuff from a user perspective, provided you're an administrator. The kernel represents a level of abstraction that common users aren't going to want to manage, including memory, process management, and hardware interfacing. If you were responsible for all that in \"user space\", use of a computer would be very tedious.",
"Question: Are you interested in the programming one, the mathematical one or the yummy one?",
"You walk into a restaurant and sit down. You order food, and a little while later the food comes out and you get to eat. You are not allowed in the kitchen, and you are not a chef and you don't know how to use all the stuff in the kitchen, or where things go, or how food is rotated in the fridge, or who's job back there it is to cook what. And guess what? The staff back there doesn't care what you do either or what you talk about, they only care about what you order, bringing you food, and cleaning up after you.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou are a program running on the computer.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe kernel is all the restaurant workers; waiters, bussers, chefs, supervisors, dish washers, line cooks, etc.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe computer hardware is the stuff in the kitchen; the stoves, sinks, refrigerator, stuff in the fridge, food on the stove, etc. You are not allowed in the kitchen. If you need something from the kitchen, you ask the wait staff to get it for you. They are allowed into the kitchen.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe \"Front of the house\", the tables, chairs, decor, menu, and even the wait staff and hostess, are what the Kernel allows you see. You don't see and can't get to the hardware in the kitchen - nor should you really care about it."
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7abkud | why are most canned foods high in sodium? doesn't the canning process eliminate the need for preservatives? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7abkud/eli5_why_are_most_canned_foods_high_in_sodium/ | {
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"To make up for the flavor lost when processing and storing. Even though the nutrition value does not really change, the flavor does. \nSodium is very versatile. For example normal salt (sodium chloride) for a salty taste, but also msg (monosodium glutamate) for umami. Most processed food flavorings contain multiple sources of sodium. ",
"Eh. Not entirely. A few things.\n\nFirst, depending on the food we're talking about, salt might be an inherent part of the process, either of canning in particular or just the food in general. Pickles? Olives? Gotta have salt. You just do. Salt is also a critical ingredient in any number of fermented foods, many of which are canned. \n\nSecond, salt is a flavor enhancer. Processed food manufacturers have tended to add loads of salt to a wide variety of foods for the better part of a century as a way of making their products tastier. Canned foods are hardly unique here. \n\nThird, while canned vegetables are certainly saltier than their raw counterparts, they're not necessarily as salty as you might think. [One 30g slice of white bread](_URL_0_) has a little less than *three times* as much sodium as [28g of canned green beans](_URL_1_). \n\nFourth, while canning certainly *tends* to kill biological organisms, it's not magic. Some organisms are merely weakened. Some may even survive, though in small enough numbers that they can't cause a problem if the food is eaten within a year or two. A little salt goes a long way towards ensuring that fewer bacteria survive, and those that do stay dormant. \n\nBut lastly, bacteria aren't the only things that contribute to food spoilage. There are other chemical processes that have nothing to do with bacteria that can make food go bad, or at least lose quality over time. Discoloration comes immediately to mind, but that's not the only thing. Flavors can change. Textures can break down. Foods can take on flavors from their containers. Salt creates an environment inhospitable to bacteria, to be sure, but it also tends to interfere with some of these other processes, making it useful as a preservative even in a largely sterile environment. ",
"Humans also have what is known as a 'bliss point' in which foods are perfectly balanced and we love them. It's true for sugar and salt. So food companies want to give you that 'bliss point' and they have been engineering food for years to have fat, sugar and salt levels that make you achieve said 'bliss point' and crave these foods time and time again. \nFinland realized that they were eating too much salt in the 70s and started an informational campaign on lowering salt contents in their foods and making better labels to indicate if the food had high levels of sodium or was healthier. The government informational campaign, along with their food industries, were able to lower their population 'bliss point' for salt and their sodium intake diseases has gone down. _URL_0_ also, people traveling to the US often say that their find american food extremely salty ",
"~~Too lazy to find the article, but~~ I remember reading that bitter compounds are produced in the canning process. To balance out the bitter, additional salt is added for flavor. I believe the article was on researching chemicals that act as 'bitter blockers'. The idea was that they could be added to canned foods to balance the bitterness without all the excess salts.\n\nEdit: [Found the Article from Discover, 2005](_URL_0_)\n",
"The canning process kills a lot of bacteria but it also kills flavor and introduces a small amount of bitterness to the food. This is countered by adding salt because it's one flavoring ingredient that is chemically stable.",
"It would be helpful to know which foods you mean. Canned vegetables, for example, aren't typically high in salt - I checked my nearest supermarket's website and the figure for carrots is exactly the same (0.1% sodium) canned or loose. Canned peas contain less salt than frozen, though frozen peas are still less than 0.2% salt. Tinned tomatoes contain less salt than fresh, and chickpeas again have essentially the same amount (i.e. virtually none) between canned and dried.\n\nI thought maybe the story would be different for meat, but canned sausages contain less (1.28%) sodium than fresh packaged sausages (2.2%), and their meatballs in tomato sauce contained only slightly more than their fresh, packaged meatballs (without sauce) - 0.8% vs 0.7%. I'm especially surprised by this because I'd have thought meatballs that have been prepared with sauce would be quite salty (they are when I make them!)\n\nMaybe the story is different in other countries, but it would be helpful if you could cite a few different foods that are saltier in cans than their fresh/dried/frozen counterparts.",
"For a five year old:\n\nWhen you can foods, they get exposed to a lot of heat and pressure. This destroys a lot of the compounds that give food it's flavor, so canners add in lots of salt to try and make up for it. The salt can also extend how long it's good for.",
"Depending on the company, sometimes marketers are the deciders of salt content. User group studies and other data drive sales estimates that ultimately set the salt level. ",
"Canned soups are produced in retorts. Effectively, these are giant pressure cookers with two main variations: Rotary and Hydrostatic. Hydrostatic, as the name implies, keeps the cans static during the processing. Rotary, as the name implies, rolls the cans in a big spiral to help mix the soup. \n\nBecause rotary mixes the soup, processing times can be much shorter than hydrostatic. Static cooking can sometimes be 9 times longer than rotary. Another way to think of this is that rotary induces convection in the can whereas hydrostatic only induces conduction. Both process at temperatures well above boiling. \n\nThese high temperatures for 90 minutes or more sterilize the food. There's a lot of science that goes into pinpointing exactly how much time and temperature needs to be applied to the product to make it safe to eat. However, major food companies obviously prefer to err on the side of overcooking because that ensures their products are safe for the masses. \n\nIt is important to note that, at least in canned soup, *sodium does not play any role in the safety of the food.* Food safety of the canned products are 100% guaranteed by the heating process they undergo. Salt content is just for flavor. \n\nMany products lose their flavor in steam retorts over long periods of time. Something that doesn't lose its flavor at these high heats is salt. Sodium is universally delicious, present in almost every cuisine in some form or another. It's a cheap way to build back some of the flavor that is degraded from the retorts. \n\nI think it's been very clear in the last 20 or so years since more evidence has come out about how sodium influences high blood pressure, more consumers are trying to lower sodium in their diets. Even the RDAs by the US Government have lowered the maximum limit of sodium in one's daily diet. As a result, many companies have tried to lower sodium in their products. Retort technology is improving, slowly but surely, so I anticipate that sodium will decrease over time in canned foods. ",
"During the creation of corn syrup, they add a strong acid HCl to maximize the amount of sugar that they can extract out of the corn. Later in the process, they add a strong base NaOH to neutralize the acid. The combination of the acid and the base create salt NaCl and water H2O.",
"Salt makes the food taste better by enhancing other flavours. Better tasting food sells better. Companies want to sell more."
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[],
[
"http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/baked-products/4872/2",
"http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2344/2"
],
[
"http://www.worldactiononsalt.com/worldaction/europe/53774.html"
],
[
"http://discovermagazine.com/2005/mar/biology-of-bitterness"
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