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acznaz | the difference between functions, methods, objects, classes, and oop languages. | I can't wrap my head around when to use which, or why they are used.
Also, what makes an object oriented language different from the other type. How does it go about doing the above? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acznaz/eli5_the_difference_between_functions_methods/ | {
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"A *function* is a block of code which runs some commands and can be called on from elsewhere in the code.\n\nexample:\n\n def function():\n print \"I do something.\"\n\n # now we can call the function from other code, like this, and it will always print \"I do something\".\n function()\n\n\nA *class* represents an object. A thing. It can contain both *data* and *functions that operate on the data*.\n\nA function which is attached to a class is called a *method*. It can only be called through the class.\n\nSo, for example:\n\n class Car():\n def __init__(self):\n self.model = \"Honda\"\n self.color = \"red\"\n\n def drive(self, destination):\n # do something \n\n henry = Car()\n henry.drive()\n\n\nin this example, I have a \"car\" class with two attached methods. One of them, __init__, is something used by python to create the object. The other one, drive(), does something about driving.\n\nthen i created an *instance* of the car class, and called the method 'drive' on the instance.\n\nSo: function() is a 'function', meaning a block of code that can be called from elsewhere and run when it is called. 'Car' is a *class*, which is a collection of data and functions that operate on that data; the functions contained within a class are called 'methods'. So *drive* is a function contained within Car, meaning it is a method.",
"An object is almost anything - it's a conceptual term. Almost everything should be an object in OOP. A school, a room, a teacher, a pupil, an arm, a finger - all objects.\n\nClasses are a collection of stuff, usually to create an object (things like abstract classes are a bit different but if you don't know what a class is, you probably don't yet need to know what an abstract class is) that implement the behaviour of something. So you'd have a School class, a Room class, a Person class, a Pupil class that extends Person, a Teacher class that also extends Person, and so on.\n\nFor the sake of ELI5, methods and functions are basically the same thing."
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2p4tdd | why does the box of my ps4 say it comes with 500 gb when it only comes with 407.2 gb? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2p4tdd/eli5_why_does_the_box_of_my_ps4_say_it_comes_with/ | {
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"Technically it does come with a 500gb hard drive but the ps4's firmware and updates need a bunch of that space. Doesn't matter though, they still provided you with a 500gb drive.",
"GB can technically mean 2 different things. One is the computer definition. That works off binary and powers of 2. So, there are 8 bits in 1 byte. Then we start counting bytes by doubling 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024. 1024 bytes is a kilobyte (KB). If you do the same thing, counting KB, 1024 KB is a megabyte (MB). If you do the same thing, counting MB, 1024 MB is a gigabyte (GB) and so on to terabytes (TB), etc.\n\nNow, in non-computer contexts, the prefixes kilo, mega, giga, tera all mean a thousand, a million and a billion. So, while computers themselves use the first system to count up space, the manufacturers can use the definition of \"a billion bytes\" for GB on the packaging without the FTC coming down on them for lying in their advertising.\n\nThe bigger the hard drives get, the bigger the difference between the 2 methods of calculation get. \n\nAnd, because this went to court a couple of times a while back, you'll find that the packaging itself usually has fine print explaining this in legalese."
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3am0gy | why my dog loves his collar so much? | He's a small 6 year old dog, but every time I take off his collar he follows wherever it goes until someone puts it back on. Even outside! Why does he like it so much? I'd think he'd love to have it off every now and then | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3am0gy/eli5_why_my_dog_loves_his_collar_so_much/ | {
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"It probably feels odd to have it off. If he wears it all the time it would be like having a necklace on all the time, you'd notice when it wasn't there and feel a bit 'off'. ",
"Do you always use a leash when you walk him? The leash is attached to the collar, so he might be able to associate the collar with going out."
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91u76b | why is china airlines from taiwan? why not call it taiwan airlines instead? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/91u76b/eli5_why_is_china_airlines_from_taiwan_why_not/ | {
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"Because Taiwan's official name is the Republic of China (ROC).\n\nAlso, China Airlines was founded back when the Taiwanese government still considered itself the government of China (though exiled)\n\n",
"China had a civil war between the communists and the nationalists. The communists won and the nationalists had to flee to Taiwan, but both of them still claim to be the sole legitimate government of China. Because of that, Taiwan's official name is actually the Republic of China, not the Republic of Taiwan or anything like that. And if they called themselves (or their airlines) \"Taiwanese\", it would mean that they'd be tacitly giving up their claim to the mainland.",
"The exact legal status of Taiwan has never really been settled after WWII.\n\nThis goes back to the Chinese Civil War. You had two sides: The Communists and the Nationalists. WWII screwed everything up and, after the war, the Communists ended up in more or less complete control, except for the island of Taiwan, which was controlled by the Nationalists. The United States, seeking to contain Communism, backed the Nationalists in Taiwan enough that the Communists couldn’t/wouldn’t invade and that’s basically where things have stood for 50 years now.\n\nEach side considers themselves the *real* China and the *other* China to be in rebellion against their *legitimate* authority."
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c02y6c | how does tidal energy not break conservation of energy? | So the moon pushes makes the tide go up and down by orbiting the earth in a stable orbit, and then electricity can then be generated as the tide moves up and down, but where did this energy come from? What is being used up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c02y6c/eli5_how_does_tidal_energy_not_break_conservation/ | {
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"In short, the moon is constantly slowing the rotation of the earth. Eventually the moon and earth will always be facing each other.",
"The energy from the tides actually comes from the kinetic energy of the moon. the tides are slowing down the moon and thus slowly pushing it away from earth very slowly and also slowly slowing down the earth's rotation and making the day slightly longer.\n\nThe moon uses to rotate at a different speed than it down now but the tidal forces have slowed it down enough so that it now shows the same side to earth all the time. It has become tidal locked. If earth wasn't so much more massive than the moon than eventually it would become tidal locked to the moon too. As it is now it seems that Sun will likely expand to eat both of them before that can happen."
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2e559f | does putting "i do not own this song" on youtube videos actually prevent it from getting taken down from the record label? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2e559f/eli5_does_putting_i_do_not_own_this_song_on/ | {
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"Nope! Some people think it's polite though, which is kind of strange, because the people are pretty much saying \"Yes, I knowingly violated the copyright on your product, but at least I'm not claiming it's mine\"",
"No, for two reasons. The first is that, in most cases, the video is still violating copyright law. Whether they know or admit to it or not is irrelevant, because it's still illegal.\n\nNow, in some cases they're not actually in violation of the law under Fair Use clauses, but that's also irrelevant. It's not the government taking the videos down as a matter of criminal punishment, it's Google taking them down out of fear of a lawsuit. It doesn't matter if the video is actually legal, because any potential legal action will be a pain to deal with, even if Google wins the case. "
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3sgxdf | what damage can be done if someone gets access to your wi-fi password? | I've recently had a bit of a network 'break-in' in which someone gained access to my network and started streaming videos onto my Xbox via SmartGlass. I assume this was a prank but I'm still unsure how this person got past my WPA encryption. How can somebody get into my network and what damage can they do? What do they/don't they have access to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sgxdf/eli5_what_damage_can_be_done_if_someone_gets/ | {
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"There are definitely a few guides out there detailing how to beef up your network's security, check them out when you have a chance (on mobile, can't link any at the moment).\n\nThere are a few implications when someone has access to your network:\n\n* If they're doing something bandwidth-heavy (gaming, streaming HD, etc.), it can slow down the connection for other devices on the network.\n* If they're doing illegal things, you are the first person your ISP will come after or warn. \n* There is software out there that allows people to \"sniff\" the traffic of other people on the same network that is being sent back and forth from the device to the network. They can't explicitly see what you're doing, but the software can glimpse at the data being sent back and forth and steal cookies, passwords, and other data being transferred.\n\nELI5 Version:\n\n* You start taking a shower on the first floor, but only have lukewarm water because someone else in your house has been running the hot water in the shower on the second floor for the past hour.\n* I stole something with your name on it, started beating people with it, and left the object with your name on it behind as the initial piece of evidence.\n* You snuck into a dark closet with your friend, shut the door, and told them who your crush is. But before you came in, someone else snuck in, hid, and overhead you telling your friend who you have a crush on. They now have your sensitive information."
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46gqgg | why do politicians and the media never just call people liars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46gqgg/eli5_why_do_politicians_and_the_media_never_just/ | {
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"They do, often. Have you not seen any of the presidential candidate's debates this season?",
"Because that can be considered defamatory, leading the person to file, and win, a lawsuit against you. This will have the effect of making them look like a victim, and making you look like an asshole while paying them a bunch of money.",
"You didn't watch the GOP debate last week did you?",
"1. Most people in the media are journalists. Journalism has a certain code of ethics based around objectivity and reserving judgement. They like to just put out the facts and let the viewer make the jump of judging the person as a liar. Ex. there is no ethical problem with putting out a story saying \"Donald Trump said the war in Iraq was a good idea in 2005, but then said it was always a bad idea in 2016\", but there is a problem if (as a journalist) you say \"Donald trump flip-flopped on his beliefs about the war in Iraq. He is a liar.\" Also, there is the possibility of lawsuits for defamation, but this generally is not a problem if you are being truthful and is not the sole reason for avoiding calling people liars. \n\n2. Politicians regularly call people liars. As an example, look at last weeks debate.",
"Politicians rely on the media to forward their careers, and the media need politicians to give them stories. Neither side is eager to piss on their chips."
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3qjhq1 | string theory and m-theory | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qjhq1/eli5_string_theory_and_mtheory/ | {
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"String theory: everything in the universe is connected by invisible strings and can be interacted with through the forces of nature.\n\nI can't even imagine how someone would explain M theory to a five year old...\n"
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7w2922 | why do most foods, drinks etc have to be refrigerated after one use? what happens to the contents after just one use? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7w2922/eli5_why_do_most_foods_drinks_etc_have_to_be/ | {
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"For some products, they are packaged in a environment and method so that the package is sealed, and pathogens are not present. This results in a product with a long shelf life when unopened. Once the package is opened, it is no longer sealed from the environment, and it is possible that bacteria may come in contact and grow rapidly in a warm setting.",
"In many cases, the contents have been pasteurized. So they're \"clean\" and \"free\" of bacteria sealed as they are. The second you open it, they become exposed to bacteria. Refrigeration slows the growth of bacteria.",
"Opening it has introduced microbes from the air, your mouth, or hands into the bottle, which will now reproduce and release toxic wastes (food poisoning) into the drink or food. So you have to refrigerate the food or drink to slow them down. The food or drink was pasteurized during packaging which killed the microbes inside, but opening the container recontaminated the food or drink.",
"What happens is bacteria, spores, and other contaminants get inside the packaging. Most food producers take great care to have exceptionally clean facilities, and many packaged foods are frozen, pasteurized, or otherwise treated to kill bacteria after the package is sealed. This keeps them fresh, until you open the package. After they're re-exposed to contaminants they need to be refrigerated to inhibit the growth of bacteria/mold/etc.",
"It comes into contact with the air and all the various contaminants that are in it. Within its packaging it has been sterilize or close to it so will not grow bacteria. ",
"Take an example of a sealed bottle of apple juice. When the juice was bottled, it was sealed and pasteurized. So any harmful bacteria that might have been in the bottle or juice was killed during pasteurization and vacuum sealing prevents any harmful pathogens or oxygen from reaching the product. \n\nOnce opened, any bacteria that might have been on the bottle lid, or in the air can reach the product inside. Refrigeration keeps the product cold, and slows down the growth of bacteria/yeast. \n\n40 F - 140 F is called the \"danger zone\" in food safety, that's the temp range where bacteria can rapidly grow and multiply. So that bottle of apple juice that you took a sip from has been contaminated with bacteria in your mouth/lips/saliva, and any that settled in from the air. Kept in on the counter, it's basically a giant petri dish with an all you can eat buffet. \n\nA fridge should be colder than 40 F, often set to 37F, so out of the danger zone, bacteria can still grow, but slowly.",
"You broke the seal and now bacteria and mold got into what was a (relatively) sterile environment.\n\nNow you have to refrigerate it to slow the growth of all the nasties you just let in.\n\nHate to sound jaded but is this not something you learn by the time you're 2-3?",
"How does something so easily googleable get so high on the list but if I posted this it would be 5 trolls telling me to google it or it would be closed because its been asked already...",
"TLI5 (try like i'm 5) experiment:\n\nBuy some cheap jam. Open it. Lick a spoon and stir the jam a few times with it. Close it and leave it somewhere at roomtemperature for a week. Open it and look at it. You now know why it would have been better kept in the fridge.\n\nOthers have explained it well enough, but this can easily be made visible with a very cheap experiment.",
"Many packages have what is considered 'modified atmosphere' with a lower oxygen level than normal air. These packages are gas flushed with a mixture of CO2 and Nitrogen to remove oxygen. This extends the product's shelf life because it reduces oxidation of fats. When the package is opened this modified atmosphere escapes and normal air enters, starting a more rapid oxidation and spoilage process, so refrigeration is suggested to reduce the spoilage rate for further usage. "
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9ytv3i | how can people sell video game merch or art on etsy? | Like the title says, I’m confused as to how people are allowed to make art based on popular video game franchises (like Legend of Zelda and Kingdom Hearts) and sell it on Etsy. Wouldn’t that be a copyright violation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ytv3i/eli5_how_can_people_sell_video_game_merch_or_art/ | {
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"Some companies don’t bother with the costs of a lawsuit because it would mean too much cost for little payback. A good lawyer will probably cost way more than a % of the profit a Etsy artist makes ",
"It’s not legal for sure, but they probably aren’t making enough to be on anyone’s radar. There is also the slim chance that they are doing really well for themselves and managed to get some sort of license. \n\n\n_URL_0_"
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39wapz | why can websites appear to be down for me but be online for everyone else? | I just tried to access a website, and I went on _URL_0_ to check if it was really down - it was. That got me thinking - what causes this? Why is there a need for websites like this, and is there a way to prevent it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39wapz/eli5_why_can_websites_appear_to_be_down_for_me/ | {
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"Unless a website has different servers for different people (very unlikely if it's within the same region) this should not happen ever. If you experience a website that is down and others don't, the problem is on your end and could be your internet connection."
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"http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/"
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9rfc82 | why is it that if you drop something electrical into a pool it affects the whole pool, but if you drop something electrical into the ocean, it dosent electrocute the whole ocean | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rfc82/eli5_why_is_it_that_if_you_drop_something/ | {
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"The pool is ≠ the ocean, in any way.\n\nThe electrical thing you throw in the pool doesn't affect the whole pool either. Electricity is very, very good at finding the path of least resistance and following that. It's almost never through a human or a fish. Those metal drains and grounded lights are just a better path.",
"Simply - it does affect the whole ocean, but the effects at any distance from the device would be very small.\n\nWhen an electric device falls in water, electricity flows from the high-voltage live parts inside the device to the low voltage grounded parts. Now, most of it will flow almost straight across, because that is the shortest and easiest route. But the electricity will take all routes, including long, looping ones. But as it has to travel a long way, it is hard for the electricity to follow that path, so not much does.\n\nSo some of that power following a longer, looping path would reach a person swimming nearby, and as the insides of them are salty and conduct electricity more easily than fresh water would, it would then flow through them. And it doesn't take much electric current to kill a person, or stun a fish.\n\nBut the further the electricity would have to flow, the less electricity flows. By the time the loops are many meters long, the amount of power flowing is very small, and no longer has any effect."
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3mch15 | how does the current "competitive healthcare market" benefit the patient? | All I keep seeing in the media when Single-payer/Nationalized healthcare is brought up is how the free market is better in terms of competition. But providers don't advertise pricing or results i nany manner resembling other aspects of free-market commerce (grocery stores, car companies, etc.). How does "competition" make things better? Or does it only make things better for the insurance companies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mch15/eli5_how_does_the_current_competitive_healthcare/ | {
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"The idea is that the insurance companies will compete with each other and this will cause lower prices for the patient. Sort of like the cell phone companies (Sprint, Verizon, AT & T, etc...). Unfortunately, this hasn't really happened, and I'm unsure if it ever will. ",
"Hasn't happened in my experience. Too much collusion in a mandated and regulation captured market in the U.S. (What competition?) Instead most prices and the passing on of costs not covered by insurance appears to have increased since the ACA.\n\nReally needs further reform with caps set on some things and opening the market to imported pharmaceuticals to lower costs along with requiring insurers to fully cover certain costs in order to qualify under the mandated program.\n\nEurope and Canada have the much better deal even given what they pay in taxes. And if anyone has been paying attention, their public healthcare hasn't been exclusive. If you're willing to pay, private healthcare is still available if you want it."
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4ffpbt | james holmes killed 12 people and injured 70, but is charged with 24 counts of first degree murder and 140 counts of attempted first degree murder. why does he has 2 charges for every murder/attempted murder he did? | just curious. saw it on the wiki article [here](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ffpbt/eli5_james_holmes_killed_12_people_and_injured_70/ | {
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"From a ways down that page:\n\n > For each person killed in the shooting, Holmes was charged with one count of murder with deliberation and one count of murder with extreme indifference.",
"He also probably got 1 count of attempted murder for each person in the room that he didn't kill."
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ak51x8 | how do different antibiotics target different parts of the body? | There are different antibiotics that seem to be used to target infection in different areas of the body, but mainly taken orally. Is it the type of antibiotic that targets a specific area or do we get the same infections in the same area of the body? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ak51x8/eli5_how_do_different_antibiotics_target/ | {
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"The thing about antibiotics is that they only effect bacteria, which are very different from your cells (if you’re 16:bacteria are prokaryotes and your cells are eukaryotes). So as previous reply said, the antibiotics disperse throughout your body and attack the bacteria... all of them. Including the good ones in your gut. That’s why a common side effect of antibiotics is the runs (the poops, the scoots, diarrhea, etc)",
"When you swallow an antibiotic tablet, it passes into your stomach and then your small intestine. At some point, depending on the drug, it is taken into the blood stream. The blood carries it to the liver and then throughout the body. \n\nAt this point it’s easiest to imagine that the drug then leaks out through the blood vessels into all the tissues of the body. Skin, muscle, bone, lungs etc. It acts on your entire body, hopefully killing (bactericidal antibiotic) or preventing growth of (bacteriostatic) the bacteria causing infection.\n\nIn the case of a kidney or bladder infection, after the antibiotic has gone all around the body, it is then excreted by the kidney and passes into the bladder. \n\nDifferent antibiotics have different chemical structures and characteristics. This makes the drug more likely to target certain areas. For example if you have a brain infection, you will need an antibiotic that can cross over from the blood into the brain through the “blood brain barrier”. If you have pneumonia, you will need a drug that is likely to spread into the fluid that lines the lungs. Certain areas of the body have different acidity levels, different protein concentrations and different blood flow arrangements, allowing them to be more accurately targeted rather than the shotgun approach I explained above. \n\nAn injection is just a way to get the antibiotic into the bloodstream, bypassing the digestive tract.",
"In general, oral antibiotics don't target different parts. But different parts of the body are prone to infection by different types of organisms, which respond to different antibiotics.\n\nThere are targeted antibiotics which are not oral, like ointments, eye drops, ear drops, wound-packing materials impregnated with antibiotics (I'm not sure how much clinical use this last one sees), etc. \n\nThere are also antibiotics that don't get absorbed when ingested, and are usually given by injection, but which can be given orally if the goal is to treat the gut itself."
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58v1zd | how do we make extremely, extremely high frame-per-second cameras? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/58v1zd/eli5_how_do_we_make_extremely_extremely_high/ | {
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"The sensors in most cameras are perfectly capable of capturing at a higher frame rate than what they are normally being used for, but the challenge is getting the data and putting it somewhere fast enough. If your storage subsystem is too slow, you won't be able to ingest the flood of incoming data fast enough. Some of the fastest high-speed cameras have ridiculous amounts of RAM to initially capture the video, and then they take a minute or two to dump that to a slower hard drive or SSD afterwards.\n\nAnother issue with super extreme high speed cameras is light sensitivity of the pixels, as well as cooling of the sensor. When you get into the *really* high speed territory, the individual pixels in the sensor have less time to gather light before the next frame, so you have to use extremely bright external lighting, or even sunlight to get a usable video. The sensors that are capable of such fast frame rates require additional cooling which makes the cameras bulky and loud.",
"What will the potential upper limit be? Could it get to \"plank time\"? What's the upper limit currently?",
"How researchers made a [1,000,000,000,000 FPS CAMERA](_URL_0_)\n\nStarts at about 5 minutespeed\n\nTL;DW: Film the same experiment many times with a normal high speed camera, then use software to compile the data into a composite super high speed film"
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vrdik | why are most (not all) military personnel right wing and anti-obama/universal anything if they are part of a government run, universal healthcare providing, free almost everything military? | If find this odd. I grew up on military bases and know that most of the members of the forces tend to be either right wing, or lean that way. They criticize universal healthcare and "socialist" initiatives, but in the military gain:
- Free house
- Free healthcare
- Free food
- Free services
and if it is not free at a completely discounted price, paid for by the government! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vrdik/eli5_why_are_most_not_all_military_personnel/ | {
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"The majority of America's military volunteers come from regions in the US that are majority conservative. That gives way to a majority conservative military. That being said, I've met plenty of liberals who served in the military, who are pro-gun, pro-gay, and anti-war.",
"Because it is not the same as a pure universal system.\n\nThey only get free housing because it is a necessity so that they can live where they are ordered to work. Many of the lower ranking soldiers can not afford to live in apartments and own homes.\n\nThey do not get free healthcare. Soldiers pay premiums like everyone else in the country. The premiums are just typically much lower. It is also a job benefit because of the high hazard work. Soldiers are at very high risks of injury and are offered a benefits package like you would get at places in the private sector.\n\nFree food is typically only applied to people living in barracks and is hardly universal. The same applies for the other \"free services.\"\n\ntl;dr - there is nothing universal and/or free about what the military gets.",
"My hypothesis: because they see themselves as putting their lives on the line for their benefits while the rest of the population doesn't.",
"None of those things are \"free\" it's part of their salary package. They earn them. Being in the military is a 24/7 job."
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3xlur2 | how do courts decide who to send to white collar prison? | Is it the crime itself? Celebrity status? Net worth? If I had an inco.e of only 100k a year but was found guilty of inside trading, would I go to WCP or standard prison? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xlur2/eli5_how_do_courts_decide_who_to_send_to_white/ | {
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"There's a point system that takes into account a number of things (age, gender, crime committed, whether the person is an escape risk, and whether they have violent tendencies). The more points the convict gets, the higher level of prison security they get."
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4i99pg | how do electromagnetic pulses (emp) destroy electronics and is it possible to deploy it in bombs for warfare? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i99pg/eli5_how_do_electromagnetic_pulses_emp_destroy/ | {
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"it is basically a very strong signal that is capable of frying weaker systems. It can be used for warfare, but its use is some what limited by the fact that military hardware is tough and most known systems are not big enough or thorough enough to take down civilians areas with any effectiveness. Either would take a nuclear sized blast to get anywhere, and by that point your already nuking them."
]
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||
7bps5m | why do headphones sound tinny until you put them on? | When i hold my headphones about an inch away from my ear they sound tinny but when i actually put them on they sound amazing.
What sort of physics is behind this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7bps5m/eli5_why_do_headphones_sound_tinny_until_you_put/ | {
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"Bass waves travel the least amount of distance, while higher pitched waves will reach your ears. Your ears are best at picking up and discerning those higher pitched sounds because they are most like the sounds you would normally be hearing. All of this considering the headphone speakers are very small and produce a relatively small decibel level.",
"Because the sound is tiny relatively. Normally when you hear things they are pretty far from your ears. If you took your tv for example would be a comfortable listening volume while sitting on say a couch would be painful if you were forced to hold your ear right to the speakers. Also if they aren't on your head then the speakers are likely being aimed away from you which might make them sound even smaller. The whole point of headphones is to have tiny speakers that produce tiny sound but sound normal because they are in close proximity to your ears and oriented specifically for the purpose."
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s4gx7 | the d & d alignment system, particularly the distinction between "neutral good/evil" and "chaotic good/evil." | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/s4gx7/eli5_the_dd_alignment_system_particularly_the/ | {
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"It helps to just view the alignments one axis at a time -- lawful, neutral, chaotic; good, neutral evil.\n\nLawful means you will follow certain rules.\nChaotic means everything is random -- rules are made to be broken.\nNeutral is somewhere in between these two; really, most people you meet with in real life would fall in the neutral spectum.\n\nGood means you put others above yourself.\nEvil means you willingly harm others, either for your own good or because you have been told to.\nNeutral will generally not kill innocents, but certainly will not sacrifice themselves for others.\n\nNeutral good would be someone who puts others above themselves, but isn't following a set pattern to it -- not helping others because their god said to, just because they want to. Neutral evil would be similar -- not killing just for the heck of it, but not killing just to obey a higher order.\n\nChaotic good is a character who is out for the greater good, but feels \"the man\" gets in the way, so (s)he will buck the rules constantly. Chaotic evil is one of those who just wants to watch the world burn.\n\nCheck the [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) page; it gives a pretty good overview of each of the nine types.",
"I always broke it down this way: the suffix of good/neutral/evil has to do with how they interact socially. Good = \"for the common good with self-sacrifice,\" evil = \"for myself, damn everyone else\" and neutral = \"no set sense of self,\" which is why a lot of non-intelligent creatures are set as \"true neutral.\" Chaotic, lawful, and neutral as a prefix is how this is delivered. Chaotic=\"no set plan,\" lawful = \"structured plan\", and neutral is \"either/or.\" \n\nSo a neutral good/evil person approaches how they act according to whim, but sides for either good of others or selfishness. Chaotic good/evil is someone who truly believes in their cause, but never plans anything. Take Star Wars:\n\n- Neutral good: Han Solo. He thinks mostly about the moment, but basically a good guy. Becomes more chaotic good as the series progresses.\n- Neutral evil: Jabba the Hutt. Nothing personal, it's just business... you dick. He might be lawful neutral, but he does kill a lot of people.\n\n- Chaotic Good: Luke Skywalker. Intergalactic boy wonder.\n- Chaotic Evil: Count Duku. This guy is fucked up, completely taken by the dark side.\n\nDarth Vader and the Emperor are more lawful evil because of all the pre-planning he does.\n\n",
"\n\n**Lawful Good:** Yoda (* Believes in order and in good*)\n\n**Neutral Good:** Obi Wan (*Good, but also sarcastic and adventurous*)\n\n**Chaotic Good:** Luke ( *Roguish, lone wolf, good above all*)\n\n**Lawful Neutral:** Stormtroopers (* Follow orders above anything else*)\n\n**True Neutral**: Boba Fett ( *No affiliation to anything except himself*)\n\n**Chaotic Neutral:** Han Solo ( *Outside the law and selfish, becomes CG*)\n\n**Lawful Evil:** Darth Vader ( *Follows orders but believes in evil*)\n\n**Neutral Evil:** The Emperor (* Pure evil* )\n\n**Chaotic Evil:** Jabba the Hutt (* Murderous crime lord*)\n",
"Lawful good characters believe in the rule of law for the good of society. They follow the law and advocate using the power of the law to help people.\n\nNeutral good characters believe in altruistic actions and outcomes, whether allowed by the law or not.\n\nChaotic good characters believe that maximizing individual liberty will produce the greatest benefit for society. \n\nThere are two types of lawful neutral characters. The first values the rule of law over altruism and selfishness; this kind of person would rather live in a society where the law is firmly enforced, whether or not for a \"good\" or \"evil\" purpose or outcome. The second type is a follower of a traditional moral code; much like the first type of lawful neutral person, whether the moral code is altruistic or selfish is less important than it being traditional.\n\nTrue neutral characters also fall into two types. The first, and most common, are people who are a roughly equal mixture of altruism and selfishness, law-abidingness and individualism. They don't put much thought into morality and often act according to peer pressure or their needs at the moment. The second type, which is more rare, believes in striving to maintain a balance between law and individuality and altruism and selfishness. The first type is somewhat apathetic about morality; the second type is very active and generally has some kind of religious motivation for seeking a balance.\n\nChaotic neutral characters favor the freedom to act over any good or evil outcome.\n\nLawful evil characters favor using the power of the state for their personal advantage or to persecute their enemies.\n\nNeutral evil characters favor selfishness and personally-beneficial outcomes, whether by law or illegally.\n\nChaotic evil characters disregard rules and seek selfish outcomes and complete freedom to act. Psychopaths are an example."
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3pjo5p | why can my dog eat shit and be fine, but not grapes or chocolate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pjo5p/eli5_why_can_my_dog_eat_shit_and_be_fine_but_not/ | {
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"text": [
"Because dog shit doesn't contain a compound (Theobromine) that is toxic to dogs. It *may* contain pathogens that make them sick, though."
]
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24ib45 | how credits were added to film | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24ib45/eli5_how_credits_were_added_to_film/ | {
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"Assuming you are talking about the older days before computers, credits where often printed onto a a sheet which was attached to two rollers, kinda like a treadmill. Then they could just film it.\n\nThey could also layer films over one another to superimpose credits on a live action scene."
]
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2rlp1l | why do japanese swords only have one edge? | So I'm curious as to why katanas and other similar Japanese swords only have one edge, whereas many other swords of European origin have two edges. Is there a distinct advantage/disadvantage that having one edge gives? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rlp1l/eli5why_do_japanese_swords_only_have_one_edge/ | {
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"Two advantages of a single edge is that with a thicker back the greater the stiffness than a comparable double-edged sword, which in turn greatly improves the blade's thrusting capability.\n\nAlso with a thick and flat back edge it is better for defending a strike from your enemy. ",
"Japanese swordfighting styles are suited to slashing with a sharp, curved edge to negate the style of armour (or non-armor) popular at the time. European, medieval styled swords are double edged with a point to infiltrate the heavy, plated armour that was used. Thick armour, but many joints and separations can be penetrated by a point and heavier, \"blunt\" strikes.",
"The katana is a slashing weapon, curved to cut through the layered armour of warriors wore. The edge is a hard steel, meant to retain it's edge and hold up to wear and tear. The spine of the blade is a softer steel to lend it flexibility, again to improve the durability of the blade. This is why you see the temper line (hamon) as the two metals of the blade meet. Having only one edge allows the blade to be curved as it is to improve a dragging slash technique when cutting, eg when cutting the you both swing and pull the blade back with your wrists. blocking is done mostly with the flat of the blade because edge on edge contact with serious strikes results in chipping and ruts along the cutting edge.\n\nInterestingly this curve is achieved when the blade is cooled during forging and the spine steel shrinks, pulling the bonded edge with it. \n\n",
"By having only one cutting edge, it means you can leave the opposite edge, the dull side, thicker. This adds both to mechanical strength of the blade, as well as increased weight, allowing for more momentum during a slashing motion. Here's an image of the [cross-section](_URL_0_) of the blades.",
"Katanas were designed primarily as slashing weapons. It turns out that curved blades with a wedge-shaped cross section work really well for that. The stereotypical Western sword was more of a multipurpose weapon that could be used for stabbing or slashing in a variety of ways--the arms manuals of the medieval period show a great diversity of techniques and fighting styles. There are also numerous Western sword types that are more similar to the katana in their design, such as cavalry sabers, cutlasses, falchions and (adding in the Middle East) scimitars.",
"It's already been said, but the difference in the metals (blade and spine) provides greater durability. Also, the curvature of the blade means it can slice things with greater ease. They use to rate how well a blade was made by how many prisoners it could cut through in a single blow. The curvature also allows an easier extension of the arm. You can still stab with the katana, but it's meant for slicing. A katana could hold up rather well to the medieval armor, so long as they went for weak points or a straight stab. You have to remember, different areas had different ways of fighting. You may protect yourself one way for one occasion, but another attack from someone else foreign could prove fatal. Most swordplay is motion/circular based. The curve helps with this as after the initial cut, there is still more blade going along the same path the cut deeper. European swords being double edged gave them the advantage that if one side dulled the other was still good to use. You could use most katanas and double bladed swords with one hand, but a lot used both hands for greater control. Katanas are a very unique sword and highly regarded as one of the best created. ",
"For much the same reason as scimitars (Western) and falchions (Middle Eastern). It adds more mass to the sword whilst allowing a thin profile, thus making a slash far more effective. \nDoesn't matter how sharp a sword is. If it has no mass it won't penetrate very far. Think a razor. Swing it hard at someone, you might give a nasty cut, but it won't actually be very deep. You could actually cut deeper with a steel-ruler. All down to mass."
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3zcy8r | how does professional poker work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zcy8r/eli5_how_does_professional_poker_work/ | {
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"I am not a professional poker player, but I do know three pros personally. They are not big name pros, but they do earn a modest living ((think mid-five figures) playing poker.\n\nOne of them got his start by making the final table of a large multi-table tournament at a casino with a smallish ($200 or so) entry fee. He then ran that 25k up quickly and has settled into a routine playing $2-$5 hold'em, 2-5 Pot Limit Omaha, and slightly larger games when they are available at his home casino.\n\nThe other one saved his money working an 8-5 job until he had a decent amount of money to make a go at it (he said it was $10,000) and then ran that money up playing similar limits live and online.\n\nThey also invest their poker profits in other players that they know are above average.\n\nYou mention elimination in your question. I think you may be referring to tournament poker, which is only one of many, many forms of poker. Tournament poker is definitely one way to make money when playing poker professionally, but the pros that I am aware of make most of their money playing \"cash\" or \"ring\" games where you sit at a table with set limits on starting cash (typically at least 100 times the small and big blinds) and play against other players. So a 2-5 table might have a $200 minimum requirement and a $500 maximum, though many casinos do raise the maximum requirement to as much as twice that.",
"I will answer your questions in reverse order.\n\n > How can it be considered a sport?\n\nProfessional poker players are always calculating the chances of the card they ned coming up in the hand. They also have to calculate the return on their investment (bet). Ok, grranted, it ain't a physical sport, but it is as much a mental sport as baseball or football. \n\n > How does elimination work? \n\nIn tourneyment play, each player is allowed a certain \"buy-in.\" That is how much the value of their chips are at the start of the tourneyment. When all of a player's chips are lost in a tourneyment the player is eliminated. The saying, \"A chip and a chair is all it takes\" has a lot of meaning to the pros. \n\n > Do they have to bet with their own money?\n\nMost do. Some don't. Some of the pros will need corporate sponsorship. Some will win their way in and not have to play with their own money. Some elite touneyments may require $1M buy-in. If you ain't got that kind of money, but you got a good history, you may find a sponsor to put up that money for you. Then if the sponsored player wins, he may have to pay the sponsor say half of the winnings. The other way to get in without your own money is to win a few lesser tourneyments and with a win, you get to play in a higher stakes touneyment. There was a guy a few years ago who entered in a free play tourney and kept winning until he won the World Series of Poker with never having invested a cent of his own money. \n\n\n > How does a person become involved in professional poker?\n\nSame as you do in any other career field. Give up any other source of income and make your living playing poker. \n\nJust so you know, I played Hold 'em and I got good. Not good enough to win titles, but enough to know that I would never make it past the minor leagues and be able to go pro. If you like doing math problems for fun, you may be able to be a poker pro. "
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||
d4qwkd | how do completely torn ligaments such as atfl heal? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d4qwkd/eli5_how_do_completely_torn_ligaments_such_as/ | {
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"Fairly complicated, the simple answer is that cells communicate. A cell can tell other cells where is it, what type of cell it is, and if it’s in some kind of “distress”. There is also a 3 step response when tissue tears, and the first step is basically inflammation. In this step, a ton of different cell types (tissue, stem, blood, immune, etc.) rush to the site of trauma and they all have different jobs. This is where a lot of communicating occurs, and your body is essentially trying to figure out what happened and how it can best be fixed.\n\n\nCells that make up what’s left of the ligament will communicate, and with the help of other cell types, will slowly undergo mitosis and other cellular processes to repair the ligament."
]
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||
1tb10p | why do my muscles hurt after using them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tb10p/eli5_why_do_my_muscles_hurt_after_using_them/ | {
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"text": [
"You are literally damaging them on the cellular level. That's what prompts them to rebuild and become stronger.",
"Lactic acid build up within the muscle may cause pain. Muscle tightness also may cause pain in the muscle.",
"Teeny tiny tears in your muscle that repair themselves."
]
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||
2sjd79 | what is going to make future 5g internet, faster than current 4g networks? | 'Gigabit' Internet, better coverage and signal efficiency on a *mobile* network?!
How are they doing it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sjd79/eli5_what_is_going_to_make_future_5g_internet/ | {
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"text": [
"Well, there was a mobile network CEO or tech apecialist recently that described how the 5g network will work. It will be closer to skynet in terms of the net will be smarter, faster, more organized, and better equipped with newer generation technology that enables up to gigabit. There will be bigger, thicker cables to every cell tower so that connectivity will be wider spread and more reliable. The network will be smarter in the sense that it can tell when your battery is low and it'll start pinging your phone less, and more organized since there will likely be a prioritization system set up that deals with making business lines have a higher priority than our own commercial lines. Generally, the network will be smarter and more efficient for every cent spent on it."
]
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|
3yj1wt | has the physiological damage caused by trauma been the same through out history? | I hear many stories of people being raped or kidnapped and tortured and the person suffers physiological damaged for years, possibly for life. However, in the past rape and torture and all manors of horrible harm were infected on people on a routine basis. Was nearly everyone in the past emotionally and physiologically damaged from the struggle of day to day life, or does our modern soft life make us more susceptible to physiological and emotional pain? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3yj1wt/eli5_has_the_physiological_damage_caused_by/ | {
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"text": [
"No. Trauma has been present with humanity throughout our history. The difference is that nowadays, we are allowed to actually speak about our traumas, and help them heal, whereas in the past there was mostly an attitude of 'why are you acting like this, stop it'. Or if it was mentioned, it was mentioned in vague terms that do not always translate well to modern ears. The deadly sin sloth, for example, initially didn't really refer to simple laziness. It was meant for apathy and loss of interest in life, exactly the sort of symptoms commonly associated with depression (potentially due to former trauma). ",
"Yeah, no, it wasn't nearly as common as you seem to think. Why do you think things like the Salem Witch Trials or the Spanish Inquisition are such a big deal in history books a century later? People only get tortured and raped by every other guy on the street in the movies.\n\nThe fact of the matter is, by the time it got to torture, most people didn't survive it. And those who did, well... we don't know how damaged they were, because it almost always ended with them confessing to something they were going to be executed for anyway. As far as rape goes, depending on what part of the world you were in, you could either be killed for being raped, or forced to marry your attacker - there's no record of what women suffered under those conditions because no one cared. That does not remotely begin to mean they were okay."
]
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252kku | how do octopuses avoid giving themselves brain damage? | Octopuses, in general, are probably one of the most intelligent non-human animals on this planet, which speaks to a highly developed brain structure.
Yet, they're also extremely flexible and lack any sort of supporting skeleton (for the most part) How do octopuses avoid damaging their brains when they squeeze into tiny spaces or (in the case of captive octopuses) leaving their tanks? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/252kku/eli5how_do_octopuses_avoid_giving_themselves/ | {
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"text": [
"They don't really have a localized brain, like we do. Rather, it is spread throughout their body, with a lot of neural tissue in the tentacles."
]
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|
3q1dai | why did we go from round headphone wires to flat ones? | As far as I know they both get equally tangled. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q1dai/eli5_why_did_we_go_from_round_headphone_wires_to/ | {
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"text": [
"i'm not sure what you mean. all headphones i've bought in the past few years have round wires. can you give an example of these \"flat\" wires?",
"Flat wires do have a harder time getting tangled. Also some prefer them for aesthetic reasons. That's pretty much it. It's worth noting though that the conductors inside most \"flat\" wires are still round. Just the insulation is molded to look flat."
]
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[],
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2xxynm | why do most unknown calls i receive on my home phone end up having no one on the other end? | Why would they waste their time calling? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2xxynm/eli5_why_do_most_unknown_calls_i_receive_on_my/ | {
"a_id": [
"cp4eoat"
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"text": [
"They're usually from call centres where they have a machine automatically call numbers on a pre-assigned list. Then, when a voice is detected on your end, someone is connected on their end to talk to you. It saves them time, even if it does result it people going \"Huh. No one there\" and hanging up before they get a chance."
]
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] |
|
4hjgas | when you jump into a cold lake (say 60°f or ~15°c) why does the water no longer feel cold after about 5 minutes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hjgas/eli5_when_you_jump_into_a_cold_lake_say_60f_or/ | {
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"text": [
"Your body has mechanisms in place to warm you up should you be in a cold environment. Dilated blood vessels provide a flush of warmth, and shivering also produces warmth. By doing this, your body can increase its internal temperature and keep you a bit more comfortable. Stay in too long though, and your vessels will end up constricting, because your body deems it's too cold and ends up preserving heat for your vital organs.\n\nHowever, if you're staying in that cold water for too long, it'll cool your blood and by association, the rest of your body and that's how hypothermia happens. Stay comfortable, but stay warm. Old people can die of hypothermia simply by falling onto a cold floor without getting help getting up."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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||
4px5ja | what's the difference between nuclear and thermonuclear? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4px5ja/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_nuclear_and/ | {
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"Usuaully Nuclear weapons are basic uranium or plutonium based 1 stage nuclear bombs that function by triggering a single fission reaction which causes a highly radioactive material to \"break\" apart and release large ammounts of energy. \n\nThermonuclear is used to describe Fusion devices which usualy fuse Hydrogen in to helium and release energy that way, a Thermonuclear weapon uses an initial fission explosion to \"kickstart\" a 2nd stage fusion explosion. thats why Hydrogen bombs are usualy refered to as \"Thermonuclear bombs\"\n\nTL;DR\n\n- Nuclear = Fission = Breaks apart atoms to generate energy \n- Thermonuclear = Fusion = Joins Atoms from element A in to Element B to generate energy. \n",
"A nuclear fission reaction (as in a nuclear power plant and every nuclear bomb) can happen at any temperature range, since all that happens is that a neutron hits an atom of a nuclear fuel (like Pu-239), and causes a fission reaction. Nuclear bombs and powerplants work by making it more likely for neutrons to hit nuclear fuel instead of something else, and thus creating a chain reaction. A real world analogy would be a landslide or avalanche.\n\nA *thermo*nuclear fusion reaction doesn't rely on neutrons, but happens spontaneously if pressure and temperature is high enough, and the atoms are so close to one another that they can react. A thermonuclear bomb creates this condition by using a conventional nuclear bomb in a way that it squeezes the fusion fuel between two layers of uranium. It has some similarity to the way spontaneous combustion is used in a diesel engine: You expend energy to compress the air so much that it can ignite the injected diesel fuel, in the process creating far more energy than you used."
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6en6ta | the science of coffee | I love coffee but it kind of baffles me how just hot water and some ground up beans creates such a drink. What chemical process makes the drink from this? Why is it bad for my teeth if it's just hot water? Why do the grounds taste nothing like a good cup?
Thank you! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6en6ta/eli5_the_science_of_coffee/ | {
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"Coffee is a solution - in the same way that mixing salt with water gives you salt water, coffee is bits of coffee mixed in with water.\n\nWhen you grind a coffee bean, there are some parts of the bean that can dissolve in hot water, and other parts that can't. What you're tasting, then, is the bits that *can* dissolve into water leaving the bits that can't dissolve behind in the filter.",
"Unroasted, \"green\" coffee beans look a bit like a pale green peanut. These beans can keep for years. Once roasted, though, the clock is ticking. Flavorful compounds are fragile and decompose, they're sensitive to heat and light, or they gas out with the copious amounts of CO2 the roasted beans produce. These compounds also readily oxidize, turning into bitter compounds. You can slow down the aging by storing your roasted coffee in a vacuum container, but you can't stop it - you'll even discover your vacuum is lost as the gassing process continues. Pre-grinding coffee only accelerates the process by creating a large surface area for light, heat, and oxygen to attack.\n\nCoffee peaks at 11 hours after roasting, and is dead after a week.\n\nThe soluble compounds also oxidize at an accelerated rate when introduced to hot water, so an extended steep will start turning flavorful compounds into bitter and sour compounds. This is falsely attributed to over extraction, which is also a real thing - after all the desirable compounds are extracted, a prolonged steep will start extracting undesirable compounds. This is why a proper coffee house will brew to order instead of preparing jugs ahead of time. Even if they have something like a large coffee urn, they'll change it out after an hour.\n\nTime. Time is your enemy. Time hates your coffee, and by extension hates you. Buy your coffee from a roaster. If your roaster can't tell you when your beans were roasted, if it's not on the bag, they're too old. Get whole beans. Store them in a cool, dry, dark, air-tight container. Grind before you brew, and brew small batches. Experiment with grind sizes appropriate for the brewing method - this is why bur grinders are popular - control will lead to a consistent cup, and dialing it in will help make a better cup. Too small or too large can lead to improper extraction. If you don't like \"strong\" coffee, error on the side of using too many beans, because over-extraction from too few will lead to a bitter cup. Regardless of your brewing method, it all starts with the beans. You can buy the fanciest, most expensive whatever you want, but if you started with stale beans, you're going to end with a bad cup. And you can't make espresso at home without spending $1k for an entry level machine. There are things that make something similar to espresso, but it isn't espresso. Go to a coffee house."
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4if0lg | if the majority of people are right handed, why does the fork go on the left when setting a table? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4if0lg/eli5_if_the_majority_of_people_are_right_handed/ | {
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"What are the origins of that being the case?",
"The knife requires more dexterity compares to the fork which works an anchor.",
"Because you want to be manipulating the sharp, dangerous, pointy knife with your dominant hand. Which is why the dinner knife is on the right, and that leaves the fork to be on the left. ",
"Because you are expected to pick up the fork with your left and the knife (to the right of the plate, edge in) in your right; you then pierce/hold the food with the fork while you cut with the knife.\n\nTraditions then divert depending on where you are from.\n\nSome countries you then simply place the cut morsel in your mouth with the left hand, while other countries you put down the knife, shift the fork to your right hand, then put the food in your mouth. The fork then is used further in the right hand for non-cut-needing food or is shifted back to the left for more cutting work.",
"The fork is held in the left hand when you're cutting with the knife. You cut with your right hand for a couple of reasons:\n\n1. if you're righty, then you'd embarrass the hell out of yourself when cutting with the knife using your left hand.\n\n2. someone long ago thought we ought create social rules to help people from embarrassing themselves, but really were concerned about being embarrassed _by you_. \n\nSo..after you cut using the fork to steady the food you're cutting and the knife to actually cut it, you then put your knife down, transfer the fork to your right hand and eat.",
"As a left-handed person, I find it generally inconsequential whether I use my fork in my left or right hand. I pretty much always use my left hand for knives though, because I'd prefer not to cut myself trying to use a sharp object in my non-dominant hand and risk seasoning my food with my own blood.",
"[The last two threads](_URL_0_) seem to agree with most of the replies."
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4l4wn6 | why do some people leak pee when they sneeze? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4l4wn6/eli5_why_do_some_people_leak_pee_when_they_sneeze/ | {
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"The release of your bladder is controlled by muscles. Those muscles can, for a variety of reasons, be weakened. If those muscles are weak, a sudden jolt like a sneeze can dislodge them for a moment, releasing a small amount of pee."
]
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ehqnmn | topology/topological manifold | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ehqnmn/eli5_topologytopological_manifold/ | {
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"Topology: the study of the geometric properties of a space/surface and which properties are affected by changing that shape/space through a continuous deformation (i.e. no rips/tears and no gluing); or the rules governing a specific topological space or manifold. \n\nTopological Manifold: A surface (or group of surfaces) with given properties (such as a metric, a specific number of holes/openings, etc.) \n\nFor example, a doughnut and a coffee mug belong to the same manifold (a solid with a single hole) which can be deformed from one to the other without changing some properties. A topologist would then look at what happens during the transformation to things like distance between points and any changes to a circle (does it get bigger smaller etc.)"
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3osfy2 | how come most 3d games render at 60 fps while it takes a few seconds to render a textureless cube in blender? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3osfy2/eli5_how_come_most_3d_games_render_at_60_fps/ | {
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"The answer depends on what you're doing in Blender. Most likely, it's because you are using a different kind of rendering. When rendering a scene, there are a bunch of computations that *can* be done. 3D games have a (mostly) fixed set of computations they perform, and they're tuned for efficiency. Graphics software like Blender allows you to do a lot of other computations - and the defaults are usually tuned for resulting image quality, not efficiency.\n\nYou won't notice much difference in the quality of the output when you're looking at a textureless cube, but that doesn't mean that Blender can skip all of the computations (though it can certainly skip some).\n\nAnother part of the delay can be in startup time. 3D games load a bunch of resources before you get to play. Blender may be doing similar loading when you tell it to render the scene.\n\nThere are a lot of \"may\" answers here because software is complex, and it depends on what games you're comparing to - and on the current implementation details of Blender.",
"There are two ways to render graphics on the screen. \n\n[Rasterization](_URL_0_) - Which is used in video games. The very simple version of this is the world is made up of triangles and all you have to do is figure out if a triangle is visible and if a pixel is in the triangle or not. Many graphics cards have electronics deigned to do this over and over again very quickly. Compare this with...\n\n[Ray Tracing](_URL_3_) - Which is used for static 3D rendering. This **calculates the path light travels for every pixel on your screen** back to the light source. The objects don't have to be triangles and are often expressed as mathematical solids. This gives you, for all intents an purposes, unlimited resolution and detail depending on how much time and CPU power you want to throw at it. Because ray tracers use complex math, the CPU brute-forces the tracing calculations. In fact, with bender, when doing ray tracing, you don't use any of the 3D capability of your graphics card at all. \n\nUpshot:\n\nRasterizer: \"Hey 3D card, draw and fill 532 triangles the make that make up this [isohedron](_URL_2_) and texture it to make it look like sphere \n\nRay Tracer: \"Hey CPU calculate how light will reflect on a [sphere](_URL_1_) of a volume of 4/3*πr^3\"\n\nOne take much more time then the other, but it also make it much more realistic at infinite scales.",
"I have very limited knowledge in this but I know a thing or two. I have used blender for 3 years and read up on articles. Think about it. If you looked at renders vs how games look, you can see that renders have better quality where as games tend to be faster. The game engine was built more for speed while the rendering engine was built more for quality. Games are pre-calculated while renders have much, much, much more things to put into the scene, such as lighting, global illumination, if animation, then physics. Also, games, instead of having more hi-detailed models, they \"bake\" the extra details to textures to make it faster but it has lower quality. \nHere are some good articles: _URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_\n\nSo in conclusion, games render more faster because of pre-calculated geometry and use techniques to achieve faster and mediocre render while 3D rendering software uses an engine that renders everything and doesn't have these techniques since it gives lower quality, thus the quality is better but longer in 3D rendering software. \n\n**Edit**:This is also why renders look SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better!!!!!!!!! Seriously search up 3d Renders. Also, when you talk about a texture-less cube, that's simply due to lighting, reflection and you graphics card. Even though you graphics card is good at rendering games, it may not be good at rendering 3D objects in 3D modelling software. Another article on graphics card for games vs render: _URL_0_ \n\n*Note: I would highly recommend reading the article links instead of taking my word for it :)",
"While others have answered, I'll simplify it a bit more for Eli5.\n\nVideogames take a LOT of shortcuts in lighting, use a lot smaller and simpler textures and filters and models. A lot of textures are pre-shaded for ambient occlusion, for example. Ambient occlusion is not so much a shadow, but when things are closer together and without a direct light source(eg a cloudy day) they're darker, this is very resource heavy and you don't typically see much actual occlusion in video games, and when you do it is quite rough or simple.\n\nIf you want to make a comparison to music, it would be a kazoo vs a symphony.\n\nIn the case of the blank cube and blender, you're also dealing with what is likely a much older render technique that puts a lot of effort into an accurate shadow cast upon a different object. Your shadows are going to be born of light sources in a way that more closely resembles reality by quite a bit.\n\nA lot of what video games do is just enough to deliver the impression, and the difference between them and a good 3d render really show up under scrutiny."
]
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[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29#/media/File:Recursive_raytrace_of_a_sphere.png",
"http://mft-dev.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/icosahedron_frame_sub3.gif",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29"
],
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/zs1ct/can_someone_explain_the_real_difference_between/",
"https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-take-minutes-to-render-a-scene-in-3ds-Max-or-Maya-etc-but-games-seem-to-render-seemingly-on-the-fly",
"http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/82816/why-are-gaming-graphics-not-as-beautiful-as-animated-movies"
],
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||
6ajfcq | how do lithium ion batteries work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ajfcq/eli5how_do_lithium_ion_batteries_work/ | {
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"A lithium ion battery uses charged lithium particles (ions) to move electricity from one end of the battery to another. As energy leaves the battery, these lithium ions move from the negative side of the battery to the positive side, forming a conductive lithium layer that releases electricity. When all the ions are on the positive side of the battery, the battery is spent and no longer releases electricity. When the battery is put in a charger, the sides flip temporarily, and the addition of electrical energy to the lithium causes the ions to move back to the negative side of the battery, making the battery ready for use again.\n\nBecause of these properties, lithium ion batteries are among the more common rechargeable batteries for home electronic use. "
]
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22hkqx | i turned on my old guitar amp with nothing plugged in and it started playing a radio station. how is this happening? | It's an old Crate guitar amplifier. Could it be a loose wire somehow acting as an antenna? Any ideas? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22hkqx/eli5_i_turned_on_my_old_guitar_amp_with_nothing/ | {
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"Radio waves are stupid easy to pick up on any basic consumer amplifier. I've picked up radio stations on PC speakers before. Somewhere along the lines, the radio signal is inadvertently translated to an electrical signal that your system can amplify. You don't need a loose wire; just an unshielded system.\n\nAdding to that, I think the FCC mandates that consumer electronics must accept radio interference.",
"Radios have amplifiers as part of how they convert radio waves to sound via a speaker. Unshielded amplifiers can be excited (made to produce a signal) due to a strong RF signal passing through them. wires leading to an amplifier stage or even the amp circuitry itself can act as the antenna in this case. What has likely happened is either you have moved to a location closer to a transmitter (radio tower) or a transmitter near to your location has either upped its power since last you used this unit or perhaps it is operating on a new frequency. Any cheap AM/FM radio in a house near a transmitter will play the signal of a nearby powerful transmitter. As will cordless phones and other items with amplifiers. ",
"OP, your question makes me want to build a radio. I haven't played with a soldering iron in six or seven years.",
"Interference, My father had (has?) a very cheap clock radio that picked aeroplane radio traffic as it flew overhead.",
"To convert high frequency Radio Waves to frequencies that you can hear, you need a \"Detector\". \n\nThe simplest Detector is a Diode of some kind. Years ago people built Crystal sets that used a piece of Galena and a fine wire (called a Cat's Whisker) as a Detector.\n\nAny well designed electronic equipment is relatively immune to radio waves, but some cheap gear can pick it up because it is poorly shielded and something inside is acting as a Detector.\n\nWhen CB radio first came out, Radio Interference was a nightmare because there was so much rubbish electronic gear around, especially early TV sets. These days the manufactures are much more aware of the problem and tend to not cut corners so much."
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d1eos8 | what happens with the intellectual properties of a company when they close down? | Let's say The Walt Disney Company somehow went bankrupt and closed down and all movies, plushies and toys stop being made.
& nbsp;
What happens with the things that already exist? Will the ideas enter the public domain or will they be given to someone? Could they be used and distributed freely? If not, who will manage them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1eos8/eli5_what_happens_with_the_intellectual/ | {
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"It gets sold off/liquidated, like physical assets (to take your example further, Disneylands, corporate headquarters, and other things like that).",
"Rights, like intellectual property rights, only really matter if there is someone to assert them. If no one purchases the rights, then they might as well be in the public domain, as no one will have any standing to file lawsuits or other actions against any infringers."
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51crhp | why do you see so many saabs and other out of production cars in movies? | Maybe it's because I've owned one before but, I just see an inordinate amount of Saabs, Pontiacs, and Saturns in movies. Is this a cost cutting thing or is there something else behind it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51crhp/eli5_why_do_you_see_so_many_saabs_and_other_out/ | {
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"text": [
"Those brands are/were all owned by GM, and GM has made it a point of pride that their vehicles have been showcased in many motion pictures. What you're seeing is product placement coupled with favorable rental rates for fleet vehicles to achieve that effect."
]
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ahsaz5 | how does a bike stay up when at faster speeds but will fall over when not going fast enough? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ahsaz5/eli5_how_does_a_bike_stay_up_when_at_faster/ | {
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"The gyroscopic forces created by the wheels mass cause the wheel to fix itself on a plane in turn overcoming to forces of gravity stopping it just falling over",
"Generally bikes have handlebars which have a centre of mass infront of their pivot. Meaning if you lean the bike to the left the handlebars will turn left. This has the effect of making the bike turn left and when it turns left the body of the bike is thrown outside of the turn just like in a car when going round a corner. Then it leans to the right and the cycle repeats. Then your brain helps a bit too. If you push your bike fast with no one on it will go upright for a while however if you tie the handle bars so they can't turn it will fall over just as fast as if you just let it go stationary. \n\n\nAnother interesting fact is this causes your steering to be inverted when going at speed. If you can cycle with no hands you can try this by cycling with no hands and using one finger to push your handlebars to the left you'll find the bike will lean over to the right and turn right."
]
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698zak | what is infrasound and how can it cause panic attacks in humans? | I'm reading about the Dylatov Pass Incident and the theory of infrasound is interesting to me but I don't understand what it is. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/698zak/eli5_what_is_infrasound_and_how_can_it_cause/ | {
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"Human hearing works for tones in the frequency range of 20hz-20000hz. Everything below that is called infrasound, everything above is called ultrasound. \n\nThe resonant frequencies of a lot of human organs happen to be in the infrasound range, so a loud/powerful enough tone can cause them to vibrate strongly, resulting in discomfort and nausea. "
]
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dxl1yc | what would happen to a person when they cannot afford payment to a loan/debt. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dxl1yc/eli5_what_would_happen_to_a_person_when_they/ | {
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"In the US, they may be able to file for bankruptcy protection, discharging the debt if the person has no way of paying the debt (except for selling off essential assets).",
"This varies widely by what state you live in and what kind of debt.. Business debt, mortgages and other standard loans can usually be handled through bankruptcy. Student loans will haunt you until you die and then dig you up and demand payment. Go murica.",
"They default on a loan which means they can't pay it back, they may have to declare bankruptcy. Their credit gets ruined and for most loans the credit bereau is told to basically just forget about the loan and take the loss. This is worst case\n\n\nIf you just miss a payment on a loan then you get a ding to your credit for non-payment however a single non-payment from a late payment won't be too damaging and can even potentially removed from your credit history in some circumstances.\n\n\nIn general, credit bereaus will try to work with people to have lower payments that they can afford because they would rather have a loan take longer to be repaid than to take the loss."
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60r3vt | how can a tiny amount of toxic chemical affect a person's entire body? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60r3vt/eli5_how_can_a_tiny_amount_of_toxic_chemical/ | {
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"Toxicity is determined by the dose and the rout of administration. Some substances are highly toxic in small quantities (like ricin and cyanide) while others take large quantities to have negative physiological effects (like table salt or even water). A substance doesn't need to be toxic to all tissues in the body, just enough tissues to cause problems. Cyanide, for example, interrupts cellular respiration (basically the creation of ATP, or the energy cells use to function). By blocking this, the cells deplete their energy quickly and die off. \n\n",
"Let's do some math. Methanol is lethal at a dose of 1-2 mL/kg. So for an 80kg person, say 2mL/kg dose to be on the safe side (or dangerous, as it were) and that gives a dose of 160mL or 5.4 oz. This dose contains 2.38 x 10^24 molecules of methanol. If you have millions of cells, that's still on the order of 10^18 molecules per cell or billions of billions.\n\nEDIT: There are roughly 3.72 trillion (human) cells in the body, so that bumps it down from billions of billions to only trillions of molecules per cell."
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fhbspc | why the rear wheel in buses and trucks is close to centre? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fhbspc/eli5_why_the_rear_wheel_in_buses_and_trucks_is/ | {
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"It's to increase manouverability. The further back the rear wheels are, the longer the wheelbase of the vehicle is, and therefore the wider any turns it will make will be. \n\nIf you move the rear wheels towards the front of the bus, then the bus can swing into tighter turns. The tradeoff is the back end of the bus can swing out now, whereas if the wheels are at the back, that can't happen.",
"The longer the wheelbase, the wider the turning circle. A wider turning circle makes negotiating corners harder."
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1uqhjs | how do first responders or hospital personnel know who to contact if you have had an accident and are unconscious? | For example, say you've been in a car accident and are rushed to the hospital. What methods are used to find your emergency contact? Obviously your driver's license would be a start, but what about having an ICE number programmed into your phone? Does anyone ever look for that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uqhjs/eli5_how_do_first_responders_or_hospital/ | {
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"I believe this generally sorted out only after you get to the hospital.",
"Well, in my case when I was involved in a battery and knocked unconscious; someone found my phone and got my dad's number out of my contacts and called him. \n*Edited*",
"I worked in an ER and to find contact info for patients who were unable to provide it, we would look in wallets and cell phones for listed emergency contacts (ICE is recognized by hospital staff). If none were listed, we would look through \"recent calls\" to get in touch with someone who might know who we should call, or through the contact list for \"mom,\" \"dad,\" etc. \n\nIt's worth mentioning that if you have a passcode on your cell phone, hospital staff can't find contact numbers in an emergency. I suggest putting a small piece of paper with emergency contact info in your wallet or purse, and including your passcode on that too. ",
"Cop here. \n\nI can't speak for all Police and Fire, but the first thing I do is check the driver's license. If they don't have an ID, I'll run the license plate on my computer and see who it comes back to (assuming it's a car accident). From there I'll find a name and start looking for contact information. \n\nIf it's not a car accident, and there is no identification on their person. Start checking cellular phones. Last numbers called and start calling and asking questions. Sometimes tattoos give a last name, or at least an identifying mark. Worst case scenario, you can't identify them and you wait for them to wake up, or if they're dead, fingerprints/DNA sometimes can help.\n\nOdds are someone is going to notice they're missing and/or had lack of contact for a while and will come forward looking for the person. It's very rare to be able to be completely anonymous these days. Another resort is putting the picture of the person on the local news for someone to identify them.\n\nAs a suggestion. A good practice is to leave your cell phone unlocked, and program all your contacts in with their first AND last name. That way if something catastrophic does happen, responders can go through the phone and see a lot of family members and know where to start with contacts. For example, if my last name is Smith. There will be a lot of Smiths in my phone. If your mother's name is Linda Smith. Program it as Linda Smith (Mom). Or just Mom.\n\nHope this helped."
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49vlan | what ever happened to the sequestration? | So I remember sequestration happening but there was never really the fallout everyone was talking about. So I googled and looked for some news articles and just never found one that sufficiently answered my question. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49vlan/eli5_what_ever_happened_to_the_sequestration/ | {
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"The simple answer is it happened and almost nothing has come of it. The people that said the sky would fall were wrong, and the people who said it would fix our deficit were wrong. That's it.\n\nSequestration is the exact prime example of why you cannot just listen to the news and \"experts\" to determine what is going on. People lie and exaggerate to get more attention. ",
"Oh there was fallout... it just affected a small portion of the population. Basically what happened was this: a wide swath of federal employees were deemed \"essential\" by various cabinets. So *a lot* federal employees continued working, but were unpaid. This is why you didn't notice a huge shut down of services. There were a few exceptions, but not many. At the end of sequestration both parties agreed to go back and pay federal employees who weren't deemed \"essential\" even though they hadn't worked. Federal employees who did work through sequestration were eventually paid as well.\n\nI worked for the federal government at that time and they gave us letters to give to our landlords, credit card companies, etc explaining why we were being paid. Everyone at the time worked with me and I wasn't charged a late fee for anything. So basically I diverted all my funds to necessities like food and gas. When I got my sequestration check I paid all my bills. Everything worked out fine. I am still a little sour about federal employees who *didn't* work getting paid... that wasn't really fair to those of us who worked through it. Basically they ended up with a paid vacation and we didn't get jack shit for showing up like good little government drones."
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64dj5x | why does 101 mean the basics of something rather than just 1 or 001? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64dj5x/eli5_why_does_101_mean_the_basics_of_something/ | {
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"It's based on a standard for how college classes are numbered. All the first-level classes are 1XX, second level are 2XX, etc. \nBased on that model, the basic beginner class on any subject would be *Subject 101*",
"In a college curriculum, courses are numbered to indicate both the level (100-level courses are more basic than 200-level courses) and, frequently but not always, the sequence of courses (you have to take Biology 101 before you can take Biology 102). \n\nA course with a number of 101 is typically the first introductory-level course offered in a discipline. \n\nWhy isn't it 100, though? Well, first, it's the sequency. If you have to take 101 before 102, it's easier to understand and remember that 10***1*** is *1st* and 10***2*** is **2nd** that it would be to remember that 100 is 1st and 101 is 2nd. \n\nAlso, at some institutions, the number 100 is reserved for remedial courses. So as a typical first-year student at a US university, you would be likely to take English 101 in the fall and English 102 in the spring ... but that assumes that you have the basic skills in reading and writing from high school. If testing shows that you aren't quite ready for the college-level English courses, you might have to take an English 100 class to brush up those skills before moving on to 101 and 102. That's only at some institutions, though, and not as consistent as the 101, 102 style numbering. ",
"In college, within a department, first year courses start with a 1, second year with a 2, third year with a 3, etc.\n\nThe *first* first year course you take often *ends* with a 1. A new freshman in their first semester might be taking Psychology 101, Chemistry 101, and Economics 101. The second semester general courses would be 102, and a second year course would be 201. As courses get more specific and electives become involved, the courses are no longer sequential. Child Psychology might be 335, while Abnormal Psychology might be 470.\n\nNote that this system is not universal, and most colleges today use 4 digit class codes.\n\n",
"It's the same reason hotel rooms often start at 101, because it's helpful to attach 1 to the number to indicate first (floor/year) so as to not later mess it up later. If the rooms on the Hotel's first floor were 1, 2, 3, the second floor would be 101, 102, 103 (or even worse, 45, 46, 47 if we just straight up count). Similarly by attaching 1 to the beginning to indicate first year courses as \"101\" we can indicate that they're first year courses and \"201\" or \"250\" are second year courses and \"301\" and \"375\" are advanced/third year courses.\n\n100 is usually reserved as a pre-101 course that is somewhat remedial in nature (e.g, for a person who is capable but for whatever reason isn't familiar, like a returning student who hasn't taken math in 20 years), with numbers from 95-100 being *really* remedial (I had a friend who had to take Math 97 their first semester of college, which was like high school freshman-level algebra)"
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2iszqc | why are arabs and people from north africa (egypt, libya, morocco, tunisia, etc.) labeled as "white" or "caucasian" in the us census? | I did some research before posting but I couldn't find a legitimate answer so I come to Reddit in hopes that someone can shed some light on the matter.
I am Egyptian and on my papers it says I am white. Whenever I fill out anything is official I label myself as white. I even had an instance when I was younger where I labeled myself as "other" and wrote "middle eastern" for a survey and the surveyor handed back the form and asked that I put down white.
I have nothing against being white. The only reason I ask is because... well... I am not really white. I am fair skinned but still. When I go to my white friends whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents are from Ireland, or Germany, or Italy, or any other white country and tell them that I am white they always give me a funny look.
So why are Arabs labeled as "white" or "caucasian" even though socially we are not viewed that way at all? Why aren't we a separate race or group? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2iszqc/eli5_why_are_arabs_and_people_from_north_africa/ | {
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"Race is a construct. There was a time when Russians, Irish and Italians weren't considered white themselves. ",
"Though race is a social construct, and colloquial speech generally equates \"Caucasian\" with \"white\", Caucasian includes people from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian sub-continent. Since race doesn't really mean anything genetically, it really doesn't matter if you're \"Caucasian\" versus \"sub-Saharan African\". As for why you're not viewed as \"white\" even if you are \"Caucasian\", that goes into the historical and social matter of whiteness, institutionalized racism, immigration, and much more. For a while, \"white people\" were only a very small portion of Europeans, excluding many people we'd now considered white like the Irish, Italians and Russians, (and possibly Ashkenazi Jews), but they were over time, subsumed into the \"white\" race. But racists in the US and Europe still didn't consider people from the Mideast and North Africa to be white. This racism still informs our culture, even if we are not ourselves racists, and that's why you, as an Arab Egyptian, are not socially viewed as \"white.\" \n"
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2ilran | why do older tvs have a weird screen effect while being viewed on another camera? | The kind of effect you can see when you're family is recording you as a child while you're smacking the TV in the 90's. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ilran/eli5_why_do_older_tvs_have_a_weird_screen_effect/ | {
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"because the refresh rate of the TV screen collides with the frame rate of the video resulting in an \"animation\" of said refresh rate - the line moving up or down the screen. It's similar to the way rims on a car often look like they are going on the wrong direction on film, or how in a strobe environment water droplets look like they are travelling up instead of down."
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9e4h4l | why do some offices have a pc connected to a virtual machine? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9e4h4l/eli5why_do_some_offices_have_a_pc_connected_to_a/ | {
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"In my organization, we dealt with a large amount of sensitive data. SSNs, DOBs, Names, Addresses etc. We are laptop heavy and our rules stated that we were never allowed to work with that type of data on our local machine, and must be signed into a remote server.\n\nThe idea behind that is to ensure that no sensitive material is stored on the actual machine in case of theft or breach. The remote server machine is much more secure.\n\nAdditionally, it's two step credentialing. One log in for the local machine, a separate username and pw for the remote machine.",
"For my firm, working from a virtual server means that updates are significantly easier. Having to update a program individually on 600+ computers would be an IT nightmare (for obvious security reasons, workers do not have the rights to install programs themselves). Working on a virtual machine allows IT to update much more quickly and smoothly.",
"We have a certain number of licenses for very expensive software that only exist on virtual machines. We are a global company so folks on one side of the world are using the very expensive software while the other side of the world sleeps and then vice versa. We don't have to buy a license for everyone in the company to have this software locally, just enough to support the folks working at any given time.",
"When the user connects a VM is spun up using a copy of IT's VM template. IT can control the VM template, to patch it or whatever, without any pesky users. If something goes wrong, or some malware gets in the VM - poof it gets blown away when the user logs out and a new VM is made from the template when they log in again. This ends persistent malware.",
"Because you can use **any** PC to connect to that **same** VM.\n\nYou get the same desktop whether you are in your office, at home or at a remote worksite. If you spill coffee on your laptop, you don't have to worry about the last time you backed up, everything is backed up at once on the VM server. The *real* machines are locked up in a data center and babysat by experts, so you don't have to care so much about the other ones. You can also get away with giving everyone cheaper, less powerful hardware. \n\nThere are security and support advantages as well. Laptop get stolen? Stupid employees put malware on their machines? Need to install a crucial security patch **right now**? The VM acts as a firewall, giving the company complete control of the important parts will leaving the employees with a lot of flexibility."
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48jkk7 | how can a state be projected to be won by a candidate with only 1% of the polling reporting in? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/48jkk7/eli5how_can_a_state_be_projected_to_be_won_by_a/ | {
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3ggbvt | why is democracy the go to political system despite its inherent instability with every election. what made it a better choice than something else? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ggbvt/eli5_why_is_democracy_the_go_to_political_system/ | {
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"I'm probably paraphrasing here, but I always dug The old saying that \"Democracy is the worst form of government, followed by everything else.\"",
"It is better to have a bit of instability every few years and the ability to peacefully replace the current douche with a turd than to be stuck with a nutjob that cannot be changed at all. ",
"The instability of every election is the strength of a democratic process. It means that, at least in theory, one person or group of people can't entrench themselves and turn the government into their own machine and the country into their own kingdom.\n\nThe people gets a mandatory opportunity to replace those in power every few years, again in theory meaning that if we are dissatisfied with them, we can replace them.\n\nOf course over time people who crave that kind of enduring power have created all sorts of different ways to remain in power despite the rules, either by coup or by election fraud or simply by having a dual party system where both parties talk very differently, but act very similarly, and we get to pick a different figurehead every few years.",
"Actually, it is not. We are a Republic. Most 'democracies' are actually republics. The difference is that we elect people to represent us and make decisions for us. This is flawed in that the person elected gets to pick and choose which things he/she does to represent the electorate and which things he/she does to represent anyone or anything that helps get reelection.\n\nBut.....the reason why this is a good thing is this: In a pure democracy, it is strict rule of the 51%. The 49% get absolutely no say in governing. Meanwhile, other forms of government tend to encourage totalitarianism and rule of an elite few at the expense of the many. A Republic lets the masses get representation in the government without having to make the lame day-to-day decisions of government and also has some safeguards in place to protect minorities from the rule of the majority.",
"My political professor put it in the best way: \"Democracy is inefficient and slower in putting into action compared to other governments but its the government system with the best track record in terms of longevity and stability.\" \n\nMost monarchs today turned into democracy. My opinion, is that democracy is the only form of government which citizens have a say in their government. \n\nEverything above is assuming it is actual democracy and not democracy in name. ",
"1. Stability isn't the only important consideration. It's a pretty commonly-held idea that governance is only moral with the consent of the governed, and this makes democracy the most legitimate form of government.\n\n1. Autocrats are thoroughly capable of being crazy, incompetent, paranoid and/or unstable. In a mature democracy with strong institutions and checks and balances, demonstrating these traits is likely to make you unelectable.",
"submitting to ANY form of government requires a citizen to give up a particular degree of individual freedom in exchange for the perks that one can better obtain from a government..these perks includes social safety and security, healthcare, industry and technology, and the sense of belonging to something greater than yourself..\n\nthe best thing about democracy is it allows the people to enjoy the remaining freedoms that they have without really making them feel like they are completely rules..\nthey are still ruled by certain men/group of men, but they have the tools in their hands to dictate who those men/group of men ruling them are..\n\nthe problem with any other form of government is that\nFirst: it is predictable who gets to rule the people and the people doesnt really have a say on who that person/group of people to rule them are\nSecondly: individual freedoms are much more restricted in order for the ruling individual/party to secure their continued foothold into power\n\n(while that may sound completely bullcrap from a western democratic citizen's purview, consider viewing it from the perspective of a citizen of a third world \"democratic\" country..consider the Philippines for example..since nationhood during WW2, they have adopted democracy as their form of government..however, it is an illusion since the highest and middle levels of government is monopolized by elite families, passing on political office from parent to offspring..a lot of people have become demoralized by it over time that there have been several mutinies in the past to overthrow the system, and when it was clear nothing is going to change no matter how much blood is spilled, those who can, started fleeing the country instead, touching off an event called \"the brain drain\", where the first to flee are the educated professionals, leaving a massive shortage of skilled labour in the country..)",
"I disagree with the premise. Maybe I have a different definition of instability, but at least in my experience in the US, even when the outcome of the election for our highest office, President, took a significantly longer time to resolve and was surrounded by controversy, there was no governmental instability. The country still functioned the way it was supposed to. There was no confusion about who was in power. No violence. No calamity. Government services were still performed as usual. What part of that, or any other election in the US has been unstable?\n\n"
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1oi99s | why more recently than ever do webpages refresh and not actually go back when you hit the back button? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1oi99s/eli5why_more_recently_than_ever_do_webpages/ | {
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"It is more and more common mispractice to include a 0 second redirect in a site, which as soon as you load a page, redirects you to a slightly different page they actually want you to see. So far, this isn't a bad thing, it helps site design. The problem is, if you hit the back button on most browsers, it will take you back to the page with the instant redirect instead of back PAST that page to the page you came from. It is bad design, and SHOULD be easy to avoid, but some web designers are idiots.\n\nSource: I'm a web developer.",
"Some common elements can be stored on your computer depending on your cache size. But there are alot with dynamic content that is constantly changing such as posts on an image board or forum that need to be updated every couple of minutes.",
"I also have this issue. I use chrome, and also adblock and adblock plus. I read the other day that it's something to do with adblock that is the problem. If you don't use any of these, then I have no idea\n [Source] (_URL_0_)"
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2y5o1b | why do people tie shoe laces and toss them over power lines? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y5o1b/eli5_why_do_people_tie_shoe_laces_and_toss_them/ | {
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"Three reasons:\n\n1. Gang members do it to mark their territory ([supposedly](_URL_0_)).\n\n2. Bullies steal someone's sneakers and throw them over power lines to taunt their victim.\n\n3. People take their old sneakers and throw them over power lines because they are inspired by (1.) or just think it's cool, funny, or exciting to do.",
"From my personal experience it is a subtle way of showing that there is a drug dealer in the general vicinity. ",
"As others have said, usually drug dealers. Also done by skateboarders/hikers as a form of 'burying' shoes that are too beat up to keep wearing.",
"My dad said that private school kids used to do it on the last day of school since they wouldn't need them all summer and would then get new ones next school year. ",
"There is a video called \"The Mystery of Flying Kicks\" that looks at possible answers to this very question. _URL_0_",
"i work on the university of oregon campus. the kids here do it just because. idiots.",
"The drug dealer theory has always seemed dumb to me, at least as far as it still being true today. Maybe it was a under the radar the first few times people did it, but now that the rumor is widely known (to even police), wouldn't near those shoes be be the last place an actual drug dealer would want hang out?",
"I always thought it was a symbol for leaving the hood",
"Because its funny, and fuck that guy. The stuff about drugs and gangs is nonsense.\n\nSource: lived in the hood most of my life.",
"This is like asking \"why do people draw dicks and write shitty poetry on bathroom walls?\"",
"Regardless of how it originated, it has become so common now that the meaning behind it could be anything. ",
"It's mostly has r.i.p on them a sign of respect for a Fallin friends",
"According to Big Fish, it's to keep you in the paradise of Spectre.",
"When I lived on an Air Force Base, it was a superstition to throw a pair of combat boots up into a specific tree. If the boots never came down, you would never be stationed at that base again.",
"i think Crab Man said it best...\"spontaneous combustion happens all the time. how do you think shoes get caught up in power lines?\" ",
"We used to do it just because it was something to do with your old shoes. We had a shoe tree going.",
"I find it extremely fascinating that so far no one has mentioned the reason I have heard (time and time again): This is something you do when you lose your virginity.",
"I always assumed this was a really awful prank. ",
"It is supposed to be symbolic of you leaving an area for a better place or life. This is why you typically see this in poorer area's.",
"Tofino BC, hundreds of pairs of shoes on wires beside skate park!\n\n_URL_0_",
"I don't buy into the 'shoes over the lines' being crime related because even in the worst parts of Philly it's just kids throwing their shoes over the lines because it's fun. No one needs to advertise where to buy drugs or who's corner it is, it's always pretty obvious.",
"Not sure if this is accurate but someone told me its to signify leaving the hood",
"I found this last year and I'm still waiting for an answer. \nNSFW\n_URL_0_",
"I once saw a a pair of skates over a power line. It's Canada. It's what we do."
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1rzgfd | what's the possibility of puerto rico becoming the 51st state of the us? | edit: these are great answers, thanks guys | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rzgfd/eli5_whats_the_possibility_of_puerto_rico/ | {
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"This is a complex issue so I failed miserably at ELI5 so I did an ELI15 instead. I hope that you're OK with this.\n\n---\n\nIn order for Puerto Rico to become a state two things would need to happen.\n\n1 - Puerto Ricans would need to reach a consensus. \n\nPresidential elections are periodic events where things remain pretty much the same. Because of this the best strategy for the losing party is to wait 4 years and try again. A change in status, however, is a life changing and potentially irreversible permanent event. And if a Puerto Rican group felt that an illegitimate status definition had been imposed on them a cascade of events that would mirror the [assault on the house of representatives](_URL_0_) and the [Ponce massacre](_URL_1_) could unravel. And no American politician would want to risk that.\n\nAnd you have to keep in mind that in Puerto Rico the main political parties are tied to status definitions. (That's why Puerto Rican politicians make some noise on the subject every once in a while. They're just pandering to their voters.) In the island there is no Democratic or Republican party but a status quo political party (PPD), a statehood political party (PNP), and a minority independence political party (PIP). The status quo party and the statehood party have rougly the same number of supporters so they switch seats in the government once every few years and as a result the status of the island is in a permanent political stalemate.\n\n2 - The US government would need to reach a consensus. \n\nThe political status of Puerto Rico is a very risky political issue for any American politician. However, the US government knows about the island's political stalemate so they don't have to take any meaningful actions. But in the unlikely event that Puerto Ricans reached consensus every relevant politician would have to ask himself the two following questions:\n\na - Would a Puerto Rican state add more votes to my political party or would it benefit the competition? Keep in mind that in Puerto Rico there are no Republicans vs. Democrats although the local politicians do affiliate themselves loosely to some extent with those political parties. Republican politicians would reject a new Democratic state and vice versa.\n\nb - Would my constituents approve of adding Puerto Rico as a new state? Keep in mind that although many Americans consider Puerto Ricans to be marginalized and underrepresented American citizens others consider them to be a culturally incompatible burden for the American taxpayers.\n\nSo, even if Puerto Rico could reach a consensus the issue could remain in a stalemate in the US government forever.\n\nThere's a third option but it is very unlikely so I didn't mention it as a plausible path to statehood. The US could just force a status definition on the island like it has done many times before with many territories. But the political repercussions would be too great in this age of ubiquitous communications so unless a very dramatic series of events occurred this won't happen.\n\ntl;dr: It is very unlikely but it makes good news so you'll continue to hear about it regularly.\n\n// Disclaimer: I am a Puerto Rican",
"It's highly unlikely. Congress would need to approve it, and the Republicans would never support the addition of a state whose electoral votes would almost certainly go to the democrats in every presidential election.\n\nThen there's time money issue. If admitted to the US, Puerto Rico would be the poorest state in the us. Not a lot of US politicians want to take that on.\n\nAlso, just over half of Puerto Ricans approved of statehood in a 2012 vote. If the us approved statehood, you'd have quite a few Puerto Ricans actively working against it.\n\nIt might happen someday, but not anytime soon."
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53q1r4 | would it be possible to replace all of your bones with some sort of metal replica? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53q1r4/eli5_would_it_be_possible_to_replace_all_of_your/ | {
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"Short answer: no. For a couple reasons.\n\nFirstly, there's all the biological functions bone has in the body - as a store of calcium, a site for red and white blood cell production, a fat storage location, and probably more I'm forgetting.\n\nSecondly, there's the material reasons - bone is an amazing natural composite, a living material. It's constantly breaking itself down and rebuilding in response to your needs, which is what makes replace parts with metal so complex. With bone, it's rare to have to deal with fatigue fractures, from years of constant cyclic loading (your leg joints take multiples of your bodyweight in load each time you take a step), as your body rebuilds the bone constantly. Metal isn't doing that, so it can eventually crack.\n\nThere's also the ways it would be held - our body knows what to do with bone, how to attach soft tissues to it, how not to attack it with the immune system - with metal (or any other material really) these things have to be taken into consideration. "
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5y4l89 | who's in charge of coming up with street names and is there any approval by a committee? also, if you were someone that decided street names how did you come up with them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y4l89/eli5_whos_in_charge_of_coming_up_with_street/ | {
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"In private developments in Ohio, it's up to the discretion of the developer. For example, the development I live in AND the street I live ON are both named after the developer's grandson... who lived in the development. The development I used to live in was interesting because every street was named after a winner of the Kentucky Derby. I would guess that the county commissioners name the public streets. This is probably different in all fifty states and I'm sure it's different in other countries. ",
"In my hometown streets named by developers, but town planners can veto. Once development is done, town is responsible for maintenance. \n\nAs a rule they never permit common first or last names (\"Katie Drive\") because the street signs would just get stolen.",
"I am not sure how heavily it's enforced anymore, but I believe that here in New Zealand the type of road (Street, Avenue, Road, Lane etc) used to be (may still be?) dictated by features of the location, while the unique part at the start was up to the land owner.\n\nI've always wanted to see a place called Lois Lane"
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2qz1dm | what happens to our mind when you spin around? | Why do we get dizzy when we spin around a lot and why is everything out of balance? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qz1dm/eli5_what_happens_to_our_mind_when_you_spin_around/ | {
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"Nothing happens to your brain. You have fluid in your ear that helps your brain recognize what is up and what is down. When you spin the fluid has to re-equilibrate and while this is happening your brain is confused and the result is nausea, vertigo, and that weird effect where your eyes continue to follow whatever direction you were spinning in."
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263kwo | why is there two ways of writing "4" and "a" ? | Why is there two ways to write the lowercase "a" and why is there two ways to write the number "4" ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/263kwo/eli5why_is_there_two_ways_of_writing_4_and_a/ | {
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"The '4' and 'a' you see on your screen right now (unless you're using an odd font) are the technically correct glyphs, which is why they appear that way in most typefaces unless it's specifically mimicking handwriting. The \"open 4\" is use in handwriting because it's easier to distinguish from a 9. When writing quickly, those two digits can often look similar. The other way of writing 'a' is more because it's easier and faster.",
"There are multiple ways to write any character. Just look at different fonts. It just so happens that in the case of a and 4, there are two popular main styles used in print which are very obviously different.\n\nOther equally obvious examples include 1, 7, g, w, l and z.\n\nIf you look at handwriting, the differences are way bigger.",
"The \"closed 4\" comes from the arabian formation of numerals where each numeral has the [number of angles as the number](_URL_0_), the \"open 4\", as far as I can tell, comes from the [lcd display](_URL_2_).\n \nAs for *a*s you have [double-story and single story](_URL_1_) the double story is more correct and used for cursive, but the single story was easier to make for printing presses."
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"http://www.solargauge.com/4kR4DClr.png"
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4ou24s | how are movies that were recorded in a lower definition able to be released in higher definitions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ou24s/eli5_how_are_movies_that_were_recorded_in_a_lower/ | {
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"They were recorded on film, which isn't limited to an amount of pixels- for the most part.\n\nRemember that they were broadcast on a huge screen.\n\nAs long as you can get the original print you can re-release the movie as HD.",
"There are two reasons. One is that most movies are recorded on higher definition then they are released on. A lot of movies are recorded on film which have very high resolution. Even those scenes that are not as high resolution are still higher then the VHS and DVD releases because the movies use higher resolution film and the editing process might also reduce quality of the picture.\n\nSecondly a lot of the HD releases get a pass of post processing to artificially sharpen the picture and improve effects that could be done better with modern technology and higher standards for quality. Technicians will usually go through the movie frame by frame and add details and texture to make it look better. Sometimes entire scenes are redone if possible.",
"There is a lot of confusion here because \"high definition\" is a *television* standard, and movies are mostly on film. And as technology has progressed, we've been able to make television transmissions higher and higher definition.\n\nThat said: a movie camera 60 years ago produced a higher resolution product than any television you can buy today. Film has *very* high resolution.",
"They were recorded on film and then remastered with modern techniques. A lot of people think of film and think it is low quality, but film is actually incredible when it comes to quality, standard 35mm film being better than most digital sensors today. So when a film is rereleased, it is actually being rescanned at a much higher resolution than originally, because there never used to be a need for film to be scanned at say, 4K. So it is scanned, touched up to remove any scratches and often denoised to reduce bad film grain (a lot of which is left in, but sometimes it's too much and needs cleaned up). Now you're left with a very high quality digital file, more than capable of being watched in HD. ",
"I'll try to give a simpler answer. They weren't recorded in low definition, they were actually recorded in hi-defintion, they were just transferred to a low definition format because old televions and vhs technology had low resolution. So they just go back and re-transfer those movies to high definition for modern tvs and blu ray players."
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4oapyx | why does the us armed forces have an army, navy, marines, and coast guard, instead of just an army and navy. | It seems unnecessary to have all these branches when the Navy can just absorb the Coast Guard and the Army can absorb the Marines. To me it seems counter-intuitive for these specialized branches to exist when in reality they are essentially the same branch.
For example, Marines are supposed to specialize in invasion and ground combat, but so are Army Rangers. The Navy reigns in international waters but both the coast guard and the navy perform the same tasks with the same equipment.
To me, it seems expensive and overly complicated to keep 4 branches instead of 2. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4oapyx/eli5why_does_the_us_armed_forces_have_an_army/ | {
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"Coast guard is department of homeland security. It has a shit ton of missions... Search and rescue, aids to navigation, drug and migrant interdiction, waterways management, pollution response and prevention port security etc etc etc... The navy does their thing and the coast guard does theirs.",
"The Marines (mostly) separated from the Navy when they started to be used as shock troops, and first engagement troops on mainland more often. They still operate as guards and boarding party combatants on naval ships though which is their historic role and specialization. \n\nThe Coast Guard was formed because the military is not allowed to operate on US soil or territorial waters outside of emergency or invasion. They cannot legally function as police for our water borders. They also do not have the same equipments, the coast guard does not have war vessels or nukes. \n\nThe Air Force split from the Army after the importance of air power was determined to be growing. They specialize in air defense, long distance strikes, and our missile systems. ",
"Back when they first started making militaries, there were two kinds of fighting people:\n\n* People who fought on land. When they got around to inventing the English Language, they called them *Armies*.\n\n* People who fought on water, from ships. We call them *Navies*.\n\nNow around the time of the American Revolutionary War (late 1770s), navies fought using wooden sailing ships with lots of cannons firing solid iron balls. These guns were pretty powerful, but they were pretty inaccurate unless you got really close, and unless you got really lucky and blew up the enemy's gunpowder magazine, they couldn't really do enough damage to sink another ship quickly. \n\nSo if you were willing to sail through cannonball fire for a little bit, it was possible to get close enough to the enemy ship to board it with your own men. However, most sailors were good at sailing, and not as good at shooting or hand-to-hand fighting, so they decided to create groups of soldiers who specifically trained to fight from ships. These are called *Marines*. \n\nSome countries kept them as part of their armies or navies, but in the US, they put them specifically under the authority of the Department of the Navy, and slowly over time they gained more and various responsibilities- Presidential guard, Embassy guard, etc. Also, because they were on Navy ships all the time, they were usually the first ground troops to show up when the government was trying to flex its power overseas, so they also started doing amphibious warfare (invading beaches from ships), which is their primary mission today.\n\nAround the same time, many countries saw a need for a nautical police force. Using the Navy for that was in most cases overkill; you want to enforce tariffs and catch criminals, not blow merchant ships out of the water. So *Coast Guards* started becoming a thing, tasked with seagoing law enforcement and search and rescue. In the US, it was put under the authority of the Department of Transportation in peactime, and the department of the Navy in wartime. (there was no Department of Defense then). Recently they've been put under the Department of Homeland Security.\n\nSo, finally, years later, airplanes were invented. Immediately all the armed forces saw a use for them; mainly spotting for big guns at first (Navy battleships and Army artillery), but later they started carrying guns and bombs and torpedoes and missiles. In some countries, they managed to create a separate *Air Force* right away (the UK did this with the RAF), but in the US, the Army and Navy each handled their own aviation, arguing (accurately enough) their needs were different. So it wasn't until after World War II that the Air Force was split off from the Army into a final branch. The Army still maintains its helicopters for transport and close air support, and the Navy argues that aircraft carrier operations are too different from the land flying that Air Force personnel are used to, so they each have their own aircraft. The Coast Guard needs aircraft for long-range search and rescue. And the Marines have their own aircraft because they're supposed to be a self-contained, independent and fast-moving fighting force once the Navy drops them on the beach.\n\nAs for why they haven't merged them back? Politics, money, and tradition. There have been several attempts made--the Air Force argued in the 50's that nuclear weapons made all surface forces obsolete; the Army has tried to absorb the Marines several times; the Air Force has tried to take the Navy's planes, etc. But it seems unlikely in the near future."
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e1txf4 | how do hooves make animals better at climbing mountains? | Wondering how mountain goats are so good a climbing. How to hooves help them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e1txf4/eli5_how_do_hooves_make_animals_better_at/ | {
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"Mountain goats have special hooves that are like a pirate's hook with soft padding to help adjust. They suck at running long distance running but are great at scaling verticle surfaces because of this.",
"From what I’ve read the two hooves in the front of each foot has a hard edge able to grip the rocks and a soft center pad. A sort of combo of a cats claw (gripping with sharp edge) and horse hoof (soft bottom for traction) the hooves can move independently to help it climb. _URL_0_",
"If climbing and you stand on a small edge (a bit of rock sticking out that's anything from a couple of inches wide down to a few millimetres), when you put weight on it in bare feet or trainers the sole will bend as its flaubert and your weight is distributed across the whole area, most of which is unsupported.\n\nClimbing shoes And, more relevant to hooves, mountaineering boots, have much more inflexible and solid soles. Mountaineering and walking boots even have a scale of hardness/inflexibility - b1 to b3 with b3 being totally inflexible. These allow you to put a tiny area of the boot on an edge and put your weight on it.\n\nHooves are the same as in they are far more solid and inflexible than eg paws."
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5jzy0n | nuclear arms race | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jzy0n/eli5_nuclear_arms_race/ | {
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"they dont just stockpile the same type of nuke, with time other nations can come up with newer and better delivery methods that cant be stopped or intercepted or your older nukes become incapable of delivering/entering the target area so they make more nukes with better technology.\n\nsometimes they upgrade previous systems , other times its complete new systems.\n\nsince those weapons dont ever get used they stock pile into the thousands.",
" > So if X amount of nuclear weapons are enough to completely wipe a country off the map, then what changes if you get more? Nothing, right? It's redundant?\n\nRedundancy is important. The goal of a theoretical \"first strike\" is to knock out the capability of your opponent to return fire. This means a lot of nuclear weapons are targeting the launch silos of other nuclear weapons. More nuclear weapons then makes it harder for an enemy to reduce your weaponry below the threshold of acceptable losses. If you only have precisely enough weapons to destroy an enemy then anything they can destroy before they reach their target is a reduced impact, but overkill means it doesn't matter.\n\nAlso, what if a nuclear war breaks out and you \"win\"? Now all your nukes are expended and you are defenseless! There *are* other nuclear powers out there you know. You want enough nukes to destroy your enemy even if you lose a portion to unknown defenses or surprise first strikes, plus enough to protect yourself after a conflict presuming you succeed."
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1s9e2l | how are people/groups of people legally allowed to place "bounties" on others? | For example the NYC Jewish community offering bounties for people involved in the knockout game or the Black Panthers offering a bounty for George Zimmerman. How is that legal?? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s9e2l/eli5_how_are_peoplegroups_of_people_legally/ | {
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"They're not \"bounties\" like in the Boba Fett sense. They're rewards to turn over information which would lead to arrest/prosecution. Boba Fett bounties (\"Capture and/or kill this person\") are illegal."
]
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|
4306vm | lots of people barely eat vegetables and never take multivitamins, and still seem to be in good health. how is the daily recommended amount of micronutrients calculated, and why do people seem just fine even if they don't get it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4306vm/eli5_lots_of_people_barely_eat_vegetables_and/ | {
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"Pretty much everyone in a developed country gets enough nutrients to stay reasonably healthy unless they are on some kind of super restrictive diet.\n\nThe RDA's are *very* conservative and you have to be *very* deficient for a long time before you'll start seeing serious health effects.",
"One big thing is that we have a lot of vitamin enriched foods. Rice, pasta, flour & bread - pretty much anything coming from grains - are almost always fortified with nutrients. Milk is widely fortified with vitamins A & D.",
"Holy fucking shit. Great minds think alike. Dude I was just gonna ask this same question TODAY I kid you not. "
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2emmi2 | why do radio stations sometimes have two frequencies playing the same thing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2emmi2/eli5_why_do_radio_stations_sometimes_have_two/ | {
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"text": [
"They would probably be broadcasting from different locations, giving the station a wider range."
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a9p29l | why do your lips peel when you’re sick? | Currently sick and pissed because my lips hurt | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a9p29l/eli5_why_do_your_lips_peel_when_youre_sick/ | {
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"text": [
"lip skin is different than regular sin & doesn't make it's own lipid.\n\nIt comes from the skin around your lips & those pores could be clogged. As an experiment you could try AHA cream on that skin, or just get good chapstick.",
"I think it may be a combo of dehydration and breathing more through your mouth if your nose is stuffy. \n\nDo you have a good chap stick? Burts Bees or something similar can be a game changer. Olive oil could also help."
]
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22hj74 | what is the purpose of so much pollen everywhere? | I get that the more pollen the more likely fertilization will happen, but not every place has the same pollen levels...and also most places don't seem to have anymore plants than others with more or less pollen. So why do plants give off so much pollen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22hj74/eli5_what_is_the_purpose_of_so_much_pollen/ | {
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" > So why do plants give off so much pollen?\n\nTo make sure they have enough. Way out on the edges of the most distant spread of the pollen there may be just enough for fertilization, and the ground covered increases greatly as they put more and more out there. It isn't a group effort; each tree is trying to spread its genes individually. It doesn't matter if other trees have \"enough\" pollen, it matters if they have the pollen of a given tree."
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61qxca | we have a huge sea which is evapourating all the time which comes back to us in the form of rains. we can create artificial rains. why do we worry about water shortage in future? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61qxca/eli5we_have_a_huge_sea_which_is_evapourating_all/ | {
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"We can not create rain from nothing. We are able to seed rain clouds so that the water falls down before it normally would. The problem is that farms require water over a large area which increases evaporation before the rivers are able to get to the sea. If you were to create artificial rain over the farms to water the crops instead of using the rivers that supplies water to the downstream areas there would be less rain upstream and the rivers would still dry out.",
"First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by creating \"artificial rains.\" It's possible to seed clouds and make them rain, but it costs money, and only works if there's sufficient moisture available. We can desalinate saltwater, but it's expensive and time consuming. Personally, I think that it's a really important scientific pursuit and more people should be working on the problem of how to do it cheaply, but as it stands, turning saltwater into freshwater is not easy or cheap to do at volume.\n\nSo, what we're left with, you may be surprised to hear, is 2.5% of the earth's water. That's what percentage is NOT saltwater. Of that, less than half is easily accessible (from lakes, rivers, or aquifers close enough to the surface for wells). We're talking 1% of the planet's water is not salt and available for people to reach. Now, if we let industry dump waste products into that water, we have less and less potable water for future generations, and we have to invest more and more money into cleaning up the freshwater that's available to us. \n\nNow, we're looking at a population that continues to expand. Many people are already at a disadvantage when it comes to acquiring water. They either live in arid regions where there is little freshwater to start with (that's another problem with desalinating saltwater--it's terribly expensive to ship it to people who don't have access to water) or else in places where there is little water regulation, and the \"fresh\" water available to them is dangerous to drink. \n\nEvery year, the planet's water usage increases. There are more people, more factory farms, more industry. This all decreases our available freshwater, as do the increased pollution that comes with an increased population. Now we have situations where places that already experience drought/water shortage find that industry has more right to the water than people do. We have companies like Nestle pumping water out of drinking sources, bottling it in plastic (and I'm pretty sure the plastic industry uses a lot of water, too), and selling it back to people. \n\nIf you have a good idea for taking large quantities of saltwater and purifying it quickly and inexpensively, you should get on that right away, because you will save lives and probably get rich. But don't believe, right now, that humanity has an unlimited supply of drinking water at its fingertips, because we don't. It's limited and shrinking and if corporations like Nestle have their way, water won't be a human right anymore. It will be an expensive privilege. ",
"We cannot create artificial rain. Why do you think we can? \n\nWater shortages are about droughts at specific local levels, or consumption being higher than supply of fresh water. "
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1n3odz | is artificial photosynthesis not viable? | Quick search on ELI5 gave nothing, Google gave me a few results about recent successes, but no reason why it isn't used. Getting rid of carbon dioxide would generally seem to be a pretty good thing right? Oxygen and glucose are also *fairly* useful things.
Have we simply not yet figured out how plants do the thing? Does it use too much energy or take too much time?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1n3odz/eli5_is_artificial_photosynthesis_not_viable/ | {
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"Photosynthesis (PS) involves harnessing light (photons) from the sun for energy to drive chemical reactions. Here's an abridged version of the process:\n\n1. A photon strikes an electron that is chilling in chlorophyll (or some other pigment depending on the wavelength of light the organism harvests)\n2. The electron absorbs the photon\n3. The electron gains the energy of the photon, becoming 'excited'\n4. The excited electron is chemical reactions that require a lot of energy (called 'energetically unfavorable reactions')\n5. The cool part: light is used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen and build carbohydrates from CO2\n\nWhen the excited electron forms a new chemical bond, that chemical bond stores the energy of the excited electron. That stored energy can be used to drive other energetically unfavorable reactions, many of which happen at night. These are aptly called the dark reactions (the reactions involved in harvesting light for energy are called the light reactions).\n\nWe know pretty well how PS works, but we're nowhere near technologically advanced enough to replicate the process artificially. There are tons of steps involved in harnessing that light energy - sort of like taking the stairs from the top floor instead of jumping off the roof. Each step is a separate chemical reaction facilitated by a unique protein. It's hard to build that from scratch.\n\nHere's a simple breakdown of the process: _URL_0_\n\nOne last thing: the majority of carbon fixation (utilizing atmospheric CO2) is done by microorganisms, especially marine microorganisms. Scientists are trying to genetically modify photosynthetic microorganisms so they'll take atmospheric CO2 and convert it into useful organic compounds like ethanol and other biofuels.\n\nI lied, here's the last thing:\n > Chlorophyll? More like BOREophyll!\n\n > Right?",
"Plants (and others) are extremely efficient!! (as are all living things/enzymes) We have a general understanding of how this process works, but have yet to do this synthetically.\n\nWe have been able to make photoactive catalysts that assist in the splitting of water, but there is still an overpotential necessary for the reaction. (overpotential: additional energy/electrical current needed)\n\nWe have also started working on catalysts that will take CO2 from the air and convert these into methane, methanol, ethanol, etc. The problem here is that catalysts that do this get \"poisoned\" by intermediates or product. \n\nMy general understanding is certain metal surfaces (Cu, Au, etc) can catalyze CO2 into hydrocarbons. But the one intermediate carbonmonoxide (CO) can bind so strongly that forward reactivity is halted, or it binds so weakly that it falls off before further reactivity can occur. And we don't want to make a bunch of CO!\n\nThere is fundamental research currently ongoing that is looking at alloys of metals and non-crystaline metals for this catalysis. The hypothesis is that certain metal surfaces are good at breaking CO2 into CO and others are good at taking CO and making it H2CO or even more complex (and useful) chemicals.\n\nHope this helps a little.",
"to your point about getting rid of carbon dioxide being a generally good thing:\n\nnot really. the less co2 there is in the athmosphere the slower plants grow and the less co2 they get out of the athmosphere themselves because of this. it's like trying to evaporate all the water in the sea, it would just rain more."
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4btgkp | how can most low-end phone have a better processor speed than higher-end laptops? | My younger brother is looking at buying a new smartphone so I've been looking at some possibilities for him. What has amazed me is the sort of processor speeds that most low-end (£100-200) smartphones have compared to a higher-end computers.
For example, I have looked at the Huawei P8 Lite:
1.3 GHz Octa-Core (£99 at Carphone Warehouse)
Sony Xperia M4 Aqua:
1.5 GHz Quad-Core + 1.0 GHz Quad-Core
I understand that these will not reach the potential combined speed of the cores (about 10-11 GHz) due to the lack of 4/8 Core multitasking functionality in mobile apps but still, that potential speed is massive.
Compare this to the processor of my laptop (Toshiba S50-B-15P):
2.40 (3.00 Turbo) GHz Dual-Core
How can my computer run so much faster and cost so much more yet only have a potential maximum speed of 4.8/6 GHz, almost half that of these low-end phones? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4btgkp/eli5_how_can_most_lowend_phone_have_a_better/ | {
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"let me make this music analogy when comparing cpu's of vastly different architectures.\n\n1. cpu speed (aka mhz) is only used to synchronize the various components within a cpu. it is essentially a metronome. a faster or a slower metronome doesn't tell you anything except the beat of the music aka bpm (beats per minute)\n\n2. more cores means more people playing in the band. it doesn't mean they would get more work done or do the work faster. it only tells you how many people there are. what is important here is how skilled the people (cores) are. and that is determined by the cpu architecture. which we don't know.\n\n3. so in order to determine which is the better cpu. we have to have them perform music (aka use a benchmark). in a musical performance, not all members of the band are playing all the time, just like in a benchmark. \n\nso when you go to judge whether a band is good or not, you don't look at their music's bpm, and you don't look at how many people there are. you have them play and you listen (aka running a benchmark). ",
"They are different architectures and run different types of operating systems, they don't compare at all.",
"number of cores and clock speed (GHz) do not necessarily indicate raw processor power. You also cannot add the GHz of multiple cores to get a number that means anything.",
"Previous answers are correct.\n\nThe gigantic cores in a laptop CPU do much more work per GHz, and per core, than the modest cores in a phone CPU. They do this using a range of tricks to ensure that at least one operation -- sometimes two or more -- will be completed nearly every time the clock ticks.",
"There is A LOT of things that are wrong with your statement, but Ill tackle the cores myth:\n\nmore cores =/= more power\n\nyou have one pregnant women, assign that task to 8 women...will they deliver the baby faster? No.\n\n**Lets deliver that baby!**\n\nIn your scenario since you have 1.3GHz(assume 8 cores), we would only use one... one super slow core.\n\nIn your laptop we will use one 2.4GHz(3.0 turbo) core, in this scenario the laptop will be faster.\n\nNot everything is coded to be divided into multiple cores. In reality most programs are run in only one, sometimes 2 cores. (2 is becoming more standard nowadays, while 4 is quite rare)",
"A full explanation is very complicated, but basically GHz is *not* a good way to compare processor speeds unless all kinds of other things are kept constant, and between cell phones and laptops they're *not*.\n\nFirst of all, more cores are not as good as one faster core, so your simple addition is fallacious. They're of some help (which is why they're included at all), in some situations, but it's not linear. As the joke goes \"it takes 9 months to make a baby, no matter how many women are assigned to the the task\". Likewise, more cars won't shorten your daily commute; it's only if you have to transport a lot of people that additional cars are useful.\n\nSecondly, the memory subsystem of the laptop is vastly better than the cell phone. The cell phone's processor is like a race car in city traffic; it can barely get started before it has to stop and wait for something."
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2etedt | what's happening in my head when sound gets drowned out while falling asleep and then a minor disturbance "opens" up my ears? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2etedt/eli5_whats_happening_in_my_head_when_sound_gets/ | {
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"I think your mind slowly blocks out all common noise perceived as safe, and you wake when something unusual is heard",
"Your brain differentiates between expected and unexpected noises. So the hum from the fridge or the music you left on is expected, but broken glass or some other noise is unexpected and your brain wakes you up.",
"No expert but I've read about this before. As your body goes through the 4 stages of sleep (there used to be 5 but two stages were combined recently), you become less aware of your surroundings. The first three stages are part of the NREM sleep (non- rapid eye movement), while the last stage is part of the REM sleep.\n\nNormally, your brain produces fast 'beta' waves, but as you're falling asleep, these waves become 'alpha' waves that are much slower. During this period you can feel strange and vivid sensations. This is when you might experience the feeling of falling, for example. I believe that this particular feeling stems from your organ of balance receiving less/no stimuli.\n\nThen stage 1 begins, during which the brain produces theta waves. These are extremely slow. Stage 1 lasts for about 10 minutes.\n\nStage 2 takes ~20 minutes while your brain has bursts of brain wave activity. These bursts are called 'sleep spindles'.\n\nStage three involves super slow 'delta' waves. During this stage your body is the least responsive of all stages. This is because your senses are very weak in this stage.\n\nThe last stage is the REM stage. This stage involves high brain activity but low muscle activity. This is when dreaming might occur.\n\nThen you wake up. Gotta go now so maybe someone else can further clarify.\n\n**Tl;dr:** A decrease in sensory stimuly weakens your senses. I believe that your hearing is least affected by this.\n\nEdit: alpha < > beta waves",
"What people seem to be saying about unexpected noises is probably a more accurate answer to your question, but I remember learning once that, in terms of words (as opposed to sounds), every word has a \"threshold\" for being noticed. You hear everything within earshot, but your mind filters out sounds that it thinks are unnecessary/irrelevant to the task at hand. This is what happens when you \"tune out\" what people are saying around you. Depending on the threshold of a word, some words get through the filter more easily. It's different for every person, but some examples of low-threshold words are \"fire,\" your own name, or other high risk/high importance words. That means that if you're tuning out everything around you, but someone shouts \"fire,\" then it is much more likely for you to hear it than if someone said \"dog\" (unless dogs are particularly important to you for whatever reason). This effect likely continues during sleep, because if someone is sleeping, they'll wake up faster if you say their name than if you just say normal words. (Fun fact: it is [supposedly] impossible to fall asleep when someone is saying your name repeatedly.)\n\nNot sure if that answered your question at all."
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7w1dua | why is e85 85% ethanol? | What makes that ratio so special? Why not a 50/50 ethanol blend? In fact, why don't they just sell pure ethanol and remove the reliance on petroleum all together? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7w1dua/eli5_why_is_e85_85_ethanol/ | {
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" > What makes that ratio so special?\n\nIt is about as much as every passenger vehicles can take without damaging the engine.\n\n > In fact, why don't they just sell pure ethanol and remove the reliance on petroleum all together?\n\nIn the winter you wouldn't be able to start your car. There are no passenger vehicles designed to take 100% ethanol and the utility of a fuel consumers can't use is pretty low. ",
"E85 has between 51 and 83% ethanol, by law (in the U.S.). Outside of the US it has 85%, and you can get 100% ethanol in some places too, mostly in warm areas.\n\nYou have to mix it because it won't ignite in cold weather without some gasoline - the exact mix of ethanol and gas is often changed depending on where you are (the weather!).",
"Many reasons:\n\n* The higher the ethanol content, the harder the car is to start in the winter.\n\n* Ethanol makes the engine run hotter, which decreases engine life. 85% is a reasonable compromize.\n\n* Ethanol is problematic, in that it dissolves gaskets.\n\n* Ethanol also dissolves oil residue gunk in places where it isn't a problem and deposits it in places where it can be a problem. I lost a petrol engine to that (they also mix some ethanol into the petrol in Sweded), as the oil ducts clogged up and the top seized. I've heard from mechanic friends that this is starting to become a common problem.\n\n* Ethanol is extremely flammable. Petrol, while it burns spectacularly when ignited, is pretty hard to ignite, as it is picky about air/fuel mixture. Not so with ethanol. Ethanol wants nothing more than to go fireball, and will do so even from a tiny spark with a much wider range of air/fuel mixtures. Petrol tames it a bit. This, by the way, is why you can lock the trigger on the handle of a petrol or diesel pump, but not an ethanol pump. If you let go of the handle, static electricity might build up and produce a spark.\n\n* 100% ethanol would be possible to dilute with water and drink, providing a cheap and uncontrolled source of alcohol. Ethanol is the type of alcohol we drink."
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cg6jsu | why are nitrites toxic to tank fish, but nitrates are okay? | I understand my ammonia is toxic to fish, ammonia is toxic to a lot of living things, but what makes nitrite and nitrate so different? The only thing separating them is one oxygen atom. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cg6jsu/eli5_why_are_nitrites_toxic_to_tank_fish_but/ | {
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"That one oxygen atom changes the shape, structure, and function.\n\nFor example Nitrates are used in many fertilizers and explosives. Nitrites are used in food preservation.\n\nNitrates form strong acids and nitrates form weaker acids.\n\nThat one extra oxygen atom in Nitrates makes a huge difference.",
"Kinda of an add on to [Fourtires3rims](_URL_0_):\n\nCO2 is not toxic but CO is toxic. Though there is only one oxygen missing. Well that oxygen changes the shape of the compound and/or its behavior.\n\nSCN is not toxic but CN is why because of the shape. Its shape allows to bond to protein (forgot, sorry) in ETC and thus does not allow your cell to use O2.\n\nThe same applies to NO2 and NO3 also another thing to note is that the charge on NO2 is 2- and NO3 is 3- and this charge difference changes what each of anions bond to."
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2s4ml7 | why is cancer the most common disease associated with dna mutations? | Is such a large part of DNA devoted to guiding cell reproduction that mutations always seem to lead to cancer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s4ml7/eli5why_is_cancer_the_most_common_disease/ | {
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"Of all the things that mutations cause (that is, mutations that happen *after* a person has been born), most of them probably just end up with the mutated DNA getting repaired or removed, or the cell that contains it being destroyed through programmed cell death. Cancer is the result of a mutation that removes the cell's ability to repair or quarantine mutations. It isn't that so much of DNA is devoted to reproduction that any one mutation is likely to damage that section of the DNA. It's that, of all the mutations that happen, the ones that can survive and reproduce are necessarily the ones that alter the normal reproduction/cell death processes (and these are the mutations that cause cancer.)",
"Other mutations exist, but one cell having some odd mutation doesn't do much. Mutations that lead to uncontrolled cell division cause that one cell to become exponentially more cells. ",
"So, with cancer, what is actually happening is a few things.\n\nFirst of all its not just one mutation. Your body mutates constantly, DNA is always messed up, and even then your RNA gets spliced up and you are making faulty proteins all the time. Mutation is actually how things evolve partly.\n\nThe concept with cancer is actually different than just mutation.\n\nThink of a car. If you cut the gas, well it won't move. Sometimes DNA will mutate and your body will find it and won't make it duplicate or be transcribed during transcription.\n\nNow DNA also can actually not be picked up by \"scanners\" when it mutates sometimes. We can call this cutting the breaks. So during transcription lots of crap happens that's not supposed to, and so we just let it go inside the cell and push everything that has been made out of the nucleus to get eaten up by lysosomses (cell stomachs).\n\nNow normally for actually cancer to happen, we need about 5 breaks cut and 10 gas pedals broken. It takes a lot of DNA fuckup to actually cause cancer.\n\nAnd if it does happen, we have this awesome enzyme called p53, which Is actually one GIGANTIC and I mean FUCKING HUGE protein made to just deal with cancer. An about 5000 different enzymes to detect it and stop it.\n\nCells also realize there is cancerous cells and go about trying to kill it, but then if we cut another 5 break lines and another 4 gas pedals in that cancerous cell, it won't tell other cells its cancerous.\n\nAfter that theres a tint threshold were the cell will try to kill itself, but one more break line cut, and that's it.\n\nIts pretty hard for this process to occur. But realize mutations happen like a thousand times a minute, and the \"gas pedals\" and \"break lines\" of DNA replication, transcription, and translation, are happening all the time."
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dbk0mw | why are some drink powders white but then turn a bright/deep shade after adding water | I noticed this happens with a lot or drink mixes mostly red ones. I'm curious how that works. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dbk0mw/eli5_why_are_some_drink_powders_white_but_then/ | {
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"Artificial food coloring is extremely concentrated. A couple of granules, hidden among the white granules that make up most of the drink mix, are all it takes."
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6de844 | how and why are books like the great gatsby and of mice and men chosen for reading in english classes? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6de844/eli5_how_and_why_are_books_like_the_great_gatsby/ | {
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"Considered part of the canon of English literature (heavily read, written about, and esteemed) and are also both accessible, easy, and short compared to many classics.",
"*Finally, my degree is useful for something!*\n\nSo educators are usually really *bad* at explaining why you read the things you read for school. The core concept to grasp here is the *literary canon*: that is, the body of works that are the foundation of [Western] literature. They are the most historically and culturally significant pieces of literature being studied currently. But how do works get added to the canon?\n\nThe surface layer is that they get into the canon because old stuffy [usually white, usually male] scholars *want* to study them, so they do, so it's expected that their students study them, so they do, so it's expected that to prepare for college you have to study them, so you do. It's not like a few Ivy League professors sat down in a dark, smokey room and discussed the future of the literary canon...but also it kind of is like that? Keep in mind, there are multiple \"sub-canons\". There is the American literature canon (featuring Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, Emerson, Faulkner, Hemingway, Whitman, etc.); the British literature canon (Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Jane Austen, etc.), the poetry canon (Frost, Emerson, Whitman, Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare, etc.), the historical foundational canon (Homer, Virgil, *Beowulf*, *Gilgamesh*, etc.), the science fiction canon (Mary Shelley, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, etc.). I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you; the point is that there is *the canon* and then there is \"I'm studying English poetry in the late 1800s, *these* are the people I should be reading\".\n\nWhich then **raises** the question, why do those scholars want to study those works? We have the benefit of hindsight, so *today* we might read Hemingway and [rightly] think he's boring and dry. But at the time his writing style was revolutionary. Before Hemingway, prose was all very *eloquent* and had propensity for verbosity. Hemingway wrote in a short, clean, *different* style. You may not like it, but he made it ok to *not* write in the old, stuffy way that everyone had been writing before him. That's not to say Hemingway was the first, or the best, but he was *good* and he was famous and he showed everyone that you could write in a different fashion. Suddenly everyone was writing in this new minimalist style, which in turn led to other changes in literature that allowed for the kinds of books we read today for fun. Without Hemingway, our literature today would look *very* different. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson did the same thing for poetry. Those are some very specific examples, but I hope they can demonstrate how authors can influence literature, and sometimes they're a part of the canon for those reasons.\n\nThe very old part of the canon is in there for much the same reason, but more in the sense of *inventing literature at all*. Homer's Odyssey is the foundational work for *so much* of western literature. Literally everything you've ever read, **ever**, was influenced by the Odyssey. And Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest great work of literature - the oldest version of That Movie That Everyone Saw. It's the first ever example of real literature, which is kind of a big deal. Studying them can help you understand how storytelling evolved, by showing you how it started. I won't go into too much detail here about what, exactly, you would learn (narrative structure, framing devices...) because I don't need to give you an English lesson, eh? Suffice it to say, there's a lot there to unpack.\n\nSome works are a part of the canon because they're just easy to digest. F. Scott Fitzgerald is fairly easy to analyze and understand on a more abstract level, mostly because all of his symbolism is the same (that is, everything represents the \"unobtainable American Dream\"). It wouldn't do any good to say, \"Here kids, learn how to analyze literature by *analyzing the most difficult literature possible*\". Of course, unfortunately that's often *exactly* what English classes do. It's akin to saying, \"Here kids, let's learn how to do math. Shall we start with calculus? No? Trigonometry then...\" Which is unfortunate, because literature is awesome and there's some really cool stuff to learn...once you learn the tools you need to do it. But I digress.\n\nBut most of the canon boils down to be cultural icons of the time when they were published, or sometimes later when people rediscovered them. They can be both a window into the culture surrounding the person that wrote the works, why they wrote what they did, what symbolism they were using at the time, how they thought and viewed the world; and also a window into how that one piece of literature or author or movement changed the culture they were in, which trickled down to influence our own culture. They can also be ways to understand ourselves by analyzing our own reactions to what we're reading, and the literature in the canon often elicits strong reactions in its readers.\n\nNone of that is to say that the canon is perfect; far from it! I studied English and I hate huge chunks of the canon ([don't even get me started on *Catcher in the Rye*](_URL_0_)). But that's the idea of it: important literature that had a powerful influence on people and the times they were from, which encourages others to study that literature, which is itself a strong reaction that encourages others to study why the first people studied it, etc., so that it continues to have influence and continues to be important literature worth studying. TL;DR: The literary canon is literature that is \"worth studying\".\n\nEDIT: Important thing I totally missed. The literary canon is also supposed to be an introduction to your own national identity. When you so much as watch cartoons you'll be getting [references to cultural icons](_URL_2_). Seriously, as an adult go back and watch Animaniacs (it's on Netflix!) and see how many references you *didn't* get when you were a kid. When you read the American literary canon it's in part teaching you what it means to be an American. It helps build a unifying web of understanding, because when you make a joke about how painting a fence is \"fun\" and someone else laughs, you think *This guy also read Tom Sawyer* and you feel a connection with that person. Enough of those cultural connections help form the glue that is our national identity. It kind of sounds like indoctrination...and it kind of is. And that's not *bad* because it's teaching you about your country and how to be a citizen of that country, which is perfectly fine as long as it doesn't get out of control.\n\nEDIT: Hemingway has one m. I derped *so hard*. Thanks for the guys that caught it. EDIT: and Emerson, dammnit. I am a derp, sorry for the typos. Eventually I'll run out of names to misspell.\n\nEDIT: for the pedants: ~~begs~~ raises\n\nEDIT: Obligatory Thanks for the Gold, but [I think they misspelled Emmerson](_URL_3_). ^^/s\n\nBecause people have been asking: [This is my scifi reviews/essay blog](_URL_1_). The responses have really been really encouraging, so I'm going to try to revitalize it and get to posting there again. If you're into aquariums, [I also have a blog about aquariums](_URL_4_). I do most of my writing on Reddit, though - right here in ELI5!\n\nI have been convinced to reread *Catcher in the Rye* to see if age will give me a better perspective. I stand by my dislike of Hemingway, but if you enjoy him don't let me stop you.\n\n**TL;DR - Like the rest of this comment, the books you are assigned to read in class are probably worth reading for reasons that will be made clear if you read the rest of that book/this comment.**",
"They are easy to teach. \n\nOf Mice and Men is packed full of figurative language and writing tools (metaphors, similes, foreshadowing, imagery, idioms and personification), which is necessary for teaching English and writing. \n\nIt is relatively short so not unreasonable to expect students to be able to read it in full in a short period of time and not expensive to print, relatively speaking. \n\nThere are lots of classic and canon books out there, but they can be too long, or the symbolism is absent or too obscure & complex for high-school teaching. \n\nAlso I love John Steinbeck so don't mind adding that it is genuinely an enjoyable and unpretentious book to read as well. \n\n(I haven't read Gatsby so no idea on that one)",
"Most curriculum cover brit lit, or american lit, which explains certain titles of literature chosen from that time,but most always they choose from classics, specifically from what's called the \"western canon\", a selection thought to heavily shape western civilization.\n\n_URL_0_",
"They choose the books based of Historical/cultural significance and writing quality. Basically all the books you study should be chosen based on some important theme in them - of Mice and Men is about the depression, Gatsby is about the Roaring Twenties and To Kill a Mockingbird is about racism and the Great Depression. This can inform the students about important context (especially Mockingbird) and a 'real connection' often makes books more attractive to study. \n\nThe other reason is that these books are easy to analyse. They are full of symbolism, foreshadowing and the historical context. Books like Frankenstein might be a dry read but it is a goldmine for analysis, and the deeper themes present (social commentary, (possible) homosexuality) means you can go to town on them. It is far easier to study that (and will benefit your skills more) than to go for something more enjoyable and (often) newer - which are often more readable but less deep (or restrictively long). \n\nOf Mice and Men is a really easy text to do analysis in, it's short and full of foreshadowing. Gatsby also has foreshadowing, but also themes of wealth, inequality etc. And some books can be 'read into' easily - that Nick is gay is not specific in the text but many student pick that up and believe it, it gives chances to develop skills simpler books don't have. \n\nThese make then qualify for the studying 'cannon', books like Gatsby and Of Mice and Men are chosen a lot because of the wealth of secondary literature on them, making critical opinion easy to find. ",
"I have taught in South Central LA and I now teach in Urban Indonesia. I have yet to have one student not connect personally to Of Mice and Men. Whether they are in a gang or a billionaire (I've taught both) there is something in there for them. Part of literature and story-telling is that it unites us all. Good stories can transcend time and culture. The mythical Canon is usually made up of books that teachers believe do these things. ",
"First off, my credentials: B.A. in English from UC Santa Barbara, M.A. in Modern Literature from Queen Mary University of London.\n\nJohn Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald are canonical American authors. Period. Full stop. Why? They were best sellers. Why? Because they captured what is known as the \"zeitgeist\" or the 'spirit of the era,' to paraphrase. They also happened to be masters of the novel form. Don't believe me? Read \"East of Eden\" and \"Tender Is the Night.\" Disagree? Go ahead. Write something better. These men wrote what is known as \"the great American novel.\" Who will be next?\n\nYou?\n\nHer?\n\nMe? \n\nWho knows?\n\nBye.",
"They live in the sweet spot for the reading comprehension level in high school. Easy themes, short, secular,\n\nPlus they teach you valuable life lessons. Like wearing a glove full of vaseline to keep your hand soft for your fiance. ",
"Any combination of these:\n\n(a) They're considered classics because people still enjoy them (or find value in them) long after they were published;\n\n(b) They're considered edifying, in that typically they have a strong moral message;\n\n(c) They present a full smorgasbord of things that can be studied, such as strong narrative themes, characterisation, cultural properties, historical interest, and so on. \n\n",
"Books such as Gatsby and OMAM are chosen because they are arguably the most accurate representations of the literary philosophies of their respective time periods. Perhaps the very reason that English classes study books at all is to gain an understanding of the author and his/her perspective, but these so-called classic books give insight to the opinions and values of the masses at the time. For example, Gatsby was written by one of the prime modernist writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was able to really capture the essence of early 20th century America in the novel. Because of this, students can go back and study Gatsby to gain some kind of understanding of what life may have been like during that era and possibly garner some new perspective that can be applied to their own belief systems. ",
"Ooh ooh I got one more for this one. How are graphic stories like \"The Lottery\" allowed for children to read in English/ELA classes? I read that and the lesson was \"somethings were deemed too inappropriate\" and that was it. Had to write a book report on a stoning which could still be very possible just because of the wow factor of the story at the time of its original release, nothing of value was learned from it.",
"When I took an Access to University course I learned so much. We studied a variety of subjects; history, psychology, English literature were my main three; and I found that they all went hand in hand.\n\nWe studied One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest by Ken Kesey, Trumpet by Jackie Kay, the poetry of Maya Angelou, , A Passageway to India and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. We did some Shakespeare and short stories by Roahl Dahl, The Vendetta by Guy de Maupassant, The Veldt by Ray Bradbury, Town and Country Lovers by Nadine Gordimer and poetry by the Brontë sisters.\n\nThis literature is like a snapshot of the time in which it is written. Not only do you learn about the style of writing a great deal, you also pick up knowledge of important events and themes that made me feel more well rounded as an adult. \n\nI wasn't a feminist until I was introduced to the idea through history and literature. I learned about the Suffragettes in History, read literature that illustrated examples of prejudice in action in English Lit, and studied the psychology of discrimination and prejudice in Psychology. \n\nThey expanded my knowledge of Apartheid, mental health before the 60s and how this tied in to women and the idea that both the mentally ill and women were discriminated against and locked away. \n\nI learned about Slavery and Racism, and how that tied in to feminism. And society and class, again showing the oppression of minorities and looking really at the different ways we identify ourselves and others, and how that can make us feel, both good and bad.\n\nAs I learned I realised that not only was this studying helping prepare me to learn at a higher level, I was becoming more well rounded as a person. Knowledge was not the only thing imparted, it shaped me and the way I thought. I learned more about myself on that course than in the whole of my life before it, it showed me ideas that I had never considered before, taught me how to think critically and how to express myself. \n\nWhen I looked back at the literature I studied in high school, I had a much deeper understanding of why I was taught these things. Literature was a vehicle for so much more than words on a page. It helped me to see why I studied, who I was inside, what my values were, what direction I wanted my life to go in and broadened my horizons in life. I wanted to know more about everything. \n\nI've not done my degree yet and it's been a while since I studied so forgive me if I am not entirely clear or have gotten any authors or titles wrong.",
"There are two reasons we read these books: \n\n1. The books are part of a group of well-respected books called \"the canon.\" These are books that over the years scholars have studied again and again until they became \"classic.\"\n\n2. Out of all the books in the canon, some are easier to teach because they are more obvious in their use of literary devices (tools writers use to make their points). The Great Gatsby, for example, uses metaphors and symbolism all over the place. They're easy to point out and kids get a quick win when they recognize them. \n\nMost high school reading fulfills both of these criteria. Occasionally you'll see teachers pick books that aren't classic but have a literary device they want to teach, or you'll see books from the canon that are harder to teach but important to learn (some Shakespeare). But you'll seldom see some of the denser or more ambiguous books in the canon: I've yet to see a high school teacher try to teach Ulysses. \n\nEdit: TIL that plenty of high schools were way cooler than my kinda crappy backwater public school and taught Joyce's Ulysses. Color me jealous. ",
"Because books like these contain many levels and layers of meaning to reflect upon. Some of those layers will be noticed by teenagers, perhaps some mostly by adults, and perhaps even some only to senior citizens. As a reader grows, evolves, and gains life experience there are new ways to look at them in addition to the teenage ways. This is why \"old, stuffy, white, or male\" readers might consider them worth rereading in the first place. If there was something about the books that continued to resonate with those readers, then that value will be available for the following generations of readers. In short, the books of the 1920's that did NOT resonate with teenage readers of subsequent generations aren't being taught in English classes. Likewise, books written in 2017 that do not resonate with subsequent generations will NOT be taught in English classes in the beginning of the 22nd century (regardless of the race or gender of the author.) It takes a long time to realize this.",
"Classics in American literature are chosen because the story or the hero reflects an important part of U.S. culture, ideals, or history.",
"Haha! Finally MY degree is useful here. I am a special education teacher and teach middle school high functioning autism. I also happen to teach for a cooperative, mrsningy (edit: most of my) students come from all around the area, covering multiple school districts each with their own set of expectations for student growth. I'm basically told each year \"figure something out\".\n\nNow this would be golden for most teachers who hate teaching from a required script but since I deal with students who hate school by the time they get to me, it can get tough. I'm also a veteran teacher so my admins just figure I know what I'm doing (sometimes I do sometimes I don't). I'm given a budget each year and expected to field an entire curriculum from that.\n\nAbout 4 year ago I decided that having them read science fiction and fantasy books is over. They prefer that type of story because it's more fun to read, but I hate Harry Potter and the hunger games by now, so I decided to find books that would challenge them. We now read classics iny classroom like \"Of Mice and Men\" and 'Huck Finn\", books that have far deeper meaning than anything they would ever read on their own, and books that even most middle school teachers avoid. \n\nSo for my experience, we read those books because I want them to. \n\nEdit: We read Percy Jackson each year because I can tie in Greek history and they get a kick out of that. We do read plenty of books they enjoy but I HAVE to expose them to historical literature or \"classics\" such as The Outsiders which most may not consider a classic yet. Most of my students come to me because their home schools have given up on them and can't figure out how to teach them. I have a specialized classroom designed for their needs and while it is a relaxing place I force them to challenge themselves and at times the work is far tougher than in their home school because I do have that easier environment to learn in. But they all come out better people because of it. If I don't they won't be prepared for high school and I have yet to have a student not finish a book and love it after six years in this group. Yes it's hard and yes they fight at first but once we see in there I see the light in their eyes and I know I have them hooked.",
"As an English teacher - they're the only books the school has copies of so we get to read them. Specially true with Shakespeare. O I love him but I don't love Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer's Night Dream. I'd love to read a winter's tale or richard III. Or even a play by a different author from the same time like The Roaring Girl which is about a girl who dresses like a man and had sword fights. But the schools can't afford new books.",
"As an English Lit grad, high school teacher and college prof, I love this post and all the discussion, passion and debate.\n\nHarold Bloom offers us his version of a western canon of 26 works and explains why they should be part of the canon.\n_URL_1_\n\nAlthough Bloom does not ELI5, it does offer us a succinct list. But it also points out that anyone can make their own canon. Although Bloom is not just anyone in scholarly circles.\nHe also makes explicit that his is a \"Western\" canon. Other canons exist, either by geography or by theme, style, gender, period, language etc. The number of canons could be endless.\n\nAn author that tops my canon is Milan Kundera, and my favourite is \"Immortality\".\nb p nichol is my favourite poet. So playful and free!\nNot sure if these make my canon, but I love reading Vonnegut, Hunter S Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk. \nI couldn't wait to share each new Harry Potter novel with my son and loved how so many of my students got turned on to reading by J K Rowling.\nWas about to submit, but can't without adding Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and even the Ender's Game series although I choke a little when I think about its author's religious and moral beliefs.\n\nKeep reading and enjoying literature!\nWho is in your canon or canons?\n\nedit: replaced book cover with blurry angel butt with alternative edition\n \n _URL_0_ ",
"So my wife is an English teacher and she is going through the process to pick out her books for next school year right now. The teachers are limited by a number of factors. \n\nTo start, they are limited by school funding and student fees. My wife's school won't let her spend more than $12 worth of books per student, she since teaches in a poor rural Ohio school district. Because of this limit, she can only spend $3-4 per book. That limits her to only the mass market books. In truth, she wants to branch out to do different, more modern works, but just buying one would blow her entire budget and leave her without enough materials to stretch out through the entire school year. \n\nSecond, she has to choose books that fit into her student reading levels. They use lexile ranges, which are a way to measure reading levels. Lexile ranges don't necessarily correlate with grade level. She teaches 9th and 10th grades and she has students reading between 2nd and 12th grade reading levels. How does she choose novels that fit for all of them? She can't. \n\nThird, she has to deal with the administrators. Some of the administrators are very opinionated about what books are taught. \"To Kill A Mocking fits with what the 10th graders are learning in social studies, so I want to you teach that to your sophomores.\" The administrators are also much more difficult to convince the value of some of these more modern and innovative books she wants to teach. \n\nSo between all of these factors, my wife only has a handful of books to choose from. So you know what she ends up having to order? The old standards. In some cases, she doesn't mind, but she is definitely annoyed by how little room choice she has in the selections. ",
"I remember having this same thought in school while reading one of the many short storya out of the big litarature text books. Always being asked to reflectand find meaning in the stories. I always missed the big obvious morals and made up my own whimsicle reflection.",
"here is an alternate view of why\n\nBecause some pretentious people in the past, that invented fictitious reasons why the books were awesome, told younger people that these books were awesome...and being young some of them believed the pretentious people knew wtf they were talking about. They in turn got into positions of authority and regurgitated the same crap to more future young people. \n\nNow we and our children and our children's children are stuck reading the same boring books because some a-hole 60+ years ago thought they manufactured some hidden meaning or lesson from something that was just a book.\n\nthis is the same principle behind rich people pretending that caviar and pâté actually taste good....when in reality they both taste like crap",
"The fact that they are short is more important than it should be. There are other reasons, but short makes books a lot easier to teach. ",
"Books like 1984 or similar things are read in school usually to help teach critical thinking and logic.",
"The \"great books\" don't always cover deep topics but also are considered benchmarks in the use of language. My favorite example is Moby Dick. As a book it's frankly boring, but open it to any random page and read any random paragraph and it's just perfect. Somehow Melville wrote an 800+ page epic in which every piece of it reads like poetry. Ditto Shakespeare.\n",
"It's important that kids know what great literature is, even if it's \"forced\" on them. They may not like it when reading it at first but at least they get to know that there is more to literature than Harry Potter and the likes.\n\nIt's like when I was younger I was exposed to all that great music from my parents all the time. Even if I didn't like it and preferred my own modern music at the time, it gave me a sense of what music could be. As I got older, I learned to appreciate great classic music and different genres which I might not have developed if it wasn't for my exposure to it when I was younger.",
"I'm a high school teacher. I teach those books because I like them. Many people who are extremely uninformed about education standards will tell you that I have to follow some formula or series of worksheets, but in reality the English standards can be easily applied to any book as long as they aren't commercial fiction. I enjoyed those books, so I get to force students to read things I like. I'm definitely not about to spend 40 weeks a year trudging through books I hate. It's hard enough to get students to do and enjoy reading, not liking the book yourself just makes it harder. ",
"I don't know, All I remember is that in secondary 5 (Quebec french school) I had to read \"Des souris et des hommes\" in french class and \"Les miserâb\" in english litterature at the same time... a whole semester hearing \"Jean Valjean\" in english when 100% of the students were native french speakers. Teachers do whatever they want I think.",
"When teachers see those books they think: -\n\nOh, what a cute little book. Just what I always wanted. My own little book. I will name him George, and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him and pat him and pet him and rub him and caress him and...",
"what I never understood is why we were forced to read Shakespeare. I had so many teachers who hated it. When you're 14 years old in ninth grade, even the spark notes version doesn't really make sense. What they should really do is strength your ability to write, so you don't end up like all the college kids in my classes who still didn't know how to use a semicolon\n\nthey focused way way too much on expository writing. They should be teaching research based more, learning how to get the facts. Technical is good too, and creative writing is a really good way to expand your mind.\n\nour public education system in America is lacking, a great example is how it is heavily based too much in the past. The world changes and so should the way we teach. The fact that not a single class I ever took in public school history went beyond the Cold War means they really don't give a shit. How are we supposed to focus on changing the future if you don't teach your kids what happened in the past 30 years, but rather what happened 600 years ago. I had three classes on the French revolution but never once learned about the Vietnam war or first or second Gulf Wars\n\nPublic education in the USA in 99% garbage. You want our kids to be successful, so you teach them nothing and then blame them for incompetence. Fuck the baby boomer generation",
"Dale Carnegie once said that when he goes fishing, he doesnt use strawberries and cream as bait, but worms. Now he can never understand what fish find so appealing about worms, but then again, he doesnt have to.\n\nSo to answer your question, schools are fishing (teaching) with strawberries and cream (literary classics) and wondering why the fish (students) arent biting (reading).\n\nIm sure the denizens of this subreddit will downvote me to death, which is fine, but remember, teaching is about relating to the student more than getting the student to relate to you. ",
"Ill pitch in because Im an English teacher. Usually the books we read in class are determined by what we have available in storage. There isn't a big annual budget for new books so we work with what we have. Shitty answer but true. I cant ask my students to buy their own books so short of the cost coming out of my pocket, my hands are tied.",
"Possibly because they are great books, they challange students and deal with important political and moral issues that we often still deal with today. Like acceptance and stuff like that. That's my opinion anyways. Could be wrong. :)",
"As a professional writer, subjecting students to the classics before they have a baseline enjoyment of the act of reading fiction really chafes me. I think a LOT of young readers are permanently turned off of prose fiction because of stuffy, obtuse, irrelevant shit they were forced to read in high school.",
"I'm probably too late for this shindig, but there's an important component I see many people missing, and this is, in my view, the most important reason we read books like Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice.\n\nYes, part of the answer here is the 'canon', i.e. there's a (possibly arbitrary) group of central texts chosen by old white dudes with Oedipus complexes. Look at other comments for answers about the canon.\n\nNow, I have a problem with the 'canon' answer because it's overly simplified, and is often used as a false comfort. 'The Canon' is the answer people want to hear if they don't understand why they're being made to read *The Great Gatsby*. That is, if you're just bored by *The Great Gatsby*, it's comforting to say, \"Well, some boring old white dudes arbitrarily decided I should read this when really it's just boring drivel that has no relevance to modern life and that's Fitzgerald's fault, not mine, let's move on to Harry Potter. Fuck the canon, it's racist.\" (The canon is, indeed, pretty racist, but let's move on)\n\n**Something I don't see people talking about, however, is literary tradition, which I see as the more significant reason to read writers like Fitzgerald and Steinbeck.**\n\nTo explain: writers read each other. Whom writers read and whom writers like will impact their own work. Toni Morrison's *Beloved* is illuminated if, afterwards, you read Faulkner. Morrison wrote a Ph.D. on Faulkner for cryin' out loud. That doesn't mean you can't read *Beloved* without *As I Lay Dying*; it simply means Beloved will be a different, and more interesting book if you do. You can't fully appreciate J.G. Ballard unless you also understand Joseph Conrad. J.G. Ballard is basically using the exact same metaphors as Conrad, just updated and less racist. He's admitted as such. If you read Virginia Woolf before you read Ursula K. Le Guin, you'll be amazed by the connections you'll make. The texts dance with each other. It doesn't matter that Le Guin writes Science Fiction and Woolf writes in the mode of Modernism--Le Guin has been heavily influenced by Woolf, and reading the two together is very enlightening.\n\nAnd then come the two giants of them all: Shakespeare and The Bible. Look, you can read literature without having read any Shakespeare or any of the Bible, but that doesn't mean you'll be erasing the ginormous impact these works have had on literature. In the most fundamental ways, the language of The Bible has seeped into the entire umbrella of English literature. Even if you don't know it as a writer, you're either adopting the ways The Bible uses words, or rebelling against it. No matter what, you're always responding to it. It doesn't even need to be purposeful on your part.\n\nSo, yes, there's an aspect of 'the canon', but the canon wasn't just chosen by stuffy old white men. It was also chosen by writers, and a writer worth their salt will have read from the canon, and will know what interests them, and what they think is missing. To track this progression can give us insight into the way dialogues in our culture develop. It isn't arbitrary that Toni Morrison is following in Faulkner's footsteps, and it certainly isn't because some old white dudes told her to and that was that.\n\nPart of the issue is that high school students don't necessarily have the perspective available to approach some of these texts, and it's often in high school where these texts are read. For example, what does an expedition down the misty Congo river have to offer to someone going into engineering, or politics, or environmental science? I think the reason a book like Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* evades us is because books like it are often taught in the wrong way.\n\nHere are some ways to rethink some of the writers you didn't appreciate in high school:\n\n**Jane Austen** is the Lena Dunham of Gentry Era fiction. She's a ruthlessly observational genius filled with radical ideas about women and romance. She's totally brutal, too. A good high school teacher will guide you to see how fucking hilarious Jane Austen is. She's a bitch, and she knows it, and she doesn't care. For example, There's a whole section in Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Bingley attempts to justify his bad handwriting by arguing that he's just really smart and thinks too quickly. Austen writes this dialogue so perfectly, so cunningly that, in the end, her character Elizabeth totally brings Mr. Bingley down to size. We've all met people like Mr. Bingley, is the thing. However, if you don't understand how Austen's humor works, it could come off as simply gentle banter. Furthermore, her legacy is still felt today.\n\n**Joseph Conrad** fathered (or at least perfected) a certain kind of thinking. His works combine intense societal critiques through the power of individual consciousness. Basically, he's one of the original \"the personal is the political\". Even if you don't like *Heart of Darkness*, you're never escaping its impact (which has been followed by many great socialist thinkers btw).\n\n**Mark Twain** basically created American literature. It was mostly very puritan before he came along to satirize the moralization and piety of American literature coming before him. There's no way in hell that some stuffy white men facilitated this. American writers like John Steinbeck, Faulkner, Don Delillo and I'd even argue Bret Easton Ellis have all learned lessons from Mark Twain. His lasting impression isn't because a couple of Harvard deans standing around in a room smoking cigars suddenly decided he's interesting. It's because he's a great writer, and writers after him have either copied him or tried to repurpose his techniques.\n\n **Shakespeare** literally somehow captured and predicted every single literary movement that has happened and probably will ever happen. If you feel a certain way, Shakespeare has written about it. If you don't like Shakespeare, it isn't because you're right. It's because you didn't have a good professor to guide you. I know that may make you feel insecure. How could one dude be so amazing? Well, he was, and you need to deal with it. Shakespeare is the only writer I can say this about with absolute confidence. With the proper introduction, he's one of the most fascinating writers (if not *the* most). But he absolutely needs a guide.\n\nThis goes into the very purpose of literature, which is this: if we want political progress, scientific progress, mathematical progress, we need to know how to redefine our own personal vocabularies. All great writers have, in some way or another, reinvigorated or dismantled the old cliches of their times to document the cultural, intellectual, and psychic changes they observed. Writers give us language we can use to explore our experiences, and reading in terms of a tradition helps us see how languages and conversations develop.\n\nIf you want to dismantle the cliches of conservative America, or SJW liberals, or Orthodox Christians, it helps tremendously to see how geniuses have done so in their own contexts.",
"I have a BA and MA in English Lit, and I am currently studying to be a high school English teacher. I have been asking myself the same question as I try to figure out what I will be able, or required, to teach.\nI think there are three aspects to your question. I will address each briefly, sharing what I have learned so far in my own research. \n\n1. Why are books like Of Mice and Men and the Great Gatsby taught instead of other kinds of easier, more interesting books, like science fiction, fantasy, young adult fiction, or popular novels like mysteries or thrillers? This question is relatively easy to answer-literary merit and textual complexity. In ELI5 terms, the books are great but hard. Many posts have already addressed the issue of “greatness” (literary merit), and the issue of “difficulty” (textual complexity) has also been mentioned, and I don't really have anything to add. If you are interested in learning more about this aspect of your question, I recommend reading the [Common Core Standards for English Language Arts](_URL_2_), which also provides a list of “sample” books for high school English classes.\n\n2. Why are books like Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby commonly chosen, instead of other books that are just as great, and just as hard? This question is harder to answer, and, in my opinion, more interesting. It seems that there are a small number of books and writers commonly taught across the country-Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Angelou, etc. Yet there are hundreds of other writers and thousands (tens of thousands) of other books that are just as great, and just as hard. California alone has identified [421 “recommended” books](_URL_0_.) that can be taught in CA high school English classes, many of which I have never heard of. I think a lot of this has to do with force of habit-one generation decides these books should be taught, so the next generation believes that these are the books that should be taught, which leads to them teaching these books to the third generation, and so on. The novelist Francine Prose makes this argument in her essay [I Know Why the Caged Bird Can’t Read](_URL_1_)(She also argues that many commonly-taught books, like Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, are not that great and should not be taught.).\n\n3. The \"how\" part of your question-what is the process by which books like Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby are chosen for high school English classes? Many posts have talked about this already. I would only add that it seems many schools use “anthologies,” (textbooks that contain poems, short stories, plays, and novels, as well as questions and assignments), and that teachers have to teach the books in the anthologies. Of course, this raises the question of why publishers include certain books in the anthologies, and why schools choose certain anthologies. These are also interesting questions. Unfortunately, I have little to share here. I will, however, predict that high schools will more and more end up teaching the same small number of writers and books because of the Common Core educational standards. The Common Core standards identify a small number of “sample” books that meet the standards, and I predict publishers will end up including these books in their anthologies, with the result that these books will end up being taught in public schools everywhere. For all I know, this is happening already. (It is also possible publishers will try to be different by choosing different books. I hope this turns out to be the case.) \nEdited for formatting.",
"Easiest TLDR I can think of for this:\n\nYou know how stories always reference other stories? Like when the Simpsons references Rocky 5 or something?\n\n\"The Canon\" in any kind of literature are the books that all the other books reference back to. So \"The Great Gatsby\" is important beacuse almost every other book about \"the american dream\" that was made afterwards contains some kind of allusion back to that book. Shakespeare matters because later plays all referenced back to Shakespeare. Frankenstein matters because every story afterwards about \"science gone mad\" references back to it. Every fantasy novel references back to \"Lord of the Rings\", which itself references back to \"Beowulf\" and similar legends. \n\nIt's not universal or automatic, and there's always debate about which ones count, but usually books are chosen because of their importance on that level. ",
"Follow up question: How do we benefit from Shakespeare? The language within his work is a fantasy language based of a dialect of English that's been dead for more than 2 centuries. On top of that nothing in any of the stories I read taught me anything along the lines of morals or even proper story structure. They were just a giant mess of random problems and solutions that seemed extremely pointless.\n\nNot to mention characters lacked any depth whatsoever and their intent was usually apparent within their first scene.",
"Of course the answers from English teachers are multiple paragraphs long that could be summed up in just a few sentences. ",
"Look up \"literary merit.\" Certain works of literature express literary merit usually because a number of scholars can identify profound significance (ie beyond being a good story). Whether it actually exists is another matter.\n\nOf course, this assumes a five year old can use Google.",
"One factor that I haven't seen mentioned (though hinted at): a book that is public domain usually costs ten times less than a book that is still under copyright.\n\nThis means that there is also a substantial *practical* reason why many schools will restrict their classroom supplies to older works.\n\n(There is also perhaps an additional angle that it is presumably more difficult for a work to enter the canon when it is still under copyright because people are not so free to share it or reimagine it or rework it or recast it. Whenever its nature of being private-property conflicts with its nature of being culture, its nature as private-property often has legal priority.)",
"And when will we start having useful ones chosen that will help with adulting?",
"We had to read Fahrenheit 451 in eighth grade (I was 13) and it seriously changed a lot of my opinions and beliefs. I got super involved in class while we were reading it. Then I read The Great Gatsby when I was 15, which I also fell in love with. These classes helped me appreciate books besides teen fiction. So I'm pretty glad I was forced to read these classics. ",
"Both are great books. Personally, I enjoyed reading them in my English classes. We also read To Kill A Mocking Bird, Lord of The Flies, The Odyssey, and Huck Finn which I think are great books as well. The way I see it, reading these books not only challenge students but also exposes them to different genres of story telling aside from Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc.",
"Circling the wagons and protecting the narrative. \n\nLike if you had engineers teach English they'd cover comic books and manga. ",
"I'm super late to this, but can someone tell me what are the reading requirements in American high schools? \n\nI know it differs according to the teacher or school, but I'd just like to get some examples of reading lists. I'm from Europe and every year we got a list of books we were required to read. It was a mix of national literature classics and world literature classics. I'm wondering how similar are our lists to American and other lists around the world."
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"https://harpers.org/blog/2015/07/i-know-why-the-caged-bird-cannot-read/",
"http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/"
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r1ka1 | sarcasm and irony | I have a hard time discerning those two. Aren't they basically the same? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r1ka1/eli5_sarcasm_and_irony/ | {
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"Irony: \nThe use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning or an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected.\n\nSarcasm: A sharply ironical taunt; sneering or cutting remark\n\nSo sarcasm is an ironical remark used to taunt someone.\n\n[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)",
"Thanks everyone! It was very helpful!"
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6rgvis | how come after only a couple days of not working out, i feel and look like i'm not in good shape anymore? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6rgvis/eli5_how_come_after_only_a_couple_days_of_not/ | {
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"It takes a lot of energy to maintain muscle mass. If you aren't using it your body thinks it's better off \"eating\" it. Bodies are built for survival, not peak performance.",
"It's honestly a mental thing. If you think you look/feel good, then you will (if you're pretty healthy). I know that I feel like I'm in a funk when I don't work out for a few days. It's all in my head, though. ",
"Endorphins post workout can help boost your self-esteem and may help you feel better about your body image. Those effects can wear off after some time if you don't continue to work out. Relatively to how you felt before, you may not feel as great. ",
"Our body gets used to stretching it's muscles and having blood flow at an increased rate. After a couple of days of not working out we may feel out of shape because our body is craving exercise. We may also look slightly less bulky since we aren't pumping blood at an increased rate, but it is mostly all in our head. ",
"Its all in your head, trust me. Thats the mentality with working out is you feel you havs to keep pushing and you should always go to bed with sore arms/legs/chest or whatever you just trained, otherwise youll miss out.\n\nIf youre training for mass, youll find your muscles do take a fair while to deteriorate due to inactivity. Like up to 2 months IIRC. But your strength will decrease faster no doubt. Rest is healthy for gains but you cant do it too much or else your body will get too comfortable and soften up.\n\nConsequently thinking you look worse for missing a week or so is a mental state you enter due to feeling lazy and sluggish.\n\nTl:dr its all in your head."
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7j9st6 | how and why exactly does anxiety affect your whole body? (eg. digestive system, feeling cold, etc) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7j9st6/eli5_how_and_why_exactly_does_anxiety_affect_your/ | {
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"Stress causes your adrenal glands to release adrenaline which causes a wide range of physical symptoms. ",
"Anxiety evolved to deal with threats, so the body can respond accordingly. A lot of the physical symptoms are related to the hormones released to prepare your body to fight or flee. The reason you get digestive symptoms is because the hormones restrict blood flow to your digestive system, so there is more blood available for your muscles and other organs to use. Feeling cold is explained by blood vessels near your skin constricting to divert more blood to muscles and other important organs.",
"For anyone with anxiety problems I recommend this Ted Talks video, it’s very informative and might really help!: \n\n_URL_0_\n\n"
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42asda | why do politicians owe favors to their donors? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42asda/eli5_why_do_politicians_owe_favors_to_their_donors/ | {
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"Let's look at it at a \"before presidency thing\", first. To get to that point you have held one office or another multiple times. You would not have gotten past the first if you were known not to \"repay favours\", as you would get no donors the second time. Now, to the presidency. Let's assume you decide \"OK, I'm here, no more sucking up\". Can you get any work done? Not really because EVERYONE else needs to still suck up to those campaign funds. So you get nothing done and when your one term is over you find no jobs waiting for you on the other side. \n \nAs for evidence? It is hard to tell. Being able to \"follow the money\" in a lot of cases is difficult, although others are less so. ",
"The concept is relatively simple, you're running for election and company X likes your stance on one or more policies, so they bung you some money to help your campaign. You win, work to enact the policies you want and company X is happy.\n\nRe-election is coming up and you need money to fund your campaign, but this time company X wants something that your constituents aren't so fond of, but if you support it they'll bung you another briefcase of money for your campaign. If you don't come out in support of it however they might go talk to the guy running against you and see if he'll be interested in a briefcase of money, something that's clearly not good for you. Clearly money is changing hands in exchange for policy support in this scenario but it's not always that obvious - until someone comes out for or against something it can be hard to pin down exactly what their position might be (and therefore whether they have changed position in response to something), and so it might look like they're in favour of something that just happens to align with the goals of one or more of their contributors. \n"
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333omt | why do planes take what seems like huge detours instead of straight lines to the destination? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/333omt/eli5_why_do_planes_take_what_seems_like_huge/ | {
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"The flightpath of the plane looks curved on a flat map, but since the planet is curved that line is actually the shortest path.",
"Airplanes take [Great Circle paths](_URL_1_), the shortest distance between two points on a globe, effectively a straight line. And when you look at the globe, they do look like straight lines. But when you flatten the globe into a map, [they get distorted](_URL_0_)",
"A straight line on the surface of a sphere looks curved when you flatten the sphere out. \n\nA clearer example maybe - ever seen [a picture like this?](_URL_0_) That's what the orbit of a satellite looks like when flattened out onto a map. ",
"They also seek out wind, ie jet streams etc. Picking up the jet stream can reduce actual flying time and increase fuel savings. A line between two points isn't exactly the shortest route. \n\nImagine you had to cross a field to get to a certain point on the other side, sure, the shortest route might be straight across the field, and the longest might be walking around the edge. Now for the 'what ifs'. \n\nWhat if I told you that the field had a hill, bushes, scrub and a drain in the middle, but around the outside it was a concrete footpath, which might be quicker then. It is exactly the same for aircraft. the straight line might look quicker, but there might be hills/mountains in the way that adversely affect weather conditions. There could be a military no fly zone in between. \n\nWhen you are flying into and out of Melbourne, AU northward. you tend to come through a cutting, all air traffic is filtered through this cutting, otherwise any traffic heading towards Sydney has to deal with issues over the Great Dividing Range which impact weather systems etc. ",
"1. To catch wind or jet stream to conserve fuel and more speed. \n2. Avoid crashes and military.\n3. In a sphere for planes it's sometimes faster based on rotation of planet. Exp: from Europe to US some will go near arctic and go across there because it's a small horizontal flight then and they avoid the most of earth's rotation.",
"As someone very much in the know in the aviation industry, there's a few factors:\n \n \n1: Weather. Planes don't like flying through storms, and they also dodge areas of turbulence so passengers get a more comfortable ride. \n \n \n2. Air traffic have routes for aircraft to follow to dodge military airspace, and for a more efficient flow in and out of high volume areas. Why did you have to fly in a big circle around the city? Because there were a lot of other planes landing and taking off coming and going in all directions and that was the safest and fastest way for you to get to the runway.\n \n \nIf you're interested feel free to bombard me with questions. However I will do my best to answer them in such a way as to not give away my occupation ;)",
"Even though modern GPS allows planes to travel point to point airlines still file flight plans that are based on \"roads in the sky.\" Over land planes fly routes based on ground transmitters that form airways. Over the ocean planes file routes that allow traffic to flow all together. This prevents crossing traffic at the same altitude. ",
"Because the map you're looking at is flat, but the Earth is actually spherical.\n\nAirplanes fly on, or close to, great circle lines, which are geodesics (shortest possible lines) across the Earth's surface. If you viewed the Earth from directly above a great circle line, it would look straight. However, when you look at it from any other angle, it curves with the Earth; and if you try to project it onto a flat map, it tends to end up looking curved because the corresponding points between the Earth and the map don't match up in a way that preserves 'straight' lines. This is also the reason why, for instance, Greenland looks so big on a world map.",
"To travel from one place to another on the ground, you take roads. Some of those roads will be one way lanes, some roads will cross each others. When there is bad weather some roads will be flooded and wont be available. When there is construction work, some roads will not be available either. The same is true for the sky. Planes travel on imaginary roads, and will avoid lanes affected by bad weather, or 'construction works' (war affected countries, military exercises, really busy lanes]. The traffic police [air traffic control] might also choose to send you on a different road, one that is not as busy.",
"In short, because you are squishing and stretching a round Earth onto a flat map, paths get distorted too. Also, sometimes you have to follow traffic, like a highway in the sky, or turn to go around weather. At the end, you have get in line with the other planes, and point down the runway in the correct direction.\n\nI'm actually unclear with what you mean in your question about \"huge detours\", so I'm assuming you asking about the main part of a long distance trip and why on a map the path appears curved? Let's use Los Angeles to Tokyo as an example.\n\nHere is the path for ANA 5 on April 18: _URL_2_ compared to _URL_4_\n\nYou can check this yourself with a globe (or any large enough ball, like a soccer ball or basketball) and a piece of string. If you want to go from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from just a regular map it looks like you'd want to go straight west across the Pacific, right? Take your string and put it on those points, set the string along that east-west line in the Pacific, and then pull on the string until it's tighter. The line will go north towards the North Pole.\n\nMore on the great circle stuff can be found here: _URL_1_ \n\nBut that's if you were the only airplane in the sky, and a lot of other simplifications (such as how far you can go away from an airport you can divert to if one of your two engines fails). For all the transatlantic flights, there are the [North Atlantic Tracks](_URL_0_) that are published every day depending on the wind. This is to make the flights go faster and burn less fuel by avoiding headwinds and favoring tailwinds.\n\nIn busier airspace you might have defined navigational waypoints that all planes follow from one region to another. _URL_5_\n\nFurther reading: _URL_3_",
"Because flying over certain countries will get your plane shot out of the sky quicker than you can say \"allahu ak--\" you're dead.\n\nAlso, states and stuff have no fly zones for security that mandate circumnavigation. ",
"One item here that might have been mised. An aircraft fueling up in NYC has to pay tax for all that fuel. If they burn it over international waters or say Canada/Mexico they can file for a tax refund for the fuel expense outside of the country of purchase. Business are built on this; calculating flight plans and processing the tax return for say Delta, Dragon Air, etc.\n\nThis might make an aircraft traveling from Florida to Canada take a detour to international waters for the haul up.\n\nFiling up a 777 is costly.",
"When i travelled to thailand we had to fly around iran. They arent fans of commercial planes using their airspace.",
"I believe I watched something saying it was to do with the rotation of the earth and also weather in short.",
"Many of the above answers are correct. I wanted to include an example. Emirates flight EK226 flies from San Francisco to Dubai. It will take a detour around Ukraine:\n\nTo the north and east: _URL_1_\n\nTo the south and west: _URL_0_\n\nThe plane will fly over Iran rather than Iraq (active military area). ",
"Hi, \n\n < atc guy\n\nThey have highways in the sky. Shit would get ugly quick if everyone just went where they wanted. Think if we didnt have stop signs or stoplights or roads even but we all had cars still.",
"Air traffic controller here. Basically there are navaids that give a radial (360°) and DME (distance measuring equipment) to an aircraft. Utilizing this, we have fixes mapped out in the sky at a specific radial and DME that can connect to each other much like planning out a long distance trip in a car. On top of that we have jet routs and victor routs that start at certain navaids going out at a certain radial, much like highways in the sky. This helps keep things organized in the sky along with altitude restrictions that we use to keep separation between aircraft. These are IFR, (instrument flight rules) and are used by anyone from aircarriers ie. Delta, American Airlines etc. to anyone trying to get from point A to point B in a safe, expeditious manner. ",
"Everyone seems to forget the reason we fly waypoints and not direct routes is so you can fly fixed headings. Sure there are reasons for traffic, weather etc, but forget great circles and projections etc. Planes fly way points that map the most direct route possible with out requiring the constant heading changes. To fly the most direct route would be require infinite heading changes to compensate for the curvature of the earth.\n\nIt would be easy to fly direct if the earth was flat!\n\nEDIT, Just to clarify. The only place you can fly a great circle without constant heading changes is the equator. If you fly from north to south, each time you pass over the poles, your compass would swing from north to south. Any angle between the poles and the equator means the compass will change to follow magnetic north.",
"Most of the answers in here are wrong.\n\nContrary to popular beliefs, airplanes have their own \"roads.\" We call them \"airways\". Duh. [Pics](_URL_0_)\n\nThe first picture is a simplified version of a \"chart.\" A chart is what pilots are given prior to flying. (pilot redditors, correct me if I'm wrong) It also includes other information as well, eg. fuel weight, passenger number, cargo weight, weather, etc.\n\nBack to the first pic, notice the small triangles? Those are called waypoints. They are mostly imaginary points, same with the airways, but some could be a real landmark and such. \n\nHow do pilots remember all of this? They don't. They type it (the waypoints) into an MCDU (a computer basically) prior to flight, then they set it to auto pilot. Bam! You've arrived at your destination. Easy right? You would think that wouldn't you. As you may see in a cockpit, there are so many things pilots need to know. Computers only help with the mundane and repetitive tasks. tl;dr piloting is hard. \n\nEdit: I didn't quite answer the question. Basically to avoid weather and/or air traffic. ~~ATCs (Air Traffic Controllers) will have a hard time if planes fly however they want and where ever they want to. Waypoints and airways help organize air traffic. Imagine a ten lanes highway without road traffic markings. Won't be good for your health.~~\n\nEdit2: word",
"Many have answered your question assuming you were talking about the curvature of the earth. I think this question is often asked more when you look at airliners flight plans, and where they are flying. The simple answer is that airways are defined to allows for the smooth, uninterrupted flow of traffic. This allows for easier traffic separation, and terrain avoidance. Far easier to guarantee than if all traffic was a free for all.\n\nIn the US, there are two sets of flight rules, visual (VFR) and instrument (IFR). All airliners use the IFR system, in which separation services are provided by air traffic control. The FAA defines these routes, and it is expected if you file an instrument flight plan that you use them. If you look at this [website here](_URL_0_) you can see the airways for yourself. If you have planes flying defined routes, you only need to worry about intersections of these routes to ensure separation. If planes are flying direct (which is a possibility when ATC allows for it) you need to worry about traffic separation at all times.\n\nA flight from Boston to NYC for example, may take the form of [this.](_URL_1_) When you are talking about longer distances, you try to keep it as straight as possible when planning, however following airways causes you to sometimes have to deviate, especially in areas where no airway may be defined in the direction of your flight. These may be the detours you are seeing.",
"Planes fly over the North Pole or South Pole, depending on where it starts and where it's going, because the earth's roundness means travelling over a straight line would take longer, and going to the top and down would be much shorter. This porbably explains it better than me.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Lots of people have explained the two parts to this answer: established air routes (which may be less direct for shorter flights, but on really long flights most segments are at least close to a great circle), and the shortest distance between two points looks non-straight on a typical mercator projection map.\n\nHere is an excellent video that visualizes both of those points, but especially the second one: the paths that looked curved on the in-flight map is actually pretty close to the shortest, straightest one possible.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Airline Pilot here and Woot ! \nLet's see *ahem clears ELi5 voice*\n\nWe use highways in the sky called Jet ways (routes) and they are individually tailored to fit airspace requirements ( avoiding restricted/military areas) and navigation performance needs (Signal coverage). These routes can be viewed as a highway, some are near a destination and some are not.\n\nThen ATC ( Air Traffic Control ) issues STARS ( Arrival routes ) that help the plane transition from the \"highway\" to local navigation points so it's easier to manage traffic to a landing runway.\n\nTherefore, LOTS OF TURNS to sequence traffic or else everyone will be packed like sardines at the destination airport mmmkkaaay? ",
"Go to _URL_0_ and cluck the world high overlay in top right. You will see all the paths planes must follow to help with sequencing. On top of that, and what you don't see, many large airports have published approach procedures called STAR, or standard arrival, which allows the air traffic controller to assign that arrival to multiple aircraft with the same speed and essentially forget about them. You can also see on sky vector the large MOAs, which are military operating areas, that planes should go around because there are uusually jets doing high speed maneuvers and won't be looking out for you. There are also restricted areas you can't fly in, like bombing ranges or certain factories, etc.\n\nSource: I'm an AF pilot",
"Planes do their best to follow straight paths from city to city. These paths might look curved on a flat piece of paper, but if you look at a curved globe, they're straight paths!\n\n Sometimes though, planes can't follow that exact path if there's either weather or other planes in the way. Planes can't fly through tornados and they definitely don't want to crash! So sometimes the planes will have to turn off of their route for a little while. \n\nBut things flying at such high speeds as these planes can't turn like you and I can on the ground. They're moving so fast that it takes a long time for them to get out of the way. That's why planes end up going so far out of their way during a trip!",
"Planes historically have navigated by the use of land based radio beacons.. VORs... these are scattered across the US and world and planes fly point to point with them...(VOR's have limited range).\nThis is why you often don't have a straight direct path. \n\nWith modern GPS, planes are much more capable of flying direct to a destination... but somtimes traffic flow patterns and restricted airspace prevent that.\n\nSource: airline pilot.. and yes, I didn't account for everything..and i dumbed it down quite a bit..",
"I work in the industry. There are many reasons why:\n\n* Think of the sky as containing a series of highways. Like the highways on the ground, they're never perfectly efficient for a number of reasons - radar coverage, control jurisdiction, restricted airspace, terrain, and legacy purposes. The aircraft moves based on routes and waypoints. When you file a flight plan, you must state what waypoints you will be using. You can deviate from the plan while flying, but you still need to follow waypoints.\n\n* Radar coverage. If you're in an area without primary radar coverage, the controller must be very cautious to ensure there is ample room between you and other aircraft. (There are means of using only secondary surveillance for separation, but this is relatively new - WAM and ADS-B)\n\nThe north Atlantic tracks between Gander and Shanwick are an example - this is 60 nautical mile, procedural separation - there are no radars in the middle of the ocean. There are only a handful of tracks you can take between the US and Europe. This is to ensure that each aircraft has at least 60 nautical miles (~70 miles, or ~111km) between them. The controllers don't know exactly where the planes are, they just predict/guess. Pilots radio their position every 10-15 minutes (HF or satcom) or it is reported over CPDLC ADS-C every 10-15 minutes.\n\n* In the terminal area, you must consider the current runway configuration of the airport. If the airport is doing takeoffs from 1R and landings on 1L and you're coming in from the north and it's not a tiny airport, you can't just willy-nilly say \"I'm coming from the north, give me 19R.\" (19R is the same as 1L, just the opposite side.) The pilot will have to circle to the other side of the airport and begin an approach on 1L.",
"I work for an airlines and one reason I was told is that planes want to be traveling over as much land mass as possible in case of an emergency. This doesn't fully answer your question, but it explains some over the water type of routes.",
"Since this is ELI5, the simplest answer is we seek the quickest time between cities, not the shortest distance. Planes consume fuel by the minute, so there are applications that calculate the most efficient route based on the wind patterns at cruise altitude. The higher we fly the more efficient we are as well, but the maximum altitude allowed varies with weight. My passenger jet gets lighter (consumes fuel) by about 100 lb per minute on average.\n\nSorry I can't link on my tablet, but search for winds aloft charts for 250mb, or roughly 36,000 ft altitude to see the air currents we deal with.\n\nThere are also set flight patterns into and out of major airports for traffic flow and to avoid certain airspace for various reasons.",
"The same reason we don't let cars go from point A to B. It would be chaos. At those speeds, there would only be enough time to say, \"What is tha...\"",
"I think another problem that planes have to deal with when taking detours would be radar. Currently planes still use ground-based radar tracking, which has a limited range. This means that they have to stay within a certain distance from the coast or simply be off the radar. This leads to things like the Malaysia Airlines disappearance, where the plane was off the radar at a certain time and then it crashed. \n\nCurrently places like the FAA in the US are trying to implement satellite based radar that will allow planes to fly in a straight line to their destination and plan their routes to avoid interference with other planes.",
"Air Traffic Controllers need things to be organized in such a way that they can actually...control...the airspace. Thus there are often lanes/highways/whatever you want to call them where they place aircraft. This makes things more manageable. There are also rules like restricted airspace and of course adjustments for things like weather or emergencies. If you are flying somewhere that is not busy airspace, you can often receive clearance to take a more direct path.\n\nJust imagine an airspace with hundreds or even thousands of aircraft at different altitudes, flying at different speeds, and going different directions. Imagine that they have different rules for what they do in different situations (say, military aircraft vs civilian aircraft). Thinking in 3D is hard enough, this is like 3D+.",
"The great circles are the way to go per my son who flew\nthe C-5 in the Air Force.",
"Not a single link to an arrival routing... For flights within the continental U.S., arrival and departure routings can talk airplanes from New York to Chicago or farther without ever having followed a direct path to the destination. The [PAITN FOUR](_URL_0_) arrival begins over flint Michigan and would be used by all aircraft approaching from the northeast. If this routing experiences heavy congestion, aircraft could be re routed to the south to join with another arrival routing, adding to the apparent detours in the interest of *saving* time (like avoiding a traffic jam by taking a longer route). While some planes do fly great circle paths, this routing is usually reserved for trans oceanic flights where congestion is less, and the distances are greater; they usually will terminate with a standard instrument arrival, but a 50-100 mile detour looks much less significant after a 3,000 mile flight.\n\nEdit: aircraft also have some pretty strict limitations when it comes to the type of weather they're able to fly through. It is not unheard of or even really uncommon for aircraft to divert by hundreds of miles to avoid an advancing line of thunder storms.\n\nEdit2: if you want the real skinny on what's happening when planes do this, come on over to /r/flying where the pilots of reddit will set you straight on what's really going on in the skies over your home town.",
"And here I thought it was because they would need to tunnel to go in straight lines..",
"Hello, real live pilot here! This post is sort of old so I'm not sure if this will get read, but here it goes!\nA lot of people keep answering that the detours we take is because the world is round, but I think you are already aware of the shape of our planet, so I will go on to explain some of the real reasons. Some of the common ones would be to avoid certain air spaces, weather, and other air traffic. For example, this morning I was flying from one Midwest state to its neighboring Midwest state, and we were asked to change our heading 15 degrees to the left, to avoid another airplane. In areas with heavy traffic you have to do this more often. As far as the weather goes, if you are in a larger airplane you have the range and ability to get around bad weather, rather than cancel the whole flight. Also, if you can get a good tail wind, you can save a lot of time, even if you have to go out of your way. With the airspace, there are many different kinds, but to keep this super super simplified there are some that you are not allowed to enter at all, some for the military purposes, and some that are just too busy to handle you. \nThere are also still some planes (mostly smaller general aviation planes) that do not have a GPS in them, and so they must navigate using ground facilities called VORs. These send signals out in all directions that a plane picks up, and you can use them to zig-zag around. \n",
"In the true ELI5 sense: because you are looking at the flight paths on a flat map, but the earth is actually round. ",
"There are two different charts that can be used for navigation:\n\n\nOne is a \"mercador chart\" and the other is a \"great circle chart\"\n\n\nThe voyage is planned using a great circle chart, this chart takes into account the curvature of the earth with all lines of longitude coming together at the poles. The navigator will draw a straight line from point A to point B on this chart, this is the course that the plane will actually be flying. \n\n\nMost people are not familiar with a great circle projection (the do look kinda weird) so instead they show you a \"mercator projection.\" This is the way most maps at school are drawn. On this projection all lines of longitude are evenly apart and the curvature of the earth is not taken into account. When the coordinates from the great circle chart are placed on a mercator chart it gives the appearance of curved line when in reality it is the most direct route to the destination.\n\nSource: I am a navigation student\n\n\nTL;DR\n\nPilots use a special map that is projected differently than what we are used to. The map that most people grew up with does not take into account the curvature of the earth, so therefore it just appears that the plane is taking the long way around whereas from the pilots perspective it is actually the most direct route to the destination. \n\n",
"They are taking straight lines, you're just thinking in only 2 dimensions.",
"Lots of reasons. Here's a few.\n\nBigger airports have what's known as Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs). This manages the traffic that arrives at the airport in a predictable fashion which makes things easier for Air traffic control. When they leave they fly a Standard Instrument Departure (SID). Of course this means aircraft can't depart or arrive in a straight line because that wouldn't allow them to be sequenced with other traffic.\n\nWeather is another good reason. Often times a line of thunderstorms requires significant deviations made by the aircrew to circumvent the extreme weather. \n\nMilitary airspace, there are plenty of areas of restricted airspace in the United States (and I would assume other countries) that commercial aircraft aren't allowed to fly through. \n\nSpacing, similar to the arrivals and departures air traffic controls primary job is to keep traffic separated. So even though an aircraft may wish to proceed directly to its destination, ATC can't allow it because it would create congestion.\n\nI'm sure there are a few more reasons, or ways to explain what I mentioned but these are the big reasons I can think of off the top of my head.",
"Simple answer.\n\nAircraft generally follow [enroute charts](_URL_0_) and their associated airways.\n\nIt's obviously much more complex than this in reality but that is the easiest way to explain it.\n\nSource: I'm a commercial pilot.",
"Actually just watched a Netflix documentary on this last night. Doesn't make me an expert by any means, but provides some knowledge. Most of the routes planes take nowadays has to do with the way flights happened in the early days of plane travel. There weren't enough Radar towers to accurately track plans if they took the most direct route from A to B, so they routed all traffic along \"corridors\" that flew by the instillations that were built, allowing them to keep an eye on traffic. Otherwise, plans could/would crash and no one would know/realize until much to late, and they wouldn't be able to locate where exactly a plane crashed, because no one actually knew where it was. Obviously, this is outdated nowadays and it's something the FAA is looking into fixing/resolving.",
"I am an aircraft dispatcher and no we are not air traffic controllers lol. What we do is create flight plans from point A to point B using jet routes that have already been mapped out all across the globe. When we make a flight plan, we try to take the most direct routes to the destinations but we also have to take into consideration what weather could be blocking our path and re-route them around storms. Also when it comes to landing and take off, we use SID's and STAR's (standard instrument departures and standard terminal arrival route). When it comes to those, we try to give the pilots right SIDS and stars that will put them directly in line with the jet route upon takeoff and when coming in to land. Some SIDS and stars have turns in them for the pilots to stay on the course to avoid air collisions. Also next time you are on a flight and you go into holding, don't blame the pilots for it because they are only trying to keep everyone on board safe due to the incoming and outgoing traffic at the airport. ",
"Take a string and put it on a globe from one point to another, you will find that curving a little actually makes it a shorter route.",
"This is because the earth is a sphere and the closest distance between two points may not be the actual closest distance as you see on a 2d map. If you ever get shipment from overseas, you'll notice that many of your items first arrive at Alaska. (In fact, 90% of the industrialized northern hemisphere can be reached within 9.5 hours from Anchorage.) In order words, the airlines save fuel and money, and you also save time by arrive at your destination quicker, a win - win situation) \nSecondly, you may notice planes sometimes stay very close to areas of lands instead of passing over a big chunk of ocean. I believe that this has to do with safety, in case of a failure, planes can request emergency landings near land, instead of landing in sea (which is many more times challenging).",
"I'm a helicopter pilot so I might be able to shed a little bit of light on the matter. For the most part ATC will detour the aircraft around weather or other traffic. Usually if the local traffic control has to deviate around weather this will also change the flow of traffic coming in and out of the area. ATC is also responsible for the separation of the big airplanes and this takes a lot of coordination between their own, and other control facilities. \n\nOn rare occasions the airplanes may be put into a holding pattern before landing. Basically you'll fly in a planned circle as a planned altitude waiting for your turn in line (if they are backed up) or for the weather to clear. \n\nMost of the navigation is through GPS now, but we still have ground based nav aids and with those nav aids you have to follow certain routes called victor airways. Basically they are like huge roads in the sky between each navigational aid. Sometimes to hop from navaid to navaid might not be the most direct route. \n\nHope this helps. ",
"There's also a post showing recent traffic over Britain's airspace. That should help explain it.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: link added",
"Because of the curvature of the Earth, the paths taken usually are straight and the shortest. The diameter of the Earth is smaller as you get closer to the poles, so flying closer to the pole can cut time off a trip. Also, on flights the cross the oceans, planes tend to fly as close to land as possible in case of an emergency.",
"Long story short... Pilots account for the rotation of the earth when writing their flight plans. ",
"Firstly, the curvature of the earth distorts the path, so it may not look like a straight line, but if you take a string and stretch it between your destination on a globe it will most likely match up.\n\nSecond, they need to avoid other aircraft, and also travel above certain radio beacons/control centers, and may alter their paths to accommodating for this.\n\nThird, winds aloft can be predictable in certain areas/altitudes, so they may be taking what seems like a detour in order to be more fuel efficient/actually save time due to tailwinds.",
"There are landing approaches that are always less direct but meant to make traffic and arrivals/ departures more predictable and safe given the volume of air traffic. Flying direct would t be safe, there are also holding patterns which can be implemented based on volume and weather which will make routes appear less direct than optimal. ",
"There's a bunch of reasons.\n\n* Firstly, traffic. Planes generally try to avoid crashing into each other.\n* Secondly, geographical features. Planes try to avoid coastlines because of turbulance, mountains to avoid crashing, and volcanos because those tend to mess things up.\n* Weather. No-one likes flying through storms or thunderclouds.\n* Holding patterns. If there is an emergency, other planes will be told to stay clear for the time being.\n* Runways. Not all of them are perfectly alligned, and planes can't turn on a ditme, they need to take a \"sweeping approach.\"\n* And, then, of course there is the curvature of the Earth, but others have covered it well before me."
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"http://flightaware.com/live/flight/ANA5/history/20150418/1935Z/KLAX/RJAA",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Air_traffic_control",
"http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=lax-nrt&MS=wls&MP=o&DU=mi",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airway_(aviation)"
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"http://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ek226/#60362bb"
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"http://skyvector.com/?ll=41.68357908546022,-72.31613159566378&chart=302&zoom=4&plan=A.K6.KBOS:F.K6.MILIS:F.K6.FOSTY:V.K6.ORW:V.K6.MAD:A.K6.KBDR:A.K6.KLGA"
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wwv6e | seriously, how do cell phones work?! | How does a phone (a bunch of wires, glass, etc.) call someone across the country instantly?
Edit: the one thing that still blows my mind, is that all this is done by electricity. Period. I work on all fighter aircraft for the air force. (Computer systems specifically) and to this day , thinking about how intense shit like this really is....BANANAS | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/wwv6e/eli5_seriously_how_do_cell_phones_work/ | {
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"There are cell towers all over the place and each one covers a certain area on the ground, which is called the cell. When you travel into the next cell, that tower then picks up your signal and continues your call.",
"Sound energy becomes electricity and then the Tesla fairy takes it across the sky.",
"First of all it's not instant. It's something like one twentieth of a second from the time you speak until the other person hears you, and it depends on how far away you are from each other. It takes time to transmit information, so no kind of communication is instantaneous.\n\nStep by step here is a basic overview. If there's any specific part of this you are curious about I can explain more.\n\nThe sound of your voice goes into the microphone.\n\nThe microphone converts these sounds into electrical signals.\n\nA part in the phone called a ADC converts these signals into a stream of numbers.\n\nA tiny but very fast computer in the phone does lots of math with the numbers to process the signal, compress the information so there's not too much to transmit, and package it into a format that the phone company can understand. \n\nA radio in the phone transmits these numbers onto the airwaves.\n\nThe nearest cell tower receives the radio signal.\n\nA computer at the cell tower then retransmits the numbers, in the form of light waves, into cables that run all over the country. Lots of fancy equipment in big air conditioned facilities all over the world pass this information along to its destination. \n\nAt the other end, the reverse process occurs until the sound you made finally exits the other person's phone through its speaker.\n\n",
"The instantaneous part is due to the radio waves travelling at the speed of light. At this speed, the wave can travel around the world 7.5 times every second. The signal generated by the phone is not powerful enough and will not be able to travel across the globe on its own, and will need to be passed along by cell towers.\n\nWhen you first dial a number, the phones and towers involved must do some \"handshaking\" in order to connect you with the person you are calling and not one of the millions of other people who also have a cell phone. This is the cause for the relatively long delay before their phone starts ringing. After the connection is made, the rest of the conversation will take place with a much lower delay.",
"Like all my ELI5, I'll go big picture complicated, come back to an ELI5 answer:\n\nSo first your cell phone, minus all the \"smart phone\" compartments. Is basically a wireless phone that has a very powerful radio in it. Mattering which country you are in, that radio will be locked to set a frequency which it can connect to. The status bar will show the signal strength, and also the type of network connection (frequency) you are currently connected to. Your radio is constantly looking for a signal, and determining the signal strength. When you make a phone call, the number you dial is like an IP address on your computer. It gets sent out over the airways to a radio tower, which then sends that signal to a switch. That switch will look at the phone number just like it does an IP address. The first three numbers are an area code, and if that area code is for that area, then it moves on. If it isn't, it will look through a registry to find the location of that area code. It will then transmit the call to either a satellite (if it is a very long distance, or if there isn't a fiber connection to that site) or over fiber to the correct location. \n\nThen mattering which way it comes in, it will then take in that signal, look at the number, see that it is the right area code, and then look at the next three numbers, and then the final four. These numbers will be connected to your SIM card. (The SIM is hugely important in this process, it sends out what your number is, controls what network you can connect to, and also holds information such as IEMI, and other vital information for your carrier subscriber. I can go in detail on the SIM card if needed) so it will be able to find that number by sending out a signal looking for that number. Once it is found, the cell phone communicates back that, yes, this is that number, and the cell tower will say you have a call. The call is then patched through, and your voice is transmitted, over radio, then over a wire, then possibly over fiber, and then possibly back to radio, and then to a wire, and finally wireless to the other end of the call. This string of events are carried out back and forth over the whole process of the phone call.\n\nNow how does your voice transmitted as radio waves, and then changed into other forms, back into radio waves, come out as your voice on the other end? Well the radio in the phone takes in the signal and then is able to determine from the changes in the signal coming in what the person's voice is like, and what the person is saying. \n\n\nSo now for the ELIY5 part: Basically your phone has this big radio in it, that sends your voice over the air, and it is sent all over this country to another person's big radio and it sends back and forth.",
"My problem has always been understanding sound - > electric signals - > sound. I do not understand how I can speak, something can pick that up and turn it into not my voice then relay it again as my voice.",
"One thing I've never understood. If you're calling another cell phone, how is it possible for the 'signal' to KNOW where the other cell phone is located? Are cell phones constantly relaying their position to a phone mast or something?",
"Basically you make a handshake with the base station telling it who you are and who you want to connect to in form of a telephone-number, it then does a lookup and finds out which SIM-card that owns that number and creates a connection. Now that you have a connection you can talk to the other person in form of a digital bitstream. A digital bitstream is your voice being translated to binary code. You know how a soundwave looks like, right? \n\nImagine your soundwave being chopped up into tiny pieces, then you can take each little piece of that soundwave and find out how 'tall' it is, so if the piece you got is really high up on that soundwave, you would assign 255 out of 255, and if the sound wave is on the bottom it would be 0 out of 255. The higher the quality of the signal is, the tinier the soundwave gets chopped up. So now that we can build a soundwave out of values we can send each of those pieces by translating them to binary and sending them one by one in the right order, so if we have the first piece which is 130 we would translate that to 10000010, then we would translate the next piece to binary and send it as piece number 2, and it goes like that until the connection is broken by someone hanging up. When the other cellphone receives this bitstream it would translate it back into soundwaves so that the other person can understand it.\n",
"Maybe I missed it, but how does the individual phone know which data in a given frequency to \"grab\" out of the air?\n\nFor example, 10 phones all receiving 10 different types of data. How does my phone know that a certain series of bits make up the photo I'm downloading, while another set of bits is going to someone watching chocolate rain?\n\nDo the bits have header data to specify an IMEI? or are different sets of data sent on very specific frequencies within a broader range?",
"Watch your mouth!"
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769xsu | which is the best theory on how the world will function in ~100 years (socially, economically etc) and what reasoning supports this/these theories? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/769xsu/eli5_which_is_the_best_theory_on_how_the_world/ | {
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"there is no way to decide which theory is \"best\", and there is no good theory that can be done up in one Reddit post, do i suggest you read some books instead\n\nthe best theory i've read syas that in a hundred years, most countries will have space colonies, which will be used to gather energy and minerals. Far East Asia will be unified as an economic powerhouse, and Europe will have fallen far behind them and the US due to population crunch. Russia will go to war to create a buffer zone in Europe because the using up of fossil fuels in the middle East will make Siberia a big target for other countries. it will be defeated by America, the East Asian alliance, Eastern European alliance, and turkey. the last one will benefit from the fall of geopolitical importance of the middle East after oil runs out, and, with an alliance with Iran, will control most of the middle east and a good chunk of central asia and north africa. it will still be behind Europe industrially and technologically, and will be the major supplier of labour to the then critically undermanned Europe, causing the ethnic ratios to become very skewed. \nAlso, India and Mexico will become superpowers and challenge the US.\n\ni know what i said sounds far fetched, but it's hard summarizing a 300 page book into one comment, and it(the book) does a good job of explaining it, so i suggest you go read it."
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3tr6vv | what goes into making a new font and how hard is it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tr6vv/eli5what_goes_into_making_a_new_font_and_how_hard/ | {
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"Making a new font is a relatively simple process, but can be a lot of work depending on how detailed you want it to be, and how many different letters you want it to span. \n\nIn essence all you do is you open up MS paint, draw your letter, and save it. Then rinse and repeat for every letter in your font. You then just need to convert the file type from a .png or .jpeg to a .ot or .tt. Some software, like Photoshop allows you to save your file directly as a .ot or .tt.\n\nMaking good fonts is harder, you want letters to look the same, and you want your font to have good spacing between letters (kerning). If you're interested in more, check out the [Open Font Library](_URL_0_) and feel free to contribute. Everyone's shitty first attempt is welcome (although it probably won't be downloaded)."
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eu7wxk | why can healthy eyes look in only one direction, i.e. why can’t our eyes look in different directions from each other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eu7wxk/eli5_why_can_healthy_eyes_look_in_only_one/ | {
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"Our eyes can look in different directions. When you look at the tip of your nose, your left eye is looking right, and your right eye is looking left.",
"They can be trained to look independently, but our body was evolutionarily selected for the two eyes to work together. It's hard to break the instinct to utilize them in tandem, and there is very little advantage to doing that.",
"Under normal conditions, there's these control centers in your brain that tell your eye muscles to move at the same time. Your brain has to receive the same image from both eyes so that it can paint the world around you. If the left eye is looking to the left and the right eye is looking to the right, then the images don't match up and it makes you feel sick.\n\nLonger, not ELI5:\nLight enters your eyes and the information goes to the optic nerve, optic chiasm, and ultimately to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe (back of your head). Information is processed here and the output is sent to the muscles that control the eyes via cranial nerves (CN) 3, 4, and 6. CN 3 controls basically every eye muscle except for the superior oblique (CN 4) and the lateral rectus (CN 6). However, before the information from the primary visual cortex can be transmitted to the eye muscles, it has to go through certain control centers. One of which is the medial longitudinal fasciculus (MLF). The MLF is responsible for conjugate horizontal gaze which means it makes sure that the muscles for looking left and right contract at the same time so that your eyes are moving in sync. It does this by sending information to CN 3 (responsible for medial rectus) and CN 6 (responsible for lateral rectus). There's another area called the rostral interstitial nucleus that is responsible for conjugate vertical gaze, which is for looking up and down.",
"Some species have binocular vision, meaning two eyes pointed the same direction, and this gives them depth perception. You need two images to form a 3D picture. Predators tend to have this so they can target prey accurately.\n\nMeanwhile prey animals frequently have eyes on opposite sides of their head (which cannot physically look at the same object at the same time). For these animals, it’s more important to be able to look all around for danger so they can flee rapidly. Seeing the danger with great precision isn’t that important because the result will still be the same: they’ll just run away as fast as they can.\n\nWhichever system an animal’s eyes are set up for, its brain is also set up for. Brain matter is expensive in terms of maintenance calories and animals tend to have as much as they need and no more. There doesn’t seem to be an animal that got SO much use out of switching between binocular/dual monocular that it was worth the cost of the added brain structures. Either that or it just wasn’t useful enough that environment and natural selection drove any species toward it at all."
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3gghmb | how and why is there a standard for cylindrical batteries, and why hasn't it happened for flat batteries? | How awesome would it be if phones used the same shape and size battery.
EDIT: I maybe phrased the question wrong. I'm asking more about how a standard like that comes to be. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3gghmb/eli5_how_and_why_is_there_a_standard_for/ | {
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"There are numerous standards for flat batteries. Hearing aides have several standardized sizes, as do watches. \n\nPhone makers/companies also tend to have standardized sizes between specific brands or range of brands. They want you to be somewhat limited in options though so that you have to buy replacements from them. "
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3ejlaa | if it is thought that dreams only last for fractions of a second at a time and it is our brains that interpret them as longer, what is happening when we talk in our sleep? | I know a lot of our knowledge of dreams is based on theory, would just like an explanation for why my girlfriend never shuts up at night | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ejlaa/eli5_if_it_is_thought_that_dreams_only_last_for/ | {
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"Good question! Where did you get that information, that dreams only last for fractions of a second? If your girlfriend talks in her dream and in real life simultaneously then that becomes impossible - you're right! And if it is impossible then the conclusion must be: it isn't true.\n\n\nDreams vary in lenght, the further you are into the night the longer the dreams get. Some are very short, you're right about that, but they have been observed to last over 20 minutes in real time"
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267l4a | what would happen to a person if they were to undergo a brain transplant? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/267l4a/eli5_what_would_happen_to_a_person_if_they_were/ | {
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"This would technically be a body transplant, you are your brain."
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36by1z | why is snowden seen as such a hero? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36by1z/eli5_why_is_snowden_seen_as_such_a_hero/ | {
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"Because of the breadth of what his leaks revealed.\n\nWe spy on our allies. We spy on our own private citizens. We spy on neutral third parties that are no threat at all like fucking Brazil. We spy on everything, *because we* can, *and because noone will stop us*. \n\nAlso, the [NSA doesn't really do much to not appear cartoonishly evil](_URL_0_). ",
"...\n \nDid you not understand the things he revealed to us? Or did you not believe them? He revealed, with undeniable proof, some terrifying things about the government. He did so with great personal cost (he can never live a normal life again) so that other would know that we're being lied to, and so that we could know what's really going on. That's why he's a hero.",
"Our government is supposed to be our servant and not our master. Snowden revealed our servant has been secretly spying on everything we do, violating our fundamental human right to a private life. Those people who have access to the information have become even more powerful because they can use it to suppress opposition. If you become an annoyance to them you will soon find embarrassing aspects of your private life leaked to the tabloids. Knowledge is power."
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62u9lp | what are those fake puddles of water that appear on the road and disappear as i drive closer? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/62u9lp/eli5_what_are_those_fake_puddles_of_water_that/ | {
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"text": [
"Mirage. Optical illusion that form when light coming form critical angle bounce(reflection) off instead of refraction. As you approach closer you are no longer in the path of that bounced light, so it disappear"
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1kk02m | why do so many think robert johnson is the greatest bluesman? | According to Elijah Wald's book, Johnson wasn't influential until whites (esp. Brits) picked him up in the early 60's. I've listened and listened and he's really good, but I think others of that era are as good or better. Help me out, please. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kk02m/eli5_why_do_so_many_think_robert_johnson_is_the/ | {
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"Everything I know about Robert Johnson I learned from the movie Crossroads, but apparently he invented The Blues, or at least wrote all the early classic Blues songs. He was able to do this because he sold his soul to the Devil. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2clfqx | how come the human race still has "ugly" people if nobody wants to reproduce with them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2clfqx/eli5_how_come_the_human_race_still_has_ugly/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjgloqg",
"cjglqq6"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"People still do.\n\nEdit: also Luck, two \"perfect\" parents wont always have a \"perfect\" child. ",
"Two very attractive people can still make an ugly baby. And likewise, two ugly people can create a very attractive baby. It all just depends on how the genes interact."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
1scq28 | how did amazon gain enough popularity to support it's massive infrastructure costs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1scq28/eli5_how_did_amazon_gain_enough_popularity_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdw7esf"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"It was one of the first dot coms, back when online shopping wasn't a thing yet.\n\nThey also started niche with just books - an industry which (at that time) had lousy overpriced competition and was impossible for brick and mortar stores to compare on inventory / price. Great place to start.\n\nThen after they became the niche book go-to, they moved to music and movies which had the same basic problem before digitalization.\n\nThen they expanded to more types of merchandise. And so on."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
14ftp7 | how do disinfectants work? | How do disinfectants, like hand sanitizers work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14ftp7/how_do_disinfectants_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"c7cox9n"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"They contain an agent which kills bacteria. In the case of hand-sanitizers, the ingredient is alcohol - specifically, usually, ethanol or isopropanal (there's others too, though). When rubbed onto skin (or surfaces, in the case of other disinfectants) the bacteria are killed."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
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