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8hac2t | why do rocket engines always go over 100%? | If the standard is say 104%, than why isn’t that 100%? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8hac2t/eli5_why_do_rocket_engines_always_go_over_100/ | {
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"The reference for 100% is max power at sea level. For shortperiods of time at altitude this can be safely exceeded. However, testing and quanification isn't done under those conditions.",
" > If the standard is say 104%, than why isn’t that 100%?\n\nThe engines were designed for a given output originally which becomes \"100%\". Afterwards there are tweaks and optimizations made which allow it to go over that output, but instead of redefining that output as \"100%\" they just say what its output is compared to the baseline specifications of the rocket engine. Unless you are familiar with what specific tweaks were made to that engine you wouldn't know how much thrust the adjusted 100% would equate to."
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cgjozl | can you make a brand new internet, like it would be completely empty with no data, no website no anything? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cgjozl/eli5_can_you_make_a_brand_new_internet_like_it/ | {
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"I suppose so, but it doesn't make sense.\n\nThe internet is a network of connected computers. You could in theory create all the infrastructure to transfer data between computers without actually connecting it to anything but that isn't really an \"internet\", it is just a geographically large network.\n\nYou could connect a bunch of blank servers to that big network but I don't know why people would do such a thing. Usually you add a server to actually host something.",
"Yes. And you'll have to keep it from connecting to current internet. Otherwise it'll just be part of the current internet.\n\nYou'd have to get people to rerun millions of miles of cabling independently of all current connections. \n\nNot very cost effective",
"You certainly can. And in fact this is exactly what happens if you plug some computers into a router but don't connect that router to the public Internet — you just created your own tiny private Internet."
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2khbmr | how do tribute bands not have to pay royalties? | If I were to take a movie and remake it, nearly identical, I couldn't without facing a huge lawsuit. I have an idea for a "tribute" movie: Cosmos Chaos - Episode IV, a A Renewed Optimism. Similarly for a book. For example, my idea for a "tribute" book: Gary Rotter and the Wizards Wonders.
So, how do "tribute" bands get away with it? What are the rules for small, bar-bands playing someone else's music? Why are they able to profit from some other band's efforts? There are also "tribute" bands that do nothing but play music from another band. How? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2khbmr/eli5_how_do_tribute_bands_not_have_to_pay/ | {
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"Legally you must have a license to perform a copyrighted song. The right to license public performances are almost all held by one of three \"performing rights organizations\" (ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC). The venue usually takes care of obtaining the license and often does so in a package deal (so a venue might get the rights for any band to play all songs held by a performing rights organization). If you're playing at a nonprofit venue, such as a church or school, you may be exempt from having to pay for the license.",
"Tribute bands that play only at venues that have contract with a licensing agency (such as BMI or ASCAP) are covered by that for licensing. Or, a really popular tribute band may have directly handled the licensing. Many cover bands, however, are performing illegally, and just hoping not to get caught. A small bar band isn't likely to be noticed. if anything, the venue is more likely to be fined.\n\nHere's an interesting paper done on this:\n_URL_0_",
"It should be noted that tribute bands can't release a recording of them singing copywritten music without them paying a royalty to the original song writter. "
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55vcev | why do eli5 posts have to be longer than a sentence, when a five year old would probably appreciate and better understand a simple one-sentence answer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55vcev/eli5_why_do_eli5_posts_have_to_be_longer_than_a/ | {
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"So, this sub isn't ACTUALLY for five year olds. It's not \"Explain BECAUSE I'm Five\" but \"Explain LIKE I'm Five.\" The idea is to explain things to adults in a simpler manner, not to literally explain concepts to children. \n\nWhile I agree that there are times when a shorter answer would be better, requiring thought and length does prevent shitposting. ",
"From the sidebar: \n \n > E is for Explain - merely answering a question is not enough.\n \n > LI5 means friendly, simplified and layman-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds. ",
"I think that a significant number of studies have indicated two things:\n\na) questions with valid, useful, one-sentence answers don't really ask for an explanation. They should be referred to /r/AskReddit .\n\nb) One-sentence answers to questions which actually deserve an explanation distract from the civility of the sub, making folks cranky.\n\nThus we have the present rules."
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3m3xs1 | what exactly is _url_0_ ? it seems like a government site, yet there are a lot of papers supporting homeopathy as effective treatment, while many scientist have concluded homeopathy is fake science and just placebo. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3m3xs1/eli5_what_exactly_is_wwwncbinlmnihgov_it_seems/ | {
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"The National Institute of Health archives research from all over the place. Each paper's page links back to the original source. It's basically the Google of research- just a means of finding papers, not endorsing them."
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5mbb5w | why does pineapple hurt/irritate my tongue even though i'm not allergic to it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mbb5w/eli5_why_does_pineapple_hurtirritate_my_tongue/ | {
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"Pineapple actually has a chemical in it called * bromelain*, which is a mixture of enzymes that essentially start to break down the tissues of your mouth as it sits there.\n\nYour mouth hurts because as you're eating the pineapple, the pineapple's sort of eating you, too."
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acs01j | bearer bonds. what are they? how do they work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/acs01j/eli5_bearer_bonds_what_are_they_how_do_they_work/ | {
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"It's an IOU — a note for a debt — that says \"I owe you $___ and when due I will pay it to whoever brings me this piece of paper.\"\n\nAs opposed to a traditional bond, where the name of the person owed is written on it. A bearer bond can be handed off between people, since whoever holds it can collect the money."
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4anpd8 | what happens during a contested convention? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4anpd8/eli5_what_happens_during_a_contested_convention/ | {
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"The way that the primaries / conventions work is that states send a collection of delegates (voters in the convention) based on whomever won their state's primary. Some are winner take all, some are proportional, but either way the candidate gets a number of delegates pledge to them for the primary elections. Some states require that the delegates vote for the candidate that they were sent for and others don't (but most still vote along the lines of which candidate they were sent for).\n\nAt the convention, an initial vote is taken and if once candidate gets 50% +1 delegate, they are the party's nominee and the process is over.\n\nContested conventions happen when one candidate _doesn't_ get 50% +1 delegate in that initial vote. Once that happens, all of the previous rules about whom you have to / should vote for go out the window. The delegates are free to vote for whomever they want to - even if that person isn't running in the primary (which almost never happens, but it could). Backroom deals are brokered and candidates shift their support until one candidate is able to obtain the 50% +1 delegate in some subsequent vote.\n\nNormally, this isn't a big deal - the person leading in the primaries still normally wins because it is far easier to shift a smaller number of votes than a larger one. What is interesting about the RNC convention this year is that while Trump is the frontrunner and delegate leader, there is a large group of RNC delegates that do not want him to get the nomination - they would much rather see Cruz or Rubio. Now that Rubio has officially dropped out of the race, it is very possible that he and Kasich could ask their delegates to support Cruz rather than Trump, giving Cruz 717 delegates (by current count) to Trumps 661 - putting Cruz in the lead and giving him momentum to win the nomination. It would be an incredible upset, because the candidate who had the most delegates going into the convention might not get the nomination."
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1sjzva | why do game devs make games for one mobile system (e.g. android vs. ios) and not the other. | Two part question: I have noticed there are a number of games that are on ios that aren't on android. What stops game devs from changing their code and putting it on the other system.
2) It seems that a lot of games favour apple. This seems extra weird since Android is outperforming apple. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sjzva/eli5_why_do_game_devs_make_games_for_one_mobile/ | {
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"So iOS and Android's ecosystems are significantly different. not just at the programming level, but even with how code is organized, what libraries are available, etc. In a company somewhere between 20-30 programmers, we had maybe 3-5 who were switch hitters between the two. Most were specialists in one language, and then further specialized with one thing (algorithm, UI, game theory, etc.)\n\nFurthermore, with iOS, you are designing with fewer issues of backwards/hardware compatibility. You program for the latest iOS, and know that it should cover at least a few years worth of hardware. You then only pick up the hardware you need to test with.\n\nWith Android, the hardware can be cheaper, but there is a *lot* of issues due to the decentralized nature of both the OS and the hardware. What works on a Galaxy S3/S4 might cause crashing on an HTC because of some weird custom launcher shit. Most of our QA with android phones involved figuring out why one particular popular model had issues where none of the other ones did.\n\nThat's not to rag on Android, but from a dev point of view, it could be challenging. That's not to say iOS didn't have its own issues - constant changes to the iOS libraries caused problems for us in general, and every time a new version of XCode came out a bunch of shit would break. At least with Android it was just Java, so the worst you had to deal with were new libraries. \n\nThere is also marketing - if you are making Game A, you have to decide where your customers are. If there are 100x games like Game A on the iOS store, but none in Androidland, then Android might be the better option since you can capture that market share. At the same time, iOS is still iOS - even if Android is making solid gains, from a marketing perspective having an iOS game is almost your default position. \n\nNow, to answer your question: code from one language doesn't just translate to another. Code from one OS doesn't just translate to another.\n\nOn iOS, you would design your code around Objective C, using the iOS libraries for drawing and graphics work. On Android, its all Java, and you use a *completely different set of libraries*. Hell, even the way that the UI is designed is different. In iOS you use Views and View Controllers. In Android you have activities and intents. They don't function exactly the same way, so there isn't a 1-to-1 translation.\n\nI've seen apps designed side by side between iOS and Android - not even the wireframes are the same. The only similarities are in the concept and how it should work - everything else, from the way the UI is designed and interacted with, down to the code, is completely different."
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70copy | what is calculus? how does it work? | I understand that calculus is a "greater form" of math. But, what does it does? How do you do it? I heard a calc professor say that even a 5yo would understand some things about calc, even if he doesn't know math. How is it possible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/70copy/eli5what_is_calculus_how_does_it_work/ | {
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"Calculus does two things: Finding rates of change, and adding up infinitely small parts to find the area or volume contained by a curve or surface.",
"In algebra you learned to calculate the slope of a straight line.\n\nWhat's the slope of a curved line? Well, it's not just one number. It changes - it's higher when the curved line is steeper and lower when the curved line is flatter. You can actually graph this out and get a second line, the graph of the slope of the first line. Calculus is the set of mathematical tools that allow you to relate the first line to the second line: how to calculate one given the other, and so on.\n\nIt's quite handy for stuff like physics. For example, you may have an equation for your velocity and need to know your acceleration. Acceleration is the slope of velocity, so you use calculus to find that.",
"Calculus is the math of things that smoothly change, like the speed of your car, or the force of gravity between planets that are moving relative to each other.\n\nIf things didn't change over time or space, you wouldn't need calculus. \n\nAnd if they change abruptly, calculus runs in to challenges.\n\nBut if what you're trying to figure out is something like how fast does something fall through the air when you drop it, or how much water can you put into a pitcher of a given size or shape, then calculus is the tool you need. ",
"Think of when you are clipping your fingernails. You want to clip a curved \"line\" but you only have a flat tool (let's ignore the slight curve in modern clippers). The more smaller clips you make, the \"rounder\" your nail will get. The only way to get a truly round nail is to clip it infinitely many times. But that is impossible. One fundamental of Calculus is examining what happens as you clip more and more and get closer to infinity. ",
"The basic principle behind calculus is fairly easy to understand. Imagine painting the walls around a round ship window. It's got that neat brass stuff, and you don't want to paint that so you have masking tape. \n\n So how do use straight masking tape on a round window? You use some small strips. You can start with some big ones like the yellow in [this](_URL_0_). Well, that doesn't look right at all. You didn't paint close to the circle, and nobody likes it. Boss man gives you a second chance. OK, you use smaller strips and your outline is more like [this](_URL_1_). Much better! \n\nNow using the smaller straight strips were much better approximation to the actual window, but they were not perfect. To be perfect we need super tiny strips, and once they are absolutely tiny, they are perfectly accurate. \n\nCalculus breaks things down into those tiny strips to accurately measure curvey things. It works for straight things too, but kinda overkill. ",
"Calculus one (differential calculus) primarily deals with finding how quickly something is changing at any given time. E.g. Given a position of an object for some time interval, we can find how fast it was moving during any moment in that interval. We do this by finding derivatives of functions.\n\nCalculus two (integral calculus) deals with finding area/volume. E.g. given the velocity of an object over some time interval, we can find how far it has traveled by finding the area underneath its velocity vs time curve. We do this by finding integrals of functions.\n\nCalculus three (multivariate) deals with calculus in three dimensions. Finding the path that water might travel down a complicated hill, the volume of a three dimensional object, the circulation of fluid along a curve, or the flux of a liquid across a surface are a number of applications. It's ultimately the most useful in complicated engineering problems since the real world is three dimensions.\n\nSome related fields are analysis and differential equations. The former is more about establishing the theory that allows us to perform basic calculus, and the latter deals with equations involving the relation of certain quantities and their derivatives (big in physics).\n\nEdit: a taste of how calc 1 and 2 are done:\n\nCalc 1: So imagine you use a microscope to zoom in on a curve. The more you zoom the more the curve looks like a line. Theoretically, if you zoom in infinitely you see a line. The slope of that line is equal to the rate of change of the curve. So if you plot the graph of an objects position (given by our curve) and zoom in on that curve a lot, it looks linear. The slope of that line is the object's velocity at that position. That is calc 1\n\nCalc 2: The idea is to subdivide some closed region (think like an amoeba) into rectangles and use the formula for area of rectangles to find area under/inside a curve. We use two processes. The first is called limits (to make the rectangle width approach 0, which causes the error in our approximation to approach 0. Think about approximating a circle as a square. When we divide the circle up into more squares, our shape becomes closer to a circle and our error in approximation approaches 0. Let these squares approach infinitely small size.) Then we sum their areas using our rectangle area formula through a second process, which is called summation. This is Calc 2\n\n",
"Essentially, Calculus studies how a function works. There are two tools that are totally linked with the modern notion of Calculus: the derivative and the integral (or anti-derivative): in a nutshell if we derivate a function we obtain another function that is somehow related with the \"speed\" (if it changes rapidly, slowly... but also if it grows or decreases) of the first function, and if we integrate this new function we obtain the original.\n\nThe utility of the aforementioned is huge. For example, most of the physical phenomenons are described with a function (more precisely, with an equation where the thing to determine is not a number, but a function), so knowing how to study a function leads to obtaining a tool of studying physics. Functions are also used in economics, chemistry...\n\nThe idea of all this can be explained to a 5 year old as you said. The main notion of what underlies here is very easy to understand. You should look for the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. It dates from the Greeks but wasn't completely solved until the development of the modern Calculus. ",
"I'm an undergraduate student in pure mathematics - i.e not an expert, but I have some experience and can hopefully give a good answer.\n\nCalculus really began by seeing that finding the area under a curve is extraordinarily important in for example physics. To give an example, let's say that you get paid 12 dollars an hour, and you work for 7.5 hours. This can be visualized as a graph staying constantly at y = 12. The area under the graph, from x = 0 (beginning of the shift), to x = 7.5 (end of shift) is then how much you have earned, and this is (as we know) 7.5 x 12 dollars. Now this is all well and good, but what if our graph is more complicated? What if you steadily get paid more pr. hour of work? Or what if your salary fluctuates up and down every single minute, depending on some factors? Then, we **still** want to find the area under the graph; but its harder. \n\nThe key thing to realize is that if our salary at x hours is S(x); then if we can find a function F(x) which (lets say we work from x = 0 to x = 7.5), is zero at x = 0 (i.e F(0) = 0), and at every point x between 0 and 7.5 **increases with speed S(x)**, then the total area under the graph is F(7.5)! Now; how the hell do we find the speed F(x) increases with, when x = 2, for example? Well, this is where differential calculus begins, and the main idea here is to \"zoom in\" at the graph at x = 2 so much that the graph of F(x) at this point stops looking like some organic curve and starts looking like a line; and then finding the slope of this line and calling this the derivative of F at x. Zooming in at the function f(x) = x^2 at x = 2, for example, makes the function look (locally) like the line f(x) = 4x - 4 which has slope 4! Thus in this case, the derivative of f(x) at x=2 is 4, typically written f'(x) = 4. (see here: [Wolfram alpha link showing x^2 and 4x - 4, for x between 1.5 and 2.5](_URL_0_)\n\nSure, these ideas can be explained to a child at least to some extent, but to do calculations with them one needs a lot of time and practice.",
"Calculus is basically all about the idea that you can take an infinite number of infinitesimally-small iterations, and they can sum to a finite number.\n\nFor example: imagine you're on a coordinate plane, and have to walk to a location one mile north and one mile east. Simple geometry tells you that the distance from your destination is √2 or ~1.4 miles away diagonally. Instead you walk 1 mile east and 1 mile north. You will have gone 2 miles. If you instead walk 1/2 mile east, 1/2 mile north, then 1/2 mile east again and another 1/2 mile north, your path will be closer to the diagonal, but the total distance is still 2 miles. If you break it up into 1/4 mile increments, you'll be even closer to the diagonal but it's still 2 miles.\n\nKeep iterating like that and your path is closer and closer to a straight diagonal line but still 2 miles total. But at some impossible point, after infinite iterations, the path becomes the diagonal and the distance becomes 1.4 miles. That's called a limit, and it's the foundation of what calculus is.",
"First, the pedantic definition: \"Calculus\" simply means \"The method of calculating something\". Similar to how the word \"Transportation\" means \"the way to transport things.\"\n\nSpecifically, what we call 'Calculus' is dealing with the calculation of things using *infintesimals*, or small pieces, and *limits*.\n\nThere are two main 'pieces' of Calculus:\n\n1. Figuring out the slope, or angle, of a curve, at a certain point. You do this by 'zooming in' *as small as we can*, and using a *limit*. \n\n2. Figuring out an area under a curve, in a certain range. You do this by adding up an 'arbitrarily large number' of *smaller pieces*. So by using *limits*, we can look at the area of smaller and smaller 'slices', and add them up into a final answer. \n\n > I heard a calc professor say that even a 5yo would understand some things about calc, even if he doesn't know math. How is it possible?\n\nI'm looking at an ant. It's crawling across the table, probably to get a taste of that drop of grape jelly. It has to crawl half way to the drop. Then half the remaining distance (1/4th), then half again (another 1/8 of the way)...and so on. But does the ant ever get the jelly? Or is it stuck, never able to cross that infinite number of steps to victory?\n\nYes, the ant does. Calculus teaches how an infinite number of smaller pieces can converge to a finite amount, or a limit. And the ant gets the jelly! And then Mom gets mad because you left a jelly drop on the table, and now there a ton of ants on the table. Clean up better next time...",
"3Blue1Brown did a good set of videos. I think people will like it.\n[Link](_URL_0_)\n\nBasically calculus is the math of small changes.",
"Calculus lets you do meaningful math on systems that change over time. \n\nFor example, your car's speedometer changes constantly depending on how hard you press the gas in any instant in time. You might guess that multiplying the speed readings at smaller and smaller intervals of time would result in the distance traveled by the car, and you would be correct.\n\nWhat your professor is saying is that Newton, Leibniz, Barrow, and others discovered that when the time units are chopped finely enough and added together, this simplifies into an astoundingly simple set of rules and patterns!\n\nMuch like this phone, you don't need to understand every detail of calculus to use it effectively.",
"There are two principle ideas in calculus, the derivative and the integral.\n\nThe derivative helps you answer one question: what's the slope of a function that's not straight? Here you build up tools to find a function that tells you the slope at any given point of another function, assuming the functions work well.\n\nThe integral answers another question: What's the area under a curve? Here you build up another set of tools which help you find a function which can be used to find the area under another function.\n\nIt turns out that, if you take the integral of the slope-giving function of one function, you get the original function back. This is called the fundamental theorem of calculus and relates the integral and derivative intrinsically.\n\nEverything else about calculus is learning the specifics and nuances of these.",
"Finally, my time to shine. Calculus isn't really any harder to understand that basic arithmetic once you learn the rules. I can teach a 5 year old the power rule, but they'd have no idea what they're doing. This is why people sometimes say ignorant things like \"Calculus is easy\".\n\nThere are different types of Calculus, but the one you're probably thinking of is known as Differential or Integral Calculus (which encompasses most of the fundamental stuff). Things like derivatives (or anti-derivatives) of polynomials, rational functions, trig functions, so on.\n\nA derivative is basically just the slope of a function at a given point. You can spend several weeks just learning how to find slope of very nasty functions just using derivatives. Then come integrals, or anti-derivatives. These are essentially derivatives in reverse. You can use these things to find solutions to initial value problems or some very basic differential equations. \n\nAt its heart, Calculus is a tool we mathematicians use to analyze function behavior. In a sense, we can \"see\" what a particular function does at certain values by using Calculus (This is still the 'baby' version of Calculus though). Most of the applications of 'baby' calculus are in engineering and physics problems, where you use it to solve some different types of differential equations. However, this is only a part of the story. \n\nOne of my favorite things you can use Calculus for is to make sense of factorials with fractions. For example, 3! = 1•2•3 = 6. But what about (1/2)!... well, the story gets messy here. You'd need a tool called the gamma and beta functions to help out (which are sort of messy integrals), but they work! I could go on for days, but I hope this helps some :) Cheers! ",
"calculus: a way to solve new problems, and solve some old problems faster, Calculus is useful for finding the volume of weird shaped items mathematically, or finding the instantaneous speed of an object. its basically just algebra 2.0",
"Calculus is the mathematical study of rates of change.\n\nSay you have a big water tank, and it has a hole in the bottom so water is leaking out. With algebra, you figure out how fast the water is leaking out and solve for how long it takes the tank to empty. Easy!\n\nExcept when you go to do this, you figure out there's a problem. As the tank empties, the pressure pushing the water out goes down. There more water in the tank, the faster it comes out; the less water as it drains, the slower. Uh oh!\n\nCalculus. ",
"There's a thing you can do with calculus called Optimization. \n\nImagine you are a corgi playing on the beach and your human throws a tennis ball into the ocean diagonally from you. You are a fast runner but a slow swimmer. \n\nYou can either jump right into the water and swim straight to the ball - pretty slow. Or you can quickly run along the beach until you are directly perpendicular to the ball, then jump in and swim to the ball (your path makes a right angle) - a faster option, but you travel the most distance this way. Still relatively slow. But there is a sweet spot in the middle where you run only a little ways along the beach and then jump in and swim the rest of the way - this is the fastest option and can be calculated using calculus. \n\nFun fact - most dogs do this instinctively :D\n\n",
"Calculus explains the relationship between a car's position, speed (change in position over time), and acceleration (change in change in position over time). People have intuitive understandings of these things, even without understanding calculus. ",
"Calculus is pretty much the algebra of infinities (and infinitecimals, which are easily understood as being like 1 over infinity, pretty much infinitely small). It's easiest to understand on a graph. \n\nYou first start with limits, which basically are a fancy way of saying what value does a function approach as x gets infinitely close to a number. These become especially useful because you can use them and say that f(x) is approaching infinity. You can't actually plug in infinity because it's not a number, but conceptually you can talk about f(x) as it goes *towards* infinity.\n\nSo okay, now you can do that, how is it useful? Mainly in defining the other two dig operations of calculus which are inverses of each other: derivatives and integrals. The first thing we do is take the slope of two points on a curve: which is (y2-y1)/(x2/x1), or for a function we use the values x and x+a (which is just \"a\" units away from x, like 5 and 5+2 = 7 where x = 5 and a = 2, so a is the distance between the two points) (f(x) - f(x+a))/(x-(x+a)). Let's take a break here and picture what's happening. [You're putting two points on a function and drawing the line that touches both of them.](_URL_0_) Back to math. Then we take the slope of the two points and shove it into a limit as \"a\" approaches 0. This means as the distance between the two points (picture them moving closer) gets infinitely close to 0, you are getting closer and closer to the exact slope at that point on the curve (also known as the tangent line aka. the line that only touches the curve at one point).\n\nNext, we do the opposite; if slope is dividing rise by run, we're now going to multiply them to find the area under the curve. We'll start by splitting the curve into rectangles with equal widths and heights at the function values (usually at the left, right, or midpoints of the intervals, but it can be anywhere really). [Here's a gif](_URL_1_) Add the areas all up and hey, this is a pretty good way to approximate the area, but there's all that extra area. We get closer and closer to the actual value as we make more rectangles. So we start going to infinity. Write a summation (fancy way of adding a lot of things) that adds the sums of width*height for all rectangles. Stick it in a limit, use the limit to say n (the number of rectangles) approaches infinity. Boom, you've got a perfectly accurate way of finding the area. Then you just find easier ways of doing this stuff and applying it to more things and build off of it. ",
"I see all these big paragraphs trying to explain calculus. To simply put it, its the study of change.",
"So, something that I don't see mentioned, that I think is incredibly important to talk about, is Limits. Basically, what happens as you're going along, getting closer and closer to something, but without actually reaching it. As u/ibdx suggests, what happens when you use pieces of tape that get closer to zero width, but without reaching zero width (cause that'd be silly).\n\nCalculus wants to know, what happens when (sin(x))/(x) gets reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally close to x=0? since at x=0, the equation is undefined. What happens when you take a straight line that goes through 2 points of a curve and move those 2 points really close together? (i.e. a tangent line) These and many more things can be done by taking a Limit as some variable approaches a number (or infinity) and that gives you the basis of Calculus.",
"I realise my lateness but I tell people this:\n\nderiving a function tells you *how fast* something is changing\nintegrating tells you *how much* something has changed\n\nSeems to find a nice pigeonhole in people's heads.\n\n",
"Calculus is the study of change. Basically, algebra has mostly linear equations where everything is nice and neat. However Calculus focuses on cases that are not so linear and therefore curved and ever changing. I wouldn't consider it a higher math, but rather a math that focuses on more real world problems because anything that happens in the real world is never perfectly linear and always has some difference somewhere. For example in physics, if you have a \"normal spring\" there is no friction and you can simply just use algebra to manipulate and solve for various variable. However, in real life there is no frictionless spring and the only way to deal with this non ideal spring is to use calculus. ",
"Calculus is all about continuous change. It's one of the fields of study in mathematics. It's not a higher form at all, it's just something new that you learn.\n\nLet's say you want to calculate the speed of a car from a graph at one second. You can pick a point at 0 and 2 or 0.5 and 1.5 or 0.999 and 1.001. This is discrete change.\n\nHow do you calculate the speed at EXACTLY 1 when you need at least two points? How do you calculate things like instantaneous speed or instantaneous acceleration or instantaneous heart beat and so on?\n\nCalculus gives us tools to deal with getting infinitely close to things. So instead of average speed between two discrete points, we get speed at exactly the point we want.",
"The study of continuinity; space and time. Most things are dependant of the two, yet humans tend to understand these things better in fragments, peices of the whole. Think of time, we divide it into minutes, hours, days to discretely make since of an past or future instance. Yet this is a mere approximation of the exact, precise, moment in time we are wishing to reference. Calculus gives judgment of how to estimate continuous ideas in discrete separate entities while providing the resulting error in doing so. ",
"I see a lot of people here talking about finding slopes and rates, and all of this is correct. There's also people mentioning the area or space under a curve/surface, which is also calculus.\n\nAll of this is true, but I want to add something that gets at the beauty of calculus a bit more, and doesn't even require notion of functions!\n\nAt its heart, calculus is the relationship between change (ie. rates, slopes, differentials) and content (ie. volume, area, distance, etc). It's a field that connects how big something is to how much it grows when small changes are made or, conversely, how knowing the rate that something is changing can tell you how much \"stuff\" you've accumulated.\n\nFor example, pretend you're in a vehicle where you can't see out the window. The only thing you can see in the car is the speedometer. As the car drives, you can keep track of the speedometer at every point in time and you'll know how much distance the car has traveled without being able to measure the distance of the car's path.\n\nI think it's beautiful that calculus connects two seemingly unrelated: change and content. This is what math is in general though - it is the study of taking seemingly disparate things in the world and showing that they are fundamentally connected.\n\nEdit: added a small point on functions",
"This is going to be a simple explanation, but probably not for a 5-year-old.\n\nA lot of people think that math is about numbers and computing things. Like, solve this equation, multiply these numbers, find the value of that side, etc. But that's not right. Really, math is about *understanding* things. Math is about *how* things work and *why* they work. Different branches of math are about how and why different types of things work. For example, arithmetic is about how operations with numbers work. Algebra is about how solving basic equations works. Geometry is about how shapes work. Etc. Well, calculus is about how really tiny things relate to one another and how they come together to make normal-sized things.\n\nWhen I was really little, I knew how to count and add and such. I liked to play with Legos, and my dad taught me how to multiply with Legos. So a 4x4 piece had 16 dots -- I could see the 4 rows of 4 dots each, and I could count the 16. So that's how you multiply. And that's also how to get the area of a rectangle. I understood those before I was 5; it was pretty easy! So it's clearly not so far-fetched for a 5-year-old to understand a little arithmetic and geometry, right? So why not a little calculus?\n\nThe easiest way to understand a little calculus is to sit in the middle seat and look at the speedometer in the car. What speed does it say? Maybe it says 31 miles per hour. This means that, if you keep traveling at this speed, you'll go 31 miles in an hour. Any kid can understand that (even if the kid doesn't really know how far a mile is). But then your dad slows down and stops at a red light. The speed is 0 miles per hour now. Did you actually go 31 miles in an hour? No; 31 miles per hour was your speed only at that instant in time. Now the speed is different. The idea that it even makes sense to *have* a speed at an instant in time is... calculus! You calculate speed by seeing how far you go and dividing by how long it took you to get there, but that only gives you *average* speed. For the speed *right now*, you have to see how far you go in a very, very, very tiny amount of time. You only go a very, very, very tiny distance. And you divide by that very, very, very tiny amount of time to get a speed in numbers that you understand. Calculus is when you make that amount of time tinier and tinier and tinier, and that makes the distance tinier and tinier and tinier too, so that, at that moment, the tiny distance divided by the tiny time is 31 miles per hour, but a second later it might be 30 mph or 32 mph or something else.\n\nYou generally use calculus to talk about how fast things change -- in the case of the car, it's how fast your position changes, but lots of things can change. How fast something is changing *right now* is called the *derivative*. Sometimes you know how the rate of change for something is related to other things. For example, if you have a weight on a spring, you can write how fast the *speed* of the weight is changing based on its position on the spring, and you can write an equation called a differential equation.\n\n(I'll show you an example that's way above ELI5, so you can skip it if you want: Hooke's Law says that the force F = –kx, where k is some number and x is the position away from the spring's equilibrium. Newton's Second Law says that F = ma, where m is the mass of the object, and a is the acceleration. Acceleration is how fast the speed -- well, actually, velocity, but let's not get confusing -- changes over time, and speed is how fast the position changes over time. So the speed v = x', where ' indicates a derivative with respect to time, and a = v', so a = x'', called a second derivative. Since F = ma and F = –kx, we get mx'' = –kx, and we want to solve for x as a function of time. This is a differential equation. The solution is x(t) = Acos(wt) + Bsin(wt), where A and B can be any numbers, and w = sqrt(k/m). In order to figure out A and B, you need to know how the weigh starts out. If the weight starts at the equilibrium position and it's not moving, then it's not going to start moving, right? A = B = 0. That's boring! But if the weight starts at x = 5 at rest, then A = 5 and B = 0. There are lots of possibilities. How did I solve this? Calculus! Not going to get into it here.)\n\nYou can also use calculus to talk about how lots of little things can add up to a big thing. For example, let's say you have an object, and you want to know how much it weighs. You can break it up into tiny little pieces, figure out the density for each piece, figure out how much each little piece weighs, and add them all together. That's calculus! (Or you can just put it on a scale -- that's physics.)\n\nThe calculus of how fast things change is called *differential calculus*, and the calculus of adding up lots of little things is called *integral calculus*. In differential calculus, you take a tiny little number and divide by another tiny little number to get a regular-sized number. In integral calculus, you add together a very, very, very *large* number of tiny little numbers to get a regular-sized number.\n\nNow, actually *doing* calculus is much more advanced, but it's not actually *hard*. You basically just memorize a bunch of formulas. For example, the derivative with respect to x of x^n is n·x^(n – 1). When you need to take a derivative, most of the time you can just use that rule and similar rules. There are a bunch of them, but they're not hard to learn. There are rules about taking the derivative of stuff multiplied together or added together or divided one by the other, and even when you have a function of a function. It's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it! Integrals, it turns out, are the inverse of derivatives, so you have a different set of rules but they're just the opposite of the rules for derivatives (for example, ∫x^(n)dx = x^(n + 1)/(n + 1) + C; it's just the opposite of the derivative rule -- never mind the C for now). But the rules for multiplication and such are much more difficult, so a lot of the time you just *can't* take a nice-looking integral, not because you don't know how but because it's actually not possible without inventing new math (for example, people couldn't figure out how to do ∫dx/ln(x), so they just made up a new function [li(x)](_URL_0_) to be the answer). There are quite a lot of rules for taking integrals, but in the end, it's not really very difficult. You just have to learn how to do it, that's all!",
"physics major for a few years (then the actual physics happened and i changed majors, but i took all my calc classes)\n\n[integrals] (ANY kind of engineering, design, how computers calculate things for us)\n\nimagine you dont have a computer, and you want to perfectly measure a curve, or a slope, and the area inside of it. what if this curve is funky and weird? and you only know how to calculate the area of a rectangle? \n\na few people figured out that if you take tiny bits of this curve at a time, and transform them into rectangles, you could accurately measure the area under this curve, depending on how intense you wanna make these small rectangles (this is usually called a Reimann approximation).\n\nnow think about how many curved objects you see in your day to day life (this is also one specific example, theres TONS of things you can do with other aspects of calculus). when you use a 3D modeling software, you are basically doing this. same goes for 3D printing. the better processing power you have, the more accurately you can map that thing with millions of little shapes.\n\n[derivatives] (specifically used in physics, but again can be applied to anything)\n\nnow imagine you want to measure the speed, or velocity of a thing. people figured out you could divide the distance by the time. what if you wanted to measure the speed in a SPECIFIC moment, without having to know the entire time and speed? you *could* divide the time and the speed in half, right? you now do that instead of rectangles, and try to get it down the smallest data point possible. this allows you to create graphs of variable speeds (accelerations (speed divided by time)).\n\nhowever, you reach a point where you eventually will be dividing a super small distance by a super small time. these points essentially become zero, where dividing by zero is a big no no for mathematics. calculus (and derivatives) were essentially created to skirt the math laws and divide by zero. the Formal Definition of a Derivative is the landmark of calculus.\n\nthis formula is basically saying that as the limit of time approaches zero, you will receive an output of a derivative, at a certain point. several other math laws were created to support this (however there were many math schisms throughout the years debating notation), and it basically allows us to divide something by essentially zero. this lets you calculate the speed of a thing at any given point, which is absolutely essential for physicists and engineers, and many other different fields.",
"In short, calculus is understanding how functions change. A common representation is using a function (an equation with at least one variable such as x) of distance into a function to calculate the velocity of an object, but there are multiple scenarios where calculus can apply. The act of finding the rate of change in a function is \"finding the derivative\". You probably recall doing this in algebra with y2 minus y1 over x2 minus x1 to calculate slope. However calculus works on more complicated functions, not straight lines, and this is because functions that involve more curves are definitely more realistic when understanding the idea that a straight line will basically mean little to no rate of change at all. Now, integrals are almost like finding a derivative, but backwards. Given a differentiated (derivative) function, can you find the integral (the original function)? A good real-world example is, let's say you're given a function that represents the rate at which something sells, what is the integral of that equation which will help you understand how much in quantity did it sell over a period of time? The reason why derivatives/integrals are accurate is that a graph used to measure an output given various inputs (like distance for the y-axis given time for the x-axis, respectively). If you know that a curve represents that, then you could figure out the derivative, distance over time, is velocity, that being slope, a process of division which is simply rise over run. While velocity multiplied by time is total distance, which is multiplication, and it checks out because you multiply two numbers to find an area (base times height), or specifically the integral - the function of the area under the curve - because area changes over time with a curve. \n\nEDIT: BTW sorry for the shit load of run on sentences and bad grammar, it's 1 AM and I really am rushing trying to type this before i sleep.\n\nSource: Math undergrad, i like math.",
"You have a function, which takes one number as input and yields a number as output. You have a functional which takes a function as input and gives another function as output.\n\nMost functions have outputs which depend on input. The question that arises is how much does the output change if you change the input? Do small changes in input also yield small changes in output? How to measure this?\n\nThe answer is the derivative, which is a functional - it gives a function which tells the rate of change for an input given function. The derivative of constant functions is 0, because of no change; for the identity function is 1 because of constant change. One can compute the derivative of most functions (not all functions are derivable) by a simple formula: (f(x) - f(y)) / (x - y)) where y is a number very close to x, but not quite x; in mathematical terms a limit. The integral is just the opposite operation of the derivative.\n\nThis is just an analytical approach. Actual historical approaches were through physics/mechanics by Newton in describing instant speed and through geometry by Leibniz by measuring the slope of curves. ",
"I feel like all the answers so far have each given bits and pieces, like looking through a window at the part of the whole...\n\nCalculus is the study of changing things.\n\nThe most obvious use of this is change over time, associated with motion of objects. Drop a ball. Because of gravity, its speed changes. How long does it take to hit the ground and how fast is it going when it hits? Alternatively, drop a ball and it takes 5 seconds to hit the ground: how high was it? Calculus gives you the tools to answer those questions.\n\nSimilar to this, and one of the original problems that inspired Newton to develop calculus, was solving planetary orbits. The planets move due to gravity. How do their orbits work? Calculus lets you compute details about the orbit. Or alternatively, by observing the orbit, calculus lets you compute the mass and distance of the planet.\n\nThe most up-voted post on this thread so far is about approximating the shape of a circular window with straight segments. How to view that in terms of change? Imagine constructing the window by taking a radius of it, and then rotate that radius around 360 degrees until you have the window. Applying calculus to that process of the radius's change of direction over time, lets you calculate the area and perimeter of the window.\n\nRelated to that, one way to calculate the volume and surface area of curved solids (e.g. a sphere) is by taking a slice (a semicircle, in the sphere's case) and rotating it around an axis.\n",
"I think peoples descriptions in here are more complicated thsn they need to be.\n\ncalculus is the math of change. Specifically the math of the rate of change.\n\nOther maths will let you calculate things in a static (non changing) environment, calculus will let you calculate things that are constantly changing.",
"3Blue1Brown (the best math YouTuber ever) has a really nice series about it: Essence of calculus: _URL_0_",
"Check out [Calculus Made Easy](_URL_0_) by Silvanus P. Thompson. It's a very simple and amusing explanation of calculus. \n\nThe very lovely prologue:\n\n > Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it\nshould be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks.\n\n > Some calculus-tricks are quite easy. Some are enormously difficult. The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics—and they are mostly clever fools—seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. On the contrary, they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.\n\n > Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach\nmyself the difficulties, and now beg to present to my fellow fools the parts that are not hard. Master these thoroughly, and the rest will follow. What one fool can do, another can.",
"Really simple example of calculus application :\n\nYou have data about a car's acceleration value. You can use calculus to find the speed at which this car was going at any moment.",
"Actual eli5: when you turn on the bathtub faucet, the bath starts to fill up with water. When you turn it on more or less, the bathtub fills up quicker or slower. Calculus helps you figure out how long it takes to fill the bath (or how much the faucet is turned on by looking at how much water is in there).",
"I use calculus all the time in Economics - it measures relationships between two variables and how much one variable will change as a result of a change in another, e.g how much output will change if you add in an extra employee. It can be used for a whole bunch of other stuff too such as finding the area between a curve and the axis, which in turn can be used to calculate how much producer/consumer surplus there is when given supply and demand curves etc. ",
"I'm going to try to explain it using non-mathematical concepts that people already understand.\n\nBasically, calculus is about how you can take a big, complex problem, divide it up into parts, then simplify those small parts to be super easy (even if that simplification is a massive one), and then put them back together and bam, you've solved the big problem. Well, you solved it if you divided it up small enough.\n\nThat's a bit complicated, so let's use an example you're actively looking at right now: your computer screen. It's doing a very hard problem: showing you an image. However, there is absolutely no way it can really show you a full realistic image. Computer screens can't do that. So instead, it breaks it down into pieces. Your computer screen is made up of pixels. That's easy. Just have one little piece that's just one color. It's not an image, but an oversimplification of an image, just a dot. However when you put all of those pixels together, you get a computer screen that *fakes* an image. Again, it's not an image. It's just a collection of dots. However the more pieces you divide the problem into, the better the result. The more pixels, the closer you get to the real picture.\n\nHere's the real interesting part: when we're doing this with raw numbers and data, we can see trends as the \"pixel\" count increases. With those trends, we can extrapolate out to pieces that are infinitely small, and when that happens we are no longer dealing with an approximation. The sum of all the infinitely small pieces is now exactly the real thing. That's the miracle of calculus. It's a bit hard to wrap your brain around, but think about it this way: would a pixelated picture with infinite resolution really still be pixelated?\n\nThat's calculus. It's applications are huge because it turns out there are tons of massive problems that can be broken down into simpler chunks.",
"I'm late to the game and this won't see the light of day. I had another student explain it to me like this after having failed my calc class the first time. \n\nWhen you have an equation where you don't know a number, like 3 times \"something\" equals \"another something\", with \"something\" represented by \"x\".\nCalculus is how to do math on the \"x\" to add or remove it so you can solve it. ",
"Calculus in 10 seconds: calculus is the process of getting accurate approximations of something being measured. It works by splitting up the thing being measured into infinitely tiny pieces, then putting all the pieces back together to get an pretty accurate approximation of whatever is being measured. ",
"The most simple explanation I've ever had, was that Algebra is the language or tool that you use in Calculus and Calculus is how we fly planes and build bridges.",
"A definite integral is a SUPER adder. This magic symbol can add together an infinite amount of numbers, and give you a finite number. "
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4r5joj | exempt vs non-exempt | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4r5joj/eli5_exempt_vs_nonexempt/ | {
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"Exempt versus nonexempt what?",
"ELI5 is not a dictionary, but I'll see if I can help you out (assuming you're talking about what I think you're talking about).\n\nIf you are talking about classifications of employees, a non-exempt employee is entitled to overtime pay (since they are not exempt from the overtime pay laws) while an exempt employee is not entitled to overtime pay (which is useful for an employer since they don't have to track the employees hours no matter how much the employee works if they are paid on commission or on salary, and don't have to worry about paying overtime).\n\nExempt employees, however, are, by definition, the *exception* to the rule, so the employer and employee have to meet very specific criteria to fall into this category.\n\n"
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d1siek | how and/or when did the egyptians, greeks, vikings, etc came up with the name of their gods? | \*If these gods "existed" way before them (As in almost every civilization has primordial gods in one way or another), how or when did these gods received their names?
\*Or are these names something archaeologists interpreted from discoveries regarding said civilizations?
\*Are these names like Zeus, for example, a really accurate translation of their original names? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d1siek/eli5_how_andor_when_did_the_egyptians_greeks/ | {
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"The Greek/Roman/Norse/Germanic gods developed alongside the languages. The names similarly changed. We do have texts written about all those gods in a phonographic alphabet so we know how they pronounced the names. For example Dyeus Phater (Day father or Light father) would be pronounced slightly differently in different regions of Europe over centuries and would become both Dipeter or Jupiter and also Zeus Peter in Greek and Roman languages respectively. In Germanic languages however Dyeus became Tiwaz and then in Norse Tyr. This is just like any other words in the language changes over time."
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9kwk5j | how can glass be cut using a laser? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9kwk5j/eli5_how_can_glass_be_cut_using_a_laser/ | {
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"Glass absorbs some of the energy from the light that passes through it. Look through a piece edgewise and it will look green or blue as a result. With a laser you can put a huge amount of energy into the beam. Even if the glass only absorbs 1%, a good CO2 laser can add enough energy to melt the glass under the beam.",
"in addition to glass not being perfectly clear, not all kinds of light pass through glass. glass blocks infrared, for instance. humanity uses glass in part because it doesn't significantly disrupt the part of the spectrum we can see. \n\nit's entirely possible to fire a laser of a wavelength that glass will absorb.\n\n"
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2o8ii7 | why is cyprus still split in half. | I understand why it was split with the Greeks and Turks fighting over it but why like 30 years later is it still divided? You would think a UN mandate or something would come through settling this issue. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o8ii7/eli5_why_is_cyprus_still_split_in_half/ | {
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"The same reason Israel is still split with Palestine. The division runs deep. The north has actually declared independence and is backed heavily by Turkey. I briefly lived in Paphos in the west (Greek) in 1992/3. They lived as though the east didn't exist. Nobody seemed to talk about it, but the hatred is there.",
"Brief history:\n\n* Cyprus essentially becomes a British colony in 1878 (and officially in 1925)\n* the British grant Cyprus independence in 1960\n* sectarian violence between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots breaks out soon after, and is an ongoing problem\n* in 1974, a coup overthrows the Cypriot government, and seeks to become part of Greece\n* Turkey invades to protect Turks in Cyprus and to prevent Greek annexation\n* the Cypriot gov't is restored, Turkey stays anyway\n* Greek Cypriots are kicked out of the Turkish section, Turkish Cypriots move from the Greek section in a mass migration\n* in 1983, Turkish Cyprus declares independence, no one but Turkey recognizes it\n\nSince then, not much has happened. The has been a UN mandate condemning the Turkish occupation, but Turkey is a much more important ally to the West than Greece is, especially during the Cold War, so that is as far as it went.\n\nIn Cyprus, the Turks are in the Turkish section, the Greeks are in the Greek section, and it is probably more peaceful than before Cyprus was divided.",
"The turkish army invaded in 1974 because they claimed they wanted to protect the turkish community in cyprus who were settlers from mainland turkey when cyprus was still part of the ottoman empire.\n\nInstead they created a breakaway republic and actually allowed mainland turks to migrate to make it harder for greek cypriots who were the majority in the nowadays area under control of the turkish Cypriot republic, to regain it.",
"Because:\n\nTurkish military, inept politicians, ethnic hate and misunderstanding."
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2odhtz | why as an adult sitting on your knees is so painful compared to when you were a kid. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2odhtz/eli5_why_as_an_adult_sitting_on_your_knees_is_so/ | {
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"That possition puts your weight on a relatively small area.\n\nThis matters more when you're an adult than when you're a kid because of the square-cube ratio.\n\nThe square-cube ratio means that while your volume and mass increase by a power of 3, your surface area only increases by a power of 2.\n\nThis means as your size increases, the ratio of surface area to mass decreases, and you therefore have more pounds per square inch on your knees.",
"I have being practicing Aikido for 20 years. I can sit on my knees for days on end of needed without any issues. \n\nAs a kid you were more flexible, now you're an old fart and getting more stiff. ",
"\nAdults can kneel/squat pain-free with practice. When I lived in Japan, sitting on one's knees was an unfortunately common thing to do, but after a few months, it was like second nature. \n\nCoincidentally, elderly Japanese are flexible as hell knee and hip-wise. Years of kneeling/squatting keeps the knees and hips loose, and I saw even 85+ year olds crouch with ease. ",
"edit - now more eli5-y at the bottom\n\n/u/Sand_Trout 's [post](_URL_0_) deals with some of it, but another factor is the way stress works with growing sizes. It's similar to why a kid can make a bridge out of 200 Popsicle sticks that can hold 900 lbs, but we don't just recreate a giant version of that model out of Popsicle sticks. the material Popsicle sticks are made out of can only handle a certain amount of stress. As an object scales up, the stress exerted on it by itself (as in the force of its own weight) increases linearly as well. The same thing explains why there aren't giant insects - the biological materials that are so effective to allow ants to carry a thousand times their weight can only handle that stress when scaled down very small. \n\nCombining this with /u/Sand_Trout's post, your mass increases greater than the surface area of your knee. So, it's not even the linear stress that increasing size by a scale factor causes, it's even more, because your upper body might increase by an even bigger scale factor than your knee. Being on your knees as an adult causes a lot more stress on your joints and muscles than being on your knees as a child does.\n\nI'm sorry if this wasn't ELI5 enough, let me know if you want me to try again.\n\nFor some additional not ELI5 material, here's some math to go with what I said about stress. \n\nStress = Force / AREA (force being a perpendicular force to the surface area). Let's say a Popsicle stick is cylindrical, with Radius = 1cm (or .01m) and a length of 20cm (or .2m). The mass of this Popsicle stick is 5g (I 2don't know if that's reasonable or not, just made it up). \n\nThe surface area = A = pi*r^2 = 3.14*(.01m)^2 = 3.14(.0001)m^2 = .000314m^2 = A.\n\nF = the weight of the Popsicle stick = m*g = .05Kg*9.8 = .49N\n\nStress_1 = F/A = .49N/.000314m^2 = 1560.5 N/m^2\n\nNow let's scale this Popsicle stick up by a factor of 4. The new Radius is 4cm, and the length is 80cm. The volume of a cylindar is pi*r^2*length. We're doing pi*(4r)^2*4l = 48*pi*r^2*l, or 48 times the initial volume. The surface area is going to be pi*(4r)^2, or 16*pi*r^2. This is the Square Cube law, the volume of a cylindar increases by a cubic factor (cube of the scale factor), while the surface area is going to increase by a square factor. Since the volume increases by a cubic factor, the mass must also increase by a cubic factor.\n\nFor us, using m and r from the original equations, we get:\n\nstress_2 = F_2/A_2 = 48*m*g / 16*pi*r^2 = 48/16 stress_1 = 4*stress_1.\n\nSo, multiplying the dimensions by a scale factor of 4 also multiplied the stress by a scale factor of 4. But let's say the material the Popsicle stick was made out of can only handle a stress of .5Newtons/m^2. The original Popsicle stick is fine, because it only had a stress of .49N/m^2 which is less than .5N/m^2. However, our giant Popsicle stick has a stress of 4*.49N/m^2, which is almost 4x as big as .5N/m^2. The Popsicle stick just can't handle that stress and is going to break.\n\nGoing back to the original question, as you get older (and going from a child to an adult, we can assume bigger) your strain increases by a lot. Even more than the square-cube law, since you might get fat, as well. The amount of stress on your knee is going to be much bigger than the amount of stress there used to be on your knee, and thus much closer, or for some people, even exceeding, the maximum amount of stress your knee can handle. \n\ntl;dr stress increases linearly when you scale the size up, and the same materials you're scaling up can only handle so much stress.\n\nedit - ELI5 version:\n\nYou are building a tower out of play-doh. Play-doh can only hold up 5 lbs for every square inch of play-doh. That weight comes from the weight of all of the play-doh directly above the square inch at the bottom. Say we have 3 lbs above each square inch of play-doh. If we double the height, length, and width, we now have 2*w X 2 * l = 4*l*w or 4 times the number of square inches. However, each square inch has 2 * h inches of play-doh above it, which is twice as heavy as the first version of the tower. Now, instead of only 3 lbs for every square inch,we have 6 lbs for every square inch. The play-doh at the bottom can't hold up all of that play-doh, so your tower collapses. To answer OP's question, your knee is the bottom of the play-doh tower, and as you get older and weigh a lot more, you get closer to the point where your knee can't hold any more weight for every square inch.",
"You stop doing it so much as an adult, so you get soft.\n\nI meditate in seiza position daily, and it's not uncomfortable at all anymore. I also stock at a store, and I drop down onto my knees and slide around on them on concrete everyday. ",
"I always felt ashamed about this. Thought it was just me. ",
"How the fuck do you sit on your knees? ",
"Sitting on my knees was still painful as a kid. I was really fucking fat.",
"Simple.. It's painful because you spent so much time on your knees as a kid.",
"you're heavier. square cubed rule and all that.",
"It's not painful for all adults. If it is painful, it is because you don't sit that way normally, and your body isn't used to it. Your quadriceps are probably too tight. I am 49 years old, self-employed, rarely use chairs and sit on the floor most of the time. (My computer is on a table with the legs cut off.) I find that position very comfortable. Adults who do yoga or martial arts will have no problem with this. Edit: I'm assuming you mean this _URL_0_ "
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4cvj5v | i keep hearing people advocating for equal pay for women. i have yet to hear an argument against this. is there one? if so, what is it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cvj5v/eli5_i_keep_hearing_people_advocating_for_equal/ | {
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"I don't think anyone per se is saying that there shouldn't be equal pay, instead I think that the main argument against this is that, looking across the population, women as a whole earn less per hour than men. The advocates of equal pay say that this should be equal. However looking in depth, people in the same jobs, with the same level of seniority and qualification, tend to earn the same regardless of gender. However there is a smaller proportion who go into the high paying jobs eg Finance, STEM fields. So opponents of this would say that equal pay is already in place, it is just that more work is needed to engage women in high paying careers, with many women not liking the high pressure and working conditions many of these careers have. \n\nI awknowledge that much of what I have said has been broad stereotypes and there will be many exceptions to the rule, this is just what I think the main argument against it is.",
"Firstly, in America, men and women due get paid, this was made law by the Equal Pay Act of 1963. \n \nThe difference is cultural, not sexist. Women are more drawn to jobs that benefit others, like teaching; they typically don't work as much overtime (so less likely to be promoted); they typically don't negotiate salaries as often and as aggressive as males do, etc. ",
"A lot of things go into the pay gap. Like other commentators have said, job composition makes up the vast majority of it. Other factors are that women tend to leave the workforce for a time to have children, and women tend wot work fewer hours than men. These impact their pay and advancement opportunities. Of course, this isn't true for every woman, but these are trends, and the trends show up in pay data.\n\nAfter all that's accounted for, there's still on average a 3-5% pay gap between women and men. This is either discrimination or something economists haven't accounted for. This also varies significantly by field: Some jobs _are_ pretty biased in favor of men, other fields are as even as possible, and a few are biased in favor of women. \n\nBut the headline 70 something percent number is because they're comparing neuro surgeons to kindergarten teachers. Here's a fun math trick: Say you have 100 men and 100 women, male doctors earn $100,000/year and male kindergarten teachers earn $40,000/year. Female doctors earn $110,000/year and female kindergarten teachers earn $50,000 a year. The men are 80 doctors, 20 kindergarten teachers and the women are 80 kindergarten teachers, 20 doctors. What's the wage gap? Average male wage is $88,000 and average female wage is $62,000, so women only earn 70% of what men earn. Right? That's exactly the kind of calculation people are doing when they say \"women only earn 76% of what men earn.\"",
"Almost no one I am aware of is advocating that a woman with equal qualifications, experience, and abilities should be paid less for doing the same job.\n\nThe main argument against the equal pay movement is their statistics compare *different* jobs. For whatever reason, women tend to work fewer hours, have less job experience, and enter into lower paying careers. When you correct for these factors, the wage gap shrinks to a few cents on the dollar.\n\nMany people don't think it makes sense to blame employers for this problem, and that it makes more sense to try to address why woman aren't pursuing high pay careers with the same vigor men do."
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633rb8 | what are networking software ports and how do they work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/633rb8/eli5_what_are_networking_software_ports_and_how/ | {
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"Think of software ports like sockets in a electrical outlets. You have a whole bunch of devices e.g a toaster, a TV, a Roku, etc. that get the power from that electrical outlet. Each device will be connected to a different sockets.\n\nLet's say a girl name Alice wants to turn on the toaster from outside of the house. \nHer friend Bob - who's in the house - knows which socket will connect the power to the toaster. Upon receiving Alice's request, he plugs in the toaster to the corresponding socket, hence turn on the toaster. \n\nIn fact, network traffic is the electricity, sockets are the ports. The toaster is the service associated with the port, eg SMTP, HTTP, etc. Bob is the network stack controller of the OS. Alice is the someone on the network that want to connect to a service on the OS. "
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1gjtay | why is the obama administration supporting the syrian rebels considering they are also being support by al-qaeda? | I understand that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons on their people, but if we train the rebels supported by al-qaeda, aren't we training and arming them to attack us after they overthrow the current Syrian regime? Would the Syrian people be better off being run by a group that is backed by al-qaeda? This looks to just be a continuation of the US policy of backing the lesser evil at the time and then having to deal with an even worse enemy later on.
How is this any different that the US supporting the Afghan rebels against the Soviets? Except for the part that we know for certain this time that the people we are backing will turn the weapons on us once they are finished with their current enemy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gjtay/eli5_why_is_the_obama_administration_supporting/ | {
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" > How is this any different that the US supporting the Afghan rebels against the Soviets?\n\nThe details may be different but the overarching reasoning is still the same. We have geopolitical goals to gain by an overthrow of Assad. The old saying \"the enemy of my enemy is my friend\" applies quite nicely here. \n\nAnyhow the US isn't arming the rebels with weapons we haven't already helped funnel into the country from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Croatia. Additionally there are significant factions of more secular (still religious) and less anti-american members of the FSA. Arming these groups has the potential to give these groups the momentum to overtake groups like the Nursra Front as the lead in this war. I'm not saying this will work but this is the reasoning. \n\nSometimes you can gain a lot to arm your enemies a little.",
"There is no such group as \"the rebels\". The rebels are composed of a number of groups with wildly different philosophies. Some of them want to replace the current regime with a free democracy, others with an Islamist theocracy.\n\nThe radical Islamists are receiving support from sympathetic radical factions from around the region. Right now, of all the rebels they have the best equipment and training, and even the pro-democracy rebels rely on their support. The U.S. intends to provide support to pro-democracy rebel groups. This will, inevitably, aid the radical Islamists as well & ndash; the hope is that the democrats receiving direct support will come out on top.\n\nObviously, this is a risky decision. But so is doing nothing, because the likely alternatives are a Syria run by a military dictator or by fundamentalists. The U.S. is trying to mitigate the risk as best it can. For instance, what the Syrian rebels really want are heavy weapons to take out tanks and aircraft, but the U.S. is hesitant to fulfill these requests because if the Islamist radicals got some of them (and, inevitably, they would) then they could end up being used against U.S. tanks and aircraft in the future."
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22tl51 | why does everyone tell me to drink gatorade when i'm sick/hungover? is it better than water? | I know it is supposed to replace electrolytes, but what does that mean? Thank you in advance. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22tl51/eli5_why_does_everyone_tell_me_to_drink_gatorade/ | {
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"Think of salt placed into water. That forms electrolytes. The salt breaks down into ions. Easier for your body to use these ions to replace diminished supplies of said ions. These ions can also be referred to as electrolytes in fancy talk. ",
"Brawndo. It's got electrolytes! "
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8c1bw7 | constitutional crisis | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8c1bw7/eli5_constitutional_crisis/ | {
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"A constitutional crisis is a situation where the Constitution (which is the document that sets out the guiding principles for a country) does not have a mechanism to solve a problem.\n\nFor instance in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died, and John Tyler (his Vice President) ascended to the Presidency, the US Constitution at the time was somewhat vague as to whether Tyler remained Vice President but assumed the duties of President, or whether he became President. There were a few other issues regarding VP succession, or VP \"acting\" as President, and they were eventually clarified with the passage of the 25th Amendment.",
"The Constitution is the set of laws & rules for how government works. \n A constitutional crisis is when you have a situation where the rules don't provide a clear way to move forward from the current situation.\n\nLet's look at the US Civil War. A bunch of states got together and decided they didn't want to be part of the USA anymore. The Constitution provides no rules for how a state can separate itself. You could argue that states *should* be able to leave because there weren't rules against it just as easily as you can argue that they *shouldn't* be able to leave because no rules allowed it. The end result here was a bloody war to resolve the debate.\n\nThat's a bit of an extreme example. You're hearing it now because people are talking about suspicious dealings of the president. The potential crisis is caused by the fact that the very person responsible for investigating the president is one of the president's indirect subordinates and the president has the power to have them fired and replaced. How do you deal with a potentially criminal chief executive when that same chief executive has power over the investigation and can have it terminated if he fears it will reveal his criminal actions? "
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3x7l26 | why newspapers are so huge? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x7l26/eli5_why_newspapers_are_so_huge/ | {
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"text": [
"The more content they can cram on the cover, the more likely you'll spot a story that catches the eye. It's pretty much more real estate for stories and ads."
]
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1ji9dv | how does google's search by images work? | I tried to Google, but i am not much smarter. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ji9dv/eli5_how_does_googles_search_by_images_work/ | {
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"\"Google analyzes the image, creating a mathematical model based on shapes, lines, proportions, colors and other elements. It then matches the model against images already in Google’s index. Google then does page analysis to take a text-based guess at what the image is, which is part of the process of identifying the image and returning similar results.\"\n\n_URL_0_\n\n",
"I will try to give you an explanation that will suffice your curiosity but that is probably far away from what google uses (I really don't know the state of the art on this field, in fact, digital image processing is not my area).\n\nOne simple approach to this problem is to extract features of the image. What would be some features? Well, some simple ones would be the moments of the image (the average, variance, skewness and kurtosis of the values of the pixels on the image) or its histogram (the amount of red, green, blue, yellow and all the possible colours on the image). With this vector of features for each image you can measure their similarity easily.\n\nAnother approach, that is quite impressive and probably closer to what google really uses, is the SIFT, that is a technique to locate keypoints on the image. [Here](_URL_1_) you can see SURF (sort of SIFT) matching the keypoints from the image that it knows with the one that is being recorded by the camera (and here it's a [picture](_URL_0_) that illustrates better this)."
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bpc0nj | how do big cars end up in malls? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpc0nj/eli5_how_do_big_cars_end_up_in_malls/ | {
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"text": [
"It’s generally not overtly visible to the public, because they are a bit of eyesores, but places like these all have one or more large bay doors for the purpose of moving in/out large objects and vehicles."
]
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2wjn76 | what happens to spotify songs when they are available for offline listening? | Are they downloaded to my phone? If so what type of crazy compression happens or is it something else? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wjn76/eli5_what_happens_to_spotify_songs_when_they_are/ | {
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"text": [
"Yes it's saved to your phone, and it uses a compression scheme similar to any other compressed audio file. As far as the actual file extension and type, it's probably proprietary, and not functional with any other apps, without modification. "
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4p2r8q | what would happen if a presidential candidate simply did not pick a vice president or was hostile to the idea of a vp? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4p2r8q/eli5_what_would_happen_if_a_presidential/ | {
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"The presidential nominee doesn't actually have to nominate a VP; the two are technically separate ballots. Even if the president doesn't pick a running mate, somebody has to win the election. If there's no majority, the Senate decides from the two with the most votes.\n\nSo if the two major parties ran, but only one nominated a VP, that vice president would be running unopposed. Realistically, no party would go into the election without a VP nomination, no matter the candidate's opinion on the matter.",
"It dos not matter if the President is hostile to the idea of Vice President, it is a roll that is required to be filled by the Constitution. He can theoretically choose to run without a running mate, but the party can choose one independently, and if only one person is running for the position during the actual election they will get the job by default. "
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2rkl5t | the need for metered data plans on cellular networks. | I'm curious if there's a physical / spectrum limitation that the cellphone providers are trying to overcome, or if it's a "We are the cell providers, and we want to do this. Deal with it." thing. Perhaps a little bit of both? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rkl5t/eli5_the_need_for_metered_data_plans_on_cellular/ | {
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"text": [
"The radio spectrum that cell providers operate on is extremely limited. The industry is having a lot of trouble keeping up with demand for fast data because the entire usable spectrum is already licensed off to things like TV and radio. Providers can always build more towers and more cell radios, but at some point there is a limit to what you can have and still run a business profitably with."
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77oqwh | how does food sober you up and lessen the effect of pharmaceutical drugs? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77oqwh/eli5_how_does_food_sober_you_up_and_lessen_the/ | {
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"text": [
"That's a myth, food does NOT sober you up. \n\nDrinking on a full stomach can slow the absorption of alcohol, but eating food while you're drunk will NOT make you less drunk.",
"It doesn't sober you up, the simplest is that it dilutes what is in your stomach. Which can delay the onset of effects or depending on what you ate increase them or cause a bad reaction. Or if drinking coffee while drunk will give you a caffeine boost which will make you a wide awake drunk, but you will still be drunk. ",
"It actually depends on the drug. Some drugs are actually better absorbed when you take them with food or drink. Iron, for example, requires an acidic medium for absorption, and taking iron with orange juice will double your absorption.\n\nIn other cases, the chemical composition of food can inactivate drugs or slow their absorption. You should never take tetracyclines within two hours of dairy products, because they are high in calcium, and calcium, which is a divalent cation, will bind and inactivate the tetracycline molecule."
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7krd9j | why do people tend to touch the wound immediately after injury? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7krd9j/eli5_why_do_people_tend_to_touch_the_wound/ | {
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"1) It's nice to know that whatever body part that got injured is still there in it's entirety, so we feel to check and assess the damage\n\n2) To protect against a second strike in the same location. I mean, we defended it so poorly it got hit once, why not cover the weak spot in case round 2 immediately comes in?\n"
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fgcr7m | what is law of attraction and can there be any convincing (logically or scientifically) grounded explanation about how it works? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fgcr7m/eli5_what_is_law_of_attraction_and_can_there_be/ | {
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"Oh gods, lemme try but no guarantees.\n\n\nImagine the world is made up of interactions, because it is.\n\nWhat is an interaction? It is anything that can help us see a field.\n\nWhat is a field? It is an imaginary area around an object where another object can interact with it.\n\n\nSimplified (quite wrong, but works) analogy:\n\nSay, your field is a lake. In the centre of the lake is a whirlpool that sucks everything in. This is the source of the field. Now, place a paper boat on one edge of the lake. This is an interaction (or excitation).\n\nSay the current cause by the whirlpool was so weak that we couldn't see it. But, after we placed a boat on the surface, we can see it moving towards the whirlpool.\n\nAs it goes closer, it goes faster as more currents converge near the centre. This is why an Attractive force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.\n\nIf the boat was bigger, there would be more area of the currents to push, hence attractive forces are proportional to mass or charge.",
"The Law of Attraction says \"What you send out, you will get back.\" Even for most \"inspirational\", \"new-age-y\", \"psuedo-philosophy\" ideas, it's not well defined. Within the scope of hard science, there is no explanation of how it works or could work. You could make an argument for it within the social sciences, but even then, having a positive affect/attitude isn't going to guarantee positive attitudes are going to given back to you. In most cases, the social context will dominate over the attitude you adopt. Attempting to expand it outside the context of social interactions, it just fails apart, as cause and effect just doesn't work that way. When attempting to secure a loan or get a job, a positive attitude isn't going to actually affect your chances. It may appear that a positive attitudes helps, but that mostly survivor and confirmation basis.\n\nLook at this way: when you write a test, you need to know the facts. Now, having a positive attitude about it can reduce your stress level and help with recall, but if you don't actually know the facts, you won't pass."
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4b3wvq | why is the life expectancy of foxes so short? | It baffles me its only 3-6 years. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4b3wvq/eli5_why_is_the_life_expectancy_of_foxes_so_short/ | {
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"Essentially nature is a cruel bastard, and life is hard. In the wild foxes (and other canines) are subject to many diseases, parasites, and competition from other predators cutting their lives shorter than their potential maximum. In captivity foxes live roughly as long as their domestic counterparts, with access to healthcare, food and water. ",
"Not a foxpert but a quick google search lead me to this super professional looking website. It actually has sources listed so it might be more reliable than it looks. Man causes of death cited are: \n- Hit by a car \n- Culling ( humans killing foxes on purpose ) \n- A parasitic infection called mange. The mites cause hair loss and terrible itching. Animals with no fur are cold and look for warmer, often more dangerous places (because of humans) to warm up. Also the itching results in scratching which results in wounds than can infect easily. \n \n_URL_0_",
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, pun intended. It's a harsh life for wild animals, you get hurt, or you get weak and a little slower for any reason, and there's going to be a hungry predator that will be faster than you that will catch you and eat you. Harsh winters can be especially hard as food becomes scarce and everything starts to go hungry. There's also the fact that with the exception of some birds the majority of animals are carnivores, at least where I live carnivorous species outnumber herbivores by more than 2 to 1, and when a carnivore gets hungry enough it doesn't care what it's usual food source is, it eats anything it can get. Nevermind humans that can trap or shoot you no matter how healthy you are.\n\nSource: spent the first 50 years of my life living in the great outdoors, lived on my trapline in the winters and worked at remote fishing and hunting camps in the summers.",
"As others have said, it's just a much harsher life. For example, the average life span of an outdoor cat (if it survives kittenhood) is two years. Compare that to the average housecat at 15 years.",
"Most animals only live a relatively small percent of their lifespan after sexuality maturity to maintain selective forces. ",
"Litter size is 2-12, average 7. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the pups die within weeks/months which would bring down the LE for all foxes.",
"One needs to remember that foxes that reach adulthood likely live longer than that, infant mortality is high and likely why average life expectancy is so low.\nIn Australia they are a massive pest both ecologically and economically. I actually shoot foxes for a bunch of sheep farmers. They are interesting animals but damn they cause some serious damage.",
"It's because Life Expectancy is a statistical average. And that average is dragged down a lot by high infant mortality (i.e. baby foxes dying in their early years before they've fully developed, which is a lot higher in the wild). That's why it's generally interesting to look at life expectancy at birth or life expectancy at Age X. You generally find that the foxes who survive childhood can live well beyond their \"life expectancy\" at birth.",
"This short life span sounds like early man where life was short, and brutal. However it does illustrate how man could domesticate smarter animals who could see the obvious advantages of coexisting with humans. A symbiotic relationship where we provide greater safety and hunting flexibility whereas the wolf supplied better alertness and defence of the home territory, as well as cooperating in the hunt.\n\nThe way foxes team with badgers."
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1v2yku | how are tv shows and movies able to film on the streets without people looking at them? | For example, I just watched a promo for the new Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He was in 70s attire and dancing to the Bee Gees while walking down the street. At least 100 people passed him and no one in the foreground or background turned their head. How are movie crews able to do this? Were they all hired? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v2yku/eli5_how_are_tv_shows_and_movies_able_to_film_on/ | {
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"Most of it is filmed in back lot theaters, yes, they are usually actors",
"In addition to filming on closed backlots, They close off large sections of street and hire extras to play passers-by. In certain neighborhoods in LA, it's common to have traffic rerouted to accommodate a film being shot. "
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dxw7ze | how do white blood cells destroy large parasites, such as parastic nematodes, etc? | I think this is the right subreddit for a quick question. I can't find a straight, definitive answer online. Anyone know? Do they secret some sort of dissolving agent? They can't phagocytize them as they are too big, so how do they combat multicellular organisms as mere single cells? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dxw7ze/eli5_how_do_white_blood_cells_destroy_large/ | {
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"Yay finally something in my field:\n\nLong story short: we suck at dealing with big parasites. Some of our immune cells try to shoot them with toxic molecules (granules) but the parasite doesn’t care that much. We also try to recruit some tough guy cells (macrophages) that try to produce some other toxic compounds and activators of army cells but these suck as well. Our immune cells that make antibodies (B cells) also produce a special type of antibody (IgE) to help our “anti parasite” immune cells like mast cells produce and release toxic granules. However, most often these granules also suck. These granules also try to induce physiological responses like diarrhea and vomiting in a futile attempt to eject the parasite but this also sucks. Most often, if we try to make too big of a response, the immune system goes haywire and there is a lot of collateral damage. TL;DR: we suck at dealing with most big parasites.\n\nEdit: not to mention how some parasites actually rely on our response to further their own game. Tricky little shitstains"
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2jpmvm | if i look through a telescope at a planet 500 light years away, i am seeing what occurred on that planet 500 years ago. if i begin to travel towards that planet at the speed of light and maintain my telescope on it, what will happen to what i see? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jpmvm/eli5_if_i_look_through_a_telescope_at_a_planet/ | {
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"The light emitted would be hitting your eyes faster as you approached it. You'd be seeing more recent information the closer you got to it until you were \"live\" so to speak. Any changes that occur would be visible as you got closer to it. The speed of these changes would be relative to how fast you traveled towards that object. \n\nEDIT: getting schooled by wise knowledgeable folk! Stop upvoting me lol. Light sucks and is confusing. Thank you all for correcting me! TIL. ",
"Another question, if i would go to that planet with the telescope instantanously, would i see earth that many years back in history?"
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1i1bcr | how does the police track and bust drug dealers? | ***Obligatory side note: I am by no means a drug dealer and I'm not asking for applicable information, I'm just curious at how it's done and how effective their methods are*** | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1i1bcr/eli5_how_does_the_police_track_and_bust_drug/ | {
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"The police rely on tips from Joe Public and their own observation skills to target street-level dealers. When they have a street dealer in custody, or \"on the carpet\" interrogating them, the police offer amnesty [or a lesser prison term] for naming names higher up in the distribution food chain. They lie to get info, and that's allowed. The police have no input as far as pressing charges goes. They can influence the Prosecution's choices, to a small degree, but ultimately they have zero input in the Court's decisions. \n\nThey have a limited set of tools to use. There's informants and tips, and not much more to work with. They *do* proactively try to set up stings and honeypots with mixed results. For example, local cops here set up a hydroponics store and just followed the customers home. Some purchasers were legit, and some were growing marijuana, so that was effective.\n\nMaking undercover purchases from dealers is also frequently used. So frequent, I almost forgot to mention it. \n\nBanks report unusually large cash deposits to the police. \n\n[Some] power companies report unusual usage spikes to the police, and investigate power theft ruthlessly.\n\n"
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ba2lmm | - why do builders make up ground and then dig it out again? | I might not be explaining this very well but here goes. There's a new industrial unit going up near me. The builders moved in a few days ago and put down a layer of hard core stone. Probably only 6" deep. But then they came along with a digger and dug out the footings *through* the hard-core they'd just put down.
What's going on there? Does this make the footing stronger? How is it better than digging down through the ground that's already there?
I'm very confused!! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ba2lmm/eli5_why_do_builders_make_up_ground_and_then_dig/ | {
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"May be that the hardcore was mistakenly laid before the footings, or that the hardcore was to help support the digging machines better. Without knowing the details of the land/area, we can only guess.",
"Big chunks of rock (6-9 inches) are riprap. They keep the big equipment tires clean so mud doesn't get tracked away from the construction site (riprap is required on construction exits in my county).\n\nBut that's probably not why. Concrete slabs require a smooth solid base of gravel. It's immensely easier to lay down the gravel and level and pack it when there aren't a bunch of holes to work around. It's cheaper to waste some of the gravel than it is to pay for the additional time and labor to gravel around the holes after the excavation."
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g02r1z | what does it mean when scientists say “an eagle can see a rabbit in a field from a mile away”. is their vision automatically more zoomed in? do they have better than 20/20 vision? is their vision just clearer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g02r1z/eli5_what_does_it_mean_when_scientists_say_an/ | {
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"1.\tTheir vision is not zoomed in, it’s actually zoomed out.\n2.\tYes it’s approx. 20/5. or 5 x better than perfect human vision.\n3.\tYes for the same reason as above. \n\nIf you’ve ever watched a YouTube video on a slow connection and you witnessed the resolution dropping and everything became fuzzier, then you’d know how an eagle would feel if they suddenly had our eyes.",
"Imagine a yellow pencil with a little branding text on its side. Now imagine your eye sight is so blurry that even at arm's length this pencil looks like a solid yellow line. It's not like the image is zoomed out. It's just blurry. \n\nWhenever this pencil is so far away that it looks like a yellow line to you, an eagle can still see the text on it.",
"Eagles DO NOT have zoomed in vision. But they can see very far. Look at large obect far away, like the moon. Now cover it with your hand. Even though you hand is *way* smaller than the moon it still able to cover it up completely, how, angular size. Angular size is different from physical size because unlike physical size which is mostly fixed, angular size changes with distance, it gets smaller farther away and bigger closer to the viewer, we cannot actually directly detect physical size we can only see angular size, **Once an object reaches a certain distance it’s angular size dips below the threshold humans to see details so it looks blurry in birds this threshold is MUCH lower so eagles still see far way things as being tiny they just keep the details**. Tl;Dr it’s not zoomed in, yes their vision is just *that* clear.",
"20/20 isn't \"perfect,\" it's just the average for humans. It means you see at 20 feet things that the average human sees at that distance. If your vision is 15/20, you have to get closer or put on your glasses; 25/20, congratulations, your eyesight is better than average-- for a human. A hawk with normal human vision would probably starve.",
"It works the same way when you look to focus on something, they can just look and focus 2 miles away. Technically you can see 2 miles away, that mountain looks fairly clear or that waterfall, the eagle can just focus on that fish.",
"None of the current top answers mentions hunter-vision -- the processing difference in the brain that \"zooms in\" on things that are *different*. \n\nA whole field of gently waving grass, and three stalks going *wiggle-tremble-wiggle* because a mouse is scurrying past? \n\nIt's the eyes *and* the brain zeroing in on that spot that means the mouse is going to be lunch. \n\nClassroom teachers have it too.",
"Do they have larger foveas with more rods for better detail resolve? Do they have an equal number of rods and cones? Do certain areas on their retina have more rods than cones like humans?",
"Just to clear something up, 20/20 vision is not perfect vision, it's just the most average or common, healthy vision.",
"I highly suggest watching the scishow special about birds eyes on YouTube. Tells you about the colors they can see, the spectrum and how in this case a bird of prey can spot its target from so far while a seagull can see the entire horizon in clear view.",
"Actually, eagles can see rabbits *two* miles away.\n\nTheir eyes are about the same size as human eyes, so relative to their size much bigger than ours, but they have better focusing (no near- or farsightedness, constant focusign during movement) and, most importantly, they have about 5x more cells in their retina. You can think of eagles having higher resolution - where you as a human see just HD, they see more than 4K.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Eagle's eyes are very good as compared to humans. The reasons very simply are to do with the number of sensory cells in the back of their eye which acts as a film on which the image is read from. Imagine a screen of a old computer vs newer ones. And that being the image formed in your eye. The old ones were good for the time and were what we had and accepted as being satisfactory. But the new ones are what eagle has and we can't imagine what it's like because we haven't seen that. To add a bit more technically, eagles don't have good 3d vision because their eyes are on opposite sides of the head. They do have good long range vision because of the high definition of the image.",
"Eagles' retinas have cone-rich structures found towards the back of the eye. This causes them to have outstanding vision of 20/5, which gives them the ability to spot small prey 100's of ft above the ground (and allows them to identify shapes separately from a distance with less blur). \n\nThey also have the ability to see colors more vividly than humans can, including different shades of particular colors. They have a supreme ultraviolet light range as well, allowing them to see traces of the bodies that their prey make from far away in addition to urine. \n\nDue to the position of their eyes they have a 340 degree field of vision which makes their peripherals pretty good. \n\nLast, their cornea has the ability to change shape to better focus on near and far objects.\n\nSo all in all, their eyes have significantly different structures to them that allow them to have crazy good sight.",
"Their vision is sharper. If you have good vision, you can probably easily spot a small crumb on a table several feet away, while to an old person, that image is more blurred and the crumb is simply not visible. Your vision is not \"zoomed in\" to see the crumb, it's just sharper. Comparing the vision of a typical person to that of an older person, is similar to comparing an eagle's vision to that of a typical person.\n\nBonus fact: 20/20 is not perfect vision, it's typical human vision. It's possible to have better than 20/20, e.g. 20/10 vision, which means you can see at 20 feet what a typical person can only see at 10 feet. Or if your vision was worse than average, say 20/40, you need to be 20 feet away to see something that a typical person can see from 40 feet away.",
"Not zoomed in, just extremely sharp. Their eyes are also capable of sending more information to the brain per unit time.\n\nAn eagle's field of view is actually *less* \"zoomed in\" than ours. Eagles can see 340 degrees around them while humans can only see about 180 (sometimes a tad bit more). But just the sheer amount of photo receptive cells in an eagles eye and their ability to process more visual input is what makes their sight so much better at a distance than ours.",
"Eagles have had to evolve to see long distances and also have the means to get there quickly. In terms of evolution the eagles with the best eyesight were more successful so it evolved that way. There have sharper more detailed long distance vision as a result.\n\nThere’s no point in a human seeing a mike or two as we don’t have the means to get there quickly. No evolutionary advantage to humans so it was never selected for. We are good at 3D because we have binocular vision ...... so closer in range with good spatial judgement.",
"20/20 vision doesn't mean \"perect vision\" it means that someone sees at 20 feet what an average person sees at 20 feet. Eagles have better vision than that but by the title you seem to think that its odd that an eagle has better than perfect vision.\n\nedit: Thanks for the gold fellow redditor!",
"I mean I'm not gonna lie, if I'm 2 miles away, in the sky, and I have a field to look at, I could probably see a freaking rabbit too...",
"I copy/paste this from the internet and yes the eagle has better than 20/20 vision\n\n\nA person with 20/20 vision is able to see letters 1/10th as large as someone with 20/200 vision. 20/20 is not the best possible eyesight however, for example, 20/15 vision is better than 20/20. A person with 20/15 vision can see objects at 20 feet that a person with 20/20 vision can only see at 15 feet.",
"Also, if eagles could talk and the rabbit was holding a USA quarter- the eagle would be able to tell you if it were heads or tails. From 2 miles away.",
"I remember seeing an episode of the new Cosmos a few years ago, where Neil Degrasse Tyson was explaining how our eyes evolved. It was a bit confusing to me but if I remember right, his point was that our eyes are sub-standard due to evolving from fish and that our eyesight can never evolve to be better. Can anyone help me with this understanding please?",
"Could you put eagle eyes on a human? Will the eye work?",
"I have often wondered, if an eagle was reading a newspaper, would it's comfortable reading distance be like 300m? Would an eagle get eye strain from focusing on something at arms length like I do if I put my face too close to the page?",
"The way I look at it is the way I experimented with AI.\nLet's assume we have an infinite quality HD picture.\nNow let's make a computer that's only allowed to process so many pixels for every inch of picture, at random. \nQuick Google, says a human like computer would be allowed 400pixels per square inch. For numbers sake let's give our computer \"eagle\" 1600ppi (very low ball I'm sure). \n\n If at a given distance a rabbit takes up 4inchs of pictures, human robots have a good chance at identifying it. If it takes up 1inch, human robots still still got a pretty good chance of knowing it's a rabbit. \n\nBUT the eagle, with 1 inch of rabbit, the eagle gets an many pixels as the human got at 4inchs. They can tell that it is a rabbit, when it's nose sniffs, when it's head turns, when it's hair stands up.",
"People can have better than 20/20 vision, this is just a metric that has been deemed to be good vision, it is not the maximum a person can see and it's not even an indication of perfect vision. They don't go any further because generally there just isn't a need for it.\n\nIt just means you can see clearly from 20 feet away.\n\nThere are also a number of other areas of our vision that make up 'perfect vision' and these are not even considered in a 20/20 test.",
"I feel as though you might be asking what the world actually \"looks\" like to an eagle, which is something that I try to imagine a lot. Our visual perception of reality is largely an experience concocted within our own minds that correlates to reality but isn't **really reality**. We don't know what reality *looks* like, and I doubt that idea is even meaningful.\n\nSo what does an eagle see? I imagine it's probably similar to what we see, but just, better. A mouse two miles away probably takes up as much room on their 'HUD' as it would for us, but it just has a wildly deeper resolution and when it needs to \"read\" information from it, it just *can*, in the same way that you can easily parse something written in a large print book.",
"Think about it from the opposite perspective. A nearly blind person can barely see a rabbit down the hallway. You can see a rabbit down the hallway. An eagle can see a rabbit down the field.\n\nIf there's ten animals in the hallway you would have to focus your eyes on the rabbit, just like an eagle would in the field.",
"Resolution of the eye is not like the pixels on a camera. It's an angular problem. If my eye has a 1 arc second angular resolution, I can barely distinguish two blocks 1 inch apart at 100 yards . But it's 2 inches at 200 yards. In either case we're not zoomed in, we can just see the gap between the blocks instead of seeing a single block."
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dyfjoq | support vector regression and support vector machine | I’m struggling to understand these two topics of machine learning, I think is mainly because I’m looking it from the math side first (and it’s a little complex since I’m new). So I’d like to someone explains these 2 important concepts like I’m five. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dyfjoq/eli5_support_vector_regression_and_support_vector/ | {
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"Assume two labels for data (y in {-1,1}, for example). Support vectors are the vectors that best separate data in the feature space (e.g. the space defined by the covariates used to predict the labels) by maximizing the distance from the vector to each of the most-similar data points.\n\nIf you had some number of data, each with distinct overall feature values, and half of them belonged to each category, then the SV for the dataset should be a vector that draws the line \"halfway\" between the two data that have the most similar feature values but different labels. SVMs can also use the kernel trick when a support vector cannot be found for the feature space as-is. \n\nSVMs are just algorithms that take data and find support vectors in some way by employing the above general method."
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380zf2 | how does one multithread a program and why is it so difficult? | I was reading [this](_URL_0_) and it made me wonder why multithreading a program is so hard. So, why is it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/380zf2/eli5_how_does_one_multithread_a_program_and_why/ | {
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"basically when you multithread, you break up the program and have parts of it run in parallel. sometimes, that's easy to do, other times it's hard. a lot of times, you need a time ordered event for your program or weird things can happen. since you cannot control how fast each thread runs, you need to be able to synchronize them somehow. if you try and sync too often, you'll bring the program to a screeching halt. if you sync not enough, things can get messed up.\n\nlike for example. you need to distribute 1000 flyers across your neighborhood. sure, that's easy enough to multithread, have 4 people each take 250 flyers. but how do you ensure that there is no overlap in the houses they go to? \n\nor you need to paint a painting, and you have 4 painters, sure break it down and have each paint a quarter. but how do you ensure that the final result makes sense? ",
"Imagine that you need to bake a cake and you have a set of simple instructions to perform:\n\n* Acquire ingredients\n* Preheat oven\n* Set out a bowl\n* Pour flower into bowl\n* Pour sugar into bowl\n* Add 2 eggs\n* ...other ingredients etc\n* Stir until lumps are gone\n* Grease pan\n* Pour into pan\n* put in oven\n* ...and so on until cake\n\nCan you divide those tasks between 2 people to make it go twice as fast?\n\nSay you just divide the tasks randomly, you are going to run into issues where one of them is trying to pour milk into the bowl, while the other is trying to pour the bowl into the pan, and everything will spill.\n\nSo now say instead of dividing tasks randomly you let person A do the first half and person B do the second half. Now the issue is it doesn't go any faster, because both people are simply waiting for half the time.\n\nIn this scenario the best gains you could possibly get from having multiple people working on the cake is if both people measure and put in ingredients at the same time, and that will only make the entire process a little faster while still making the entire event much harder to organize for whoever is in charge of cake design(the programmer)\n\n**Back to reality:** In computer programming, what you are creating is a process for the machine to follow, just like the process of baking a cake except with numbers and data. Usually that process requires that things be done in a specific order, or the process needs to be run when the environment is in a specific state. If you want the process to be performed by multiple processor cores, you need to seriously reconsider your approach to the problem, and some problems simply cant be made parallel. Worse still, when two processor cores modify the same data, they often have to stop everything and wait for their memory to work out which changes to keep and which to throw away, and that is such a slow process it can very easily take longer than simply doing both halves of the process on a single core.",
"Imagine that you are my employee. Each day, I write you a to-do list, and you do the first item, cross it off, do the second item, cross it off, do the third item, cross it off, and then go home.\n\nThat is how a single-threaded program works. The computer has one list of instructions (program) and one worker (thread) who does the instructions in order. Simple.\n\nNow imagine that I want to improve my factory's efficiency, so I hire two more employees. Now there are multiple workers (threads) working on the same to-do list (program). Things get messy.\n\n- What if all three of you walk up and see Item #1 on the list, and you all spend your morning writing the exact same report, wasting time? \n - Do we argue about whose report to use? Do we submit three reports to Head Office?\n- What if one worker does item #1 (collect firewood) while the others are trying to do #2 (start a fire) and #3 (make soup) before he's finished?\n- Imagine that the workers say \"Okay, the firewood's not ready yet, so we'll start item #4\", but item #4 is something that takes days? Does lunch never get cooked?\n- What if worker #2 borrows the company car while waiting for worker #1 to finish something, but worker #1 needed the company car to finish it? \n\nThey're not unsolvable problems, most of the time. But when you have multiple threads working within the same problem you've got to spend a lot of time thinking about the various ways they could conflict, jam each other up, go wrong, result in deadlocks, get things done in the wrong order, repeat each other, etc. So it can be a headache that requires much more planning than the comparatively simple single-threaded option.\n\nThere are also certain tasks that don't benefit from having multiple threads. Imagine, for example, that I ask you to read a novel and write a book report. A naive person might say \"Well I'll get my 20 friends together, we'll each read a chapter and write a one-paragraph report on that chapter, then combine them!\", but that just doesn't work, the 20 friends aren't seeing the overall story structure or character development. In most large, complex programs, there will be at least a few pieces that are like this, so you've got to figure out ways to separate those tasks from other tasks, and make sure that multithreading the other parts isn't useless if this part has to be single-threaded. \n\nOf course, it varies a ton. There are also plenty of tasks where multithreading is simple and makes perfect sense, like converting an album from one audio format to another (\"Alright, every thread works on a different song\").",
"**Hey lets make a dwarf fortress example that wouldn't make any sense to a 5 year old!**\n\nSay you program dwarf pathfinding so that dwarfs always path around water of a certain depth. Path finding is a very slow process so you would like to put it in a thread. Updating the fluid dynamics of water is also a very slow process so you would like to put that in a thread as well.\n\nHere is the problem: When you do pathfinding, you need to know what state the water is in to make your path, and when you do water updating you need to know where obstacles are to flow around them.\n\nWhat's worse still is that updating water is a very complex process with lots of pressure gradient type stuff, and odds are you need to store that information somewhere while you are processing it. Since you already have a tile reserved for every bit of water, the most memory efficient place to put that data is probably inside the water tile itself...however that means that while updating water, you probably have every single tile in an invalid state at some point. Note that you might say \"just reserve extra memory and do the calculations there\" but don't forget that even copying large amounts of memory takes time and DF has a lot of tiles for it to copy. A pathfinding attempt could easily happen during any part of this process and ruin everything.\n\nThe same is true for pathfinding, since you need to mark down tiles in your path as you construct it, often the easy way is to just flag valid tiles that you plan to visit and build onto the end until you reach a destination. That means nothing had better change to make one of those tiles invalid after you have visited it, or your pathfinding method is going to return a path that isn't actually valid.\n\nDwarf fortress could have been multithreaded if it had been designed that way from the beginning...but that doesn't mean it ever would have been easy to design it that way. Odds are that some gameplay mechanic would have had to have changed to support a new architecture, and the game would probably be a lot more buggy because thread interactions cause all sorts of strange errors. It certainly would be almost impossible to take the existing game and add multithreading."
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3vfz1w | why can't we write straight along the lines of lined paper if when we aren't looking at it? | If we're watching what were writing we can easily write straight along the lines of lined paper. However, if we look away from the paper and keep writing it doesn't follow. Why doesn't muscle memory or anything keep this from happening? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3vfz1w/eli5_why_cant_we_write_straight_along_the_lines/ | {
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"Pretend you were playing Operation. While looking, you have a constant view of the metal edges and can avoid them. Even if you're really good at that, once you look away you lose that reference between your hand, the tweezers, and the edges. You could have the steadiest hand and best muscle memory, but it's the muscles of picking up the pieces that's strong, not of memorizing and pinpointing the next hole. And in writing you can't even feel the line."
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39k8jz | why is looking at stars like looking back in time? | Not sure I understand exactly why, when we look at the sky, it is a sky from many years ago... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39k8jz/eli5_why_is_looking_at_stars_like_looking_back_in/ | {
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"Light is not infinitely fast. It's speed is limited to the speed of light, about 300 000 000 m/s.\n\nThus, if an object is, say, 3 light years a way (light year being the distance light travels in a year), then it will take 3 years for it's light to get to us.\n\nMany stars are much farther, so the sky we look at can be thousands of years old.",
"This question was just answered 3 days ago.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThink of light like a tennis ball. If I toss a tennis ball at you, when it reaches you, you're catching a tennis ball that left my hands 2 seconds ago. \n\nThe stars are so far away, that even though the light travels extremely quickly, it still takes a billion of years or more to reach earth. \n\nSo you're seeing how a star whose light took a billion of years to reach earth, that's not how it looks now. The star might even exist anymore, it could have exploded and disappeared a million years ago, and we won't know that for another 999 million years.",
"This is all down to the speed of light and how far away the light source is.\n\nThe closest star to the Earth is the Sun, which is roughly 150 million km away. Because light travels at 300,000,000 metres per second it takes roughly 8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach us.\n\nThe next closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, and this is 4.42 light years away. A light year is a measure of distance showing how far light will travel in a year, roughly 9 trillion km.\nBecause of this massive distance, the light from Proxima Centauri takes 4.42 years to reach Earth.\n\nAs most of the stars we see in the night sky are even further away than this, it will take even longer for the light to reach us. This is why looking up in the night sky is like looking back in time.",
"Light takes time to reach our eyes, and stars are a very long way away. Compare it to someone writing you a letter and saying \"Today, I (did something or other)\". If the letter takes a day to reach you, then you know that you are reading about what happened yesterday, not what happened today. If the letter has been sent from the other side of the world, then you might be reading about what happened a week ago.\n\nEDIT: removed extraneous word",
"You see a man a few hundred yards/metres away. He's chopping wood. He swings the axe down and hits the wood. You see the strike, but it takes a moment for the sound to get to you. *THUNK* You heard a sound happen in the past. You saw the exact moment that the sound was created, but it took a little bit to get to you. You heard the past! \nLight isn't instant (but on Earth, it does a pretty job of getting close to it), but like sound, it takes time to travel. So the light is the 'image' of everything coming at you. When we 'look at the sun' (using appropriate filters so we don't go blind) we are seeing an image of the sun that left several minutes ago. \nIf someone at the sun waved at you, they'd have finished waving about 12 minutes (IIRC) before you finally saw it. You saw them 12 minutes ago. You looked 12 minutes back in time.",
"its largely because of distance. light takes time to travel but it is extremely fast (the fastest thing we know of), so everything you see is in the past. something a meter away, or even several kilometers away would be in current time as far as you know because the light can travel that distance nearly instantly. however because space is so so so SO SO massive in size the light takes a long time to reach us from the distant stars. and what you see is not all from the same time either, a closer star's light could reach us centuries before a further star's does even if they appear to be right next to each other from where you stand since you cant judge the distance between two dots of light.",
"Stars are very far away, even so that light takes time to reach us from then. That can take years. By the time light reaches our eyes, we are seeing something that happened years ago. For all we know that star could be gone. "
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2ljcf4 | why do we still use gunpowder in ammunition instead of other explosives that have a much greater energy to volume ratio? | Wouldn't it save a huge amount of weight and make weapons much more compact if the rounds were much smaller? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ljcf4/eli5_why_do_we_still_use_gunpowder_in_ammunition/ | {
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"No matter what explosive we use in guns, we'll still call it \"gunpowder\" even if it's not a powder. It's just a name that stuck.\n\nBut we've actually changed the formula several times. With small arms, you actually want to limit the speed at which the agent explodes, if you can believe it. Too much energy too fast, and you have to compensate with a stronger, heavier barrel. If you can time it just right, then the explosion provides continuous pressure for the duration of the slug's trip down the barrel.\n\nModern 'gunpowder' is designed that way. Rather than just being the simple black powder that Captain Kirk cobbled together to kill an alien lizard-man, it's now little pellets optimized for stability, timing, reduction of smoke, and power.",
"except you don't want an explosive. you want a combustion. explosive would expand too fast. you want a controlled combustion and expansion so you don't create too much pressure in the chamber and blow out the steel barrel and end up with this:\n_URL_0_\n\nor worse, a bomb with steel shrapnel flying into the shooter's face."
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64b50c | why did going into world war ii dramatically propel the u.s. economy, as opposed to ruining it like the british economy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/64b50c/eli5_why_did_going_into_world_war_ii_dramatically/ | {
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"The US had virtually *none* of it's infrastructure damaged at all during WWII. Compare that to England (and, in fact, most of Europe) being *devastated*. The US emerged from the war ready to just roll back to work. ",
"Going into WW2 was not what bolstered the economy. It's the aftermath of it that helped it grow. Throughout America's involvement in the war factories were built and expanded to produce military goods which the government pays for. Revenue from that was used to transition to every day items after the war. Combine that with little to no loss of infrastructure aside from the ships at Pearl harbor and we had the perfect storm of economic growth.\n\nThe production focus during the war made the US the production superpower in the world which created revenue long after the war ended.",
"Major parts of Britain were bombed to hell, and their closest trading partners in Europe got it even worse.\n\nMainland USA escaped virtually unscathed.",
"The U.S. didn't suffer any damage to its infrastructure or manufacturing capabilities, and during the war most factories were converted to war use... so you had pent up demand for good unavailable during the war, plus you had soldiers coming home from war and starting families (buying houses, cars, furniture, etc.). Also, much of Europe and Japan were heavily damaged and needed rebuilding, and their production capabilities were damaged, so there was high demand for exports of American good, as well.",
"TL;DR\n\nIt's all about innovation of things.\n\nInnovation meant products. Products meant manufacturing, and manufacturing meant jobs.\n\nAnd... not getting bombed too much\n\n\nHere's the long part:\n\nI recently did a paper about the Battle of Britain. I can easily tell you that the Luftwaffe did some major damage on the southern parts of the British isle. The B.O.B took place around the summer to fall of 1940 (October according to internet) and a little into 1941. \n\nStrategic bombing runs devastated many major cities as Nazi Germany's Herman Goering was confident that Britain would fall just as easily as France. Such plans were thwarted by the RAF, thus forcing Hitler to postpone Operation Sea Lion.\n\nThese bombings weren't even super accurate. they were carpet bombings, so anything was screwed if it's along the path of the bombers.\n\nObviously there are more reasons of why Britain and neighboring countries had economic difficulties. Just thought that this is a major factor to the situation.\n\n\n\nTo possibly answer your question. I would say the economic boom in the US lasted from 1945-1952 realistically if you were to take an account of stock markets crash and recessions in the 70s.\n\nInnovation/adoption is the key to post war success. Some such as commercial aviation and the application of something called Keynesian policies, which seemed effective for the government to adopt.\n\nI probably got some parts jumbled up since I was explaining this from the top of my head at 4 AM. All this info was taught by my History professor.\n"
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504hlh | why were taxes in the us in the early 20th century 90%? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/504hlh/eli5_why_were_taxes_in_the_us_in_the_early_20th/ | {
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"To fund WWI and later the great depression the top rate tax were increased to very high levels. The 94% tax rate at the highest only applied to income over $2.5M in todays money. So if someone increased their yearly income from $3M to $4M they would only have $60k extra after tax. This tax were supposed to prevent people from taking out too much money from the companies they own and rather increase the wages of their workers and hire more workers.",
"The most important thing to remember about the 90%+ top marginal rates, is that *nobody actually paid them*.\n\nYes, the top marginal rates (the highest rate that you're taxed at) used to be much higher, but that was offset by more loopholes than you could count. There were numerous deferments and exclusions, and just about anything could qualify as a deduction. Ever heard the old term: a \"Three-Martini Lunch\"? That wasn't about people getting bombed in the middle of the day, it was about people using expensive lunches as tax deductions because meals used to be 100% write-offs. \n\nAs you can see, when you look at [receipts as a percentage of GDP](_URL_1_), versus the [individual tax rates over the years](_URL_0_), you can see that we've been fluctuating between the same 15 - 25% since the '50s. ",
"The 94% tax rate is essentially a myth in the way people talk about it. Yes it did exist, but it was never an economic policy in any grand scale.\n\n* It was only in existence for 2 years. That's right. That ultra high tax rate only existed from 1944-1945. It was made specifically to fund WWII and as soon as that was over it was gone. It existed as a type of emergency funding when the overwhelming majority of the US economy was based on fighting a war. \n\n* No one ever paid 94% tax rate. The highest recorded amount anyone actually paid in income taxes was 60%. This is because there use to be ever more tax deductions than we have now. Like way more, so reducing your taxable income was much easier. \n\n* Finally we can see the reality explained in [Hauser's Law](_URL_0_). This concept says that no matter what you do to the tax code the US will average between about 15% - 20% of GDP. The reason for this is because as you increase taxes, people change the way they spent, save, invest, and pay employees. If you tax the highest paid people at 90%, they do not give that money to people making less, instead they have their company build them a golf course next to the company headquarters, they give them $1,000,000 flex accounts, they find ways to give them that compensation. That is reality. ",
"Nobody paid them. There were so many loopholes that it was nowhere near 90% when you account for those. Sweater for your dog! Sure, write that off!\n\nThere weren't any restrictions back then on forming a foreign company or opening a foreign account so anyone who was more than poor would just open a bank account in the Cayman Islands and pay nothing at all. You can't do that today.",
"The top earners weren't taxed exactly 90% of their total income. We are taxed on a progressive tax scale which /u/pythonpoole [explained really well a couple years ago on another ELI5](_URL_0_)",
"That 90% was a MARGINAL tax rate, meaning only people earning over a certain level paid that tax rate on income over that level... ie. if the 90% tax rate was set on income over $1 million, and somebody earned $1.1 million, they only pay that rate on the $100k they earned over the $1 million threshold. ",
"People are also skipping over the moral argument that existed at the time. The 90% rate was very brief (only a few years, and only income over ~ $3 million in today's money) but rates in to the 70% existed for quite some time. This was to encourage companies to invest money in workers rather than top executives. The US as a culture had a stronger moral repulsion at extreme wealth disparity within communities.\n\nSo while a manager might have a nicer house and car than his employees, they would likely still live in the same cities and their kids attend the same schools. When Eisenhower raised the top rates to extraordinary levels, he also raised the lowest rates just a little bit. The moral argument was that everyone should contribute to building the nation, but according to how well they could. ",
"You need to understand how progressive taxation works.\n\nLet's say you made $1,000,000 in one year during this time. A 94% rate means you pay $940,000 in taxes and you are left with $60,000, right? Well, no, actually.\n\nThere's this thing in federal tax law called \"brackets.\" Your money is split up and categorized at different levels. Those portions are what's taxed, and all at different rates. So let's say for example there are three tax brackets (there are more, but we'll just use this as an example):\n\nBracket 1: 15% for all income up to $100,000\n\nBracket 2: 50% for income from $100,001 to $500,000\n\nBracket 3: 90% for income from $500,001 and up.\n\nSo for the first $100,000 you make, you'll be taxed at 15%, so $15,000.\n\nYour next portion is the $399,999 you made after that. Rounding up to the nearest dollar that's a tax of $200,000. \n\nThe final portion is the remaining $500,000, which is taxed at 90%, or $450,000.\n\nSo your total tax bill is $15,000 + $200,000 + $450,000, or $665,000. Taxes of course get more complicated from there (different *kinds* of income are taxed at different rates, so my example is just normal payroll dollars and not capital gains or retirement dividends), but I won't get into that. So even though you're in the 90% tax bracket in my example, your *effective* tax rate is 66.5%.\n\nTaxes are done this way at the federal level as a way to have progressive taxation (i.e. higher incomes are taxed more) without removing the incentive to make more money. If you make $499,990 a year in my example, getting a $1,000/year raise will put you in the next tax bracket, but only that extra $990 you make above the threshold is taxed at the higher rate. The rest is taxed at the same, old rate. So there is really no situation in which you can get a raise and end up taking home less money because of taxes. The system is designed precisely to avoid such a scenario.",
"If you look at the effective tax rates of people during that time, nobody paid anywhere near that and the effective percentage was probably lower than it is today in most cases. There's this illusion that the country is suffering from a lack of tax revenue, when the IRS is collecting record-setting amounts of revenue. If you look at just the rates and nothing else, you'd think \"wow we were rolling in the dough back then.\" However, the reality is that due to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 which updated the internal revenue code, the amount of loopholes and tax shelters that were shut down led to a massive increase in tax revenue. As a result of this, the amount of revenue being collected has been consistently increasing on a yearly basis with an occasional dip here and there due to economic conditions.",
"The real answer here is that they didn't pay that rate with the help of loop holes and other tax dodges. So any idyllic economic memory people have if that time period shouldn't be attributed to higher taxes. I'm seeing a lot of we should go back to this from people which is insane considering they didn't pay that percentage then but mostly because we don't have an income problem, we have a spending problem. Our budget is massive, and wasteful. You could easily move money from less needed areas and fund others that are actually important without raising taxes. In fact we should do this and cut taxes on the middle class.",
"You asked why and not how. The why is that it was a response to the Great depression. The top marginal rate was actually 94% of anything over $200,000. That's about $2.5 million in today's money. The effective rate, however, was more like 45% due to all the loop-holes. Regan fixed the loopholes in 1986 and adjusted all the rates to keep the effective rate about the same. Total taxation has remained steady - about 20% of GDP. Effective rates have varied dramatically. Back in the 40's, there were 24 tax brackets. Today, there are seven. Mostly, the government tweaks taxes and to you and me, the difference might be a few dollars each paycheck, but nothing life-changing.\n\nThe tax code is still totally hosed, but it works. The only people that really get screwed are those that get popped with the ATM. That is mostly people that get all of their wealth from paychecks, rather than investments. Think doctors, lawyers and small business owners. Very well off, but not usually multi-millionaires.\n\nIn reality, the super-rich (top .001) pay about 70% of the taxes and the rest of us plebes kick in the other 30%.",
"People have already gone over the marginal aspect and the war aspect, so I will add a bit more.\n\nIt is often pointed out that the tax applied only to income earned over a couple million dollars (the number varies depending on which year we are looking at). What also should be kept in mind is that there were far less people as a percentage of the population that would have been earning that kind of money than there would be today, given that the economy was more equal at the time *and* was much smaller. So it only applied to a tiny number of people, and a tiny percentage of most of their income. Not only that, but there were so many loopholes that by 1960, [Piketty and Saez estimate the top effective income tax rate was 31%]( _URL_0_) (I.E. what people actually paid), despite the marginal rate being over 90%! \nSo the tax raised little revenue, but helped prop up an industry of tax evasion which contributed nothing to the economy, as well as depressing investment and [labor supply](_URL_1_) (keep in mind incentives operate at the margin, so having a similar effective rate but a larger marginal rate means more economic harm). In my verdict they were a failure, immoral, and economically harmful. \n\nAlso, the lowest bracket was 20% at the time, but I assure you no poor person paid anywhere near that, nor would that have been a good thing if they did."
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15zpzu | ...why don't i remember mostly anything before the age of 4? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15zpzu/eli5why_dont_i_remember_mostly_anything_before/ | {
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"After just simply googling this I came to know that there are four main reasons why you don't remember your childhood.\n**A)**Infants brains just are not developed enough to be able to make long-term memories.\n**B)**You remembered that world differently now from when you were a child because you were introduced to language and everything turned into words.\n**C)**Simply because you had no sense of self or that you were in a body and a mind of your own.\n**D)**there are no more clues to remember them.Everything has changed so the chances of remembering it from a sudden realization is very low.",
"Your brain develops in stages as you get older. Certain parts develop before others. For example, the region for hearing develops before birth whereas regions for cognition continue to develop through early adulthood.. At a certain point, around age 3 or 4, the regions needed for making and retrieving memories start becoming developed enough so that you start remembering things. They continue to develop over time. This is why earlier memories are more fuzzy.",
"There's a couple reasons why.\n\nWhen you were little, you remembered things differently. You see how babies love to play peek-a-boo? It's because they really think you're gone. It's kinda like they can't remember you if you're not there. \n\nNow, you know you couldn't talk when you little right? Well when you learned to talk pretty good, you began to remember more and more things. You learned the words and the words got stuck in your head. \n\nYou see how pre-schoolers get surprised when they look in the mirror? That's 'cause they don't know who that funny looking person in the mirror is. Once you begin to realize that the person is you, you begin to remember the way you do now.\n\nAll it really means is that your brain just remembers things different from when you were little, sweetie. For most people, they're about for when it happens. Because this happens to almost everybody, we call it childhood amnesia. Amnesia is when you forget the all the things that happened to you before."
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bjaduc | why does it seem like plants grow dramatically overnight? | Hey there! I really hope this comes out the way I'm thinking.
I've started growing a veggie garden- which I've done before. I've noticed that plants go from 0-100 real quick. One evening I can't see anything sticking up out of the ground and the next evening its sprouted and very noticeably coming up out of the ground.
Is it really growing that fast? How quickly are these plants growing? Is it that the plant has sprouted under the soil and when I water it, the soil washes away and it only appears to have grown dramatically? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjaduc/eli5_why_does_it_seem_like_plants_grow/ | {
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"The seed comes with whatever nutrients the plant needs in the correct ratios because the seed was grown purposefully to get the next plant started. And since the seedling can't get any nutrients unless it gets access to the sun, water, and soil, it has to grow fast to get the roots and leaves out, or it will use all the nutrients up just by being alive."
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2n4wsz | where did the generic doorbell/clock melody originate? why is it used around the world? | [This](_URL_0_) is the melody( apparently called West Minister ). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2n4wsz/eli5_where_did_the_generic_doorbellclock_melody/ | {
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"It almost certainly got its popularity from being what the [Westminster Clock Tower (“Big Ben”) plays](_URL_0_), which was inspired by the church of Saint Mary the Great in Cambridge. Where it came from before that I don't think anyone knows, but building melody patterns out of different permutations of ringing a small number of bells is an old English tradition. Especially playing *all possible* permutations, called [ringing the changes](_URL_1_)."
]
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"http://youtu.be/oLOS3VYliUs?t=10s"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Quarters",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_ringing"
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bfn9lq | why when you're outside and then go inside, you can't see properly for a while | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bfn9lq/eli5_why_when_youre_outside_and_then_go_inside/ | {
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"There’s a chemical inside your eye (who’s name escapes me at the moment). It helps you see. It is “bleached” in light, and it takes a while to produce more. So when you go from a sunny outside to a shaded inside, you don’t have enough of this chemical unbleached in your eyes to see properly.\n\nInteresting note; this is why pirates had eye patches. It wasn’t because they were missing eyes, but it was so that one eye was always adjusted to the dark when they needed to go below deck!"
]
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6bmdlb | saffron's high price stems from how rarely it blooms, how come people don't just extract the saffron from the flower when it isn't blooming? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bmdlb/eli5saffrons_high_price_stems_from_how_rarely_it/ | {
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"Saffron is the dried blooms of the plant. They literally do not exist when the plant is not blooming as they have not formed yet. What you are asking is the equivalent of \"why don't they extract apples from the tree before they grow\". ",
"Because the flower doesn't exist yet. If you extract it before it blooms, it isn't developed and won't taste like saffron. ",
"I thought the saffron threads were the dried stigmas of the flower. Each bloom only has three stigma. \n\nEdit: mistook stamen for stigma. "
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11t6zv | what is the status/nature of lance armstrong's guilt? | I have not paid attention to this scandal, because for many years I assumed the accusations were false, and based in jealousy rather than fact. It appears the internet is FREAKING OUT about Lance Armstrong, with many people insisting that the evidence is there. So I ask you to please explain
1. Is it now unreasonable to believe he is innocent?
2. What is this evidence, why is it showing up now, and how does it prove his guilt? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11t6zv/eli5_what_is_the_statusnature_of_lance_armstrongs/ | {
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"The USADA, the government agency in charge of catching people doing that in the US, wrote a big long document that they think shows he's guilty, and suggested that he be stripped of all his records and titles. They have a very big document with testimony from a lot of people involve, plus a lot of forensic evidence. The Armstrong people obviously deny that this is true.\n\nSo now that the USADA has made this recommendation, the people who are officially in charge of cycling records have to make a decision about if they should take away his records and titles or not.\n\n[As I recall, the BBC said that the cycling governing body would make a formal announcement about it on Monday.](_URL_0_)",
"Before I start, here's a glossary of abbreviations involved in all this:\n\n**FFC**: French Cycling Federation, the group that runs competitive cycling in France \n**USADA**: The United States Anti-Doping Agency, the group that runs Olympic drug testing for the US. \n**UIC**: Union Cycliste Internationale, the international governing body of cycling, like FIFA is for soccer.\n\nNow, on to the show. It's really long, so I've included only the highlights.\n\nLance Armstrong was first accused of doping in 1999, when the doping testers at the Tour de France came back positive for Erythropoietin, a drug that increases the body's ability to hold oxygen. After a whole to-do, the UCI released a report that showed that the drug testers from the FFC who had done the testing had failed to follow proper protocol in testing them, and there was no way to know how contaminated the samples were. Plus, Armstrong had been using a body creme that had a steroid in it but that was approved by the UCI and FFC. As a result, all charges were dropped.\n\n\nLance Armstrong was first accused of doping in 2004, when Pierre Ballester and David Walsh published a book that included quotes by some of Armstrong's trainers and masseuses in which they claimed circumstantial evidence that Armstrong had doped. Nobody had seen hime dope, but they mentioned things like track marks on his arms and empty syringes in his room. Armstrong sued for libel, claiming that the accusations were false, and won.\n\nFrom 2004-2010, a bunch of other people claimed the same thing, with eyewitnesses to circumstantial evidence, but never any real proof. \n\nNow, it's important here to note that the biggest piece of evidence for Armstrong's innocence is that he's been drug tested more than anyone else, ever, and, with the exception of the Erythropoietin mixups above, he has never tested positive.\n\nNow, about the recent accusations. In June of this year, the USADA accused Armstrong of doping, based on the testimony of others and blood samples from 2009. Armstrong sued to stop the USADA, but lost, because his paperwork exceeded the length limit and was more focused on making him look good than clearly explaining the facts. He sued again, but lost because the court said that it wasn't the place of the courts to decide these things. Still, the court noted, it looked like the USADA was more motivated by politics than by the facts. After a bit more waiting, Armstrong decided that he had had enough of all this, and did not appeal the USADA's decision that he had doped.\n\nNow, as for reactions.\n\n~~The UCI has never stripped him of his titles, because the USADA never provided the UCI with the proof that the USADA had used in making their decision.~~ They, and Armstrong, believe that it's their job to do that, not the USADA's. The FFC didn't need to see the proof, and believes Armstrong to be guilty. The public has not seen the proof.\n\n**EDIT:** As u/dollars2donuts points out below, I somehow managed to miss this last week's developments. A few days ago, the USADA provided the UCI with the data, and we'll find out on Monday what they have to say.\n\n~~As of today, it depends on who you ask. The UCI has said that they'll ban him if they get the evidence and it holds up, but ~~the USADA hasn't given them the evidence because they believe that they can ban him without the UCI's involvement.~~ we don't yet know how they feel towards the evidence they've been provided with. We'll know more on Monday.\n\n\nWhether or not it's unreasonable to believe his innocence is up to you. I, for one, would like to see the latest blood tests, as it all hinges around those. Even if they come back positive, I'm not sure from what time they are, and consequently, if he should be stripped of all his Tour de France titles. We'll have to wait and see before we can make a final call, and, should the USADA never release their evidence, we may never really know."
]
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38wiyv | how the solar system planets rotates around the sun | This is probably a stupid question, and i cant seem to word it correctly in order to google it. How do planets within our solar system revolve around the sun? and what i mean by this is does each planet have a different path within their so called space? or does all planet follow the same alignment? like does earth mars etc allign within each other?? or is earth like below mars and whatnot I cannot word this properly as english is not my first language.
TLDR how do planets do? waht. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38wiyv/eli5_how_the_solar_system_planets_rotates_around/ | {
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"I think what you mean to ask is \"do the planets orbit in the same plane\", and the answer is yes, they do. All the planets formed from a rotating disc of material around the sun, and since that disc was flat the planets all orbit within the plane where that disc once was.\n\nThey do not, however, all orbit together in lock-step. The closer you are to the Sun, the faster you orbit: Mercury completes an orbit in only about two months, while Neptune takes decades.",
"Imagine a gyroscope. Once it starts spinning really fast in a certain way, it tends to stay in that plane. [This](_URL_0_) is a great visualization.\n\nThis is also the reason the stars in the galaxy tend to lie on a plane, forming a disc. Another good example is the rings of Saturn"
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4is70b | why have christianity and islam been so successful? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4is70b/eli5why_have_christianity_and_islam_been_so/ | {
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"They are both religions that place a heavy emphasis on evangelizing and spreading the word, and were both adopted by peoples who were highly mobile, both as traders and invaders.",
"Christanity was a slave/servant religion with many of the early converts filling this role in addition to former Jews filling the ranks.\n\nActs of martyrdom committed by Jesus, most of the apostles and the other followers of the faith helped stir emotion in favor of Christianity.\n\nThe wife of Roman Emperor Constantine helped convince him to end persecution of Christians and eventually convert. \n\nMeanwhile Christian missionaries spread through Europe and The Middle East. \n\nEventually pagan tribes adopt the customs but choose to force conquered people to convert.\n\nIslam spread in a similar way, though Muhammad was a known war lord. Through centuries of warfare they conquered and persecuted many non Muslim peoples in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Souther Europe and Eastern Europe. This militant attitude was forged after Muhammad faced persecution in the region, it also aided in securing alliances with the war tribes in the region as they had grown accustomed to raiding their neighbors.\n\nThe Ottoman Empire was an Islamic Empire which conquered Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and killed or expelled any non Muslims who refused to convert or pay the infidel tax. The Ottoman Empire was responsible for much of the Islamic Power in the Middle East for roughly 500 years.\n\nPost WWII many Muslims migrated to Europe to aid in the rebuilding of the various governments. There have also been many mission trips including one where a Muslim explorer met vikings.\n\nSources: \n\nChristianity Segment is from multiple books written over the history of Christianity.\n\nIslam Segment is from Tamir Ansary's book detailing Islamic History, \"Destiny Disrupted\"",
"Also, both religions offer an amazing afterlife, if you follow the rules. It was a pretty good pitch for vast majority of people who's earthlife prospects were not too promising. "
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11ygpa | female ejaculation [nsfw] | So, I'm not five. Just explain *like* I'm five.
I'm a girl and even I just don't get it. Can someone explain/testify to what it's like? Occasionally I'll arbitrarily decide that squirting is just a big rouse by the porn industry and that these chicks are all pulling our legs/peeing all over us.
Do you cum every time you squirt? Or sometimes do you just kind of ol faithful down there for no reason? Why, evolutionarily, do women even have the ability to ejaculate? Lubrication wouldn't make much sense since I doubt any evolutionary features rely on a thoughtful partner to get you off before you naturally lube-up for sex.
Anyway. It's been bugging me recently. What's the deal. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11ygpa/eli5_female_ejaculation_nsfw/ | {
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"Also, follow up question: Why are some women not able to experience an orgasm while having sex but are able to easily do so while masturbating? ELI5, please.",
"I've heard conflicting stories too. And far as I know, there has not been a comprehensive study done on it. There was a discussion on /r/askreddit recently (yeah I know, credible) but someone linked a study where a squirter was asked to drink a blue dye and then engage in sexual activity. The result was inconclusive I think. They found traces of the dye, but not what one would expect in peeing. \n\nThen I hear conflicting reports from women that they ALL can squirt with training and that there is a bladder-type organ which was discovered recently which houses the fluid. I'm actually not sure what to believe. It's a ton of fluid and I'd be surprised if no one knew about a second bladder in women until recently, but I may be wrong.\n\nI had a girl that squirted, she hated it because it ruins the sheets, but she claims the came harder when she did. Sometimes she asked me to stop before climax because she didn't want the mess. To me it looked like pissing, it was so much, but she could go to the bathroom right after sex and empty her bladder. And no it didn't taste like piss. The nice part for me was I knew she was never faking which is good for the old confidence that I could please a lady.\n\nps-the ejaculate comes from the urethra. it is not the same type of fluid as lubricant nor urine. It's sort of clear and mostly ordorless. The best way I can describe it is it'd like a man's precum but not as sticky and a good amount.\n\n[This is the /r/AskReddit discussion](_URL_0_). I hate hate hate askreddit, since so many of the sex stories are fake and made up for karma (in addition a lot of men I suspect pose as women) but it's the only link I've got.",
"[some more links](_URL_0_) \n\nTL;DR they don't know for sure. Some are leaning towards dilute urine.",
"Don't know about squirting. I feel like I get the sensation of something tiptaptoeing down the pipe sometimes, but all that makes me do is clench, so maybe, but maybe I'm just losing bladder control. I intend to never find out.\n\nAs to the more \"traditional\" clitoris-based orgasm, well... It kind of rolls up on you as a slow tension, like a coil winding or the pull of a receding wave. I've had it come out of nowhere before, but I've found it was slightly less intense. During is kind of a pulsating rush. You don't really feel the clenching of the vaginal walls (unless something is in there for them to push against) but you do feel a the bunching of the muscles in a little patch right above where your pubic hair ends. When it's over, there's an observable beating/throbbing sensation in the clitoris itself, and everything can feel very tense.\n\nAnd then if you're well practiced, you can make it happen another two or three times, but their intensities will vary."
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2uunw9 | if i lift appropriately heavy weights i really can't do any more than say 10. how come if i then wait just 30 seconds i can squeeze out a few more? | What happens to my muscles to get some strength back so quickly? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uunw9/eli5_if_i_lift_appropriately_heavy_weights_i/ | {
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"Your body needs to breathe if you will. Your muscles and every other cell in your body needs oxygen (this is why we breathe). Normally your cells use aerobic respiration(making energy by using oxygen) to power your muscles for the reps but if you are really working out you'll use up your oxygen supply faster than you can get it in by breathing (which is why we breath harder / faster during strenuous activities). \n\nWhen this happens your muscles will have to switch to anaerobic respiration. Which is a less efficient way of making energy(at least for us) and has by product of lactic acid (causes the burning feeling) and is really your bodies plan b / not meant to be used forever. \n\nEventually if you keep at it though your muscles literally run out of energy and need a moment to recharge and get some oxygen back. So we can only over exert ourselves in short bursts as a result. "
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4hs9oe | how can surgeons attach all the capillaries around the new heart during heart transplant? | I get that the aorta, pulmonary vessels, and vena cava are large enough to stitch together, but how can surgeons stitch together all the little capillaries that supply power to the heart in the first place? How can they stitch up all of these vessels in a timely manner? Seems pretty incredible to me... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4hs9oe/eli5_how_can_surgeons_attach_all_the_capillaries/ | {
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"The heart is fed by the coronary arteries (right and left). These split directly off the base of the aorta (the main artery that leaves the heart to bring blood to the rest of the body); the heart feeds itself first. There are no small blood vessels to reattach, there are only a couple main ones (during a transplant the aorta is severed above the coronary arteries, and the heart drains it's blood directly into itself into the right atrium).\n\nYou can actually remove a mammal's heart from it's host and if you keep the aorta filled with oxygenated blood the disembodied heart will keep pumping away for hours or days (depending on the species)."
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2zma4b | what are the big controversies with putin? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2zma4b/eli5_what_are_the_big_controversies_with_putin/ | {
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"He's former KGB, his enemies have a habit of suffering acute heavy metal poisoning (and not the musical kind), he's connected to a lot of government corruption to help his friends get rich, and he's pushing the invasion of Ukraine.\n\nI'm sure there's some specifics I've left out.",
"There are a number of issues with Putin, spanning from his rise to power, to his actions to suppress dissent inside of Russia, to his actions internationally.\n\nThe first thing many westerners see with Putin is how he come into power. Originally, he wasn't elected. Former President Boris Yeltsin selected Putin to become his successor. Boris Yeltsin saw that Vladimir Putin became the Prime Minister, putting him second in line for the Presidency, announcing he wanted Putin to be his successor. Then he resigned, making Putin acting President. This gave Putin a big advantage in the election, which he won in the first wrong.\n\nImmediately, Putin began to suppress dissent. Those who disagreed with him often found themselves in jail. After disagreeing with Putin over the future of Russian civil society, Boris Berezovsky, who had created a larger media empire, had his media empire seized by Putin's government. This is a single example of widespread suppression. Many continued to love Putin, as he improved the Russian economy and seemed to take a strong stance against the west, but many did not. Like the Chechens.\n\nIn the Caucuses, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan had all received independence from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chechens felt that Chechnya, too, deserved independence. Ahead of the 2004 elections, terrorist attacks in Moscow. Putin blamed the attack on [Wahhabists](_URL_0_) in Chechnya. He invaded, waging a brutal war and installing a puppet in the region. There were egregious human rights violations perpetrated by both sides. Approximately 5,000 Chechens disappeared, 25,000 civilians were been killed. While this may seem innocuous at first, many claim that Russia itself attacked Moscow so Putin could invade Chechnya. Putin was worried about the 2004 elections, some claimed, and intended to garner support for his party by showing strength against Chechen rebels.\n\nFollowing his re-election, Vladimir Putin only became more brazen. Gazprom, the state owned gas enterprise, seized their competitor, Yukos, after arresting its CEO on clearly politically motivated charges. Yukos's CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was a critic of Putin's Russia. The acquisition of Yukos by Gazprom gave Gazprom an effective monopoly on gas and oil in Russia. \n\nFollowing this was the assassination of [Alexander Litvinenko](_URL_1_) who had fled Russia after stating that their had been plans to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, who you remember from earlier. Litvinenko had been poisoned a Uranium dart and blamed Putin for his own death. \n\nDuring this time, Putin also made two obvious land grabs in Moldova and Georgia. In Transdniester, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, Putin intervened against smaller nations and occupied the territories. To this day, they remain occupied.\n\nThe Russian Constitution said that no man can serve more than two consecutive terms, so in 2008 Putin, a true patriot, did not seek reelection to the office. He announced his friend, Dmitry Medvedev, was his preferred successor. But Medvedev was a puppet. Putin was made Prime Minister and together they changed the Constitution. The regional governors would now be appointed by the President. The governors appointed members to the upper house of the legislator, so this house of the legislator would forever be loyal to the President. They then changed the term of the President to 6 years, starting with the 2012 term.\n\nThen, in 2012, Putin ran again. The constitution said two consecutive terms, he argued, and this was not consecutive. In an election many accused of fraud, he won.\n\nThe rest is much more modern history, such as supporting oppressive regimes like Bashir al-Assad in Syria or Yanukovych's regime in Ukraine. He's continued to arrest and assassinate those who disagree with him or accuse him of corruption. He's supported the Ukrainian rebels. He annexed Crimea in a clearly fraudulent vote. He continues to govern by beating those who disagree with him into submission. These are most of the larger complaints against Vladimir Putin, but there are many more.\n\n**TL;DR**\n\n* Corruption in government\n* Seizing assets of rivals\n* Assassinating dissenters\n* Invading neighbors\n* Supporting oppressive regimes\n* Fixing elections\n* Waging wars on false pretense \n* Generally being a force for human suffering. "
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tn2ns | the speed of pulling on one end of a string | So, if I have a string that is tight and I pull on one end, will the other end shift position at the same time? Could I use that to send messages quickly interplanetary? (Question comes from the pholites/ansibles in the Ender's Game series, if you haven't read them READ THEM NOW!) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tn2ns/eli5_the_speed_of_pulling_on_one_end_of_a_string/ | {
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"No, it won't shift position at the same time. The position change will travel at the speed of sound in the string.",
"[A very similar question has been asked on the front page.](_URL_0_)\n\nIts essentially the same principle. But because you are talking about string, its probably even more exaggerated. Also assuming you are referring to shorter distances than from the Earth and Mars, saaay a few miles, it can be done but only in straight lines as the string would break easily."
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56u47v | why did we create words for words that already existed, but then still use that word? | I was getting ready this morning and while reaching for my hair paste I saw that the word "flexible" was also a french word "malleable." I don't know enough history about the English language but am confused as to why we would create a word, flex, to replace malleable, and then still use the word maliable. I know there are more like that but that is the one that got my noggin spinnin.
Edit: I really appreciate you guys helping me wrap my head around this. Has had me thinking all morning. I knew you guys would know. You're the only Internet strangers I trust. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/56u47v/eli5why_did_we_create_words_for_words_that/ | {
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"I don't think that flexible and malleable are exactly interchangeable like you think. There is some cross-over with their meanings, as you noted, but there are plenty of situations in which you would use one rather than the other. Malleable, for instance, is used often in metallurgy.\n\nAdditionally, there are plenty of other words that also occupy this linguistic space of describing something that is relatively easily manipulated - \"pliable\" comes to mind. \n\nSo, long answer short, I think that these words have distinct, but overlapping, definitions, so the premise of the question is not quite reasonable. ",
"Well flexible and malleable don't exactly mean the same thing.\n\nmalleable = easily able to be shaped or formed\n\nflexible = able to be bent without breaking\n\nSo for example, a sheet of paper is flexible, but it isn't really malleable.\n\nA sheet of copper is both flexible and malleable.\n\nA lump of copper is malleable, but not really flexible. You can beat it into another shape easily enough, but you can't really bend it.\n\nYour hair paste is malleable in paste form, but I wouldn't call that flexible either. However when you apply it to your hair, it sets up; at that point it's not really malleable, but it remains flexible, you hair can still be bent and move about.",
"In addition to what others have said about flexible and malleable not being exactly the same thing, I'll go on to why a lot of word duplicates exist, especially with French words in English.\n\nIn 1066, the Normans invaded England. For a long time after that, the royalty and nobility spoke French, and everyone else spoke English. It's no surprise that a lot of French words entered the English language at that time. For example, it's why we have French root words for certain meats (beef, pork) that don't bear much resemblance to the English words for the animals the come from (cow, pig)."
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5uvkud | when you get pulled over by a cop and they "run" your license, what are they actually doing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uvkud/eli5_when_you_get_pulled_over_by_a_cop_and_they/ | {
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"They are checking your id against numerous databases to see if you have outstanding warrants for your arrest, if this is a repeat offense, if your license is up to date, if your license has been revoked, etc. ",
"I would like to point out that there is an /r/AskLEO subreddit, where you can directly ask law enforcement officers questions"
]
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[],
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||
236rai | why do you sometimes start seeing in a "zoomed out" sort of fashion, and what triggers it | First time i noticed it, was when looking at my brother, his head started shrinking from my point of view, seeing him from far ahead. Another time I was programming at work , looking at my monitor, and all of a sudden, while looking at it, I was very aware about my surroundings as well, and the monitor didn't take that big of a part of my vision as previously mentioned. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/236rai/eli5_why_do_you_sometimes_start_seeing_in_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cgu4lwj",
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Sounds like you experienced [depersonalization.]( _URL_0_) ",
"Yes i know what you talking about, I use to get them alot when i was like 6 - 10 yrs old. \nI would be watching TV on those old 27inch bulky screens and out of no where the zooming out effect happend, Till this day I still dont know what thats about, i hope someone can explain."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization"
],
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|
aibwkq | how does smoking narrow upper airways? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aibwkq/eli5_how_does_smoking_narrow_upper_airways/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Irritation, which leads to inflammation, which leads to swelling as fluids like blood try to heal the irritated area. "
]
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[]
] |
|
3oiblf | why is it that our bodies feel heavy after swimming? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3oiblf/eli5why_is_it_that_our_bodies_feel_heavy_after/ | {
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"Water pushes up on our bodies with what's called buoyant force. This makes us feel like we're lighter, because there's a force pushing up on us that's partially counteracting the downward force of gravity. When we leave the water, suddenly we have to compensate for our full weight again, which makes us feel heavier and clumsier until we can readjust. ",
"While swimming, much of your body weight is supported by the water. You get used to having this support, and when you get out (and the air doesn't support your weight as much), you feel much heavier.\n\nAlso, have you ever swum with flippers for a long time, then taken them off? Feels like your feet kick a million miles an hour..."
]
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[],
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4c5thc | why did saddam gas the kurds in his country? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c5thc/eli5_why_did_saddam_gas_the_kurds_in_his_country/ | {
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"iraq has always had a problem of not having nationalism. the reason is because most of iraq's history has been under persian aka iranian rule, and for a short period of time, it was under arabic and turkic rule as well. this meant that iraq had no nationalism for itself, which is why so much of iraq is divided between KSA supporting parties (ISIS, Saddam) and Iranian supporting parties, the current administration which are Shia and Kurds which are mostly Sunni, but Iranian. \n \nSaddam tried to revive Iraqi nationalism by going back more than 4000 years to the times of the Babylonians, but Iraqi culture is so far from that that it kind of failed. You can't really revive that kind of cultural difference without getting rid of Islam first, because back then they were polytheistic, and worshiping polytheism in Islam is the equivalent to getting hanged. \n \nSo he tried to revive nationalism by getting rid of outside influence. He started by gassing not only Kurds, but all Iranians (Kurds are an Iranian people). Iranians are now the best capable of defending against a gas attack out of any country because of their experience during this war. By gassing Iranians, he pretty much acted like Hitler during his Poland invasion, simply wanting to kill in order to ethnically cleanse the area and establish a legitimate Iraq, without outside influence. The part where he failed miserably, was that his army was totally incompetent, probably because of the fact that they had no nationalism. The Iraqis had the 4th largest standing army, help from most countries including the USA, and were fighting a country that JUST had a revolution and was totally isolated, and still managed to lose the war (It was a stalemate, but if you usher a war and it's a stalemate, strategically it's pretty much a loss) \n \n\nKurds helping the Iranians was just because Kurds were targeted as well for not being Arab, and this resulted in what we see today A) Kurds wanting their own land away from Iraq. B) Kurds and Iranians both detest being considered Arab C) Saddam Hussein's countries progressive collapse after the Iran-Iraq War D) The international community talking about re fragmenting Iraq completely, but this will never happen because logically part of Iraq should be given to Iran, and the international community doesn't want to strengthen Iran further, even though Iran pretty much controls Iraq now."
]
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5ltk8s | why does china ban facebook, youtube, and tinder but not sites like reddit where there is potentially more controversial information? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ltk8s/eli5_why_does_china_ban_facebook_youtube_and/ | {
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"Chinese government censorship doesn't actually focus on suppressing competing ideologies, morals, or even dissent against the government. What they do actively censor is attempts to organize collective dissent or protest. You can complain all you want about the government until you try to band together at which point it shifts from cathartic release into a threat to government control.\n\nAs for Reddit being allowed it probably comes down to Reddit being small potatoes. In a month Reddit has 243 million users, while YouTube has more like a billion users."
]
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[]
] |
||
1wxhh0 | why can't we see the core of our galaxy with our naked eyes? | If the middle of our galaxy is so big and bright, how come we can't see it with our eyes? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wxhh0/why_cant_we_see_the_core_of_our_galaxy_with_our/ | {
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"text": [
"You can see it in a lot of places that don't have too much light pollution. [Here's a picture](_URL_0_).",
"The actual center is blocked by dust between us and it. What we see in the sky are stars in a dense spiral arm that wraps around that side of the center from our vantage point.",
"There's interstellar dust that is opaque to the visible spectrum of light. There's enough of it between us and the galactic core to block our sight of it. However, using telescopes that see in infrared, for example, the core can be seen as the dust doesn't block infrared. "
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Milky_Way_Night_Sky_Black_Rock_Desert_Nevada.jpg"
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2rmglw | why are pandas so evolutionarily inept, yet we insist they are a species that must be saved? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rmglw/eli5_why_are_pandas_so_evolutionarily_inept_yet/ | {
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"They don't struggle to breed... They simply don't breed as much, just like many others... \nNo they are not supposed to die out. They have adapted to their environment, where bamboo is plentiful. Hence they are not inept but rather well suited.\n\nSo in short, no, they would not die out without human impact.",
"Pandas are supremely well adapted to their environment. They capitalize on a large, uncontested food source. Their breeding habits keep their number from exploding beyond what their environment can handle.\n\nThey are only in trouble because we fucked it up.",
"They're so cute! \n\nWell, either that or the little fuckers have some serious dirt on us they're blackmailing us with."
]
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21180f | "women, people of color, and lgbtq individuals are highly encouraged to apply" how is this statement legal on a job application? | This statement was on the **Career** section of a union website...not a fetish website
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21180f/eli5_women_people_of_color_and_lgbtq_individuals/ | {
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"What's behind this, and most types of what became known as \"affirmative action,\" is an attempt to break a cycle. Minorities are discriminated in the work place, don't make a lot of money and work in poor conditions. Therefore their kids don't get to go to good schools, to get decent healthcare, living conditions, and to make good networks. This exacerbates the problem, and these kids will have all that against them, on top of the prejudice. At the same time, those in the majority don't get to see minorities around them, so they don't create bonds of trust, friendship, respect. They will be that more likely to discriminate against what they don't know. It is a cycle and it is very difficult to break.\n\nOne way to break the cycle, it is proposed, is to implement the reverse of the discrimination. Some people will get good jobs despite of the prejudice and despite of their backgrounds. Their kids will have that much more opportunities, and those in the majority will get a chance to interact with minorities and gain trust, respect, maybe friendship.\n\nEventually, given time, the cycle might be broken.\n\nBefore you decapitate me, I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this. I don't know enough to have an opinion. But that is the rationale.",
"I think you're misreading the notice. Let me start with an illustration from the entertainment industry, where race is dealt with a little more above-the-board. \n\nLet's talk plays and movies. A common problem in casting is that unless it specifically says in a script that a character is black/asian/latino, directors almost always assume that a character is white. Actors of color quickly learn that it's a waste of their time to bother going out for a role that doesn't specifically say \"ethnic\" or their own race, even if they'd be really good for it. So if I want to see the full range of actors for a role - and open it up to a lot of really talented black, asian, and latino actors who otherwise wouldn't have shown up to the audition - I have to specifically announce in the notice that I'm looking for a whole range of ethnicities. \n\nThe message that you read isn't saying \"we'd prefer to hire a gay black lady.\" The message is more like \"don't be scared that we'll discriminate - we want to meet you!\" Many industries are traditionally male-dominated, or have histories of discrimination. [Studies have found that](_URL_0_) merely having a black-sounding name on a job application makes you less likely to receive a job that you're otherwise qualified for. \n\nOftentimes women, people of color, or gay/trans people will be so discouraged from prejudice in certain industries or from certain companies that they won't bother applying. A notice such as that is a \"don't worry, we'll give you a fair shake\" that allows you to get a wider pool of applicants. It also puts people who may have otherwise been nervous at the interview more confident and at ease, which means it's easier for you to see how well they can perform. Imagine being a latino transperson trying to get a job in a mechanic's shop, or a black man applying at a Mississippi gun range - that can be a scary and discouraging interview, unless you know for certain that you'll be given a fair shake. "
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vwu8o | why we don't feel a stronger gravitational force at different times of day. | To make the title clearer, I mean when your side of the world is facing the direction that Earth is rotating around the sun.
edit: Wasn't clear enough. I know that Earth rotates around the sun at a pretty high speed, and when a high speed is being forced on top of you(?) that you feel g-forces. That's the stronger force that I'm talking about in the title.
[Here](_URL_0_)'s a quick sketch to kinda show what I mean. The force I'm talking about is represented by the red arrow.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vwu8o/eli5_why_we_dont_feel_a_stronger_gravitational/ | {
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"Because the gravity we feel is from the earth, not the sun. Our orbit is based on the sun, but our gravity is Earth's",
"I think I understand what you mean. Basically, it's because the force to which you're referring doesn't exist.\nOn Earth, when you're moving and you feel g-forces, it's due to the acceleration. As we orbit the Sun, we're not actually accelerating in the direction of our movement, but rather we're accelerating directly towards the sun itself, sort of like [this](_URL_0_).\n\nThe reason we don't feel **that** more strongly at certain times of day (say, local noon) is because the difference is so small as to be completely irrelevant."
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3zu0ev | how when a laptop's battery runs out, it can display a message showing the battery is dead. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3zu0ev/eli5_how_when_a_laptops_battery_runs_out_it_can/ | {
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"Essentially what's happening is your laptop is reserving a very small amount of energy in the battery to perform this action. That energy reserve cannot be used to boot the computer since there simply isn't enough. That message will use a very small amount of power. ",
"Laptop batteries use a chemistry called lithium ion. This technology becomes very upset indeed if it's allowed to flatten totally. These batteries can explode if under charged, over charged and all manner of other things. That's why you can't buy lithium ion rechargeable batteries (different from plain lithium non rechargeables) in AA or AAA format in your local convenience store. \n\n This is why laptop batteries are so expensive, because they have to have a lot of built in electronics to protect the battery. \n\nOne of these protections is not allowing it to go completely flat, and it does this by sending a Battery Dead signal to the computer. \n\nIn reality the battery will still have a single-figure percentage of life left in it, which is kept in order to preserve the life of the battery. "
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688maa | how can a normally healthy person get scared to death? is it common or rare? | I've stumbled upon an article which stated you can get scared to death despite not having any previous heart conditions.
I believe I grasp how that happens in general, the excess adrenaline from our fight or flight response can damage the heart and lead to calcifications/arrhythmia (like vfib).
Though shouldn't it be a really high survival rate in younger, healthy individuals with no prior disease, regardless of the intensity of the shock?
To me it just seems that such a misfortune is extremely rare provided you get treatment once the symptoms kick in, could someone explain me how the whole process is happening and whether that article is exaggerated or not?
Thank you in advance :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/688maa/eli5_how_can_a_normally_healthy_person_get_scared/ | {
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"It sounds like you understand the situation properly. If you are in good health, with no hidden problems (like a heart weakness), your body's normal fear response is not strong enough to kill you. Evolution has already weeded out most of the genes that would grow a person who cannot survive a large fright."
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3loc8t | sites like facebook and google have said their servers "can never be down." how can reddit constantly afford to? | From a business perspective, are Facebook and Google just wrong? Or is Reddit admin just lazy? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3loc8t/eli5_sites_like_facebook_and_google_have_said/ | {
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"text": [
"There is a 3d tour of the Google data center. Look through it. A lot of that has to go down to take down google. I also believe they have multiple data centers? I would have to double check that. Reddit I bet runs on far less infrastructure so they probably don't have the capability to assure 100% up time. "
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jiqxi | significant figures | Like how many significant figures does a number have if it has a decimal at the end, but no digits after it (5.) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jiqxi/eli5_significant_figures/ | {
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"That number is written improperly. If it were 5.0, it would have two significant digits. If it were 5, it would have one. \n\nSignificant figures are a way to show how accurate your measuring equipment is. \n\nFor example:\n\nSay I want to measure my pencil. I take out my ruler and measure it, and the tip of my pencil is somewhere between the mark for 6 inches, and the mark for 6 1/4 inches. \n\nI don't know exactly what length it is, so I put 6. That's one significant digit. With that ruler, I can tell you for certain that the pencil is at least six inches.\n\nNow say I come back with a measuring tape, and measure the pencil again. The measuring tape has more marks, dividing the inches up into smaller units, like 1/8 and 1/12. \n\nSo I measure my pencil again and the tip is right on the mark for 6 1/8 inch. Well, since we're doing science, we'll change that to a decimal and get 6.125. That's 4 significant digits, because we know that measuring tape is accurate to that point. \n\nThe reason this is important, is that sometimes you'll have to do math with these measurements, and you need to know how accurate your results are. We know that the 6 we had earlier isn't very accurate, and that it's going to affect the results of any math we do, so that whatever answers we get can't possibly be any more accurate than our least accurate measurement.\n I hope that makes sense.",
"You use the decimal at the end by no digits after it only if the decimal is preceded by a 0 (for example 50. makes sense but 5. doesn't)\n\nThe decimal implies that the 0 is also a significant digit, so 50 has 1 significant digit, but 50. has 2. 50.0 would have 3.",
"That number is written improperly. If it were 5.0, it would have two significant digits. If it were 5, it would have one. \n\nSignificant figures are a way to show how accurate your measuring equipment is. \n\nFor example:\n\nSay I want to measure my pencil. I take out my ruler and measure it, and the tip of my pencil is somewhere between the mark for 6 inches, and the mark for 6 1/4 inches. \n\nI don't know exactly what length it is, so I put 6. That's one significant digit. With that ruler, I can tell you for certain that the pencil is at least six inches.\n\nNow say I come back with a measuring tape, and measure the pencil again. The measuring tape has more marks, dividing the inches up into smaller units, like 1/8 and 1/12. \n\nSo I measure my pencil again and the tip is right on the mark for 6 1/8 inch. Well, since we're doing science, we'll change that to a decimal and get 6.125. That's 4 significant digits, because we know that measuring tape is accurate to that point. \n\nThe reason this is important, is that sometimes you'll have to do math with these measurements, and you need to know how accurate your results are. We know that the 6 we had earlier isn't very accurate, and that it's going to affect the results of any math we do, so that whatever answers we get can't possibly be any more accurate than our least accurate measurement.\n I hope that makes sense.",
"You use the decimal at the end by no digits after it only if the decimal is preceded by a 0 (for example 50. makes sense but 5. doesn't)\n\nThe decimal implies that the 0 is also a significant digit, so 50 has 1 significant digit, but 50. has 2. 50.0 would have 3."
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88rtrp | how can people drive from one point to another point without remembering every detail of it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88rtrp/eli5_how_can_people_drive_from_one_point_to/ | {
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"Highway hypnosis! Basically it's just muscle memory when you are driving and your brain zones out while your body does the normal reflexes of driving! You only remember every detail if things out of the ordinary happen then it sticks in your memory! ",
"Same places? I only remember what's different than the routine. But I also forget where I'm going too . Haha",
"People create memories better when there's some emotional association with it, so when you're driving on a plain highway often your brain doesn't pick out anything special to remember so it just forgets it. ",
"You have a short term and a long term memory. Unless you run into something driving usually has nothing that gets put into long-term memory. Same with walking somewhere. Your brain knows you don't need any of that info long-term. \n\nIt's like a computer with RAM and a Hard Drive; with your brain deciding when to Save or not just before the info gets dumped out of the RAM memory cue.",
"Your brain has two kinds of memory, short-term and long-term. Only the interesting short-term memories make it to long term. \n\nIf you are doing something boring and routine, you can be fully aware of it in the moment, but it just isn't notable enough to remember. \n\nNote that you are **not** on autopilot or zoned out. You are completely aware of your surroundings and would respond to unusual stimuli (and likely remember it). You simply don't remember those boring parts.",
"Drunk driving? Just kidding. TIL about highway hypnosis though. ",
"A technical term for it is \"script processing\". It's essentially the same thing as a computer running a program except it's your brain doing something.\n\nIt's only going to happen for drives you've done many times already, because your brain needs to memorize it before it can do it without conscious input. "
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2epyq5 | what would happen to a bank if everyone who had an account there decided to withdraw their money all at the same day ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2epyq5/eli5_what_would_happen_to_a_bank_if_everyone_who/ | {
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"It's called a \"run\", and the bank would be closed by regulators for being inadequately capitalized. Note that this would happen *before* every depositor was able to withdraw their money.",
"Its called a run on the bank and depending on where the bank is different things can happen. In america all deposits are insured by the FDIC so they wouldn't have your money that day but you would within a few days. This is due to the fact that the bank does not carry that much cash on any given day. ",
"The Fed requires banks to hold \"reserves,\" as part of our fractional deserve banking system. In the past, runs have been allowed to happen unfettered. Recently, even the hint of a run will trigger government action: mergers to ensure confidence, shutting down banks, capping withdrawals. Runs will put a bank out of business immediately because they simply cannot store that many assets in liquid form.",
"Literally the Great Depression.",
"It would be like that scene from *It's A Wonderful Life*",
"A bank holiday would be declared since there isn't enough deposits to handle a run. This is the beauty of fractional reserve banking.",
"It's called a 'run on the bank' and basically, the bank has nowhere near enough liquid cash for everybody (because most of the money is electronic, and also a lot is invested/loaned, so they don't have it as liquid capital the vast majority of the time) so they have to quickly find a way to sort out the crisis.\n\nGenerally, they will either close the bank, set a limit to your withdrawls, and begin to borrow money to satisfy the customers.\n\nA bank generally only has to hold 10-20% of the money the actually own, since in day to day life, that amount is all that will be needed - the rest is simply a placeholder - your money has actually been invested or loaned.\n\nIt generally works well, since even if a millionaire wanted to withdraw all their life savings - the bank would have enough.\n\nThe only time it doesn't work is when everyone wants to cash out.\n\nIronically, the bank only fails because a run on the bank has already started. There is no reason for everyone to cash everything out, except the fact that everybody else is cashing all their stuff out.\n\nIf nobody tried to withdraw, the bank would be fine - however, if a run on the bank is in progress, you want to withdraw as much as you can because the bank is put in to a very precipitous position by it, even if there were 0 problems the day before.\n\nIt's kind of a weird quirk on the prisoner's dilemma.\n\nNobody has anything to gain by cashing out, unless everyone else is cashing out."
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9fzy8i | does other people see us like we see ourselves in the mirror or do they see us like a photo which taken by front camera of our phones (with mirror effect)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fzy8i/eli5_does_other_people_see_us_like_we_see/ | {
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"Front camera. When we look at ourselves in the mirror we get a mirrored picture (of course) which is not how other people see us. If you take a photo and you find that you look different than when you take a look in the mirror then this is how other people see you.\n\nUsually, people find themselves to be more attractive when looking in the mirrior than a photo which results from the brain being used to the mirrored image we have from ourselves. The other people are used to the real you and findthis to be more attractive since they're used to it. Show them a mirrored picture and they will find it a little odd, even though you might like it better.",
"Neither. \n\nThe brain distorts what you see based on what you expect to see. A photo is closer to what you actually look like, but not what people actually see. The difference between photo-you and mirror-you is one example of how much the mind unconsciously alters reality. Everyone else also has an altered version of what you look like. If they like you (like, has a crush on you) then you will appear more beautiful to them. If they don't like you (like, the first time you met them you were doing something disgusting and they will never forget it), you will appear less beautiful to them.\n\nHence, \"beauty is in the eye of the beholder\"."
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68sk1k | how were ancient people able to survive out on the glaciers between modern-day russia and america when they were migrating to america? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/68sk1k/eli5_how_were_ancient_people_able_to_survive_out/ | {
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"the connection wasn't always and completely ice and glaciers. It was a land bridge in a very real sense...not just a glacier bridge. Also it was possible (and theorized by leading anthropologists --Carl Chapman) that travel could be by seafaring peoples, who boated along the coast"
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a5q5zc | why can’t great britain just change their minds and not leave the eu? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a5q5zc/eli5_why_cant_great_britain_just_change_their/ | {
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"Short answer is that it would be political suicide. The people of the U.K voted and the majority of them said that they wanted to leave he EU. The government turning around and basically saying \"thanks for the input but nah\" would look awfully undemocratic and even if you are against brexit you would probably have a problem with the government undermining the will of the people. The people of the U.K decided they want to make bad decisions and now the government is going to begrudgingly make that bad decision. ",
"They can. There was originally some uncertainty as to whether a country exiting under Article 50 could say \"no, wait, we changed our mind\" before the two year period was up, or whether they'd have to petition for reentry, or whether letting them change their mind was subject to a vote of member countries , etc. \n\nBut that was settled a week or three back. The UK can, at any point prior to the March 29 deadline, abort the process and remain in the EU. \n\nUK politics make this very unlikely, but all it takes is them submitting that as their intention. "
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2c0uly | what is my computer doing while it is frozen? | It is obviously doing something because it is using power and still putting out warm air like it would under normal use. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2c0uly/eli5_what_is_my_computer_doing_while_it_is_frozen/ | {
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"It could be doing anything. All that can be said with certainty is that it's not responding to user input & producing identifiable output.",
"Depending on the condition, it could be stuck in an endless loop. Electricity is still moving through it, but in patterns that will never change. ",
"1. It's waiting on something outside it completing, that isn't. A system or peripheral device wont reply to commands.\n\n2. It's waiting on something inside it completing, that isn't. Endless loops in system and/or application processes.",
"Normally when a computer freezes it is either because it is stuck in an endless loop (program bug) or because it is overloaded and cannot process data fast enough. \n\nIf it is stuck in a loop (or a different program bug) it will normally try to solve the problem by running different routines defined in the system. \n\nThe second point can be because of multiple different reasons. One could be that it is overloaded with user input data (e.g. when you open something too many times). Or it could be overloaded from data you are processing (e.g. trying to download a huge file, opening a huge file etc.)",
"It's either working on something so hard that it doesn't output what going on or it is stuck in a loop. If the code is in a loop the system can be stuck until the process is killed manually or a timeout/fail-safe kills the looping process automatically.",
"Imagine your computer like a MacDonalds restaurant.\n\nThere are only so many people, so many resources and so many people they can serve at the same time.\n\nThey are in constant communication to get the food you want to the counter or window.\n\nYour computer is doing the same thing, but with data.\n\nYou computer needs to access the harddrive, the memory your GPU and multiple other devices.\n\nWhen It gets data from the hardrive to show you it first puts it into the memory where it will get processed into something nice and visual rather than 0101000101011.\n\nSometimes at macdonalds too many people come in at once, and people are left waiting.\n\nLikewise a computer is loading/processing too much and it simply freezes until it finishes (because it can't devote resources to making your data look pretty)\n\nThe solution at macdonalds to prevent people waiting is to manage food better (They usually have a table behind the counter with common meals ready for people) this means that while one person can be filling it up, another person can hand them out almost strait away.\n\nThe same can be done inside a computer, using threads on multiple CPU cores, memory can be loaded/processed into what is called a buffer. at the same time another process can be displaying that information (The Interface thread.)\n\nOf couse, this is just a simplification of what is going on and there are many other issues that can cause issues like programming bugs(Imagine if people loaded cheeseburgers into the milkshake machine by mistake which means people will be stood there wondering why their milkshake hasn't come yet.)",
"\"In an operating system, a deadlock is a situation which occurs when a process or thread enters a waiting state because a resource requested is being held by another waiting process, which in turn is waiting for another resource. If a process is unable to change its state indefinitely because the resources requested by it are being used by another waiting process, then the system is said to be in a deadlock.\"\n_URL_0_",
"There are three main ways in which a program can freeze:\n\n1\\. **Unresponsive UI**\n\nThe program becomes unresponsive in that the user interface doesn't appear to respond to input, it might not produce any output and in some cases a graphical user interface might stop being draw. In this case the program might still be running fine. This is often caused by poor programming, resulting in the program doing lots of work or waiting for something to complete on the same thread that's running the UI. The correct way to do this is to have a thread dedicated to handling the UI, while background work or blocking tasks are completed in a separate thread. This allows the UI to continue to respond even when other parts of the program are busy completing work or waiting for work to be completed.\n\n---\n\n2\\. **Infinite loop**\n\nThe program actually gets stuck in a loop, where it's just repeatedly doing the same thing over and over. There are several possible reasons why this might occur, but usually the problem is a program bug or poorly behaving code.\n\nAn example might be a retry loop without any retry counter. This is basically code which continues to retry the same operation until it works. The problem is, if the operation continues to fail for the same reason (e.g. the program is trying to access a server that's down), the program will just keep trying forever, while appearing frozen. A better way to handle this is to have the code only retry up to some maximum number of attempts before giving up and presenting an error to the user.\n\n---\n\n3\\. **Blocking Program** \n\nThe program gets stuck waiting for something to complete or some resource to be made available. Again, usually the problem is a program bug or poorly behaving code.\n\nConsider the following example. When there is a shared resource, but two different threads trying to use it at the same time, the resource has to be protected with some kind of lock, otherwise the two threads could trample over each other and corrupt the resource. Imagine, for example, if two separate threads were both trying to write the line \"Hello, world\" to a file at the same time. The expected result would be two lines containing \"Hello, world\", but if they both try to do it at the same time, the result might be garbled to something like \"Helhellolo, w,wororldld\". So both threads try to lock the file, and only one succeeds. The one that doesn't succeed is blocked until the lock is made available again by the first thread.\n\nSometimes threads will try to access multiple resource and need to lock several at the same time. A common programming bug occurs when thread A locks resource 1 and tries to then lock resource 2, while thread B locks resource 2 then tries to lock resource 1. A is blocked in its attempt to access resource 2 because it's locked by B, while at the same time B is blocked in its attempt to access resource 1 because it's locked by A. Neither thread can proceed and the 2 threads become stuck, waiting forever for the respective locks to be released. This is called a deadlock and is a frequent cause of frozen programs."
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3an5vd | if someone were to "stand" on jupiter at the great red spot, what would the storm look like? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3an5vd/eli5_if_someone_were_to_stand_on_jupiter_at_the/ | {
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"Reddish cloud everywhere. \n\nDepending on your depth/altitude, you wouldn't be able to see much, you'd be lost in the fog. High enough and it looks like... you know... how we see it from space. \n\nClose enough and all that detail fades away as the gaseous nature of the atmosphere blurs it all together. Like how clouds look like solid beautiful things from a distance, but as your plane is flying through them it's just whips of fog. Same thing on Jupiter, just a heck of a lot more of it. \n\n",
"NDT's Cosmos did a great job creating it with CGI. Word is it may not be that accurate, though. In any case, [here you go.](_URL_0_)"
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65v7ww | the whole erdogan powers thing | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65v7ww/eli5_the_whole_erdogan_powers_thing/ | {
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"Ten more years of Erdogan. After that, another extension. Eventually he will retire and leave the post to his son.\n\nIn the meantime Turkey will become poorer, more religious, and more agressive with its neighbours to assert and increase its power. Especially now that he has the military under control."
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3qgr78 | nmr spectroscopy | Please someone give me a run down of this. I feel like my brain melts when I look at my notes for my organic chemistry class. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qgr78/eli5_nmr_spectroscopy/ | {
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"In continuous wave NMR (old school), we place atoms into a strong uniform magnetic field. These nuclei align with the field. They can be excited by hitting them with radio frequency radiation. So, by sweeping over the radio spectrum, we can detect the frequencies corresponding to excitation of the atoms. The frequency corresponds to the atomic isotope and magnetic field strength (that's why it has to be very uniform). Each atom in a molecule experiences a different local magnetic field due to the presence of nearby atoms. This is what separates out the frequencies of all the atoms in a molecule to give a spectrum. \n\nIn modern FT-NMR we don't scan over the frequency range. Instead we hit the sample with a strong broad pulse that excites all of the nuclei at once. When the nuclei are knocked out of alignment with the magnetic field, we detect the rate at which they precess as they return to alignment. The precession rate is proportional to the magnetic field strength, so we get the same information (and more) about the local environment of each atom. "
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2y9xu3 | how does buzzfeed get away legally by posting .gifs from movies/sports/tv shows when that is all copyrighted source material. | Essentially, Buzzfeed takes premade copyrighted content and hosts it on their site embedded in the article and makes money on the ads surrounding the article. How is that legal when they are making money off of somebody else's matterial? Specifically, considering how complicated it is for Netflix to just get one movie streaming, how the heck can Buzzfeed get away with legally playing hundreds of gifs in their listical articles from multiple well known movies. Same thing regarding sports or tv shows. Do they have ridiculous amounts of contracts and rev share models with Universal, Disney, NFL, etc or are they just a million dollar lawsuit waiting to happen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y9xu3/eli5_how_does_buzzfeed_get_away_legally_by/ | {
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"Fair Use provisions allow you to incorporate parts of copyrighted work (e.g. short video clips / GIFs) for purposes of critical review, journalism / news reporting, parody/satire and for certain other uses without seeking explicit permission. This protection can be afforded even in the case of commercial distribution. Not all uses of video clips from movies/TV shows are protected by Fair Use though - for example, you typcally can't just post a video clip from some random movie and then not criticize, parodize or provide commentary on said clip.",
"From an IP law perspective, they could claim fair-use. If a journalist writing an article that reviews or comments on a copyrighted work, he does not need permission to use short sections of the work (with attribution) if he can demonstrate that a) his use of the copyrighted material is essential to his review or commentary, b) the sections used are small enough to not infringe the rights of the copyright owner. Even if his commentary is sold, he is selling the commentary itself, not the excerpts of copyrighted material.\n\nCalling Buzzfeed a review/commentary site may be stretching it. I don't visit \"aggregator\" sites so I'm not sure how much actual commentary they do, but with a good enough legal argument and the right judge, they probably could dodge any infringement claim."
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468tbb | why is china preventing chinese yuan from worth more? | Heard in the news a couple of times. Never understood why. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/468tbb/eli5_why_is_china_preventing_chinese_yuan_from/ | {
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"If the yuan goes up, it will become more expensive to purchase goods from China, since importers of Chinese goods will pay for them in yuan. That naturally means exports from China will decrease, and considering its export-based economy, that could be quite the shock. In the United States, we often worry about relying on Chinese imports--but China relies just as much on exporting to the U.S.",
"They dont want to create deflation (reduction in prices) which can be caused by the currency gaining in value. Most central banks aim for modest inflation (low to mid single digit percentages). By keeping the Yuan from rising in value too much they reduce the chance for deflation. "
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35kqif | why are some dangerous mammals, like tigers and wolves, able to be tamed from a young age, but not reptiles like alligators | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35kqif/eli5_why_are_some_dangerous_mammals_like_tigers/ | {
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"Apparently there are some cases of crocodiles being tame around trainers. I would guess it's due to intellegence. Cats have a much higher cognitive capacity than reptiles. Cats and most mammals also have a parent-child relationship that would make human interaction much easier and natural. Reptiles for the most part only ensure the birth of the young and then pretty much leave them to survive on their own.",
"Good one.. (correct me if im wrong) but my understanding is warm blooded mammals are taught at an early age and reptiles are more instinct driven.",
"Because people rarely identify well enough with reptiles to tame them. I was able to tame a snapping turtle that hatched from an egg in my hand - it would try to attack anyone else to the point of trying to chase after them but was always friendly toward me. Body language also has _a lot_ to do with it. Imagine if you were growling and snarling baring your teeth at every stray dog you came across - that's what you probably do to most reptiles without realizing it."
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5i1v4e | could a helicopter hover inches above earth and wind up on the other side of the planet? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5i1v4e/eli5_could_a_helicopter_hover_inches_above_earth/ | {
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"No...if that were to happen, everytime you jumped, you would move 1000 miles+. Everything is moving with the earth, the ground and the air itself.",
"When the helicopter rises up it's still carrying the momentum of moving with the earth. It's also surrounded by atmosphere which is moving with the earth.",
" > Theoretically, wouldn't Earth continue to spin under the helicopter?\n\nNo. Helicopters hover by remaining stationary with respect to the surrounding air, and all of the air is rotating along with the Earth (or else there would be constant 1000 mph winds as the Earth rotated through the atmosphere). So the helicopter will be carried along with the air around it as the air and Earth rotate together."
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3njzys | how large graham's number is using atoms, stars, blackholes etc. (or even a multiverse) | I was astounded by its vastness, so I need more explanation. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3njzys/eli5_how_large_grahams_number_is_using_atoms/ | {
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"The observable universe is \"only\" 4×10^80 m^3 in volume, and at about 6 protons average per m^3, that barely makes 2,4x10^81 protons in the universe.\n\nThese numbers aren't even as big as a googol (10^100), let alone a googolplex (10^10^100), let alone Graham's number. A googolplex is far and beyond the number of particles in the universe.\n\nYou may find some answers [in this Numberphile video](_URL_0_)\n\nSee how a googolplex is too big to write in plain numbers but easy to write with powers of 10?\nLet's say you want to write Graham's number. When \"counting\" Graham's number, you run out of writing space in the very early steps if you use powers of 10 we're used to, so you go to arrow notation (explained in the video), then you run out of space in the universe to fill with arrows by g1, and then no notation can help you anymore, so you just write g1, g2.... g64, and g64 is graham's number.",
"Okay:\n\nThe Planck volume is the theoretical smallest size anything can exist in. It is about 10^-105 m^3 .\n\nThe observable universe is about 93 billion light years across, and has a volume on the order of 10^80 m^3 .\n\nSo you can fit around 10^185 of the smallest possible thing into the Universe.\n\nSo, what if we make a number that was just 10^185 9s, written one after the other? How close to Graham's number would this be?\n\nNot even close, I'm afraid.\n\nIf you took that new number and wrote a new number by writing out that number of 9s ... it still wouldn't be close.\n\nIf you repeat the process another 50 or so times, you might get there, but my maths skills aren't quite there to work out how many times.",
"It's beyond comprehension. If your brain were able to parse all the digits of the number, it would become a black hole."
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108zur | how did republicans shift from being not so conservative to ridiculously conservative? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/108zur/eli5_how_did_republicans_shift_from_being_not_so/ | {
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"Here's the thing to understand: the real swing in their party was between being fiscally conservative and for personal liberty to being essentially a party of religious fanatics.\n\nIt happened because they tried to cater to religious voters, and ended up being overrun with them, to the point that the party's platform was shifted to reflect the interested of the religious fanatics they thought they could exploit.\n\nIronically, it was the Republicans (you know, 50 years ago) who pushed for many of the reproductive freedoms that the modern Republican party detests.",
"I can see three major reasons:\n\n1. For the last 20 years, the Democrats have been abandoning liberalism and moving to the center. This has alienated traditional Democratic base groups, but has allowed the Democrats to win the support of many independents, centrists, and former moderate Republicans. As a result, as many moderate Republicans become Democrats, the Republican party that is left behind is much more conservative, and Republican primaries reflect that. The Republican party of 30 years ago would have dismissed people like Santorum and Gingrich, not made them serious presidential contenders.\n\n2. As part of #1, as moderates drop off, the Christian Right has become the dominant force in the Republican party, and they are in a position to make real demands on candidates on the few issues that matter to them. They can draw a hard line on issues like abortion and gay marriage.\n\n3. The growth of conservative media - Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, National Review, Weekly Standard, right wing blogs, Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio hosts, etc. Those institutions keep Republicans in line - Republicans are afraid that if they take a position that offends that media, they will get attacked endlessly.",
"It's actually more complex than that. What's really going on is that both sides are shifting to the outside of the spectrum. The reason that is happening is because less and less people take part in the party system. \n\nElections in the US can largely be predicted using what's called the [Median Voter Theorem](_URL_0_). Essentially if you were to put people's political leanings on a line and assign them a number between one and ten (one being liberal ten being conservative) the candidate who wins the election will be the one who best caters to the median voter.\n\nThis applies just as well to primaries where we elect the candidates who will be on the ballot in November. The person who best plays to the median in their respective party usually wins the primary.\n\nThe problem is that fewer and fewer people are declaring parties. If you look at[ this graph from Gallup,](_URL_1_) you'll see that the percentage of voters who are independent is tied for a 30 year high. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters who are Republican or Democrat are at an all time low.\n\nIn addition it's important to know that political parties in the US are not really static like they are in most parts of the world. You tend to have a lot of subgroups acting under one umbrella. To really understand the dynamic shift in the Republican party you actually have to go back to the Great Depression. \n\nDuring the Great Depression, FDR was able to assemble a pretty powerful coalition of different political factions called the [New Deal Coalition.](_URL_2_) Essentially FDR was able to get labor groups, intellectuals, urban populations, minorities, the south, and the religious conservatives all to vote together. This actually worked really well for the Democrats. From '32 to the late '60s the only Republican to win the presidency was Eisenhower. However, as you can gather from that list, some of those factions have directly competing interests. In the 60's a lot of the underlying social tensions start to flair up. \n\nAs you can imagine, the minorities were pretty staunchly in favor of civil rights, but the south didn't really like that and hippies really didn't play well with either the religious right or a lot of the blue collar types. So what ends up happening is that the Democrats become a lot less about economic issues and a lot more about social issues which pisses off the social conservatives. \n\nMeanwhile, a lot of the more ardently anti-communist people are getting pretty unhappy with the general softening of the Democratic party, especially when it came to Vietnam and the USSR. \n\nUltimately the hippies and the minorities win out and a lot of the upset people leave the Democratic party. Meanwhile, the Republicans are all about beating the communists and while I won't go so far as to say they're against civil rights (Ike did integrate the military) they certainly weren't as big on it as the civil rights advocates in the Democratic party.\n\nSo what ends up happening is that the Democrats malcontents come over to the Republicans. Maybe the Republicans aren't going to agree with them on everything, but they tend to be more likely to support the troops and the war and they were also closer on economic issues. Meanwhile the Republicans who are already Republicans take these guys in for similar reasons. Maybe they're a little more socially radical than they'd like, but you need to win an election some time if you're not going to let the Democrats choke away the fight against communism.\n\nThe real issues within the Republican party don't flare up until the late 80's/early 90's. \n\nOn the state and local level it's sometimes pretty hard to find people that are willing to run for office. There are plenty of instances where someone might even run for office unopposed. This was definitely true of the Republicans in the early 90's. A lot of party offices and state level offices were really hard to fill because nobody wanted them.\n\nOr at least that used to be the case. As it turns out, the religious conservatives picked up on this and realized that if they started filling them, it'd become a lot easier to get the party to start pushing their agenda. All of the sudden religious conservative candidates start cropping for local offices all over the place. As a result they start gaining a lot of key positions in the party without the moderates really paying all that much attention. By the time the moderates realize what's going on it's pretty much too late. \n\nThe religious conservatives are hard to beat too. Keep in mind that like I said before, candidates are chosen by elections within the party. This becomes especially problematic because moderate Republicans are:\n\n1) More likely to register as independents than hardcore conservatives \n\n2) Less likely to vote in primaries.\n\nSo what ends up happening is that you have a highly motivated, highly organized group who controls a large portion of the party offices and is pretty much willing to do whatever it takes to win. Fast forward to the 2000s and the moderate Republicans are all pretty much in hiding. Like I said before, the political arena in general is becoming increasingly polarized, and the moderate conservatives are increasingly not registering as Republican which means that the moderate candidates almost never get out of the primaries.\n\nAs a result you never actually hear from the moderates because nobody cares about the guy who got curbstomped in a primary against someone who made a tour of all the churches in the state in the months leading up to election day.",
"There is nothing fiscally conservative about the modern GOP. They spent like drunken sailors when they had control. It's paying for that spending spree that they have a serious problem with and that conserves nothing but painful debt for the next generation."
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3s4b5n | what bad things are actually in mcdonalds now? is it really that bad? | I've just seen McDonalds' latest 'good to know' ad campaign, and a few things surprised me. All the chicken meat is chicken breast, the fries are just cut and fried potatoes... it's pretty different from the chemistry experiment I assumed I was eating.
Is there something I'm missing that means it is as unhealthy as I'd previously thought? I know the calories are way too high, and there's too much sugar in the drinks, but I don't eat it often enough to really care about that. I thought it was still all pink slime and chemicals, and now I can't tell if I'm being hoodwinked by mcdonalds PR... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s4b5n/eli5_what_bad_things_are_actually_in_mcdonalds/ | {
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"AMOUNT. The 'bad thing' is AMOUNT. Meat is meat, but do you need half a pound of it? Potatoes are potatoes, but if they're fried and salted to the point of becoming unhealthy, it doesn't matter what they started as. It's not like the food is 'artificial', there's just too much of it, in forms that are so refined it's easy for the body to gain weight from eating it. \n\nA hamburger is nutritionally a pretty good piece of food, if you make it right. Nothing wrong with that. ",
"this is just ignorant conjecture...but, in my opinion, the worst part of a mcdonalds meal is the giant bucket of soda that comes with it...french fries aren't much better. I say eat your sandwich and get a smaller drink or drink water, ditch the fries...no fucks needed for giving...",
"I never liked the concept of labeling certain foods as good or bad, which fad diets love to do in order to scare people and/or sell merchandise. Such practices do people looking for honest advice about being healthy no favors. [Here are a few examples.\n](_URL_1_)\n\nMy fellow posters have already hit on the two major talking points here. With McDonalds and other fast food establishments, a bigger problem than composition is quantity. The standard burger, medium fries and soft drink in the U.S. can [easily be more than 1000 calories.](_URL_0_) Unless you are exercising enough to offset heavier meals, you are certain to gain weight.\n\nThe other talking point is processed meat, and it is one not specific to fast food. Ground meats come from multiple animals, be it hamburger, sausage, lamb, or your favorite brick of deli meat. Besides the increased chance of food-borne illness (due to the number of animals used in a single production run), processed food tends to lose some nutritional value along the way. \n\nTo illustrate, imagine a potato. Let's say you skin that potato before cooking it. You have processed it and reduced its nutritional value. Let's say you then microwave or boil the potato. That reduces nutritional value even further. Finally, lets say you mash up that potato with some salt and butter to taste. Now your potato has additives that may not be as wholesome or good for you as the original potato.\n\nTL:DR - it is less about the bad things in food and more about the quantity of food and the amount of processing the food goes through. And no, it is not particularly bad for you unless you eat big macs four times a day.\n",
"You may have been hoodwinked by someone other than McDonalds. You and I are made of chemicals. Nothing they serve is worse than what's in a supermarket. You have to choose wisely. \n\nI eat at the golden arches, but only get the salads and smaller sandwiches and no sugary drinks. Once in a while, I'll get a small order of no-salt french fries. In 40 years, I've never gotten food poisoning from it. Wish I could say the same about the \"organic\" grocery store. For me, [food borne illness](_URL_0_) is a much greater health risk than fast food."
]
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[],
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"http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.pdf",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad_diet"
],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodborne_illness#United_States"
]
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|
kg5n9 | why do dvds look fine on a tv bigger than my monitor? | Why does a DVD look fine on a 30" tv but when I play it on a 22" monitor on fullscreen, it looks very pixelized? When it plays on the computer in a smaller window like 1000 pixels, it looks fine but then it looks terrible when maximized. Are there more pixels in a tv than most lcd monitors? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kg5n9/eli5_why_do_dvds_look_fine_on_a_tv_bigger_than_my/ | {
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"monitors use a higher resolution generally but the problem is probably that your dvd player and tv upscale things while your computer may not be for some reason. Though this would depend on your tv, dvd player, program your using on the computer.",
"You usually sit closer to your monitor. 2 feet from a 22\" monitor is going to be bigger to your eyes than 10 feet from a 30\" TV. This makes it easier to see every little imperfection.",
"Most DVD's have a resolution (number of pixels / dots on the screen) of 480p (720x480).\n\nThis means that there are 480 dots horizontally making up the video that you're watching.\n\nThe TV that you're using is more than likely standard definition (480p), or high definition (720p).\n\nBecause the source resolution (the dvd that you're watching) shares the same resolution as your television, the image clarity is fine and does not look distorted (or in the case of your TV being 720p, the dvd is only stretched/upscaled a very small amount, thus retaining a good level of quality anyway).\n\nNow, contrast this to your 22\" monitor. It more than likely has a resolution of 1680x1050 or over.\n\nIn this instance, you're taking your tiny 720x480 video and stretching it out to 1680x1050 pixels.\n\nThis means that your source video is being stretched a great deal more on your monitor, which causes a higher amount of distortion. Couple this with sitting close to your computer monitor, and the result is a very poor looking video.\n\nHope that makes sense.",
"monitors use a higher resolution generally but the problem is probably that your dvd player and tv upscale things while your computer may not be for some reason. Though this would depend on your tv, dvd player, program your using on the computer.",
"You usually sit closer to your monitor. 2 feet from a 22\" monitor is going to be bigger to your eyes than 10 feet from a 30\" TV. This makes it easier to see every little imperfection.",
"Most DVD's have a resolution (number of pixels / dots on the screen) of 480p (720x480).\n\nThis means that there are 480 dots horizontally making up the video that you're watching.\n\nThe TV that you're using is more than likely standard definition (480p), or high definition (720p).\n\nBecause the source resolution (the dvd that you're watching) shares the same resolution as your television, the image clarity is fine and does not look distorted (or in the case of your TV being 720p, the dvd is only stretched/upscaled a very small amount, thus retaining a good level of quality anyway).\n\nNow, contrast this to your 22\" monitor. It more than likely has a resolution of 1680x1050 or over.\n\nIn this instance, you're taking your tiny 720x480 video and stretching it out to 1680x1050 pixels.\n\nThis means that your source video is being stretched a great deal more on your monitor, which causes a higher amount of distortion. Couple this with sitting close to your computer monitor, and the result is a very poor looking video.\n\nHope that makes sense."
]
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|
3uomqs | if someone posts a sexual picture of a minor on a site like imgur (for example), would a regular person get in trouble for finding it while flipping through random stuff? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uomqs/eli5_if_someone_posts_a_sexual_picture_of_a_minor/ | {
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"I don't think so, it's pretty evident when someone accidentally stumbles across something like that vs. When someone on purpose looks for something like that. For the most part if people who are not interested in that will report it as soon as they see it. ",
"Viewing child porn is not a crime. *Possessing* it is. \n\nEven though a copy is stored on your computer temporarily when you view it, it is not considered \"possession\". "
]
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[],
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||
1kum8q | why did bradley manning get a 35 year sentence? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kum8q/eli5_why_did_bradley_manning_get_a_35_year/ | {
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"He violated a number of federal laws which prevent disclosure of classified information. He pled guilty to violating some of the infractions he was charged with, and so the court martial moved to a sentencing phase. The sentence was a lot less than what prosecutors were asking for, and a bit more than what his defense attorney had requested. \n\nAs part of his guilty plea, Manning apologized to the court martial and to the US and the people he says he hurt, saying: \n\n > \"I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I'm sorry that they hurt the United States. I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people. ... At the time of my decisions I was dealing with a lot of issues.\""
]
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[]
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||
2ozgdr | why is there oversupply in oil right now? | I understand that the dropping oil prices are from oversupply of oil, but why is there an over supply? Did the world's oil usage suddenly drop? What from? Or is there some new kind of oil-extraction tech that made supply jump up? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ozgdr/eli5_why_is_there_oversupply_in_oil_right_now/ | {
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"Saudi Arabia (Saudi Aramco) has purposefully been producing additional oil, and OPEC has been as well to drive the price down for various reasons. If you're looking for reasons, there are 100s of threads on it already.",
"Production has gone up. Mainly this is because of fracking. Fracking, within the past 10 years, has gone from virtually unknown to a major oil production method. Lots of places in the US (and the world) have oil but it's locked in my gelogicial formations that prevent us from using standard drilling pratices. Now, with fracking we can get at some of this oil and those methods have started yelding results.\n\nSecondly many oil producing countries are upset by the new US oil production. Those countries know that fracking is only profitable when oil is above $60 or $70 a barrel. So those countries have decided to drill for MORE oil in hopes that it drives the price below the threshold where fracking is profitable. Thus driving the fracking companies out of businesses. No word yet on if this is working, and these countries historically have problems working together. \n\nThe oversupply exists because production is up, it's not about the demand side.",
"The world has for a long time had the capacity to produce more oil than is used on a given day/year. OPEC - as a result - controls daily output to stabilize prices. This has been very effective because the vast majority of OPECs oil can be got at relatively cheaply. However, with prices going higher and higher it has become cost-effective to get at more expensive-to-extract oil ala fracking, tar sands, deep water drilling and so on. So...as this has happened non-OPEC oil has flooded the market. OPEC thinks to themselves \"hey...theres is expensive to extract if the prices drop it won't make sense for them to continue production and we can return to favorable marketshare position by just waiting it out\". ",
"Trying to push American shale out sums it up pretty well.",
"My understanding is that there is always an oversupply of oil -- you just moderate how much you're willing to sell. Just like diamonds.",
"So I don't have the exact numbers, but I believe they are close. OPEC makes profit at $15 a barrel to put a tube in the ground and suck up oil. The US makes profit at $30 a barrel fracking, or whatever the new hot thing is now. Basically OPEC has an abundance of cheap oil, and knows that the US has higher costs. So, as the US just became the #1 producer, OPEC didn't cut production at all. To add, winter is here, and we use less oil then to begin with, as we switch from summer blends of gas. So what OPEC wants to do is drive the price so low that US producers stop, possibly bankrupt. \n\nTldr- too much supply, OPEC isn't cutting production to drive out US drillers\n",
"Economist here. US invading Libya pretty much capsized their oil exports. Plus there was the turmoil in Egypt and the ongoing Syrian conflicts. These events led a drop in the oil supply on the market. \n\n\n\nTo compensate that OPEC counties (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait) had to increase their oil production. \n\n\n\nNow thе Libyan oil is back on the market, The US is producing more and predictions for consumption are low. \n\n\n\nFact! The key point that sent oil plummeting was the OPEC decision to maintain current levels of production, thus creating an oversupply of oil.\n\n\n\nTheory! Because of the ongoing situation with Russia, The US \"encouraged\" Arab countries to maintain production. While they (arab) won't suffer that much and fracking in the us might get backtracked a few years, this was a huge blow to the already tense Russian economy."
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5r8q2f | why is the g string on a guitar the one that tends to go out tune the most. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5r8q2f/eli5_why_is_the_g_string_on_a_guitar_the_one_that/ | {
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"I've always assumed it was because of a couple things - \nThe g string has some pretty crucial notes in open chords. In an E major chord it's the third (so even if your guitar is tuned perfectly it would be a little sharp) and in an A major chord it'd have an octave (and out-of-tune octaves are particularly noticeable). In a G major chord it's the same problem - octaves. \n\nI'm sure there are some physical reasons that I don't know about, but I think that an out-of-tune G string would just be more noticeable than other strings. \n\n-- In addition, on most electric guitars, it's the lowest string that isn't wound. It requires the least amount of change in tension to change pitch. That would probably be the biggest reason. \nTo further explain - imagine putting a new string on your guitar. If you pluck the string as you're just tightening it, the first few turns change the pitch a lot more than the last few turns - it's because of some physics I don't really understand, but in short the same change in string tension will drop the pitch of the G string more than the E string. ",
"I have always come to the conclusion that because it's the thinnest wound string (on most electric and acoustic guitars)it has the thinnest core and thinnest wind,these are more prone to stretching due to the nature of the materials they are made from, than say the high e or b string which once stretched out it becomes more stable unlike the g string which has 2 types of material to stretch out,therefore making it the last one to stop stretching. Make sure you stretch the strings out when restringing thoroughly and you'll have the need to re-tune the guitar less. Been a guitar tech for nearly 10 years and it's the best answer I can piece together after speaking to the guys at rotosound in the UK. Hope this helps \n",
"Have your guitars professionally set up, and you won't have strings going out of tune. Tighten the keys, put a little bit of Vaseline with graphite shavings from a pencil, mix up and put in the nut. That will stop slipping. So as long as your keys are tight, you should stay in tune. There's a lot of things you can do to your guitar to get it to perform better."
]
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||
1k54ow | what is the point of captive breeding if the animals lose their ability to live in the wild? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k54ow/eli5what_is_the_point_of_captive_breeding_if_the/ | {
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"If done properly, animals bred in captivity don't lose the ability to live in the wild. The wild California Condor population is growing due to captive breeding efforts and release into the wild."
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||
5uzg6j | are the different shampoos and soap actually different or is it all just a marketing trick? | if they aren't then is there is any ultimate product that includes everything? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5uzg6j/eli5_are_the_different_shampoos_and_soap_actually/ | {
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"I assume it's the same for soap, but as a hairdresser I can say that yeah, shampoos and conditioners for different things actually are different, especially if it's a professional product -cheaper products may contain lower quality ingredients and are often much harsher but should still do the job of cleaning your hair.\n\nTo keep it simple a colour protecting shampoo will be sulfate free, a shampoo for fine hair may be silicone free while one for coarser hair may not be, shampoo for curly hair may be designed so that it won't lather as much, and one for damaged hair will contain more protein than a shampoo that isn't for damaged hair.\n\nDesigning a \"one size fits all\" product is very difficult since ingredients will contradict each other and using something good for one hair type could be terrible for another. For example, for damaged hair to really get the benefits of a shampoo there would have to be extra protein, and extra protein isn't good for healthy hair and can actually make it brittle since it's too much. ",
"I recently learned on Reddit that tide is more expensive because the enzymes and ingredients they use are more expensive then most other laundry soap. My son gets bloody noses frequently and tide gets his sheets clean every time. We have tried others and would love to save money on a cheaper detergent, but whatever they use in tide is unique and worth the price.",
"I bought shampoo at the dollar store and it wouldn't bubble or really spread through my hair. ",
"I think soaps all use the same detergents, just varying amounts of it. The cheap soaps have mostly fragrance & sulfates, while better soaps contain less sulfates (or none at all, like lye soaps) and more moisturizers. I buy most of my soaps locally, as they are cheap and I have very sensitive skin. You can make your own soap from a kit at Michael's and make your own scent. Better quality soaps are completely worth it and they aren't ridiculously more expensive for a better soap. \nShampoo is a completely different story and doing your research is tedious. Cheap brands are mostly water & bubbles. ",
"There are definitely differences. Most soaps/shampoos clean nearly the same, but some are better for people with sensitive skin than others, etc.",
"Depends. I have worked at a cosmetics company. Some soaps, shampoos, body washes all had the same formula, even in the same brand. Others did not.",
"Correct me if I'm wrong here:\n\nI was always taught shampoos/soaps that boasted about containing vitamins were bullshit because your skin/hair can't absorb them and it's all a marketing ploy. I've tried googling it, but of course all that pops up are beauty blogs talking about vitamin enriched products. ",
"Interesting, I just went to a soap making class yesterday. We made cold pressed soap using coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil, lye - this makes the soap, but it needs time to turn into soap. You add whatever color and fragrance to it that you want. \n\nMy teacher said that Dove and Irish Spring aren't real soaps, but instead fragrance bars. Something about their ingredients. I'm not too sure about the specifics of it, but it was something she was very adamant about. \n\nTo make cold pressed soap you can use a lot of different things. The oils I mentioned above or fats (like chicken fat) or even butters (like coco butters). \n\nThere's a whole online recipe guide that helps you pick ingredients for the type of soap you want. Creamy, more lather, for dry skin, etc. So yes there appears to be many differences. ",
"I worked for an industrial soap making company, and yes, each of our soaps were designed to lift a specific range of grimes from specific surfaces. There are surfactants which help wet a surface so the soap molecules can cosy up to the grime, chelates which help the molecules disperse the grime into solution, the soap molecules which are double ended. One end sticks to a bit of some kind of dirt, the other end sticks to water. Flush and rip dat dirt outta there.\nBut there are many other things that affect the performance of a detergent like moderating bits, protectors and conditioners for the clean surface, perfumes and colors.\n\nHeat improves activity in most chemistry so a temperature range for best results is according to the formulation.\n\nComplex stuff. Your mileage may vary.\n"
]
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|
4o1w4p | why is it easier to read on paper vs. a screen? | Any time I am editing a paper, I print it out and find so many more errors than I do if I read on-screen. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4o1w4p/eli5_why_is_it_easier_to_read_on_paper_vs_a_screen/ | {
"a_id": [
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"score": [
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"text": [
"Here is a link to an article describing how a University of Stavanger (Norway) concluded reading comprehension was higher with paper-based text than with computer screen. Perhaps this also raises editing proficiency?\n\n_URL_0_"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://sciencenordic.com/paper-beats-computer-screens"
]
] |
|
2d1rib | john d. rockefeller had a net work of, adjusted for inflation, $330 billion. where did he "keep" this sum of wealth? | I know he participated in a lot of philanthropy throughout his life, but at his most "wealthy," where did he keep his money? Was it tied up in company stock? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2d1rib/eli5_john_d_rockefeller_had_a_net_work_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"cjl90km"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"He owned a very large company. Standard Oil was the main source of his net worth. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
3nnn0z | why do all deaf people speak with that specific tone in their voice? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nnn0z/eli5_why_do_all_deaf_people_speak_with_that/ | {
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"They can't hear, so they can't hear the voice inflections that we all have. This means they have never learned how to properly use voice inflection. Instead they have just been instructed on how to properly form letters and words. This is difficult enough to teach someone who can't hear, and voice inflections aren't totally necessary, so they get dropped in favor of spending more time on the pronunciations. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
c01v7x | why does the us not officially recognize taiwan as a sovereign state? what would happen if the us decided to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c01v7x/eli5_why_does_the_us_not_officially_recognize/ | {
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"It's because China says Taiwan is rightfully their territory, and that US has decided it's better to play along rather than risk relationships with China. Despite many disputes China continues to be a very important trade partner to the USA. Trade with Taiwan will pretty much never reach that of with China since Taiwan is much smaller and has less people.\n\nIf the US did decide to recognize Taiwan the Chinese would probably decide to veto any UN recognition of Taiwan. China would also probably get more hostile to the US and increase their military spending, something that the US doesn't want China to do.\n\nIt's also worth noting that the dispute between Taiwan and China comes from the Chinese Civil War. In the end there were two main factions, the communists and the right-wing KMT. The KMT were ultimately kicked out of China, except in Taiwan where they managed to survive. To this day Taiwan considers itself as the rightful government of all of China. The mainland Chinese government disagrees with this and considers Taiwan part of their territory.",
"We don't because China doesn't want us to. China is a major trade partner with the US, Taiwan is less so. If the US had an issue like the Taiwan/mainland separation, China would also acknowledge it's ownership. The Chinese government is extremely insistent that Taiwan is part of China.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhat would happen? Chances are China would fight a very large tariff war with the US until it relented. Trump actually did this early in his Presidency, and had to rescind it due to the Chinese backlash."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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||
3np5en | why do orthodontists put a permanent retainer on your bottom teeth, but not your top teeth? | I got my braces off a long time ago, and my ortho put a permanent retainer on my bottom teeth to prevent shifting, but for the top teeth, he made a removable retainer. I just don't understand why they don't put one up top too, it'd be very convenient. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3np5en/eli5_why_do_orthodontists_put_a_permanent/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Uhh, I have a permanent retainer on my upper teeth. Maybe it's just you given your certain condition, the orthodontist decided it wasn't necessary. ",
"my sisters got their retainers on top and bottom, but mines just bottom. the orthodontist said it was because there wasn't enough room to comfortably fit on top. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
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|
2kzw0r | what roadblocks hinder us from feeding dna (genome or snippet) into a computer and "running" the strand to see what it builds? | I think the question is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, do we currently have processes that allow us to "run" a DNA sequence like we run a program, and if not, what keeps us from doing this. Is it a lack of computing power? Do we not fully understand the mechanics? Does something moving toward this end goal exist now? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kzw0r/eli5_what_roadblocks_hinder_us_from_feeding_dna/ | {
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"You cannot just feed a genome sequence into a computer and ask it to \"run\". You need to know what you are looking for. You need to know how proteins fold after the DNA has been transcribed and translated which is an extremely complicated process involving millions of protein interactions. We do not even know how proteins precisely interact with each other. Proteins undergo several steps of folding and structural changes to make it super compact before it becomes functional. Reverse engineering that take a long time and something that computers cannot do, because there are way too many variables that it can account for.\n\nEDIT: my assumption was that OP was talking about the human genome.",
"We can determine the string of amino-acids that a DNA sequence encodes. Problem is this only gives us the primary structure of the protein. After (actually during) the construction of the primary structure the amino-acid chain interacts with a bunch of other proteins present in the cell that fold it in various ways, creating the secondary and tertiary structure of the proteins, and that these folds occur correctly is critical for the function of the protein.\n\nWe understand the construction of the primary amino-acid chain but not the protein interactions that produce the secondary, tertiary and quartenary structures. Beyond that we have no idea how the produced protein will interact with other proteins.",
"Several factors\n\n1. DNA gene sequences contain regions that don't code for anything (introns). These are removed during processing but if they stayed it would likely be a shitty protein not capabal of much\n\n2. Proteins sequences can give some information but not a lot. They can tell you the amino acids but how these amino acids arrange themselves is VERY VERY VERY VERY hard to determine on a large scale. you can look at a string and say \"oh that makes a certain structure\" but you also need to determine how the things that make up that structure interact with all of the others in the system.\n\n3. proteins undergoe modifications before they are used\n\n4. there are several possible confirmations for a protein\n\nOVERALL: not enough computing power. There are nearly infinite possible structures for even a short strand of sequence. Better algorithms need to be developed. ask more questions if you want ",
"We don't really understand how protein folding works, so our simulations don't get past the stage immediately after dna transcription when chains of amino acids take on the specific shapes which allow them to function as the proteins constituting living cells."
]
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