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fh5p7a | how does anyone know the long term effects of medication that's been invented in the last 20 years? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fh5p7a/eli5_how_does_anyone_know_the_long_term_effects/ | {
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"They have indications, but they don't \"know know\". But...consider a few things:\n\n1. The \"invention date\" of a drug is really a very, very long time before the launch date. During that process there is a lot of testing that goes on and that testing produces data. Not 20 year data, but the _average_ amount of time to get through FDA approval is 12 years. You probably haven't even heard of a drug before it's been had by others in a controlled environment for 10 years. \n\n2. The long term effects also err on the side of warning you. so...lots of \"May\" statements (this may cause that) are based on understanding a mechanism of action and then looking at impacts of that mechanism known from other drugs, other research and so on. so...warnings get folded in based on how a drug works.\n\n3. Lots of drugs are variants of existing drugs - e.g. a slight modification (for example \"time release\" isn't a change to the drug, but is to its delivery). so...a drug may be older than you think.",
"Drugs go through rigorous testing for ~10 years before even going public. This involves preclinical animal dose finding and toxicology before moving to human clinical trials. The drugs are pretty well studied before even going public.",
"The truth is: They don't. Just ask anybody with [tardive dyskinesia](_URL_0_) who got it after using popular drugs like Seroquel or Abilify."
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2bg4gh | why does my wireless network connect status say 72.0mbps, yet when i do a speed test, it shows an average of 30mbps? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bg4gh/eli5_why_does_my_wireless_network_connect_status/ | {
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"Your uplink to your ISP is 30 Mbps. \n\nThe link between your computer and your wireless router is 72."
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3034px | how come the human body performs poorly at repairing the spine when it's damaged ? | Looked up spinal cord injuries and it said often cases result in a permanent changes in strength. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3034px/eli5_how_come_the_human_body_performs_poorly_at/ | {
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"It has to do with how complicated the spinal cord is. There are just too many connections that all have to be made exactly as they were before in order to be repaired.\n\nIt's better to leave it severed than to attempt an improper repair. At last that's what our bodies think."
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bczj9g | how can we still keep seeing proposed ridiculous laws pop up at the state level dealing with abortion. hasn’t the supreme court multiple times decided you can’t make it illegal to have an abortion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bczj9g/eli5_how_can_we_still_keep_seeing_proposed/ | {
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"It's politics as usual. You introduce or pass laws that gain you favor with your constituents or moneyed interests (or, arguably less likely, because you actually believe in the thing). In this case, you can write or vote for a law and say that you're \"tough on abortion\" or \"tough on crime and drugs\" or \"free healthcare for everyone\". It doesn't matter if it doesn't pass or if a court tosses it out, because you proposed it or backed it. You support this thing, and you were stopped by the other party or government with their laws and rights and courts and silly stuff like that. It doesn't change the fact that you believe this way and are willing to stand up for it.\n\nAnother thing to consider are single issue voters. Voting can be complicated, and idealism can be very strong. If a candidate supports one issue that you feel strongly about, you may vote for them because of their stance on this one issue. Gay rights, gun ownership, abortion, and tax rates are examples of modern causes that have motivated single issue voters."
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7wawka | why do treasury bond yields have such a profound impact on the equity market? | I searched this ELI5 up, couldn't find anything..
From what I'm hearing, the lower the value of a bond gets, the higher the yield. So that means your paying less money and getting a higher return, right? This should make bonds more in demand...but right now they're still not?
How do these yields tie into:
a) Interest rates and inflation
b) The equities market
This is based on the chaos in the market right now, I would love to fully understand this. Thanks in advance | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wawka/eli5_why_do_treasury_bond_yields_have_such_a/ | {
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"Bonds are issued for a specific life (5 year, 10 year etc.) and have a built in interest rate. So if Treasury bonds are being sold today at 5% rate, the marketplace adjusts the price to that rate. Tomorrow, Treasury bond rates drop to 3%. Suddenly the 5% Bonds are worth more than before and there's a run on purchasing the 5% therefore price rise. Same token - bond rates rise to 8%. The 5% bonds are worth less overall since they don't make as much money in interest over the life. \n\nThe bond prices and rates are correlated. Higher rate, higher price. The goal is to make the yield (aka your total profit) static on it by the market lowering the price on the bonds with the lower return",
"Let's start things simple. Bonds are debt instruments, meaning every time you buy one somebody owes you the total money you gave them plus interest. That interest rate is set by the central bank. \n\n\nSo when you owed by someone lets say $100 and you will get paid 5% for it ($5) until the debt expires the value of your investment is basically worth $100 + $5 = $105. If you then decide to sell that bond before it expires you should theoretically receive an amount around $105.\n\n\nIF the central bank changes the interest rates, by let's say reducing it from 5% to 3%, then the bond you hold pays more than what the NEW bonds will pay. Therefore your bond must worth more to offer the same % returns as the new bond. The same works if the interest rates are increased, then the $105 dollar bond should decrease in value to match the returns of the new bonds that pay better. \n\n\nHOW DOES THAT AFFECT THE STOCK MARKET:\n\n\nFOR MANY years countries around the world have been reducing interest rates essentially to zero as a way to battle the 2008 GFC. \n\n\nThere are two things you must consider:\n\nFirst is, if interest rates are going up after all these years, the new bonds are more attractive than the older ones, therefore making investors that like safer investments to buy them instead of stocks. \n\nSecond, when interest rates go up that indicates few things such as that the inflation is increasing and that the cost of debt will now increase, meaning that companies that borrowed money will now have to pay more for their debt as well as seeing increased costs caused by inflation resulting in their profits to drop and as a result of the stock prices to decrease. "
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g11afj | if heat causes things to expand, why does using the drier cause delicate's to shrink? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/g11afj/eli5_if_heat_causes_things_to_expand_why_does/ | {
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"Cotton is made of cellulose which has long stranded fibers that curl up when dried quickly. As the water is forced out of the little \"tubes\" full of water dotted all over the surface, the water at the top evaporates first and the water more in the center pulls toward the top to fill the space. The process is reversibleish by soaking the clothing in question and gently pulling it into shape, as the water lubricates the fibers. \n\nThe tumbling action also doesn't help it essentially pushes the clothing into a smaller ball. \n\nI used to run an appliance store."
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dcaixk | if all carbohydrates get broken down to their most simple form, sugar, why is it unhealthy to just eat tablespoons of sugar? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dcaixk/eli5_if_all_carbohydrates_get_broken_down_to/ | {
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"A few reasons:\n\n1.) The amount of carbohydrates you get per-pound from more complex foods is much less than the amount from processed table sugar, and it also takes more time to digest. So, it's more difficult to overeat. A pound of table sugar will be stored mostly as fat, while a pound of chicken will need to be broken down and digested first. Whatever sugars are extracted will mostly be used, and only a minimal amount will be stored.\n\n2.) Table sugar has virtually no other nutrients or minerals, so you won't be getting any of those either.\n\n3.) It can be killer for your teeth, since bacteria *love* sugar.\n\nSugar itself isn't bad - in fact you need it. *Added* sugars are bad, because too much will cause your body to store it. This can lead to weight gain, heart disease, and a whole slew of other problems primarily caused by overeating.",
"Most of the dangers come from the glycemic response to these various foods.\n\nPure sugar with nothing to slow the absorption rate will spike your blood sugar. This causes your pancreas to release Insulin to counteract that spike, which in turn reduces your blood sugar below normal levels, so your body releases glucose into the blood stream to compensate, which spikes it again, causing your pancreas to release more insulin... Lather, rinse, repeat until your glucose levels have hit a steady baseline.\n\nThis yo-yo effect taxes your pancreas significantly, as well as has other downstream effects on your body. \n\nThe more effort it takes your body to absorb the sugars, the healthier it is for your system when consumed in moderation.",
"What does it mean \"unhealthy\" exactly? It's a very vague term. A tablespoon of sugar is just too much sugar to be used immediately by the average human, so most of it becomes stored as fat. If that is what you consider unhealthy, then yes, it's unhealthy. But if you need the carbohydrates, because you are doing heavy work, then a tablespoon of sugar is \"fine\".",
"Not all carbs do. Some fibers get broken down to component parts only by the bacteria in your colon, at the very end of the digestive tract. Others are somewhere in the middle but are still used mainly by bacteria without resulting in sugars that get absorbed. These bacteria are very important for your digestive and nervous systems as a whole.",
"\"Sugar\" is a slightly problematic term, because it is a term for a class of compounds. \n\nTable sugar, which is normally what we have around, is sucrose, which is made up of two simple sugars stuck together. Your body has no issue splitting them up, so each molecule of sucrose becomes 1 glucose and 1 fructose.\n\nMost sweet foods contain either sucrose directly, or \"high fructose corn syrup\" which, is a mixture of fructose and glucose all mixed together.\n\nCarbs are mostly just long chains of glucose, and enzymes happily cleave off glucose from the chains and use it. So carbs become sugar, but mostly, become glucose. This is energy for the whole body, every cell.\n\nThe difference comes with fructose.... remember the sucrose is a source of it.... When your liver processes sugars, it makes fats and cholesterol. This is \"de novo lipogenysis\" which is just the fancy latin way of saying \"the creation of new fat\".\n\nThe thing is, remember how I said glucose is food for your whole body? Because of that, only a small percentage < 10% ever gets processed by the liver.\n\nFructose however is not an energy source for every cell. Fructose is processed in the liver, and 90% of it goes there. [Fructolysis](_URL_0_) is the process:\n > Unlike glucose, which is directly metabolized widely in the body, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver in humans, where it is directed toward replenishment of liver glycogen and triglyceride synthesis.[1] Under one percent of ingested fructose is directly converted to plasma triglyceride.[2] 29% - 54% of fructose is converted in liver to glucose, and about a quarter of fructose is converted to lactate. 15% - 18% is converted to glycogen.[3] Glucose and lactate are then used normally as energy to fuel cells all over the body.[2]"
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uu4er | why haven't other species on earth reached the same level of consciousness of humans? | I'm not talking simply about intelligence like in dolphins or some species of ape, but complete self aware and conscious beings. Does it have to do with evolution? Can there only be one self aware species on a planet as the top predator? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/uu4er/why_havent_other_species_on_earth_reached_the/ | {
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"Some corvids have passed self awareness tests, as well as some primates.",
"dolphins are self aware. There have been tests where a mirror is placed in the tank, instead of getting bored or thinking it is another dolphin in the mirror, the dolphin acknowledges that its a reflection, they will marvel for great lengths at a time and will check themselves out. Its more in the matter that we ourselves, truly dont know what they are thinking or what other animals have high levels of consciousness.",
" I can't guarantee you everything I'm about to tell you is right or that I'm even answering your question, but here it goes.\n\n The problem I think you're running into is assuming that our level of consciousness is somehow the next step in evolution, or that it is somehow the best place to be at. Sure, for us it is, but we're a bit biased don't you think? The only reason (Based off of evolution) that we have this level of consciousness is that it somehow benefited us and made us more likely to survive and pass on our traits to our offspring. \n\n In my mind, there is not anything preventing any other species from reaching the same level of consciousness at some point in their evolutionary progress, but the environment in which the live has to have the right conditions to get them there. \n\n Not really sure how much that helped or answered anything, but feel free to ask clarifying questions. In the meantime I'll see if I can't find the post to which I was referring. :]",
"It is because evolution is not aimed at any goal of intelligence or any ideal species. It is just a response to life attempting to exist via survival and reproduction. Whether that is hiding underground for 17 years followed by a few days of mating and death, becoming intelligent enough to use tools and pass on y knowledge with developed language, or setting up shop in the brain of another species and trying to send offspring off to find another one before killing it. No one system is any better than another.",
"Dolphins are completely self aware. we just don't care because we can't communicate with them but scientists are learning their language now and hopefully one day we'll be able to tell them all about the miracles of Jesus! ",
"Humans are special in a couple of big ways. \n\nFirst, we have fingers and thumbs, like monkeys and apes, who are primates like us. This makes us very good at working with small objects and using tools. Because we have hands, we can build big things like skyscrapers and cars and rockets. \n\nSecond, we have language. This is mostly because we walk on two feet instead of on all fours. Animals who walk on all fours can mostly make vowel sounds like \"ah\" and \"ee\" and \"oh.\" \n\nWhen we started walking upright, we had to bend our heads down towards our feet in order to look forward. When we bent our heads, we also bent our throats, which allowed us to make sounds like \"k\" and \"g\" and \"r.\" With the sounds we make from bending our heads, we got enough sounds to have a useful spoken language. \n\nSpoken language allowed us to talk about what to eat and where to go and how to kill big animals. We could understand plans and instructions without having done things ourselves. We could also talk about each other, and more importantly for your question, we could talk *to ourselves*. We eventually learned how to talk to ourselves without making any noise, which is the same thing as thinking. When we think about ourselves, or think about thinking, we experience that as consciousness. \n\nLanguage and consciousness are separate from tools and building. For example, ants can make big, complicated houses for themselves, and they can make farms of leaves and bugs, but individual ants can't think about themselves. \n\nDolphins can talk to each other, and they can recognize themselves, but they can't build anything, because they don't have hands. That's why humans normally think of dolphins as less advanced. But we don't know for sure. We don't understand their language, so we don't know what they're talking about, or whether they think, or whether they think about themselves and experience consciousness. \n\nAnother thing to think about is reading and writing. When we read, we think pretty hard, and when we write, we share what we're thinking so that anybody can find out later. Reading and writing let us share our consciousness across time and space, and we can only do that because we have both language and tools. Other animals with language don't have tools, and so they can't record their ideas and share them later. \n\nSome scientists think that there might be advanced intelligence on other planets, but it might be in animals like dolphins, who can talk to each other but can't use tools. Those aliens would never be able to build spaceships and come visit us, but they would have interesting and valuable lives. \n\nSo, to answer your question, right now we think we have a special kind of consciousness because we can't talk to other animals. But some other animals, like dolphins and whales and gorillas and crows, are really smart, and maybe we can eventually figure out how to talk to them and how they think.\n\n(Source: most of my understanding of the evolution of consciousness and language comes from \"Consciousness Explained\" by Daniel Dennett. [**EDIT:** The [book's bibliography](_URL_0_) is available in the middle of the \"Click to look inside\" pop-up. It's not a science book, but the author is reputable.] The speculation about extraterrestrial intelligence came from a brief article I read several years ago and cannot find.)",
"What are you talking about? [Didn't you see the documentary that came out last year?](_URL_0_) ",
"One guy claims it is because of monkeys who stumbled Into a patch of psychedelic mushrooms. ",
"Brains require a tremendous amount of energy to operate. Unless the intelligence helps the animal acquire more food, it will be selected out.",
"I got to explain this to another person not long ago: All animals have a certain degree of intellectual development,from the snail to us humans. And along the line comes self-awareness, which is not really a trait but a spectrum of characteristics that we like to say define \"being self-aware\". \n\nNow, why haven't other species reached the same level as us? Well because they don't need to . Their path on evolution has led them to specialize on other things, which doesn't necessarily include being smart enough to develop was we did.\n\nThink about it this way-- Imagine a shark could talk, and asked you **why the hell don't you have more teeth??!!** -- For the shark that means long life and supremacy underwater.",
"you're asking too many questions here. 'complete self aware and conscious beings' vs 'self aware species'\n\nfirst, there's only a small handful of humans who are completely self aware and conscious, historically. i mean that from an 'understanding of self' perspective, in the buddhist sense of humans having a mind that interferes with true perception of reality. \n\nbut in the sense that humans don't know how our brains and bodies work, you could argue we are not all that fully aware. \n\nsecond, just because we are smart doesn't mean we are aware of other intelligence. large hives of insects and other groups exhibit an intelligence distributed across their thousands of constituent parts - our intelligence is mostly localized to individuals, but via politics and culture we too have a distributed group intelligence. \n\nalthough, when you consider what we're willing to do to our surroundings, i.e. pollute, we may not be that advanced after all"
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6fy2q8 | in terms of weight and calories what is the difference between binge eating a food such as a tub of ice cream all at once and eating it incrementally? | For example hypothetically say a tub of ice cream is 800 calories and you normally eat 1800 calories a day to lose weight is there a difference between eating the whole tub of ice cream in 1 day rather than over 4?
When trying to lose weight at slimming clubs I've gone to they award points to different foods and when talking people generally seem to say I at this in the week this is why I gained, even if they cut ha k on points other days. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fy2q8/eli5_in_terms_of_weight_and_calories_what_is_the/ | {
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"There's none. If you have a strict diet but over the course of a month you eat one tub of ice cream, you will have gained as much weight at the end of the month even if you ate all the ice cream on the first day. Assuming you keep your diet otherwise exactly the same.\n\nThe problem is most people don't keep their diet otherwise exactly the same. If they eat an entire tub of ice cream in one day at the beginning of the month, they're likely to eat another tub of ice cream in one day another time during the month. So if you spread it out the changes are more gradual and 'feel' like they last longer.\n\nThat said, exactly when and how you gain the weight-- really everything about it-- is slightly more complicated and depends on lots of things.\n\n"
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1s7gwi | how much data can fit in a qr code? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s7gwi/eli5how_much_data_can_fit_in_a_qr_code/ | {
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"Around 2,953 bytes or 7,089 numbers or 4,296 Letters but that is an extremely big one at 177 pixels by 177 pixels. It would be easier to use a web address and download the content at that point."
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50jwui | why didn't canada fully adopt the metric system in the construction industry like european and oceanic countries? | The Canadian construction industry is 100% imperial. You can find a few things here and there in metric, but almost nobody is measuring decks in metres. And yet we all use kilometres and litres and even starting to use kilograms a bit more. Engineers with feet (no pun intended) in multiple industries have to constantly switch between imperial and metric. Why is the construction industry in particular slow to change?
Edit: For anyone else curious, [this comment](_URL_0_) from 9 months ago in a similar ELI5 sums up the overall metrification problem nicely. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/50jwui/eli5_why_didnt_canada_fully_adopt_the_metric/ | {
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"Not an expert. But maybe because Canada is next to the US?",
"Changing standards is not as easy for every industry. Some Canadian industries are doing a lot of trade with the US side and it only creates a lot of issues if one were to change standard. And it takes time to redo everything. Even the European construction industry have not switched completely away from imperial units. Most wood still come in the old inch standard but rebranded in cm. 2x4 is just as common in Europe as in the US and is still called 2x4. This also goes the other way. Your standard 2 feet cabinet is actually 600mm as that is a global equipment standard.",
"I'm old enough to remember when the metric system was imposed by the government and the reason was to make us more competitive in foreign markets.\n\nSince one of our biggest exports was lumber, and 90% of it went to the US, lumber was an exception."
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6m8wfq | how do theoretical physicists find solutions to the biggest and smallest answers to the universe using math alone? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6m8wfq/eli5_how_do_theoretical_physicists_find_solutions/ | {
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"They don't.\n\nThey have centuries of observations to draw upon, they are trying to find math that is consistent with those observations. Sometimes that math takes them beyond what can be shown with experiments, but by no means are they using math alone.",
"So, the underlying thing here is that *math is never wrong*. The physical law that uses math to describe itself may be wrong, but the math itself isn't flawed.\n\nSo, when you have a given theory, you stretch that theory to it's mathematical limits in order to predict the existence of a given phenomena. If you then search for that phenomena, and find it, that is one more bit of evidence that the underlying theory is correct. If you don't find it (assuming you know that you *should* have found it), then you know the theory is wrong, because the things the theory predicted didn't come to pass.",
"As others have mentioned, physicists have lots of observation to draw upon and they then use math to obtain or find more concrete proof. A good example of this is Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. Both are highly regarded, yet Faraday didn't include much math (if any at all) in his papers. He used basic algebra or trig, but his findings were mainly based on observation. Later, James C. Maxwell took Faraday's findings and developed equations to sum up and model them.\n\nBoth are very famous physicists, but they are very different. Faraday was essentially a librarian who later became a lab assistant and then went on to describe his observations.",
"Theoretical physicists make models, not solutions to answers. In practice the models are much more complicated than my example, but the idea is very much so the same.\n\nSay you're playing a game and what to know your win rate. You know how many games you won and how many games you played. The formula for your win rate (# of wins)/(# of games played)=winrate.\n\nNow, when you look at that formula you see that you can use it to determine any 1 of those variables so long as you know the other two. You also notice that your win rate is only dependent on those 2 variables, and only those three variables. It's not dependent on the moon phase, not dependent on the time of day, or anything besides those 2 variables. In this particular example that's obvious, but in general that kind of thing is not obvious.\n\nSo, just by creating an obvious formula we discovered that your win rate is only dependent on 2 things, and we were able to make predictions with that formula (eg how many games it will take to win 50 games with a 70% win rate)."
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44wnz1 | why doesn't type ii diabetes curb weight gain? | If insulin mediates fat uptake, and proper functioning of these receptors/GLUT2 is what stores fat in adipocyte tissue, doesn't that mean less fat would get stored when that mechanism is disrupted? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/44wnz1/eli5_why_doesnt_type_ii_diabetes_curb_weight_gain/ | {
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"You are right that it can cause weight loss. In fact, unexplained weight loss is one of the first signs of undiagnosed diabetes. This happens because of the mechanism you described, but also because diabetics urinate out sugar. But it also stops cells from getting enough energy, which makes people hungrier so they eat more. Also, when people take insulin as treatment for diabetes, it can lead to weight gain. \n\nIt's important to visit a doctor regularly to keep from gaining or losing too much weight when treating diabetes. (Also, don't forget that there is a good weight loss and a bad weight loss. Good means you lose fat. Bad means you lose muscle too.)"
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avqlqg | what does serotonin do exactly and how does it work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/avqlqg/eli5_what_does_serotonin_do_exactly_and_how_does/ | {
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"Low serotonin levels have been linked to depression. Serotonin is an important chemical and neurotransmitter in the human body. It is believed to help regulate mood and social behavior, appetite and digestion, sleep, memory, and sexual desire and function.\n\nHere’s a definition. ",
"Whoever is able to answer this question in detail will probably win a Nobel prize. We understand some of the broad strokes of how neurotransmitters work but it is becoming more and more clear that there is a great deal of complexity that we don't understand yet."
]
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[],
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jnkgu | why smoking cigarettes is bad for you? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jnkgu/eli5_why_smoking_cigarettes_is_bad_for_you/ | {
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"Cigarette smoke contains many poisons that damage your lungs (which are crucial for breathing) and other important body parts",
"It's only bad for you physically.\n\nIt's fantastic from a psychological point of view. ",
"- Nicotine is addictive and by nature *bad*\n\n- Many of the ingredients in a cigarette are straight up poison, as mentioned by Samicom, which have different effects on the smoker, almost all of them are only made to get the user buzzed\n\n- Smoking can eventually cause a controlling grip on the user, which usually settles right around the time the user begins saying \"I need a cigarette\" for the first time. It becomes a habit. A necessity. The hand motions pulling in and out several times a day become familiar to the brain and also make it normal. This makes quitting harder.\n\n- The list goes on. Tooth and gum decay/bad breath, dirtying the inside of a car....there are way too many side effects that are just plain awful. You know, like cancer.",
"It's a bit difficult to read, but [this](_URL_0_) should answer your question.",
"Cigarette smoke contains many poisons that damage your lungs (which are crucial for breathing) and other important body parts",
"It's only bad for you physically.\n\nIt's fantastic from a psychological point of view. ",
"- Nicotine is addictive and by nature *bad*\n\n- Many of the ingredients in a cigarette are straight up poison, as mentioned by Samicom, which have different effects on the smoker, almost all of them are only made to get the user buzzed\n\n- Smoking can eventually cause a controlling grip on the user, which usually settles right around the time the user begins saying \"I need a cigarette\" for the first time. It becomes a habit. A necessity. The hand motions pulling in and out several times a day become familiar to the brain and also make it normal. This makes quitting harder.\n\n- The list goes on. Tooth and gum decay/bad breath, dirtying the inside of a car....there are way too many side effects that are just plain awful. You know, like cancer.",
"It's a bit difficult to read, but [this](_URL_0_) should answer your question."
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620nm1 | how people can be spiritual and not religious. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/620nm1/eli5_how_people_can_be_spiritual_and_not_religious/ | {
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"text": [
"It's like being able to believe in something bigger than yourself, without all the crazy garbage that comes along with it. A belief in 'god' without necessarily believing in a burning bush or walking on water, being spiritual is having a general faith without having all the craziness about the religion dictated and shoved down your throat. "
]
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4or9iy | starting from where you are, travelling in a straight line in the universe at the speed of light for 13 billion years, and then doing a 180 to go back to the point you started, would you get there in 13 billion years and would it be the same spot you left from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4or9iy/eli5starting_from_where_you_are_travelling_in_a/ | {
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"Well, seeing as nothing would actually stand still while you're travelling, no. \n\nThink of it this way - if you go outside and point something at the moon which will then travel in that straight line at 100MPH... it will likely never each the moon, because the moon hasn't just stood still for that entire time. ",
"No, because space itself is expanding, so the distance you covered in the first 13 billion years would be smaller than what becomes of the same distance over the second 13 billion years."
]
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2io3y9 | how do people manage to hack scores on iphone game leaderboards? | It seems like every time I look at leaderboards, even for very unpopular games, there are several hundred legitimate scores that are steadily better and better, there is a huge jump up, and the top ten or so have ridiculous, unachievable scores.
Lots of commas. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2io3y9/eli5_how_do_people_manage_to_hack_scores_on/ | {
"a_id": [
"cl3uepo"
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"text": [
"Depends on how the leader-board is implemented. Varies case by case. Generally going to be an oversight in programming by the game devs that allows arbitrary scores to be reported, or a flaw in the game that allows for points to be gained when they shouldn't be. "
]
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|
1swieb | why does cheese 'sweat'? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1swieb/eli5_why_does_cheese_sweat/ | {
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"text": [
"The 'sweat' is actually oils from the cheese.\n\nThink of the cheese like a sponge holding in water. When its freezing, the water stays in the sponge. When it thaws, the water starts leaking out.\n\nOil has a different boiling and freezing temperature than water. When you keep cheese in the refrigerator, the oils stays in the cheese easier (Although is may sweat a little over time). When you take it out, the oils start leaking out. However, because oil evaporates much more slowly than water, the oils tend to just sit on the surface of the cheese."
]
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[]
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||
b6srwu | what is radioactive fallout and why is it so dangerous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6srwu/eli5_what_is_radioactive_fallout_and_why_is_it_so/ | {
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"In a nuclear explosion or fire involving nuclear materials, radioactive particles gets thrown into the atmosphere and the fallout is when the radioactive particles fall back to earth.\n\nIt's dangerous because it is airborne (breathing in radioactive material is very hazardous) and is nearly impossible to contain.",
"When a nuclear bomb (or any other fission reaction) blows up, the \"ashes\" of the fission reaction are a mixture of different elements, most of which are anywhere from medium radioactive to extremely radioactive. (The more radioactive, they faster they decay, making the radioactivity goes away)\n\nIf a nuclear bomb blows up high in the air, most of the radioactivity will dissipate up in the atmosphere. However, if it blows up near enough to the ground (with the fireball touching the ground), bits of sand and dirt will get coated with radioactive elements. It will then *fall out* of the sky and become... fallout. This is more dangerous because a large area downwind of the nuclear explosion will be coated with highly radioactive dust. However, after some weeks, the radiation is much diminished. It's a total myth that nuclear bombs make the landscape deadly radioactive for years or centuries, unless they are deliberately set up to make the most radiation possible. "
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174uto | kugelblitz & event horizon | I have virtually no knowledge of astrophysics (or whatever field this would be classified in) but recently heard these terms in a video, and became very confused.
Would really appreciate if someone could explain these to me while I have no background in the field. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/174uto/eli5_kugelblitz_event_horizon/ | {
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"An event horizon is a boundary in space across which two things can't affect each other.\n\nHere's a room with a chair and a lamp. The lamp's controlled by a switch on the other side of the door, outside the room. I want you to go into the room and sit down, and when you see the light come on, I want you to say the word \"banana.\"\n\nWe've just established what scientists call a \"causal relationship\" between you and me. At some point, whenever I decide to, I'm going to flip the switch. Electricity will start flowing down the wires, eventually reaching the lamp. The electricity will heat the bulb causing it to start emitting visible light. The light will move across the room to your eyes, where it'll tickle molecules in your retinas that give you the sense of sight. When you see the lamp come on, you'll say \"banana.\"\n\nEach of those steps takes time. When I flip the switch, the lamp won't start emitting light *instantly.* It'll take time for the electricity to reach the bulb. Not a *lot* of time, mind you, cause the distance the electricity has to travel is very short. But still, it'll take a little time. Similarly, you won't see the light from the lamp the instant it starts coming out, because it takes time for light to cross the room and enter your eyes.\n\nThe important point here is that my flipping the switch *must come before* your saying the word \"banana.\" The two things cannot happen at the same instant. The effect can follow the cause so quickly that it's *essentially* instantaneous — as would happen in this case — but it can't ever be exactly instantaneous. There will always be a minimum time that must elapse between a cause and its effect.\n\nNow … what is that minimum time? Obviously it varies, depending on how the cause causes the effect. If I told you to say \"banana\" when you catch the ball I'm about to throw at you, you can't say \"banana\" any faster than the time it takes for the ball to move through the air from me to you. But there's still an absolute minimum, can't-ever-be-faster amount of time that has to elapse between my cause and your effect. That absolute minimum time is set by the speed of light. Nothing can move between two points any faster than the speed of light, so nothing I do *here* can ever cause an effect *there* in any less time than the time it would take for a ray of light to get from here to there. The closer we are to each other, the less time it takes for light to get from me to you, meaning the minimum possible time for me to affect you is smaller.\n\nCause-and-effect, then, is intrinsically related to time, and time is intrinsically related to space. Whether two events have have a \"causal relationship\" to each other depends on how far apart those events are in time (how much time elapses between them, that is) and how far apart they are in space.\n\nIf you pick two events that are quite close together in time but quite far apart in space — say, one second apart in time but a quarter of a million miles apart in space — those two events *cannot* have a causal relationship. Because a ray of light can't get from the first point to the second point in so short a time. If you either pick a *closer* point, or pick a point that's the same distance away but that happens later, then those two events can have a causal relationship.\n\nAn event horizon, basically, is the dividing line between events which can have a causal relationship and events which can't. If two points in space and time are sufficiently close together in space that a ray of light can get from one to the other in less time than the time between those two points, then those two points can have a causal relationship. If they're farther apart in space than that, or else closer together in time than that, then they can't have a causal relationship; one of them is \"over the horizon\" from the other, and you can't get there from here.\n\nMost of the time when people talk about event horizons, they're talking about black holes. A black hole is a hellishly complex thing, and I won't try to explain it here. But suffice to say that black holes are surrounded by event horizons. Nothing outside the event horizon of a black hole can ever affect anything inside the event horizon.\n\nA \"kugelblitz\" is a long-discredited hypothetical idea from physics. The original idea was that it might be possible to put enough light into a small enough volume for a black hole to form there. Later this idea was extended to any kind of energy in the electric field (since light is just one particular type of electric energy). But this idea turned out not to be correct. As we came to understand more about quantum mechanics, we learned that if you put a lot of energy into the electric field, that energy will tend to \"leak out\" through something called pair production. Basically, when there's enough energy in the electric field at one point, it becomes possible for that energy to spontaneously transform itself into matter. Particles pop into existence at that point and radiate away, carrying energy out of the electric field as they go. So it isn't possible to put enough energy into the electric field in order to make a black hole; the energy in the field will radiate away long before that happens."
]
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1rhuaj | will watching porn in the uk be illegal or just harder to access? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rhuaj/eli5_will_watching_porn_in_the_uk_be_illegal_or/ | {
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"Come to Scotland, we're voting on independence soon and can't wait to tell Cameron to fuck off.",
"Harder to access.\n\nTo dispel a common myth, you probably won't have to actually call up the ISP in most cases (although it will vary between ISP's).\n\nIn the internet settings page that ISP's provide, there will be a box asking if you would like pornographic material to be blocked. That box will by ticked to 'yes' by default. If you login to the settings page and untick the box, you'll be able to watch all the porn you want.\n\n(Source: _URL_0_)",
"If the government's involved, expect it not to work anyway."
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335wtz | what is the difference between negative symptoms of schizophrenia and depression | Hello friends in /r/explainlikeimfive/. Honestly at first I am a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia in February 2014. I had been hospitalized but now is stable and recovering, taking medicine (antipsychotic) daily. Actually I don't think I experienced the so-called "negative symptoms" at most of the time. But in recent weeks I find my mental condition seems is changing. I find myself have to take antidepressant (currently venlafaxine, without prescription) to alleviate recurring drowsiness and lack of motivation caused whatever by drug or by health. The doctor still treat me as a schizophrenia patient tough, but I will discuss this situation soon (in 4/24) with him.
So my questions now are: What at all is the difference between negative symptoms of schizophrenia and depression? Is negative symptoms of schizophrenia related with depression? And am I probably experiencing depression or negative symptoms of schizophrenia?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/335wtz/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_negative/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqhtfer"
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"I guess you removed and posted your question again, so I'll re-post my original reply:\n\nA lot of the negative symptoms of Schizophrenia do share similarities with depression (e.g. social withdrawal, loss of motivation and interest in activities, etc.) and many people with schizophrenia may be found to have depression.\n\nMost people who have depression don't start developing speech problems though, but impoverished speech is a relatively common negative symptom of schizophrenia (i.e. where your speech becomes difficult for others to understand and make sense of).\n\nAlso, people who are depressed don't necessarily have flattened affect (i.e. loss of emotion). They may have mood swings where they are angry or irritable, for example, but only people with severe depression start losing emotional feeling completely. It's not uncommon though for people with schizophrenia to experience complete emotional flattening (where there is almost no sign of emotion or personality)."
]
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49j9q4 | why are there weight classes for boxing? i understand people at lower sizes face disadvantages, but isn't intervening in this comparable to having height classes for basketball or swimming events? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/49j9q4/eli5_why_are_there_weight_classes_for_boxing_i/ | {
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"text": [
"Basketball kind of does. Each position is a height and weight differential. A 7 footer can't be a point guard and so forth.",
"It would be, if all that was being taken into account was the victory itself.\n\nWhen you're talking MMA or Boxing a 100 pound difference (100 pounds of muscles, mind you) usually means a very onde sided event where one person get the shit beat out them, and might be hospitalized or even die from it. The reason it only exists in fighting is because an unfair advantage on a sport like this could mean serious injury to the smaller dude.",
"The reason is that in boxing (and other fighting sports) muscle mass is way more important than technique, so people with good technique have no chance against people in higher weight classes (as opposed to just a disadvantage). The advantage is so extreme that a legless dude has been the state wrestling champion somewhere - it's *more of an advantage* to lose your legs and squeeze into a lower weight class than to, well, have legs.\n\nOf course, we do have mens and women's sports, and varsity, junior varsity, and intramural, so there are similar ideas.",
"If you've ever fought/wrestled/weight lifted in competition, you'd realize VERY quickly that a weight advantage is almost insurmountable.\n\nWeight is muscle. It's power. It's strength. It's inertia. Taking on someone more powerful than you are is an incredible task. Taking on someone nearly the same size makes for a fair and entertaining competition.\n\nBasketball is not a contact sport, it's not 1-on-1. A small and fast player can beat a larger player, and vice-versa. Everyone has a specialty, and they come together into a complimentary team. Size and strength won't change your ability to get a ball in a hoop or read movement and position yourself well, nor does it interfere in teamwork.\n\nFor swimming, larger bodies have more resistance. They might have more muscle, but they have more to overcome as well (same can be said of almost all track & field events, a big runner is disadvantaged against a lean runner). Again, it's not a 1-on-1 event, and there's no contact, they're competing against the same rules, conditions, and measurements as everyone else.",
"It has a lot to do with safety (which sounds strange, I know, when you're talking about an activity where two men get into a ring and poiund on each other). A 6'2,\" 250 lb. guy is very likely to do quite a bit of damage to an opponent who's 5'9\" and weighs only 170 lbs."
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4bvyia | why we can't have surgery when the blood pressure is high? and also isn't it possible to decrease the pressure by draining some blood? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bvyia/eli5why_we_cant_have_surgery_when_the_blood/ | {
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"Having high blood pressure increases the risk of a cardiovascular event happening during surgery. The anaesthetist will judge how comfortable she is with managing that risk, if the risk is judged too high then surgery will be postponed. \n\nAs to lowering blood pressure through bleeding, the cardiovascular system is set up to keep blood pressure at a constant at the expense of blood volume. This means if you lose blood the vessels will contract to keep pressure up. This situation breaks down when you get to very low blood volumes, at this point the blood pressure starts to fall rapidly. ",
"High blood pressure is rarely a reason to delay a surgery. \n\nElective procedures may be delayed due to high blood pressure to reduce the chance of complications (such as heart attacks, strokes, or medication interaction and adverse reactions) as many anaesthetics have the side effect of increasing blood pressure. \n\nDuring any procedure an anesthesiologist will monitor the patient's vital signs and administer corrective drugs accordingly. The main idea is that if they do not have to do the surgery, why not want until a time when the patient requires less drugs in their system and the surgery would be safer. \n\nHave a great day! :-) \n\n"
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bwlqwc | why do so many low-quality youtube videos loop over from the beginning midway through the video? | Is it some sort of way to escape copyright infringement? Some quirk of a video recording software?
Do people do it intentionally, to pad the length of the video? Why, what does that accomplish? I've seen it even for videos that show part1 part 2 of some old TV show for example. Each part plays twice.
Sometimes the looped-over second run doesn't have sound. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bwlqwc/eli5_why_do_so_many_lowquality_youtube_videos/ | {
"a_id": [
"epylgvl"
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"text": [
"To pad the runtime and try to make more revenue. Longer videos = more money. 10 min YouTube videos make the most per ad click for the time they are. Short videos don’t make as much. \n\nLonger videos make more money than shorter videos, given they have the same number of subscribers and views. \n\nSolved!"
]
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|
9ukkxp | can someone really o.d. from potassium, and if so, how much would someone have to have to cause negative side effects? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9ukkxp/eli5_can_someone_really_od_from_potassium_and_if/ | {
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"Your blood is at a constant level of sodium, potassium and calcium. Cells require this constant level (in a certain range) to function properly. Outside of this range, you get funky effects like your nerves misfiring, or your muscles not working properly. The most dangerous is when it affects your cardiac muscles, which can cause your heart to beat in a rhythm that's not good for pumping blood, and can even cause it to stop.\n\nYour potassium is normally 3.5 - 5 mmol/L of blood, and levels higher than 6.5 mmol/L of blood are considered to be severe hyperkalemic (severely high potassium). The LD50 for potassium in a rat is 2600mg/kg, assuming a 70kg normal male, that's 182grams of potassium ingested to kill him (50% of the time).",
"The LD50 (the dose that'll kill 50% of people) for potassium is 2.5 grams per kilogram of body weight. For a 80kg person, that is 200 grams.\n\nA banana contains around 0.8 grams of potassium. If a 80kg person were to eat 250 bananas, they'd have a 50% chance of dying.\n\nHowever, the body naturally excretes potassium. Assuming you're well-hydrated and very healthy, your kidneys can filter out around 18mg of potassium per kg of body weight each hour. Our 80kg person would be reducing their potassium by 1.4g per hour, meaning that each hour you lose nearly 2 bananas worth of potassium.\n\nIf you managed to eat 1 banana every five minutes (and keep it all down), then after an hour you'd only retain 10 bananas worth of potassium, not 12. So, if you were to constantly eat bananas for 25 hours, non-stop, you would stand a good chance of dying from potassium intake."
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koicu | why ftl implies backward time travel | I understand how FTL travel can imply forward time travel, but not backward. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/koicu/eli5_why_ftl_implies_backward_time_travel/ | {
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"text": [
"I fail to understand how FTL implies time travel in any direction.",
"it is a sci-fi show cliche for one thing... in theory, the faster you go, the slower time goes for you and it approaches zero as you get closer to the speed of light. So, based on that logic, if you go faster than the speed of light, you go into negative time. Supposedly, matter can't go faster than the speed of light and the energy required to even get close is huge.\n",
"Light is the fastest transmitter of information known to humans, and according to physicists this sets the whole stage for how events play out in forward time. Having a FTL postal service that can go faster than light it implies you can paradoxically receive a letter before it was sent, so you could stand next to your FTL mailbox and wait for a letter from your future self that reveals tomorrow's lottery numbers.",
"I fail to understand how FTL implies time travel in any direction.",
"it is a sci-fi show cliche for one thing... in theory, the faster you go, the slower time goes for you and it approaches zero as you get closer to the speed of light. So, based on that logic, if you go faster than the speed of light, you go into negative time. Supposedly, matter can't go faster than the speed of light and the energy required to even get close is huge.\n",
"Light is the fastest transmitter of information known to humans, and according to physicists this sets the whole stage for how events play out in forward time. Having a FTL postal service that can go faster than light it implies you can paradoxically receive a letter before it was sent, so you could stand next to your FTL mailbox and wait for a letter from your future self that reveals tomorrow's lottery numbers."
]
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5vs1ze | why does it seem that a typical blade of grass lives for years? | Yes, I know grass can die. But in a front yard, for example, the grass can remain green year round and for 10+ years. Does it not die simply from "old age" if no other factors are taken into account? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5vs1ze/eli5_why_does_it_seem_that_a_typical_blade_of/ | {
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"text": [
"Plants usually live for thousands of years where animals dont. We aren't 100% sure what causes death naturally however. That's the best I can give",
"Plants aren't alive in the same way as you or I. When a person or animal dies, it's usually because something stops working, usually the heart. Plants don't have organs though, at least, not in the sense that we understand them. That, coupled with the fact that they have extreme regenerative abilities (you can chop of the majority of a plant, but if just a part of the root survives, the whole thing comes back) means that a lot of plants are close to immortal."
]
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1wu3sc | would i be using more data setting up a hotspot and browsing reddit on my computer than just browsing reddit on my phone? | I have an iPhone and a Mac if that makes a difference. I feel like the answer is obvious | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wu3sc/eli5_would_i_be_using_more_data_setting_up_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"cf5e3fi"
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"text": [
"For the site itself there might be a tiny difference, if any..\n\nBut if you're browsing on a Reddit app made for your phone then you're likely to save data as it's going to be optimised for mobile.\n\nAlso, if you tether to the phone then who's to know what other requests are being sent out automatically (in the background for the most part) by the computer simply because it's got a network connection."
]
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|
1b1095 | why can nfl players "walk away" from contracts? | Isn't the point of, say a five-year contract, to ensure that the player stays for those five years?
It seems like players (e.g. Revis) are able to just hold out without penalty until the team either renegotiates or cuts the player. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1b1095/eli5_why_can_nfl_players_walk_away_from_contracts/ | {
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"Players who hold out pay a fine for each week they miss, the fine is a set rate and isn't chump change, so generally only the star players can afford it. They also of course do not get paid for any missed time. \n",
"If a player is under contract, they will suffer serious penalties if they hold out. One player, Ashley Lelei, actually *lost* money, because the penalties exceeded his salary, he had to pay the team to come back."
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ft9l1w | how do endangered species who successfully reproduce in zoos / captivity help the population in the wild? | Edit - I broke rule 6, so I reposted with out the question. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ft9l1w/eli5_how_do_endangered_species_who_successfully/ | {
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"Zoos have special training programs for baby animals. They have the animals forge/hunt for food in a bit of a simulated habitat before releasing them to the wild. For species that tend to live in groups, the zoos often locate nearby groups to release the baby animals near. This allows the animals an extra chance to learn to live in their natural habitat.",
"For endangered species, it is sometimes very difficult to find a mate (because there are so few of them) and to have healthy offspring (because of inbreeding). \n\nZoo’s are a great help because their reproduction programs tackel both these issues. Unfortunately, animals are hardly ever released back into the wild. But if you measure the success of a species by their numbers, zoos are a huge boost for the endangered ones.",
"In several ways. The first is education. Someone may come in to see the rare baby orangutan, but a keeper comes up and talks about palm oil and how deforestation to get this palm oil is making orangutans go extinct. You feel bad for the cute baby apes and buy sustainability sourced snacks instead, \n\nThe second is release to the wild. In the northwest, the black footed ferret was thought to be extinct. They discovered a few individuals, however. Zoo breeding programs worked together and the black footed ferret has greatly increased in numbers. This is probably the answer you were looking for. The zoos may also give their captive bred endangered species to programs in their native countries so they can breed there and be released. \n\nThe third is by supplying other zoos. This one doesn’t seem as relevant anymore, but it is. A few decades ago, many animals in zoos were taken from animals. Every animal you see in a zoo is descended from one that was captured and put in captivity, from pandas to meerkats. By breeding these animals and sending them to other zoos, they ensure wild populations can remain where they are, and captive born animals are happier in captivity than wild caught ones. \n\nThe final way is through donations. When you go to the zoo to see that baby orangutan, you pay $15 at the front. You slip $2 into the donation box. While your ticket price and donation will not Be enough to help the orangutans, hundreds of thousands of people also go to this zoo each year. The zoo uses most that money to pay their staff, care for the animals, and improve the zoo, but they also donate millions to help the orangutans in the wild."
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2clxfl | how does throttling netflix (or any data for that matter) benefit verizon? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2clxfl/eli5_how_does_throttling_netflix_or_any_data_for/ | {
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"Because netflix represents 1/3 of total internet traffic in the U.S. (downstream, to consumer). So...by controlling the rate with which data from that single site is transmitted you can reduce the demand on your entire network by A LOT. That means verizon is paying less money to their peering networks, has to have less total capacity within their network and so on. In short..it saves them money.\n\nAdditionally, most of the companies who provide connectivity at least toy with the idea that network connections themselves will be commoditized and that they need to find revenue streams - content is an easy one to imagine. So...if you can make a shitty experience for other content then you're more likely to be successful at your own. This is more true for comcast than verizon.\n\n",
"Many ISPs don't like Netflix because the way the internet works is that, by example, you and I both have a network. We both want to communicate with servers beyond our network boundaries, and so we agree to pass each others network traffic through our own networks. This is called peering. ISPs don't charge one another for the bandwidth used, I'm going to use some of yours and you are going to use some of mine, and the agreement is mutual. Sometimes, your traffic is going to be heavy, so I'll make accommodations for you, knowing you'll do the same for me.\n\nNetflix is a network, but they have almost no inbound network traffic. They're almost exclusively outbound. So there's no \"peer\" aspect. Here I am, getting my bandwidth consumed like crazy, because video streams saturate bandwidth, and I'm getting nothing in return.\n\nNetflix knows this, and they're offering to place caches in-network, closer to their customers, and it will minimize traffic over the network boundaries, but there is no financial incentive for any network to agree.\n\nSo it's not that there is all that much benefit for an ISP to play nice with Netflix because there's nothing to gain from doing so. Since the ISPs can't get bandwidth and peering out of a relationship with Netflix, they've suggested they would charge Netflix for bandwidth usage, making them not a peer, but a high bandwidth customer. I find this fair, but people blur the distinction between peer and customer, and the implications of these relationships, and throw a hissy fit.\n\nIf Netflix were a customer, and paid for their usage, the cost for their subscription would go up. Way up. Their subscription is so cheap because they're milking the \"peer\" relationship. Being an ISP customer is bad for you and me, but is the only compensation the ISPs would get.",
"Another thing that hasn't really been mentioned, is that most ISPs are not only selling their customers internet, but also typically sell their customers TV service as well. This service costs them virtually nothing to provide to you, because it typically does not involve an increased investment in infrastructure if they can already provide internet. Many consumers consider Netflix to be a viable alternative to traditional television and thus Netflix can cost them huge sums in subscriber revenue. However if Netflix is slow, and rarely providing HD video, you are more likely to continue watching (and more importantly, paying for) your traditional HD TV streams."
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8xgm1r | the difference between a restricted and unrestricted free agent in the nhl. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8xgm1r/eli5_the_difference_between_a_restricted_and/ | {
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"A unrestricted free agent can sign with whoever he wants. The team he used to play for has no special rights as compared to any other team in the league.\n\nA restricted free agent on the other hand, if another team makes an offer to him (called an \"offer sheet,\") his current team has a window of time to respond to the offer sheet. If they match the offer sheet, the player stays with that team. If they decline to match the offer sheet, the player gets signed to the new team, and the new team has to give up a draft pick (or picks) as compensation. ",
"An unrestricted free agent is free to sign with whichever franchise he desires for whatever compensation and term he is able to negotiate.\n\nMany unrestricted free agents reject higher offers in order to play in a more desirable location, such as one closer to home or with better marketing/endorsement opportunities. John Tavares recently signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs for far less than he was offered by other teams.\n\nRestricted free agents are players that have finished their entry level contract but do not yet qualify for unrestricted free agency. The duration of an ELC is age dependent. An ELC for a player between the ages of 18 and 21 is 3 years in length, an ELC for a player that is 22 or 23 is 2 years in length, and an ELC for a player that is 24 is 1 year in length.\n\nA player qualifies for unrestricted free agency when he has either played in the league for 7 years or reaches the age of 27. Since the minimum draft age is 18, no player can reach unrestricted free agency (except under one condition) before they hit the age of 25.\n\nIf a player signs an ELC at the age of 18 and that ELC expires when the player is 21, the player would be restricted for four years after which they would have played in the league for 7 years.\n\nIf a player signs an ELC at the age of 24 and that ELC expires when the player is 25, the player would be restricted for two years at which point they would be 27 years old.\n\nRestricted Free Agents can negotiate with whichever franchise they desire, and negotiate whichever terms they desire, subject to the franchise that gave them their ELC trying to retain them.\n\nIn order to retain negotiating rights, the franchise that the restricted player signed their ELC with must extend at least a qualifying offer to that player. A qualifying offer is for a one year contract with a prescribed minimum increase in salary. If a qualifying offer is not made at all, the player becomes unrestricted. If a qualifying offer is made and rejected, the player remains restricted.\n\nIf the qualifying offer is rejected, the restricted player may seek offers from other franchises, called an *offer sheet*. The player may also negotiate a better offer with his existing franchise. If another franchise's offer is accepted, the franchise that retains negotiating rights through a rejected qualifying offer may match that other franchise's offer within one week. If the franchise declines to match the other offer, the player becomes a member of that franchise. The franchise that lost the player receives a compensatory draft pick based on the new salary."
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28eqrn | why cars only have 6 gears while bikes have 21? | Most bikes have 21 gears while most cars have 6. Why don't cars have more gears, wouldn't it be more efficient to have more gears? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28eqrn/eli5_why_cars_only_have_6_gears_while_bikes_have/ | {
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"technically CVT's have infinite gears. but for standard transmissions trucks have 21 gears. for cars, you can put more gears, sure, but do you really want to be shifting all the time? it would just add bulk and complexity. we want to keep it simple. for bikes, there're more gears b/c we as humans are limited to how many rpms we can put out. but for a car, it can go from 1k to 9k or even higher depending on the engine. a human maybe can go at most to 150 rpm (just a guess, i average 60 rpm on the cycle machine)",
"Because gears in a car's transmission take up way more space than gears on a bike, gears on a bike are actual gears that are different sizes while gears in a car's automatic or manual transmission are far more complex and each \"gear\" is comprised of several gears that convert the engine's power into power that can be used by the wheels. Yes having a 21 speed car would be more efficient power wise but a 21 speed transmission for a car would be very large and heavy and also very complex mechanically. But however some large trucks can have as many as 18 gears.\n\nIf you want to know more about how transmissions work look [here](_URL_1_) for how an automatic transmission works and [here] (_URL_0_) for how a manual transmission works.",
"People in average shape are comfortable pedaling at a very narrow range of speeds. Much faster or slower and you will tire out very quickly. Having a lot of gears means you can go the speed you want while pedaling at the frequency that works for you.\n\nCars would benefit a bit from more gears (that's effectively what a CVT helps with), but adding gears to a car tremendously increases the weight, complexity, and cost, compared to a bike (where the gears are under fairly little stress, and aren't constrained for space as much).",
"Too many complex answers. Here's the simplest: Humans can't create as much torque as an engine. If you could put out 180hp & torque you wouldn't need gears 1-7 on your bicycle.",
"TL;DR: cars have 6 gears because adding more would make them more expensive and not much more efficient, and bicycles have 21 because as an effect of how bicycle gears work, not because they need them, and many of the 21 gears are not usable or useless.\n\nNone of the answers so far are really complete or correct, I suspect because no cyclist has answered so far :-)\n\nLet's start with cars. Modern cars have usually 5-8 gears, with a ratio from the lowest to the highest gear of about 5. That means that at fixed engine RPM, top gear gets you about 5 times the speed of 1st gear, and about 5 times less torque on the wheels. The gears are more-or-less evenly spaced across that range, and having 5-6 gears is sufficient for most applications. Having more gears would make it a little more efficient, but the benefits get smaller as you add gears, while the gearbox gets more complicated and expensive.\n\nA typical mountain bike also has a ratio from first to top gear of about 5. Road bikes typically have a smaller ratio.\n\nBecause you have to pedal yourself and can't rely on an engine doing the work, you'd want to have gears spaced a bit more narrowly than in a car, so that you can always select \"the right gear\" for your fitness and preference. That explains why there might be \"a few more\" gears, but not why there are in excess of 20 (I think 33 is the current maximum).\n\nThat's due to the mechanics of bicycle gears. A bicycle basically has two gearboxes in series: the (typically three) chainrings in front, and the (typically 7-11) sprockets in the back. The are independent of each other, and \"multiply\" each other. That is required to get the wide range from first top top gear - one gearbox alone would not be able to achieve the wide range required.\n\nThe reason that only the front or back gearing would be insufficient is that the size difference between the individual sprockets can't be too big or the chain won't change smoothly from one sprocket to the other, and adding more sprockets won't work because the stack of sprockets would become too wide and won't leave any space for the wheel.\n\nThis is not a problem in cars because car transmissions work very differently - google \"synchromesh\" for an example.\n\nAs an effect of the two multipliers in bicycles, you get a large number of gears: for 3x7 you get 21, and for a 3x11 a whopping 33 gears.\n\nThe problem is that many of these gears are not usable (e.g. when the chain goes \"across\") or not useful (the same or very close to another gear) - they are just a side effect of how bicycles are built. You don't get more than maybe 12 significantly different ratios from a 21 speed bicycle.",
"Its all about Gear Ratios. the number of \"gears\" isn't the actual number of sprockets, its the number of possible gear ratios between the powerplant (engine or pedals) and final drive (drive wheels). On a 21 speed bike, there are 3 sprockets in the front and 7 in the rear. It is possible (though not recommended) to have 21 combination, as each rear gear could be selected with each of the front... the reason this isn't recommended is because 1- cross chaining, where the chain runs diagonally, say between the most outward front gear and most inward rear. You're actually supposed to shift both front and rear to keep the chain as straight as possible. And also, if you actually ever do the math, if you were to use all 21 combinations, a lot of gear ratios would be repeated (or repeated within 10% or so)\n\nSo really, if used properly, a bike with 7 rear sprockets has 7 gears.\n\nCars are the same way- the transmission has way more then 4, 5 or 6 gears, but they are set up in such a way that when you select 1st gear or 3rd gear, etc, you are aligning the transmission sprockets in one of 6 gear ratios that has been engineered to be most appropriate for a given speed. \n\nEdit: To compare cars to bikes a little more, we should talk about \"power band\" In an engine, the power band is the RPM range in which the engine is most efficient, putting out the most power with the least fuel comsumption (relatively, if you hit the redline, yea, the engine is putting out a ton of HP, but fuel efficiency takes a dive). The human equivalent would be pedaling cadence- the muscles in your legs will work most efficiently if you pedal at a specific and relatively constant RPM. In both cases, the 4-8 gear ratios you have to choose from are engineered to keep the engine RPM or pedaling cadence as constant as possible, within the power band, at any speed"
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c22rk0 | how come acid containers does not disintegrate when in contact with its super acidic contents? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/c22rk0/eli5_how_come_acid_containers_does_not/ | {
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"Acids react with compounds to produce other compounds, which is where the \"disintegration\" or \"melting\" effect comes from. However, acids can only do this with compounds that react with them. \n\nExamples: \n\n- Sulphuric acid reacts with metal, but not with glass.\n- Hydrofluoric acid reacts with glass, but not with plastic. \n\nThe container that the acid is kept in has to be made of the right material to avoid a reaction from occurring.",
"Acids can't dissolve everything, they can only react with chemicals susceptible to chemical attack by that acid.\n\nSo while they'd have no trouble disintegrating a container made of steel or cheap polyethylene, highly chemically resistant materials like glass or polytetrafluoroethylene (teflon) can shrug off most acids.",
"Acids are one of those things that most people don't realize how they work because Hollywood has produced a lot of really bad misinformation.\n\nThere are a couple of different technical definitions of the term acid which change their meaning somewhat, but in simple terms acids break down other substances by reacting with free pairs of electrons in that substance. If a substance has a very stable configuration of electrons, and doesn't have free pairs to react with, then the acid will not dissolve it.\n\nSometimes materials that can resist acid seem more flimsy than the materials that are not affected by acid. One of the more accurate examples from Hollywood is in Breaking Bad, where plastic tubs that would have resisted the acid we're not huge, and instead the acid was poured into a metal bathtub, dissolving right through."
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2qww0d | why does my phone screen look multicoloured when the screen is on if i look at a reflection of it? | If was on a blank white page and I look directly at the screen I can't see even the faintest colour but if I look at it through a window or any other shiny surface I can see very strong colours | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qww0d/eli5_why_does_my_phone_screen_look_multicoloured/ | {
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"This has to do with the polarization of the screen. This fillers out specific waves of lights and then you add another mirror to that filtering (because mirrors don't reflect perfectly EVER) and you got yourself these cool colors"
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21huh2 | gods in hinduism | I understand (or I think I do) that in Hinduism there are many deities, but that ultimately they are all just representations of the single unifying Brahman. However, I've just discovered that in the Rigveda there are many gods such as Yama, Indra, Agni etc, deities that I've never heard of before. What I'm confused about is where the more modern ideas of gods in Hinduism, the ones I was told about in school such as Vishnu, Ganesh, Kali etc. come from, and how they relate to these 'older' deities. Can someone explain this to me? Thanks | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21huh2/eli5_gods_in_hinduism/ | {
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"Hinduism is different from religions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism by a simple fact that Hinduism has no founder. As humans evolve their belief system changed. Hinduism encompasses these evolution for the last 3000-5000 years. \n\nAt one point of time humans worshiped the elements. These elements are represented in Rig Veda:\n\nVaruna: Air\nAgni: Fire\nIndra: Rain\nYama: God of Death\n\nAs time progressed humans felt the need of more personified gods. In this period across civilizations more human like gods appeared. Vishnu, Ganesh, Kali are representation of those.\n\n",
"There is no such thing as Hindu dogma, as there is for every other major religion. There is no one holy text or religious body that dictates the Hindu religion. Hinduism just kind of started and, as it encountered other cultures and religions, it evolved and absorbed them, in a way. Hinduism is an inclusive religion, so when it encountered another religion, it could just say, \"Yeah, your god is totally cool, too.\" \n\nThis was particularly key to its survival as different Indian cultures were invaded or conquered by both foreign powers as well as other Indian kingdoms. So what you get is a mishmash of a bunch of view points under the umbrella of Hinduism. That's why \"older\" deities and \"modern\" deities seem so confusing, and kind of contradictory. They originated in different belief systems at different times, but were all co-opted into Hinduism at some point.",
"Just thought I'd add to the already insightful comments.\n\n\"Gods\" isn't the same kind of term as other religions. As some others have said, there isn't a central system of belief or dogma. Many Hindus, by definition, are atheists. They don't believe in a \"God\" which is a living entity as such, but more as a tool or concept to focus on. \n\nTo explain further, anthropomorphizing aspects of our lives are an easy method for us to be able to manipulate them in our minds eye for a variety of uses e.g. the pursuit of academic study (there's a god for that), however, in place of anthropomorphization, symbols such as mandalas can be used instead, among other devices (think Pentagrams and other occult symbols). When I say manipulate, what I refer to is firstly, assigning a symbol (e.g. a god's name) which describes a concept, so upon recall of the symbol, you're recalling everything the concept entails and secondly, focusing on this symbol through meditation which, for a variety of psychological reasons would be beneficial for your personal advancement towards that concept. Hinduism and the occult have much in common.\n\nThis is a reason why Hinduism has 330 million \"gods\" - they are just 330 million identified aspects of our universe for us to manipulate in our minds eye.\n\nHowever, as previously stated, there is no centralized order in Hinduism and as it's pretty old, followers have had all sorts of involvement with it. For example, for many believers, Hinduism isn't much different to the Abrahamic religions - it can be dogmatic, prejudice etc. And as always, there's always going to be somebody along the way to use said belief system as a form of control for the masses - Hinduism is no different.",
"Hinduism is a collection of ideas and stories. It does not have centralized figure for god. Every god is related to other gods in some way. In one story one god can be a seen as the superior, and in other story the same god can be seen as the inferior. ",
"Hinduism is a psychonautical philosophy with a front of a religion. You are that.",
"There are no definitive answers to this question :-)\n\nWhy? Because *Hinduism* is not a Religion in the sense that Christianity/Islam etc. are. There is no well-defined origin point. It is basically the name given by others to a whole cornucopia of Philosophies, Belief Systems, Traditions and Culture of the various people inhabiting the Indian subcontinent. Originally the various gods were representative concrete models of abstract concepts in the people's philosophy/belief systems. Thus every god/goddess stands for some specific characteristic which a group considers important enough to model. Given the diversity (on dimensions of language, regional differences, culture etc.) of the peoples of India, it stands to reason that each distinct group would model and name what it feels as important and when you take them all together you get a dizzying ensemble of deities! \n\nToday, Hinduism is conflated with the dominant Vedanta philosophy/religion though strictly speaking, it does not have to be. When you study the various Hindu scriptures belonging to different schools, you will find very different self-consistent world views which are admirable in their own right (eg. Samkya/Yoga vs. Vedanta).\n\nThe best comparison to Hindu schools of philosophy are the ancient Greek schools of philosophy who had a similar breadth of thought and a corresponding pantheon of deities.\n\n\n",
"This speaks to an evolution from an agrarian/nature-dependent society who saw the gods in the elements (Agni = Fire, etc) to a more urban society with time for fellowship and existential musings. A lot of these earlier Vedic gods were subsumed by later versions, such as elements of Rudra being seen in Shiva, and other gods were just made less important. The shift to the Bhakti tradition is where you get the Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu and his avatars, and Shiva). \n\nThe wheel on India's flag points to a great descriptor of Hindu belief which is enlightenment is like the center of the wheel around which everything revolves, and the spokes are the many (or infinite) paths to enlightenment. Some say there are as many gods in Hinduism as there are Hindus, as it is a very personalized form of worship. Most worship either Vishnu in one form or another, or Shiva in his forms. Kali worship is also a popular albeit regional practice. \n\nAnother interesting analogy shows that some people practice Hinduism as neither a monotheism or polytheism, but rather a monism. An old man at a nearby temple once told me that he worships GOD. All three of the trimurti are as one to him, and he says it is because our state of being requires a Generator (Brahma), an Organizer (Vishnu), and a Destroyer (Shiva). Then the cycle starts again.",
"I'd like to explain this from the eyes of an outsider. The way I've interpreted it as well as takings from people I've met here along the way.\n\nMost Gods personify virtues - are metaphors for the goings-on around us. Life begins with creation - it needs to be sustained; protected and groomed, and finally ends with destruction. The holy trinity of Hinduism are the source of all creation, sustenance and destruction - namely, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. To answer the question of chicken-and-egg, Brahma is said to have sprung forth from the Lotus of Lord Vishnu's navel. To me, this makes sense in that all creation springs from a protector, a benefactor's presence. Just like a seed needs a kind terra to provide it with the nourishment it needs to grow and bear fruit and give birth to other trees. Life flows through its stations and the protector (Vishnu) guides man through it. In the end, when the time is right, the culmination is death, in which Shiva - the eternal truth and emotion - the sum of beginning and the end, would invite the true believer. Since Shiva is to bring about balance to life - with destruction, it would happen when the time is right. As with all things, it's incorrect to assume that destruction is always evil. Sometimes, for life to continue, destruction is needed and this God of all things does exactly that. \n\nEvery aspect of human life is given a \"God\" to help people cross over from birth to death. This is done to make things easier to visualize and understand. For example, Lord Ganesha is said to be the God of knowledge and wisdom, the destroyer of Evil and of Misdeeds, the one who consumes all that is bad and troublesome. For such a God, it's fitting that he has the body of a human with the head of an elephant. An elephant which is large, which is alert, which remembers everything - representing everything that knowledge and wisdom stand for. Like too much of a good thing being bad, every God is shown to be benevolent or stern/harsh, depending upon the mood of that God. Rather than blame the God when in dire times, the believer is asked to appease the God - now rather than taking it literally, it should be taken as a way to patiently wait for the calamity to pass over...\n\nIt's a way of life with lots of examples and metaphors. Like in Christianity, a lot of those metaphors have been lost. However, by thinking for himself/herself, every Hindu will reach the state of final salvation when he/she integrates with the divine consciousness or the \"Brahman\" (not to be confused with Lord Brahma). The Brahman is the primordial pure essence of all existence - hence, the ultimate truth of our lives (maybe, akin to the superdense universe *just* before the big-bang?)\n\nTrue Hinduism is all encompassing - I've never seen anyone flinch when I've visited temples, rung bells there, or when I've asked the priests to bless me - across the breadth of India. There's some serious tolerance in-built in the system (along with a lot of adoration for white skin). There's a lot for everyone to learn from true Hindus - I have and still am learning every day that I'm here. Cliches aside, they did have a civilization going here when the rest of the world was crawling out of the moors of barbarism.\n\nTL;DR: The roots of Hinduism are common-sense, respect, tolerance and acceptance - anyone who is tolerant and accepting of others and uses his/her common-sense as a moral compass is doing what a true Hindu should be doing.\n\nP.S: I'm not here to tread on anyone's toes. If you're offended, well, I'm sorry that you are. It's my viewpoint, though, and I'm learning everyday. My God knows that I'm pretty comfortable being an atheist and a believer at the same time. ;) Common sense. ",
"In southern India, every village has a village deity (Grama devata). Most families have a family deity or social deity ( Kula devata/daivam). Each individual has ones favourite deity (ishta devata/daivam). As per the festive occasion, there are celebrations hosted for popular deities. One is allowed to seek ones own path, and join others as long as they show reverence to others beliefs.\n\nThen there are cults/sects that adore humans claimed to be of divine nature. There are worship systems that are 'goal' driven (yagnas, kritus). The objects worshipped can be inanimate (stone/rock formations swayambhu, mountains, hills, or man made sculptures/idols); can be animate (snakes, cows, humans); can be abstract ideas (scriptures, manasa puja, advaita philosophy, sacrifice, charity/daana); can be forces of nature/natural phenomena (seas, rivers, celestial bodies)\n\nIn modern times, one is free to choose, but ancient times made a big fuss (saliva vs vaishnava, jain vs Buddhist schools) and fought wars. Rigveda speaks of natural forces of fire-agni, varuna-rain/water, yama-time/death, indra-prime among gods. While not very common, I have seen Christ, Buddha adorning the same altar in room of worship (puja room).\n\nAs you may realise, it is to much to explain every nuance, then there are anecdotal stories with inconsistent time lines, old wives tales. The folk lore is as fascinating as Greek mythology\n\nI don't want to quote wiki, but it has a very good definition.Hinduism is set in a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning henotheism, monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, monism, and sometimes in forms of atheism or non-theism (see advaita) among others.[1][2][3][4] It is often aptly termed monistic theism and even open monotheism by some scholars, but is not purely polytheistic as outsiders perceive it to be.",
"In addition to all that has been mentioned, I will give you a slightly more direct answer in terms of how the \"modern\" and \"older\" deities are related.\n\nIt is hard to pinpoint which god was mentioned where first. In fact, as a hindu I have never made a differentiation of modern and old. To me all these gods are part of our culture. The ones which you call modern, are in my view the \"mainstream\" gods. Many people tend to believe in them as a primary god. The \"older\" gods are secondary gods in terms of worship. \n\nLet me explain the various differences under two headings:\n\n1) Daily Life and Worship\n\nMost households have a primary god they worship. This is often dependent on the area they are from. For example, most households in Bengal, worship Kali as their primary god. \n\nEach god has its own story and legends. So they are usually associated with specific actions. So, if one holds a ceremony including a havan(sacrificial fire), the god being worshiped is Agni, the god of fire. Similarly, Ganesha, is considered the god of good beginnings. So his name is taken before any momentous task and he is usually the first god worshiped in a ceremony. \n\nAll primary gods have their own specific festivals which are celebrated on specific days. The secondary gods are usually worshiped during the event related to their specific domain.\n\nOf course there are groups of people who do worship Agni, Varuna(water god) etc as their primary god.\n\n\n2) Hindu Mythology\n\nHere I will mostly draw from the Mahabharat and the Ramayan. This is the literal relation/hierarchy.\n\nThe holy trinity is composed of Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Hindu mythology is spread out over millenniums. So many of the gods encountered in the accounts are avatars of the above mentioned three. But they are still worshiped individually, often because of the specific qualities they represent. For Example:\nRama and Krishna are both avatars of Vishnu. Rama is worshiped for being the perfect man. Krishna is worshiped for being the solver of problems.\n\n\nGuardians of the directions:\n\nEast - Indra (King of Gods)\n\nSouth - Yama (God of Death)\n\nWest - Varuna (God of the Seas)\n\nNorth - Kubera (Lord of Wealth)\n\n\nElemental Gods:\n\nAgni - Fire\n\nVaruna - Water\n\nVayu - Wind\n\netc etc.\n\n\nNote that there is no specific hierarchy. \"Modern\" gods such as Krishna etc consider any god they meet their equal and even their superior. The only real hierarchy you can draw is that all gods respect the Holy Trinity. It is believed they were all born of them. \n\n\n\n//Hope I helped. Sorry if its a confusing. First time answering. Happy to answer any questions.\n\n~Edit: Fixed formatting a bit.",
"One interesting, and important, bit about the Gods of Hindhuism is that they are not removed from making mistakes.\n\nmany of the stories revolving around Gods, Devas, Asuras, etc. involve them falling prey to ego, pride, greed, lust, etc., and finding punishment for it.\n\nGrowing up I always thought this was to remind us that no one is above morality and good behavior - e.g. there is a story that tells of Vishnu and Brahma finding a pillar of light. They race to see who can find the end. Neither do, but Brahma lies and says he does. Shiva then appears out of the pillar, accusing Brahma of the lie, and cursing him to not be worshiped - thus the lack of Brahma-centric rituals. \n\nThe Asuras are known for this - the name itself indicates someone who has a great desire for pursuit of power. Many of the asuras are granted boons by a God for their dedication in meditation, prayer, etc. The Asura Hiranyakashipu who was blessed with many boons by Lord Brahma. But in his arrogance, he struck out against his son, a loyal devotee of Lord Vishnu. And thus Hiranyakashipu was slain, despite his boons.\n\nMany of the stories in Hindhuism have this sort of underlying trait - humans constantly and consistently make mistakes, as do Asuras and Devas, and even the Gods in some cases. These mistakes often revolve around the over-indulgence in base desires, or an excess of ego/pride that leads us to deal harm to others and engage in Adharma (that which is not in accordance with the law/duty). The punishment varies, but in the end, those who are most rewarded are those who can commit to a life of dharma without falling prey to ego, pride, etc.\n\nThere is a lot of philosophy in addition to the religious aspects that are sometimes ignored or unknown. Many times I've argued with other Hindhus who are completely against the tenents of Mimamsa or Samkhya philosophies despite their roots in the Rig Veda, or have not even considered the ideas expressed in the Brihadaranyaka regarding the identify of the individual.",
"Modern day Hinduism has only a distant relation to Vedic gods. This can be attributed to the gap between the decline in the Vedic period (around 400 BCE) and the revival during the Bhakti movement (8th century AD - 15th century AD). The Vedic philosophies and rituals were kept alive by Brahminical sects who were spearheaded by Adi Shankara (700 AD) and who later blended themselves into the Varnas (class system) around the 4th century AD. \n\nEven today, only the Brahminical sects follow the rigidly followed ritualistic practices that invoke the Vedic gods. "
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fwtxlb | time it takes to save something onto the hard-drive vs deleting it | How does saving something onto the hard drive (or moving from one hard drive to another) take a long time, whilst deleting it takes a couple of seconds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fwtxlb/eli5_time_it_takes_to_save_something_onto_the/ | {
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"Saving something on the hard drive is like writing 10 pages in your diary.\n\nDeleting something from the hard drive is like writing an X next to a diary entry in your table of contents. (The X is a shorthand note to your future self that the diary entry's garbage you don't care about any more. So you can erase whatever''s on them if you start running low on blank pages.)\n\nIt's a lot quicker and easier to write a single X than it is to write a 10-page diary entry.",
"When you’re saving it, it’s changing the code in the free space to match the code of the item, however when deleting, the last digit of the code has a 1 changed to a zero or verse vice.",
"When you store a file you do have to write all the data that in content to the disk and update the file table with a file name, what blocks on the drive the file is stored at, and some other information.\n\nWhen you delete a file you do not touch the data but just update the file table and remove the file from it and say that the blocks are no longer in use and can be overwritten.\n\nSo deleting a file is just removing the information of where it is the data is still there and there are programs that can recover the information. The data is lots when the next file uses the same block and overwrite them."
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14lq1q | how is the internet connected? | In the "guide to the galaxy," there was a post about "what is the Internet?" The answers only explained what the Internet *is*, not how it works, etc.
I'd assume there are some kind of underground wires from country-to-country, or wires from country-to-headquarters (Google now either thinks I'm retarded or a terrorist for searching "internet headquarters"). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14lq1q/eli5_how_is_the_internet_connected/ | {
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"There are big cables under the sea, between the continents. The cables are by far the weakest point in the whole internet, and if you cut a few wires a whole continent can lose access to the internet. This actually happened a few years back with a fishing both and the cable to Africa. \n\nAnd then you have smaller cables between nodes within countries (and between countries). ",
"[It's a series of tubes.](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: It's also NOT a big truck.",
"Read [Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet](_URL_1_) by Andrew Blum. It's written by a journalist who asked the same basic question as you and then went on a bunch of field-trips to see the physical components that make up the internet. I really enjoyed it.\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) an interview from NPR with the author.",
"Upvoted for being a very nice question.",
"I'll take a shot at this.\n\nLet's first think of the network you have set up at home. You have your router which is hooked up to the internet. You probably also have a few computers and maybe even a tablet hooked up to the router. All of those devices get an IP from the router so that they can \"converse\" if you will. If you copy Dora the Explorer S03E11 from computer A to computer B, your router knows exactly where those computers are and how to access them. Let's stop there before we get into the nitty-gritty of TCP/IP.\n\nBut let's blow this model up. Like, a lot. You may have heard how domains get translated into IP addresses BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE THOSE IP ADDRESSES ARE?? So the internet is run by big, important companies (we'll call them tier 1 networks) that run HUGE networks (In fact, here's the very short list of them: _URL_2_). Between them, these companies know where every single IP address goes to (whether it's a specific server, computer, or even another network), just like your router. Now, they may not know that a certain IP goes to a certain server somewhere but they do know that that IP address \"belongs\" to another network which is below the tier 1 networks. We'll call these \"lower-level\" networks tier 2 networks and there A LOT more of them (some big data centers might be classified as tier 2 if they provide bandwidth for their servers). BUT WAIT, there's [another layer](_URL_1_)! This last layer is called a tier 3 network and that will be the one that you get your internet from.\n\nTo wit, here's how it goes after you want to access a website and you already have their IP address:\n\nYour router: \"Hey, tier 3 network that I'm connected to, do you know which network this IP address belongs to?\"\n\nTier 3 (your ISP): \"Heck yes! I'll route you to this tier 2 network which I know will either be the destination or at least knows the next place to look for that IP.\"\n\nTier 2: \"Sorry bud, I can't route you directly to that IP but I know a tier 1 network who will know where you need to go. I'll transfer you over to them now.\"\n\nTier 1: \"Oof, sorry dude, I don't know which tier 2 network this belongs to but I know this other tier 1 network will know that. And here's the name of that network: ASxxxxx\"\n\nAnd it kinda just goes back the other way for the return trip back to your router.\n\nWHOAH, WHOAH, WHOAH. HOLD UP HERE. WHAT'S THIS ASxxxxx STUFF??\n\nGood question. All these networks (since there's not millions of them like there are IP address) have IDs and are identified with AS and then some 3-5 digit number. It's called the [autonomous system](_URL_0_) and Wikipedia does a much better job of explaining them than I can.\n\nIt's also worth noting that those big, tier ~~3~~1 networks don't pay for bandwidth between themselves because they transfer A LOT of data (more than you can probably even imagine) and it would get very expensive, very fast. However, tier 2 networks pay money for bandwidth to tier 1 networks and tier 3 networks pay money for bandwidth to tier 2 networks. And that's why you have to pay money for your internet.\n\nI hope this has helped as I have never, ever come across an explanation which involved the explanation of these tiered networks which I feel is basically essential when you discuss the subject. Otherwise, it's just the basic \"here's how your computer get the IP of a website and your computer knows how to magically get to that IP address.\" If you have anymore questions, I would be more than glad to try and answer them!\n\n**Edit:** formatting, minor fact editing",
"1. So first, you have machines that just connect computers to each other: *Switches*. You may have one of these in your home to connect your computers to each other or to your Xbox or cable modem.\n\n2. When you are going to connect a bunch of those together, you want a machine that can organize them into groups, so it's not just a a thousand devices babbling at each other all the time. Sort of like breaking a building up into rooms. Not everyone crowds into the same room at the same time - that would be loud and confusing. If you want to talk with someone in another room, you need to figure out which room they're in and go there to talk to them. These \"walls\" come from connecting your switches together with *Routers*. At this point, you have a *Network*.\n\n3. Now you've got a few separate buildings and you want to connect them, so people can go from one building to a totally different building (probably owned by a different company). So you build a road between them (and you probably have locks on the doors and security guards and whatnot). This - where you've connected two or more networks together, is an *Internetwork*.\n\n4. Now Texas is full of roads and buildings connected to each other, so is New York, and California, and Florida, etc. So now we build interstate highways. Maybe one at a time - a big one from NY to FL, then another from TX to CA, etc. Maybe the one in Texas is run by their toll authority, maybe the one in Florida is run by the federal government, and the one in NY by the state government. Maybe at first, the only good way to get from NY to CA is to take the highway down to Florida, then over through Texas. Then someone builds an NY to IL highway, and IL to WA, and eventually you have a choice or two, or three how to get there. This Interstate Highway System as a whole is no longer referred to as *an* internetwork, but as *the Internet*.\n\nTL;DR: \n\nComputers connect to Switches (usually with the regular cables you have at home), which connect to Routers (usually with fiber optic cables over long distances), to form a network. Networks connect to each other to form internetworks. When the biggest Internet Service Providers connect all their networks to each other, we call that one \"the Internet\".",
"It's just like how all our homes are connected with roads."
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a8mqej | why is imitation crab meat in everything instead of real crab meat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a8mqej/eli5_why_is_imitation_crab_meat_in_everything/ | {
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"Why is there sawdust in my cornflakes?",
"Purely because of the cost. If it tastes *similar* and can be had for 1/10th the price, most people are ok with imitation crab. ",
"Real crab meat is really expensive. Getting big chunks like king crab or jumbo lump is like $30+ per pound. "
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1l41nh | why do banks not allow more than a 4 digit pin ? | There is a chance of 1 to 3333 to guess the right PIN with trying 3 times. Actually that´s better than playing lottery.
Chances to guess the right one with 8 digits would be 3/10^8 and pretty secure. So why doesn´t my and many other banks allow this ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l41nh/eli5_why_do_banks_not_allow_more_than_a_4_digit/ | {
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"They do allow it, or at least some do. ",
"While it's greater than winning the lottery, it's still really small. There are millions of people playing the lottery, and that's the only reason anyone wins. If you stole a credit card each day for 5 years, the odds of getting one would still only be slightly over 50%. So they don't really need any more. \n\nThe biggest risk is by far people writing down the pin code. And if you make it longer, more people would need to write it down. Which would be a much bigger risk than someone randomly guessing the code. ",
"Over here, it can be between 4-6 digits. You're crazy not to opt for a 6 digit pin.",
"Because it's two-factor authentication. You might be able to guess the right PIN in one out of 3000 cards (possibly a little better than that with social engineering and \"dictionary\" attacks), but guessing the right PIN **and** getting 3000 cards in the first place is fairly difficult.",
"i'm assuming you're talking about your ATM (debit) card PIN, right? actually a 4 digit PIN is very safe.\n\n* first of all, a thief has to PHYSICALLY steal your card which in itself is a somewhat hard task.\n* then guess your 4 digit PIN in 3 tries WITH a security camera pointed DIRECTLY at your face.\n* additionally, there's generally a withdraw limit and if you want to withdraw more in a bank (not at the ATM), you'll need to provide an ID & Face that matches the card.\n* lastly, if everything fails, your money is insured."
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2hr420 | how come asphalt sometimes looks blurry or distorted from a distance? | Title. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hr420/eli5_how_come_asphalt_sometimes_looks_blurry_or/ | {
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"Heat coming from the asphalt distorts your vision. Same concept as desert mirages."
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bnnw83 | how do companies like coca cola, pepsi, google keep a lid on their trade secrets with such an enormous amount of people involved | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bnnw83/eli5_how_do_companies_like_coca_cola_pepsi_google/ | {
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"Usually it’s not really a secret. It’s more the risk of litigation if some uses a patented process/formula that prevents the use."
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29bjgm | how come i can remember every single embarrassing moment of my childhood but manage to forget someones name right after they tell me? | Im sure everyone has had this problem one time or another. Youll meet soneone new and they tell you their name and even if you make a point of remembering their name for some reason your brain is just like "nah this persons name isnt important enough to remember" and you forget it istantly. So my question is why can I remeber things that happen decades ago but not the most important thing about meeting a new person? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/29bjgm/eli5_how_come_i_can_remember_every_single/ | {
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"Embarrassing moments make an impression worthy of remembering. People's names, however, are usually last on the impression making list, unless your name is Sir Dick Phok. ",
"Your brain will see the embarrassing moments as big important things that really affected you - where as someone telling you there name doesn't exactly make you internally freak out like when you did something embarrassing when you were younger, so obviously the times something bad's happened are going to be made a priority when little things like names are easier to just forget as they aren't seen as important",
"A person's name is not a novel experience that changes your life.\n\nHaving something embarrassing/life-changing is a much more significant memory because you feel the need to remember it. You don't want to be in those embarrassing situations again, so you remember them in an effort to prevent them from happening again.\n\nMaybe you were pants'd in school; you will wear a belt in school now so you don't get pants'd again...you don't want to be embarrassed because it makes you look weaker/less alpha than those around you. This stops you from attracting a mate, which, deep down inside, is your ultimate goal. You want to attract a mate, survive, and be healthy...so your brain does what it can to make you a more desirable mate.\n\nGo ahead and think about why you do everything that you do for a second... \"Why do I go to school?\" \"Why do I want to beat this kid in a race?\" \"Why do I want to be happy, have a job, and make money?\"",
"Remembering names is simply a matter of what you're *consciously* giving your attention to. My guess is that when you are meeting a new person, you are focusing inwardly, maybe worrying about how you seem to this new person rather than their name. "
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9yu7yh | we say that only some planets can sustain life due to the “goldilocks zone” (distance from the sun). how are we sure that’s the only thing that can sustain life? isn’t there the possibility of life in a form we don’t yet understand? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9yu7yh/eli5_we_say_that_only_some_planets_can_sustain/ | {
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"Yes, but how would you know what to look for with a life form we know nothing about?",
"Well, to be clear, the \"Goldilocks\" zone is not a hard and fast rule. \n\nIn the story \"Goldilocks and the Three Bears\" there were still creatures who ate the porridge and slept on the bed that was too hot or too hard. So the notion is simply that this zone has the greatest opportunity for life, not that it is the only possible place where life exists.\n\nI mean, we are pretty sure there is life on the various moons of Jupiter, Uranus etc... and they are well outside that zone. \n\nBasically, at this point in our ability to scan the universe, it makes more sense for us to focus our efforts on this \"Goldilocks zone\" rather than expend a higher level of effort searching out these other areas where life is less likely. ",
"Totally. But we have no idea what \"other life\" would look like. We could be staring it right in the face and we might have no idea that we could call it \"life.\" So until we have compelling evidence that some other form of life can exist, it's best to limit our search to \"Earth-like\" life, because at least then we actually know what we're looking for.\n\nHell, for all we know, there are living rock monsters on Venus that breathe the horrible sulfur gases in that atmosphere that would kill us. But if we were to see that in some future observation, we'd probably say \"Huh, there's some interesting effect that these rocks are having on the surrounding air, it makes them move around. We should study that a bit.\" It wouldn't occur to any of us to call that \"life\" at first glance because we've never seen anything like it.",
"\\ > **Isn’t there the possibility of life in a form we don’t yet understand?** \n\nAbsolutely.\n\nThe problem is we don't understand what we don't understand, and have no real way of searching for that kind of life. It could be the most common form of intelligent life is superconducting crystal on worlds near absolute zero. Or gas-filled balloons in the atmospheres of Jovial planets. Or any of a thousand other possibilities we barely understand, we just don't know. What we do know is how earthlike life looks like, and how it might appear to us from distant planets. ",
"Basically the only life we know is on earth, without knowing other life we can only assume other life is carbon based and therefore have same limitations on earth. Then you look at constraints that would make even the most resilient living organism die, like for example too close to sun and you boil, too far and you freeze, not enough of a protective shell your atmosphere blows off. The goldilocks is the region where a planet can be without getting too cold or too hot.",
"I believe this assertion assumes that water in a liquid form is the key element in having a chance for life. So the goldilocks zone is really just saying there will only be LIQUID water in the universe when a planet is X distance from an object that releases Y heat.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEdit: a word",
"On top of what others are saying, the Goldilocks zone isn't even the only space in a star system which might have liquid water. It's just the only \"basic\" location which might.\n\nAs an example, you could have a gas giant which is orbiting outside the GZ with a planet sized moon, the tidal forces on this moon increase the heat in the depths of the moon which can result in increased surface temperatures. Couple that in with a decent dose of greenhouse gasses and you can have a liquid-water temperature across large swathes of the moon.\n\nReally the trick with the GZs is that they are the easiest ones to find with our current technology.",
"When you get right down to it, all life relies on chemistry. And in order to facilitate that chemistry, we need a few very basic things that are hard to replace.\n\nFor starters, we need a building block. Something versatile that can be combined in many different ways like a lego block. I'm sure you've heard the phrase \"carbon-based life\" in sci-fi or science sometimes. All Earth life is carbon-based. Carbon has the ability to bond with four other atoms at the same time, that makes it key to creating incredibly diverse and complex molecules.\n\nTo use the lego analogy, carbon is that super versatile block that makes a staggering variety of builds possible. It's not unimaginable that extraterrestrial uses some other base, but out of all known atoms, none are as versatile as carbon. So any known alternative wouldn't support the complexity of molecules that gave rise to Earth life.\n\nSecondly, if you want to facilitate chemical reactions, you need a neutral medium for the ingredients for that reaction to mix in. For Earth life, that's water. Water is a perfect solution for chemical reactions and it's plentiful to boot. Just like carbon, it's hard to find a substitute that is as plentiful or useful for the purpose as water.\n\nFinally, life needs to be able to generate energy. And and the most effective simple means of generating energy is through the chemical reaction of combustion, which requires... oxygen! Sure, there are other ways of generating energy but they're usually more complicated and more limited in scope. Which in turn limits how complex life can get using those alternative methods.\n\nSo it's not like life is impossible without those components. We just have a pretty good idea why those components provide the best opportunity for life.\n\nThe reason those goldilocks planets are so interesting is that they have the key components for *complex* life. If you had to search the entire galaxy for signs of life, would you focus on the factors that are most likely to result in life... or would you search for that one bizarre outlier where some microbe managed to come into existence with suboptimal building blocks, a suboptimal medium for chemical reactions and a poor man's way of generating energy?",
"To elaborate on a concept being expressed here:\n\nYes the Goldilocks zone is looking for conditions that could potentially enable life of the kind we know about. Yes, it is possible other kinds of life exist.\n\nBut, based on some well-reasoned supposition, life of other kinds existing is not as equally likely as our own kind of life existing.\n\nConsider the statistical case. We have a sample size of just one - *us* - but that's still not nothing. It is far more likely that our kind of life utilizes many of the most common mechanisms of life in the cosmos, rather than a rare kind. \n\nBut beyond that, the chemical case. Life of the kind we know and care about is dynamic, sitting on the edge of changing it's form and maintaining it, which means it can both make itself into a complex order, and modify that order over time. \n\nThe carbon atom itself seems to offer the most optimal version of this - carbon bonds are stable, but not too stable. And can chain together to form links of indefinite size to create a wide variety of complex molecules with distinct chemical and catalytic behaviors. Silicon might behave similarly, but silicon bonds (if i'm not mistaken) are stronger and thus change how much energy is necessary to change and alter the materials. Other chemicals could very well serve a similar purpose. But they are less likely to. So looking for carbon is a big part of looking for other life.\n\nBut the main thing looked for is the presence of conditions necessary for liquid water. Water is a very impressive material. Not only is it abundant, but it serves as a great solvent. Life cannot exist on solids alone. No significant chemical activities occurs between solids, and no complicated chemical pathways can be controlled at small scales. You *need* some kind of fluid. Being in a fluid means that materials get circulated around and distributed. You can get access to a large, diverse amount of materials and control the concentration through compartmentalization. You get access to the many resources in your environment in a more reliable and consistent way. \n\nThink about having a pile of salt sitting on your left hand and a pile of sulfur sitting on your right hand. Contrast that with floating in water that contains salt and sulfur. If you skin cells could make use of these materials somehow, all your cells would have access to both, rather than two places being super-saturated and the rest left to starve. Then also consider the likelihood of sulfur or salt being brought to you in the first place. Maybe if you're lucky and some wind blows some dust over you? Far more likely to get the material you need in a puddle of water, where various chemicals can be leeched out of the surrounding rock in far greater quantities than what's available from surface-contact.\n\nHaving liquid water also means moderate temperatures. A really hot place like Venus is liable to break down most bonds, so you can't get large stable molecules to stay together. Meanwhile somewhere like Titan is so cold that chemical processes would occur exponentially more slowly, limiting the rate of development of life, and also leaving too high of an energy barrier to break apart molecules that haven't themselves frozen into inaccessible lattices.\n\nThere's no hard and fast rule here, but as a general supposition, you really do *need* a working fluid to get any life of significance going. And water is abundant and ridiculously convenient in it's ability to serve that role. Maybe a gaseous atmosphere could support such a thing, but then the life would evolve to be buoyant and likely unable to work heavy materials necessary for any sort of exotic material process for electronics, or to utilize significant chemical or nuclear power for industry. Thus they'd be unable to advance to a technological state where they harness lots of energy and can communicate or interact with the rest of the galaxy. Sentient Dirigibles on another planet would be cool, but since light-years are currently a physically insurmountable distance, if they don't have radio, they're not nearly as useful to know about.\n\nSo it's not like we're looking for blue planets just because our life developed on a planet that's blue, as though a Mars or a Venus or a Jupiter would be equally capable of life and we're just biased. Our prejudice towards liquid-water-bearing planets is based not only on us being aware that that environment *can* work, but by having good reason to believe it is far more *likely* to work than other forms. Especially to work in a way that permits the development of non-trivial life that could potentially develop sapience and industry.\n",
"There aren't a *lot* of chemicals that make life possible like water does. Ammonia might be one, methane might be another. But water is chemically simple and does a lot. It dissolves enough chemicals in itself to act as a chemical transport mechanism, but it dissolves other chemicals slowly enough so that it doesn't destroy *everything* it touches. Having *liquid* available is important to life as we currently not only understand it but even as we realistically *imagine* it might be. Water works well for this, and we know it well enough. \n\nBut other liquids *might* work, but a lot more liquids probably won't. Alcohols probably won't work, because too many things break down in their presence. Oils probably won't work so well because they *don't* dissolve other things. Liquid carbon dioxide *might* work, but the temperature band between where it's not frozen solid (life can't happen if stuff can't move) or a gas (also can't really happen if it blows away in the wind) is pretty narrow. Ammonia and methane/ethane are best bets, but those are liquid at *roughly* the same temperatures as water anyway.\n\n**TLDR** Life *probably* needs a liquid to enable movement of chemicals and stuff in organisms, and that liquid needs to not destroy the life in the process. This leaves relatively few chemicals, such as water, ammonia, ethane, and methane. Most of them are liquids at similar temperatures, so a planet or body in space would need to be within a zone that allows those temperatures to not boil or freeze our life.",
"Yes. It is possible. It's just not very likely, compared to carbon-based life relying on water as a solvent and medium. Carbon is uniquely flexible. It wants to form four bonds, and easily forms double bonds. The next-best candidate, silicon, also wants four bonds - but it's big, which makes it less likely to form double bonds.\n\nIts size has another drawback - heavier elements (broadly speaking!) are less abundant in the universe than lighter elements. There is roughly [an order of magnitude more carbon](_URL_1_) in the universe than silicon. (To quote [Wikipedia](_URL_0_): \"Of the varieties of molecules identified in the interstellar medium as of 1998, 84 are based on carbon while only 8 are based on silicon.\")\n\nThe relationship between abundance and mass has another consequence for this conversation - there's lots of hydrogen around, so hydrogen compounds are comparatively easy to make. Carbon and silicon both bond well to hydrogen, except silicon-hydrogen compounds (silanes) tend to be very reactive with water, while hydrocarbons tend to not be very reactive with water.\n\nAnd water, like carbon, has some unique properties that make it an excellent medium for complex chemistry like life. It's the next best thing to a universal solvent, but saturates quickly for most solutes. Its liquid phase encompasses a very broad temperature range - liquid nitrogen, for example, is only liquid over a \\~15° C range, liquid methane only exists in a \\~20° C range - and a liquid medium is crucial for chemical reactions to occur.\n\nSimilarly, it has a large thermal capacity, meaning that its temperature is comparatively resistant to change - and a stable medium is conducive to complex chemistry.\n\nAnd we come back to the relative abundance issue here, too: oxygen is twice as abundant in the universe as carbon, and hydrogen is seventy-five times as abundant as oxygen. So the building blocks of H2O are about as common as possible, it's a very easy compound to form, and it's a relatively hard compound to break.\n\nThe point being that carbon and water are really, really good candidates for making something as complex as life. They're chemically well-suited, and they're very common.\n\nThis doesn't, obviously, mean there can't be life based on silicon or liquid methane or what-have-you, but it seems like the easiest building blocks of life are also the ones we happen to know have formed life.\n\nWhich makes it the best candidate to search for, since we have to pick what it is we want to look for.",
"Sure, it's certainly possible, practically guaranteed that there are possibilities of life that we don't yet know about. But, we know for a fact that Earth can sustain life, so if we want to find life, let's check the places we know are capable of having life before we start exploring unknown areas. ",
"Yes and no.\n\nLife requires complex and well organized chemistry. Complex and well organized chemistry can only evolve in an environment that's neither too hot nor too cold. The chemical building blocks of life don't have to resemble Earth's, but it's still simply impossible for complex molecules or any kind of biological structure to evolve in extremely cold or extremely hot conditions.\n\n[Extremophiles](_URL_0_) exist, but it is assumed that such forms of life originated from moderate environments and later adapted to extreme surroundings.\n",
"we are not sure and its totally possible that other forms of life exist and thrive outside the goldilocks zone.\n\nif we knew of 10 planets that had life on them, we could make much better guesses about where in the universe life might exist.\n\nBut we only know of 1 planet that has life. So we are only able to make somewhat poor guesses about where in the universe life might exist. still those poor guesses are much better then completely random guesses.\n\nIf mars and earth are the only planets in our solar system to have life then that will strengthen the goldilocks theory.",
"They always say it's \"perfect\" circumstances how we evolved but what if we adjusted to what the circumstances were? What if we're thinking of it in an opposite way, how life adjusted to what it's given ",
"To think it couldn't would be naive I think. In the same way an ant can't grasp nuclear physics, we don't know anything beyond our observable universe. Our entire universe could be one of billions of quantum particles that make up a much larger object or living organism.\n\nThere could be different dimensions we are not capable of accessing or undestanding with completely different laws of physics.\n\nWe could be in a simulation that is coded using rules and elements that may only be a subset of many more, or may not even exist in the non simulated world.\n\nBasically we don't know how much we don't know, but the possibilities are near infinite. Of course it entirely possible that our observable universe is all there is and life as we know it exists under the most propable conditions. \n\nHell there could even be a God and life as we know it is just one of many vastly different experiments or creations of his/hers/its. There is no way to disprove this.\n\nYou may have only existed as you for the last 10 seconds and all your memories created to make it seem you have been here for your whole life. In 10 seconds could wake up as different organism in a different reality with different rules and new memories and never know any different.\n\nIt all sound fantastical and a little out there, but all these scenarios are possible, and perhaps even equally likely. We have no way of knowing otherwise. ",
"It confuses the fuck out of me because there's some bacteria that live in absolutely _insane_ temperatures. I'm not a scientist but I feel if some form of life can exist in extreme heat / extreme cold it's possible that something exists outside of the zone",
"This is a big argument for a lot of Christian apologists. That life on Earth couldn’t exist within precisely the parameters that it exists here, and that’s why we know for certain there’s a God. \n\nSo I’m a Christian. I believe in God. But that argument is silly to me, because OF COURSE life would need the current parameters to exist. These are the parameters life evolved to exist in. Our environment matches us because we evolved within this environment. If life has arisen under different circumstances, we’d say the same thing about the incredible coincidence of circumstances being exactly what we needed to survive.\n\nThe Goldilocks zone is “just right” for us. It’s not necessarily indicative that anything that can be called living must live in the same type of zone. "
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3wcsbv | why swinging the hands in the right way can make one run faster/more comfortably? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wcsbv/eli5why_swinging_the_hands_in_the_right_way_can/ | {
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"When you run, your pelvis is twisting as you move each leg. This causes each step to go slightly off-center from your running direction - when your right leg goes forward, it twists your pelvis to the left, causing a change in your angular momentum, thus a change in your direction. In order to maintain your course and not wobble side to side, you'd have to use a lot of extra energy to redirect each step to make sure you keep running in the right direction.\n\nUnless, of course, your upper body twisted in the *opposite* direction from your lower body on each step. By swinging your arms opposite your legs, you are twisting your upper body opposite your lower body to cancel out the change in momentum from your pelvis, thus keeping your direction in a straight line instead of wobbling as you run.\n\nPro tip: don't swing your arms wildly when you run, as that over-compensates. If you keep your arms in a straight line, you'll run more efficiently.\n\n(I apologize if this is not worded very well. It is late and I am failing to go to bed appropriately.)"
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1mad8y | why some large displacement engines (eg 5.7l hemi) don't produce nearly as much power and torque as many other smaller engines in production vehicles? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mad8y/eli5_why_some_large_displacement_engines_eg_57l/ | {
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"For any engine, power is limited by how much air can flow into the cylinders. To a first approximation, this is the product of displacement, rpm, and turbo boost. That engine has huge displacement, but can't run at very high rpms and has no turbocharger.",
"It's cheaper to just make engines with more displacement. The equation for horsepower is directly related to RPMs, so smaller engines need more RPMs to get more power. More RPMs needs lighter, strong parts. Car companies have to maximize intake and exhaust and spend more time designing the chambers for efficiency and power. It takes more time and research to maximize smaller engines than just build a larger engine. ",
"There is a lot more involved in horsepower than just displacement. For example, a smaller engine with a turbo charger can produce as much if not more horsepower than a larger engine without a turbo because the turbo increases the amount of oxygen being taken in by the motor. If you delve deeper into the mechanics of an engine there are even more differences in the quality of the parts being used and the specific tuning. Another example is the type of motor used in Nascar. They use a 358 cubic inch engine that puts out nearly 900 horsepower. Meanwhile, there are consumer level motors with the same displacement that struggle to produce 300 horsepower. Nascar engines don't use turbos or super chargers, but their parts are more finely tuned and of a higher quality. Their parts are lighter, stronger, and there is no concern for emissions. In contrast, consumer engines are made to be cost effective and low emission (although the two often contradict eachother). Their parts aren't as finely designed and are not as precisely manufactured. Then add on things like mufflers and cats and you loose a lot of potential power. ",
"Almost every answer on here is wrong. Some more than others. Internal combustion engines are very complex and giving a simplified ELI5 answer really doesn't do it justice.\n\nRemember that when a manufacturer reports horsepower, they are reporting *peak* horsepower, meaning the most power the engine makes over it's rev range. To avoid getting too heavily into technical terms, imagine this... Try flooring your car at 1500rpm, then try it again at 4000rpm, since your car most likely has a power curve that makes more power at higher RPM's, you will accelerate more quickly when you floor it at 4000rpm. That is because your engine is making less power at 1500 rpm. Saying that two cars make \"300hp\" is not very telling if one makes 300hp at all revs, and the other produces 300hp at a very high rev and doesn't make much power at other times.\n\nThere are many reasons why some manufacturers choose to use large displacement engines. One of the best reasons is what we just went over, often times a large displacement engine can produce a more even power curve. This is not always true, but it is easier to make an engine with a large displacement have a balanced power curve. This is great for all kinds of driving because being able to accelerate quickly from a low rpm is useful for road driving and racing.\n\nAnother reason is simplicity and weight. Weight? What? I thought that bigger displacement meant heavier! Not quite. Smaller displacement engines often use turbo chargers to help boost their power and efficiency. This is good, but turbo chargers add their own weight, take up space, and usually come with supporting units like inter coolers that take up more weight and space and will affect the car's center of gravity as well as a host of other driving characteristics. \n\nThe third reason why large displacement engines are used is because they usually place less stress on components. Without diving into the combustion process, understand that making a small displacement engine produce the same horsepower as a large displacement engine makes it more \"high strung.\" Components are exposed to higher pressures and higher stresses. This with the added complexity of turbo chargers means that they can wear out more quickly (2.0L turbo charged Mitsubishi Evolutions are a good example of this) and be less susceptible to adverse conditions. Since the components are less stressed in a large displacement engine, they can also be made cheaper, making service cheaper. Furthermore, a relatively unstressed engine is easier to modify to produce more power while an already high strung engine might be at the peak of its abilities without heavily sacrificing reliability.\n\nLarge displacement engines have drawbacks, they often use more fuel and produce more emissions. A turbocharger that they might lack increases efficiency. However, do not confuse large displacement with exterior weight or size.\n\nThere is much more to this. Notice that I try to use \"usually\" as much as possibly because there are very many exceptions. Engineering an engine is a complex process and like all engineering, compromise is the key.\n\nSource: Automotive Mechanical Engineer"
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f20v6s | from the moment my town picks it up, what happens to the soda can, glass bottle and stack of papers i’ve recycled? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f20v6s/eli5_from_the_moment_my_town_picks_it_up_what/ | {
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"Cleaned, broken down to base material and remade into new products. Glass and aluminum would be melted, while paper probably shredded and soaked, pressed, and dried into new paper.",
"depends on your town. I live in a major city in Southern California and even though recycling is required for residents, about 15% of it ends up in a landfill.",
"It also depends on how contaminated the lot is. A lot of items are not recycled and are incinerated or sent directly to landfill because there are either unrecyclable items mixed in with the lots (like polystyrene) or they are simply too dirty. This is the case for a lot of plastic items.\n\nIt isn't economical for a recycler to accept a load of plastic that is covered with food waste, for example. Pizza boxes are not recyclable because they're soaked with grease.\n\nItems which can be sold on are sold to middlemen who sell them to companies which process the material into usable material - usually by breaking them down at industrial scale. Those companies then sell the recycled material to manufacturers who process them into new products.",
"If you live near me it goes straight into the landfill. All of it, with the possible exception of clean aluminum.",
"In Poland they get mixed and stored at open dumps, then \"accidentally\" burned down to save the trash mafia (yes, this is a real thing and no, it's not funny) money on actual recycling.",
"Is there a way to find out the recycling practices of the area you live in?",
"In the UK it gets taken and piled up massive stacks at 'recycling centres'.\n\nThen eventually it catches fire, somehow.",
"In Germany you pay 25 cents extra as 'Pfand' and return empty cans and bottles to the shop. Don't know what exactly happens to the cans but bottles get recycled and about 1 out of 4 is made into a new bottle",
"Here is the best best ELI5 answer from my perspective (many other comments alluded to this). \n\nIt depends where you live! What can they recycle? A lot probably ends up in a landfill because it’s not easy to clean it up and recycle. \n\nI advocate using compost materials when possible because these break down. And a few communities I’ve lived in promote compost instead of recycle."
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1fj4hu | how does family guy, robot chicken, and other shows like them get away with using other people's copyrighted characters in sketches without being sued? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fj4hu/eli5how_does_family_guy_robot_chicken_and_other/ | {
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"Fair use.\n\nMaking a parody of something else isn't illegal.",
"In short, as has been answered elsewhere in this thread: Fair Use. American (and I believe a lot of international) copyright law, allows for use of copyrighted material for the purpose of critcism and parody. That is to say, Any use commenting on or making fun the original work, characters and what have you. \n\nSatire is a bit more of a grey area, and can in some cases get you into legal trouble. Satire is where you use copyrighted material for the primary purpose of mockng something unrelated to the copyrighted material, usually something in a real world political context. Like say, you make a cartoon where the characters from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory make fun of the president. \nI've heard opposing claims about this, but on the whole my impression is that satire can get you into legal trouble (as you're not really commenting on the work, just using it to make your points) whereas parody usually won't.\n\nThough in the particular cases of Robot Chicken af Family Guy, stuff like their Star Wars specials are actually endorsed by Lucasfilm, the copyrightholder of the material, so in those cases the point is moot."
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1s4u3e | is there any real difference between the fruit drawer and the vegetable drawer in my refrigerator? | My refrigerator has two drawers, labeled "Vegetables" and "Fruits". However, there aren't any knobs or special vents for either of them, as far as I can tell. In fact, I can remove them without any trouble for cleaning.
Perhaps my specific refrigerator model simply creates separate storage areas for fruits and vegetables. However, I'm pretty sure I've seen cases where there ARE knobs, albeit no discernible function...
Could somebody please enlighten me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s4u3e/eli5_is_there_any_real_difference_between_the/ | {
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"In general, I think the fruits drawer will be vented more than the veg drawer - the idea being to keep fruits from rotting by letting them stay drier, but keeping veg crisper in a higher-humidity environment.",
"The rule of thumb is to put things that rot in a drawer with low humidity (fruit drawer). \n\nAnd to put things that wilt in a drawer with high humidity (veggie drawer).\n\nThe difference is the amount of air/moisture that can leave the drawers though gaps in the assembly. The fruit drawer will have bigger gaps (and therefore more dry air circulation) than the veggie drawer.\n",
"Depends on how nice your refrigerator is. If it's a cheap one, like you'd likely find provided in a typical apartment complex, it's probably just two drawers with labels to help you organize your fridge space. If it's a nicer model then the drawers will actually be climate controlled, with the fruit drawer at a lower humidity, and the veggie drawer at a higher humidity. \n"
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3mqjp9 | what's the difference between centrifical and centrifugal force? which is the "fake" one? | Every time I attend a science class and we bring up physics someone brings up one of these two and half the time someone gets shot down and told that it doesn't exist. And every time we move on too fast for me to ask. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mqjp9/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_centrifical_and/ | {
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"Neither one is \"fake\" however one is \"*fictitious*\". But fictitious doesn't mean \"not real.\"\n\nThe centrifugal force is the fictitious one.\n\nWhen you have circular motion, there must be a force pointing inwards, since the object is always accelerating towards the center of the circle. That is the centri**petal** force, and that's the on that exists no matter what.\n\nThe centri**fugal** force is \"fictitious\" in that it only exists in a non-inertial reference frame.\n\nIn a reference frame that is rotating with the spinning object, there must be a force to counteract the centripetal force, since the object is stationary in this reference frame. That force is the centrifugal force. It's called a \"fictitious\" force because it's really just there to correct for the acceleration of the reference frame itself."
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513dzc | when and why did natural things that everyone does like peeing become a private thing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/513dzc/eli5when_and_why_did_natural_things_that_everyone/ | {
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"When close knit civilization started. It's unsanitary and can breed a myriad of different deadly diseases. It's better to do it away from people. Through doing it away from people, it became \"private\" due to a cultural tradition type thing.",
"I am not sure your premise is true. The smell of pee is offensive to us. So even in hunter gatherer times people probably didn't pee in the same spot they lived. \n\nMoreover when peeing or shitting most animals are vulnerable and they prefer some sort of privacy. I would imagine the same sort of instinct works in humans too. \n\nFinally the evolutionary/social construct that made us wear some form of clothing probably inhibits playing with our dicks like water pistols. \n\nThe reason for using so many maybe and probably is because there is very little that is left of human cultural/social evolution on record. "
]
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[],
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7660jz | how does does drum sheet music work with all the different types of percussion in a drum kit? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7660jz/eli5_how_does_does_drum_sheet_music_work_with_all/ | {
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"There are some standard conventions, like in a 5-line staff, the lowest space is the bass drum, two spaces above that is the snare, and cymbals are written above the staff with an 'x' instead of a circle.\n\nHere's a blog that explains those basics:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nHowever, there are many exceptions to this, and also there are tons of sounds you can get from a drum kit that don't have a standard notation. It's pretty typical to have the sheet music just make up a symbol to use for that sound and describe what to do the first time in words.\n\nHowever, the other important thing to understand is that music for a drum kit in rock, jazz, broadway, etc. (unlike classical percussion) is usually more of a sketch than an exact notation.\n\nThe drummer is expected to know how to do a lot of different beats, and they're given a lot of latitude to be creative in their exact interpretation.\n\nFor example, in a lot of big-band and broadway music, you may have 23 bars that are just blank with slashes for 4 beats, the word \"heavy swing\", then the 24th bar might just say \"fill\" with a note on the 4th beat - indicating that the drummer should play something creative that \"sets up\" the 4th beat for the whole band to hit.\n\nHere's an example of that:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nOne way I'd describe it is that the sheet music just gives you the fundamental pattern, highlights the beats that should be accented, and then it's up to the drummer to make up the rest.\n"
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bpz9d8 | why do mobile devices perform better when wifi takes over cellular but not the other way around? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bpz9d8/eli5_why_do_mobile_devices_perform_better_when/ | {
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"The trigger when you go from wifi to cell is because the wifi signal is so bad. The trigger from going cell to WiFi is because wifi exists, assuming it's always better. One is intentional. The other is a failure to connect. So of course it's bad when you have to fail over."
]
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[]
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||
tisoe | why foods general taste better cooked on low heat and slowly rather than high heat and quickly | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tisoe/eli5_why_foods_general_taste_better_cooked_on_low/ | {
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"text": [
"[Alton Brown explains it pretty well in this episode](_URL_0_)."
]
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"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ2Uj_3v6Dw"
]
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||
8kgtuz | when trying to delete a file, why can't your pc tell you what programs it's open in? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8kgtuz/eli5_when_trying_to_delete_a_file_why_cant_your/ | {
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"Because nobody designed the file management interface to do that.\n\nSeriously; it should be dead simple to do. When you attempt to delete a file, the OS checks to see if the locked bit is set. However, the OS also keeps track of what files each open application has file handles for; it just doesn't take the time to walk through that list of open filehandles for each running application to identify the culprit.\n\nOn OS X, you can do this yourself from the terminal using the command \"lsof\" (LiSt Open Files). Windows and Linux have similar features.",
"You can tell which programs are using which files in Linux. The lsof command. So it depends on the operating system to have that capability.",
"Download Lock Hunter for Windows. It adds a right-click context menu item to all files so you can see what process is locking it and then unlock it or kill the offending process."
]
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37e0ta | how do places legally get schedule 1 drugs for clinical trials? | Every now and then you see a news article about MDMA or LSD or mushrooms being evaluated for treating depression, PTSD, whatever.
Are all these trials exclusively outside of the US? Do researchers ask the DEA for permission? If so do they then make the drugs themselves or is there a facility that does manufacture schedule 1 drugs for legal clinical trials?
I'm leaving marijuana out of this topic as that's been discussed many times and is in a different political climate to the others on the list. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37e0ta/eli5_how_do_places_legally_get_schedule_1_drugs/ | {
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"If the trial have been approved by the FDA, NIH and the DEA (a very expensive and time consuming process). The researchers are entitled to purchase the otherwise illegal drugs from regulated chemical suppliers (e.g. Sigma-Aldrich--pro, your drug is guaranteed pure; con, cocaine costs $10 000 per gram). Although most of the time, these companies do not produce these chemicals from human consumption in clinical trials, most of the drugs are used to calibrate forensic instruments (to identify cocaine, you need to use cocaine to calibrate your spectrometer) or in animal experiments. "
]
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|
2x7oqk | why don't boats/submarines/planes have gearboxes? | It seems that only cars and motorbikes have gearbox.
Why don't propeller planes/boats and submarines have a Transmission?
Wouldn't it allow better fuel consumption for the same amount of power output? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x7oqk/eli5_why_dont_boatssubmarinesplanes_have_gearboxes/ | {
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"Boats do have gearboxes. Mainly they have reduction gears that step down the high RPM's of the engine to the lower RPM's that are manageable by the prop in the water. ",
"Just a clarification I'd like to make here, most things do have a gearbox. Even if there's only one gear, there's still a gearbox. I think what you might be asking is more along the lines of \"Why do boats/planes/submarines only have one gear?\"",
"The purpose of a gearbox is to transform engine output to low RPM high power when resistance is high, and high RPM low power when resistance is low.\n\nThe resistance that boats and airplanes experience does not change as much as what a land based vehicle does...they stop and start less often, they don't have steep hills or curves to contend with, and don't have to maintain speed to keep up with traffic. That makes changes to power/RPM less important.\n\nIn addition, they often have other mechanisms that server much the same purpose. Some airplanes, for example, have variable pitch propellers, that can alter power/speed performance without changing engine RPM."
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bgmgpc | how can alcoholic drinks claim to have only 3 carbs at 170 calories per serving but zero grams of fat or protein? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bgmgpc/eli5_how_can_alcoholic_drinks_claim_to_have_only/ | {
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"12 calories is from the carbs. The other 158 is from the alcohol, which has 7 cal per gram iirc.",
"Alcohol has calories, 7 calories per gram. A 12 oz beer that is 5% ABV contains about 14 grams of alcohol which is about 100 calories. So that 170 calorie drink that has 3 grams of carbs (12 calories) should have about 22.5 grams of alcohol to get the remaining calories."
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3ekmh9 | why can one not text or export a slow motion video from an iphone 5/6, and have it stay in slow motion? | When you text/export a slow motion video from a newer iPhone it changed the speed from the original slow motion 120fps/240fps to normal speed. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ekmh9/eli5_why_can_one_not_text_or_export_a_slow_motion/ | {
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"The iPhone saves the video as a normal video with a separate file telling the device which part of it should be slowed-down (because you can still change the slowing down or remove it, it's not fixed in the video itself). For some reason, when exporting the video to other devices, Apple hasn't made it so that it converts it to a single file with the slowing down in it.. this does happen when uploading it to Youtube or some other app. "
]
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7e80vg | why is queen elizabeth also the queen of many independent sovereign nations (former colonies) ? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7e80vg/eli5_why_is_queen_elizabeth_also_the_queen_of/ | {
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"Because those countries have so far not decided to become republics. They are known as the Commonwealth Realms (note that is different from simply being a member of the Commonwealth of Nations).\n\nMany of Britain's colonies did not violently break away from the British Empire. It was a gradual transfer of power until the point they were independent countries. So there was no big overhaul of their constitutions post-independence, nor was there much anger towards Britain, hence they retained the monarchy.\n\nMany former colonies have become republics. And a few current Commonwealth Realms have stated their intent to become republics at some point in the future (Barbados and Jamaica I think). As they are independent countries, they are free to do that and the UK cannot stop them (nor would it want to).",
"Because they chose to have her as their head of state. All countries that have her as the Head of State are called Commonwealth realms, which means they are members of the Commonwealth of Nations that have Queen Elizabeth II as the monarch. They're all sovereign nations that voluntarily choose to recognize her as head of state and maintain ties to the UK.",
"She takes the part of a symbolic head of state.\n\nIn the US the president is an actual head of state with powers over military and policy. In many other countries (most of Europe) a president is just there to represent the country with little or no actual powers. Countries are run by prime ministers chosen by parliaments, elected by the people.\n\nSome of the former British Empire nations chose to not bother with presidents at all and just go with the Queen."
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9vgmdy | why do airlines have ashtrays in the toilets when you can’t smoke ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9vgmdy/eli5_why_do_airlines_have_ashtrays_in_the_toilets/ | {
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"because people are going to smoke there, whether or not they are allowed too. So put an ashtray so they don't put the butt somewhere stupid. like the garbage can ",
"The explanations I've heard are that it's there in case someone does smoke, there's a place to put it. And because it wasn't that much trouble to just keep making it that way. ",
"Another reason ive heard is that some planes arent new new so a lot of the time the ashtrays are there as a leftover from when smoking WAS allowed in the plane. As well as i think designers just go, eh well its there and its too annoying to remove it so we'll keep it there",
"As someone who works for an aircraft lav company, I can explain it. \n\nJust because smoking on an aircraft is not allowed doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Also, those planes fly all over the world, and some countries are not as forceful about smoking bans as others. \n\nSecond, the lavatory has an ashtray because a butt thrown into the toilet may not be extinguished. An aircraft toilet uses very little water to rinse. It flushes through vacuum pressure between the fuselage and the outside air. Also, the bowl is made of plastic. it's not going to burn, but it's not COMPLETELY fireproof. \n\nThird, and most important, someone smoking in the lav killed 23 people in 1983. \n\n_URL_1_\n\nSince then, aircraft lavs have smoke detectors, oxygen masks, automatic fire extinguishers in the waste bins, and fire containment engineered waste bins. \n\nGood thing, too, because there are still idiots out there. \n\n_URL_0_",
"The best way I’ve heard it explained is, “just because it’s not allowed doesn’t mean people don’t need somewhere to put it out when they do.”",
"I used to think it was cause plane toilet doors were really old but that doesn’t make a lot of sense so, I asked a flight crew member one time, she told me it’s there by law. In case a person DOES ignore the law, cabin crew need an approved container to put a cigarette in. I imagine it has to do with aircraft safety but also insurance. \n\nAs others have mentioned, flushing, and waste baskets aren’t built for the purpose of taking potentially hot ash. You’d have to be a special kind of idiot to put a cigarette butt in a bin full of paper towels but, there’s a lot of very special people out there.. and for some nicotine addicts, a 12+ hour flight is just too much.. ",
"We have ashtrays in the cockpit too. The aircraft are made for a global market and not every country has the same regulations.",
"The other responses here are correct in principle: there were several aircraft fires and accidents attributed to cigarette butt disposal in aircraft waste bins. Even after smoking was prohibited, the FAA and airlines acknowledged that some passengers, despite regulations, would continue to smoke in the lavatories. The ash trays are installed to enable the illegal smokers to dispose of their cigarette without endangering the aircraft by disposing the butt in a bin full of flammable of paper towels.\n\nLegally, the ash trays are required on all US-certified aircraft via Airworthiness Directive 74-08-09. Airworthiness Directives are Federal Law, and compliance is legally mandated without any allowed deviations.\n\n74-08-09 is applicable to all *\"...transport category airplanes, certificated in any category, that have one or more lavatories equipped with paper or linen waste receptacles. These lavatories may be on various airplanes...\"* (i.e. it's applicable to basically every commercial airliner).\n\nThe AD was issued to rectify an unsafe condition, as stated in the AD: *\"This revision to the AD (...) address fires occurring in lavatories caused by, among other things, the improper disposal of smoking materials in lavatory waste receptacles. This revision to the AD would continue to prevent possible fires that could result from smoking materials being dropped into lavatory paper or linen waste receptacles. \"*\n\nParagraph (i) of the AD specifically addresses the ash trays on lavatory doors: *\"Within 180 days after August 6, 1974 (...), or before the accumulation of any time in service on a new production aircraft: (...) Install a self-contained, removable ashtray on or near the entry side of each lavatory door. One ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory door served.\"*",
"Why are there amnesty bins at airports? People don't always do the right thing, but giving them a way out of trouble that mitigates the fallout of their mistake is often preferable to spending the resources prosecuting every violation. It also helps prevent people from doing even worse things to try and cover up the first mistake.\n\nThe ashtray is an amnesty bin for your cigarette. ",
"The same reason Denny’s has locks in their doors...because even though they’re not supposed to be needed, sometimes they are. ",
"In case someone does have a smoke, they need somewhere safe to put it out. It's a safety thing.",
"People seem to forget, but I could smoke on airplanes as late as the year 2000. I did a random Google search for 'most successful commercial aircrafts' and [this link](_URL_0_) popped up. The latest aircraft on the top 3 listed aircrafts (the 777) came into active service in 1995.\n\n\nWhile smoking may have been banned in Europe and North America by that time, that might not have been the case in the Middle East for example, where th biggest airlines of the last 2 decades have originated (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar).\n\n\nAlso, airplanes are complicated machines. The approval for making a commercially successful aircraft takes a long time, and I'm sure goes through a lot of scrutiny. The ashtrays on the seats and airplanes; maybe it's about getting approvals for new designs of seats and doors and bathrooms that perhaps might not have ashtrays in them? And perhaps the aircraft manufacturers thought it's just easier to keep those ashtrays rather than go through the lengthy process of redesigning some things and getting those redesigns reapporved by different agencies?",
"Here's the American law mandating them (note: the EU and Australia, among other places, have adopted this law verbatim):\n\n_URL_0_\n\nShort version:\n\nFire in planes bad.\n\nIdiots smoke in planes anyway.\n\nHarm minimization.",
"Unfortunately, there are people among us who just know better than everyone else. I'm sure you know of a few yourself.\n\nThose people simply know that smoking inside a lavatory is just fine, and nothing will happen to them.\n\nPeople who know better generally make bad decisions under stress. For example stress caused by smoke alarm going off and flight attendant trying to gain entry to the lavatory.\n\nProviding a flame-proof, familiarly shaped place to ditch the lit evidence, is infinitely better than counting on people who know better not to throw the lit cigarette into a place where you would not want a lit cigarette to be present. Such as the trash bin full of paper towels next to the sink.\n\n",
"If committing a crime is illegal, why do we have jails?",
"Quoting this fantastic comment posted by /u/pixel_of_moral_decay in [this thread a few weeks ago](_URL_0_)\n\n > The ashtray is actually one of my favorite engineering bits on an airplane.\n\n > The design parameters for aviation all center around one thing: redundancy. If something fails, you don't want it to cause a problem. That's why planes are designed to be able to fly if an engine fails (ETOPS), there's secondary hydraulics (you'll lose functionality, but not enough to crash), there's secondary everything. Landing gear doesn't deploy? It can drop with gravity. Electrical goes out? Ram Air Turbine (RAT)! Every thing critical to flight and safety has an alternative. You're effectively flying a plane inside a plane, but don't realize it.\n\n > The ashtray follows that engineering mantra perfectly. The primary method of avoiding fire is to not have cigarettes and open flames in the cabin. The secondary method is to not have flammable materials in the cabin when possible and things like an ashtray, so if someone does light up, there's less of a risk of them causing a fire (like dropping it in the trash with all the tissues). There's also smoke detectors for early detection and fire extinguishers.\n\n > Even something as mundane as a no smoking policy is engineered with the thinking \"what if our primary defense doesn't work?\"\n\n > Brilliant when you think about it. Even the smallest detail like that is thought about, and the solution is simplistic, which is the best kind of solution for an engineering problem when safety is involved.\n\n > That's why an airline can't take off without an ashtray in the lavatory. They will actually delay a flight over it. It's a redundancy and another thing to make flying safer.\n\n",
"Simple question, simple answer:\n\nIt's a requirement by the FAA.\n\nSource: I'm an Aerospace Engineer.",
"The ashtrays are required by regulations to be there. In particular, 14 CFR 25.853(g) reads:\n\n > Regardless of whether smoking is allowed in any other part of the airplane, lavatories must have self-contained, removable ashtrays located conspicuously on or near the entry side of each lavatory door, except that one ashtray may serve more than one lavatory door if the ashtray can be seen readily from the cabin side of each lavatory served.\n\nIn a less \"it's that way because we said it has to be\" response, it's because people are assumed to break the rules and smoke anyways, and they need somewhere safe to put the butt. The toilet is dangerous as all hell, and the garbage can cause a fire. So, ashtrays.",
"Same reason that most city’s have needle exchange, they want people to be safe even if it’s illegal if people are going to smoke they don’t want it to you know.... burn the whole plane down ",
"I'm no expert. But I heard somewhere that they are left in because if some idiot decides to light up, where are you going to stub it out? ",
"Even when smoking was still permitted on planes, it wasn't allowed in the toilet. The smoke alarm in there is really sensitive. And during stewardess training we always had toilet fires to put out. Not good if you have any issues with claustrophobia. The smoke mask alone is really restrictive and you are then in a tiny toilet trying to find the fire. ",
"Airline pilot chiming in.\n\nSo there are some planes still in operation today from the days when it *was* permissible to smoke, but not many.\n\nUsually the reason is to prevent a fire. Weird right? We all know you can't smoke on airplanes, but there's always some fuckwit out there who will light up despite knowing the rules, and the ruling authorities and manufacturers would rather those people have a safe place to dispose of their cigarette butts rather than throwing them in the trash and causing a fire. \n\nAt least that's what I heard from a captain, who was told by another captain, who heard it from a flight attendant, who got that information from her grandmother, etc.\n\nShit, we even have ashtrays in the cockpit."
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"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/25/man-started-fire-plane-toilet-sentence-doubled-john-cox",
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5b4wwl | why are american pro sports championship parades held on weekdays instead of weekends? | It seems like the weekend after a championship win would be the best time for the city to hold a parade since there would be much less commuter traffic to contend with. It would also make it easier for out-of-town fans to visit, thus increasing tourism revenue. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5b4wwl/eli5_why_are_american_pro_sports_championship/ | {
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"It's really what day the championship game falls on. Usually the parade is the following day or day after. Basically a welcome back party for the organization. Kind of like when armies would march back home after a campaign victory. ",
"A few reasons: it keeps crowds down some, it means mass transit is running on full schedule, and it means not paying special overtime pay for city workers, police, etc. Chicago was only considering Friday or Monday for Cubs' parade -- no talk of a weekend parade."
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4c9g5r | why do planes have different seatbelts to e.g. cars? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4c9g5r/eli5_why_do_planes_have_different_seatbelts_to_eg/ | {
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"Aircraft seatbelts are designed to hold you down in the seat as turbulence is the biggest danger as the aircraft can drop suddenly. Car seatbelts are designed to hold you back into the seat with your upper body as the biggest danger is a frontal impact (to which a car is predominantly designed for, and which an aircraft isn't).",
"Aircraft seatbelts are designed primarily to stop you bouncing about during turbulence. They're not really meant for anything more severe than that, because lets face it, if anything occurs on an aircraft that's more severe than even heavy turbulence, the likelihood is that a seatbelt will make no difference to anything. Also, as /u/Gavinso has said, brace position would be difficult with a three-point seatbelt. \n\nA car's seatbelt on the other hand is designed with the expectation that you might hit something pretty solid at pretty high speed, so it is built to work with the other safety features in the car to ensure you have the best possible chance of riding it out. ",
"The overlap on the Venn diagram of \"aircraft crashes where a three-point belt would keep you alive where a two-point wouldn't\" vs. \"Aircraft crashes where any kind of belt will save you at all\" is small enough that the expense isn't justified.",
"What about the difference in how they latch?",
"I was flying (transatlantic) with *United* this week, and I was surprised to see that business and first passenger have a shoulder strap (like a car) on their seatbelt. Moreover first and business class passenger can get some *rear-facing* seat (which are proven to increase survival rate in case of crash). The *plebean* travelling Economy and Economy *plus* (which I am) don't get fancy seatbelt and rear-facing seat, I assume that the company think their life is less valuable than the one from more expensive classes, or more likely that the economy seat are so small that there is not enough space to put fancy seatbelt. \n",
"Uh, guys? Everyone with an explanation that's all about 'holding you down' versus 'hold you back' into the seat???\n\n**They are made the way they are because that's what seatbelts looked like in the 40's, 50's and 60's when they became commonplace and then mandated on aircraft.**\n\nThey are approved, they are known quantities and they don't need to change to new car-like ones that have hidden latches and release mechanisms that might be difficult to operate in an emergency.\n\nGeez.\n\n",
"The seat is arguably the weakest parts of the aircraft. Flimsy to put it exactly. Whereas car seats are much stronger and designed to hold the occupant in place in the seat during a single axis collision (which the typical car accident is a single axis collision). Aircraft unfortunately almost always experience multi-axis collisions unless you are in a dive or hit something head on. In which case a shoulder harness will do you no good anyway. Plain speak (or should I say plane speak?): The aircraft passenger seat belt will keep your ass strapped into the seat as the plane crumples around you and the seat itself collapses crushing whatever is underneath it in a higher dynamic force impact. Seats have gotten a bit stronger but not much. In fact, most of the improvements have been in the form of stronger seat rails that are fastened directly to the strongest structure of the aircraft so that when a crash does occur and the seat crumples beneath you and obliterates your legs and and lower back you stay with the aircraft and ride it out rather than being thrown from the aircraft still strapped into your seat and still obliterated.",
"If the plane \"dolphins\", and you're without a seat-belt, you'll bounce around inside the fuselage like a peeled grape inside a Pringles can, but instead of going \"clink clank bonk clunk\", you'll go \"splat splat splat splat\", and leave greasy, bloody spots at every impact point. "
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vdi6k | from my mother: eli5 what the difference is between downloading and installing. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vdi6k/from_my_mother_eli5_what_the_difference_is/ | {
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"Downloading is essentially copying files onto your computer from the internet, and installing is essentially your computer learning how to run a program.",
"Downloading is like buying or getting-for-free a product in the store.\n\nInstalling is like taking it out of the package\n\n(and running the program is like using the product)",
"OK you should be able to explain this to her yourself but consider this analogy, buying a new TV.\n\nDownloading:\nIt's like going to the store(going to website); buying, receiving free or stealing; and bringing it back home (downloading).\n\nNow it lays around doing nothing, taking up space. You need to do certain things to make it work.\n\nInstalling:\nPut it up on the wall, plugging in cables etc etc.\n\nNow it can be used!\n",
"Downloading is actually acquiring a program, piece by piece.\n\nInstalling is putting those pieces in the right place so they can be used.\n\n\nThink about it like a jigsaw puzzle. Downloading is taking all the pieces out of the box. Installing is putting them together.",
"Downloading is when you get a build-it-yourself model car as a present.\n\nInstalling is putting that model car together so you can run around the living room going \"vroom vroom\" and then you run into the nightstand and break a glass and your mom yells at you BUT WHATEVER I'M A NASCAR DRIVER",
"Downloading a program is like buying groceries.\n\nInstalling it is like cooking them.\n\nRunning it is like eating the meal (except you can eat this meal over and over again, so the analogy falls on its face a bit there!)"
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kcfsj | the california deficit, why is the state in such a deep hole??? | How did this end up happening?? Is the state spending it on useless things?? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kcfsj/eli5_the_california_deficit_why_is_the_state_in/ | {
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"Well, from what I understand, there are two major operators that have driven California into the ground more quickly than other states.\n\n1) They make it easy for everyone in California vote on things directly, rather than letting the people in the capital do it.\n\nThis is fine for lots of things, but when it comes to money lots of people don't think about how much money they have in the bank before they make decisions. So, they usually vote to spend more money, without ever voting to save more money. Since it's really hard for the people in the capital to undo the things that the people voted on, after a while, the bank account looks pretty empty.\n\n2) The people in the capital needed 2/3 of congress to vote yes to the state budget, instead of 1/2 like most other states.\n\nThat doesn't sound like a big deal, but Congress is split into two groups that haven't been getting along very well lately. Neither of them are much bigger than the other, so while one group might have more than 1/2 of the people, neither party ever has 2/3's. As a result, whenever it's time for Congress to decide how to spend money, both sides yell and scream a lot, and the bigger group has to promise to spend on what the little group wants as well as what it wants. Anytime saving money is brought up, people get angry and go home without doing anything.",
"During the 1990's and 2000's, California experienced a huge boom, particularly in technology and real estate. Tax revenues went up, and they had tons of money.\n\nUnfortunately, they spent that money like the boom would never end. They spent a lot of it on state employees, hiring new ones, higher salaries and better pensions. When the boom ended, in the early 2000's, tax revenues went way down, and they were spending more than they were taking in. And the state employees didn't want to give any money back, and since they were politically powerful, they didn't have to.\n\nSince most of the budget is state employee pensions and salaries, the couldn't cut enough to make up the difference, so they tried raising taxes. But California already had some of the highest state taxes in the country...businesses started to leave, people lost their jobs, and so higher taxes didn't bring in enough money. And the people who still had jobs got very angry about tax hikes.\n\nSo this year they are looking to spend $100 billion, but only taking in $75 billion. Raising taxes is very unpopular, and hasn't worked before. Cutting spending can be done without cutting wages or benefits for state employees, who are politically powerful. \n\nThere is no obvious solution, and since the state might go bankrupt, they are having a hard time even borrowing money. They have to make some tough decisions, or the problem will get work, and they will go bankrupt.",
"Well, from what I understand, there are two major operators that have driven California into the ground more quickly than other states.\n\n1) They make it easy for everyone in California vote on things directly, rather than letting the people in the capital do it.\n\nThis is fine for lots of things, but when it comes to money lots of people don't think about how much money they have in the bank before they make decisions. So, they usually vote to spend more money, without ever voting to save more money. Since it's really hard for the people in the capital to undo the things that the people voted on, after a while, the bank account looks pretty empty.\n\n2) The people in the capital needed 2/3 of congress to vote yes to the state budget, instead of 1/2 like most other states.\n\nThat doesn't sound like a big deal, but Congress is split into two groups that haven't been getting along very well lately. Neither of them are much bigger than the other, so while one group might have more than 1/2 of the people, neither party ever has 2/3's. As a result, whenever it's time for Congress to decide how to spend money, both sides yell and scream a lot, and the bigger group has to promise to spend on what the little group wants as well as what it wants. Anytime saving money is brought up, people get angry and go home without doing anything.",
"During the 1990's and 2000's, California experienced a huge boom, particularly in technology and real estate. Tax revenues went up, and they had tons of money.\n\nUnfortunately, they spent that money like the boom would never end. They spent a lot of it on state employees, hiring new ones, higher salaries and better pensions. When the boom ended, in the early 2000's, tax revenues went way down, and they were spending more than they were taking in. And the state employees didn't want to give any money back, and since they were politically powerful, they didn't have to.\n\nSince most of the budget is state employee pensions and salaries, the couldn't cut enough to make up the difference, so they tried raising taxes. But California already had some of the highest state taxes in the country...businesses started to leave, people lost their jobs, and so higher taxes didn't bring in enough money. And the people who still had jobs got very angry about tax hikes.\n\nSo this year they are looking to spend $100 billion, but only taking in $75 billion. Raising taxes is very unpopular, and hasn't worked before. Cutting spending can be done without cutting wages or benefits for state employees, who are politically powerful. \n\nThere is no obvious solution, and since the state might go bankrupt, they are having a hard time even borrowing money. They have to make some tough decisions, or the problem will get work, and they will go bankrupt."
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qyu5a | how do internet browsers (ie, firefox, chrome, netscape :p) make money/profit? | Obviously they do make money, I just can't work out how. There's no 'Pro' paid versions. Is there some sort of subtle advertising system I've never noticed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qyu5a/eli5_how_do_internet_browsers_ie_firefox_chrome/ | {
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"They don't, at least not directly in most cases.\n\nInternet Explorer and Safari are \"part\" of their respective operating systems, there's no reason for them to be monetized. Safari is available for Windows freely as part of Apple's \"halo effect\" strategy - i.e. see how cool and easy to use this is, now go buy a Mac. IE used to be vice versa but MS abandoned that.\n\nChrome is part of Google's overall package of free \"give us every detail about your life so we can advertise to you\" tools. In other words, Google doesn't care about your money, they make their dough off advertisers and giving you a nice browser guarantees you'll surf and see those ads.\n\nNetscape.... Really? Best I can tell Netscape no longer exists as a browser. They were bought by AOL several years ago who were in turn bought by Time Warner... A series of hilariously retrospectively bad decisions. If we rewind and think back to the earlier days of the Internet, Netscape actually was sold for money. Remember in the mid 90s the Internet and the web browser were not typical parts of the computer experience, you actually had to go to a physical brick and mortar store and buy a copy of Netscape in a box on a disk. Fast forward past that and for a few years they sold a pro version and gave away a free version. Then after being bought by AOL they became part of a package that cost money anyway.\n\nFirefox is a unique example, none of the above apply... Instead its just simply that they aren't out to make money. Mozilla is a non profit seeking to drive open source tech and freedom of information. It's right on the home page when you go to download it.\n\nI'll expand on your examples a bit too: Opera is probably the biggest browser you didn't mention, and they have an interesting strategy - they sell their browser on an enterprise level. Meaning that when a company wants to build a browser into their product, like say the Nintendo DSi, they pay to license the Opera browser.\n\nThere are more browsers out there, some that actually do have a cost, but most mix and match with the above.\n\nEdit for the nitpickers: This is a ELI5 answer, not a comprehensive quarterly earnings report for the Wall Street Journal. My intent was to provide the OP a summary of the money making strategies used by these companies outside of the obvious direct sales model. Additionally, I did inadvertently omit revenues from search engines, but keep in mind that while various figures quoted are impressive for us poor plebeian users, they are minor parts of the income in most cases for these large corporations.\n\nEdit 2: [Avenger_v3 linked to an AMA with a Mozilla developer](_URL_0_) who explains the bulk of their revenue does come from search engine sharing.",
"See that little search box in the top right of your browser?\n\nEvery time you use it, the search engine pays the browser maker.\n\nSee the homepage and suggested links that also came with the free browser?\n\nAdvertisement for those sites.",
"The top post is essentially missing the point.\n\nBrowsers make money through advertising.\n\nGoogle pay Firefox money for every search and a percentage for clickthroughs on the custom google search on the default Firefox homepage.\n\nChrome ensures that google search remains default.Bit also saves paying another browser maker money.\n\nSafari and IE are requisite offers from the two major OS vendors. (Note that Safari's rendering engine is open source, and based on the KDE one).\n\nOpera is closed source and frankly I don't know where they make money from, maybe advertisers, maybe paid support.\n\nBut, in general, the browsers make money from search engine advertising.",
"Opera has a unique revenue generating model: \n_URL_1_ \n_URL_0_ \n_URL_2_",
"[Mozilla developer about Mozilla revenue in IAmA](_URL_0_)"
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yp0xa | no child left behind and race to the top | What are the criticisms? Benefits? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yp0xa/eli5_no_child_left_behind_and_race_to_the_top/ | {
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"NCLB was a Bush43 era law enacted to improve the educational system. \n\nThe idea was that the education system wasn't doing very well (pretty accurate) and we needed to do something about it (good idea) and we needed some way to measure our success (good idea but easy to go off the rails as you will see).\n\nThere were a lot of changes in the law, but the one people think of is that it placed a huge emphasis on standardized testing. The idea was that everyone takes the same test so we have a way to compare students in different school districts. The problem with that is the standardized test is not that good at determining whether a student learned the material or not. A lot of times this meant schools started teaching 'to the test', focusing on material that was easily testable, like dates in history, instead of material that was useful, like the why and how of history.\n\nThe other problem was there was financial incentives to schools. If your students do well, your school gets a bonus. If your school does badly, your funding gets cut. Because the best way to increase student scores is to lower the funding for teachers and supplies for those students. \n\nThere also wasn't adjustments for schools that were in the rich suburbs versus the poor urban areas. It's not surprising that the rich schools with few problems did better than the poor schools that dealt with drug problems and gang violence on a daily basis.\n\nSo, NCLB was an attempt to fix educational problems, maybe good in theory but bad in practice.\n\nObama had his own educational initiative, and that is RTTT. Here the idea was the Federal government would tell states \"Alright, each of you submit proposals to improve your schools in any way you think is best. Then there will be a round of funding for the best ideas. Then each state implements the ideas that work for them. The states that improve the most get more funding.\"\n\nThe trick to this is, states that but effort into finding ways to improve their schools for the RTTT money are not going to throw that away afterwards. They are still likely to implement those reforms even if they didn't get money. And the second round did the same thing - if a state improves their schools, they aren't going to get rid of those improvements just because they didn't win a prize. So RTTT was much more cost-effective.\n\nLong story short, they are both there to improve education. NCLB was a stick. RTTT was a carrot. "
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1sftl4 | how were brochures, posters, magazines and ads edited before inexpensive pc's, digital photography and photoshop? | ELI5: How were brochures, posters, magazines and ads edited before inexpensive PC's, Digital Photography and Photoshop?
I wonder how they did it, and so effectively as well.
Nowadays you just take an image of the middle-aged female model eating cereal, you use that special close-up lense, transfer it to the PC, drag it to PS, free-transform the image, make it bigger, make a red background, choose and download a font, add nice little text, perhaps do something with it on Illustrator, and finally put in the original vectors logo and you got yourself the next cereal box for the next 6 years.
Same for the car brochures, billboards, etc.
So Reddit, how were these things done before?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sftl4/eli5_how_were_brochures_posters_magazines_and_ads/ | {
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"[Here you go.](_URL_1_)\n\n[And here is a picture of some classified advertising being pasted-up to produce a page.](_URL_0_)"
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b0w3sc | how do things you ingest (pills, specific foods like fish, etc) make their way up to the brain? | Fish is "brain food" and some pills help solve headaches. But how exactly do they enter the bloodstream? Isn't it all gastric acid before the digestive process actually begins? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0w3sc/eli5_how_do_things_you_ingest_pills_specific/ | {
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"Your stomach acid breaks down the food you eat. The broken down food next goes to the intestines. The intestines absorb nutrients from broken down food. The microscopic nutrients pass through microscopic channels in the intestines to enter the blood stream. The blood carries the nutrients all through the body. Some of these nutrients can pass through the blood brain barrier. If they make it past, they can be distributed to the brain."
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47iqvj | why does putting a mug of water in the microwave keep bread from getting soggy when heated? | Edit: For everybody asking about microwaving frozen bread I was meaning like a biscuit or a roll, not slices of sandwich bread. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47iqvj/eli5_why_does_putting_a_mug_of_water_in_the/ | {
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"The water acts as a 'dummy load' when you have it in the microwave with bread. So it reduces the amount of energy going to the bread. Think of it in terms of cranking down an energy knob. The higher the energy the faster it heats up which means it gets soggy. If you have less energy and cook it slowly and evenly it won't get soggy.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n\n**Edit: Some additional details. Happy to see all the interest in this.**\n\nIt's assumed the bread is frozen.\n**Why is the bread frozen?** *It stays fresher longer. Good for when you're living by yourself and don't go through food as fast. As a poor graduate student who knows the struggle lol.*\n\n**Can I lower the power for the same effect?** *Yes, basically it will do the same thing. Lowering the amount of energy reduces the amount of 'work' used to heat the bread. You'll have a lower temperature and this will allow for the heat to dissipate evenly throughout the bread.*\n\n**Wait a minute, what happens if I heat room temperature bread?** *If you heat it the moisture from the bread will be released and moisten the bread. If you do this with water that water will be 'added' to the atmosphere in the microwave and may condense to make the bread wet on the outside. Of course if you heat it long enough it will dry out or burn.*\n\n**Edit 2: Why does bread get soggy?** *At room temperature for example the bread is saturated with moisture, kind of like a damp sponge that has been sitting out for a couple hours. If you heat it up it softens the pores of the material and you get that 'soggyness'. When heating frozen bread at high temperatures it can be concentrated in certain areas and the heat may not be able to spread out. If you lower that temperature the heat can spread out and let the vapor escape.*\n\n & nbsp;\n\n\n*I worked in a bioenergy lab for a year with some people who studied pyrolysis with domestic and industrial microwaves. We had a metal 'mixer' to mix up the wood pellets or other biomass. We used water as a dummy load so that the microwaves would not be reflected back and damage the magnetron.*",
"never had bread get soggy. I only usually do a slice or two for max 5 seconds though. I'm guessing that the water is there to absorb some of the energy so the bread gets less and keeps it from overheating the water that's in the bread causing it to steam into each of its little air bubbles and breaking them down?",
"John Green actually tried doing that on his Mental_Floss channel, in his \"Life Hacks Debunked\" video. He put a glass of water in with a slice of pizza and the pizza (if memory serves) came out even soggier than it normally would. If anyone else has tried it, does it work with only certain types of bread?",
"I find that microwaving any kind of bread makes it tough and chewy.\n\nI put pizza in a covered frying pan on the stove. It heats it up while maintaining the crispiness of the crust.",
"If your bread is chewy and hard, you've microwaved it too long.\n\nDon't bother reducing power for bread, unless you are heating a full loaf. The magnetron doesn't have a variable power output. It just gets turned on for the percentage of time you request, during each minute it runs. Ex. 30% = on 20 seconds, off 40 seconds. Good for defrosting meats, and preventing fluid heavy foods from boiling over.\n\nThe most I do is 30 seconds for a frozen roll, to make it nice and steamy to accept a butter pad willingly. At 40 seconds it will start getting chewy. Nuke bread sparingly.",
"People microwave bread?",
"Use the defrost setting. Works great on frozen items. Wrap bread/bagel/roll or whatever in a paper towel and set for 1 min on defrost. Flipping it over after 30 seconds works best. Remove from MW and wrap in foil and put in toaster oven for ten min on 250 degrees. Comes out bakery fresh!",
"As a followup question, why are you heating bread in a microwave?\n\ni.e. is it in a casserole (and the water matters less) or are you just putting a loaf of bread in there to warm for some disgusting reason?",
"I tried this. The premise of the question is wrong. The bread does become steamed and soggy when you take it outside.\n\nI suggest that people try this at home before answering the question.",
"TIL: Put a cup of water in the microwave with your bread/sandwich to keep the bread from getting soggy.",
"You talkin' about a science oven? ",
"This is a thing?! ...all the flour burritos I've microwaved...all the soggy. \n\nMy god",
"Microwaves work by exciting water molecules to boiling. This works because pretty much every piece of food is going to have some water in it. \n\nThe result is that whereas your food may seem soggy on the outside after microwaving, it's actually dried out as the water was boiled out of it. \n\nIf you microwave a bread roll, for example, you'll probably find the outside covered in condensation, but the center hard as a rock.\n\nPutting water in the microwave can work by saturating the air with water vapor. Just like when it's hot and humid out, and your sweat won't evaporate, if the air in the microwave is too humid, the water in your food may not evaporate.\n\nThis can keep too much water from leaving your food. It's not always effective, however.",
"Bigger question, why are you guys microwaving bread?\n",
"So I've had this argument with two of my roommates. They say that when they put a mug of water in the microwave for a minute with let's say leftover rice or chicken that it helps steam it a bit and makes it less dry. I don't believe it. Anyone have any input on whether or not this makes sense?",
"And this is why I also have a toaster oven. Reheating any moist food is just so damn good and quick. Left over pizza taste just like the day I ordered it.",
"I clearly didn't know this. Does it work with pizza too? ",
"I did not know you could do this and have staunchly avoided microwaving bread my whole life. Thank you. You have liberated me.",
"heating the bread causes it to dry out because the heat causes water to vaporize and the mug is an extra source of vapour to counteract that. or at least, that's how i understand it.",
"How do I reheat my burger? ",
"What kind of barbarian would microwave bread?",
"How did I get a helpful LPT in ELI5?",
"Learned this trick from a french baker who used to make crispy croissants by placing a bowl of water in fire brick oven. Moisture and starch chemistry at different temperature plays an important role in making glutenous bread soft inside and crusty on outside.\n\nThere are two kinds of starch, short clumpy ones (amylose, 70% of bread starch) and long brachy ones (amylopectin, 30%). The short clumpy ones absorb moisture and melt at about 100ºC and dry inside the porous bread making it firm, the long branchy ones 'unwind and stretch' and make it fluffier — this is what probably happens in microwave. More discussion [here](_URL_2_).\n\nSimilar but extended process happens when bread is baked the first time. At 82ºC the surface of bread soaks up a lot of moisture and explodes into gooey gel which dries out to become a hard shell. At 135ºC sugars caramelize giving out fresh bread smell and the taste of crust. Between 140-200ºC, sugars and amino acids react to give the dark brown color ([Malliard](_URL_1_) reaction). More details [here](_URL_0_).",
"I've always used like a slightly wet papertowel over my pizza when I warm it up... never knew mug of water with bread was a thing.",
"Would this work for Pizza then? I hate reheating pizza in the microwave.",
"Why not just turn the power down on your microwave?",
"Wait... Does this work for pizza...?",
"Why am I reading about this in ELI5 and not Life Pro Tips?",
"Can someone ELI5 this question for me? How does bread get wetter when you microwave? Am I the only one who tries to keep their bread from drying out in the microwave?",
"Microwaves target water molecules and heat them up. The water turn to vapor and is absorbed by the bread. ",
"People microwave bread? ",
"who even does this....?"
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3tqczh | if genders are equal than why are women's live valued over men's lives in disasters? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tqczh/eli5_if_genders_are_equal_than_why_are_womens/ | {
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"Its not that they value them more, it comes from an old instinctual code. It's been that way for centuries in almost every culture. What some researchers believe is the idea of progression of the species. Children propagate the species. Women propagate the species. If you have only one man, he can impregnate up to 14 women within a week, but once a woman is pregnant there's no getting more pregnant. So it's better for a man to die for the sake of a woman so that the species can progress.",
"Because of procreation.\n\nIts the same reason hunters aren't allowed to kill females of some species. You only need 1 male per many, many females in order to preserve the species. \n\nAs such us learning to protect our women and children was very favorable by evolution. Putting women and children first preserved humans through years of evolution. Later we turned it into a social thing.",
"Children are the priority and women are their caretakers.\n\nWomen are also less likely to be active terrorists and are more vulnerable than men in these situations. Some of the reasons are cultural, like being seen as property, and some are biological (think brute force).\n\nThe Titanic incident cannot be compared to any refugee situation. Different times, different circumstances. ",
"Because genders are not equal. \n\nNow the Syrian refugees are a bad example. 0% of the refugees coming over the Mediterranean are from Syria or Iraq and barely 20% that come through Turkey are form there... and how many of those are really legitimate? Also, about 90% of all the people coming through from Turkey are men and the remaining 10% split between women and children. \n\nNow lets get to the core of the issue, why are womens' lives valued more than men? \nThis is for a variety of reasons. They cannot fight against men. Take 100 women and 100 men from the random population, and women will lose in any physical competition 100% of the time. Men are more aggressive, more powerful and far more capable of physical violence then women. Because it's men who do the fighting almost all of the time, their lives are expendable. Men and women are not the same ,biology purposed us for somewhat different specifications. Unlike feminist theory, there is no patriarchy that kept women down. Women don't want to go and stride through shit and rain and cold to hunt 100k years ago. Just like they don't want to stride through shit and tunnels and cannals to do the sewage work. Just like they don't want to break their backs and bones doing construction work. Which is why there are so few women in those jobs. Men don't want to have to do those jobs, but they do because they have to. Once we have robots that can do that, believe you me, there will be few men who will be working those jobs, mostly as supervisors and specialized work. \n\nAnyway, biologically, men and women ended up behaving in the ways I described above, men being more outgoing, risk-taking and capable to put themselves in danger or harms way or even be miserable because that's what you needed to keep the species going. Women who would behave in the same way, because they wouldn't have the muscle or the testosterone and the endurance of men, would die out, so such women would no longer propagate their genes. The women who stayed chill, did non-lethal jobs, propagate their genes. The men who survived the danger and took big risks for big rewards, propagated their genes. \n\nHowever today, unless we are at war, the reality is that until we can make perfectly healthy and normal babies in incubators, women are more precious then men because they can reproduce. Now they can't reproduce by themselves, they need a man ,but as someone said, a man can reproduce with a lot more women at one point and impregnate them where as women have a \"down-time\" until they can reproduce again. Granted, that's not great for genetic diversity which is why all societies that became civilized went for monotony... but that's a different point all together. \n\nAnyway, as a man, you don't matter biologically. Nobody cares. The only way people will make them care that you're a man is if you achieve something as a man. Otherwise, you're nothing. Women have intrisic value just for existing, men get value by doing something. Get used to it, stop complaining and stop believing in the fantasy that women and men are the same. We aren't equal or the same, and that's ok. We're different because we're supposed to complement one another, not compete against one another. \n",
"I think that children's lives are valued higher in such situations because they haven't had the chance to live their lives yet, while the older people have had the chance to experience life already.\n\nI think that women's lives are valued higher in such situations because men have a drive to protect women from harm, and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect women and those too young to have had much life experience. And also because of the idea that men can deal with going down with the ship because they are more hardy in general and, much like in a war, they sacrifice their lives to protect the lives of others.\n\nThere may be some biological/instinctual level to it for continuing the species, but I think most of the reason for it is out of culture and virtue.",
"The same situation can be seen as \"men being expendable\" and \"heroic men making sacrifices for their loved ones.\" In making that sacrifice, men are still seen as the hero, saving the women and children who are helpless. Not saying it's right, just that the perspective can be changed for whatever agenda one is pushing.\n\nIt had always seemed to me that the \"save the women and children\" attitude was because A. women, like children, are seen as weak and can't protect themselves, and therefore are in need of protecting by the men that were in charge of them B. historically, men fight wars and lead governments, so women and children were more likely to be innocent civilians.\n\nUltimately, my life as a woman is worth just as much as the next man, child, whatever, but these are still strong and complicated social narratives and can be interpreted different ways, just like all parts of life.",
"It's not that they're less valuable -- but there is an assumption that men are more able to take care of themselves, more able to survive without help. Survival is valued equally, but the assumption is that women and children are more in need of help in order to survive equally.",
"Semantics. Genders are not equal in the literal sense of the word: for two things to be equal they must have only like qualities, and cannot exhibit differences. To actually and definitively consider genders equal you would have to be unable to differentiate, or purely deny the ability, which is typically as ignorant as segregation.\n\nSocially, and semantically, I believe that people misuse *'equal'* when they mean *'fair'*. To be treated equally, either everyone would receive a chance, or no one would, it is very black or white and is based not on differing circumstances, but on objective facts. Equality says: if you have a freedom, either everyone should have that freedom, or no one should, regardless of if they even want it or not. Equality does not adhere to subjective nature, or circumstance, it is purely an objective deduction of like qualities.\n\nFairness is being allowed to deduce objective information by adhering to differentiating circumstances and understandings. It's the freedom to take any number of understandings (people) and compromise them until there is only one understanding that everyone ultimately can agree with. It's not black or white like equality, because fairness allows us to change facts based on the needs of the immediate circumstance.\n\nTL;DR: words are confusing\n\nedit: spelling\n",
"I think this is mostly emotional manipulation. Some people are concerned about security implications regarding the refugees, which is understandable because no amount of background checking is going to predict who will or won't become violent once arriving in a Western country. When this is the topic, people understandably get a mental image of 20-30 year old single men. Talking about women and children is a way to disrupt that mental image without actually addressing the underlying arguments."
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bjdj1x | how does nasa prevent asteroids from hitting the earth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bjdj1x/eli5_how_does_nasa_prevent_asteroids_from_hitting/ | {
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"They don't. Currently we have no systems to stop something that's big enough to be a threat, and everything else doesn't really matter or can't be spotted in time.",
"Uh. Hate to break it to you but as of right now the answer to that question is above NASA's paygrade",
"It doesn't. No nation or space agency has any ability to deflect asteroids or comets. There are some methods currently being explored, but they're years or decades away from being usable, and they rely on us detecting the asteroid or comet years or decades before impact. The best we can do now is to monitor and track known objects that could pose a collision risk in the future."
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3aswan | when i lay down and stare at my wall sometimes and everything in the room seems to look very far away until i look around again, what's happening? | Usually happens at night when I lay down to go to bed and the room is dark, but not very often. It's also sometimes followed by strange changes in senses like everything feeling prickly, like needles. Hope I'm not the only one! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aswan/eli5_when_i_lay_down_and_stare_at_my_wall/ | {
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"your not the only one i know what your saying but i lack proper explanation. To me it happens often if i'm either concentrating on a single object or on solely myself and my guess is the shaped focus stops me from focusing on the spatial reasoning of my surroundings and since they aren't right next to me they are just in the distance somewhere. as for the prickling sensation for me its just a focus on the sensory information my body is feeling",
"Yes I think I've experienced a similar thing. Not sure if this is what you're feeling, but when I was younger Id be trying to go to sleep, my eyes closed it would seem like i was focusing in on something only to all of a sudden be zoomed out to some sort of floating external view. It was an extremely uncomfortable sensation for me also with a pins and needlesque feeling all over. It acted like a recurring nightmare except i wasn't asleep. Hasn't happened in years though I suspect it might have something to do with Vertigo? Never found out what caused it.\n\nIt kind of feels like you're spinning out, or falling through your bed, with mutual exclusivity"
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267h6n | what would happen if we genetically engineered/modified humans? | Would there be a breed of superhumans? Or would it be a total disaster? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/267h6n/eli5_what_would_happen_if_we_genetically/ | {
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"There are only ethical reasons for us to get over. It will not be long until we can perfect the technology. But, we will need to test and breed humans to verify the results. \n\nFor some reason, this is considered wrong. (not sarcasm)",
"Gattaca is your answer, OP. Awesome movie where eugenics is the norm and where normal individuals are basically the trash of society.",
"Well, designer babies for a start. \nAnd at the moment we still could only modify an embryo - to eradicate a genetic disease you would have to change the mutant DNA causing that illness in every cell in our bodies. \nInterestingly though, experiments with mice have shown that giving telomerase, an enzyme which protects our DNA and the decline in activity of which is part of the reason why we age, could reverse the aging process and increase our lifespans dramatically..",
"It's happening in medicine just now: _URL_0_",
"I'll wrap you in a sheeeeeeet. "
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1489b3 | why does electricity appear blue? | Or, at least it looks blue to me. Why would it have any color? Isn't it just a stream of electrons? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1489b3/why_does_electricity_appear_blue/ | {
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"As the electricity arcs through the air it heats up the air molecules. As the air heats up it starts glowing. The particular color it glows in this instance is blue.",
"It's actually excited molecules in the air. It's the color of excited nitrogen and oxygen. The wikipedia article is called [Ionized-air Glow](_URL_0_)",
"Because you're not seeing electricity, you're seeing the plasma that is created by the breakdown of the air across what is known as an [Electric arc](_URL_0_). The hotter something is, the more blue-white it is, and the cooler it is, the more red-orange it is. \n\nIf you have enough energy moving through a small enough area with enough gas (air is used a lot), you can form a plasma arc that can burn through steel plates. I use a machine that does exactly this. It sort of scares me a little =D\n\n",
"Wow, I never thought about it that way. Thanks for the responses everyone. ",
" > Isn't it just a stream of electrons?\n\nTechnically, you never see atoms; you see EM waves bouncing off their electron shells. Everything you've ever seen is electrons.",
"What you see is radiation caused by the ionization of molecules.\n\nThat means that electricity isn't always \"blue\". It can be a lot of colors. However, in the atmosphere we are breathing the ionized molecules emit blue light.\n\nWhy that is: Imagine electricity to be tiny transparent balls. And air is composed of little people who all hold tiny balls, too, but their balls have all kinds of different colors. But the air-people don't like to share and hide those balls from you out of sight and you need a lot of power to pry it out of their hands.\n\nNow, however, when you throw your tiny electricity-balls directly at them hard enough you can get those guys to let go of their colored balls. And what you see is exactly the color of the balls you have kicked out of their hands.\n\nAnd depending where you are the people have different colors for their balls. In our atmosphere there are the Oxygen and Nitrogen people. They have blue-colored ones. \n\nIf you would go to the [Sodium-Vapor](_URL_1_) people then that color would be yellow.\n\nIf you would go to the [Mercury-Vapor](_URL_0_) people then that color would be turquoise.\n\n"
]
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1xhu8s | why are there so many white men/asian women couples? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xhu8s/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_white_menasian_women/ | {
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"Pairings between Asian women and Caucasian men are twice as common as matches between Caucasian women and Asian men, a gap that has often been attributed to the hypersexualization of Asian women and the emasculation of Asian men in US pop culture. The nuances and repercussions of that discussion extend farther than the way in which Caucasians view Asians, with many Asian Americans citing those same stereotypes as having shaped their own sexual preferences and the confidence in which they pursue or don't pursue partners of other races.\n\n--ChinaNews Daily\n_URL_0_"
]
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"http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/us/2013-06/29/content_16685433.htm"
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6zfu21 | what will happen many years down the road when inflation makes it so that buying small things like a pack of gum requires ridiculously high amounts of money? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zfu21/eli5_what_will_happen_many_years_down_the_road/ | {
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"First, we'll stop using cents. The dollar will be the smallest unit of currency. Then later on, we'll just re-denominate when things get ridiculous (\"one New Dollar is worth 10/100/1000 Old Dollars\")",
"The world will continue on like it always has, no big deal. If you mean what will happen to coins, some will be dropped. Might seem odd but many countries have dropped their penny and some their nickel.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n",
"The mere fact that prices increase at a modest rate year over year is relatively unimportant if incomes keep pace (which they more than have).\n\nWhether I make $1 an hour and a product costs 5 cents or I make $20 an hour and a product costs $1 doesn't really matter.",
"Two things.\n\nFirst, the problem with Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany wasn't just that it required a huge nominal quantity of currency to buy anything, but that this inflation happened *very, very quickly*. Who cares if it costs $1 trillion to buy a gallon of milk if it only costs $995 billion the year before? It's when it costs $1 trillion today and only $1 billion last year that you have problems. \"Normal\" inflation and *hyper*-inflation are very different in terms of their economic effects.\n\nSecond, turning specifically to the question of what the result would be of abysmally-low real-world values for units of currency after a very expended period of *normal* inflation. . . . I'm not sure anybody knows. Hasn't really happened yet. Or, to the extent that it has, the answer is \"Basically nothing.\" After all, something that cost $0.25 in 1913 would probably cost more than $6.00 today. That's a twenty-four-fold increase over a little more than a century. Which is about the difference between the $4-5 for which one can buy a gallon of milk today and the $100 you've suggested as an unreasonably-high nominal price. So if it takes another century for inflation to get there, I'm not sure anyone will care overly much.\n\nThe question is whether it's realistic to think there will be no major discontinuities--historical or economic--over the next century that would make such a comparison impossible. That's what happens to currencies most of the time. The British have been using currency called \"pounds\" for centuries, but there have been several major changes over time such that a \"pound\" today really isn't the same thing as a \"pound\" in AD 1700. \n"
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1opyz9 | did people in history "know" what year they were in? | For example, did people in 450 AD know that they were in the year 450 AD? When did the current standard year system start?
Obvious items to note -
-I understand that people before Christ (BC) couldnt have know what year they were in.
-Each civilization had their own calendar so not all of them know the present calendar that is utilized. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1opyz9/eli5_did_people_in_history_know_what_year_they/ | {
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"Yes, people knew what year they were in. They just called it something else. \n\nFor example, the Hebrew calendar is currently on 5774. ",
"The Julian calendar was introduced by it's namesake, Julius Caesar, in 46AD. \nThe calendar had 12 months and added one day to February every four years, making the average year 365.25 days. Now, the tropical year is a few minutes shorter than that, meaning that the calendar gained a few days every four centuries. \n\nThis was all fixed when the current Gregorian calendar was put into place in 1582. \n\nWe tend to think of people back then like us, which in many cases is correct in regards to attitude and behavioral nature, but not with \"history\". People back then were *very* poorly read if they knew how to read at all, which was rare, but even then, they didn't have a concept of history in the same sense we do. \n\nThere was no available catalogue of historical occurrences and timelines other than what was passed through word-of-mouth proberbs, traditions and and common storytelling. \n\nThey knew whatever time they were in compared to whatever calendar they followed at the time, but people had no context to know exactly what time they were in in the sense that we do. \n\n",
"The gregorian calendar (where BC/AD comes from) didn't exist until 1582, so for your specific example the answer is no. More generally it was different for different people. Some had calendars based on some major historic event (real or mythical), such as the founding of the empire, or the \"beginning of the world\". Others used a relative year system, such as \"the 12th year of the reign of King Robert\" or \"The 6th year since the Great Plague\".",
"People in AD 450 did not call it 450. At that time the Julian calendar was being used in some of those parts of the world that had been part of the Roman Empire. This calendar had almost the same years and months as we have now but the years were counted from the other prominent events.\n\nIn AD 530 years were being counted from the start of the reign of the emperor Diocletian, in what we now call AD 284. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus proposed that years should instead be counted from the birth of Christ, which he worked out to have been 530 years ago (although it is generally agreed now that he got it wrong by a few years). This system spread through Europe and most of the world over the next few centuries, in fact the process is ongoing as some countries and organisations officially use other dates. Various adjustments were also made over the years and will continue to be made.\n\nThere is a lot more that could be said on this wide subject, you could start [here](_URL_0_), in particular part 6 and 8."
]
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3ixohy | p and s waves in earthquakes | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ixohy/eli5_p_and_s_waves_in_earthquakes/ | {
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"I think, this is best explained with an [image](_URL_0_). In that image, the blue arrow indicates the direction in which the wave is travelling.\n\nBut to put it in words: \nP waves shake the ground on the axis on which they travel. So, if the P wave is moving north, then the ground is shaking to the North and South. \n\nS waves instead shake the ground in a right angle to the direction in which they are going. So, if the S wave is moving north, then the ground is shaking to the East and West."
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enlck7 | how do cpap machines work? how exactly do they benefit you to get more sleep at night? | Continuous positive airway pressure is what the acronym means. How do all the components work together to produce more sleep for the user? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/enlck7/eli5_how_do_cpap_machines_work_how_exactly_do/ | {
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"text": [
"When you sleep, the muscles that keep your airway open relaxes, sometimes causing your airway to collapse. The machine has a sensor in it. The sensor monitors airflow when you exhale. If it's too low, it indicates some sort of blockage (such as your airway collapsing). The CPAP machine will then force air into your airway, essentially like blowing up a balloon, with the intent to prevent your brain from jolting you awake to restore 'normal' breathing. I recently did a sleep study as a precautionary measure, and thankfully I don't need a CPAP machine myself."
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2sh87h | what is the difference between nitrites and nitrates in the nitrogen cycle? | I want to understand how these keep my fish tank healthy. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sh87h/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_nitrites_and/ | {
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"text": [
"fish breathe out and poo out ammonia NH3. NH3 in concentration prevents the fish gills from exchanging O2 and CO2. \n\nthere's a bacteria that's literally EVERYWHERE that eats NH3 and expels out nitrites NO2. NO2 is slightly less dangerous to fish but still isn't healthy in concentration.\n\nthere's another bacteria that's also everywhere that eats NO2 and expels out NO3. NO3 is basically harmless to fish except in extreme concentrations. Plants uptake NO3 as main source of natural fertilizer."
]
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|
3z11sj | why a lot of americans become so passionate/aggressive about whether they are democrats or republicans. | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3z11sj/eli5_why_a_lot_of_americans_become_so/ | {
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"Europe has a long tradition of classism, and the general idea that the government was a bunch of out of touch fuckwits, you're never gonna be one, you're not gonna be rich unless your born rich, and there are the \"nobles\" that run the country, and the commoners, etc. America was founded on the distinct opposite of that entire idea. Regardless, most Americans at the very least feel the same way, or feel precisely that way about the other party they disagree with. ",
"Lots of people in America are like that too. There's a reason that even our biggest elections have voter turnouts of about 50%. \n\nThat said, especially at the national level, the two major political parties offer very different packages. While you do have a lot of people who are roughly in the middle, who pick and choose what they like about each party, a lot of people are also solidly in one camp or the other. If you're a diehard Republican/Democrat, then you're almost certainly going to be morally opposed to the policies of the other party. \n\nAnd of course, the more crazy you are, the louder you tend to be, which means you get more coverage. The people who don't care about politics much at all (which is honestly more than half the country) obviously don't say all that much on the subject, so the only people talking at all are the ones who are really passionate. "
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11gvgf | the difference between american and canadian football? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11gvgf/the_difference_between_american_and_canadian/ | {
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"Their respective wikipedia articles are great.\n\nBiggest 3 I can think of?\n- 3 downs in CN, 4 in US\n- 110 yd fields\n- 12 man teams",
"I am assuming you know the basic rules to Football. There are a few main differences between the two. \n\n1. In Canadian football you are only allowed 3 downs to get the ball 10 yards, in American football you are allowed 4\n\n2. The size of the Canadian Football field is 10 yards longer and wider than an american field\n\n3. The Canadian football is much bigger than the american one\n\n4. In Canadian football there is 12 men on the field at one time where as american's generally use 11\n\nEdit look at [this] (_URL_0_) for more information"
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7fj7ci | why do humans have temperature sensors in our stomach? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7fj7ci/eli5_why_do_humans_have_temperature_sensors_in/ | {
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"text": [
"Human beings sense the temperature of food with their mouths, not with their stomachs. If you have a sensation of heat in your stomach, what you are sensing is acidity, not temperature. Excess stomach acidity causes a burning sensation."
]
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|
13v9m4 | the advantages and disadvantages of wep, wpa and wpa2 | Advantages and disadvantages for all three. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13v9m4/eli5_the_advantages_and_disadvantages_of_wep_wpa/ | {
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"Basicly these are the locks you put on your wifi (wireless internet/network)\nWEP is the oldest lock, this has the advantage that everything knows how to make a key for it (if you know the password). In other words every computer or device that can use WIFI should be able to use WEP. The disadvantage is that its not as secure. Its an old lock an can be more easely broken.\n\nWPA2 is the new secure lock. Not everybody knows how to make a key for it but most do. (In other words any computer that isn't too old should be able to connect to this. The only device I've seen so fat that couldn't was a nintendo DS, the first one. anything older should be fine and older will probably be too) It is generaly accepted that the lock is unbreakable (within a reasonable timespan of more than a couple of years) by brute force. (trying all posibilities)\n\ntl;dr Get WPA2, its more secure and you shouldn't have any compatebility problems. Even if you do you can revert back to WEP but WEP is way easier to hack\n\nSource: I studied IT and now work in IT",
"Do not ever use wep encryption on your home network. It can be easily hacked in about 5 minutes by capturing packets coming across your network, or by generating them. If your running wep and someone wants on your network, they'll get on. \n\nHowever with wpa/wpa2 if someone manages to get on your network, you should give them a high five and letem use it. Wpa/2 is alot harder to crack, and involves alot more hoops that need to jumped through in order to make the crack work. Often times its not worth the trouble to an average hacker to crack wpa unless they really don't like you or really want in. \n\n",
"The only disadvantage I can think of is my DS doesn't connect to WPA or WPA2 :/ First world problems"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3ux4mh | how can certain breeds of animal have an inherent behavioural trait? | For example, how can all Labradors have similar behavioural traits? I understand that physical traits can be selected for, but how can behaviour traits be selected for? Can the same logic be applied for humans? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ux4mh/eli5_how_can_certain_breeds_of_animal_have_an/ | {
"a_id": [
"cxii8q9"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"People tended to select dogs for breeding based on both physical and behavioral traits. A pit bull's perfectly powerful musculature isn't much use if it can't be taught to attack. (I think the way I phrased that should avoid the nature vs. nurture pit bull debate.) An overly aggressive dachshund won't be able to defend itself if it's always getting into fights and probably won't live very long.\n\nThere's a hypothesis that this has already happened in humans and is the reason behind civilization and society. Humans with anti-social traits are less likely to be attractive mates and are generally (but obviously not always) selected out of the gene pool. Those who could cooperate with their neighbors had a better chance of survival, and therefore a better chance at reproductive success."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
1tcb1c | how/when are flat roofs feasible when lots of snow is expected? i'm seeing them at a ski resort right now. | I typically see in excess of a metre (3.28 ft) of snow buildup and I just noticed due to extremely poor snowfall this year that some of the roofs are flat. How is collapse prevented? Is the snow removed in some way?
Edit: I haven't found any doors so far but maybe I'm blind. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1tcb1c/eli5_howwhen_are_flat_roofs_feasible_when_lots_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"ce6hsuj",
"ce6n4io"
],
"score": [
10,
2
],
"text": [
"The roof is built to handle the weight of the (assumed) worst-case snow fall.\n\nEvery roof is engineered assuming some kind of load, usually spelled out in building codes. These can include rain, wind, snow, people walking around, etc. As long as the engineers planned for the snow, and the builders what they were supposed to, the roof is strong enough to hold up the snow indefinitely.",
"I do know that some lightweight buildings (think big box retail) plan on manual snow removal to minimize risk of collapse, but I've only seen that with one company. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
2oeo1l | why are some laws passed as constitutional amendments and some only as plain, old laws? | Such as the 13th Amendment (Slavery Ban) or the 18th Amendment (Prohibition). Can someone explain the federal govt law structure? Acts, Statutes, Laws, Amendments...What's the difference? Does the supreme court judge all of them? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oeo1l/eli5_why_are_some_laws_passed_as_constitutional/ | {
"a_id": [
"cmmf36b",
"cmmhv3x"
],
"score": [
2,
3
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"text": [
"Amendments to the constitution are much more difficult to undo or erase, so it is like an \"ultra super law\" in that sense.\n\nAct, statute, and law all mean the same thing.\n",
"Any normal law is invalid if the constitution does not allow it. Generally an amendment is needed either to make way for laws that currently are not constitutional, or to curtail laws that currently are constitutional. (eg: the 14th amendment was passed to prevent certain existing laws and policies being used to deny citizenship to former slaves and their children, and the 19th to prevent local laws that denied the vote to women) more rarely, an amendment is made to modify rules set forth for the government in the original articles (such as the 20th which changed when the president takes office and when congress should go in to session, or the 22nd, which set a term limit for the office of president.)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
but0rg | if garbage workers have a holiday off, how do they get all the garbage picked up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/but0rg/eli5_if_garbage_workers_have_a_holiday_off_how_do/ | {
"a_id": [
"eph5r4h",
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"text": [
"In my area they work overtime the day before or day after. Not sure how it works everywhere though.",
"My township collects our trash twice a week.\n\nSo if the garbagemen are off on Memorial Day, which would have been a trash pickup day ... people will just hang onto their trash another three days until the Thursday pickup.",
"Not everybody at the trash company drives a truck. They can move people off other jobs to handle the extra load."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
j7fe7 | please, can anyone explain to me what exactly /r/fifthworldproblems is/what it is based off of? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j7fe7/please_can_anyone_explain_to_me_what_exactly/ | {
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2,
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"text": [
"First \"world levels\":\n\nFirst world — the nations allied with the US during the Cold War; now usually taken to be synonymous with \"developed\".\n\nSecond world — the nations allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War; this term is largely no longer used, but the \"problems\" subreddit seems to think it should mean a country that's \"not fully developed\".\n\nThird world — the nations that were unaligned during the Cold War; now usually taken to mean \"undeveloped\".\n\nFourth world — nations and peoples that are basically unrecognized by the larger world.\n\nFifth world — sometimes meaning landlocked developing countries, sometimes referring to an aspect of Native American mythology; the subreddit appears to think it means \"world of chaos and madness\".\n\nThe \"n-thworldproblems\" subreddits are dedicated to posts about problems faced by people living in these worlds. In this trend, \"fifthworldproblems\" is a place to post about the sorts of problems encountered by people who live in a world of chaos and madness where the laws of physics are more like impolite suggestions to be disregarded unless absolutely necessary.",
"First of all, fifthworldproblems is a joke subreddit based on firstworldproblems. The idea behind fifthworldproblems is that the \"fifth world\" is like some inaccessible parallel universe; one in which \"My spawn refuses to inherit my reign and become the harbinger of unchosen souls. How will he ever experience the bliss of quintillium hyperconsciousness?\" is a common, or funny, question to pose.",
"In it's simplest sense, it's a sci-fi roleplaying subreddit.",
"First \"world levels\":\n\nFirst world — the nations allied with the US during the Cold War; now usually taken to be synonymous with \"developed\".\n\nSecond world — the nations allied with the Soviet Union during the Cold War; this term is largely no longer used, but the \"problems\" subreddit seems to think it should mean a country that's \"not fully developed\".\n\nThird world — the nations that were unaligned during the Cold War; now usually taken to mean \"undeveloped\".\n\nFourth world — nations and peoples that are basically unrecognized by the larger world.\n\nFifth world — sometimes meaning landlocked developing countries, sometimes referring to an aspect of Native American mythology; the subreddit appears to think it means \"world of chaos and madness\".\n\nThe \"n-thworldproblems\" subreddits are dedicated to posts about problems faced by people living in these worlds. In this trend, \"fifthworldproblems\" is a place to post about the sorts of problems encountered by people who live in a world of chaos and madness where the laws of physics are more like impolite suggestions to be disregarded unless absolutely necessary.",
"First of all, fifthworldproblems is a joke subreddit based on firstworldproblems. The idea behind fifthworldproblems is that the \"fifth world\" is like some inaccessible parallel universe; one in which \"My spawn refuses to inherit my reign and become the harbinger of unchosen souls. How will he ever experience the bliss of quintillium hyperconsciousness?\" is a common, or funny, question to pose.",
"In it's simplest sense, it's a sci-fi roleplaying subreddit."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4sq6in | why do keygens always have 8-bit music playing in the background? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4sq6in/eli5_why_do_keygens_always_have_8bit_music/ | {
"a_id": [
"d5baa7x"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"_URL_0_\n\n\nSince this sub will not let me just leave it at that, here's another sentence to fill up some space. And another one. Man it sure is hot out today."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/qoqyu/why_do_keygens_always_have_cheesy_8bit_music/"
]
] |
|
3u2rk7 | how can a mother be charged with child abuse for harming her unborn child (e.g. drug usage, alcohol consumption), but abortion does not fall under this category? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3u2rk7/eli5_how_can_a_mother_be_charged_with_child_abuse/ | {
"a_id": [
"cxbcika",
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"score": [
3,
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3
],
"text": [
"Because we say it doesn't.\n\nI'm not being a smartass, that's literally the reason. We make distinctions and exceptions to laws all the time, and this is no different. ",
"Because drug usage and alcohol consumption while pregnant is harmful to a child, so long as that child eventually GETS BORN. I don't think in-utero alcohol use would make a difference if the embryo was aborted as well.",
"Because abortion means that the mother decides that she's not going to be having a baby. Drinking or doing drugs while harboring a child means that the mother agrees to keep that child but is not giving it a safe environment."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1wu6vn | why chubby women sing better/ have better voice (especially in opera)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wu6vn/eli5_why_chubby_women_sing_better_have_better/ | {
"a_id": [
"cf5e8zn",
"cf5eb6s",
"cf5gcns",
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"score": [
18,
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"text": [
"That's actually a false stereotype. Many of the great divas are quite petite.",
"Several ideas have been put forward, but there's no solid evidence that fat helps. There are plenty of noted opera singers who aren't overweight.",
"In some cases having a larger frame can help with lung capacity, bigger rib cage, more air etc...but it doesn't help much in the long run. Opera requires some pretty serious abdominal toning, so you need to develop the diaphragm muscles to have good breath support. It's not your typical \"ripped abs\" though, when I was studying opera in college, I was obviously overweight...but if you pressed on my diaphragm muscles, they were pretty impressive. \n\nI think a lot of opera singers in the past were overweight because the lifestyle didn't encourage much physical fitness. Also, when the singing is done correctly, you can continue singing well into your elderly years, so you tend to see a lot of singers who look like an average middle aged person pretending to be a young romantic character...there's supposed to be a lot of suspended disbelief in opera! \n\nLately, much like in the popular music world, people are starting to expect more attractive physical appearances and aren't as willing to believe a 300 lb woman is sexy just because her voice is beautiful, and some singers have felt some pressure to slim down. \n\nDeborah Voigt is a good example, she was fired for not fitting into her costume for the role of Ariadne, but was rehired after losing 100 lbs with gastric bypass. Granted, she's now a size 14, which is still considered fat by entertainment standards...so you can draw your own conclusions with that one.\n\nSo as a TL,DR: You can be fat to be a singer, as long as your breathing muscles are toned...but being fat is not a requirement. \n\n\n\n",
"I am a vocalist and I've been training for about 13-14 years in classical music (various conservatories). I'd like to agree with NerdyDasty about the misconception of weight being a factor of how well you can sing.\nI myself weigh about 190lbs but it makes no difference. As you practice, it reinforces your abdominal muscles, you diaphragm, and your vocal chords. Really talented singers can manipulated their vocal chords in specific ways and the more you practice, the stronger you get and the larger your range becomes. \nPreviously (as mentioned before), exercise wasn't as necessary and women who sang opera spent their time practicing, I would assume. Also, eating carbs is good for your voice because of it's bland taste. Foods with spices have an impact of stomach acidity which is bad for the vocal chords. This is why you'll see a lot of singers drinking non-caffeinated beverages and eating bread. \nAlso, in the past the weight you were signified your wealth. Women who were larger (and even men) were glorified for their figured because it was a sign that they were rich. Women with curves use to be very desirable which ties in to why many were singers. \nToday women are always to be skinny and therefore you will rarely see opera singers that fit your original stereotype. However, it has nothing to do with talent as opposed to the influence of media. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2am5g8 | why is opening many restaurants in a short amount of time bad? | I know many big companies have almost failed because of this, but why is it bad if the restaurants are still doing good business? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2am5g8/eli5why_is_opening_many_restaurants_in_a_short/ | {
"a_id": [
"ciwj2e6",
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"score": [
3,
2
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"text": [
"Most restaurants, and businesses generally, will fail within a couple years. You need to be prepared financially for the entire investment to disappear.",
"1) Opening a restaurant (or any small business, really) is highly risky. Just because 1, 2 or 5 locations are profitable doesn't mean 10 are. If you're a small (but growing) business, you probably don't have a ton of resources, so you may be unknowlingly oversaturating the market or being over confident in a specific market. And just one bad location can drag you down.\n\n2) Opening rapid numbers of locations spreads your resources thin. You only have so many workers (builders, staff, experts, managers) and you may have to hire a bunch of new people rapidly--new people who don't know the culture or the business yet. \n\n3) It's a huge money sink. Even if it's wildly successful, starting new locations is a HUGE money drain. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
|
1xhd3k | why do i get a lower singing register when sick but unable to access the register when well?? | I am naturally a Tenor I (sometimes I sing counter-tenor). I've never had a strong lower register and wish I had more accessible baritone/bass notes. I joke that I become a bass when I get sick because I can sing low notes at the cost of my high register. Why does this happen and can those lower notes be trained? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xhd3k/eli5_why_do_i_get_a_lower_singing_register_when/ | {
"a_id": [
"cfbhanb"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Mucus in your throat dampens the vocal cords, allowing them to vibrate slower. It's not trainable."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
8fze2y | what is the difference between rest & soap web services? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8fze2y/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_rest_soap_web/ | {
"a_id": [
"dy7m6vh"
],
"score": [
9
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"text": [
"A SOAP web service has a very structured request and response. Data types, required fields, etc., are all defined in a WSDL that you can consume with your application to automatically build the entire request structure. All of it goes over HTTP POST methods. The entire web service has a single endpoint that covers many methods.\n\nA RESTful web service is a more open concept that uses the raw HTTP data fields in the request to pass parameters. It also uses the HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to handle things differently. The URL is also part of your parameters, as that handles part of the function routing. (i.e., _URL_0_ would be expected to do stuff about inventory 12345, but _URL_1_ would be doing stuff about Customer 12345). The URL can also contain mandatory variables, such as those key ID fields."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"example.com/inventory/12345",
"example.com/customer/12345"
]
] |
||
31m72d | economically speaking is there an optimum population level where almost all citizens have a high standard of living? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31m72d/eli5_economically_speaking_is_there_an_optimum/ | {
"a_id": [
"cq2w8j1",
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"score": [
4,
6
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"text": [
"The ideal political structure you're thinking of is communism. Everyone works for everyone and the greater good of society, as well as being classless so no one is better than anyone",
"Modern socialist countries come close. Really, it's a matter of technology and infrastructure - Communism is practically impossible because of the massive administrative costs, bureaucracy, and logistics - all of which are aided significantly by modern information technology, which is why socialism is working, because it's sort of a compromise between private ownership/business versus government ownership/business.\nIf we ever get to Star Trek-level technology with fusion power, replicators, and teleportation, getting food to the needy will be practically free and effortless, which is why in Star Trek no one starves. The only reason people starve now is that it costs money and takes time to move food (plus the people who have it have to be willing to share)."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[]
] |
||
2atir1 | how can stars like vy canis majoris, betelgeuse, and rho cassiopeiae be so large without collapsing upon their own gravity? | I originally submitted this as a comment and decided to take it to the next level. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2atir1/eli5_how_can_stars_like_vy_canis_majoris/ | {
"a_id": [
"ciym7yy"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"They are held at bay by the **cataclysmic** heat of nuclear fusion. When that runs out, when it starts fusing iron and can't keep generating heat at the fusing edge of the core it goes poof and forms a neutron star or black hole. The sudden collapse ejects an amount of energy that is difficult to imagine and you see a supernova.\n\nLogic says that if rate of fusion is proportional to the pressure, then larger stars die faster. And they do.\n\nOur sun has existed for > 4bil years. Something like VY Canis would likely die in under a few hundred million."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
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